thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb I’m revising the lecture mentioned in the last entry for another conference. Here’s a *.pdf of the current draft. Basically, I’m abbreviating the first part (scientism and liberalism are bad, tradition and Catholicism are good) and expanding the second (what do we do about it). I intend to do more, and any comments would be … More ...
I gave a talk about reason, scientism and liberalism at a recent conference put on by the Roman Forum. Here’s a *.pdf of the talk’s written form.
Here are the Pope’s remarks to reporters on the papal plane on his way to the United States that became an issue in a recent entry :
… More ...Beltramo: I’ll ask the question in Italian, but we would love to have just a greeting in Spanish. With the enormous growth in the Hispanic presence, the Catholic
One issue raised by Brooks’s “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians, his new hip yuppie ruling class) is how long they’ll last in power. They do have some advantages:
I continue my investigation of current ideals of life, with Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks and Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. (The former author is the NYT columnist, the latter a couple of youngish socialist Canadian … More ...
I noticed a blogger denouncing the Pope for unspecified comments on immigration during his current visit to America, and sent him the following email:
… More ...Dear Mr. Lillpop,
What did the Pope say that you object to?
So far as I can tell from Joe Guzzardi’s piece at
http://vdare.com/guzzardi/080418_pope.htm
all the Pope did was (1) say
“Coolness” is an odd sort of thing. It’s a little ridiculous for someone over the age of 40 or so to notice or comment on it. He should have something better to do, people will say, and he’s going to get it wrong anyway.
Still, it’s an ideal of life that does have some authority … More ...
What do you say in response to a theory of things that is simplified to the point of absurdity: that asserts that existence is an illusion, or physical objects do not exist, or language is all a rhetorical power-game, or mathematical objects are only physiological states of someone’s brain? Some possibilities:
I just watched 12 Angry Men, supposedly one of the top 100 movies of all time, on DVD. Before watching it told my wife that I thought based on reputation that it was going to be “improving.” Now that I’ve watched it I suppose I must be improved.
Movie-wise, it’s not exactly up there … More ...
You might as well ask what it means to speak of any other basic reality. What does it mean to speak of time, space, number, particularity, universality, good, evil, or other minds? We use such concepts, and accept and comment on the things they denote, but explanations of exactly what they are never completely satisfy.… More ...