thoughts in and out of season
Romano Guardini’s book The End of the Modern World provides an interesting comparison with Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Both were written in the immediate post-war period, and first presented to the public in 1947-1948. Both considered, in the setting of recent horrors, the tendency of technological mass society to reduce all things to function … More ...
Weaver’s views in Ideas Have Consequences suffer from a standard problem with conservative views: they attempt to secure the benefits of recognizing transcendent authority without actually recognizing it, at least not in any form definite enough to be useable. They thus attempt to substitute “piety”—generalized respect toward man, nature and history—for religion.
He insists that … More ...
I’ve been rereading Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, a basic text in traditionalist conservatism.
Weaver’s basic thought is that the world is intelligible, man is free, we must understand the world intelligently to choose correctly, and we’ve been growing progressively less intelligent on basic issues for the past few hundred years. Most of … More ...
The bizarre argument that getting rid of the specificity and implicit function of marriage would strengthen it has been refuted by experience: How Holland Destroyed Marriage. The piece (by Charles Colson) cites a series of pieces by Stanley Kurtz showing how the move toward “gay marriage” in northern Europe has gone with abandonment of … More ...
On the face of it, the expected decision of the New York City Board of Health to let people decide what sex they are and to have the decision reflected on their birth certificates seems a reductio ad absurdum of the “gender perspective,” in effect the view that sexual distinctions should be treated … More ...
A Good Source tells me that everyone at the Vatican is in a tizzy over the rumored document liberalizing availability of the Tridentine (traditional Latin) mass. Everyone think’s it’s a big deal, but no one (except I suppose the Pope) has any idea what’s going to happen or when.
So much for inside gossip. In … More ...
I remember the beauty of Anglican worship when I first encountered it, and I used to attend an Episcopalian church, so like others I’ve been watching with horrified fascination the continuing devolution of the Episcopal Church. So here are some comments on Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori’s investiture sermon as presiding bishop of what is now … More ...
Or that seems the lesson to be drawn from the fact that Mary Stachowicz gets 1350 Google hits and Matthew Shepard gets 563,000.
Here’s a list of links relating to issues regarding tradition and Catholicism we’ve dealt with at Turnabout. Inclusions and exclusions tend to be arbitrary, personal and happenstance, and don’t show whether I agree or disagree with something. They are also largely based on ignorance of what’s out there, so suggestions would be welcome—links don’t … More ...
Oriens, the journal of the Ecclesia Dei Society of Australia, has a good website with a good selection of articles, reviews, and other materials connected to the restoration of the traditional Latin Mass and its bearing on the situation in the Church generally. Among the articles I particularly noticed The Papa Luigi syndrome and … More ...