So Long, Farewell

The Donald Trump of Catholic Higher Education by Thomas S. Hibbs
February 14, 2016
As the short-lived presidency of Simon Newman comes, apparently, to an ignoble end at Mount St. Mary's University, deeper questions remain about the focus and goals of many Catholic universities.


Related:
Fr. Schall on a lecture by Tracey Rowland: The Theological Foundation of Catholic Education

Dr. Hibbs at The Thomistic Institute in NYC

Post by Thomistic Institute.

Items of Interest, 22 April 2012

Thomas Fleming, The Rationality of Anders Breivik

Fabius Maximus: Rome speaks to us. Their example can inspire us to avoid their fate.

New Book: Forgotten Conservatives in American History by Winston Elliott III (the new book is by Brion McClanahan and Clyde N. Wilson)

Edmund Burke and Natural Rights

Sound the Alarm to the People: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and the Principles of 1798

Paul Gottfried, Throwing People Under the Bus to Stop a Runaway Vehicle

Justin Raimondo, Problems of Empire and Race and Empire

US Pushing Libya Model for Upcoming Syria War

Ron Unz, China's Rise, America's Fall

Let's be clear - the ruling intellectual elite are psychotic, not ignorant
Hawaiian Libertarian, Escape the Zoo

How democracy devolves into tyranny by John Milbank

Andrew Haines, Cohabitating is Bad
Cohabitation and Happily Ever After: A Response to Meg Jay

Obama's Birth Certificate a Forgery?
Obama Officially Ineligible
Tom O'Halloran
Daily Paul

Economics and Sustainability:
Life Without Usury
Let's Build a Future Without Cars
Health Care: An Anarchist Approach
Permaculture Magazine #72
John Medaille, Friends and Strangers: A Meditation on Money
Recovered Economic History: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”
By Yasha Levine

Dan Barber: foie gras parable: TED TALKS: documentary,lecture,talk


Catholic:
Music for Private Devotion, Not Liturgy
What's Wrong With NFP
Thomas More: True Enlargement of Mind
Rasing the Bar: Christianity and Liberal Arts in the University by Randall B. Smith

Orthodox:
Greek Orthodox Church Collapsing Due to on Impoverished Government

Feminism:
Young Women Are More Career-Driven Than Men Now - James Poulos asks why.
Eliminate Feminism Forever

The Battle Against Nature’s Sexism by Mary Rose Somarriba

Thomas Hibbs reviews Damsels in Distress.

Diet and Health:
Karen De Coster, Searching for the Perfect Human Diet
8 Natural Cold Remedies to Improve Immunity
Ask The Low-Carb Experts (Episode 13): ‘Low-Carbing Women & Weight Lifting’ | Dr. Cassandra Forsythe (mp3)
Natural Remedies for Seasonal Allergies
Coconut Oil Reverses Dementia in 100 Year-Old Woman

Music:
Fiddler Mark O'Connor is changing how people play the instrument
Striggio Mass In 40 Parts by Wendy Gillespie (mp3)

Breaking: U.S. Army places order for 24,000 M4 carbines with Remington

New Prometheus Viral Video Arrives
First Look At Anthony Hopkins' Hitchcock
For Sacha Gervasi's latest

Tom Hibbs lecture on Catholic higher education

Is This The Catholic Moment in American Higher Education? Camille Paglia, Stanley Fish, and Two Popes

University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana

10/8/2009

Listen to Audio

More on Dr. McInerny

Insight Scoop: McInerny by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. IS also links to this piece by Dr. Hibbs. California Catholic Daily article.

Tom Hibbs reviews Up in the Air.

Hailed by critics as an Oscar contender, Up in the Air features fine performances, a witty script, and a story line that manages to avoid predictability of tone and resolution. Yet the film is ultimately a disappointment. Perpetual motion, the filmmakers want to say, is only a partial remedy for the ills of human life, as it reflects only a partial truth. Striving to say something more, something significant about its main character, about the tensions between independence and dependence, about the importance of family and friends, the film fails to transcend clichés.

That's too bad.

