thoughts in and out of season
Why “metanoia”? Usually I don’t like the Christian use of Greek words, agape, kairos, koinonia or whatever. The effect is to suggest special authoritative knowledge that the rest of us just have to accept, and the substance is more often tendentious overemphasis on a one-sided interpretation of a key term. Still, I like … More ...
I put the following notes together shortly before beginning the process leading to conversion:
… More ...I want to become a Catholic because:
1. Grand philosophical reasons:
- I believe in a God with purposes. That’s the only way I can make sense of a world in which there is real good and evil, or for that matter
Naturally, I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. For anyone who’s interested, here are some thoughts on Catholicism from my other blog:
My first entry! I have another blog, a political one that I share with another editor, which hardly seems the place for random thoughts and ramblings about what after all is my personal situation. I’m a 55-year-old man, married with three children, a lawyer and writer, who is going through the process of … More ...
No surprise here: hundreds of British child welfare professionals, including police officers, care workers and teachers, have been identified as ‘extremely high-risk’ paedophiles by an investigation into internet porn. If you were a pedophile, wouldn’t a position that gave you access and authority over children—with no one supervising the situation because you are the supervisor—be … More ...
No safe haven for bigotry: Nannies in Britain to sue for racial bias. When you’re choosing someone to be alone with your kids for hours on end day after day, the burden will be on you to prove you acted in a nondiscriminatory fashion. I wonder whether this will apply to sexual orientation too?
I ran into a discussion of “why leftism” over at 2blowhards.com that was interesting because it dealt with the problem of the attractiveness of the Left. The discussion ended by proposing that the Right
“Claim art, claim food, claim pleasure, claim generosity.”
My response:
… More ...Good idea, but one that’s hard to carry out.
Art: The
Another thought on that crowd-pleasing topic, “essentialism.” Many claim that Islam and the West can’t be in conflict because there is no “Islam”—just many Islams. If you say something bad about feminism the complaint will be called unfounded because after all there are many feminisms. And if you present some grand theory of liberalism from … More ...
Comments about the “clash of civilizations” and such like provoke complaints about “essentialism,” the supposed error or sin of attributing a particular fixed character to a group of people. The thought behind such complaints is that something as complex as a civilization or religion or race must be a heterogeneous collection of things that seems … More ...
Conservative optimists who claim that the arrival of millions of Latin Americans and orientals isn’t all bad, because after all they bring their family values with them, should consider the case of California, a state in which the “new immigration” has recently made whites a minority. Somehow, the arrival of the Third World hasn’t done … More ...