thoughts in and out of season
I suppose the Puritan’s (and maybe Plato’s) hesitation about something like Delacroix’s Basket of Flowers is that its excellence and this-worldly self-sufficiency seem to divert beauty from a better function. (I’m no doubt making too much of this, but the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom and all that so I’ll pursue … More ...
According to George Weigel, the big issue in the fuss over the Society of Saint Pius X (the traditionalist group whose bishops just got de-excommunicated) is religious freedom: whether “coercive state power ought … be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body.”
That obviously can’t be the issue. If … More ...
While visiting the Metropolitan Museum this past weekend we wandered through one of the galleries devoted to French painters of the post-Revolutionary period. It looks like they mostly wanted a return to normalcy. Hence Ingres’ portraits of extremely self-possessed and incredibly well-tended notables and their wives. All the storms in the world couldn’t affect … More ...
I found the to-do over the New York Post “chimp” cartoon unbelievably depressing.
The idea that there are all those racists out there is extremely useful to some people. It explains why black people have problems and our rulers have the right to rule us. They are, after all, morally superior, and the rest of … More ...
Crunchy con Rod Dreher gives a long excerpt from my “terrific” book. R.R. Reno quotes it at First Things. Isn’t it time you got your copy?
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 ...
