Ali G and Pat Buchanan discuss the threat of bacon, lettuce and tomato: Read more
Ali G and Pat Buchanan discuss the threat of bacon, lettuce and tomato: Read more
My alma mater, the University of Dallas, has an art exchange program with a non-Catholic university. Well the other university sent over an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a g-string with dollar bills tucked in in a stripper pose. In the name of academic freedom, the University allowed the image to be presented in the on campus gallery. Someone took great offense and removed the piece. Now President Lazarus is furious that the piece is gone. The full... Read more
Since the theology of the politicized American right is essentially derivative Calvinism (with a heavy dose of Gnosticism and a measure or millenarianism to boot), it is not surprising that Catholics who align themselves with this movement should fall sway to Calvinist arguments. Nowhere is this more clear than with First Things. And I don’t want to go after the easy targets here: Michael Novak’s wholesale embrace of laissez-faire liberalism or Richard John Neuhaus’s selective reading of Catholic social teaching.... Read more
There are many Catholics who have held prominent positions in world history and yet are often neglected in surveys of Church history. Of course, there is justification for this. Not everyone can be represented. Nonetheless, there are some who I think should never be ignored and yet are. (more…) Read more
The Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology is now a go. The website’s front page includes photos of two of my favorite phenomenologists and feminists, (St.) Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt. Looks to be a very interesting group of scholars. Read more
The other day I ran into a woman who looked SO familiar but I could not place her. All of a sudden it dawned on me that she is a parent of a former student. I hadn’t seen her in years yet there we were carrying on a conversation. The encounter brought back memories of that student and how sad and alienated he was. I have no idea what has gone on in his life to make him so unhappy... Read more
At first blush, it may seem obvious that equality ought to be a central goal of social policy, and that insofar as a society contains significant inequalities that society stands revealed as fundamentally unjust. In fact, even many of those who would oppose efforts to decrease inequality admit the desirability of equality as an ideal or goal, and merely contend that these efforts are ineffective or impracticable. Yet upon reflection it is not clear (to me, at any rate) why... Read more
Spend five minutes with a global warming denier, and you will inevitably hear about how the scientific community was predicting an ice back back in the 1970s. As with so much else on that side of the debate, it simply isn’t true. Eduardo Penalver links to a study showing that there was in fact no such scientific consensus in the 1970s. Myth, meet fact: “The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published... Read more
There is an excellent post about the messianic rhetoric (as this blog has commented on elsewhere) in Obama’s campaign by Patrick Deneen. [N.B. I wrote about the problems of Messianism in Obama’s campaign a year ago; much of this post follows what I wrote there earlier.] The reason this is important is because the messianic tones of this campaign are the latest instantiation of the constant dynamic in modern politics: to immanentize the eschaton. Eric Voegelin wrote much of this... Read more
The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers is a book written by two journalists and is structured with an easy-to-read question and answer format. Frequently asked questions regarding legal and illegal immigration in the United States are answered with detailed historical and socio-economic background. It is a must-read for everybody who wishes to learn the truth behind the immigration debate and the people who found themselves at its center. The paperback edition of the book costs $9.56 at Amazon. Read more
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