thoughts in and out of season
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!
I expanded the lecture I gave last summer at Gardone into a series of three essays that can be found in the October, November, and December issues of The Angelus. You can also read a Google docs version of the series as a single document.
There’s a tendency today to criticize “essentialism,” the idea that something like Islam has an enduring character such that (for example) you aren’t going to see a moderate liberal Islam become the predominant form of the religion.
I’m inclined toward a moderate essentialism. It seems to me that at bottom the opposing nominalist view is … More ...
Another part of the appeal of Catholicism today (apart from its truth) is a sort of this-wordly extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the Church there’s no satisfaction now and no hope for the future.
The problem can be stated briefly: the West now stands publicly for secular liberalism. The latter has reached a philosophical, … More ...
Here is the text (plus or minus a few ad libs) of a lecture delivered at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone, Italy, on July 3, 2008.
You might as well ask what it means to speak of any other basic reality. What does it mean to speak of time, space, number, particularity, universality, good, evil, or other minds? We use such concepts, and accept and comment on the things they denote, but explanations of exactly what they are never completely satisfy.… More ...
The satanic is rebellion against God. In more abstract and secular terms, it is rebellion against all order that is not a matter of unconstrained human choice. Either way, contemporary intellectual culture often tends toward the satanic. Extreme idealization of human autonomy makes willfulness, transgression, and subversion seem like virtues. They destroy traditional standards, which … More ...
The progressive National Catholic Reporter has an editorial on liturgy that makes their view altogether clear: “Liturgy is the visible expression of the arrangement of power.” They don’t say why that is so, although their whole discussion presumes the point, so it’s worth making the logic explicit: a sacrament is the visible expression of a … More ...
Here’s a provocative if somewhat odd piece on hatred from Taki’s Top Drawer. A quote:
… More ...According to the old, religious “psychology” of hatred, people controlled by this sin are inherently quarrelsome, because they see slights everywhere. Hate-dominated individuals perceive as snubs actions in which others see nothing, for example a glance, a tone of