New Humanists
New Humanists
Latest Episodes
Real Culture, or Culture as Costume? | Episode CXIII
Properly understood, politics is an expression of culture. But the politician would like to use culture for political ends. In doing so, he boils his people's culture down to the merely aestheticized: food, traditional dance, music, dialect or ...
BONUS: The Speeches in Thucydides
Thucydides says that the conflict over Epidamnus was the first discrete cause of the Peloponnesian War, and it is in his recounting over that conflict that we encounter the first speeches in Thucydides' history. For many students, a handful of ...
Protestant and Catholic Culture | Episode CXII
Since the time of the Reformation, England has had an established Church alongside a rich variety of Protestant Dissenters as well as a group of Roman Catholic hold-outs. The country exemplifies the tense but productive diversity in "sect and c...
BONUS: Who Caused the Peloponnesian War?
After the simmering conflict between Athens and its allies squaring up against Sparta and its allies, often referred to as the "First Peloponnesian War," the warring parties entered into a treaty known as the "Thirty Years' Peace." But well bef...
Nationalism and High Culture | Episode CXI
T.S. Eliot argues that cultural vitality depends in part upon a balance of unity and diversity in a nation with respect to its various regions. But this raises all sorts of questions: What distinguishes a nation from a region? Isn't a nation ju...