Is the invisible hand justly celebrated by Adam Smith really the hand of the pilgrim human community, of the Body of Christ forming—however imperfectly and incompletely—in this mortal realm? Yes, though the language is far from optimal and that language can lead to improper concepts regarding the Body of Christ and its relationships to human … [Read more…]
My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins … [Read more…]
I distort for the sake of modern men who have trouble focusing upon reality. Apes are our cousins, not our ancestors; the terms used for the common ancestors of men and ape seem to change every few years or so. And those ancestors were only killers part of the time, perhaps less often than modern … [Read more…]
In the back of my mind, I’ve been pondering a strange blind spot in mainstream modern historians and political commentators since reading Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly in May of 2013. It seems to me that she saw clearly the somewhat complex and fluid balance of forces between individuals and families or other tightly knit … [Read more…]
Due to some volunteer projects followed by a sinus infection, I’ve been writing little for publication. My energies have been devoted to early drafts of a couple of novels as well as reading background material to the next stage of understanding the world from a traditional Christian viewpoint—where `traditional’ should be taken in the dynamic … [Read more…]
I’ve written on this general topic before: as one example, one revealing an important development in my thoughts, see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding as one example. In that essay, about the necessity of abstractions, but proper abstractions, I stated: My interest lies in an important stream of thoughts and attitudes of New … [Read more…]
Srdja Trifkovic wrote of Jean Raspail’s New Warning on the website of Chronicles Magazine. Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1973; that novel was a controversial take on immigration and multiculturalism; it depicted France decaying into a state of violent incoherence in a multicultural age. Forty years after publishing his prophetic dystopia Jean … [Read more…]
I’ll begin by saying that I believe God is at work even when morally disordered men are seemingly in command. It is God who is moving the story of the Body of Christ forward. We, all Christians in the most recent few centuries, have been following our own inclinations rather than paying attention to the … [Read more…]
The center hasn’t held and the pieces fly away. Without the most basic sorts of order, the sorts of order which are specifically labeled `moral’ aren’t possible, at least not on a large-scale such as that of the United States or even that of the city of Springfield, MA less than a quarter mile away … [Read more…]
In Colossians 1:24, St Paul writes: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church…” [From the Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version as published by Ignatius.] I suspect, partly on the … [Read more…]