Published in print

I have an essay in the current First Things on the current political and social situation and how to respond to it. The whole thing is available here.

I have an essay in the December First Things about current sexual attitudes and the Cartesian outlook that lies behind them. Alas, it’s not freely available on line.

Here’s a review of Garry’s Will’s Why Priests? that appeared in the June 2013 Chronicles.

Here’s an essay from the current issue of Modern Age that’s been posted at the Intercollegiate Review website. It gives an architectonic account of all possible political positions in present-day America that explains the necessity and awkward status of social conservatism. The piece started out as a lecture I gave a couple of years ago at a Catholic conference and then shortened and made a bit less papist to fit into an officially non-Catholic publication.

I’ve got a new book out, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It develops some of the arguments from The Tyranny of Liberalism and applies them in a more focused way to debunk our supreme moral principle, or what now seems to count as such. Since it’s published by a Catholic press I could get more specific about the principles for keeping the various aspects of human relations in balance other than attempting to suppress one or another of them because it might cause trouble.

That’s the title of an essay I wrote that appears in the Spring 2012 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.

[The following review, somewhat edited in ways I did not have a chance to look at (and in some respects would not have approved), appeared under the title Libertarian Limits in the January 2012 issue of First Things]

On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence, by Frank Furedi, Continuum, 224 pages, $22.95

The independently-minded British sociologist Frank Furedi has variously been a Hungarian refugee, a self-proclaimed revolutionary communist, and a libertarian public intellectual. The last tendency seems likely to stick, and it has led him to write this critical analysis of therapeutic and custodial liberalism and plea for the restoration of classical liberalism.

[The following review appeared in the January 2011 issue of Chronicles.]

The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, by Pascal Bruckner, translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 256 pp., $26.95

[The following review appeared in the October 2010 issue of Chronicles.]

Neoconservatives: The Biography of a Movement by Justin Vaïsse, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 376 pp., $35.00

There are very few neoconservatives, people disagree on who they are, and they have no popular following or definite organizational structure. Even so, they have deeply affected American public life for 40 years.

My review of Daniel Mahoney’s recent book has provoked a response from Professor Mahoney, which appears (along with my rejoinder) in the current (March 2011) issue of First Things.

That’s the title of my review of Daniel Mahoney’s The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy Against Its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends in the current issue of First Things.

[The following review appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Modern Age.]

The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, by Lee Harris (New York: Basic Books, 2007)

What do we make of radical Islam? Of Islam in general? Of the present state of the West? It is easier not to deal with such large questions, but events force them on us. Lee Harris wants us to take them very seriously indeed, since he believes that weaknesses of the liberal West make radical Islam a threat to its very survival. To avoid disaster, he believes, we need to abandon a great deal of fuzziness, insist on the unique value and fragility of liberal society, attend to considerations drawn from sociobiology and social Darwinism, and moderate the liberalism we want to preserve.

An old friend asked me to contribute something to an issue of the Mensa Research Journal he was guest-editing on the topic of “Barriers to Educating the Gifted” (vol. 40, No. 2; summer 2009). Here’s the result, plus or minus a few footnotes and editorial fiddles:

“Our children are our future.” 
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
“Human ingenuity is our greatest resource.”
“In America we believe in education.”

I expanded the lecture I gave last summer at Gardone into a series of three essays that can be found in the October, November, and December issues of The Angelus. You can also read a Google docs version of the series as a single document.

I have a review of the first volume of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order in The University Bookman.