thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb I’m sorry I haven’t been posting much recently. I’ve been busy editing things I’ve already posted and organizing them into online “books” in hopes of making them more useful. I hope to return to posting shortly. In the meantime readers might want to look at some of the golden oldies, for example The meaning of … More ...
Freedom—the liberation of desire from restraint by other people’s understanding of the good—is central to liberalism. It follows that liberalism is incoherent. The problem is that freedom has to be freedom to do something in particular, and goals conflict. As a result some particular goals, and thus some freedoms, have to be chosen over … More ...
Can Christendom be restored?
Every society is based on some understanding of man and the world that is comprehensive enough to define good and evil, moral obligation, the nature of the good life and so on. But that is just to say that every society is based on a religious understanding.
The issue then is … More ...
Communism, in its concrete sense as a political movement based on the writings of Karl Marx, has been one of the three main variants of political modernity. The others have been liberalism and fascism. As such it combined liberal goals (emancipation of the individual from restraint) with fascist means (struggle in solidarity against an enemy … More ...
Europe refers to a geographical area and a civilization. In the former sense it stretches in the West from Gibraltar to the British Isles, in the East to the Urals, and on the South to the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian Sea. In the latter sense it has usually been more restricted. Napoleon said … More ...
The question regarding man today is whether man is simply a natural object like any other, the qualities of which can be explained in the same way as those of a maple tree or computer program, and if not, whether he has a particular substantive essence—a necessary character that makes him what he is—or whether … More ...
Christendom is the part of the world inhabited by Christians, understood as a polity ordered toward Christ though recognition of the authority of the Church. The ordering of course has never been perfect, but Christ was nonetheless once understood as the principle of unity and the highest possible authority. As such, Christendom endured until the … More ...
The West is a sort of abstract version of “Europe”, which in turn is a secularized version of [Christendom]. As such it is not completely clear what it is or was, except that it wasn’t the “East” (thecommunist world) or the “South” (the Third World). It included New Zealand but not Argentina, for example, and … More ...
The “world” can be taken in more than one sense. It can mean the sort of thing that promotes “worldliness”: things like career, politics and life in a consumer society. In that sense, “the world” refers to human things to the extent they ignore God:
… More ...“Love not the world, neither the things that are in