• Skip to main content
  • Current
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Reviews
  • 🔎

anti-intellectualism

Reviving intellectual life in the university is “more than simply promoting the humanities or encouraging interdisciplinary study”

John Fea   |  January 9, 2025

Earlier today I posted on Steven Mintz’s categorization of university professors. Read it here and figure out where you fall in Mintz’s taxonomy. Mintz’s categorized professors as part of his larger thoughts on how to make universities less anti-intellectual. Here […]

Shakespeare is “mid:” and other arguments in favor of education

Elizabeth Stice   |  October 7, 2024

Skepticism about books or culture is hardly new or different or exciting. Anti-intellectualism is a grand American tradition.

If David Barton’s work has been widely discredited, why has he remained so popular and influential?

John Fea   |  November 18, 2023

Journalist Jon Ward, the author of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, recently asked me the question in the title of this post as part of a story he is writing on David Barton for Yahoo News. […]

Mark Lilla on “beautiful souls” and democracy

John Fea   |  December 24, 2022

What is a beautiful soul? In 2020 essay at Liberties, cultural critic and humanities professor Mark Lilla defines it this way: What is a beautiful soul? For Schiller, who coined the term, it was a person in whom the age-old […]

“On the Evangelical Mind and Consulting the Faithful”

John Fea   |  October 21, 2022

In September 2017, the founders of Current (Jay Green, Eric Miller, and yours truly) participated in a conference in Indianapolis on the “State of the Evangelical Mind.” (This was 3-4 years before we launched Current). We spoke at a session […]

“Anti-Intellectualism and the Integration of Faith and Learning”

John Fea   |  October 20, 2022

In September 2017, the founders of Current (Jay Green, Eric Miller, and yours truly) participated in a conference in Indianapolis on the “State of the Evangelical Mind.” (This was 3-4 years before we launched Current). We spoke at a session […]

The anti-Catholicism of some “Catholics” (and Marjorie Taylor Greene)

John Fea   |  April 30, 2022

America contributing editor Bill McCormick S.J. writes on a recent Marjorie Taylor Greene interview with Michael Voris from an organization called “Church Militant.” A taste: For many Catholics, there was no real story in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent interview with Michael Voris […]

How one small Eric Metaxas comment sums-up the current state of evangelical thinking

John Fea   |  July 16, 2021

In yesterday’s Evangelical roundup I posted and commented on evangelical conspiracy theorist Eric Metaxas’s interview with fellow evangelical conspiracy theorist and Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano. Here is the interview: At the 1:25 mark, Eric Metaxas says: There was just […]

Should the first 50 pissed-off people to get to the microphone at a school-board meeting be running our schools?

John Fea   |  July 12, 2021

Rich Lowry of The National Review writes: To paraphrase Bill Buckley, it’d be better if the schools were run by the first 50 pissed-off people standing in line to get to the microphone at a contentious school-board meeting than by the […]