The mind that dare not speak its name

I have a healthy respect for Albert Mohler, but sooner or later a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Christian will disagree. Mohler:

Christians need to remember that the sufficiency of scripture gives us a comprehensive worldview that equips us to wrestle with even the most challenging ethical dilemmas of our time.

Responding to the Transgender Moment (around 56:31)

That claim was part of his postscript to an interview with Roman Catholic Ryan T. Anderson, who relies heavily on natural law. Mohler’s last three guests have been Catholics. And he had just recommended Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally, for Christians, saying “this book is a very good source, a very good place, to begin thinking through some of these issues.”

Methinks Mohler is a bit double-minded about “the sufficiency of scripture” — and the mind that dare not speak its name at a Southern Baptist Seminary is the mind that gives me my healthy respect for Mohler. (If all he was going to do was stretch scripture, pretending that it is the source of the worldview he has gained by reading and thinking more widely, he wouldn’t be worth bothering with.)

I do wish, however, that Mohler and Anderson had discussed how actual birth anomalies — objectively present and testable, the exceptions that test the rule of sexual dimorphism — would play out in these debates.

I do not think those “hard cases” are where the action is on trasgenderism, but their existence is often an effective rhetorical tool, and with only 24 hours in a day, and with other issues than sexuality to interest me, I haven’t yet nailed down the fallacy in their invocation.

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The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Will Kavanaugh butcher the sacred cow?

I think it was Nina Totenburg who on NPR Tuesday evening was incredulously challenging a Trump spokesman on the claim that President Trump didn’t ask SCOTUS nominee Kavanaugh about abortion — because Trump said on the campaign trail that he would appoint pro-life justices. As the spokesman pointed out, he also promised that there would be no litmus test and that he provided a list, later expanded, of people from whom he would nominate.

Here’s the solution of Totenburg’s clumsy effort at setting up a trick box:

There are no secret handshakes or pass-codes. Trump and Kavanaugh are (or will be) telling the truth when they deny discussing abortion. Get over it.
Trump (or, likelier, his advisers on judicial matters) are just quite confident that the people on his list are going to be hostile to the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence because it’s a hot, steaming mess, lacking firm roots in the Constitution. The people on the list revere the Constitution and will be disinclined, all else being equal, to ignore hot steaming messes that sully the Constitution by the pretext that it, the Constitution, and not errant justices, created the mess.
Notably, Democrat Chuck Schumer has declared his certainty — and horror — about how Kavanaugh would decide abortion cases (presumably starting with Kavanaugh’s constitutional reverence and following the trail from there, though Schumer would never admit that the one follows the other logically).
Democrat Presidents are similarly confident, without actually asking, that their nominees are not going to be overly troubled by the legal messiness of the status quo. Their party has a rather latitudinarian view about the importance of the Constitution’s original public meaning, plus some theories on how we can never know that meaning, and (double-plus) it reveres the sexual revolution. Q.E.D.
Trump was and is a bullshitter. Any correspondence between what he promises and what he does is, generally, coincidental. His judicial nominees from that list have been a happy exception, as he has hewed to the list of nominees from which he promised to pick. (Okay: Schumer’s a bullshitter, too, though definitely a minor-leaguer compared to President MAGA.)

A Kafkaesque part of the prescribed ritual combat will be invocations or deprecations of “Roe v. Wade.” It’s weird because Roe finally succumbed to its birth defects (helped along by a thousand cuts from Law Journal articles, left, right and center) in 1992, with Anthony Kennedy and company quietly interring it and trotting out the new rationale for continuing a liberal abortion regime: No more trimesters or such; the test of a law is whether it creates an “undue burden” on access to abortion, because “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.” (Damn! How could I have missed that?!)

Roe is dead. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But if you take away the totemistic invocation of Roe, the Senate might be struck dumb(er).

And therein lies the dilemma that will produce some sordid theater over the coming months.

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The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

In pursuit, but barely

As I told you previously the more I see how other societies (d)evolve, the more I’m glad to be French, at least for now. But is that really “other” societies, or just some of them? The Sexual Revolution, the LGBT cult and other niceties were mostly born in the Anglosphere and that’s where they are most virulent …

I understand that you’re clinging to your “secularization = Sexual Revolution” thesis and it certainly has some merit, but you can’t deny that France, for instance, is much more secularized than the United States and as much as the UK and yet is much more conservative on social matters — just check our abortion laws or the resistance to the LGBT agenda. Same goes for Eastern Europe. I think thus there is something rotten in the Anglosphere….

