Paul Gottfried is a political scientist always worth reading, his books and his short writings on the Internet. In this article, What Drives the Religious Right , he made some good points about the nature of the religious right, predominately Evangelical Protestant though I know some Catholics who’ve taken up with their way of thought, … [Read more…]
The New American has published an interesting article written by Sam Blumenfeld and dealing with the American transistion into our current state of dumbness defined by just enough literacy to read advertisements and to struggle through textbooks written to the purposes of the leadership of the day — Looking Backward 123 Years Later I knew … [Read more…]
In The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue speaks of misguided political and social reformers in the line of modern liberal thought: How many visionaries have unwittingly prepared a hell on earth because their gaze was stubbornly fixed on heaven? And when hell comes — well, there is always some ad hoc theory of sinister interests or … [Read more…]
As I read books on mathematics and science, I’m always thinking of issues in theology and metaphysics and politics and history. My inclination, whatever works I produce as byproducts, is to absorb knowledge as if it were background knowledge for a novelist. This doesn’t mean ‘research’ that will produce reliable historical novels but rather the … [Read more…]
See this article by David Henderson for a short and clear discussion of Hayek’s understanding of knowledge in light of the real-world problem of American incompetence, most especially when our governments move in to solve our problems or those of Afghan tribesmen. Professor Henderson puts the situation simply by saying: “Who has the relevant information … [Read more…]
Relationships of a more abstract sort, such as those in politics and economics, are not so much different from concrete relationships as we might think. Not so much different as we’ve led ourselves to believe. Those concrete entities which are more complex, such as a man or a rhinoceros, are made of substances which have … [Read more…]
You’re a moral creature when you live by moral principles, many of them turned into habitual behaviors or at least admired behaviors. To be a moral creature, you have to look outside of yourself to God’s Creation in light of your best take on objective moral truths which are embedded in that Creation. In terms … [Read more…]
On Tuesday, 2010/11/09, I posted an article Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict: The Promise and Comedy of Modernity commenting on a talk he gave while in Spain to consecrate the basilica of the Sagrada FamÃlia in Barcelona, though I mistakenly implied it was in Santiago de Compostela which was his other stop. (I made … [Read more…]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge … [Read more…]
Nearly all human beings, nearly all the time, think only thoughts which have been thought already within their sphere of knowledge, typically some level and region of a particular culture. Few and far between are the identifiable creative thinkers, though we must remember that creative thinkers are also members of specific communities which provide the … [Read more…]