Updated Collection of Weblog Writings Now Available

I’ve uploaded an update to the collection of my weblog writings: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2018. Here is the text from the Preface for this new edition: I’ve added another 25 or so chapters to this Eighth Edition. All but this chapter are reformatted essays from my writings during 2018 … [Read more…]

The Historian and the Psychometrician on Collapse of Innovation and Problem-solving in West

In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun wrote about a gradual and long-term decay of the West. He wrote that only about 50% of French peasants in 1500 were literate but also noted that those peasants were reading novels far too complex for most (nearly all?) modern-day college professors. Quality of … [Read more…]

What is the World?

I’ll start with a digression to the question, “What is paganism, really?” In a simple comparison of paganism vs Christianity (in the sense of comparison and not of combat), I’ll be able to better define the “world” from the Christian viewpoint but for modern sensibilities. I’ll write of higher paganism. To a pagan, the world … [Read more…]

Here Be Dragons

Despite the urban legend I had once accepted, the phrase Here be dragons was not often used on maps and sometimes the dragons or other monsters drawn on unknown regions were decoration rather than warnings. Yet, they clearly state what “should have been true” though it was only “sometimes” true: “Here be dragons” means dangerous … [Read more…]

St Paul Just Might Have Been Right.

In Romans 9:19-23 (RSV Catholic Edition), we can read: You will say to me then, “Why does he [God] still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, a man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me thus?” Has the … [Read more…]

Do Americans Have What It Takes to be a Self-governing People?—Part 1.

Political scientists and political philosophers seem to be fundamentally irrational by way of an excessive faith in rationalistic a priori‘s; in particular, they are almost willfully dense, on the topic of citizenry and have been since the failure, unlike physics and even mathematics, to reconsider their metaphysical assumptions by way of empirical tests—a single case … [Read more…]

Seeing Creation as It Really Is

I have begun a new research and thinking and writing project which bears the tentative title: Through Christ: Creation. It is intended as a step or two forward rather than a step or two toward a different goal than I’ve been pursuing in recent years: the use of modern knowledge of the world to build … [Read more…]

What is Man? And All That?

Liberals lie. And I include libertarians among liberals. Perhaps they lie first to themselves, but they lie. All liberals, from Hobbes to Locke to Jefferson to von Mises to Nozick and on to the collectivist enablers or advocates of a `liberal’ and totalitarian order. The biggest part of their lie is the one which claims … [Read more…]