Crunchy Con: Guenther von Hagens' cadaver porn

I still haven't gone to a Body Worlds exhibit, and I don't plan on it. When von Hagens made an apperaance on Regency House Party, I was offended, and I decided that I would not be purchasing the DVD or the companion book any time soon, if ever. While it is true that the aristocracy would be interested in scientific developments, I would guess that the actual display of corpses would be repugnant to them. What were the show's creators thinking?

So he is now arranging displays of sex by the corpses? How does one respond to that?

Thomas Hibbs: Shocking display relies on society's morbid voyeurism
Georgette-Heyer.com - Regency House Party

California Catholic Daily: “Already deeply involved in the daily running of the school” --
Thomas Aquinas College names interim president.

Meanwhile, the college has announced funeral arrangements for Dr. Dillon. The funeral Mass for Dr. Dillon will be held in Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel on Friday, April 24, 2009, at 10:00 a.m. Interment will be at Santa Paula Cemetery. There will be a reception immediately following in the St. Joseph Commons on the Thomas Aquinas College campus.

See the homepage for TAC for tributes to Dr. Dillon. (A Life of Faith and Reason by Dr. Thomas S. Hibbs)

Newly ordained Thomas Aquinas College alumni Fr. Michael Goyette blesses Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Dillon, president of the college and his wife. (source)

Dr. Hibbs has an answer

to the question I posed here, in his review of the last Harry Potter book

A review by Eve Tushnet (with minor spoilers).

T. Hibbs on Pan's Labyrinth

his review

Thomas Hibbs reviews Volver

at National Review

College kids get brains, no soul

Something from my old advisor. I wonder how things are going over at Baylor. Thanks to Eunomia.


College kids get brains, no soul

Universities may be churning out capable earners and consumers, says THOMAS HIBBS, but they are failing to equip students for meaningful lives

03:16 PM CDT on Sunday, August 20, 2006

"You are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?" – Plato, Apology

In the course of his trial, Socrates poses this challenge to his fellow citizens. For the first of all the great philosophers in the Western tradition, the "care of the soul" – the pursuit of knowledge and virtue – is the chief task imposed on us as rational human beings. Knowledge is both desirable for its own sake and as a means of forming citizens for freedom; in fact, the pursuit of knowledge is, for Socrates, one of the ways in which we can exercise responsible citizenship.In the early 21st century, in America's elite universities, institutions renowned across the globe for "wisdom and power," there is a growing mood of discontent. Having become increasingly skeptical about knowledge itself, our most prestigious educational institutions now find themselves ill-equipped to educate youth for the common good. Or so an emerging consensus would have us believe.

Criticism of higher education is nothing new; among conservatives, it constitutes a sport that never seems to go out of season. Yet, in recent years, criticism has arisen from within mainstream liberal academia. Two books from Harvard administrators are signs of this spirit of self-criticism. Derek Bok, former and currently interim president at Harvard, has written Our Underachieving Colleges; and Harry Lewis, a former dean at Harvard, has just published Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education – a central contention of which is the dismal judgment that the "ideal of liberal education lives on in name only."

In much less detached prose, Tom Wolfe's last novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, released in 2004, depicted undergraduates at an elite university (Mr. Wolfe called the place Dupont University, but rumors abounded that his target was Duke) as booze-saturated, athlete-worshipping, sexual libertines. Reviewers, particularly from the academic world, were less than generous. But, if we are to believe Rolling Stone magazine's stunning recent expose, "Sex at Duke: Raging Parties, Random Hookups & the Girls Who Say the Lacrosse Players Aren't Guilty," Mr. Wolfe's book is a fairly accurate description of drinking and mating habits in the elite social world of schools like Duke.

By comparison with an average night of partying in Duke's fraternity system, the drinking bouts and sexual shenanigans of Animal House , the 1978 frat house party film, seem like the lost episodes of Happy Days. One frat hosts a "foam party," described in Rolling Stone as "a sweaty, alcohol-soaked bacchanalia ... like taking an enormous bubble bath with hundreds of strangers."

But there is an even more striking difference between Greek life at Duke and Animal House. The inhabitants of the film frat were academic failures: "Seven years of college down the drain," was Bluto Blutarsky's lament upon learning that he'd been expelled. By contrast, the rigorous amorality of the Duke party scene does not mean that these students are slackers. "Night Duke," as it is known, gives way to "Day Duke," during which time students are consumed by academic demands.

