Whiffs of implicit politics, nothing explicit.
- Liberal Culture?
- “Diverse points of view” in spades.
- Shocking, irresponsible virgin marriages!
- Thank SCOTUS, Welfare Queens have the “right to choose.”
- Every religion loves it’s converts.
- Julia Child as you’ve never seen her!
Liberalism denies limits. Culture is, at its heart, a complex array of limits, both positive and negative. Thus, a liberal culture is a contradiction in terms. Pure liberalism is simply incompatible with a coherent culture. Liberalism seeks to erode and overturn all limits while a coherent culture continually affirms and reinforces the outlines that both limit and direct action. Liberalism is, then, inherently anti-culture, and to embrace liberalism in its pure form is to actively undermine one’s culture.
This morning my oldest son Matthew starts a new classical homeschooling program in Baton Rouge. He and his classmates will have two mornings of instruction per week by a couple of former college professors. It is not true that my child won’t be receiving exposure to points of view different from those of his parents. In fact, I’m sitting in my home office looking at some of the books Matthew and his classmates will be reading from over the next year: the works of Livy, Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Plutarch, and Thucydides. Are those points of view sufficiently diverse for these ill-informed homeschooling critics?
…
I am not a libertarian at all, but I find that the whole homeschooling phenomenon is pushing me towards being a functional libertarian in order to defend practices — e.g., studying the great works of our civilization in an orderly way tailored to my children’s varied learning styles — that I am convinced is a great good for my children. In other words, to protect my ability to educate my children in a conservative way, I’m learning a strange new respect for libertarianism.
I probably wouldn’t have posted either article alone, but encountering both within 10 minutes seemed like an omen:
- From Mercatornet, The Abnormality of Virgin Marriage.
- From Mystagogy, What Elder Epiphanios Said About Premarital Sex.
I’ve referred to pro-abortion arguments that allude to abortion reducing welfare costs, and I’ve called that “crypto-racist” because we’ve all been taught that references to welfare are ultrasonic dog-whistles to racists. I just want you to know I’m not making this stuff up:
Joe the Plutocrat says:
and what become of that child? did the mother require public assistance in the form of food stamps, section 8 housing? did the child and the (presumed) single mother become part of the ‘unfunded entitlement’ tote board? abortion is what it is; it is no more or less moral/ethical than dropping cluster bombs on Kosovo; Predator drone strikes in Pakistan, or capital punishment. it is the state sanctioned end of a life; not an ‘unborn baby’; a life. the only question is; whom do we want to make this difficult ‘choice’? the SCOTUS (Roe v. Wade) has simply stated that a woman has the right to choose. bully for organizations like CPC, but at the end of the day; the ‘state’ while granting to right to choose cannot determine if the choice was the right one.
(From the Comboxes to Rod Dreher’s brief View from the Crisis Pregnancy Center)
Jerry DeWitt, a small-town Louisiana boy who lost his friends, his job (pastor) and his wife when he acknowledged – well, “having ended up,” let’s say – an atheist, seems like a man with some tragic integrity. He now subsists on a sort of atheist convert celebrity circuit.
I wonder what the attributes and personality are of this God he ceased believing in? Maybe I don’t believe in that one, either.
Has he any idea – Evangelicals, cover your eyes! – that Evangelicalism and historic Christianity are two very different things? Maybe he’d find the God of historic Christianity pretty believable – then again, maybe not. Life’s complicated.
This is a great use for the technology I think they call “auto-tuning” the human voice. I can’t seem to get it to embed, and it’s late, so here’s the link.
A ton of work went into picking snippets that really characterized her, according to Wednesday evening’s All Things Considered. More to come.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 