As Del Noce pointed out, Wilhelm Reich was brilliantly prescient when he identified America (and the English-speaking more generally) as the culture where the sexual revolution would triumph most thoroughly.

In hindsight, the reason is obvious: the sexual revolution is a philosophical by-product of scientistic positivism (the denial that anything, including sexuality, has a symbolic-sacramental value) and extreme “bourgeois happiness” utilitarianism (faith that happiness can be reached without any reference to the transcendent). Both trends were and are far more advanced in countries with a Puritan-empiricist-utilitarian cultural tradition like the UK and the USA. The results show.

Rod Dreher, updating a bit of gender madness from the U.K. with comments by a French reader and by Carlo Lancellotti, who has been hitting the nail on the head quite a bit lately. (Emphasis added)

I don’t think these comments are off the mark when it comes to the Anglosphere nexus with the craziest parts of the sexual revolution and LGBetc. stuff. Which means, as Rod says:

I think this is a point worth pondering. So I am going to ponder it, and invite others to think of it too, and add their thoughts. My instinct tells me it has something to do with the radical individualism of the Anglosphere.

But if we get no further than picking “scientistic positivism,” “bourgeois happiness utilitarianism” or “radical individualism” out of the police lineup, we’ll not have gotten very far.

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The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving.

Why I’m not calling for Revolution

I cannot forgive or forget Trump’s praise for the most hideously totalitarian regime on the planet, for a bloodthirsty scion who conducts regular public hangings, keeps his subjects in a state of mind-control, holds hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, and threatens the world with nuclear destruction. To watch an American president give his tacit blessing to all of that, to laud Kim for being “rough” on his people, right on the heels of attacking every democratic ally, is an obscenity.

And this was the response of the secretary of State, when asked, inevitably, how the U.S. could in any way verify North Korea’s promised denuclearization: “I find that question insulting and ridiculous and, frankly, ludicrous.” It’s ludicrous, he explained, because the president said there will be verification of denuclearization. And so there will be. Get that? Just lean into the delusion, and everything will be well. Trump’s various mouthpieces have resorted to exactly that formula, when asked difficult or obvious questions that assume a reality different from Trump’s. The empirical questions — those that reference the real world — are “ludicrous,” “inappropriate,” or “ridiculous.” But then when the Trump peons can’t answer the question, because it would reveal Trump as a fantasist, what else are they supposed to do? Show a propaganda video made by the National Security Council?

…

[Vaclav] Havel had a phrase: “Living in the truth.” In a totalitarian society, living in the truth can be close to impossible, and yet it was possible for someone, as Havel analogized, as lowly as a greengrocer to refuse to “live in a lie”:

The original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all: if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the “dissident” attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest “dissent” could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life.

No, that’s not Rod Dreher. It’s Andrew Sullivan, Trump Is Making Us All Live in His Delusional Reality Show.

We are not (yet) living in a totalitarian society, and a series of Tweets from POTUS falls short of actual (versus aspirational) authoritarianism.

But we are governed by a man who has a severe personality disorder and is, if not delusional, perhaps even scarier for that. As just one microcosm (called to my attention by my brother in a Facebook exchange), our President, self-proclaimed master deal-maker, apparently knows nothing of win-win; our adversaries and even our allies must lose for him to feel that he has won bragging rights.

Be resolute. Do not surrender to the lie. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

But on the other hand …

Although I may have overdone “Trump versus Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it” in the run-up to the election, it was because I discounted God’s graciousness and patience (scripture citations omitted), of which discounting I’m repenting.

But the “Resistance” party is scary — very scary — in its statist impulse to cut down every structure of civil society that doesn’t conform to the latest progressive pieties. Only the space inside the “four corners” of our homes is spared, and that only for now.

Consider Catholic Charities, driven from adoption licensure in several states because it won’t place children with same-sex couples (who have alternate agencies for adoption, be it noted), or Trinity Western University in Canada, a Christian University which cannot start a law school, and presumably will soon lose its other accreditations, unless it declares open season for fornication and sodomy among its students.

If it’s just me (or me plus some feckless institutions that won a government Seal of Docility) versus the government, then I’m as powerless as Roper when the laws of England were mowed down so he could pursue the devil. This conviction was germinating in me fifty years ago and has grown stronger as I gained vocabulary, added contexts, and watched the mowing down proceeding in ways I never thought I’d live to see.

