October 16, 2014
October 16, 2014 EPPC Briefly: Yuval Levin on Forming Citizens
Featured Publication
“The idea of liberty that both progressives and conservatives generally articulate takes the person capable of freedom for granted without pausing to wonder where he might come from,” argues EPPC Hertog Fellow Yuval Levin in First Things. The “moral formation” of the “individual for freedom is the long way to liberty—and the way that our liberal society plainly requires.”
In a conversation (part one here; part two here) with Charles Kesler, editor of The Claremont Review of Books, Mr. Levin expounds on related themes in discussing how Edmund Burke’s insights might apply to American politics today.
The Great Catholic Cave-In that Wasn’t
The New York Times and other observers this week reacted to an interim report from the Synod of Bishops as though the Catholic Church was prepared to “concede that the sexual revolution had gotten it right all along and would adjust its teaching and practice to suit,” writes EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel. But the real issue that leaders of the Church are grappling with, Mr. Weigel explains, is how to “craft pastorally effective strategies that address real situations of suffering without compromising the truth.”
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New Publications
Leading neuroscientists believe that we need to junk our everyday understanding of the mind, and that much of philosophy needs to go too. In this essay, adapted from his new book The Soul of the World and published in EPPC’s New Atlantis journal, EPPC Senior Fellow Roger Scruton pokes holes in their confidence and proposes another way of understanding who and what we are.
The Indelible Lessons of Auschwitz
EPPC Senior Fellow Mary Eberstadt observes in Time that, seventy years after the Nazi genocide, ongoing anti-Semitic attacks in Europe are “shocking the consciences of people who never thought they’d see such displays there again.”
Progressives’ Flight from Reality
EPPC Senior Fellow Mona Charen shows that the supposedly “pro-science party” is in the grip of an “obsession with sex and now the mainstreaming of truly bizarre ideas about human identity.”
Obama’s Strategy to Defeat ISIS Collides with Reality
Two months after the start of U.S. airstrikes against ISIS, EPPC Senior Fellow Peter Wehner writes that “it’s worth assessing how the Obama strategy is faring and to review what leading military figures who served under President Obama are saying about it.”
The Culture Wars – Have We Lost?
Examining recent data about Americans’ views on social issues, EPPC Fellow Mary Rice Hasson argues that “liberals may have tipped the balance on some measures, but they’ve by no means ‘won.’”
EPPC Senior Fellow Mona Charen argues that “the movement for same-sex marriage pushes our culture in exactly the wrong direction because it forwards a damaging conception of marriage.”
With the president floundering on crises at home and abroad, EPPC Senior Fellow Peter Wehner rounds up “what members of Mr. Obama’s own party, and in some cases former members of his own administration, are saying about him.”
