Friday, March 13, 2009
Douthat on Political Theology in General and Me in Particular
I'm glad to see the New York Times hired Ross Douthat to replace Bill Kristol as their new "conservative" Op-Ed columnist. I do admit though I'm a bit biased towards Mr. Douthat given the kind words he had for an article/blog post of mine on political theology. You can read Mr. Douthat's commentary on my article/blog post on political theology here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
.
Nice and concisely put.
.
Clarity is a virtue.
An interesting take on Douthat's earlier career by Greg Atwan, Author of "Privilege" and "The Facebook Book:
link on bigthink.com
Douthat's earlier writings for The Harvard Crimson and Salient paint him as someone whose "writer's zeal as a culture warrior, as well as his often bizarre moral logic, should be disconcerting to readers of the Times who share a few fundamental premises more cosmopolitan than this."
MORE EXCERPTS:
"I’m a little shocked, though, that so few bloggers have turned the obvious journalistic trick of looking up Douthat’s columns from the college paper. (Campus Progress and Cambridge coeval Matt Yglesias are the exceptions.) In fact, Douthat wrote voluminously for two Harvard Yard organs: The Times-feeding, left-lilting Crimson, and the hard-right Salient, of which he was president. As CP points out, Douthat’s collegiate corpus reveals a far more bitterly partisan, and far less sanitized, brand of conservatism than does his work after graduation.
In his journalistic adolescence at the Crimson, Douthat comes off as anti-gay, anti-Islam, curiously anti-Asian, and rabidly right on cultural issues like abortion. At the time, though, his most famous—and for me most indicative—column, was an ostensibly non-partisan one: “The Harvard Syndrome” in which he diagnoses virtually all detractors from Harvard’s glory with a peculiar mass delusion. The Tufts man may have reasonable-sounding criticisms of the behemoth University next door, but the source of his gripe, per Douthat, is invariably that he “was denied admission to Harvard.” Douthat’s elitism is not only intellectually insane, but conjures, if indirectly, the least palatable and most antiquated elements of American conservatism."
Post a Comment