The two feed one another. What emerges from the Rolling Stone interviews with students is a unifying devotion: a craven desire for approval, from the classroom to the bedroom. The picture of Duke student life is a community that is completely structured, superficially successful and utterly vacuous. A glimpse into the emptiness can be had in one student's confessional aside: "If there's ever a time when I just sit around, I get horrible anxiety." Beneath the shining surface of perfectly assembled appearances – the right clothes, the right schools, the right social connections – lurks anxiety and depression, the individual and social costs of which are dramatically detailed in Madeline Levine's powerful new book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.

For all the youthful effervescence involved in the undergraduate penchant for turning sex into a "sport," there is something chillingly unromantic about it all. Rolling Stone calls sex at Duke "a way of life, a source of constant self-scrutiny and self-analysis." An attractive young woman comments, "I've never been asked out on a date in my entire life – not once." Nor has a guy ever bought her a drink. "'I think that if anybody ever did that, I would ask him if he were on drugs," she says.

For all of the apparent insouciance about sex, the interviewees confess to gnawing anxiety and uncertainty. As essayist Wendell Berry once observed, "Sexual liberation ought logically to have brought in a time of 'naturalness,' ease and candor between men and women. It has, on the contrary, filled the country with sexual self-consciousness, uncertainty and fear." In the midst of this carnivale atmosphere of sexual freedom, colleges try to erect clear boundaries. The result is a vertiginous movement from unbridled freedom to severe legality. Mr. Lewis describes Harvard's date rape policy, for example, as creating "an artificial and infantilizing sexual world." And that may be the most telling and painful paradox of liberal sexual mores. Universities have ended up precisely with what they initially wanted most to avoid – legalism regarding sex.

For the sake of knowledge

But that's not the only place where contemporary universities are in trouble. The failure of elite universities to deliver on their core mission is the lament running through Mr. Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul. With a curriculum void of coherence and faculty lacking a sense of teaching as a noble calling, students find that education offers no sense of "larger purpose in life."

Calls for reform, of which Mr. Lewis' book is but the latest in a long list, must overcome the vested interests of both students and faculty, who have an unspoken agreement about their own freedom. The laissez-faire attitude of the precocious teenager meets the professional libertarianism of the faculty. Mr. Lewis is not the first to wonder whether the turning of students into consumers is to the clear detriment of the ideals of liberal education.

In this atmosphere, universities can easily lose track of the one thing necessary for a university, the one thing that it alone can foster: the cultivation of the intellect. As Mr. Lewis notes, what is distinctive about college life is the possibility it offers students for a short but crucial period in the years between adolescence and adulthood to become "immersed in the life of the mind." College is freedom for , not freedom from.

In his classic statement The Idea of the University, John Henry Newman argues that liberal education can be justified only if "knowledge is capable of being its own end." Although Newman defended professional training, he argued forcefully that universities ought to develop in students a philosophical habit of mind, a habit of wonder and an ability to trace the relationships among different parts of knowledge. One of the reasons for the inclusion of all branches of knowledge in the university curriculum is that even though students "cannot pursue every subject, they will still gain from living among those who represent the whole circle."

There are manifold obstacles to realizing Newman's idea in today's university. Given the increasing emphasis on specialization in faculty research, few if any faculty can be said even to approximate representing the "whole circle." And of course students do not "live among" the faculty anyhow. The shared libertarianism of faculty and students results in a diminishing number of contact hours between students and faculty, and even between faculty, who rarely know colleagues outside their departments.

Specialization breeds an inevitable individualism and elevates narrow expertise over breadth of learning. Clearly a university cannot do without rigorous, specialized knowledge in its faculty. The challenge Mr. Lewis and others pose is whether universities can create incentives to balance focus with breadth.

This would entail another sense of liberalism. Such a liberality or generosity of spirit would revive a proper appreciation of amateurism – not in the sense of an absence of serious training but in the etymological meaning of the word "amateur," from the French for "lover."

In an academic context, an amateur would be one who has a passionate enthusiasm for knowledge, an infectious joy at human inquiry itself and a commitment to transforming students from dependent absorbers of information into colleagues in a shared pursuit of knowledge. This spirit of wonder is the most compelling embodiment of Newman's claim that knowledge is an end in itself. Such a spirit knows no bounds – it can be equally present in an English poetry class, a chemistry lab, a music tutorial or a philosophy seminar.

