“Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal”—Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio,” meaning “Faith and Reason,” is an encyclical by Pope John Paul II published on September 14, 1998. It emphasizes the essential relationship between faith and… Read More Encyclical Letter ‘Faith and Reason’. Pope John Paul II.
SH —> A.I. : I am curious what ‘you’ think of and how you might critique the following. I’m not asking you to make or pass any kind of theological or philosophical judgment. I’m primarily curious what you think of the coherence of the thesis.. If you wish, please also discuss how modern philosophy might… Read More A.I. Critiques an Approach to Theism and ‘Man’ (m/f)
Norman Geisler, the Evangelical scholar who studied at Loyola University, Chicago, reflects on Jean Paul Sartre’s atheism: “It should be noted … that Sartre’s attempt to eliminate God is seriously flawed. First of all, he constructs a straw God by defining him as “self-caused.” Most theists do not believe God is a self-caused being; they… Read More Sartre’s Humanism
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
This morning I heard some politicians in the UK bemoaning the bewildering numbers of suicides, especially among men, in the West. It was difficult to hear their reports and stories. Mental health. It is not enough to throw more and more money at the problem. If at bottom our deepest unattended personal problems are fundamentally… Read More Politics cannot heal what ails us
“Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key problem with modern liberalism. In… Read More Mark Groubert On the Whittaker Chamber – Alger Hiss Case
Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War Independent, UK. 1995 For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works… Read More Independent, UK: Modern art was Government ‘weapon’.
For some reason I thought it was another book about our frivolous TV shows and general culture (Seinfeld, Larry David’s vicious Curb Your Enthusiasm —pick your nonsense— and I already knew this about the culture. But then things got darker. Very recently I somehow bumped into this reading. I listened. I couldn’t have been more… Read More I’ve had the book for decades. But I never read it. “Shows About Nothing.”
81% of Enlightenment Americans approve. Divorce in America Gets a glow Up.Axios. Jan 27, 2024. Divorce has become a major life milestone replete with specialized parties, large support networks and a whole industry ready to capitalize on the big change — just like weddings. Why it matters: Cultural attitudes toward ending a marriage have become… Read More Divorce in America Gets a Glow Up
“The order marked for destruction can be summed up in one word: Europe—the intellectual and spiritual synthesis of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. The new totalitarianism proceeds by negating every form of transcendence, especially the religious truth and universal reason which Del Noce calls “Platonism.” It reconceives reality as “a system of forces, not of values.” Being… Read More Del Noce on Liberalism & the Scientism of Marx
A fascinating look at the devolution of culture and the arts over time through the lenses and timelines of Beat, Folk, and Rock ‘n Roll. Superseding orthodox Marxism and other political and social movements, theBeat Movement was the ovum of all later decadent movements in both cultures and music . The Encyclopedia Brittanica defined the… Read More Psychedelia, Beat, Folk, Rock’n’roll…and Us
As a Christian I’ll eagerly go as far “Left” as seeking to meet the needs of a person’s physical hunger, injury or homelessness; but never so far “Left” as approving absolute “equality” (so-called “equity” today!) in wages; or approving promiscuous immigration, or the supposedly “equitable” availability of abortion, automobiles, personal video games, pornography, sex changes,… Read More Going Left
For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials Malcolm Muggeridge lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. The following is from 1979. (Drawing by a former Gulag prisoner) “The Great Liberal Death Wish” is a subject that I’ve given a lot of thought to and have written about, and it would be… Read More The Great Liberal Death Wish. Malcolm Muggeridge.
“The question of gender—who we are as men and women—has never been more pressing, or more misunderstood. Weaving personal experience with expert knowledge, Dr. Abigail Favale provides an in-depth yet accessible account of the gender paradigm: a framework for understanding reality and identity that has recently risen to prominence. Favale traces the genealogy of gender to its… Read More Abigail Favale on the Genesis of Gender
Updated. Nancy Pelosi vowed to reverse the end of Roe v. Wade ‘one way or another’ By Anders Hagstrom | Fox News Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urged her fellow Democrats to put the abortion issue front and center in their 2024 campaigns, arguing Republicans will lose big on the issue across the country. Pelosi appeared… Read More Pelosi says abortion is Democrats’ ticket to victory in 2024, accuses Republicans of ‘disrespect for women’
David Halberstam’s The Fifties: “Selling The American Way” “The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of… Read More Videodrome. When the Seven Deadly Sins of Excess Morphed Into “Progress”
Beyond Independent Thought “In the World State in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, embryos are placed in a social class and conditioned to the careers and peers that best meet the needs of the community … we learn about the social class called Epsilon. Bred to Be Unintelligent. The World State produces five distinct social classes named from… Read More Huxley’s Uniform Epsilons
For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind? [The] bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster),… Read More The Bullshit-Job Boom
Catholic Critique 