thoughts in and out of season
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.”)
That’s the title of an essay I wrote that appears in the Spring 2012 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.
[The following review, somewhat edited in ways I did not have a chance to look at (and in some respects would not have approved), appeared under the title Libertarian Limits in the January 2012 issue of First Things]
On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence, by Frank Furedi, Continuum, 224 pages, $22.95
The … More ...
That’s the name of my March column at Catholic World Report.
It seems accepted among educated Westerners that the rationality of an action is a matter of means and ends, of what we want and whether what we do is going to bring that about.
That’s true even among people who consider themselves right-wingers, reactionaries, traditionalists and so on, and who in many ways really are … More ...
The following is a talk delivered at the 2011 Conference of the H. L. Mencken Club.
Why has American conservatism been such a flop? It finds it impossible to define what it wants, stick with it, and defend it. The result is that it never wins and never even stands its ground.
To understand what’s … More ...
Modern thought can’t make sense of man. Science wants to treats him as part of single system of cause and effect, and liberalism also takes that approach when considering social policy. The problem though is that science and liberalism need scientists and liberals as they understand them—that is, they need thinkers, observers and agents who … More ...
Princeton professor Robert George gives a remarkably pure presentation of the “America as proposition nation” thesis here. If you want to know what that thesis is, watch the clip—it’s only a couple of minutes, and it’s a collector’s item.
Here are a few obvious issues the thesis raises:
The world is run by people who run things. Liberalism eliminates the principle of authority and puts the individual and his desires at the center of concern, so it makes it important for people who run things to be able to claim that the people at large have agreed to what they’re doing—they approved the … More ...
Four religions: