thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb John Dewey (1859-1952) remains an extremely influential thinker whose thought sums up important trends in American life. Many oppose his thought and the trends it favors. He wrote a huge amount (his collected works run to 37 volumes) and frequently expressed himself unclearly or outright contradicted himself. Perhaps as a consequence, too many … More ...
A lawyer with mainstream liberal views on the Establishment Clause sent me a note taking issue with some of my comments on my page on the Establishment of Religion and I responded. Here’s an edited version of the exchange:
… More ...Liberal Lawyer: How can you justify the assertion that liberalism is implicitly totalitarian? A society
A couple of items among many to show how things stand in law, learning and the church:
There was shock, horror and head-shaking in my late ’70s law school procedure class when we read a Supreme Court opinion to the effect that education wasn’t a fundamentally adversarial relationship and it didn’t make sense to insist on full adversarial procedure (notice, a hearing, right to counsel, right to confront witnessess etc.) before students … More ...
A correspondent criticized my statement in Science, Rationality and the Good to the effect that “‘rationality’ is itself an evaluative term, and to say a proposition is rational is to say that it should be believed—an evaluative statement”:
… More ...In science, a proposition worthy of belief needs to comport with reality. A proposition comports with reality
There’s some interesting history on the Supreme Court’s anti-religious turn in the last century in an article by a couple of Catholic social scientists, Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism? It seems that the big change occurred around 1940, when the Court stopped talking about “civil liberty,” a traditional conception that recognized the common good, … More ...
Here’s an article relevant to recent comments on liturgy: Eamon Duffy on the abolition of fasts post-Vatican II. The basic point is that man is not wholly determined by thoughts divorced from externals. Specific practices help constitute religion even when the connection to doctrine is fairly loose. Some notable points in the article:
Found on the web:
I got another note from my Finnish correspondent, who continues to express some dissatisfaction with conservatism (he is specially concerned with Russell Kirk). As in the past (here and here) his questions seemed worth editing and passing on, together with my attempts to answer them:
… More ...Finnish Correspondent: Nothing changes. When communism failed,
More odds and ends: