[`Complete’ in this essay refers only to the willingness of a human being to acknowledge his communal human being as well as his individual human being and is no claim that we human beings can ever be complete in this mortal realm.] In a recently posted essay, Looking Backward, Moving Forward, Moving in Circles, I … [Read more…]
Conservatism: looking backward for wisdom and understanding about human being and about all of God’s Creation. Progressivism (of a truer type): moving forward into an everchanging world. Liberalism: unleashing individual human beings from traditions and from true progressive movements to the benefit of would-be centralizers in (corrupt) politics and (corrupt) business. The real point I’m … [Read more…]
Introduction Recently, I attended my monthly men’s prayer group and made a comment about history books telling of the importance of highly educated men from warlord (sometimes royal) families in converting many of the German peoples to Christianity—some of those evangelists, such as Boniface (“Apostle to the Germans”), were themselves Germanic. The organizer of the … [Read more…]
I’m currently struggling, but joyfully at times, to finish my book, The Shape of Reality. Alas, it won’t be finished by year-end as I had hoped, which hope I’ve stated on my blog. The end of January or even during February is more likely. As I struggle to complete this book, I’m obsessed with questions … [Read more…]
[Draft as of 2016/10/03. Hoping for publication on Internet before end of 2016.] Human being isn’t merely quantifiable but many components or aspects of human being are quantifiable. Other components are more describable by the term `qualitative’, but this shouldn’t be taken as connoting `irrational’ or `mystical’. Our understanding of the qualitative aspects of being, … [Read more…]
[Draft as of 2016/10/03. Hoping for publication on Internet before end of 2016.] Is a man a unity or is he a collection of warring fragments? Or is something else true, perhaps an intermediate view, or—my favorite—some sort of complex being not describable in current terms of discourse? I should qualify my statement of the … [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…]
Even without a Christian civilization, Christianity remains a holy thing, but it would be a little thing. Partly because of a bad bargain that various Christian traditions made in coming to the United States, dominated after the War Between the States, by a liberal, non-Creedal form of Protestantism, Catholics and Orthodox and Lutherans and other … [Read more…]
In The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher, we learn of the very prominent role played by aristocratic families, even royal families, in the conversion of the European barbarians to Christianity. The missionary monks and bishops and priests were often from powerful and wealthy families of Ireland and England and then Francia … [Read more…]
Wayne Allensworth has a frighteningly interesting commentary on virtual reality, an addictive abuse of technology which might generate still more problems than what we’re seeing from our better established abuses of technology (`ordinary’ video games, cellphones for 4 to 104, etc), Disconnected: Our Virtual Unreality, where he writes near the end: Alistair Charlton of the … [Read more…]