Beauty, saving the world, and similar topics
I have a short piece up at Solidarity Hall, a site that seems fairly new. It’s a comment on a much longer piece by Mark Signorelli, his review of the book Beauty Will Save the World by Gregory Wolfe.
Society and culture
How to remember 9/11?
The current issue of First Things has a piece by R. R. Reno that’s worth reading on The Failed 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center. The basic issue it raises is that it’s odd to have a large impressive memorial in a location that’s as prominent as the WTC, only to have the memorial … More ...
Two films with food mysticism (spoiler alert!)
A blogger’s complaints about foodies put me in mind of a couple of award-winning and actually quite good movies I saw recently about food and drink as religion, Sideways and Babette’s Feast.
Sideways is set in present-day California. It’s about confused people with sordid lives for whom wine gives access to transcendent reality, or … More ...
Escape from the antiworld
Here’s the text of a lecture I presented at the 2011 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:
Escape from the Antiworld
James Kalb
Presented at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone Riviera, Italy,
July 6, 2011
This conference raises a variety of questions. What is the present situation? How should we deal with … More ...
From living order to transcendence
I mentioned marriage as an example of the antiliberal implications of the new science of complex order developed by writers on architecture such as Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros.
There are of course many other examples, because the new science goes to basics. It helps make sense of living systems, explains how their specific qualities … More ...
Figuring out our situation
I’ve been reading Nikos Salingaros’ Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design. It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented in his other books. … More ...
A Self-Contained World
[The following review appeared in the January 2011 issue of Chronicles.]
The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, by Pascal Bruckner, translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 256 pp., $26.95
Pascal Bruckner is a French version of the Cold War liberal, updated for the age of jihad. … More ...
Whither knowledge and power?
A recent discussion with Bruce Charlton on knowledge, society, and the Eastern and Western Church provokes reflection.
It’s notorious that involvement in particular activities makes it hard to keep their connection to the whole in mind. Standard examples include making money, attention to the opposite sex, and attempts to control things generally. Hence the monastic … More ...
Pitch to a Gen-Y rightist
Over at Alternative Right I had a discussion with a participant who—like a lot of people who comment there—tended toward a sort of action-oriented tribal relativism. His basic thought seemed to be that social order doesn’t go very deep but comes out of crude drives plus choice, with this and that expedient added in to … More ...
The tyranny of pluralism
Here’s Hollywood’s take on the meaning of the Battle of the Bulge in 1949, four years after the shooting stopped:
(Battleground, 1949)
“We must never again let any force dedicated to … a super idea or a super anything become strong enough to impose itself … We must be smart enough and tough … More ...