thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb My publisher tells me they want my book to be a bit more coherent and a little less vague, so I’m busily unscrambling arguments, tightening up prose, and adding examples and such. As a result, posting is likely to be sporadic for a while.
In the meantime, I was inspired by Michael Blowhard’s link to … More ...
Steve Sailer has a couple of interesting pieces on Obama and his identity issues. Reminds me a bit of someone I once knew, a black man with a Christian mother and Muslim convert father whose marriage broke up over religious and other incompatibilities. He was intelligent, extremely disciplined, attentive to what others were looking … More ...
A basic question that’s attracted surprisingly little discussion in spite of its obvious social importance is why so many people not only let religion slide practically but deny it as a theoretical matter. Their apparent claim is that one part of a universe that arose by chance and means nothing can interpret that universe correctly … More ...
Anthony Esolen visits one of the few surviving men’s colleges and finds it a hotbed of benign timocracies. Fine upstanding young men, sense of honor, all that sort of thing. From his account it seems that education really can make a difference, and people can bounce back and start acting normal again if given … More ...
Here’s some more moaning about These Young People Today, where “today” means recent decades going back God knows how long: The Closing of the American Mind Revisited. The piece is prompted by the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s book.
Like most complaints about These Young People Today it’s really about the consequences of the … More ...
The 70s were called the “me” decade, but it appears that we’ve built on the foundation they laid. College students’ scores on a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory have been rising steadily since testing began in 1982, with the proportion of high scorers rising from half to two-thirds. The study worries that narcissists “are … More ...
Several items that touch on the current effort to turn the whole world into a unitary rationalized industrial scheme:
More news from the Sex Front that for some reason I’ve been covering a lot lately:
It’s become routine to say that current Anglican disputes are really about scriptural authority or unity of doctrine within the Anglican communion rather than sex. To my mind that doesn’t wash. At bottom the basic issue is always truth, in this case the truth about sex. If the right answer is that its human meaning … More ...
Some may harbor half-articulate doubts, but Catholics who want to be relevant have jumped on the bandwagon like everybody else. “Human rights” are now the sole moral basis of public discussion in the Western world. Rights rule, at least in theory. The bumper sticker says “question authority,” but that doesn’t apply to … More ...