Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood
reports: After praying the Rosary this evening, Pope Francis reflected on how Mary “gives us health” by helping Christians mature in their faith and not remain “teenagers for life.” “Dear brothers and sisters, how hard it is, in our time, to make the ultimate decisions! The temporary seduces us. We are victims of a trend [...]
‘Tis the season. I went to my first Easter morning Mass ever this year, and holy cats, was it packed! Yikes. Just wall-to-wall Catholics in all phases of forward- and backsliding. It got me thinking about what I learned from being intermittently Jewish as a kid–taken to High Holy Days services a few times, once? [...]
I’m at Acculturated. Don’t worry, it’s not an endorsement of “happiness research”: The title of this article is also the title of a 2009 study by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The study looked at data from the United States and Europe, focusing on the period from the 1970s to the mid-2000s: a time of [...]
yes, yes, yes: What I find so attractive, therefore, about Catholicism is the fact that many–though certainly not all–of the practices within the church are grounded in something beyond fad and the opinion of a single pastor or leader. Put another way, I think a huge part of me would actually like it if my [...]
One cheap but useful definition of natural law is that it’s the belief that there is a universal human nature which is knowable by reason (and here we fight about what we mean by “reason,” but ignore that for now), and so our desires can be rightly ordered based on what would express and support [...]
I included this as a link in my previous Wurtzel post but I think it’s worth reprinting an old blog post. I liked Andrew Cherlin’s book quite a bit, but he did this several times: As other lifestyles become more acceptable, you must choose whether to get married and whether to have children. You develop [...]
Everybody’s beating up on this Elizabeth Wurtzel column, in which she says: …It had all gone wrong. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I [...]
One of the current liberal projects is the replacement of an old legal and cultural model, in which the paradigmatic public “person” is male, with a new legal and cultural model in which the paradigmatic public person is unisex. Both of these models are damaging because the underlying vision of human nature is false. This [...]
We give up the temptation to move from place to place in search of an ideal situation. Ultimately there is no escape from oneself, and the idea that things would be better someplace else is usually an illusion. And when interpersonal conflicts arise, we have a great incentive to work things out and restore peace. [...]
In Trilling’s account, the focus on sincerity arose in the 16th century, with the Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on individual conscience rather than institutional ritual and doctrine. Over time, travel and trade made sincerity ever more important in judging the bona fides of strangers. According to Trilling, sincerity was eventually elbowed aside by the [...]
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