Posts by author

Jonathan Church

21 posts

Jonathan Church is an economist, a chartered financial analyst, a CFA charter holder, and a writer. He is the author of Reinventing Racism: Why “White Fragility” Is the Wrong Way to Think about Racial Inequality (2020), and Stoicism and Social Justice: Virtue in an Age of Identity Politics (forthcoming). His writings have been published in Quillette, The Good Men Project, Washington Examiner, The Federalist, and other venues. He is on Twitter at @jondavidchurch. Start a conversation with Jonathan: https://letter.wiki/JonathanChurch/conversations

4 min

Politics

What Ibram X. Kendi Gets Wrong About Reparations

Prominent scholar and activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has claimed, “To oppose reparations is to be racist. To support reparations is to be anti-racist.” But is Kendi right? One way…

16 min

Philosophy

Pragmatism, Empiricism and the Meaning of Truth

At the turn of the twentieth century, philosopher and psychologist William James arrived at a theory of truth and knowledge called radical empiricism. By contrast with the empiricism of John…

9 min

Politics

Queer Theory and the Case for Marital Infidelity

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or…

28 min

The Orwellian Dystopia of Robin DiAngelo’s PhD Dissertation

As I have written time and again, Robin DiAngelo’s theory of white fragility is defective on so many fronts that it is a wonder people take it seriously. But they…

4 min

Civility Without Squeamishness: Making Impossible Conversations Possible

One of us is a proud member of the Left. The other rejects the Left. One of us writes sympathetically of Jordan Peterson’s critique of postmodern neo-Marxism. The other does…

26 min

Philosophy

How Critical Theory Came to Be Skeptical of Science

In the introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write: When public opinion has reached a state in which thought inevitably (emphasis mine) becomes a commodity, and language the…

15 min

Philosophy

How Individualism and Social Constructivism Can Be Reconciled: Part 2

In part 1 of this essay, I explain the difference between the Cartesian subject and Heidegger’s Dasein. Descartes was primarily concerned with skeptical doubts about the state of knowledge accessible…

11 min

Philosophy

How Individualism and Social Constructivism Can Be Reconciled: Part 1

In a recent exchange of letters on the platform Letter (more on which here), Matthew McManus and I explored the topic of inequality, with a focus on leftist critique. The…

28 min

Politics

In Defense of the War on Terror: A Response to Ben Burgis

In a recent article on free will and determinism for Areo, Ben Burgis concludes that “everything that’s been done in the last eighteen years in the name of fighting terrorism…

16 min

Philosophy

Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School to Foucault

Critical Theory is a modern philosophical development that stems, in large part, from a group of twentieth-century philosophers affiliated with the Frankfurt School, who argued that the culture of Enlightenment,…

8 min

Politics

Personal Narrative at the Expense of Fact: Ariel Saramandi’s Essay on the Alt Right

An earnest and moving essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the alt right in Mauritius is sadly plagued by lazy factual errors that undermine its intellectual integrity,…

10 min

Politics

White Fragility Theory Mistakes Correlation for Causation

As I have noted before, Robin DiAngelo, the sociologist and critical race theorist who authored the bestselling book White Fragility, does not hold the “presumed neutrality of White European enlightenment…

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