Nathaniel Peters is the executive director of the Morningside Institute and a lecturer at Columbia University.
We go off track when we conceive human rights as representing freedom, and the natural law as representing oppression.
George Weigel on the truths we still ought to hold dear.
Michael Novak, October 1, 2004 (Image Credit: Basso Cannarsa/Opale/Amaly.com).
He lamented Americans’ lack of moral consensus about the common good. But unlike his critics, Novak would not impose his vision of it from the top down.
Jason Clarke and Andria Blackman in Chappaquiddick.
Mary Jo Kopechne perished not because Ted Kennedy crashed his car, but because the legacy was more important than telling the authorities she was in it.
What Do We Hold in Common?
In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender vacations in Paris with his fiancée and her parents. One night Pender takes a walk to escape the insufferable egotists who surround him and stumbles upon an antique Peugeot. It takes him to the 1920s, the golden age for which he has always yearned. He falls in love with Picasso’s lover Adriana, who herself has always longed for the 1890s’ Belle Époque. After a horse and carriage pass them by and whisk them to that period, and after the Impressionists they meet yearn for the Renaissance, Pender realizes that no age is as golden as we imagine and concludes that it is better to live in the reality of the present.
Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is an extended essay on the same theme.
In the public debates over religion, politics, and morality, isn’t there some rational standard that we all can agree on? Surely there must be a set of common foundations and core first principles from which we can reason together. This is by no means a new question, of course. For viciousness of rhetoric and physical treatment of other human beings, few ages rival the early modern period. In the midst of that age’s battles, Hugo Grotius, the Dutch humanist whose writings have greatly contributed to international law, sought to determine and argue for the core principles of Christianity on which all parties could agree.
The topic was not an abstract one for Grotius. He wrote from the castle in which he was imprisoned by Dutch Calvinists, who opposed his allegiance to a party that sought toleration for dissenters from strict Calvinism.