Bad arguments make good men do bad things. Even a very good man can outthink himself and justify bad choices. This is particularly tempting when we wish to do something or the choice is what most people in our social group are doing. Kids just say: “Everyone is doing it.” Grownups say: “It is the lesser of two evils.” Grownups are wicked without the honesty of the motivation. Insight: choosing the lesser of two evils is almost always wrong. When... Read more

God save France and the West. If enough people hate France enough to die to kill Frenchmen, then stopping them will be very hard. One reason this will be a long war is the cause of the hatred. We are not just hated for our vices, but for our virtues. You could hate the West for her vices and God knows we have them. Past generations colonized large parts of the world and now we are forcing a decadent morality... Read more

Sometimes one has to say something so obviously good and true that saying it sounds foolish or even condescending. Yet even the best of us ignore the truth, so at times it needs to be said . . . especially when most of us are not the best of us! Reading a great author, somebody like Plato, forces me to see these big, glaring, obvious but sometimes ignored truths. It’s embarrassing to see them, but worse to ignore them when... Read more

Everyone knows until some smart guy comes and confuses them. Sometimes he is just a pompous ass out to score clever points, but other times Socrates is showing us that we are the asses. We think we know something we do not. The faux-Socrates spends his time showing regular folks their ignorance, but the real Socrates spent his time showing up rulers. There is harm in anyone believing he has knowledge when he does not, but there is great harm when... Read more

To love absolutely one must learn to say no to love. This is not a paradox since everyone can “love” more than one thing or person at once. To love one person is to give this beloved time and psychological energy making them unavailable to that other beloved. If I give myself to pizza totally, then the love of fitness will be squeezed out. On top of this, some loves are incompatible with other loves: you cannot love God and... Read more

I am told that Ayn Rand did not like CS Lewis. Yet having read Fountainhead over this Saturday*, I am convinced she should have given him  more credit than she did. Her Fountainhead shares a theme with his That Hideous Strength.  She loathes the “secondhander” … the man who loses his self by giving up self for the approval of other people. She sets up her hero, Howard Roark, as a man who lives selfishly. He lives for his own desires in pursuit of greatness in... Read more

True love is willing to wait for the beloved and in our broken world, love’s long game is the best strategy for peace. Hate and revenge get immediate results and so satisfy our desire to “do” something. The thing we do is evil and never works. Intent is the content of our morality and so no action based in hate can be truly moral. The hate may not be obvious, but in the vast interconnections of God’s cosmos, hate cannot... Read more

Racism. Dead African-Americans. Dead officers. These are bad things. The temptation is to use stronger words, but bad is perfect. The murders and centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, whitewashing, stereotyping, are a decent definition of bad. Thinking a problem is solved when the group impacted by the “problem” knows it continues is itself part of the problem. Everybody who is decent wishes racism was gone and it has not. Unconscious, unintentional racism (“those people”) is wrong. Being “color blind” is... Read more

My Nana was a strong woman surviving a childhood that would send most people spiraling into a dark place, yet my first memories of her are sitting on her sun-porch with her laughing. She was “Mrs. Cucumber” and I was “Mr. Tomato” and we were up to some nonsense.  Whenever times got tough, she would smile and remind me that she had been through the Great Depression. She would gently point out that times had been very bad, nobody wanted them back,... Read more