thoughts in and out of season
Why is “McCarthyism” such a dirty word, when no-one seems to know exactly why, and there really were commies under every bed? Communist influence was real and dangerous, and a “witch hunt” may not be so bad when there are real witches. So one moral of the story is that it’s always good … More ...
Some reasons I prefer the kind of Church the traditional Latin Mass suggests to the kind of Church that—to my eye—appears to have come out of Vatican II:
The new world of tolerance just keeps a-building: in England two social workers lost their jobs because they thought adoptions by homosexual couples (which became legal last November) were a bad thing. It’s not clear from the article whether social workers are required to believe in the wisdom of every legal adoption, or only those … More ...
Notes from the religion beat of the newspapers of the New York Times Company:
Multiculturalism takes off! Hospital seeks Klingon interpreter.
On a whim, I stuck “dream of a church” into Google. What came up, it seemed to me, was rah-rah stuff from people who want the community spirit of the church to substitute for God. It’s a kind of bootstraps approach to religion that doesn’t make much sense, because the whole point of religion … More ...
The conservative liberalism of Stanley Kurtz accepts the liberal view that the good of the individual is the ability to do as he chooses. It nonetheless recognizes the need for traditional moral restraints to moderate the pursuit of self-interest, and in particular to promote the network of habits and mutual obligations that constitutes family life. … More ...
The British government wants to give a man who shot a burglar a longer stay in jail because he poses a threat to the public—that part of the public that happens to be engaged in burglary. Government lawyers say burglars ‘need protection’. So as to the government, a burglar is someone who can be … More ...
Another column by Stanley Kurtz lays out in more detail the conservative liberalism that I noted a few days ago. In That Other War: Where the moral debates are, post-Bennett-gate, he proposes that “we are living in a moral universe consisting of three broad groups: religious traditionalists, social liberals, and a balancing and relatively … More ...
Looking back on protestantism, the thing that strikes me most is its collective nothingness. There are admirable individual believers and small groups, but in the absence of a principle of concrete authority larger groups become utterly mindless. There’s really nothing there. For evidence, consider the newsclips from the mainline protestant denominations at The Institute on … More ...