Any authors would be pleased by an array of laudatory and thoughtful comments on their work, especially by a group of critics as distinguished and diverse as this. We are grateful for the care and attention our commentators have taken with American Grace, especially given that they are outside of our own discipline of political science. In writing this book, our hope was to speak beyond disciplinary boundaries. It is thus particularly gratifying to read John Torpey describe American Grace as “public sociology.” This is precisely what we hoped to achieve. We believe that more social science should be directed toward informing our public discourse, and that rigor versus relevance is a false choice.
Posts Tagged ‘conservatism’
December 19th, 2011
Public sociology: rigor and relevance
posted by David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam
January 19th, 2011
God, money, and power
posted by Charles GelmanAt Killing the Buddha, John D. Fitzgerald describes the inside of a little-known conservative Christian college in the heart of New York City.
July 27th, 2010
Catholicism, conservatism, and antihumanist politics
posted by Simon During
Geroulanos’s central thesis is compelling but simple: French antihumanism, in its theoretical mode, was based on a radicalized “negative anthropology,” i.e., the idea that man is a negating animal, as articulated in a widespread rejection of neo-Kantianism, first by Heidegger and then passed on to French thinkers like Bataille and Blanchot, largely via Alexandre Kojève and his “end of history” argument. Instead of the homo absconditus that Ernst Bloch was to locate in Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann’s “Protestant anthropology,” we have here a “last man,” heir to those “negations” of the world named freedom, history, and individuality, whose historical realization reveals that humanness is ultimately based upon a relation to death. And to the degree that this antihumanism continues to order thinkers like de Man, Derrida, and Foucault, it has also shaped many Anglophone intellectuals of my generation. Geroulanos tells a story that thus illuminates us too.
June 18th, 2010
When the personal keeps on being political
posted by Penny EdgellSusan Jacoby’s recent post is one of the best statements I’ve seen in opposition to the “mamma grizzly” feminism of Sarah Palin et alia. But no one riposte is going to settle a debate that taps into deep, and deeply felt, cultural contradictions. We may be in the post-feminist era, but questions about feminism and women’s bodies and reproduction are far from “over.”
June 15th, 2010
Hegel in the heartland
posted by Charles GelmanIn The New York Times, J.M. Bernstein holds forth on the metaphysical dimensions of the sustained paroxysm known as the Tea Party.
June 4th, 2010
God, science and philanthropy
posted by Jonathan VanAntwerpenNathan Schneider profiles John Templeton and the Foundation he built, in The Nation.
May 20th, 2010
Circling the line
posted by Jason Bivins
I was asked after the 2008 Presidential election to make some loose predictions about the future of conservative political religions in the United States. As any handicapper would, I’ve kept tabs as the Town Halls grew first loud and then armed, as cries of outrage were heard in legislatures, as conspiracies once the province of Lyndon LaRouche were given a national airing, and as tea parties were held. I’m not surprised, of course, having written two books about the recrudescence of religious antiliberalism. But I found it very interesting that Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age—a wonderfully rich collection of reflections on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age—should appear in the thick of revived public panics regarding the perceived value of secularism. As bumper sticker-length slogans are hurled like grenades from various corners—celebrating the “divinely-inspired” vision of the Founders or defending their cautions against religious presence in public life—it seems obvious that secularisms are precisely what we should be scrutinizing. Right?
March 15th, 2010
Texas Board of Ed. ratifies new textbook standards
posted by Charles GelmanLast Friday, the Texas Board of Education ratified—with a seven-vote margin—a series of controversial new textbook standards, reports TPM’s Justin Elliot.
March 9th, 2010
A new twist in the Texas textbook case
posted by Charles GelmanJustin Elliot of Talking Points Memo reports that Don McLeroy, the “top conservative activist on the powerful Texas Board of Education, who rejects evolution and has pushed for a revisionist right-wing U.S. history curriculum,” has gotten the boot.
December 22nd, 2009
Dean of natural law
posted by Nathan SchneiderIn the New York Times Magazine, David Kirkpatrick writes about Robert P. George, one of the architects of the recently-unveiled Manhattan Declaration and a legal scholar who is emerging as a leading voice among Christian conservatives. He is also an outspoken proponent of natural-law reasoning.
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