thoughts in and out of season
My latest column at Catholic World Report goes into various flip-flops in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward secular powers. There are no perfect answers, but clear-headedness is good, and maybe the Church is righting herself from the extreme optimism of the post-Vatican II period.
On other fronts, Larry Auster posted a comment by me on a comment by Robert Spencer on a comment by Larry on a comment by Spencer on a canceled concert in Indonesia. How’s that for intertextuality? (The comment by me does have an actual topic, social understandings of the good.)
An old libertarian friend, Todd Seavey, posted an entry in his blog regarding The Works of Joseph de Maistre that complained about Maistre and mentioned me, so in response I posted a couple of comments that I think make sense even apart from the original setting. The point at issue, as you will see, was … More ...
I have a piece by that name (subtitled “some preliminary considerations”) up at the Liberty Law Blog.
The question seems important, since where liberalism comes from affects how we should deal with it and where it is likely to go. Many right-wingers, for example, think of it as psychological or instrumental: people are liberals because they feel this way or that, or because they want to get money, power, status, or whatever. … More ...
I have another column, this one on liberal and Catholic conceptions of the good and the just, at Catholic World Report.
That’s the original title of my latest column at Catholic World Report. It’s basically an argument that Catholics shouldn’t base their political arguments on freedom, they should base them on substantive goods. (I don’t know what it shows that they renamed it “Tyranny, Religion, and the Fight for Freedom.”)
Here’s a study that may be more interesting than the author realizes: people in Ann Arbor, Michigan, presumably mostly quite liberal, literally don’t realize that people whose politics differ from their own react to cold the same way they do. Does that explain the Gulag, or am I wrong in my immediate reaction that (at … More ...
That’s the title of an essay I wrote that appears in the Spring 2012 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.
[The following review, somewhat edited in ways I did not have a chance to look at (and in some respects would not have approved), appeared under the title Libertarian Limits in the January 2012 issue of First Things]
On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence, by Frank Furedi, Continuum, 224 pages, $22.95
The … More ...