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…]
Jose Ortega y Gasset “was a Spanish philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and republicanism infiltrated by communist agents, and dictatorship of a stabilizing and fascist-tinged sort. His philosophy has been characterized as a “philosophy of life” that “comprised a long-hidden beginning … [Read more…]
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…]
[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.] From 2006 to the present, I’ve been writing about the need to make peace with empirical reality. This is not … [Read more…]
Or… Are they? That is, are the roots really amoral? More appropriately, do we humans see wrongly when we separate moral order from other sorts of order, raising moral order to angelic, ethereal realms? Once upon a time, when the West was truly Christian, we Western men did that with human nature. By tying Christian … [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…]
Unfortunately, we don’t have a public Christian intellectual elite which is re-understanding Creation and its Lord-Creator by way of courageous and honest responses to what is known from various fields of human exploration and speculation. We have a Christian intellectual elite more inclined to try to fit new knowledge into old schemes. We have ecclesiastical … [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…]
I’ll start with a link to another insightful and honest analysis by Paul Robinson, a seemingly true expert on Russia who is a professor at the University of Ottawa: Patriotism is enough. Western analysts often mistakenly describe the people now governing Russia as nostalgic for the Soviet Union, an idea which Putin’s recent statements about … [Read more…]
A good question: Why did Peter, the shepherd of the flock of Christ, go to Rome, the center of earthly power in its most centralized and most brutal manifestation yet seen. [In fact, we shouldn’t forget that China was at a similar level of power and wealth, but no higher so far as I know.] … [Read more…]