Extorting ‘Virtue’: The Problems with the Same-Sex Marriage Bill by Andrew McCarthy
Democrats want the Respect for Marriage Act because it is a potent weapon against religious liberty, camouflaged in lofty rhetoric about dignity and benign intentions.
Interesting article from someone I trust. Worth thinking about.
Leo Strauss and the Closed Society by Matthew Rose
“He argued that good teachers should not seek to dispel the allure of the closed society; instead, they should carefully draw students directly inside of it. This pedagogy would enable students to experience the power of the closed society’s moral demands, to sense the appeal of its political life, and to feel challenged by its vision of human excellence.”
Very interesting analysis of a speech given by Leo Strauss encouraging the values of a "closed society" while living in an open one.
Humanism is a Heresy by Tom Holland
God was dead — but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell. The myths of Christianity would long endure. And yet they were no less myths, for all that, because they now wore the show of the secular. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour”: these were Christian through and through.
Very interesting thesis on the secularization of culture.
Educating the Founder by Lee Trepanier
The Framers’ education was grounded in a deeper and broader tradition that stretches back to the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. They believed that practical political solutions could be found in the literature, history, and philosophy of the ancients, the common law of the English, and Christianity theology.
Obviously I love this.
The Problem with Student-Centered Education by Rebekah Wanic and Nina Powell
When we adopt a student-centered educational philosophy, irrespective of how well-meaning we may be, we short-change students. Rather than succeeding in empowering them, we fail to equip them with the skills to deal with the challenges they will invariably confront as their life after university unfolds. When we see these consequences and choose to do nothing, we perpetuate this unkindness.
Imagine treating students as students and insisting the teacher has something to teach...
Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness by Adam M. Carrington
Yet we must understand that we encourage what we honor and we discourage what we disapprove. Encouraging the birth of more children while respecting all persons regardless of familial status will demand the careful balancing that attends all true statesmanship.
Interesting ideas, going back to Montesquieu on how to encourage child-bearing in America.
[Leo] Strauss understood that Athens was closer to Jerusalem than many presupposed. In his 1967 essay, he concluded “[t]hat both Socrates and the prophets are concerned with justice or righteousness, with the perfectly just society which, as such, would be free of all evils.” To be sure, the two approaches define the perfectly just man differently, for
according to Socrates, [it is] the philosopher; according to the prophets, he is the faithful servant of the Lord. The philosopher is the man who dedicates his life to the quest for knowledge of the good, of the idea of the good; what we would call moral virtue is only the condition or by-product of that quest. According to the prophets, however, there is no need for the quest for knowledge of the good: God “hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6.8).
Plutocratic Socialism and the Corruption of Democracy by Mark T. Mitchell
The American constitutional order assumes a populace of property owners, a middle class whose virtues provide the necessary ballast to support our republic. Our founders imagined strong communities, strong families, and independent citizens capable of self-government. They knew if the people degenerated into an insolent plutocracy on the one hand and a disgruntled, insecure, proletarianized mass on the other, the American experiment in self-government would become increasingly fragile and eventually collapse.
Welcome to the Plutocratic Socialist States of America.
The return of Covid fearmongering by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi
At this point, it really isn’t clear what advocates of these “tried and failed” restrictions hope they will achieve, given that — even in conjunction with several doses of the Covid vaccines — they haven’t been able to prevent the vast majority of people contracting Covid. As Edinburgh University’s Professor of Epidemiology Mark Woolhouse wrote in The Year the World Went Mad, lockdowns and associated non-pharmaceutical interventions cannot eliminate a virus, or even prevent infections — they can only delay them, and even then just for a short while.
Great article on the whole Covid response and what we now know.
The West needs to grow up by Paul Kingsnorth
The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up.
This may be the most insightful article I've read detailing the reason for the rot at the heart of our culture.
The Right Standards for American Schools by James Hankins
Without a grasp of the historical experiences of religious war, of the abuse of lordly power, of the control of labor and trade by governments, privileged individuals, and corporate bodies; without understanding how unproductive and even harmful science can be when it becomes dogmatic; without understanding the centuries of costly errors that led to Western embrace of religious freedom, freedom of expression, and economic freedom—without understanding all that, the young will never understand the reasons for preserving Western traditions. If you need an explanation for why the younger generation—the generation now beginning to take over the institutions of our society—does not value the great achievements of Western civilization, here’s your answer: they have never been taught anything about them.