God’s judgment or just the denoument of liberalism, we really are in a pickle. That’s why I’m trying to remain vigilant but not calling for revolution, the results of which are highly, highly likely to be, hard though it be to imagine, as bad or worse than the status quo.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Thoroughly modern misogyny and plutocracy

Have you heard about the “Flipping Out” lawsuit? Ross Douthat sticks his neck out so I don’t have to. (I’m sure that’s what he had in mind.)

The “Flipping Out” lawsuit, sad and sordid, falls 31 years after a far more consequential surrogacy debate: The “Baby M” case, in which a surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, changed her mind after the birth and sued — ultimately unsuccessfully — for the right to keep her child. I was 7 during the case but I remember it vividly, mostly because my mother was obsessed with it. We were not Catholics then, or any kind of conservative, but opposing commercial surrogacy seemed like a natural extension of her feminist and liberal principles, which would of course oppose a system in which the rich paid poorer women to bear their children.

…

[T]he simplest way to describe what happened with the surrogacy debate is that American feminists gradually went along with the logic of capitalism rather than resisting it. This is a particularly useful description because it’s happened so consistently across the last few decades: Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women.

… Feminists were divided over surrogacy and commercialized fertility, but the opposition to both practices gradually dissolved, and now only eccentric conservatives notice the weird resemblances between California-style surrogacy practices and the handmaids and econowives of Gilead.

…

I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercising in trolling. (Did you know, feminists, that you’re all just slaves of capital? That you need less cultural Marxism and more of the genuine economistic article?) But the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision.

Ross Douthat

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Jesus, loser

I think Christian Smith pretty well described Moralistic Therapeutic Deism when he coined the term, but Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon’s definition is now my favorite:

The function of Church in society is to keep spiritually healthy and morally upright those who are pursuing the American Dream.

But according to Luke, the Gospel is to leave all things and embrace the cross daily.

Could anything be more opposed to the cross of Christ than a life dedicated to the quest for personal prosperity? … What Jesus warns this man about is a life in which he loves God with his whole heart, loves his neighbor as himself, and goes about making as much money as he can … Wealth itself so easily becomes idolatrous.

If wealth is the mark of success, then think about it: Who are the failures? Who are the “losers”? …

Can any philosophy be more at odds with the cross of Christ than the [social Darwinist] survival of the fittest? The cross is the absolute answer to Darwin, just as the absolute answer to Nietszche and the will to power. The cross stands against all of that.

The basic floor of the cross of Calvary is that Jesus did not survive. He died as a poor man who had nothing to show for his life. He left no bank account. He was a loser. As he died, he was obliged to leave the care of his widowed mother to another poor man. By every standard recognized in the money market, Jesus was a failure. A poor man who died a poor man.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Woke for what purpose?

David Brooks nails it, though it stings:

In an older frame of mind, you try to perceive the size of a problem objectively, and then you propose a solution, which might either be radical or moderate, conservative or liberal. You were judged primarily by the nature of your proposal.

But wokeness jams together the perceiving and the proposing. In fact, wokeness puts more emphasis on how you perceive a situation — how woke you are to what is wrong — than what exactly you plan to do about it. To be woke is to understand the full injustice.

There is no measure or moderation to wokeness. It’s always good to be more woke. It’s always good to see injustice in maximalist terms. To point to any mitigating factors in the environment is to be naïve, childish, a co-opted part of the status quo.

…

These days we think of wokeness as a left-wing phenomenon. But it is an iron law of politics that every mental habit conservatives fault in liberals is one they also practice themselves.

(David Brooks, The Problem with Wokeness)

It seems to be my role in life to try to “awoken” people, from the conservative side, to the problems conservatives see, especially in the culture and in religious freedom. I’d be a lousy legislator because I’m weak on solutions. (Hmmmm. Is that what’s behind some of our polarization?) I know people who’ve made pretty good livings being even more woke (or it’s conservative counterpart) than me.

But I’ve begun reading, apropos of one of my longest-standing concerns, Charles C. Camosy’s Beyond the Abortion Wars, which is premised on there being wider-spread ~~dis~~agreement (“agreement” — “disagreement” was a Freudian slip of the fingers) than the warring sides seem to think. I’m skeptical (of course — it’s a reflex), but I’ll try to remember to share a bit if, despite myself, I think there’s much merit in his argument.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Tighten up, now

I would like to call attention to the Religion News Service report that was posted with this headline: “Employees quit American Bible Society over sex and marriage rules.” The overture is quite strong:

(RNS) — One of the oldest nonprofit organizations dedicated to distributing Bibles around the world will soon require all employees to adhere to orthodox Christian beliefs and heed a conservative code of sexual ethics.

