Donald Kagan RIP

By

I have no personal connection to Yale or Donald Kagan, but I enjoyed listening to some of his lectures on Ancient Greece that are free online, as I previously noted in my first blog post, and I approvingly cited his take on Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest, here. 

He was a stout defender of the West in academia, and I’m sure he will be missed. He passed away Aug 6, the age of 89. 

Hat tip Tyler Cowen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leo Strauss's infamous "esoteric" reading of John Locke

By
Image
Leo Strauss It is no secret that I am a fan of John Locke. I stole this blog’s name from the title of one of his books, after all. I am very impressed and inspired by his unique and refreshing combination of clear-headed reason and reliance on faith and scripture. I have to say I was a little dismayed and surprised when I saw that many or most political commentators today see John Locke as an atheist / deist / secularist, following the “Straussian” reading of Locke. This so strongly contradicted everything that I saw in my reading of Locke that it was quite baffling, and I felt a need to figure out what was going on. The Reasonableness of Christianity was the first of John Locke’s works that I came across (see my thoughts here ), as my interests (outside of my day job) are essentially Christian and religious. I found in Locke a scholar who taught that Christian revelation is not just reasonable, but that Christian religion is the best and only foundation for true reason. Locke wrot...
Read more

The response to my concerns about the "How to talk to a Mormon" video

By
Image
TL;DR: Synopsis and takeaways from an email conversation with the Christian apologists who created a YouTube video spreading salacious and disturbing misinformation about my religious beliefs. This is my 4th and final post on what I have called "unhinged Category 2 rhetoric" against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This rhetoric consists of absurd and salacious false ("unhinged") claims about The Church and its members intended for a mainstream Christian audience (See Part 1 ). The goal seems to be to inculcate in mainstream Christians an instinctual aversion to The Church, in order to counter the missionary efforts of The Church which are seen as a problem for mainstream Christianity. Unfortunately, these attacks lead not only to an instinctual aversion to the The Church, but also to its human members. The result can be (and has been for my family) deeply un-Christian behavior toward us (see Part 3 for the story) from mainstream Christians steeped ...
Read more

The Problem of Evil: An Introduction to Bambi

By
Image
Hello all! Asher here - I want to preface this post with a note that here, as well as in all of my posts, I will be including a TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) summary at the beginning of my ramblings. If you’re like me, some days you’re just not cut out for squinting your eyes at a bunch of philos ophical and theological blabbering, and sometimes the Sparknotes version is all you can handle. That being said, I hope that this series on the problem of evil will be interesting and thought provoking; it’s something that any person of faith has stake in, and should be aware of. TL;DR   - I've found it harder to believe in God since I've considered the problem of evil, and I'm starting a series on posts detailing my journey to work that out. The problem of evil states that an all knowing, all powerful, all loving God cannot exist in a world like ours where evil abounds, or at least it's highly unlikely that God would exist in such a world, let alone create it. Many philosopher...
Read more