Catholics
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More on Eudaemonia
[Alasdair MacIntyre seems to be having a moment, and if you want a succinct overview of his thought, David Brooks’s piece today in The Atlantic is pretty good. I’m going to get into the MacIntyre weeds later this summer as part of my longer term Utopian Thinking project. The problem with conservatives like Brooks is
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How Significant, Really, Was Bill Buckley?
I’ve just finished the Tanenhaus Buckley biography. It engaged me on a number of levels, not the least because his life, 1925-2008, mapped to the lives of my parents, and reading the story of his big life helps me to understand their smaller ones. Like most good biographies, the story told is not just about
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‘Mountainhead’, Late Capitalism, and the Catholic Moment
By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he’s satirizing. Perhaps because he’s written from their perspective, he’s empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. “It’s like how the politician always thinks they’ve got the answer,” he said.
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Hip to be Catholic?
What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?” From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova,
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Heroes of the Fourth Turning
I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a
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On Reading Simone Weil’s ‘Gravity and Grace’
There’s a palpable shift going on in elite institutions where it’s becoming edgy or even fashionable to take spiritual concerns seriously again. The fashionableness is important, not because fashion is in itself important, but because it creates a permission structure for people to start exploring ideas that were before beyond the pale. Twenty years ago
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Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State
I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be
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Drift toward Authoritarianism
I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time