thoughts in and out of season
The “world” can be taken in more than one sense. It can mean the sort of thing that promotes “worldliness”: things like career, politics and life in a consumer society. In that sense, “the world” refers to human things to the extent they ignore God:
… More ...“Love not the world, neither the things that are in
Catholicism is a community, a tradition, a vehicle of revelation, and a world. The word means “universal” or “all-inclusive.” The Catholic Church is therefore the Church that is not partial but possesses by right the whole of Christianity and truth. The extent to which particular Catholics, including Church officials, exercise that right of course varies.… More ...
Tradition is a collective term for the beliefs, habits, attitudes, institutions, stories and so on that grow up among a people living together and give them a common mind and spirit that enables them to make a life together. Tradition is also the knowledge of things that can’t easily be put into words, diffused and … More ...
The three must be understood together. Each comprehends, in its way, the whole of the setting in which we live. Catholicism is the explanation of all things from the standpoint of the most basic realities. “The West”—the political world that surrounds us—is the remains of Catholic Christendom, now in disorder because it has lost touch … More ...
What kind of moral life is possible depends on what the world is like. The view educated men in the modern West take seriously is that what exists is (1) the world described by modern physics, and (2) sensation and desire. Those things are somehow just there, and no one understands or agrees on their … More ...
Robert Reich was a class ahead of me at college, and at the time he stood out for his knack at picking out positions that were (1) somewhat ahead of the curve, so he could get a leg up as representative of The Next Big Thing, but (2) not too far ahead, so those in … More ...
After 3 years of operation, the English version of Wikipedia now has more than 300,000 articles. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a web encyclopedia in the form of a “wiki,” meaning an collection of pages that can be created, edited and interlinked by absolutely anyone, even a random surfer who wanders in … More ...
I’ve noted the Amnesty International view that violence against women is the greatest human rights scandal of our times. Their campaign against that scandal continues, with their submission of a report to the UN that complains, on human rights grounds, about the failure of the Spanish Government to do away with violence against women… More ...
The Turnabout database got corrupted, so I had to restore it from a backup. Everything should be there except whatever was added between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. Wednsday New York time (I think one comment was lost). If you notice any oddities, do let me know.
Scientism and the cult of the expert are fundamental features of contemporary liberalism.
Liberalism intends to abolish oppression. Since oppression includes all subjection to the arbitrary will of another, liberalism attempts to base government action not on will, or on particular personal understandings of the good, but on what the situation objectively requires as determined … More ...