The defense of liberal education as both invigorating for young souls and an indirect catalyst for social transformation stretches from Socrates to W.E.B. DuBois, who in his famous Souls of Black Folk penned the most eloquent defense of liberal education ever composed by an American. DuBois is best known for his debate with Booker T. Washington over post-Reconstruction civil rights strategies. A consequence of Washington's more conservative approach is the continued exclusion of African-Americans from higher education.

Although ignored in contemporary retellings of this standoff, DuBois makes higher education the centerpiece of his argument. For DuBois, this was about more than simply equal opportunity. To refuse African-Americans access to a truly liberal education, to relegate them to training in trades, was to deny their full humanity. Every other sort of education renders human beings fit to perform this or that role in business or society; it makes them serviceable, as we say. But this is to treat education – and human beings – in a merely instrumental fashion.

DuBois counters, "The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure and inspiring ends of living, – not sordid money getting, not apples of gold." DuBois shares Socrates' objections to a citizenry that gives no thought to true education, to the state of the soul, to pondering what DuBois calls the "riddle of existence." DuBois asserts, "the true college will ever have one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes."

Losing track of its primary goal, higher education lapses into the sort of confused state Mr. Lewis describes and fosters in students the sense that they are nothing more than hollow consumers for whom success is a well-padded resume. DuBois was confident that a truly liberal education could be truly liberating, that it could provide a counter to the instrumentalism that threatens to crowd out an appreciation of life's larger purposes.

Another way to express DuBois' argument is to say that he, like Socrates, takes the term "soul" seriously, as indicating a sense of what is higher and lower, better and worse, in human life. The word "soul" also figures in the title of Mr. Lewis' book about Harvard. But what does Mr. Lewis mean by "soul"? Can contemporary academics use the term without putting it in scare quotes to indicate its status as a relic from a bygone age of religious primitivism? Without snickering, can we seriously pose to our students the challenge Socrates posed to the Athenians, who in this case are a pretty good stand-in for Americans? Can we issue the challenge to give more care to the soul than to the body?

These questions bring us round to Duke and Tom Wolfe's satire, which seizes on the problematic status of the soul in the contemporary university. Mr. Wolfe's title character Charlotte Simmons brings with her to Dupont a conception of soul she inherits from her devoutly Christian mother, who uses the word soul without any hint of irony or doubt. By contrast, one of Charlotte's professors, a Nobel winner for his work in neuroscience, uses the term "soul" advisedly. The self, he asserts, is "nothing more than a 'transient composite of materials from the environment.' " In an interesting convergence between the sciences and the humanities, the dissolution of the self into a series of intersecting impersonal forces is also a prominent feature of an influential postmodern philosophy.

Mr. Wolfe's book suggests a subtle link between the demotion of the soul to a ghost in a machine and the exhaustion of young adult life in a series of activities – work, study, drinking, sex – lacking any overarching sense of mission. If that's right, then the problems facing the modern university in its attempt to recover its liberal arts mission go much deeper and may be more intractable than any of its contemporary critics have thus far acknowledged.

Beyond the herd

There is no easy, short-term corrective for what ails higher education. But, for parents of bright students with aspirations for more than mere social or career advancement, there is a short-term answer, a paradoxical one given what we have argued thus far. Be better consumers, tougher negotiators and don't follow the herd of parents who mindlessly rattle off a list of acceptable schools. The converse of the truth concerning competition among students for admission to selective schools is that schools compete very hard to lure good students. They need to be forced to compete even harder.

And wherever your children end up going to college, urge them to seek out the best professors, which is not the same as an entertaining professor who grades easily. Even in the midst of an otherwise bleak environment, an encounter with a gifted teacher, a latter-day Socrates, can make all the difference.

Thomas S. Hibbs is a philosopher and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. You may e-mail him at tshibbs@aol.com

Surely he wouldn't be advertising for the Honors College at Baylor, would he? haha

I know he is an advocate of liberal education, and he would agree that a liberal education can be "useful" for future employment; I just wonder if liberal education has much of a future in the Western world, given the way things are going and the precarious state of the economy. If one could attract both Christians and non-Christians to the good colleges and universities that are still left, that would be great, but those who are "practically-minded" will probably disregard the advice.

