I’ll first provide links and summary quotes to two of my earlier posted essays: In Is God’s Creation Compatible with Centralization of Authority and Power?, I concluded: …that God’s Creation isn’t compatible with anything approaching complete centralization of power and authority, though centers of power and authority do exist and have their own role, often … [Read more…]
In a discussion of a recent speech by President Trump, Robert Merry gives a short summary of one aspect of our current political mess—see Trump’s Warsaw Speech Threw Down the Gauntlet on Western Civilization: Is America just `an idea’?. In Merry’s discussion, we can read: In his Warsaw speech on Thursday, Donald Trump threw down … [Read more…]
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. [Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell.] As Western Civilization is decaying, we still don’t know what we had and there’s a good reason for that. As I’ve stated repeatedly, a civilization is mostly inside of its members: our understanding of ourselves and others, of Creation and Creator. … [Read more…]
Let me expand upon the title: Self-government isn’t government structure, it’s a claim for (positive) rights successfully made by a morally well-ordered population; that is, a claim for rights not magically granted to us but earned by real-world efforts and made possible by a bit of luck. We, the American people and our government, can’t … [Read more…]
The title of this essay refers to a book I recently published, The Shape of Reality. That book is an effort to move forward in our understanding of created being, perhaps even move forward a little in our understanding of the Triune God of Jesus Christ. That book builds upon my understanding of created being, … [Read more…]
For nearly 30 years, I’ve been writing novels and nonfiction, having sacrificed much of a chance of a good life of the normal sort, largely while deluding myself that some modest, or even substantial, financial rewards were coming in six months or, at worst, a year. Though I had personal problems and inclinations that led … [Read more…]
For years, I’ve been doing what might be called “deep analysis” about the decay of the Western Mind, an inseparable part of the decay of Western Civilization, that is—Western Christian Civilization. Along with this, at times inseparable from this, I’ve been doing “deeper analysis” of Creation and its relationship to the Creator. Much of what … [Read more…]
A radically secularized society will make it tough to engage in any sort of religious practices. This happens in a particularly intense way if the majority of parents simply turn their children over to the school systems or to modern American culture as a whole. And so it is that I’ll retreat from philosophical or … [Read more…]
In reviewing A war for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman, Seth Bartee writes: In A War for the Soul of America Hartman argues that the late 20th century’s cultural conflicts were born out of the tumultuous 1960s. To most observers this might not seem a particularly provocative … [Read more…]
I’m reading The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson and find it interesting that Isaacson sees matters in terms of individual effort vs collaboration, parallel to my efforts to deal with human being in its individual and communal forms. The research laboratories such as … [Read more…]