thoughts in and out of season
Here’s a chapter from 2008 for a projected collection of essays. The book never got published, but here’s what I wrote:
PC and the Destruction of Culture
by James Kalb
Political correctness is an odd tendency. It does not fit in with how people normally think about things, so no one knows what to make … More ...
Evan McLaren notes that I mostly deal with grand issues and tend toward a “big tent” approach, at least among right-wingers, and wonders whether that makes sense.
I think my approach has been helpful theoretically, for getting an overall understanding of issues. If you give free play to a lot of different concerns, and don’t … More ...
A friend has forwarded to me his translation of Letter to Cardinal Fornari On the Errors of Our Time by Juan Donoso Cortes and given permission to make it available on the web. At the time the letter was written Cardinal Fornari was in charge of a commission studying modern errors for Pope Pius IX … More ...
Zenit, the international Catholic news agency, just published an interview with me about the topics I cover in my book.
I just finished reading Allan Carlson’s Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared. It’s a really excellent collection of short case studies of 20th century attempts to create, recreate or maintain local, familial, distributist or agrarian economic forms in the face of commies, … More ...
I’ve added arguments and responses made in a discussion of the issue elsewhere to my recent entry on faith and reason. For convenience’s sake I’ve added them in the form of comments.
The discussion has clarified for me why modern secularists and antimodern traditionalists view each other as crazed tyrants. Each inhabits in thought a … 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 ...
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