“It is vanity to desire a long life, and to have little care for a good life.” — Thomas a Kempis. Tolkien mourned the decline of the Shire* i.e., …the real shire of his youth which he ever remembered and sought to salvage to the extent that he could. The Shire: the simplicity and beauty… Read More Tolkien’s Battle for the Shire. And for Us All.
Love, Christians have always known, believes in both good fences as well as shared pastures. We do this by, as St. Thomas defined love, “willing the good of the other”. Peoples who do not think alike and who would not likely live well together can still share much to the benefit of all, the entire… Read More Good Fences, Shared Bounty
Neither Socialism nor lassez faire CapitalismOctober 1, 2001 | By Mark and Louise Zwick The following was a talk given at the American Chesterton Society annual conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 2001. Dorothy Day and G. K. Chesterton were contemporaries. Both came into Catholicism in the 1920’s, Chesterton in 1922 at age 48… Read More G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day on Economics
Economics as If Families Mattered. by Joseph Pearce. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very centre of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern societies. In the current… Read More Small Is Still Beautiful
What good is “progress” in the wrong direction Chesterton asked. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates… The Jetsons fantasy. After Oppenheimer? Really? But, the Progressives retort, it’s only crazy reactionaries who oppose Penicillin —or Planned Parenthood (as if these were morally equivalent) who oppose Progress. No specious rationalization can justify R&D technology for… Read More Localism — or what?
Updated. Is the local government and local church involved in seeking to help? Why do some US cities struggle more with homelessness? A new book explores a key component of the issue: housing supply. [ Note / SH]: Illegal Substance Use Data also “show high rates of comorbid disorders such as anxiety disorders—which include generalized… Read More Homelessness, Housing Supply — and Co-morbid Disorders.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” — Bhagavad Gita, Robert Oppenheimer “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” — JFK, American University, 1963 “The dropping of the… Read More Oppenheimer and The End of Time.
What, exactly, is a just and moral taxation going to look like? — The Distributism Review See also, What is Distributism? By Thomas Storck Neither Capitalism or Socialism Distributism and TaxationBy Andrew McInnes “To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.” – Pope… Read More Distributism and Taxation.
“The Hidden Environmental Toll of Smartphones If you’re reading this on a phone screen, you hold between your hand valuable pieces of the Earth’s crust which have been extracted from mines all over the planet. You’re not alone: an estimated 3.5 billion people use smartphones, almost half of the world’s population, and this number grows… Read More Oligarchs Choose Efficient Global Surveillance Over Environmental Ideology
Catholic Critique 