To say that students leave the typical college or university with brains is misleading. Indoctrinated, yes; able to reason, no.

Someone should say something about the gods of usury at Boston College. All that student debt for the promise of prosperity...

A mention of Dr. Hibbs as a distinguished faculty member. Baylor Magazine article. The Honors College.

T. Hibbs' review of A. MacIntyre's book on Edith Stein

source

Books in Review
The Beginning of the Journey
Copyright (c) 2006
First Things 163 (May 2006): 49-52.
Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922 by Alisdair MacIntyre. Rowan & Littlefield. 224 pp. $25.95.

Reviewed by Thomas S. Hibbs

IN THE SUMMER OF 1921, while visiting friends, Edith Stein chanced upon the
autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Reading through the night, she completed
an important stage in her own intellectual and religious development. She decided to become a Catholic and to follow the path of St. Teresa into the Carmelites.

Now, with Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922, Alasdair MacIntyre has written a remarkable intellectual biography of Stein that ends, rather than begins, with her conversion. The author of such influential books as Marxism and Christianity, After Virtue, and Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre is not writing hagiography but a “philosophical prologue” to a conversion—though that carefully chosen word prologue invites thoughts about the life that Stein would lead after her conversion.

Edith Stein has much to say about reason and faith, the nature of conversion, the
relation of phenomenology to Thomism, and the understanding of philosophy as a
way of life. In Stein, MacIntyre detects an exemplary philosophical life, not so
much in the conclusions reached but in the questions formulated and the integration of thought and life. MacIntyre opens with a reference to the ancient genre of “Lives of the Philosophers,” and MacIntyre’s account of Stein’s life is a contribution to that venerable genre: a counter to the trivializing relegation of philosophy to the professionalized and specialized world of academia, which too often reduces the life of a philosopher to salacious gossip.

MacIntyre’s book is at once an example of, and yet transcends, the contemporary
philosophical impulse to recover what philosophers call the “situatedness of thought.” He does indeed locate Stein—a female, Jewish philosopher who was
killed at Auschwitz and canonized as a Catholic saint—in the context of her Jewish upbringing, her philosophical apprenticeship under Edmund Husserl, and her growing awareness of German nationalism and its attendant anti-Semitism.
But the book is not finally about the background history of Edith Stein’s
intellectual development. Instead, it defends a thesis about the unity of thought and life and about Stein’s own life as an embodiment of a certain form of philosophical life.

MUCH CONTEMPORARY philosophical biography involves unmasking scandal. Among modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger is the most widely mentioned case—and the comparison of Heidegger with Stein illustrates the centrality of truthfulness in the attempt to think clearly about how thought and life might be integrated. At various points, MacIntyre offers tantalizing comparisons of Stein and Heidegger, whose lives have intersecting but opposed trajectories. Heidegger began as a Catholic, studied with Husserl, abandoned Husserl to embark on a radical deconstruction of traditional metaphysics, and ended up an ally of the Third Reich.

Edith Stein began as a practicing Jew, turned to atheism, studied with Husserl, struggled to move beyond the limitations she detected in Husserl’s phenomenology, became a Catholic, moved toward traditional metaphysics, and was executed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

But MacIntyre’s Edith Stein also concerns the history of modern Thomism, to
which MacIntyre has since the early 1980s himself been a contributor. In his 1990 book Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre argued that, by making epistemology into first philosophy, certain strains of Thomism inevitably dissolved into a number of competing schools. Of course, MacIntyre does not think that Thomism can simply seal itself off from modernity. Instead, what is needed is a way of engaging modern philosophy without succumbing to its epistemological assumptions.

One possible way to address this problem is through the kind of phenomenology that Edmund Husserl began. MacIntyre does a nice job of introducing the reader to the central philosophical issues in phenomenology and its development out of the history of modern philosophy. While many modern thinkers lined up in defense of the two lines of modern thought that were developed from David Hume and Immanuel Kant, Husserl objected to what Hume and Kant shared: an atomistic and punctual account of experience as consisting of easily isolated sense impressions.

