thoughts in and out of season
An old friend asked me to contribute something to an issue of the Mensa Research Journal he was guest-editing on the topic of “Barriers to Educating the Gifted” (vol. 40, No. 2; summer 2009). Here’s the result, plus or minus a few footnotes and editorial fiddles:
… More ...“Our children are our future.”
“A mind is a
Susan McWilliams, a political scientist and Front Porch Republic contributor, has a slightly belated contribution to the symposium on my book up at First Principles. She praises the book highly from a generally liberal perspective as an attempt to get beyond the dichotomies of today’s politics by looking at basic questions.
First Principles, the ISI online journal, has a symposium on my book The Tyranny of Liberalism with positive reviews by Paul Gottfried and James Matthew Wilson, and a not-so-positive one by William English. My response to the reviews is here.
Evan McLaren notes that I mostly deal with grand issues and tend toward a “big tent” approach, at least among right-wingers, and wonders whether that makes sense.
I think my approach has been helpful theoretically, for getting an overall understanding of issues. If you give free play to a lot of different concerns, and don’t … More ...
A friend has forwarded to me his translation of Letter to Cardinal Fornari On the Errors of Our Time by Juan Donoso Cortes and given permission to make it available on the web. At the time the letter was written Cardinal Fornari was in charge of a commission studying modern errors for Pope Pius IX … More ...
There are any number of decline-of-Western-Civ books. Since I just wrote one myself, I ought to talk down the competition. In the case of John Carroll’s book, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited, I just can’t. It’s too brilliant.
Carroll’s basic point is that man needs a place to stand, and humanism—the attempt … More ...
In my discussion of Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition I commented that “functional pattern” (my usual term) seems to cover the same ground as Thomistic “formal cause” and “final cause” taken together. In each case the point is to describe the thing missing in modern thought that makes it go haywire, most strikingly in connection … More ...
Rod Dreher sent a note asking how trads should argue with “gay marriage” proponents, and posted my reply at Beliefnet.
And that comforts me. (The title of this entry isn’t literally true, but Rod Dreher does say my book is “a blockbuster that belongs on the shelves of any thinking conservative who wants to understand where we are today, and where we are going.”)
I just finished reading Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. In spite of its title, the book is less a discussion of the “New Atheism” (Dawkins, Dennett, et. al.) than a wonderfully clear overview of Thomism. As such, it emphasises its response to the insights and inadequacies of … More ...