SPEAKING OF STUFF THAT’S NOT ONLINE YET, today’s Washington City Paper has a really, really cool cover story about a filmmaker who’s making his second movie set in Anacostia. Tomorrow the story should be here but that link will decay in a week. The story is key for those following the renewal of DC and Southeast. Read more

“INSIDE A CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER.” That’s the title of my piece in the current Weekly Standard. If you want to know more, you’ll have to track down a copy, since it’s not online yet. If you subscribe to the WS, you can get my article here. Read more

VERY BRIEF: I wanted to reply to the Goblin Queen’s criticism of my Jewish World Review column on gender, but I don’t really have a huge amount to say, except that I think she’s expanding the meaning of “feminism” until the concept basically disappears. This doesn’t strike me as good for feminism. If “feminism is the radical belief that women are people,” then the Old Oligarch is a feminist; the Pope is a feminist. It seems to me that if... Read more

CAN CONSERVATIVES THINK? So there’s this small inter-blog discussion of whether conservative philosophy is shut out of universities and whether that’s a bad thing. A Volokh Conspirator has a good roundup of the relevant links; my comments can be found in the box here. A lot of good points have been made. I will grind two small axes: a) Fascinating as thought experiments are, they are no substitute for literature; more philosophy courses should look at responses to Rorty and... Read more

I KNOW I’M LATE HERE, but Amy’s witness will be very much missed. Blah. But you can still buy her books! Rod Dreher’s tribute. Read more

She was araied all in lilly white, And in her right hand bore a cup of gold, With wine and water fild up to the hight, In which a Serpent did himselfe enfold, That horrour made to all, that did behold; But she no whit did chaunge her constant mood: And in her other hand she fast did hold A booke, that was both signd and seald with blood, Wherein darke things were writ, hard to be understood. Her younger... Read more

I’M BACK, but I’m wildly busy. So no posts tonight (blah, I know). Tomorrow I’ll be back for real, with: a really neat segment of The Faerie Queene; some thoughts on conservative political philosophy in college; a response to the Goblin Queen on what feminism is; a couple thoughts on that Roe v. Wade conference at Yale Law; and maybe some other stuff, maybe about Jews. Meanwhile, the Goblin Queen has a really excellent post on marijuana legalization; here’s a... Read more

CONTINUITY OF IDENTITY. Final point about tradition: Continuity is key. Once a tradition has been disrupted, it’s very hard to revive it without falling into the “catch the past in amber” mentality I dissed below. It can definitely be done–renaissances are possible. But it’s hard. And continuity is one way in which tradition makes an institution mimic a person. This point is especially close to my heart because I’ve changed so many of my habits and beliefs over time. When... Read more

SO DOES “TRADITION MUST BE ADAPTIVE” MEAN “ANYTHING GOES”? Uh, no. I reserve the right to consider any particular adaptation LAME. And, of course, there’s a big difference between a living tradition and a series of reversals, rejections, and capitulations to fleeting cultural fads, even if the series maintains some superficial elements of similarity. Read more

TRADITION VS. THE PAST: When people talk about tradition and “traditionalism,” they’re often thinking of something that I would consider to be closer to nostalgia than to love of tradition. Jaroslav Pelikan has the sharp one-liner, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living,” and I think there’s a lot of truth there. I had never entered into an explicitly traditional institution until college, and so figuring out what tradition is, how... Read more