Joseph Bottum

Every philosopher knows, at last, that not all ethical systems are equally good. We demand that a general ethics conform, as philosophers put it, to both truth and logic”which is to say, we demand that it not contradict the facts we hold about the universe and that it not contradict itself. . . . . Continue Reading »

There is a vague connection to vulgarity-there exists a tinge of logical association-when Calvin Klein advertises underwear by draping underclothed boys with girls who seem to tremble on the breathless edge of emphysema. Underwear suggests the body parts it covers, after all; those body parts . . . . Continue Reading »

What passes in the human heart is known to God alone, and the private spiritual life of T. S. Eliot may have been rich and full. But Eliot’s publicly presented spirituality-the spirituality in the Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Rock -seems merely weak and strange. Not all . . . . Continue Reading »

Part of the problem with the awful kind of augury performed by Alvin Toffler and the futurists is that it is heretical to any religion outside L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, and part of the problem is that it is aesthetically vulgar, but most of the problem is that it is all so silly . . . . Continue Reading »

We have in town a store where clerks in hushed and reverent tones sell breviaries and Bibles, Holy Cards and St. Christopher medals, rosaries and coffee-table books of photographic scenes of Rome, Assisi, and the Holy Land. On the walls, and all for sale, are photos of the Pope and JFK and Mother . . . . Continue Reading »

On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society By Gergrude Himmelfarb Knopf 192 pp. $23 “Ideas,” wrote the Victorian and Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton, “have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of . . . . Continue Reading »

I We are living at a time near the end of the world. Not that our age is apocalyptic: apocalypse means an uncovering, a revelation, and revelation is what we lack. And not that our age is eschatological: eschatology means the discourse, reason, science, the logos of last things, and all that kind . . . . Continue Reading »