Episode 49 – God and the Speechless at Yale with Avi Woolf
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Release Date: 01/21/2020
139 – Perspectives from Across the Pond with Sarah Stook
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
The United States and United Kingdom have enjoyed and, at times, endured a symbiotic history, culture, politics, and global relationship. Often understanding the quirks of one nation helps us better understand our own. Sarah Stook, journalist of American politics and history, joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to discuss what Americans and Brits can learn from one another, what unique challenges face young, British conservatives, the importance of the British monarch, and whether American politics looks as off-the-rails from an outsider’s perspective as it does from those...
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138 – The Conservative Historian with Belisarius Aves
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
“History offers not simply a chronicle of events but, more importantly, opportunities to gain insights about the human condition from the experience of other times and places,” writes Thomas Sowell in his provocatively titled book . “That is, it offers not merely facts but explanations.” Yet history’s capacity to benefit us is naturally limited by our natural biases. “History cannot be a reality check for visions when history is itself shaped by visions.” To learn how to extract beneficial explanations from history, therefore, we must first learn how to...
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137 – Political Theology with Jonathan Cole – Part 2
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Christian or not, it’s undeniable that Western civilization, and the United States in particular, has deep historical roots in Judeo-Christian teachings. Scripture has shaped much of our culture, thought, values, and politics. But while plenty of Biblical passages appear to have political implications, there’s little consensus among the general population—to say nothing of the religiously devoted—what a political worldview based on the Bible should look like. Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis continues his conversation with Jonathan Cole on the topic of political...
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136 – Political Theology with Jonathan Cole – Part 1
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
“I never discuss anything else except politics and religion,” English writer, philosopher, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton once quipped. “There is nothing else to discuss.” For some sensible, genteel Americans, politics and religion are precisely what you don’t discuss in public and—perhaps even—in private company. Others discuss both with ease yet may have trouble thinking through what their politics might say about their religion, or how their religion ought to inform their politics. The discipline of political theology specializes in studying...
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135 – Cool Ellul with Jason Thacker
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Modern views on how future technology is likely to change our lives range from bloviatingly aspirational visions of utopia to musings on whether the latest advancement in AI will destroy humankind in our lifetime or merely enslave us all in Matrix-style battery capillaries. Yet debates on whether technology is a neutral tool for our benefit or a near-unstoppable force leading us to a particular destiny are nothing new. In 1964, French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote , in which he argued technology had a totalizing effect that could potentially dehumanize our world...
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134 – Gilding a Mess with Avi Woolf
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In the aftermath of the Civil War and prior to the first World War lies an often overlooked era in American history known as the Gilded Age. This was an extraordinarily “messy” period where it’s often difficult to identify the heroes to extol or villains to condemn. But it is also a period that has unusually similar parallels to our own times from rapid technological advancements, growing partisanship, and the unraveling of communities and traditions. We might benefit from a closer understanding of the lessons learned in this messy period. Saving Elephants host...
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133 – Grappling with Hate Speech with Brooke Medina
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In this brave new digital world, opportunities for hate speech seem ubiquitous and increasingly dangerous. How should a conservative balance their values of limited-government and protection of the vulnerable in social media? How do we answer the charges of “silence is violence”, or that speech and equal violence from a legal, cultural, and moral framework? Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by frequent guest Brooke Medina to grapple with the problem of hate speech. Josh shares his experiences of being harassed while (briefly) identifying as a woman on...
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132 – Classical Period Non-Perverts with Jack Butler
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Among the very-online, relatively young, and mostly male cohorts of the Right is a movement growing in popularity and intensity that valorizes the very excesses the Left criticizes as toxic masculinity. This movement, promulgated by the likes of and and defended or even praised by a surprising array of mainstream conservative outlets, has captured the attention of many a young man yearning for a deeper sense of purpose and pursuits in an age of secular materialism and Leftist wokism. In this episode Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by National Review Online submissions...
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131 – Witnessing Whittaker with Sam Tanenhaus
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
In 1948 Whittaker Chambers shocked the nation when, while testifying before Congress, he gave the names of individuals he claimed were working within the United States government as Communist spies for the Soviet Union. Among those named was Alger Hiss, Chamber’s close friend and former Communist comrade. The ensuing trial quickly divided the nation into competing narratives. Who was lying and who was telling the truth? Was Chambers insane or, perhaps, seeking to destroy Hiss due to some personal grievance? Was this merely a pretext to the coming Communist...
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130 – Cultivating Kirk with Jeff Nelson
Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values
Perhaps no other individual (or person, for the benefit of the Kirkian insider) was more responsible for resuscitating intellectual conservatism back to life in the mid Twentieth century than Russell Kirk. Today, Kirk’s efforts to recover and conserve the “Permanent Things” lives on at the . Co-founder and Vice Chair of the Russell Kirk Center, Jeff Nelson, joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to explore the legacy of Russell Kirk and its lasting impact on the conservative movement today. About Jeff Nelson : Jeff Nelson co-founded the Kirk Center with Annette Kirk...
info_outlineEver since William F. Buckley wrote his landmark book “God and Man at Yale” in the 1950s, conservatives have had a deep love/hate relationship with higher education. That relationship has only soured in recent decades with some prominent conservative thinkers—such as the recently deceased sir Roger Scruton—suggesting it may even be time for conservatives to work to “get rid of universities altogether.”
But unlike Buckley’s generation, conservative groups today have emerged and even thrived on college campuses across the nation. Many of these groups have successfully instilled conservatives in prominent think tanks, political offices, the media, law, education, and other important areas of society. But as conservative speakers and ideas become increasingly marginalized in American Ivy League universities, so too have these groups grown increasingly aggressive in demanding their right to freedom of speech.
Many college conservatives and their organizations are in danger of losing sight of what it is they demand to have the right to say. So much so that, were Leftist administrators and students to suddenly tolerate anything and everything their conservative counterparts had to say, they may find themselves quite dumbstruck. We are in danger of fighting for freedom of speech for the speechless.
Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is international and returning guest Avi Woolf to weigh in on where conservatives can go from here. Avi is a translator and editor whose work has been published in Arc Digital, Commentary, National Review, The Bulwark, and The Dispatch. He is chief editor of the online Medium publication Conservative Pathways, and he hopes to help forge a path for a conservatism which is relevant for the 21st century while not abandoning the best of past wisdom. Avi hosts his own podcast entitled “Avi’s Conversational Corner”, a podcast on culture, history, and politics in a broad perspective, which can be found at https://avisconcorner.fireside.fm/
Avi can be found on Twitter @AviWoolf