Teaching Wendell Berry to students today isn’t a thankless task, but the victories are small and far between (which, one might say, is all the best victories always are).
April 2010
Military use of PowerPoint confuses even as it simplifies.
Even for the average homeowner, ownership all too often is imagined as a way of gaming income flow and consumption over a lifetime, accumulating enough to spend down before one has to become a ward of the welfare state. It is part of consumer society, not a buffer against it.
In 1983, Jack Stack led a group of employees to buy-out a division of International Harvester, the Springfield Remanufacturing Company (SRC). But Stack and his associates where not just interested in building another business, but a new kind of business.…
If one thing is clear it’s that there’s no shortage of morons in the world.
Banning computers in the classroom shows, once again, that the way forward is the way back.
The neighborly arts begin at home, extend outward in service to others, and return in the form of gratitude, friendships, and commitments born of practical skills shared and received.
I’ve been reading Bill Kauffman’s immensely entertaining, and very serious, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin. This is Bill’s attempt to get us antifederalists back into the discussion. One of my Straussian friends (a friend, truly!) once…
The American Bolsheviks, on the other hand, are the mad-as-hell Tea Party with their sexpot Lenin Sarah Palin, fresh from cash-cow book tour and on a First Class Junket into Everyday Celebrity.
I should not eat Snickers Bars in the afternoon. While it is not yet illegal, and probably not immoral, it is certainly fattening. But I like the veneer of chocolate and by now my body has become dependent on the…
I mean raw meat. I mean mooing beef, as in “the cattle are lowing.” I mean red bloody uncooked dead cow.
But if there is one thing that both Democrats and Republicans agreed about in the 90′s, it was that these “monstrosities” didn’t need to be regulated.
It’s hard not to look with bemused satisfaction at the quiet ash-filled skies above Europe.
If voting for your favorite baseball player doesn’t prove his greatness, does the same lesson apply to your favorite or even your own community?
Benedict’s encyclical responds to the elite technocrats of the liberal order more charitably than they deserve. It is true that, in mundane circumstances, liberal society often professes a congenial relativism, and it is equally true that the technocrats of modern charity—who discover the redemption of man in contraception, efficient abortion, and maximized “private” freedom with neither self-government nor moral judgment—reject the identity of “Agápe and Lógos”, the “God of the Bible” who is “Charity and Truth, Love and Word.” But this does not mean they lack a conception of truth or that they are in fact mere sentimental relativists. They rather advocate an immanent and materialist absolute.
Benedict XVI’s first social encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” challenges long-accepted understandings of the relation of faith and reason and of charity and justice. In so doing, he not only calls into question the failed rationalism and failed conceptions of ownership that have done so much to harm and misshape the modern west; he also revises the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, in some respects drawing it away from its origin in the neo-Scholastic political theory of Leo XIII, while in others renewing and strengthening the profound continuity of the Church’s Gospel message.
