thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Another snapshot of the self-destruction of thought: “Under this asinine rule we’d never have heard of Darwin.” The “asinine rule” is a quantitative measure of scholarly productivity UK bureaucrats use to allocate funds. Academics get high marks by treating “research” as an industrial product. That sort of research is normally worthless, but such questions fall … More ...
Turnabout is:
One way to express the contradiction at the heart of “gay marriage” is that it demands the right to a special status—marriage—in the name of abolishing special status. The real effect of such demands is to eliminate marriage in favor of equal treatment of living arrangements. The sentimentality about how nice married life is, and … More ...
The homosexual movement and its allies constantly use the phrase “sexual identity.” The phrase seems to be taken for granted, and is rarely explained and justified. It seems, though, to refer to the notion that our sexual habits and inclinations are fundamental to what we are, more so than religion or even sex in the … More ...
For anyone who’s interested, I just posted some comments on Rick Santorum/Andrew Sullivan at the other blog I participate in, here (page down for further discussion) and here. Also, a couple of essays I wrote recently appeared in print, “Emerson and Us” in Modern Age and “Understanding Conservatism and Tradition” in Telos.
More bulletins on the willed abolition of the American mind:
John Ray, an anti-leftist social scientist in Australia, has a couple of blogs for his academic papers (here and here—I don’t know why he has two). Many of the papers are concerned with debunking social science theories advanced in support of efforts to combat what is called “bigotry.” What he finds in … More ...
The local Una Voce chapter did a short email interview of their most recent convert to Catholicism and the Latin Mass (me). Here’s the Q&A:
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- How long have you assisted at the traditional Latin Mass in Brooklyn? How did you find out about it?
A bit more than a year, since the Lent before this
If the West is Catholic Christendom, and Catholic Christianity is the truth to which all roads lead, how come the West has evidently abandoned Catholicism and Christianity?
In a way, that’s like asking “why the Fall”? Men are inconstant. They aren’t satisfied with real goods that make demands and are always the same. They want … More ...
It’s good that the World Council of Churches wrote a letter to Castro regretting a “miscarriage of justice” in a trial of Cuban dissidents. It’s less good that they made a point of saying that their letter was “both friendly and firm in tone.” And the substance of their argument was genuinely bad: authorities should … More ...