Category: History
Gray on Sociology
Gray: If Positivism is the chief source of the twentieth century’s most powerful secular religions it is partly through its impact on the social sciences. For Positivists, modernity is the transformation of the world by the use of scientific knowledge....
Positivism and Universal Free Markets
Gray: The core of Logical Positivism was the development of a scientific worldview. Going further than Saint-Simon and Comte, the Logical Positivists declared that only the verifiable propositions of science have meaning: strictly speaking, religion, metaphysics and morality are nonsense....
Gray and the Deeply Modern Bolsheviks
John Gray: The roots of the Soviet system were in the Enlightenment’s most utopian dreams. Lenin never gave up the belief that, after a period of revolutionary terror, the state would be abolished. Trotsky defended the taking and killing of...
In Memoriam: Queen Elizabeth II
In the climactic scene of the 1998 movie The Truman Show, the protagonist, a man named Truman and played by Jim Carrey, has recently discovered that this entire life has been a TV show lived out inside a gigantic dome...
On Mr. Berry and Professor Jennings
In his critique of my discussion of “whiteness” in the book, my friend Scott Pryor observes that it seems as if I’m shifting away from Wendell Berry’s critique of modernity and toward Willie James Jennings’s. On one hand, in Chapter...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda V
More on nationalism: The leader must recognize that politics alone do not create a nation; a whole network of cultural, religious and social factors play an important role. Nation-building, therefore, is not solely a political operation, active encouragement must also...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda IV
The whole chapter on nationalism is fascinating reading, especially if the main forms of nationalism you’re familiar with are European forms or the muddled thing we have here in America. African nationalism, this explosive force which has changed the shape...
Reading the Pan-Africanists: Kenneth Kaunda III
It’s from 1966 and Zambia but, dang, if parts of this don’t map eerily well onto the “racial reconciliation” discourse. It is truly tragic the fear which has been engendered in European minds because they now find themselves ruled by...
The Bavinck Turn
In his (excellent) biography of Bavinck, James Eglinton notes a shift that happened in the great Dutch theologian around the turn of the century. Earlier in his career, Bavinck was deeply concerned with the project of reinvigorating Calvinism in the...
Notes on DeYoung’s Review of Thompson and Kwon
We are going to be reviewing the book in some fashion on the main page (I see you, Sarah). That said, given Kevin DeYoung’s review at TGC this morning, I wanted to put up some quick notes replying to what...