Category: Blithe Spirit

The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times

On Jeffrey Epstein and a New Yorker attack on me

Oh you New Yorker, we hardly know ye. Once there were those marvelous short stories. Now?

The election of Donald Trump has pulled American debate away from objectivity and turned publications into actors in a political battle. After Donald Trump’s election, the New Yorker magazine lost no time nailing its colors to the anti-Trump mast.

Alan Dershowitz once more to the barricades.

via Spectator USA

A Response to Fr Weinandy’s 2017 Letter to the Pope – characterized by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Not just “churchy” people, but they may have led the way and remain very good at weasel talk, here a presumably friendly admonition, one theologian to another.

What gets me is not the content, but the tone churchy people use these days. It can only be described as sentimental mumbo jumbo.

Its become a kind of new Catholic orthodoxy. In the old days prelates inveighed in magisterial tones against heresy, wickedness, dissent and apostasy. They spelled out their disagreements clearly and logically.

Now it’s beg-your-pardon etc.

Look to the courts if you want to find the perpetrators

People say cultural change makes for political change, says Hadley Arkes.

According to this argument, we???ve lost in the courts because we have lost in the culture, and so the object is to change the culture.

??But that line of argument misses at once what has been plainly before us:?? the Supreme Court, pronouncing with the authority of law on the things rightful and wrongful, has been the main Engine in the coarsening and corruption of our culture.??

And our friends miss this point because they have never absorbed Aristotle???s understanding, at the very beginning of political philosophy, on the necessary connection between the logic of morals and the logic of law.

Politics matter.