“Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart” Harvard, June 1978 My wife Meg spent many years of her life teaching children to love...
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Intrinsic, not extrinsic. Somewhere in the American Southwest, I began to understand an idea that has run through my life for most of my life. A year earlier I had dropped out of college, and had spent the first year in a commune in the Bay Area of California, working on a magazine committed to...
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Is it not amazing how men and women who profess the same Christian faith can end up coming to such different political conclusions when we vote? How is it that two people who confess Christ as Lord and the Bible as his infallible word end up in such anxious and even vitriolic disagreement? Of course,...
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“Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.” Twice a year I teach a course that requires the students to read carefully and critically week by week, listening and analyzing as they make their way through the world. A graduate-seminar in pedagogy, for three hours we...
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“They sit on the couch and look at walls.” I had never heard that one before. To be honest, she wasn’t entirely off base: the philosopher likes to look. She likes to gaze. She likes to observe. Aristotle had his horse. Descartes had his candle. Heidegger had his hammer. But unlike the scientist, the philosopher’s...
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