About Me

The Innocent Smith Journal is a blog about politics and religion that I created in 2009 to fill the reading-and-writing void left by my decision to discontinue a doctoral program in English.  I tend to take a both/and approach to politics and am at once sympathetic to welfare state liberalism and more radical alternatives — especially distributism, the third way economic philosophy of my hero G.K. Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc.  I am well aware of the tension between these vantage points, but understand it to be creative tension and not mere antagonism.  More generally, I am a Catholic and a follower of Alasdair MacIntyre, whose book “After Virtue” I take to be a decisive refutation of classical liberalism.   At the same time, I find myself increasingly drawn to Buddhism and hope to write a book exploring the relationship between Buddhism and Catholicism.

I have divided this blog into three sections:

• Short, informal posts (Smithereens);
• Longer book reviews (The Smith Review of Ideas and Letters); and
• An ever-growing vocabulary list (Smith’s Dictionary).

You may also wish to follow my Twitter news feed.

Innocent Smith is an alias taken from G.K. Chesterton’s splendid little novel, Manalive.