PaterFamilias Today
Once upon a time the economy lived at home. Households were for work and the people who lived in them were put to work. Read more
Once upon a time the economy lived at home. Households were for work and the people who lived in them were put to work. Read more
I had something of a ride last week following the publication of something I wrote for National Review. Being the flagship publication of conservatism I expected it. Left-wingers tend to hangout on the periphery of things like National Review. So when the trolls descended I wasn’t surprised. There was a call to harm me that went out on Twitter, but I saw it early and managed to turn the person in to the Twitter police. I did get some kudos... Read more
Most books for men conform to the expectations of the modern world. Read more
Liberalism is only honest when men spontaneously generate. Any other way of coming into being lands a man in debt. If we are social animals, as Aristotle taught, then we owe just about everyone and everything for the existence we enjoy. It is this innate sense of our indebtedness that makes modern people to pick up the scissors. To deliver ourselves from our debts we libel our ancestors: snip; hand over children and our aged parents to the “helping professionals”:... Read more
We’re in a bad way, but we may be coming to the end of it. I’m not saying the people responsible for it will give way without a fight, they’ve managed to ensconce themselves in our most important institutions. They’ve written themselves into the budgets. But I think we can see where they’re trying to take us. And it is an place that most of us want to stay far away from. They are the Disenchanters. We can roughly identify... Read more
When I was in graduate school (Harvard Divinity School) one of my professors put the choice starkly: “It is Nietzsche or Aristotle, make your choice.”* It seemed off topic at the time, we were working through Montaigne’s essays. But it really wasn’t, because Montaigne, and others like him, have lead us away from Aristotle and in the end gave us Nietzsche. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time as it applies to another question: “What does it mean... Read more
Largely it is axiomatic among libertarians that human institutions are fictions and only individuals are real. It is used as a check to the the overweening ambitions of our social engineers. To keep those people from grinding us all down to a lowest common denominator, or turning us into cogs in machinery of the Total State, we must reduce the really real to the social atom we call the individual. But this is a false choice because the libertarians and... Read more
I learned how to frame when I was in seminary. What I mean by “frame” is rough-in carpentry. There were half a dozen of us, all aspiring preachers with one exception. We’d spend mornings in class learning Greek and studying Wesley and Calvin, then jump in our trucks and head out to the job site. We specialized in cedar decks for the new subdivisions going up around Kansas City. Many of the homes we worked on were pretty upscale. I... Read more
I’m pleased to announce that my latest nonfiction book is available for preorder from my publisher. It is titled, Man of the House. And its subtitle tells a tale: A Handbook for Building a Shelter That will Last in a World That Is Falling Apart. But it doesn’t tell the whole tale. For years I have been angered by people who have no interest in understanding premodern households, but have no hesitation condemning them as the source of so much... Read more
By their fruits you shall know them. Matthew 7:16 The hermeneutics of suspicion have made us barren. To be expected though, since the world is structured in a particular way and disregarding its structure should make us sterile. I suppose the haters are gonna hate, and if you hate the world, why would you want to be fruitful? The first chapter of Genesis gives us an account of the structuring of the world: God broods over the primal sea and... Read more
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