It has been said, famously, that all Western philosophy is “footnotes to Plato.” And, while this statement rings true, the deeper and more salient observation is that much of Western philosophy is footnotes to Lucifer. Indeed. At the Fall, the Evil One spoke a word against God’s word, calling into question the truth of God’s [ Read More ]
Many contemporary thought leaders have spoken intriguingly about a future without Jesus or, to be more precise, a future in which the transcendent truths of the Christian faith hold little or no sway over society. More to the point, these thought leaders often pose as anthropologists who find Christianity dehumanizing and as tea-leaf readers who [ Read More ]
For almost twenty years, I taught a four-seminar rotation of “Great Books” for The College at Southeastern. The readings were formative not only for the students, but also for me, the professor. I gained an invaluable education. Through these works, I was able to trace the rise and development of Western thought and civilization, in [ Read More ]
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 ]
Socialism is a highly-energized and mobilized political movement—especially among Millennials—in the United States right now. The 2016 presidential primaries saw a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, almost defeat establishment candidate Hillary Clinton. The 2018 mid-term elections saw a 28-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defeat incumbent House democrat Joseph Crowley. The 2020 elections are being influenced [ Read More ]
Recently, Romanian public intellectual Mihail Neamtu came to Raleigh to facilitate a seminar on Marxism. Together, he and I and the participants read portions of Romanian historian Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, French philosopher Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and the Catholic Church’s statement [ Read More ]