thoughts in and out of season
At the ISI Conference I spoke at in November a student asked me whether reliance on tradition will continue to make sense if genetic engineering makes human nature more malleable.
My reply was that at this point the potential of genetic engineering is probably overstated. No doubt it will be possible to fix specific defects, … More ...
From discussing America I decided to move on to Rome, or at least to Bavaria and the threshold of Rome. With that in mind, I just read Milestones, then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1998 memoir of his life until he became a bishop. It’s not a major work, but it does give a vivid impression of the … More ...
What we see around us, and my last entry points to, is a perfect storm of compulsory unreason:
A blogger offers comments on my talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism, concluding that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.
I don’t think that’s quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they’re different but they can’t get on without each other. … More ...
At a friend’s suggestion I watched a bit of the Lehrer News Hour last night. He had a couple of think-tank types on, a guy from the Rand Corporation and a lady from somewhere or other, who were saying we had to show everyone we had a commitment to stay in Afghanistan for the long … More ...
The appeal of secular conservatism, like the appeal of laying off cultural conservatism, is that it tells us we can have a minimal politics.
From a conservative standpoint, that’s generally a good thing. As many have pointed out, the conservative tendency is to work within what exists and favor intelligent minor adjustments. If … More ...
I’ve been talking about America and Catholicism, so why not put the two together? With that in mind, I decided to look at Michael Rose’s Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood. There’s been discussion whether the book deals fairly with every person and institution it … More ...
We live in a liberal age. A conservative, then, is someone who resists liberalism. He wants to reverse it or at least resist its advance.
There are a variety of reasons for resisting liberalism, and they lead to different kinds of conservatism. Some are more liberal or radical than conservative, and each can be at … More ...
The contributors to the weblog Secular Right: Reality & Reason have put together a sort of credo, What is the Secular Right? Here it is:
… More ...We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed
My excellent American adventure continues with George M. Marsden’s The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief—not the whole book, but enough to get the picture.
In Marsden’s telling, American colleges were originally designed to serve both a public and a religious purpose. That worked well enough: the social order … More ...