HUME, FOR INSTANCE, inventoried sense impressions and declared that he could detect no clear impression corresponding to such common philosophical notions such as substance or cause and effect. We perceive, Hume famously asserted, only contiguity in time and place: We never have a sense impression of some thing causing another thing, just of one thing happening after, and adjacent to, another event.

To Husserl, this looked less like an accurate description of experience and more like the result of a peculiar sort of analysis. To counter Hume’s reductionist analysis, Husserl offered a meticulous descriptive account of experience, sensitive to the complex ways in which objects are given to us as actual or potential wholes—and as
inextricably intertwined, especially in their actions, with other objects. We do not experience fire, paper, and then ashes; we experience fire actively consuming paper and reducing it to ashes.

What attracted so many young scholars to the Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900) was the sense that he had rescued philosophy from an impasse into which the lines of David Hume and Immanuel Kant had driven it. Instead of Kant’s insistence that we know only appearances, that things in themselves remain hidden to us, the shibboleth of phenomenology was, “To the things themselves.”

YET WHEN HUSSERL released his later book Ideas (1913), he seemed to have retreated from things themselves to ideas and to have lapsed from realism back into idealism. As Edith Stein wrote, “All of us had the same question on our minds. The Logical Investigations had caused a sensation primarily because it appeared to be a radical departure from critical idealism which had a Kantian and neo-Kantian stamp. Knowledge again appeared as reception, deriving its laws from objects not, as criticism has it, from determination which imposes laws on the objects. All the young
phenomenologists were confirmed realists. However, the Ideas included some expressions which sounded as though the Master wished to return to idealism.”

In his penchant for depicting reality as utterly mind-dependent or intentional, Husserl created notorious problems for himself, concerning (a) the role of the human body in our acts of knowing and (b) our awareness of, and communication with, other persons—the famous problem of intersubjectivity. As MacIntyre sees it, Husserl’s thought embodies two distinct and incompatible philosophical positions.

MACINTYRE DOES A marvelous job of reconstructing all this historical context for Stein’s philosophical journey. He takes up, for example, the little-known Adolph Reinach, a student of Husserl’s and one of Stein’s teachers. Reinach shared Stein’s worries about latent idealism in Husserl, and, ahead of Stein, he saw the import of the social conditions of certain types of acts of knowing: those involved in making promises, for instance.

Among Stein’s own philosophical contributions to phenomenology, her work on empathy stands out, particularly for the problems concerning embodiment and inter-subjectivity. Stein’s graduate thesis, “On the Problem of Empathy,” bears all the marks of an early, incomplete work, where the questions and suggestions for further research are in many ways more significant than the conclusions established.
Still, her focus on empathy brings to the fore precisely those constituting conditions of human experience and knowledge that Husserl was always in danger of suppressing or at least pushing to the margins: the way in which first-person accounts of experience can be changed by alternate third-person accounts, the way in which our sense of ourselves and of others as embodied persons is crucial to the experience of empathy, and the way our self-understanding is frequently mediated by third-person recognition.

MacIntyre detects the overlap of Stein’s life and thought as her philosophical interests in empathy and the social conditions of knowledge, on the one hand, match her desire to participate in the right sort of community, on the other. Stein concerned herself with such fundamental practical questions as: To what sort of community do I owe allegiance? And with what sort of others should I be in dialogue?

It is not surprising that her decision to become a Catholic was nearly indistinguishable from her decision to join a religious order. MacIntyre rightly sees that Stein’s conversion is a disruption of philosophy. Indeed, given the limitations in her philosophical resources and her lingering disagreements with Husserl, it is not clear how she could have proceeded philosophically.

But MacIntyre also suggests that her conversion provided the seeds for future progress on precisely the lingering questions that Stein was unable to resolve from within Husserlian phenomenology. From Stein herself, MacIntyre derives the observation that large-scale changes in belief are less a matter of organic evelopment of latent possibilities than of an “otherworldly” influence that could not be predicted or compelled.

MACINTYRE COMPARES Edith Stein’s conversion to that of a number of her contemporaries (Reinach’s conversion to Protestantism, Rosenzweig’s to Judaism, and Lukacs’ to Marxism) to show that the gap between Stein’s philosophical prelude and her religious conversion does not imply that the meaning of “conversion” is
reducible simply to “the adoption of beliefs beyond reason.” One can undergo a
conversion from one set of rationally held beliefs to another set, or from irrationality to faith in reason. Moreover, the most dramatically compelling conversions are those that enable individuals to understand, if only retrospectively, what they could not before.

