thoughts in and out of season
The appeal of secular conservatism, like the appeal of laying off cultural conservatism, is that it tells us we can have a minimal politics.
From a conservative standpoint, that’s generally a good thing. As many have pointed out, the conservative tendency is to work within what exists and favor intelligent minor adjustments. If … More ...
I’ve been talking about America and Catholicism, so why not put the two together? With that in mind, I decided to look at Michael Rose’s Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood. There’s been discussion whether the book deals fairly with every person and institution it … More ...
We live in a liberal age. A conservative, then, is someone who resists liberalism. He wants to reverse it or at least resist its advance.
There are a variety of reasons for resisting liberalism, and they lead to different kinds of conservatism. Some are more liberal or radical than conservative, and each can be at … More ...
The contributors to the weblog Secular Right: Reality & Reason have put together a sort of credo, What is the Secular Right? Here it is:
… More ...We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed
My excellent American adventure continues with George M. Marsden’s The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief—not the whole book, but enough to get the picture.
In Marsden’s telling, American colleges were originally designed to serve both a public and a religious purpose. That worked well enough: the social order … More ...
I just finished (more or less) another book on my Americana reading list, Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. It’s a straightforward book that uses lots of examples to make the obvious points that conservative locally-minded people mostly don’t like foreign adventures, and that war … More ...
To follow up on recent discussions of America and Americanism I’ve been reading a couple of books: Tom Woods’ The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era and T. J. Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 . Both are well-written, well-informed, and well worth a … More ...
I’ve left something out of the first two pieces. When people speak of love, loyalty or hatred for America they don’t just mean America as land and people, together with whatever human connections happen to join them. They mean America as a substantive moral unity, as a sort of personality. Otherwise they wouldn’t talk so … More ...
I’ve said what I like about America. But what do I dislike?
Here again it’s hard to avoid cliche and attitudinizing. People have been hating America for a long time. It hasn’t done them much good or shown them to advantage.
On the whole, my dislikes are the flip side of my likes.
I don’t … More ...