In 1971, John Lennon wrote a song that captured the spirit of a generation—“Imagine.” In it, he invited us to imagine a world with “no heaven above us,” “no hell below us,” “nothing to kill or die for,” and “no religion.” The result he envisioned? “Imagine all the people / Living life in peace.” Nearly [ Read More ]
In My Life Among the Deathworks, sociologist Philip Rieff argued that the West in general, and America in particular, is in the midst of a historically unprecedented attempt to sever social order from sacred order. Whereas all civilizations historically have understood that sacred order shapes culture and that culture, in turn, shapes society, many of [ Read More ]
During winter of this year, I began a research project on idolatrous political movements, reading and re-reading texts such as Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, Mircea Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy, and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. These books focused on the evils of Communist socialism [ Read More ]