The Church and Social Programs
That’s the title of my latest at Catholic World Report. For people in the thick of things it can look like enterprises like Obamacare would make a lot of things better, but the overall picture is more troubling.
Political theory
The state and the sacred
Here’s another column at Catholic World Report, this one on the essential sacredness of the state. If you say “no, the state is simply practical” then some aspect of the simply practical will become sacred.
Looking back on the Sixties
I have a new piece up at Crisis on the illusion and reality of the Sixties. What people expected to be liberation and soaring horizons turned out to be the rise to power of a severely flawed ruling class.
The Left, the Right, and Catholicism
My latest at Catholic World Report is about left liberals, right liberals, and what to do about them.
Chain comments and the good life
On other fronts, Larry Auster posted a comment by me on a comment by Robert Spencer on a comment by Larry on a comment by Spencer on a canceled concert in Indonesia. How’s that for intertextuality? (The comment by me does have an actual topic, social understandings of the good.)
Mixing it up over Maistre
An old libertarian friend, Todd Seavey, posted an entry in his blog regarding The Works of Joseph de Maistre that complained about Maistre and mentioned me, so in response I posted a couple of comments that I think make sense even apart from the original setting. The point at issue, as you will see, was … More ...
Freedom and the political good
I have a piece by that name (subtitled “some preliminary considerations”) up at the Liberty Law Blog.
What is the etiology of liberalism?
The question seems important, since where liberalism comes from affects how we should deal with it and where it is likely to go. Many right-wingers, for example, think of it as psychological or instrumental: people are liberals because they feel this way or that, or because they want to get money, power, status, or whatever. … More ...
Liberalism, Catholicism, and the Good
I have another column, this one on liberal and Catholic conceptions of the good and the just, at Catholic World Report.
More on freedom and tyranny
That’s the original title of my latest column at Catholic World Report. It’s basically an argument that Catholics shouldn’t base their political arguments on freedom, they should base them on substantive goods. (I don’t know what it shows that they renamed it “Tyranny, Religion, and the Fight for Freedom.”)