Peter Lawler — The New Atlantis

Peter Augustine Lawler

Peter Augustine Lawler was a New Atlantis contributing editor and Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He was the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Allergic to Crazy: Quick Thoughts on Politics, Education, and Culture, Rightly Understood (St. Augustine, 2014) and Modern and American Dignity: Who We Are as Persons, and What That Means for Our Future (ISI, 2010).

Professor Lawler was a regular contributor to the Postmodern Conservative blog. He blogged for First Things and the Ashbrook Center’s No Left Turns, and wrote a column called Rightly Understood on BigThink.com.

He was also the editor of the journal Perspectives on Political Science and the co-director of the Stuck with Virtue conference series. He served on the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2004 to 2009.

In a remembrace, New Atlantis senior editor Yuval Levin wrote that Lawler “shaped generations of students to take their country seriously, but to take their souls even more seriously.” Describing Lawler’s view, Levin wrote:

[A]ctual human beings can never really be quite happy while playing the role that modern free societies assign them. That means they will be restless, and eager for a different role. That restlessness is a source of endless anxiety, but also of hope — because it sends us searching for a way of life better suited to who we really are. It means modernity will always be producing its own critics and always live in a kind of creative tension with itself.