State of the Culture
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So says Elizabeth Scalia, and she seems to mean The Party in the sense that it's used in one-party states. It's as good a term as any to refer to the whole amorphous yet clearly identifiable entity that includes the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, the majority of journalists and news outlets, most of academia,…
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When my wife and I got married she owned a copy of Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, not to mention several other feminist works of the time, which in retrospect should perhaps have worried me a little. But in the early '70s most college girls with any sort of intellectual inclination read things like…
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From Donald Kagan's farewell speech upon his retirement from Yale: Whatever the formal religious attachments of our students may be, I find that a firm belief in the traditional values and the ability to understand and the willingness to defend them are rare. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of…
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Here's something else I've revisited in the process of selecting Sunday Night Journals for inclusion in a book: a series of posts from 2006-7 called "The Liberal Conservative," in which I lay out at some length my notion of a meaningful conservatism. It covers a lot of the ground we've visited here in recent discussions…
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…philosophy, naturally. At Oxford, no less. "Speaking to the Sunday Times, Sandberg said that life with just a head would be limited…" Maybe this is what the Sex Pistols really meant by "no future."
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Some direct quotes from that James Hitchcock piece in Touchstone that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: …liberalism is now not merely a political philosophy compatible with many kinds of religion but has itself become a religion. …it is expedient for liberals that their movement not be seen as a religion, since it thereby…
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After my first day of school in Victoria, my mother was walking me home and I asked, "How long do I have to keep going there?" She said, "About 12 years." I burst into tears and was inconsolable for the rest of the day. from a blog which someone linked to on Facebook yesterday. Is…
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Smartphones, of course, are not the only crazy-making technology we have to contend with. One day last week I ate lunch at a sports bar of which one whole two-story wall was filled with TV screens, two huge and eight very large. That's a total of ten video screens, which were playing a total of…
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I have resisted the smartphone trend, partly out of general contrary reluctance but more out of parsimony: the dang things are expensive, and they cost a lot to use. I do have a mobile phone. I've had one for something like ten years, since I embarked on a long drive alone and my wife talked…
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I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and I find that every time I start collecting my thoughts I discover that events have taken another step. It's dawning on more and more Christians that the movement for homosexual marriage and for approval of homosexuality in general means that the liberal culture is…
Light On Dark Water 