thoughts in and out of season
I’ve just finished reading The Phenomenon of Life, the first volume of Christopher Alexander’s four-volume work The Nature of Order.
It’s really extraordinary. For those who aren’t familiar with him, Alexander’s an architect and theoretician who’s horrified by the inhumanity of contemporary architecture and has spent his life trying to define principles that … More ...
Another fruit of Vatican II: Catholics who have come of age since then are without sin, or at least don’t think they have anything much to confess. After 40 years of the new springtime in the Church, 42% of Catholics born before 1943 still go to confession at least yearly. Only half as many of … More ...
![[Growing Proportion Outside Christianity]](https://antitechnocrat.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/outsiders.jpg)
Here’s another discussion of social trends related to Christianity, this one relating to the themes about which opposition to Christianity seems to be crystallizing: A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration.
From the statistics presented it appears that the long-term trend toward explicit abandonment of Christianity is continuing, with self-described non-Christians now constituting … More ...
I’ve been talking a lot about contemplation—what it is, why it’s needed, and why it’s at odds with the modern spirit. I should note down a few thoughts on what happens if you don’t have it.
To get rid of contemplation is radically to subordinate truth to action, word to deed. That tendency has developed … More ...
Some time ago J. Bottum, now editor of First Things, published a sort of hit piece on T. S. Eliot, What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed, that I just ran into going through some old correspondence.
It’s not clear just what claim Bottum is making in the piece, for example when he says “I … More ...
Truth and beauty enable us to place and orient ourselves in a world that is larger and more full of things that are worthwhile and interesting than the closed system of resources, desires, technology and formal logic that modern thought presents. That’s why contemplation is basic to the good life.
That kind of statement sounds … More ...
This sounds like a techie’s fantasy: hundred dollar laptops for Hottentots. Someone wants every poor kid in the world to get his own laptop. Computers haven’t done much for education in America, though, and it’s not clear they’d do more in Waziristan. It’s not as if every third world schoolkid is a computer nerd who … More ...
America was once a Protestant country. However that may be today, polling results confirm that Catholicism has become an American religion—indeed, as a sociological matter, largely identical to an increasingly secular Americanism. Thus, one recent report finds that 69% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics (compared with 43% of Protestants and 28% of white evangelicals) think … More ...
The point of present-day political thought is to integrate everything into a single system of technological hedonism that managers and functionaries can dominate with the aid of their ideological champions. A better and more human way of thinking would recognize that we live in a larger and less controllable world, one in which things … More ...
So far I’ve proposed beauty and contemplation as pieces of a program for restoring the transcendent and therefore humanity. What else is needed?
One obvious point is tradition. I’ve gone on and on about what tradition is, how it comes about, why we need it and why it’s generally reliable. I don’t think I’ve … More ...