thoughts in and out of season
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
I was looking at We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960) by John Courtney Murray. For those who don’t know much about him, Murray was a Catholic priest and theologian who
… More ...was especially known for his efforts to reconcile Catholicism and religious pluralism, religious freedom, and the American political order.
A Swedish correspondent wrote to ask why ideas of historical and cultural community never seem to go anywhere today. My response continues some of the thoughts touched on in the recent discussion of social conservatism:
… More ...The basic problem I think is that such ideas depend on notions of what one is, and the modern
Takimag has published the following piece I wrote on social conservatism. Unfortunately, they no longer allow comments, which was always half the fun of publishing there.
Is Social Conservatism Necessary?
by James Kalb
January 15, 2009
Is Social Conservatism Necessary?
The voices of conventional wisdom are telling us once again that the Right should … More ...
I’ve been doing some radio interviews to promote my book, maybe a couple dozen in total. Here are some I have links to:
Here’s the text of a talk I gave at the first annual conference of The H. L. Mencken Club. (Actually, I only had time to present the first 3/5 or so of the talk. The remainder was mostly a rehash of previous talks, though, so maybe it’s just as well.)
James … More ...