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Reflection for Good Friday
[For Good Friday in 2015, shortly after the death of my wife, I was asked by my parish at the time to be one of the speakers on the Seven Last Words on the Cross. I chose “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me.” I am republishing it here because of the occasion
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MAGA Maoism
I haven't much to say about Trump.2 because things have developed pretty much as I thought they would, and there's no point in belaboring the obvious. Trump's latest atrocity or idiocy isn't interesting to comment on because so predictable. Defying a 9-0 supreme court order? No biggie. Unprecendented? Kinda. But there was Andrew Jackson about
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Assessing the Brazenness of Trump’s Coup
“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.” “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two
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Maximizers vs. Minimizers
From Edsall's column this morning: Gil Duran, a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, who produces a newsletter covering the tech industry, is sharply critical of recent developments. In an email, Duran wrote: Having realized that money buys political power, these tech billionaires are now trying to buy
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Rescuing Aristotle.5: Afterthought
Hart doesn’t call it the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, but what he describes here as ‘modernity’—I think what he means is its terminus in ‘late modernity’ or ‘early postmodernity’—is what I’m talking about when I use the phrase: PSYCHE: I fear—I dread—a nihilistic narrative reaching its ineluctable nihilistic terminus. Whatever else modernity is, good and bad alike,
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Rescuing Aristotle.5
Toward Finding a Common Idiom In my post "The Difference between Faith and Belief" I introduced the Kantian antinomies. The basic idea is that important arguments about whether humans are free or determined or whether God exists or doesn’t lead to conclusions that can neither be considered proved or disproved. So which is right? Well,
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The Difference between Faith and Belief
I haven’t read Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious, and I don’t intend to. I’m sure there’s much in it that overlaps with what I’ve been writing here, as well as significant differences, neither of which are particularly interesting to me. I’m more interested in George Packer’s review of it this morning
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What Resistance Requires
First, a point of clarification: I entitled my last post "The Nightmare of No", and that might suggest that I think that the attempts to resist, to say No to, Trump/Vance and the techno-fascists currently wreaking havoc in Washington is a waste of time. I obviously don't think that. My original title was "No is
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The Nightmare of No
There is a certain sadness to this state of affairs. Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience,
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What Solidarity Requires
Before returning to Hart, I want to make the case that “Rescuing Aristotle” is not just an abstract intellectual exercise. It is that in part, but it’s more. I think the current chaos provides an opportunity to replace the existing cultural Operating System that I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix with a different system with a