In his book God, Philosophy, Universities, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that “neither the university nor philosophy is any longer seen as engaging the questions” of “plain persons.” These questions include: “What is our place in the order of things? Of what powers in the natural and . . . . Continue Reading »
One way of telling the story of Western philosophy over the last few centuries is to present it as the rise and fall of a particular view of language. Gradually, piecemeal, the idea of language as primarily a matter of accurate naming and information-sharing has yielded to a recognition of language . . . . Continue Reading »
A century ago, the most potent moral figure in the West was Jesus Christ. Believers and unbelievers alike accepted him as an ethical exemplar. Not to do so was to make oneself an outcast. But now, our most potent moral figure is Adolf Hitler. In our relativist, pluralist age, he is our one . . . . Continue Reading »
In the fall of 1970, a year after Yale welcomed its first female freshmen and six months after it descended into the vortex of a Black Panther trial and a university-wide strike, Gloria Steinem came to the college to speak. She wasn’t yet a household name—the launch of Ms. magazine . . . . Continue Reading »
Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of . . . . Continue Reading »
Sally: Did you notice, Harry, how positive that pro-life speaker was about IVF? I was amazed. Granted, he saw some problems with it, but overall he obviously thought it is a great blessing for would-be parents. Harry: Well, after all, every baby is a . . . . Continue Reading »
What are children for? For my grandmother, this would have seemed a strange question. For her, having children was not a matter of choice but simply, as she once put it to me, “what one did.” Today, though, children have become decisions we make: an opt-in variation on our default state of . . . . Continue Reading »
Near the start of this book, there is an unexpectedly absorbing digression on the subject of the late Paul Mankowski, S.J.’s shirts. In a letter about clerical clothing, Mankowski explains that he owns “a total of about six shirts, four of which are wearable in public and the others of which are . . . . Continue Reading »
Thanks for playing. Here’s your consolation prize:a mountain capped with fog, the sun behind throwing light circumspectly on a lake, the waya painter lights a lovely face from out of frame. I’m sorry that you didn’t win, but here’syour daughter’s voice at eight floating on breath as softly . . . . Continue Reading »
Patricia Snow joins R. R. Reno on The Editor's Desk to talk about her essay “Taylor Swift's Sexual Revolution” from the November 2024 print edition of the magazine. Continue Reading »
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