My review of Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Heaven’s Bride appeared in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.
Philosophers & Saints
Thanksgiving, which may initially seem like a practice that is all too foreign to our second nature, can become an activity that realizes our more original human nature-i.e., the nature given to our species at its creation.
And nowhere, not in so much as a page of this literature, does one discover even the beginnings of an answer to the question, “what is it like to be a man?”
![[Capello St. Angelo and view of Bellagio, Como, Lake of, Italy]](http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/como.jpg "[Capello St. Angelo and view of Bellagio, Como, Lake of, Italy]")
In which “culture” is distinguished from our contemporary “anti-culture.”
Modern science has given us modern miracles, like iPhones and atom bombs and Chrysler cars, but has not given us the wisdom to use them.
William Gilmore Simms’ claims about the decay of morals and the arts that results from the rise of scientism and decline of supernaturalism can be elaborated by reflecting on the insights of Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Agrarians.
We’ve got no real choice but to be competent workers, from the first stone to the last shingle.
Planting a greener Green Revolution.
We have perceived ourselves as free and unrestrained and limitless creatures living in a world of unlimited freedom, wealth, energy, and resilience.
They have no objections to non-scientists writing on evolutionary topics, so long as they do so in the proper spirit of submissiveness and adulation.
For Wendell Berry, the environmentalist cause and the localist cause are (or should be) one and the same.
Obfuscating language and philosophical ignorance do not prevent Hawking from suggesting that modern physics confirms Christian cosmology. Nature really does conform to uncreated law.
Civilization rests upon the sacred. Thus it is as grimly appropriate that the first atom bomb test was sacrilegiously codenamed “Trinity” – as in *the* Trinity – as it is that the Fat Man made an almost direct hit upon Urakami Cathedral, the most sacred spot in Nagasaki.
Economics has become a totalizing system claiming the power to explain all things. It is as much a religious system—by another name—as is Berry’s Great Economy.
Tradition supposedly bears the thumbprints of Roman patricians with browbeaten wives or frustrated monks who shivered in mediæval abbeys.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” provides a springboard for reflecting on the problems of scientism, especially the temptation to self-deification and, what Eric Voegelin terms, modern Gnosticism.
