I’ve nearly finished reading The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin. I didn’t have any particular plans to comment on the insights and delicately ironic prose of Professor Boorstin until I read these words: For while Eliot, reformer though he was, still thought and talked about “subjects” of study, Hall, Dewey, and their … [Read more…]
[This is an essay which I though had been posted on 2012/06/02, but I left it in draft status. I don’t think this glitch in publishing date matters much.] In an essay I published in April of 2012, Intelligence vs. Intellect, I quoted Jacques Barzun from The House of Intellect: We [in the United States] … [Read more…]
A few weeks back, Michael S. Greve published a discussion of one of our fundamental problems in these troubled times, as opposed to the secondary problems discussed by the better technical experts in financing, investment, etc. Greve’s essay, in three parts, can be found at: The Constitution of Affluence, Part I, The Constitution of Affluence, … [Read more…]
This is a short follow-up post to the essay I published yesterday: Prosperity that Never Ends…Oops. Besides a few unexplored aspects of this situation, I also left hanging the question which is the title of this post: Why Are the Parasites Killing the Host? Indeed, why? Wouldn’t they be better in the long run to … [Read more…]
Historians have noted that approaching crises typically take longer to arrive than the more prescient of the victims-to-be would expect. And then they are typically far worse than the more pessimistic of the victims-to-be would expect. I fear the truth that might lie in the above claims because we of the West, and many in … [Read more…]
Many modern Christians can’t understand why a distinguished man of letters, Vladimir Nabokov, would have written a novel about a man attracted to girls just before adolescence or perhaps just entering that ripening of sexual nature. The answer is as clear as the glorification of Mel Gibson’s gory movie, The Passion of the Christ. We … [Read more…]
I realize there are a multitude of good books out there I’ll never so much as open but sometimes I feel an urge to re-read a particularly good book. So it is that I’ve picked up The House of Intellect copyrighted by Jacques Barzun in 1959. In the first essay, he makes a nice distinction … [Read more…]
I want to ask a simple question of the bishops of the American Catholic Church: Why is it acceptable for Federal agents to fondle the breasts of American women, probe the genital regions of American children, and publicly remove the diapers of incontinent elderly Americans but beyond the moral pale to force those violated Americans … [Read more…]
The bishops of the American Catholic Church are upset with President Obama’s mandate that all participants in regulated health-care programs should have coverage for contraceptives, abortions, and perhaps some other services and products considered immoral by Catholics and many others. But this Catholic layman has a question: What right have the bishops to object in … [Read more…]
Not one to accept the mishmash of ideas which is the modern worldview, Professor Minogue reminds us: A free State is one in which there is a strong resistance to professionalization; it is marked by that “versatility” which Pericles claimed for Athens. [page 150] This is not to argue that professionalization is bad. Minogue was … [Read more…]