Early in May, I read The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment by Ethan H. Shagan. I thought the analysis was pretty good, but I didn’t like the ‘global’ conclusion: Enlightenment rationality did not devour the world in its ravenous maw, it was only a subset of … [Read more…]
There are writers on the Internet, some maybe just scribblers but many are thinkers of some capacity, who criticize other peoples, including most Latin Americans, for being too dumb to handle complex, American-style economic and political systems. To be sure, many of these criticisms are quite true, though we should realize that current immigration patterns … [Read more…]
The funny answer would be that I don’t have enough time to write my essays so that they would be shorter and easier to understand. Ordinarily, there would be some serious truth in that—even so great a writer as Blaise Pascal could say: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have … [Read more…]
I’ll start with a digression to the question, “What is paganism, really?” In a simple comparison of paganism vs Christianity (in the sense of comparison and not of combat), I’ll be able to better define the “world” from the Christian viewpoint but for modern sensibilities. I’ll write of higher paganism. To a pagan, the world … [Read more…]
I’ll ramble a bit in a way suited to a discussion of a life lived in the chaos and moral coarseness of Western Civilization in its period of advanced decay. Why are there so many men, mostly white and middle-class, who are said to have been living good lives and said to have been happy, … [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…]
The problems of the United States, and of some other countries in the West—maybe most, are deeper than are usually acknowledged. I’ll start with this claim: Crimea is more truly part of the Russian realm than California is part of the Anglo-American realm. American leaders are ignorant, functionally stupid, and maybe innately stupid; they are … [Read more…]
I’ll not write too much about this issue I’ve addressed before, but I’ll go further than before on one detail: the United States government is barely such a thing and perhaps it’s leading us into a fragmentation which might lead to multiple governments of some sort or a civil war or some periods of each. … [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…]
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…]