Ideas
-
Gay Marriage vs. Civil Unions (Updated)
Maine got all the attention, but It's interesting to me that Washington State voters supported a bill popularly known as the "Everything but Marriage Act" that gives gay couples all the civil rights of marriage without calling it marriage. Maybe there's a lesson in that. Maybe gay activists should let conservatives have the word 'marriage'
-
Kierkegaard on the Couch
…the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair. –Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all
-
Futile Culture Wars
I’m with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a time that doesn’t have much exterior spiritual energy anymore–the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul’s interior. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer…
-
Faith, Hope, and Love in a Decadent Age
I see the fundamental gesture of Christian conservatism and its orientation to the past to be a fearful and self-protective, as lacking hope and lacking faith or confidence in the Promise with a resulting small-soulness that lacks the confidence to love the world as it is. This tight-fisted, irritable, I-get-no-respect Christianity is tiresome and irrelevant…
-
Conservative Takedown of Reagan’s Conservatism
My contention, though, is that there is no longer ‘living memory’ that we Americans can live from. It simply no longers informs our mainstream culture, and the project to try to sustain or conserve one’s cultural heritage as a given “living memory” is as futile as the Irish trying to sustain Gaelic as their national…
-
Empty Rights
Ivan Kenneally in a comment to a Peter Lawler post at Postmodern Conservative: One could argue, as Delsol has, that the big thing now is a kind of cosmopolitanism without Xn faith, or a peculiarly secular interpretation of the Pauline spiritual unity of mankind. In a sense, today’s cosmopolitanism is easier to theoretically construct since
-
More on the Balance between Liberty and Equality
I've been thinking a lot about why this country almost broke apart in the 1860s, and why it's a good thing it didn't, and why the secessionist mentality lingers now as a destructive force in this country. In a globalizing world, the secessionist mentality is analogous to the adolescent who eats his dinner in his
-
Zombie Conservatism
Sullivan and Dreher are catching on, so to speak, to my trope about "Zombie Traditionalism". For a more in-depth look, check my 2005 posts on this theme here, here, and here. See also "Dying Traditions."
-
Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
On who really creates wealth: the true creator of wealth is, ultimately, the commonwealth – not only the political community, but the civilization that it shares with other nations. No technical invention or business innovation is a creation of something from nothing. All depend on the intellectual capital that the human race has accumulated since