One of the matters on which Stein had clearly made some progress before her conversion was in her thought about German nationalism. MacIntyre makes a convincing case that Stein moved beyond a crude patriotism in the German Volk to a more democratic conception of government, even as she became gradually aware of the rising currents of anti-Semitism in her country. Her analysis of the way what she calls “contagion” can sweep over the masses and render a people susceptible to irrational social currents looks remarkably prescient.

HERE, TOO, MACINTYRE makes a case for Stein’s exemplary integration of thought and life, with her ability not so much to come to peremptory conclusions but to think through questions, both theoretical and practical, and to adopt a corresponding way of living. And this returns us to the comparison of Stein with Heidegger. MacIntyre puts the question, to which Stein’s life is the answer, thus: “What would it have been in that period of German history in which Heidegger grew up, served his philosophical apprenticeship, and became the most influential of
twentieth-century German philosophers to have lived quite otherwise as a
philosopher, to have consistently taken seriously both the implications for one’s life outside philosophy of one’s philosophical enquiries and the implications for one’s philosophy of one’s other activities?”

Edith Stein is a splendid philosophical book, whose significance over time may come to rival that of After Virtue. That it should also constitute a compelling prelude to
theology, indeed, to hagiography, goes some measure toward confirming Thomas
Aquinas’ paradoxical claim that philosophy can both have its own integrity and
function as a handmaiden of theology.

Thomas S. Hibbs is distinguished professor of ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University. His books include Virtue's Splendor and Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld.

T. Hibbs reviews Superman Returns

Jesus Christ Superman
A familiar motif gets sidetracked.

By Thomas Hibbs

Snippets:
"Once you get past the stirring, iconic S on his uniform, Routh resembles not so much the Man of Steel as a GQ cover boy."

"The question here is not about orthodoxy. Superman is a Christ figure — a common-enough type in our virtue-starved culture — not “The Christ.” But even the imagery of the Christ figure requires a certain degree of dramatic and ethical consistency. It’s not clear by the end of the film whether Superman is really a self-sacrificing hero or a chump for a woman who is best suited to a marriage with a conventional, upwardly mobile male. One might argue that that question had already been raised in the 1978 film, but that doesn’t help clarify anything here. And the accentuation of the divinity of Superman only serves to exacerbate the problem."

Thomas Hibbs reviews Crunchy Cons

At Crisis.

Thanks to NoLeftTurns.

Crunchy-Con Awakening Thomas S. Hibbs

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counter-cultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)Rod Dreher, Crown Forum, $24, 272 pages

With the publication of Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher—previously an editor at National Review and now an editor and writer for the Dallas Morning News—brings into public view a movement that’s not really a movement, a sensibility rather than an ideology, a phenomenon that’s perhaps best captured in the book’s eclectic subtitle: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party). Crunchy Cons, which mixes the anecdotal and the philosophical, is a great read. Despite a lingering fuzziness about what precisely crunchiness is, Dreher’s book is a compelling and hopeful portrait of the way many Americans are altering their lives, in conscious opposition to the culture, in order to recover what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.”

Dreher’s book details a kind of awakening of many Americans from a certain naïveté about the market and popular culture. There is a disconnection, or perhaps a hidden connection, between the material prosperity of our culture and our inarticulacy about what matters. Perhaps there was a time when that inarticulacy did not matter as much; now, it does. Dreher mentions the regular occurrence of well-intentioned parents who hand their kids over to public or private schools and to our popular culture and then end up shocked at the results. The objection is not to the market in all forms, only to the market as infiltrating all spheres of human life, particularly marriage, the family, and the rearing of children. Crunchy Cons is full of stories of active resistance to the culture and the market: parents who throw out their TVs and decide to homeschool their kids, join a food co-op, or take up farming. The task, as Dreher describes it, is to “imagine life outside the boundaries set by our media
culture.”