Employees are resigning in protest of the new policy, which will effectively prohibit sexually active LGBT people and couples in cohabitating relationships from working for the American Bible Society. But the organization stands by it as a measure intended to bring “unity and clarity.”

The key word in that lede is “orthodox,” with a small “o.” It would have been possible, I guess, to have used phrases such as “ancient Christian beliefs” or even “traditional Christian beliefs.” Both would have been accurate in terms of history. In this context, the use of “conservative” is fine, since there are “liberal” churches that have modernized their doctrines on these subjects.

However, strange things start happening soon after that strong, factual opening, Note, for example, the end of this paragraph:

The American Bible Society, founded 202 years ago to publish, distribute and translate the Bible, presented its “Affirmation of Biblical Community” to employees in December. It requires employees to “refrain from sexual contact outside the marriage covenant,” which it defined as man and wife.

Now, let’s be clear. It is accurate to state that the American Bible Society document defines “marriage covenant” in this manner. However, the implication is that there is something unique or controversial about that doctrine – as opposed to it being a restatement of 2,000 years of basic Christian moral theology

…

It is … crucial to note why the American Bible Society, and many other religious groups, are putting these kinds of doctrinal specifics into print. They aren’t doing this because they want to do so, they are taking this step because of emerging legal realities.

The roots of these decisions can be found in recent government actions and court decisions (think HHS mandates) requiring religious nonprofits to be much more specific about the doctrines that define their voluntary associations. In other words, there are now solid legal reasons for being more candid, as a defense strategy when being sued by those who oppose these doctrines.This story isn’t going away. So be careful out there.

(Terry Mattingly, emphasis added)

Let me put this another way: When organizations like the American Bible Society find that an employee is cohabiting or sexually active with members of the same sex, if they dismiss or otherwise discipline them, they don’t want the employee, sincerely or disingenuously, claiming that they had no idea that doing so violated a general rule that employees are to conduct their lives outside of work “consistently with Biblical morality” or some such general, umbrella standard.

There’s nothing new about this. For twenty centuries now, the Church has defined its teachings more rigorously when some sort of challenge arose to what previously had been, if not universally understood, at least not openly defied and disputed. From Arian heresy through iconoclastic heresy, that’s the background of the Ecumenical Councils of the undivided church.

The only thing that’s changed, it seems to me, is that tens of thousands of denominations and parachurch groups are going to have to do this one-by-one now, the clear and visible unity of the church having been blurred and obscured beyond possibility of an ecumenical council that all would recognize as binding.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Fr. Stephen snippets

A Prayer to Our Lord Jesus Christ

My most merciful and all-merciful God, O Lord Jesus Christ! In Thy great love, Thou didst come down and become flesh in order to save all. Again, I pray Thee, save me by Grace! If Thou shouldst save me because of my deeds, it would not be a gift, but merely a duty. Truly, Thou aboundest in graciousness and art inexpressibly merciful! Thou hast said, O my Christ: “He who believes in me shall live and never see death.” If faith in Thee saves the desperate, behold: I believe! Save me, for Thou art my God and my Maker. May my faith replace my deeds, O my God, for Thou wilt find no deeds to justify me. May my faith be sufficient for all. May it answer for me; may it justify me; may it make me a partaker of Thine eternal glory; and may Satan not seize me, O Word, and boast that He has torn me from Thy hand and fold. O Christ my Savior: save me whether I want it or not! Come quickly, hurry, for I perish! Thou art my God from my mother’s womb. Grant, O Lord, that I may now love Thee as once I loved sin, and that I may labor for Thee without laziness as once I labored for Satan the deceiver. Even more, I will labor for Thee, my Lord and God Jesus Christ, all the days of my life, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

From the Morning Prayers

…

I hear the heart’s cry in the prayer quoted above. The depth of its honesty provokes the hearts of those who read it. It recognizes the truth of our will and echoes St. Paul’s observations:

For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand….Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:18-21; 24)

There is, I think, an abiding temptation towards Pelagianism (the belief that we can will our own salvation). In Orthodoxy, the teaching of “synergy” often runs in that direction. We indeed “cooperate” with God in our salvation (“cooperate” is the Latinized equivalent of “synergy”). But our cooperation is best illustrated in the prayer above. It is the cry for help from the lips of the helpless. This is not nothing – it is synergistic. But it is not the imagined synergy that some profess. We are saved by our weakness, not by our excellence.

