Christian Humanism

• David Bentley Hart: Defining Socialism

  I just came across this NY Times op-ed written by Hart in 2019. It’s a useful retort to Hazony’s anti Neo-Marxism, and worth the read because, if nothing else, it shows why Neoplatonists like Hart (and me) are naturally drawn to a ‘genuine’ Left politics. Here’s a shortened version— … It may be amusing to

  read more

• 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

  read more

• Democracy and the Classical Tradition

  I’ve been using terms like “original”, “Deep Real”, “Neoplatonism” in ways that I’m sure many readers here find obscure, if not objectionable. When I talk about Neoplatonism or about Aristotle, I’m really talking about the classical tradition, which is Neoplatonic through and through. I thought it might be helpful to excerpt from a post entitled

  read more

• Archetypes and the Zeitgeist: The Tension between Order and Chaos

  Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies.  Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common-sense solutions seem impossible to come by.

  read more

• The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

  ..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”  Matthew

  read more

• Young Socialist Intellectuals

  Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo– What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular. … Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard

  read more

• The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II

  And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means

  read more

• Naive Idealism

  During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever

  read more

• The Return of the Bobos

  A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful. For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the

  read more

• A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

  My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and [G.B.] Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the

  read more