Contributors
Editor Paul J Cella
Editor Paul J. Cella is grateful he may freely wage intellectual warfare against the dominant spirit of his age. He is honored and awed that there is still such good in his country that this warfare is necessary and may perhaps be just. And in the company of such men and women as these he wonders whether he can measure up. He is an Editor at Redstate.com. His writing has appeared in The New Atlantis, The American Conservative, Touchstone, The Dallas Morning News and other publications. He is decisively outnumbered by girls in his domestic life. He loves golf but is quite bad at it. A Colorado-born Georgian, he attended Wake Forest University, mainly to watch ACC basketball.
Jeff Martin (Maximos)
Jeff Martin (Maximos) insouciantly repudiates the immoral swindle of consent, according to which he owes some measure of loyalty to the liberal political and social regime under which he has lived, offering him, as it has, the shelter of its laws. He finds that this swindle is an obstacle to his self-actualization as a reactionary, and the actualization of the self is what the liberal bargain claims to be about, is it not?
He accounts himself unworthy of the company in which he finds himself, and the of domestic felicities which he enjoys with his wife and two young sons. He is a lifelong resident of the greater Philadelphia area, and a fan of the local sports franchises, which may account for his affinity for lost and futile causes. He attended Cedarville College (now a University!), from which he earned a BA in philosophy, and would even have graduated summa cum laude had his alma mater believed in the Latin language.
He believes that, however good things may be today, they were surely better yesterday, and takes solace in the fact that, however bad things may seem for the traditionalist at present, they could always be worse. Nevertheless, mindful of the fact that no cause is ever truly lost because none is ever truly won, he holds forth the hope that, as the passional aspect of human nature must be held in subjection by the rational, so also may the liberal tendency one day be governed to its proper measure by the traditional, the historical principle of reason.
Lydia McGrew
Lydia McGrew is a housewife and home schooling mother living in the Midwest. She has a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University (1995), but nearly all of her published work has been in analytic philosophy, with specialties in epistemology and probability theory. She has recently published Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason (Routledge, 2007) with her husband, Tim McGrew. Blogging in defense of conservative and unfashionable political positions is one of her hobbies.
Steve Burton
Steve Burton received his B.A. in Philosophy from Berkeley in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Michigan in 1992. He specialized in aesthetics - especially the aesthetics of music. He taught for a year at the University of Indiana, and for three years at the University of Chicago, and, later, for a couple of years, interned in the Bio-ethics Department at the National Institutes of Health.
But he never learned to keep his conservative/libertarian trap shut.
He now lives near Kansas City, Missouri, where he does his best to look after his aged mother.
Bill Luse
Bill Luse has written articles for Touchstone, The New Pantagruel (now defunct but still online) and Orson Scott Card's Ornery.org, and is the author of a novel he hasn't tried to publish in twenty years, but which is available in paperback book form upon request, as long as the request is accompanied by cash money. To actually survive, he teaches English at Valencia Community College in Orlando, and hosts the website Apologia (although the latter is not really pulling its weight in the matter of survival). He likes playing golf with Paul Cella when the opportunity arises, because it's easy money.
Daniel Larison
Daniel Larison is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine history at the University of Chicago. Currently living in Hyde Park, he hails from Albuquerque. When he is not allegedly writing his dissertation on the sixth ecumenical council, he blogs at Eunomia on politics and foreign policy, translates Armenian poetry and serves as a reader at his local Russian Orthodox parish.
Zippy Catholic
Zippy Catholic is a pseudonymous blogger. His qualification for commenting on momentous subjects is that he is some guy. He has a bachelor's in engineering, an MBA, and five software patents. He takes graduate courses for fun (usually in science and technology, most recently in bioinformatics) and might at some point ask some institution to recognize the fact with another wall hanging. His addiction to books is cause for concern among his relatives, who don't think that that much shelf and box space should be dedicated to books you haven't gotten around to reading yet.
He has worked in the cubicle farms of very large corporations, has personally started and run two small high tech companies, and has invested/participated in several more. He was briefly on the board of directors of a public NASDAQ-traded company and is a partner in a number of investment partnerships. In spite of all this he has just the barest clue how venture capital and Wall Street work, and is useless (dangerous even) as a source of advice on personal investment. He is an instrument rated private pilot.
Francis Beckwith
Francis Beckwith is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. A graduate of Fordham University (Ph.D., philosophy) and the Washington University School of Law, St. Louis (Master of Juridical Studies), he is the author or editor of over a dozen books including Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007), To Everyone An Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (InterVarsity Press, 2004), Law, Darwinism & Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Do the Right Thing: Readings in Applied Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Wadsworth, 2002).
His articles have appeared in a wide range of a academic journals including Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, International Philosophical Quarterly, Public Affairs Quarterly, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Medicine & Philosophy, Social Theory & Practice, Catholic Social Science Review, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, San Diego Law Review, Journal of Law & Religion, Christian Bioethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, and Philosophia Christi. He presently sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Church & State and Rhetoric & Public Affairs.
He and his wife, the redoubtable Frankie Rozelle, live in Woodway, Texas, and are parishoners at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Bellmead, Texas.
Edward Feser
Edward Feser teaches philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. He has been a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton.
Called by National Review "one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy," Feser is the author of On Nozick, Philosophy of Mind, Locke, and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek. He is also the author of many academic articles. His primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.
Feser also writes on politics and culture, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective. In this connection, his work has appeared in such publications as The American Conservative, City Journal, Crisis, National Review, New Oxford Review, Reason, and TCS Daily.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children.
Michael Liccione
Michael Liccione earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and his BA in philosophy and religion from Columbia University. After a brief brush with running for political office, he taught in a number of institutions, mostly Catholic, including the Catholic University of America, the University of St. Thomas (Houston), Guilford Technical Community College, and a seminary that had declined to admit him as a student. His conventional publications have appeared in The Thomist, First Things, National Review, and Christifideles; his personal blog is Sacramentum Vitae. Still unsure of his place in what's left of the conservative movement, he looks forward to teaching again in a reasonably tolerant Catholic institution that is, all the same, an actually Catholic institution. Currently living in Central New York, he hopes either to return soon to his home town of New York City or to Washington, DC, to feed the fires of consternation.
Jeff Culbreath
Jeff Culbreath is a married father of five, a bumbling rural homesteader, and a Catholic who attends the traditional Latin Mass. A fourth-generation Californian, he is fortunate to make his home amidst the scenic pastures and orchards of the northern Sacramento Valley. He lives vicariously through his musical children, known locally as “Prairie Strings”, who perform European classical and American traditional styles of music with nine instruments between them. Mr. Culbreath is less concerned with the politics and personalities of the day than he is with religion, culture and the “permanent things”. His views are strongly influenced by the ideas of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, John Senior, Wendell Berry, Neil Postman, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and many others, but above all by the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.