As Dreher notes, there is a palpable overlap of crunchiness and a particular strain of religious conservatism. The clearest way to bring out what’s distinctive in Dreher’s book—and the central place of religion in it—is to compare it with the best work of cultural observation in recent years, David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster, 2000). Like Brooks’s bobos, crunchy cons combine the bourgeois and the bohemian. Like the bobos, the crunchies turn shopping into an art, prefer “intuitive and organic modes of thought” to the mechanistic, and celebrate “the intimate humanism of the pre-industrial craftsman.” They also both love “texture,” which is just a more refined word for crunchiness.

On the surface, both groups long for a kind of romantic authenticity and risk turning their way of life into a new trend in shopping, precisely the thing the crunchies profess to abhor. And yet the crunchies depart in striking ways from the bobos, nowhere more dramatically than on the topic of religion. For the bobos, religion must be measured by its contribution to the expansion of the self; thus, bobos engage in the (at best paradoxical) task of erecting a “house of obligation on a foundation of choice.” As Brooks hilariously imagines it, bobo heaven would involve not a last judgment, but a final conversation, a dialogue with the angel of death, not about one’s piety or even one’s moral character but about one’s taste in interior design, coffee, and food. Brooks’s unsurprising conclusion is that bobo “spiritual life is tepid and undemanding.” Although he does not cite the bobos, the following terse statement
from Dreher is apt: “A God no bigger than our desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.” That’s a pretty good description of bobo religion.

A troubling feature of Brooks’s new elite can be seen by asking a question Brooks never poses. What happens to bobo paradise when tragedy strikes—when a bobo gets fired from work in an embezzlement scandal, has to care for a seriously disabled parent, has a kid who develops a drug addiction, or worse, has a child killed in an auto accident? These sorts of tragedies never so much as surface as possibilities in Brooks’s narrative.

Not all readers will be moved to imitate the sort of choices made by the crunchies, but one at least can admire the sacrifices made and especially the sense of missionary devotion to the family; for example, giving up a lucrative position in business to run a local farm or sacrificing a second income to homeschool kids. They also demand a great deal of time and imaginative energy. It is not surprising that these choices either result from, or lead to, profound changes in self-understanding. One interviewee after another speaks of realizing a “calling.” Far more than the bobos, the crunchies and their children will be prepared, to the extent that anyone can be prepared, for tragedy.

Still, Dreher’s argument is a bit unclear about the status of crunchiness in relation to mainstream America. There is a tension between the goal stipulated at the end of the book’s prolix subtitle, “to save America (or at least the Republican party),” and the impulse, rooted in a sense of impending cultural decay, to retreat to communities at the margins of society. Dreher’s crunchy cons are trying to recover a sense of community, a sense of human association not entirely ruled by government or big business. In the words of the economist E. F. Schumacher, whom Dreher frequently quotes, “Small is beautiful.”

The crunchies are also recovering a sense of self-governance. Alexis de Tocqueville warns of the way in which individualism and centralization conspire together to squeeze out room for citizenship. And Irving Kristol observes the way in which the bourgeois consumer has replaced the bourgeois citizen. But crunchy cons seem more pessimistic about American culture than Tocqueville was. While they are by no means indifferent to the public good, crunchies are not interested in associations as instruments of political health, but as ways of recovering a sense of personal purpose.

Do the crunchies want to save America or the Republican Party or, having acknowledged the short-term irreversibility of civilized decay, do they plan to “retreat behind defensible borders”? Of course, Dreher and most of his crunchies are somewhere between these two options, just as the contemporary Republican Party is between social conservatism and libertarianism. To the extent that the crunchies aspire to opt out of the wider culture, they are vulnerable to the free-rider objection: that of creating little enclaves that are nonetheless dependent on the society that they have abandoned for services and protections. As I say, this is clearly not Dreher’s ideal, but it is a difficulty the crunchies should face squarely.

But these sorts of questions might well inform a Crunchy Con sequel. Such a book would indeed be welcome, as it would provide Dreher an opportunity to argue further for the contemporary viability of Kirk’s permanent things. The great merit of Dreher’s book, after all, is to remind us of a permanent truth about which large portions of our culture suffer chronic amnesia. The bourgeois virtues may satisfy the needs of the political order, but they will never satisfy the longings of the human soul.

Thomas S. Hibbs is the author of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld (Spence, 2002).