Last updated on August 3, 2022
To my embarrassment, I have not written on my website since Ash Wednesday. I suppose I could lie and say I gave up blogging for lent, but now that we’re past Pentecost I think that ship has sailed.
The Spring semester was a difficult one work-wise, and so I just could not get back here to write anything. My website is not exactly a major priority, relatively speaking, but I need to make more of an effort to update it.
This semester I taught an Intro to Politics and Government Course, Political Philosophy, Environmental Politics and Law, and a class on the Supreme Court and Judicial Process. The second two were brand new and required a significant amount of preparation. I hope to write more about teaching this summer when I have the time.
I’ve also been doing some writing. I just sent off a review of Mark David Hall’s excellent book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? which I highly recommend. I also am finishing up the final revisions on a peer-reviewed article for the Political Science Reviewer on Russell Kirk and environmentally-conscious conservatism.
The biggest project I’ve been working on though is helping to revive The Ciceronian Society, an organization near and dear to my heart and a major part of my career thus far. I’m excited about what we have planned and I hope to share more in the days ahead. I also plan to get back to my commentary on Luke, which I have missed working on.
Another major project I’m plugging away at is a book chapter on Philip Rieff and imagination. This is going to be unusually difficult because Rieff can be incredibly hard to read, especially in his later work. If I can find the time, I’ll “practice” talking about him on this site while I read through his books and articles this summer. A good article by Jeremy Beer, introducing Rieff, can be found here.
Rieff died in 2006 and was an Ivy-league American Sociologist who was famous as an interpreter of Freud and as a cultural critic. He was married to Susan Sontag for a few years as well, which, in my view, is not as important as some commentators make it seem. Perhaps I’ll change my mind on that, but not just yet. His most accessible book is Triumph of the Therapeutic and all his work is controversial in one way or another. But he is unquestionably brilliant and unduly neglected by scholars in the all the disciplines with which he overlaps. He was Jewish and not exactly a conventional sociologist. He was hostile to Christianity for a while, but by the time his final works were published, that seemed to be less true.
At this point, it’s far too early to offer a full assessment of Rieff. I have much more to read. But I find him to be in line with the work of Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt, but with a very different set of historical “data” to work with. Rieff, like other conservatives, is aware of the erosion of those traditions and institutions that ground human beings in reality and the sacred/social order of meaning and direction. The consequences of our self-destructive path are obvious to him in ways that remain opaque to most others. The 20th and 21st centuries continue to prove him right about much, and that is not a good thing.
At the same time, Rieff, so far, seems to overdo the critical side. It’s not so much that his critique is false – I actually think it’s quite accurate – but there’s so bleak a diagnosis and far too little hope. Perhaps this comes later, but I have yet to get there.
Rieff is also a significant influence on one my favorite authors currently living, Carl Trueman, whose new book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, references Rieff repeatedly. I love Trueman’s work and look forward to diving deeper into this book.
I’m also read Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi Foundation series, which I’m really enjoying as I need the end of the first book.
Anyway, I need to get back to revisions and other projects I haven’t even mentioned. Hopefully I can get back to a more regular schedule soon.
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