thoughts in and out of season
I’ve been watching the Polish TV miniseries The Decalogue, directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. It’s really extraordinary, the ultimate category-buster as far as TV miniseries go.
As the name suggests, there are 10 films or episodes, each based (somewhat loosely) on one of the 10 Commandments and each about the lives and moral struggles of … More ...
I was struck by a quotation from an essay by feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether mentioned in an article about a Catholic-connected conference in which she’ll be taking part:
… More ...“All racist, sexist, classist, and anthropocentric assumptions of the superiority of whites over blacks, males over females, managers over workers, humans over animals and plants must
A couple of recent polls indicate a decided recent shift to the left on social issues, and so make it evident that current fears of fundamentalism and theocracy are due mostly to the shock of increasingly radical “mainstream” thinkers that there are people who haven’t radicalized as much as they have and so act as … More ...
La Rochefoucauld says that “he who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks.” The point applies more strongly as the effort becomes more comprehensive, so that a whole society that tries to live perfectly rationally will go stark staring mad. That is increasingly the case with our own society:
A commenter, apparently an American Jew long resident in Italy who can view America (and Europe) as both insider and outsider, has posted a lengthy ramble about America, Americanism, modernity, and related topics. His ramble raises some interesting issues, but two that seem especially worth commenting on are whether advanced liberalism, the currently ascendant … More ...
Student free speech cases like “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” strike me as rather silly. Schools always try to bring students to think and act in some ways rather than others. That’s why they exist. To do so they maintain controlled environments and clear hierarchies of authority. In particular, they prescribe the topics of … More ...
Senator Obama, whose own church seems quite ready to accentuate differences, repeats the common goodthinker’s complaint that
Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart.
The change is not so mysterious. In the 60s or thereabouts governing elites decisively rejected their … More ...
I don’t know much about the topic in its specific sense as a theory opposed to Darwinism. Some ideas associated with it do seem to make sense. It seems to me, for example, that mathematical analysis and basic physics and chemistry ought to set outer bounds on what random variation and natural selection can do, … More ...
I’m about half-way through Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (available free online). It’s a great book from the great age of New England letters. His account is still considered quite accurate, or so it seems, and he presents it in the form of a clear, vivid and impartial narrative based on the … More ...
Steve Sailer notes something notable:
… More ...In the past, typically, happy talk was the style of the insecure middle of the social scale. Those who wished to be seen as above status concerns espoused frankness … A really odd thing about American culture today, however, is that as you go up the educational and social