Essay

881 RESULTS

Falling in love with the New York intellectuals

It took a fierce group of 1930s journalists to show the world a new standard for truth, and how much truth should matter in personal and public life. The New York intellectuals insisted, in their ideas and their business, on both the continuing quest for truth, and the importance of living in the light of that truth. Whether or not their beliefs—tinged by Marxism and Modernism—were right, it’s the ferocity of the intellectuals that makes them significant—and charming.

Replacing the Pan-Canadian Consensus

The 2006 election may prove to be the beginning of a political realignment, making a decisive shift away from what the authors term the “pan-Canadian consensus,” which has governed Canada since the 1960s. Ray Pennings and Michael Van Pelt propose a most interesting theory: revisiting “the very idea of a ‘Canadian consensus’ and ‘Canadian values,’ and asking whether there really is a homogeneous mainstream that represents, whether with a right or left emphasis, a clear path on which to govern.”

What is to be done… about schooling?

Aaron Belz thinks the contemporary high school classroom is a bastion of the bourgeois, that students who excel in this environment are gifted at waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and that the Socratic method is a form of hectoring. He offers an alternative way of doing . . . schooling.

The Calgary School and the Future of Canada

The Calgary School and its advocates are often accused of wanting to Americanize Canada. Heavily influential in the Conservative Party of Canada and in this country’s broader public debate, the School is a collection of political theorists, pundits and public intellectuals, including Rainer Knopff, F.L. “Ted” Morton, David Bercuson, Barry Cooper and Thomas Flanagan. What shall we make of the Calgary School?

What is to be done… in the public square?

Domesticated religion isn’t for Ray Pennings. Not for him, Christian faith that “knows its place” . . . as a private, highly individualized religion of the prayer closet and the cloistered chapel. Instead, Pennings calls Christians out of the cloister and the closet to pursue a strategy of cultural change as a public religion working together across disciplines, through institutions, over the span of generations.