The peace of all things is the tranquility of order. -- St. Augustine
Christian tradition enjoins us to recall often that we are each fated to die. Cicero and Montaigne consider it the point of philosophy to learn how to die . During Advent, I have devoted my daily prayer and meditation to considerations of my own death. It s often said that a person radically reconsiders his priorities in light of [ ]
How can one know a source is trustworthy? One could do it by independently confirming everything the source says, but if I can do that and am willing to do that, then the trustworthy source is useless. Thus the argument that one cannot base one’s knowledge on external authority. However, it proves too much, because [ ]
Some say that the conservative veneration of authority is mere nostalgia, an outdated model of society, or even anti-Christian. I strenuously disagree-authority is a core category of the social world, and its moral quality cannot be understood without it. However, it must be properly understood. In particular, it must be clear in what sort of [ ]
What does it mean that Satan is the prince of this world? I take it to mean that the world is fundamentally hostile, that holiness is “moving uphill” and sin is “moving downhill”. In particular, impersonal forces alway oppose Christianity and support the Left. Changes in technology, in economic structures, in cultural fads–in summary, everything [ ]
Barfield takes the true nature of things as they are in themselves (as opposed to things as sensed and conceptualized by us) to be what is revealed by physics. The precise nature of this revelation of the particles / the unrepresented does not matter much for the argument, only that the world thus revealed is quite alien [ ]
The arguments that slavery per se is immoral are very weak, something one doesn t notice only because no one is allowed to challenge them. They usually either prove too much and would condemn any authority or social organization (e.g. complaints about one person s will being allowed to override another s) or they object only to potential [ ]
Political reactionaries and orthodox Catholics are often accused of engaging in nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The accusation is peculiar, for similar reasons as the accusation that American conservatives are nostalgic for the 1950s. Insofar as the Catholic prefers the Middle Ages for its religion, or the monarchist and neofeudalist prefer it for its social [ ]
I oppose reform, not just this or that ill-considered reform, but reform in general. I ve brought this up before with regard to the Catholic Church, a much reform-ridden entity, but reform is poison for any group. To understand this, one must be clear about what reform is. Not all changes tend to be described as [ ]
By this I mean a marked increase in statements like X is not who we are or there is no place in this city/state/country/organization for people who believe/practice X . Such statements are not necessarily bad. For some values of X, such exclusion is appropriate. However, for values of X that impugn a large fraction of [ ]
If we were allowed to speak on our own behalf, we would prefer to have non-white quotas than diversity thought policing at work (including diversity statements from applicants and humiliating diversity training of employees). We d rather the salaries of the diversity and inclusion commissars who torment us went to hiring non-white regular employees instead. We [ ]