Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

There's a longish interview with me at Ignatius Insight, the website of Ignatius Press.

I just finished reading Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. In spite of its title, the book is less a discussion of the "New Atheism" (Dawkins, Dennett, et. al.) than a wonderfully clear overview of Thomism.

Commenter Alice, with whom I've had a couple of exchanges at her husband's weblog, carries her battle into the opposition's territory. The pile of arguments is getting unmanageably high, so I'll set up my response as a new entry:

Dear Alice,

I agree that not all ways of viewing the world are equal. Some are more rational than others. Some are more adequate than others. The problem is to combine rationality and adequacy.

According to George Weigel, the big issue in the fuss over the Society of Saint Pius X (the traditionalist group whose bishops just got de-excommunicated) is religious freedom: whether "coercive state power ought ... be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body."

From discussing America I decided to move on to Rome, or at least to Bavaria and the threshold of Rome. With that in mind, I just read Milestones, then-Cardinal Ratzinger's 1998 memoir of his life until he became a bishop.

A blogger offers comments on my talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism, concluding that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.

I've been talking about America and Catholicism, so why not put the two together? With that in mind, I decided to look at Michael Rose's Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood.

The contributors to the weblog Secular Right: Reality & Reason have put together a sort of credo, What is the Secular Right? Here it is:

To follow up on recent discussions of America and Americanism I've been reading a couple of books: Tom Woods' The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era and T. J. Jackson Lears' No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 . Both are well-written, well-informed, and well worth a look.

I was looking at We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960) by John Courtney Murray. For those who don't know much about him, Murray was a Catholic priest and theologian who

I have another piece over at Takimag, this one a rant responding to a couple of posts over there about religion. I suppose it also responds to the interest among Takimag types in Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken.

Merry Christmas!

I expanded the lecture I gave last summer at Gardone into a series of three essays, the first of which has appeared in the October issue of The Angelus. (UPDATE: the second and third parts have appeared in the November and December issues.)

There's a tendency today to criticize "essentialism," the idea that something like Islam has an enduring character such that (for example) you aren't going to see a moderate liberal Islam become the predominant form of the religion.

I'm inclined toward a moderate essentialism. It seems to me that at bottom the opposing nominalist view is the view that social managers can turn people and their beliefs into anything they want, so I don't like nominalism (in addition to believing that it's in fact false).

Another part of the appeal of Catholicism today (apart from its truth) is a sort of this-wordly extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the Church there's no satisfaction now and no hope for the future.

Here is the text (plus or minus a few ad libs) of a lecture delivered at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone, Italy, on July 3, 2008.

You might as well ask what it means to speak of any other basic reality. What does it mean to speak of time, space, number, particularity, universality, good, evil, or other minds? We use such concepts, and accept and comment on the things they denote, but explanations of exactly what they are never completely satisfy.

The satanic is rebellion against God. In more abstract and secular terms, it is rebellion against all order that is not a matter of unconstrained human choice. Either way, contemporary intellectual culture often tends toward the satanic. Extreme idealization of human autonomy makes willfulness, transgression, and subversion seem like virtues. They destroy traditional standards, which are felt as shackles, and emancipation is thought the highest human good.

The progressive National Catholic Reporter has an editorial on liturgy that makes their view altogether clear: “Liturgy is the visible expression of the arrangement of power.” They don't say why that is so, although their whole discussion presumes the point, so it's worth making the logic explicit: a sacrament is the visible expression of a spiritual reality. For progressives, the only spiritual reality is power. It follows that liturgy is really about power. QED.

Here's a provocative if somewhat odd piece on hatred from Taki's Top Drawer. A quote: