Religion
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"There are moments when people love crime," Alyosha said pensively. "Yes, yes! You've spoken my own thought, they love it, they all love it, and love it always, not just at 'moments.' You know, it's as if at some point they all agreed to lie about it, and have been lying about it ever since.…
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I'm pretty sure it was 1992 when I first heard Rush Limbaugh, because I remember him talking about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. It's hard for people who weren't around, and of conservative sympathies, at that time to understand how much fun it was when he came on the scene. Almost all the media, electronic and…
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(This post has been sitting around almost finished for a week or two; time to go ahead and get it out of the way.) It's unfortunate that the political aspects of Evangelii Gaudium have so overshadowed its focus on evangelization. But since they have, I find myself wanting to respond further to it and to…
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In Commentary, David Gelernter has a sharp critique of philosophical materialism as applied to the human mind that's very much worth reading. Materialism for many scientists has become a sort of religion, a dogma setting the bounds of permissible thinking. You can't really call yourself a Christian if you don't believe in God, and scientist-materialists would have it…
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Being the dull introvert that I am, I've never done a lot of celebrating on New Year's Eve, though I usually am awake at midnight, and usually having a drink of something suitable for raising a toast to the passing of the old and the arrival of the new. Last night I didn't intend to…
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Well, here's a major argument-starter. Peter Leithart in First Things argues that Protestantism is over, that Protestants should stop calling themselves Protestants and call themselves "Reformational catholics" instead. I sympathize, and of course speaking as a Catholic I think it's a step in the right direction, but: Like a Protestant, a Reformational catholic rejects papal…
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The un-ecumenical days, when books like this were published: The Lenten Lectures of Rev. Thomas Maguire; delivered in Dublin in 1842, in answer to the Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England Lecture V is: The Absurdities, Contradictions and Blasphemies of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Parliamentarian Rule of Faith of the Episcopalian Protestants Yesterday…
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I'm not sure how many readers of this blog are interested, but here is an interesting piece on the situation of Anglo-Catholics since the establishment of the Ordinariate. One word summary: untenable. The author is addressing the Church of England, but what he says is broadly applicable to American Episcopalians of Catholic inclination as well. …
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In a chapter called "Blind Alleys," Kalb discusses various responses to liberalism. I'll be posting a bit from each of them. Here is what he calls "simple conservatism." Simple procedural conservatism is a view for moderate worldly men attached to what is established but willing to accomodate new developments that seem sensible or inevitable. It…
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The fatal flaw of liberalism was always its pretense or fantasy that the state could and would remain neutral on most questions of value, especially the big ones. This illusion was only possible because there was a broad consensus on most of the most serious matters in that realm. When, almost immediately after the establishment…
Light On Dark Water 