One of the dangers of contemporary liberalism is that its totalitarian tendencies trade on vague sentiments and slogans--mental gestures that, even if they are not irritable (as Lionel Trilling said of conservativism), are certainly irritating, not to mention...
Liberalism
Lord Macaulay and the Limits of Liberalism
Liberals historically did not accede to Enlightenment or secularist ideology regarding the civil order.
Woodrow Wilson, the Bible, and Liberalism in 2022
In his religious biography of Woodrow Wilson, Barry Hankins notes that Wilson’s father—prominent southern Presbyterian minister and professor Joseph Ruggles Wilson—stated after his son’s election as a ruling elder that "I would rather that he held that position than...
Liberalism contra Secularism and Theocracy: A Reply to Mark Tooley
I recently read with interest Mark Tooley’s piece “Democracy vs Theocracy.” Tooley argues that for some “magisterial Protestants” and Catholic integralists, modernity is corrupt and the aberrant exception to the human story. A return to “traditional” societies, in...
Distinguishing Before Denouncing: A Review of “Why Liberalism Failed”
Liberalism has failed. Or so confidently declares Patrick Deneen in his obviously named Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen offers one of the more useful and concise attacks on the often vaporously defined liberalism that has, according to Deneen, plagued modern societies for the last several hundred years. Deneen’s proof of liberalism’s failure is not that it failed to change society, but that liberal societies became exactly what they were supposed to be. The liberal state increasingly worked towards removing cultural and social institutions responsible for governing society’s consumer and sexual appetites. Few orthodox Christians dispute that these are woeful problems. And Deneen deserves praise for identifying the ills that plague modern society. The book’s weaknesses are anachronism, and imprecise and lethargic taxonomy.