Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to work for minimum wage. I like cheap help, and so do the Brits. (Pete Spiliakos for the Americans, Peter Hitchens for the Brits)
Awake too early recently, I waded into unread magazines and made the acquaintance of David L. Schindler in an American Conservative review of his fascinating thought.
No easy fixes, no programs, emerge from Schindler’s work—or, indeed, the Communio perspective as a whole. In fact, the way in which superficial fixes and programs often conceal and even deepen our predicament is in part what Schindler means to reveal …
The Christian story itself implies this metaphysics, but Schindler emphasizes that once disclosed by the events central to Christianity, the nature of being is in principle accessible to reason. There is no fideism at work here, but there is a different understanding of reason than the one that informs modern “rationality,” including the neo-Thomist version. In Schindler’s account of reason—one shared by Popes Benedict and John Paul II—faith does not narrow reason, nor does faith exist alongside reason as something “added” to it from without. Rather, faith enlarges reason from within, helping it to function better precisely as reason …
Schindler believes that limited government, the separation of church and state, human rights, and religious freedom are legitimate achievements that ought to be preserved. But he simply does not believe (1) that liberalism, or any other conception of order, can successfully prescind from metaphysics (he quotes philosopher Etienne Gilson: “metaphysics always buries its undertakers”), or (2) that these achievements can be preserved if they are grounded in the unwitting metaphysics of liberalism rather than in the metaphysics of love.
Schindler’s argument is multifaceted, but as his son David C. Schindler draws it out in Being Holy in the World, on one level it goes like this: by asking Christians to “bracket” their metaphysical commitments for purposes of public order, liberalism essentially asks them to accept a different metaphysics—indeed, a different theology. Christianity does not present itself as just one pre-critical commitment among others, but as the matrix or “paradigm” of rationality itself. One either rejects that claim, and is therefore not a Christian, or one accepts it as a Christian as the basis for reflection and understanding. There can be no middle, “bracketing” way.
For the Christian, the only adequate notion of reality is one that grows out of a Trinitarian understanding of the logos. The Trinitarian life of God means that love, as we have seen, is at the heart of the structure and meaning of being. But we do not really receive that logos as a logos unless we see that it grounds and transforms our understanding of everything. It is the furthest thing possible from a truth claim that might safely be bracketed from public discussion. Thus, “bracketing” one’s Christian commitments from one’s thinking at any time, as liberalism demands, is to be not only false to Christianity, but to be false to reality …
… No state, insists Schindler, “in its legal-constitutional order can successfully avoid the question of truth” ….
If my ADD/HD will behave itself, I’ll be going back for more. It seems fundamentally important.
North Carolina thinks the Establishment Clause doesn’t apply to them. Colorado, New York, Connecticut and Oregon think the eight to bear arms stops at their borders. (I’m keeping quiet about Indiana so I don’t offend half my friends.)
Gay marriage is driving some social conservatives crazy. By “crazy”, I don’t mean opposition to gay marriage as such, but stubborn, even willful refusal to understand why gay marriage has gained so much support, so quickly. Rather than acknowledging the reality of the situation, victims of gay marriage derangement syndrome just make stuff up.
A majority of Americans now approve of gay marriage for two fairly simple reasons. First, most Americans understand marriage as symbolic affirmation of a dissolvable commitment between consenting adults for purposes of emotional gratification. Second, an increasing number of Americans have come to know gay people in their own lives as beloved relatives, respected colleagues, or honored authorities rather than icons of flamboyance or specters of perversion. If you understand marriage in this sense, which has been socially dominant fordecades, there is no plausible argument for denying it to gay individuals one loves and respects.
I agree with the last sentence 100%, but read it again if you think that’s a change of position. Its form is “If … then ….” I do not accept the view of marriage in the first “simple reason,” but hold, and would like to see mended, the historic view. (On the other hand, if “most Americans understand marriage as symbolic affirmation of a dissolvable commitment between consenting adults for purposes of emotional gratification,” why did it take so long to get to something like 50% support instead of derisive laughter?)
The end of the empire is getting very interesting, with the Tower of Babel gaining currency as a type of what happens to national hubris.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 