thoughts in and out of season
My first entry! I have another blog, a political one that I share with another editor, which hardly seems the place for random thoughts and ramblings about what after all is my personal situation. I’m a 55-year-old man, married with three children, a lawyer and writer, who is going through the process of … More ...
A common slogan among deep thinkers is that the problem with Islam is that unlike Christianity it’s never had a Reformation. On the face of it the claim is an odd one. The Protestant Reformation was an attempt to purify Christianity and return it to its pure and original form, cleansed of all syncretic cultural … More ...
I hadn’t been tempted to watch the PBS special last night on the religious implications of 9/11. My only exposure to it had been a lead-in I heard on the radio with a woman complaining “where was that nice loving man [God] I had been talking to all those years … after that I couldn’t … More ...
The ACLU wins some and loses some. They sometimes have trouble getting monuments to the Ten Commandments out of public parks, but have managed to suppress “With God, all things are possible” as the Ohio state motto.
The distinction is that the monuments can be viewed as historical rather than religious. The Ten Commandments, like … More ...
In the past day I’ve run twice into Roger Scruton’s 1996 Wall Street Jounal piece on “Godless Conservatism”, from which it appears that many people who are uncomfortable with liberalism find it speaks to them.
Basically, Scruton proposes a traditionalism that refers to nothing beyond itself, one that treats human goods as purely human … More ...
What kind of conservatism is possible today? Conservatism has always emphasized tradition. Since the goods tradition promotes can be difficult to articulate—if things were otherwise the goods wouldn’t have to be embodied in tradition but could be taken straight—and since the opponents of tradition refuse to admit the reality and value of traditional goods, the … More ...
A disturbing thing about the bishops’ response to the scandals resulting from entrenched homosexuality in the priesthood is that it illustrates the extent to which institutional orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church has become dependent on one man, the Pope. The other bishops, it appears, aren’t much interested—certainly not enough to break “collegiality,” which appears … More ...
One example among many of how tolerance works: Baptist Pastor Attacks Islam, Inciting Cries of Intolerance. A past president of the Southern Baptist Convention called Muhammad a “demon-possessed pedophile” (he apparently consummated his 12th and final marriage when the lady was 9 years old), and declared that Muslims worshiped a different God than Christians. … More ...
On reading the Upanishads: they have a certain prestige in the modern world because on their face they are philosophical speculations and not divine revelation. There is no irrationality in them, just profound thought about the most basic issues. The prestige and apparent rationality come at a price, however. As the most sacred scriptures of … More ...
Is turning America into a religion the original sin of modern American conservatism? As a pre-1968 schoolboy I was taught faith in America. It wasn’t altogether clear what that meant, but it’s what I was taught and it’s what the revolution of the ’60s attacked. Popular American conservatism and neoconservatism are still mostly a defense … More ...