Current is in the midst of its eighth week of publication. I hope you have found our daily features informative, educational, and entertaining. We are pleased with the kind of writers we are attracting to this little online magazine. Thus...
Christopher Lasch
Barack Obama’s 2020 DNC convention address, democratic virtues, and the failure of Trumpism
Watch Barack Obama speak to the nation on Wednesday night from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bps3m4eFTuE&w=560&h=315] Obama’s choice of venues speaks volumes. At a time when many on the Left are disparaging the American Revolution...
Episode 65: “What Would Lasch Say?”
The American historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) had a powerful influence on the world of ideas. What would the author of the best-selling Culture of Narcissism (1979) have to say about Donald Trump and his particular brand of...
What is Populism?
I have been writing about populism in light of the recent Christianity Today editorial calling for the removal of Donald Trump. You can read my posts here and here and here and here. What is populism? How should we think historically...
Eric Miller Talks Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry
Recently Eric Miller was a guest on the Solidarity Hall podcast “Dorothy’s Place.” Listen here. Miller on Lasch: “You know you’re in the right space for Lasch when you don’t feel at ease but you feel alive.”...
Some Front Porchers Pick Their Candidate for 2020
What is a Front Porcher? One way to define a Front Porcher is someone who reads (and generally likes what they read at) a website titled Front Porch Republic. Here is a description of what the website is all about:...
Is Jimmy Carter an Antidote to Trump?
David Siders thinks so. Here is a taste of his recent piece at Politico: “Carter almost takes us out of the entire realm of what our politics has become,” said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster who worked on the...
Is Christopher Lasch's *Revolt of the Elites* Really a Reflection of America in the Age of Trump?
Kevin Mattson, Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and a student of the late historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch, reflects on the relevance of his mentor in the age of Trump. He questions whether those calling...
Quote of the Day
From Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1996): Both left-and right-wing ideologies, in any case, are now so rigid that new ideas make little impression on their adherents. The faithful, having sealed themselves off...
The Democratic Malaise
This morning I picked up my copy of Christopher Lasch’s 1995 book The Revolt and the Elite and the Betrayal of Democracy and started reading it again. I am still trying to process it all from the perspective of the so-called age...
"The Essence of Narcissism"
Those who follow me on Twitter (@johnfea1) may recall that last week I got a bit obsessed with the present-day relevance of Christopher Lasch’s 1979 best-seller The Culture of Narcissism. Narcissist lacks “any real intellectual engagement with the world.” -C. Lasch...
"Corporate Evangelicalism"
I recently finished reading Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity,and the Unmaking of the American Dream. I have been a fan of Lehmann’s writing for some time now. A former graduate student in history at the University of Rochester where he...
Do Historians Privilege "Change Over Time" Over "Continuity?"
Back in January 2007 historians Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke wrote a piece in Perspectives on History titled “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?” In this essay Andrews and Burke synthesized the concepts that historians use to make sense...
Christopher Lasch on the Humanities
Things have not changed much in since Lasch wrote his 1979 best-seller The Culture of Narcissism: In the humanities, demoralization has reached the point of a general admission that humanistic study has nothing to contribute to an understanding of the modern...
"The People" and "Citizens"
Eric Miller writes so well that whenever I read him I am inspired to work harder on my own prose. In his recent essay at Comment, Miller, a professor of history at Geneva College, discusses the meaning of “populism” in American history...
George Scialabba on Christopher Lasch and the Family
Cultural critic George Scialabba revisits Christopher Lasch’s 1977 book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged and tries to rescue Lasch’s argument from the feminists who bashed the book when it first appeared. Sciaballa writes at The Baffler: It was not […]
David Brooks: Born Again?
Columbia Journalism Review is running a great piece of long-form journalism by Danny Funt, a “Delacorte Fellow” at Columbia Journalism School. The topic is David Brooks.Funt portrays Brooks as a New York Times columnist searching for spiritual and moral answers to life’s...
Christopher Lasch and Localism
l to r: Fox, Miller, Westbrook, and Lasch-Quinn Over at his blog In Media Res, Friends University political scientist Russell Arben Fox offers a summary post of a session on Christopher Lasch and localism at a recent Front Porch Republic gathering...
Time to Pull Out Some Christopher Lasch
If you have been reading the last day or two, I have been harping on the idea that Pope Francis is not political and should not be understood through the stale political and ideological categories that Americans tend to use...
Chalk One Up for Progress
On Wednesday Barack Obama extolled the virtues of progress at a White House press event. Here is what he said: The truth of the matter is that for all the challenges we face, all the problems that we have,…if you...