An Imperium of Rights: Consequences of our Cultural Revolution

The \u27empowerment of rights\u27, whether domestically or globally, presents itself in at least a double aspect: both as a cultural revolution and as a political strategy. The strategy pursued by cultural revolutionaries who equate liberalism with secularism is to turn the basic values of the West into weapons against it so that its inherent defense mechanisms will be rendered ineffective. This strategy is most apt to succeed by provoking crises of conscience through redefinitions of human rights that, in the end, lead to individual and institutional conversion. But, as Marcello Pera notes, political liberalism itself suffers from an \u27ethical deficit\u27. Torn from its religious roots, it lacks the requisite thickness of moral authority needed to protect the rights of persons and resist threats to the very existence of civil society. Thus have we come to confuse despotism with liberty and undercut our capacity for self-government

Diagnosis and salvation: revolution, history and Augustine in Eric Voegelin and Rosenstock-Huessy

Panel 7 - Philosophies of History in Comparison Voegelin and Rosenstock-Huessy (Eric Voegelin Society)postprin

Eric Voegelin\u27s Mystical Epistemology and Its Influence on Ethics and Politics.

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to examine and analyze Eric Voegelin\u27s theory of knowledge, and to see what implications it has on his theories of ethics and politics. The profundity of Voegelin\u27s epistemological search and recovery is apparent when placed in the context of his disillusionment with and resistance to the dominant epistemology of his day, namely, positivism. Through a recovery and restoration of the symbolizations of classical and Christian philosophy, Voegelin searches for and finds experiential knowledge which is gained through faith in search of understanding (fides quaerens intellectum), which brings about a vision of the whole and a formation of the heart (fides caritate formata) in the individual person through divine-human participation. These findings have important ethical and political implications. If we are to be whole persons, our communities must reflect our whole realm of being and experience. The radical fragmentation of the social field into its parts--the religious, political, and educational--creates fragmented and deformed people. This diagnosis, coupled with Voegelin\u27s epistemology and its call for ecumenicalism, lead to a therapy, which is that we must heal our communities and the individuals within them. The various realms of the social field, the realms of our experience, should work together as one, while at the same time checking and balancing one another to insure that one does not rise toward an eclipse of the other. Such is the basis for community. Voegelin\u27s mystical epistemology, his new science of politics, and their implications for modern thought and modern life recover and restore the noetic and pneumatic sciences to their proper and necessary place, which is a serious study of human existence and man\u27s relationship to society, the world, and God