thoughts in and out of season
Commenter Alice, with whom I’ve had a couple of exchanges at her husband’s weblog, carries her battle into the opposition’s territory. The pile of arguments is getting unmanageably high, so I’ll set up my response as a new entry:
… More ...Dear Alice,
I agree that not all ways of viewing the world are equal.
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 ...
From discussing America I decided to move on to Rome, or at least to Bavaria and the threshold of Rome. With that in mind, I just read Milestones, then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1998 memoir of his life until he became a bishop. It’s not a major work, but it does give a vivid impression of the … More ...
A blogger offers comments on my talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism, concluding that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.
I don’t think that’s quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they’re different but they can’t get on without each other. … More ...
I’ve been talking about America and Catholicism, so why not put the two together? With that in mind, I decided to look at Michael Rose’s Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood. There’s been discussion whether the book deals fairly with every person and institution it … 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
To follow up on recent discussions of America and Americanism I’ve been reading a couple of books: Tom Woods’ The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era and T. J. Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 . Both are well-written, well-informed, and well worth a … More ...
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.
I have another piece over at Takimag, this one a rant responding to a couple of posts over there about religion. I suppose it also responds to the interest among Takimag types in Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken.
What is Religion?
by James Kalb
January 16, 2009
Comments on religion by nonbelievers often make it … More ...
Merry Christmas!