Every history teacher should read this article.
How the Left was Lost by Sasha Stone
The Left I used to know stood up for the little guy, the working-class poor, not just those they choose to help because they are ideologically compliant. We didn’t punish or cancel artists. We didn’t censor and bully journalists. There is no doubt we have lost our way. Perhaps a massive red wave will give the Democrats a chance to collapse completely and then rebuild with new blood and a better path forward.
Great self-reflective article on what the Left has become.
Our Failed COVID Response by Virginia Hume
In March of 2020, an elite consensus formed that nothing mattered more than the effort to reduce transmission of COVID. A child could be locked in a home with an abusive parent. Loved ones could be left to die alone. Other deadly diseases could progress, undiagnosed and untreated, because no death was as tragic as a COVID death.
No other article I've read articulates so exactly how I feel and thought from the very beginning. I could not have written a better article myself.
The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling by Robert Pondiscio
I went to school, played unsupervised in the street, and had blanket permission to range widely on my bike, far from my neighborhood, provided I was home when the streetlights came on. Adults were not omnipresent as they tend to be in children’s lives today, but they seemed in charge and mostly competent. I also knew one thing with certainty about my country, reinforced by my parents and teachers and in the media and culture at large: We were the good guys.
We are losing this attitude in education to our peril.
The Contradictions of American History by Michael Walzer
Perhaps most importantly, we should guard against hubris. Acting on our own, in our own time, we will certainly try to avoid the immorality and injustice of the past. We will do the best we can to recognize all the implications of our values. We promise, when we defend equality, that we won’t leave anyone out. But we had better add humility to our righteousness; we are unlikely to avoid the contradictions of political life.
Excellent way of dealing with the contradictions between Great Men and their sins.
The Odyssey of Roosevelt Montás by M. D. Aeschliman
Thus Montás’s case against ferocious Nietzschean irrationalism, its offspring in “postmodernism,” and their numerous, haughty, tenured contemporary successors puts him in good company and shows that he has understood the real grounds of our culture wars and their stakes, from elementary-school curricula and pedagogy to college curricula and the world of academic writing and publishing in the humanities and social sciences. He even has the temerity to defend the Victorian sage who shaped Anglo-American educational attitudes and practices for more than a century: “Matthew Arnold’s famous adage that liberal learning should consist in ‘getting to know the best which has been thought and said in the world’” has become “an object of derision among academic humanists. But Arnold was right about this, and every course offered by any professor represents some instantiation of his dictum, even if the object of the course is to refute the dictum. If we deny the capacity to make generalizable value judgments — albeit contestable and revisable ones — about what things from the past are most worth passing on to young people as they pursue ‘higher education,’ we lose the capacity to organize a liberal education curriculum. As indeed most institutions have.”
This man deserves some serious consideration!
Safety Third: Covid-19 And The American Character by Adam Ellwanger
But since those halcyon days of Obama ended, it has become fashionable to pretend that the American polity is so diverse that it’s impossible to make any generalizations about our collective identity. Fortunately, that’s false. We have many shared characteristics as a people. And “safety” has never been a defining concern of any Americans—whoever they are and whatever their heritage.
This is such an important wake-up call to remember who we are as Americans.
Whether There is a Moral Obligation to Disobey the Coercive Mandates by Douglas Farrow
This makes the question of authority a very pressing one, in the Church as in the State. To appeal once more to the Catechism, “authority does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself” and “must not behave in a despotic manner, but must act for the common good as a ‘moral force based on freedom and a sense of responsibility’” (1902). “Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, ‘authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse’” (1903).
Written in the style of Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Farrow uses the same logic to advocate for the moral obligation to disobey the Covid mandates. He quotes Aquinas saying, “a human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence.”
Has the Great Barrington Declaration been vindicated? by Thomas Fazi
It is time for the Left to look reality in the face and take stock of the fact that the prevailing Covid response of most Western governments has been an abysmal failure on all fronts —not least that of “saving lives”. An alternative approach is desperately needed. Fortunately, and tragically, it’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.
It appears the some, even on the Left, are finally admitting that the Covid measures did not work and were not really intended to work.
