Roger Scruton: What Is A Conservative?
I’ve just read a brief interview with Sir Roger Scruton over at National Review. (Hat-tip to our friend David Duff.) This caught my eye: [Interviewer Madeleine Kearns]: What is the difference between a...
View ArticleB.V. On Jerusalem, Athens, And Dual Citizenship
Here’s a fine meditation, by Bill Vallicella, on the tension between reason and faith, and what it means for the philosopher who is also a Christian.
View ArticleFides Et Ratio: Can One Be Both A Catholic And A Maverick Philosopher?
Our friend Bill Vallicella explores the tension — which he believes is a fruitful one — between Athens and Jerusalem. Why is such a tension — an essential feature of Christianity, with its mysteries...
View ArticlePilgrim’s Progress
As I get older (I will be sixty-three in a week or so) it becomes harder and harder for me to accept the Universe as a “brute fact”: a thing that just is, and that cannot, even in principle, be...
View ArticleAll Sail, No Ballast
The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the...
View ArticleMorsels from GKC
I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones...
View ArticleThe Parallel Postulate
Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d...
View ArticleJM Smith On Reason
A theme of some recent posts here has been the limitations of reason. Reason is a machine: if properly maintained and frequently inspected, it does what it does well enough, but like any machine it can...
View ArticleKeep It Simple
In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of...
View ArticleGreat Is Truth. May It Prevail.
Just in (I have bolded the key passage): The Department of Justice today filed a statement of interest in Idaho federal court defending Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act against a challenge under...
View Article2021
Well, here we are. Happy New Year. I thank all of you who’ve visited in recent weeks; there hasn’t been a whole lot to see here for some time now. My shoulder injury kept me off the keyboard for a...
View ArticleNational Archive
A while back the New York Times mounted a direct assault on American patriotism called “The 1619 Project”, which sought to promote the idea that the founding of the American nation was nothing more...
View ArticleJim Kalb On Our Mass Craziness
James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name,...
View ArticleThe Confusion Of Tongues
I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for...
View ArticleComplementarity
As we detach morality from a transcendent source — that is, a source that has an intrinsic moral authority that stands higher than our own subjective opinion — we necessarily diminish morality’s...
View ArticleAs I Was Saying…
For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as...
View ArticleNotes From The Zoo
We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in...
View ArticleWisdom vs Folly: Compare And Contrast
I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been...
View ArticleBelieve It, Or Not
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been...
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