Throwing the baby out with the veal calf
Over the last year or so, bloggers at First Things have taken the position that the animal rights movement represents a unique threat to the dignity of human life and especially the unborn. While I...
Monthly Archive: March 2010
Science fiction & God
This article at First Things by Robert R. Chase is a fascinating look at religious themes in science fiction. I’ve always felt that science-fiction was far less amenable to religion than fantasy, but thinking...
Blond at Georgetown, II
Like Will, I was at Philip Blond’s Georgetown lecture on Thursday. Unlike Will, I was predisposed to agree with everything Blond said. I came away a bit disappointed, though. I find little to argue...
Ten Books
Following the meme, here are the ten books that changed my life the most. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. This book de-Catholicized me, or at least it began the process. It set me on...
Musical Interlude Brought to You by Gregory House
As a boy raised in churches, with a profound love of the black church tradition of the Hammonds, Soul-R&B, British 60s psychedelic rock, and the Canterbury Tales, the first minute and a half of...
Leaving the ‘Sphere
Friend of the Blog Sonny Bunch hangs up his spurs at Conventional Folly. He’ll be missed.
Freedom Scam?
Debbie Schlussel calls Sean Hannity’s Freedom Alliance charity a scam. If a charity is only spending 12% (or less) of the money it brings in to provide the services that the charity was set up to provide...
Brooks on Blond
If you’re looking for a good introduction to the Red Tories, David Brooks’ column does a much better job of explaining Philip Blond’s philosophy than my muddled post. Blond is also is speaking at...
Blond at Georgetown
Your faithful correspondent donned a collared shirt and ventured into Georgetown last night to listen to Philip Blond’s presentation on “Red Toryism” (Blond’s Wikipedia entry is here; the Porch has a good introductory post...
Predictions about Healthcare
I’m going to make a few predictions about the future of U.S. healthcare, provided that the bill under consideration passes. First, the bill will prove substantially more expensive than projected. Ezra Klein is naive...
St. Patrick’s Day & Liberal Culture
For a post with such seemingly low stakes, my recent musings on St. Patrick’s Day received an impassioned reaction. There are a lot of reasons for that. The most interesting, even if not the...
Fantasy and myth
Will linked us to this piece by James Bowman earlier. Bowman writes: I mention this difference between the fantastical as it existed in olden times and today, which some may think a trivial one,...
He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus
WSJ: “He cited the case of a painter whose stock in trade had been portraits of Lenin. The man was now earning his living churning out religious subjects. But, my friend added, so ingrained...
One State to Rule Them All?
In the comments to my earlier post on Israel/Palestine, North and Michael Drew got into a very intelligent (and spirited) back and forth. Michael eventually wrote the following (way down in the thread of...
World Building
Via Alan Jacobs, here’s an interesting critique of modern fantasy writing from The New Atlantis:
We Are All Enemy Belligerents Now
I’d just like to agree publicly with every last word of this piece by Glenn Greenwald: [T]he bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and...
“Prometheus Bound” (via Hesiod, Aeschylus, Heidegger, McLuhan)
Thinking of the Kuhn discussion, I’d like to look at how a mythical culture understands an innovation of techné/craft; here treated as both a divinely revealed gift and the ground of human tragedy. We...
A list of books from my childhood
Tyler Cowen and Peter Suderman have both compiled (non-definitive) lists of books which have influenced them the most over the years. I have thought about this some, and come to the decision that the...
