It’s not the failures but rather the great successes of the West which have left it as a hollowed-out and collapsing civilization, that is, our successes as individualists and our successes in nurturing our individualistic inclinations and pushing them ever further at the expense of our communalistic inclinations. It’s not hard to understand. Human being … [Read more…]
Adam Smith famously took a new approach to the ancient problem: how to describe and understand the mysterious workings of created being in which ordered forms exist or even can be seen coming into existence. Those ordered forms can be forms imposed upon concrete matter—concrete entities such as stars or human beings, the latter being … [Read more…]
Ten years ago or more, I read the Inferno, the first volume of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It didn’t make too much of an impression on me, seeming to be at least in part a matter of Dante taking shots at some of his enemies, a lot of people he didn’t admire (often, for good … [Read more…]
A large number of Americans, leading good lives in most ways, believe the United States is and always was a champion of justice and charity towards all nations when we really believe that the only good life is one ordered to the individualistic tendencies so attractive to those descended from the residents of northwestern Europeans. … [Read more…]
Reality often messes up our formal models or our less rigid schemes of how reality should work. A good thinker takes such glitches not as a sign that we can’t use models in a particular situation but rather as an invitation to think their way to a better model or perhaps to develop a more … [Read more…]
I have published two essays in this short series: Traditional Morality is Dead, Long Live Traditional Morality: A World of Evolution and Development and Traditional Morality is Dead, Long Live Traditional Morality: The Dangers of Understanding God’s Acts-of-being. Now I will write about the greater meaning of this line of thought. I’m writing in response … [Read more…]
I’m writing this essay to set up my responses to Claes Ryn’s essay describing how the moral teachings and traditions of the West could re-establish some sort of peace in our world: The Moral Path to Peace. I’m planning for now to finish the set-up in this essay, following up on what I wrote in … [Read more…]
An Overview of What I’m Up To I’ve tried to concentrate on the general speculative, or `metaphysical’, task of making sense of created being, abstract as well as concrete, in light of Christian beliefs. I’ve tried to avoid too much in the way of theological speculation and certainly have and will avoid questioning the basic … [Read more…]
The world is what it is and we Christians, of all human beings, have to accept it and work with it. For example, against the various do-gooders including those who think themselves Christians, I believe the Body of Christ has to be built of the human material which is us, the material created by God … [Read more…]
Christians are bound to recognize that the God of Jesus Christ is truly Lord and truly Creator. We are bound to do our best to honestly and courageously and faithfully respond to God’s Creation as we can best know it and as we come into contact with it. To turn away from Creation or to … [Read more…]