I have revised my book, Four Sorts of Knowledge, in a very minor way as explained in the Preface to the Third Edition: This new edition contains only minor changes to the Preface. I eliminated references to books I’d been planning on writing back in 2010 and didn’t write. The reader might be interested in … [Read more…]
It seems that every day, I read on the Internet that some of the major failures of the United States in international affairs are due to American efforts to introduce democracy in countries which are not suited for such a form of government or are not yet ready for it. There are intelligent books, thousands … [Read more…]
I have uploaded a new book which is freely downloadable here: The Shape of Reality. The preface begins: Is a man a unity or is he a collection of warring fragments? Or is the proper question perhaps my favorite: Is man some sort of complex being not describable in current terms of discourse? I should … [Read more…]
In a recent article, Sacred Music. An Appeal To Restore Hearing To the Deaf, the Italian Catholic journalist, Sandro Magister, writes of criticism by musicians and musician-scholars of the loss of tradition in the liturgical music in the Roman Catholic Church: “This disdain for Gregorian chant and traditional repertoires is one sign of a much … [Read more…]
[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.] From 2006 to the present, I’ve been writing about the need to make peace with empirical reality. This is not … [Read more…]
[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.] What is truth? Not so ridiculous a question as some would have it, certainly those who don’t understand how difficult … [Read more…]
[`Complete’ in this essay refers only to the willingness of a human being to acknowledge his communal human being as well as his individual human being and is no claim that we human beings can ever be complete in this mortal realm.] In a recently posted essay, Looking Backward, Moving Forward, Moving in Circles, I … [Read more…]
[This essay is a lightly edited fragment from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which might be delayed a bit longer (maybe middle of March?) because of a relatively mild but persistent sinus infection as well as major housecleaning tasks as the result of a death in my family.] From ancient times, … [Read more…]
Conservatism: looking backward for wisdom and understanding about human being and about all of God’s Creation. Progressivism (of a truer type): moving forward into an everchanging world. Liberalism: unleashing individual human beings from traditions and from true progressive movements to the benefit of would-be centralizers in (corrupt) politics and (corrupt) business. The real point I’m … [Read more…]
Or… Are they? That is, are the roots really amoral? More appropriately, do we humans see wrongly when we separate moral order from other sorts of order, raising moral order to angelic, ethereal realms? Once upon a time, when the West was truly Christian, we Western men did that with human nature. By tying Christian … [Read more…]