New Polity

Small farming is a living critique of industrial capitalism, a rebellion against tyrannies established through widespread fear of and the presumption of scarcity . . . and a tasty way to live. Shawn and Beth Dougherty discuss—and romanticize!—their garden of Eden against the ideologies of modernity.

Politics is from the land. Farmers and authors Shawn and Beth Dougherty stop by the New Polity office to discuss why Catholics need to get serious about restoring the family farm.

Queer theory is all about the search for one's authentic sexual identity and the freedom to express it—or is it? Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell discuss the conclusions of Butler's queer theory and the ultimate aim of its political project.

Whoever controls the narrative, controls the truth. So can "constructing a new narrative" actually liberate oppressed identities? Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell explore the Butlerian critique of gender structuralists to find out.

Gender is a social construct. And so is sex. And so is everything else. Maria Brandell and Marc Barnes finish the first chapter of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and try to show the difference between academic postmodernism and the naive identity politics of popular transgender and queer identity construction.

Feminism can't figure out what women are, at least not without excluding someone. Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell explicate Judith Butler's troubling of feminism in the second part of their book club on Gender Trouble.

Join Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell's book club on Judith Butler's queer theory classic, "Gender Trouble." Part I features a look into the text's backdrop, postmodernism—and its unexpected confirmation of Catholic doctrine.

Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell discuss how their dissatisfaction with both sides of the gender debate led them to take a closer look at the Catholic theological tradition.

In this final episode of the Politics of Tyranny, Andrew Willard Jones and Marc Barnes attempt to tie together the many techniques of tyrants into one, comprehensive package: war. All tyranny is the expansion of the state of war into places of peace for the sake of private gain.

Population control isn't just in the forced sterilizations and genocides of tyrannical regimes. It is wherever people subordinate the human good of procreation to the punishments and rewards of the regime. We're all eunuchs now, say Andrew Willard Jones and Marc Barnes.