Paul R. DeHart
@PaulRDeHart
Prof. of Pol. Sci., author of The Social Contract in the Ruins, Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design, co-editor of Reason, Revelation, & the Civic Order
The story is behind a paywall. But Frey’s points in the summary are spot on. It’s administrators and state governments that are killing the liberal arts. As CS Lewis would say—at the expense of anything we could coherently call civilization.
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
Are the Greek words for brother and sister ever used for or synonymously with the word for cousins? Yes. Certainly. In Genesis and Chronicles in the Septuagint (outside Scripture, in Josephus). In the gospels when asked whether or not certain individuals are his brothers and…
Truth. Substituting AI for writing is substituting it for thinking. My guess is hays why the MIT study shows brain atrophy for significant AI usage.
Exactly. As John Searle said somewhere, “if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.” And the discipline that comes with the habit of hammering out the expression of a thought in the form of the written word is crucial to being able to say things clearly.
Martin Luther on Zwingli: “I wish from my heart Zwinglius could be saved, but I fear the contrary; for Christ has said that those who deny him shall be damned.” What is often called a dispute over nonessentials among Evangelicals was not a secondary matter or nonessential to the…
John MacArthur was not a good man. He ordered the wife of a man—on his staff—to take back a husband who had physically and sexually abused their children (he’s now in jail serving a 20 plus year sentence). When she refused, from the pulpit he ordered his 8,000 congregants to shun…
When you hear someone spouting the nonsense we find in AJ Ayer's logical positivism (a self-referentially incoherent, deeply illogical position nevertheless espoused at turns by folks like Dawkin's in The God Delusion) it's really an open question as to whether we must take them…
I Think some people live online and get miffed at others because they don’t interact like they live online. I think social media can be useful. To be here or anywhere else online all the time…Plato’s Cave my friends. It will s not most of my critics that I don’t even read most…
Christianity is misunderstood when framed in terms of the primacy of the written word (in this myth the Reformation then almost becomes the high point—for it takes the point to be Scripture and the Reformation, they say, made Scripture available). But Scripture—including the…
People who think institutional Christianity has done no good in the world are historical troglodytes or perhaps Nietzscheans. But such people desperately need to read Robert Louis Wilken’s The First Thousand Years and his Liberty in the Things of God, Paul Veyne’s Bread and…
When people start denigrating religious freedom and say it leads to religious consumerism and the sort of trashy megachurch stuff we find with Ed Young, Kenneth Copeland, Robert Morris, Evan Honer, Judah Smith, Paula White (all risible, unserious people) it shows that the person…
I'm doing a webinar entitled "How Holmes Got the Constitution Wrong" for the Catholic Bar Association. Open to anyone interested. Here's a link to a page with a description and a place to register, if you're interested (catholicbar.org/event-6260654). Holmes once told Harold Laski, in…
In Book 9 of Confessions, Augustine of Hippo seeks to have his readers pray for his departed parents. Prayers for deceased Christians is part of Augustinian Christianity—it’s, of course, something he also exhorted in sermons. Here’s Confessions: “May she therefore rest in peace…
The argument for God’s existence from contingency / motion (the misnamed and by critics always misstated classical cosmological argument) is deductively valid. The conclusion follows necessarily and inexorably from the premises. One cannot rationally dispute the validity of the…