I’ll be publishing this essay in three parts. This first part will deal with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the … [Read more…]
Though most of what I write in this essay is applicable to most populations and nations of the West, I don’t pretend to write in a truly general way. It might not be possible to write in such a way without engaging in needless abstractions. Thus it is that I write of the problems of … [Read more…]
The Library of Law and Liberty website has another interesting article, this time dealing with some of the thoughts of the American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray. In this article, ‘The True Sage of Woodstock’, Richard Reinsch writes: How can reasonable men and women reclaim equality over and above egalitarianism? The first principled step is to … [Read more…]
This is a very good discussion of some important aspects of our national political mess in the United States: Liberal Constitutionalism and Us. At the same time, something is missing and that something is a more general understanding of our world, in fact, of Creation as a whole. Until we have that understanding, one which … [Read more…]
A Non-dummy’s Guide to Understanding God’s Creation I’ve written before of Ortega y Gasset’s prophecies of the collapse of modern Western man into a condition of barbarian childhood. See Civilization for Dummies for a fairly recent essay on the subject. In that essay, I spoke about the importance of books to Western Civilization in particular … [Read more…]
Man and Community In recent years, I’ve been dealing a lot with the issue of man’s true nature, as an individual and as a community member. There has been a lot of groundwork to do before I make an effort to provide a more `scientific’ or more `exact’ description of human moral narratives including those … [Read more…]
Freedom as we idealize it is not at all an instrument or an agent to achieve our desires, good or bad. The lesser freedom of the tiger or the grazing deer can do that for us. Freedom as we idealize it is an aspect of the state of personhood, a state in which we are … [Read more…]
I’ve made the claim that the Christian Church itself is but one organ in the Body of Christ, though the most important and potentially most powerful organ. I would supplement that claim with another: the true power of the Church is dependent not upon external force but upon proper execution of Her duties of teaching … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, I wrote: Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. At that point in the process of … [Read more…]
Human beings think and feel and act and do so in response to what lies around them. As various communities have advanced in the way of civilization, they’ve done so—thought and felt and acted—in response to some more or less plausible worldview covering created being in its abstract realms as well as this concrete realm. … [Read more…]