“… the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of pursuing conformity while praising freedom. It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him… Read More Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the Antinomian Principle
America… “not in any sense Christian” “….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain o f scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57 The fatal mischief in the U.S. Constitution was in the purposeful ambiguity embedded in the Enlightenment concept “liberty”. This is what logically led us… Read More America and Seductive False ‘Liberty’.
CNA. Jan. 21. This week, health officials in New York City said they plan to begin offering free, city-funded abortion pills at four sexual health clinics, delivering up to 10,000 abortion pills a year. The plan, drawing consternation from pro-life advocates, is a product of an increasingly polarized post-Roe v. Wade legislative climate at the local, state,… Read More Now that the March for Life is over, a snapshot of a shifting abortion landscape
“Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of many will grow cold” — Matthew 24:12. “As the number of people experiencing homelessness increases across the country, more cities and states have passed laws making it illegal to live out of tents and cars or sleep in public spaces. More than 100 jurisdictions have had such bans on… Read More More Cities and States Make Homelessness a Crime
By Solange Hertz. The readers of Time magazine were assured in the summer of 1992 that “within the next hundred years … all states will recognize a single global authority.” The author of the article was Strobe Talbott, member of the CFR, former Rhodes Scholar and President Clinton’s roommate at Oxford. Mr. Talbott, at that… Read More The Family’s Threat to Utopia
Jason M. Morgan writes in the October 2022 New Oxford Review (“When the Secular Saints Go Marxing In”) “Fox News is not conservative. It is, in fact, much less conservative than Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), leaders of the Frankfurt School.“ “Alexander Riley, in a review of Mark Levin’s recent bestseller American Marxism, charges… Read More Conservative Foxes?
“Pope Leo XIII to the Archbishops and Bishops of the United States, and dated Jan. 6, 1895. “For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act… Read More America: “Not the Most Desirable” Form of Government. But in Principle Not the Worst.
Ominous Nuclear Aggression. Thomas Merton on Moral Chaos, and “the worst insanity”. Thomas Merton: Nuclear Weapons and Sanity: “The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs,… Read More Tucker Carlson and Thomas Merton on the Nuclear Option
By Thomas Storck. Excerpt. | September 2022. A specter is haunting the Catholic world — the specter of integralism. The most opposed groups — both Catholic conservatives and Catholic liberals, as well as some less informed Catholic traditionalists — unite in opposition to and even fear of it. But what, exactly, is integralism, and what can be… Read More What Is Integralism?
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
“The French Jacobins selected France as savior of the world. The new Jacobins have anointed the United States.” Pedro L. Gonzalez.Aug 25. “I’ve been reading The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State by Claes G. Ryn, first published in 1991. It’s a short but insightful polemic about the pernicious influence of neoconservatism—the “New Jacobinism”—on American… Read More Keeping Out the Jacobins
Don’t be smart, be wise. Pride goes before a fall. Symptoms may include: Painful Pox which reportedly scar the face and infected body parts lastingly, most commonly the face, mouth, penis / urethra, anus… (Source: WGBH Boston 98.7, 8.1.22) — WSJ: Monkeypox Patients Report Excruciating Pain and Lack of Guidance as U.S. Cases Mount “Unbearable“… Read More Who to Blame?
“The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism.” — Stuart Walton It is a sad fact… Read More Aesthetics, Relativism and the Enlightenment
“In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell’s book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty ‘vacations’ that are but interruptions in work. He… Read More Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire
“The Unspeakable. What is that? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the… Read More Merton on The Unspeakable
Review Author: Jason M. Morgan, April 2022, New Oxford Review. The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. By Ben Shapiro. Publisher: Broadside Books. Pages: 288..Price: $27.99. The Person of Jesus Christ is the hinge of all human history. The Messiah for whom the Jews had waited broke into our world in Bethlehem… Read More Judeo-Christian Westernism. An Impossible Triangulation.
…Staunch liberal, Anti-abortion … and why he so appreciated Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon Nathan Irving Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media. Hentoff was a columnist for The Village Voice from 1958 to 2009. Following his departure from The Village Voice, Hentoff became a senior fellow at the Cato… Read More Why Former Village Voice Leftist & Atheist Writer Nat Hentoff Opposed Abortion
“…democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. “Democracy and freedom will be the theme of… Read More “Democracies Will Change Their Nature”
Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII and John XXIII, wrote in 1947: “The extent of the damage done to national assets by aerial warfare, and the dreadful weapons that have been introduced of late, is so great that it leaves both vanquished and victor the poorer for years after. Innocent… Read More “No Conceivable…Justification”. Aerial warfare’s “dreadful weapons”.
Posing as Light… At the Dawn of the 20th century, On March 19, 1902, in his apostolic letter Annum Ingressi, Pope Leo XIII warned of an abuse of the concepts “Liberty” and “freedom” sweeping the globe, and which is directly opposed to the traditional Christian definition (Jn. 8:31-32). “A certain sect of darkness is engaged,… Read More Leo XIII on the “Sect of Darkness”
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