(May 2, 2018)

Sin is a movement away from being, well-being, and eternal being. It is a distorted direction (hamartia: “missing the mark”). It is equally the refusal of Beauty and Goodness, without participation in the Truth.

…

When someone asks: “Is it a sin to withhold help from someone in need?” The answer is yes – but not in a merely legal sense. It is a sin – a movement towards non-existence – a movement away from the proper direction of our lives.

…

[A]ll of this should shed much light on the importance of beauty in Orthodox liturgy and Churches, iconography, etc. It is essential – not a decoration or an afterthought. Much of the modern world sees beauty as a luxury (which it so rarely affords). I grieve deeply when I hear the modern sentiment directed towards a beautiful Church “that money should have been given to the poor.” These are the words of Judas. And those who say such things rarely give anything themselves. Beauty is not a contradiction of generosity. The movement towards Beauty is a movement towards Goodness (which contains generosity at its core).

The apprehension of Beauty is at the very heart of the preaching of the gospel. It is that which first touches the heart and draws us towards Truth. In our over-rationalized world we tend to think that it is reasoning and arguments that draw people to Christ. But this is something that comes much later. First the heart must be drawn – and this happens primarily through Beauty in its broadest sense.

(May 4, 2018)

Could a liturgy be served without vestments? Of course, though a priest would, even in extreme circumstances, try to cobble something together. The vestments themselves are not mere decorations. Can a liturgy be served without icons? Of course, though it would be wrong to do so unless under extreme duress. There was once a liturgy celebrated in the confines of the prison of Pitesti in Romania. The canons require that the liturgy be celebrated in the presence of a martyr’s relic (all altars have such a relic). It was decided to celebrate the service on the body of a deceased prisoner, the only martyr present. Such things are not extraneous. The liturgy should not be subjected to reductionism.

…

The givenness of the liturgy, in all its aspects, is a proper subject of theoria – contemplation and understanding. It is a mystery that yields itself to the heart. It is not, however, one more cultural artifact to be manipulated in the interests of consumer capitalism and its deformation of humanity. We are fast losing the memory of who and what we are. It is the confusion of Babel.

(May 11, 2018)

Jesus healed the sick, cleansed the lepers, and gave sight to the blind. Such actions are incorrectly described as the “relief of suffering.” In many other cases Jesus specifically asks people to suffer: give away your possessions; forgive your enemies; take up your Cross; turn the other cheek; give without expecting in return. Again, there is no authentic Christian voice that does not demand suffering on the part of its adherents.

More important than this, is the fact that this voluntary self-denial, a willingly embraced suffering for the sake of others, is not a diminishment of our humanity, but a necessity of its fulfillment. It is this reality that modernity, in its truncated account of existence, fails to understand or to describe. The most popular ethic within the modern world entails the relief of suffering. In the name of that ethic, people are put to death. It cannot ask us to suffer without guilt. But if suffering is inherent to our existence, then only that which encompasses suffering is sufficient as an account of being human.

To be truly human is to be conformed to the image of Christ. And not just to the image of Christ, but Christ crucified. Anything less would make a mockery of our existence and a diminishment of the fullness to which we are called.

(May 15, 2018)

I have seen, more than once, the favorable outcome of a soul whose deepest hunger has, in an unguarded moment, been exposed to the light of the gospel. I know the case of a woman who found God when a priest called her by name unexpectedly. Just her name. The mercy of God is wonderfully opportunistic. I have often thought, “Give Him an inch and He’ll take your life!”

(May 19, 2018)

As I finished up, deciding what “categories” to assign to today’s blog, the quote “Sin is a movement away from being, well-being, and eternal being” struck me as an instance of nominalism versus realism, so I applied that category. One characteristic tendency of nominalism was to see sin as sinful because it transgressed an essentially arbitrary divine decree. The consequence of sin was not non-being (spiritual death), but punishment by God. In this sense, the Orthodox understanding of sin is realist rather than nominalist.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Vignette

[H]uman freedom, properly understood, tries to resist the forces of utility that devalue human beings.

[Patrick] Deneen said he lead at Notre Dame a class on the idea of utopia, from ancient days until now. At the end, he polled the class to ask them which society of those he presented would they least want to live in, and which they would most want to live in. They all said 1984 is the one they wouldn’t want to live in. But which would they choose? A handful chose the world Wendell Berry presents in Hannah Coulter. But about half the class said Brave New World.

“It was stunning that they saw it as a utopia,” Deneen said. “That’s liberalism succeeding, and that’s liberalism failing.”

(Rod Dreher, emphasis in original)

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