Within historical approaches to questions of natural right, one can approximately distinguish three main tendencies. The first is a whiggish…
Samuel Moyn and the history of natural right
liberalism
Is secularism still Christian?
In January 2013, hundreds of thousands of French Catholics marched down the streets of Paris to protest the “Marriage For…
The long shadow of Christian politics
It has become a truism to say that Samuel Moyn’s work landed like “a grenade” amid common understandings of postwar…
From personalism to liberalism?
In his paper “Personalism, Community and the Origins of Human Rights,” Samuel Moyn argues that a relatively understudied current of…
Thomas Pfau and the emergence of the modern individual
Here I will argue that Thomas Pfau’s presentation of modernity in Minding the Modern fails to incorporate both the sociopolitical…
Stacking the deck: Thomas Pfau’s strange history of the West
Imagine that you’ve been invited to play a game of cards with Thomas Pfau and his cards are called Justice,…
The imaginary “war on religion”
Over at The Atlantic, Peter Beinhart recounts the results of a new survey on religious observance in America.
Contents and discontents of (post)modernity
The Unintended Reformation is an unusual work of history in deliberately focusing as much on the present as on the…
Conceptualizing pluralism and consensus in the modern Western world
Without pointing out those places where I agree with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, I would like to add a…
Secular supercessionism and alternative modernity
Recent years have seen the resurgence of “metahistories” that seek to provide a single complex narrative of seemingly disparate events…