Owen Grumbles is a young writer working through questions in philosophy and history — mostly self-taught, mostly out loud. He’s early in the path, and he writes to learn rather than from a settled position; the point isn’t to have the answers yet, but to ask the questions well and in public. His curiosity is wide and self-directed: ethics and moral philosophy, the philosophy of religion, intellectual and religious history, and the history of political thought, with a steady pull toward how older thinkers argued about belief, value, authority, and the good life. He brings a hands-on, take-it-apart habit from a love of building and tinkering, pointed now at ideas instead of hardware.
The thinkers he keeps returning to are John Calvin and John Owen — the Puritan theologian is his namesake — in theology, and Montesquieu among the seculars. He writes as a conservative and states it without hedging: he stands against the ruling liberal and progressive ideologies — liberalism, progressivism, socialism, communism — which he reads as versions of one error, that human nature is raw material for politics to reshape. His own case is for ordered liberty: limited government, strong families, settled tradition, and the self-command a free people can’t do without.
He’s a high school junior, and most of his training is coursework he’s chosen for himself. He’s currently taking Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness (MITx 24.00x), and working through Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature (Open Yale Courses, PHIL 181), Death (Open Yale Courses, PHIL 176), and Justice (HarvardX, Michael Sandel).