We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his [...]
I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of [...]
I’m proposing this principle: A Creation meeting the plausible criteria of unity, coherence, and completeness, would most likely behave in a manner consistent with the manner in which it was created. In other words, if the evidence strongly tells us that the world and the entities within it develop at the level of individuals and [...]
Those who’ve read some of the writings on my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, will likely realize I’ve been dealing with this project of creating a worldview on a somewhat disorganized basis, that is, I was writing as ideas came to me, sometimes addressing a few [...]
Truth unfolds in time through communal processes. I’ve realized there is possibly a very clear example of what this means in an area where I’ve perhaps misspoken a little. Maybe I’ve simply been in error. In any case, I’m also willing to claim that new truths might emerge in time through various processes, new truths [...]
This short article, Conformists may kill civilizations is about an effort to find, in archaeological and evolutionary biological terms, a way of speaking of the odd fact that the residents of a once successful but collapsing civilization will go on acting the same way they, or their ancestors, did when that civilization was prosperous and [...]
Americans, perhaps most human beings of the Modern Age, don’t perceive what’s inconvenient to their desired worldview. This is hardly a new observation — Tocqueville was puzzled by this trait back in the 1830s and others since, including Hawthorne and Melville and Solzhenitsyn and Ray Bradbury have at least spoken of this problem. Perhaps Tocqueville [...]
John Michael Greer blogs as the Archdruid, The Archdruid Report. I find it interesting that his worldview is radically different from my Thomistic existentialist worldview, but my views align with his on a number of issues rather than aligning with those of the Catholic mainstream. I would argue this happens for a simple reason: like [...]
[Discipleship as Political Responsibility, John Howard Yoder, Translated by Timothy J. Geddert, Forward by Stanley Hauerwas, Herald Press, 2003] In speaking of the temptations which the crowds presented to Christ, to make Him King after He multiplied the bread on the mountainside and again after His triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, Yoder says: [T]he political temptation [...]
I’ve spoken about the nature of evil as related to the individual creature in my previous two entries: Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend and Good and Evil: The Instability of Evil. But evil takes shape on a large scale far too often, especially in this modern age of genocidal wars, this age where [...]