I sometimes despair how hard it seems to be for so many people to “get” why attempts to depersonalize some humans as we personalize nature are so harmful. But it is, and unless current trends are reversed, it will get increasingly worse.Take the recent declaration of individual . . . . Continue Reading »
Loyalty is immoral ? Color me skeptical. Without further ado, here’s the avalanche of questions that come to mind upon reading Helen’s post: First question: "Loyalty is immoral—I won’t bother trying to deny it. Morality is universal and objective; loyalties are . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ve enjoyed exploring the nooks and crannies of James’s sprawling post , but there’s one thread of it I’d like to pick up—the one having to do with loyalty ( unsurprisingly ). It may strain my vernacular blogging style to take up such an unabashedly theoretical . . . . Continue Reading »
And an open soul. I have just read through the first chapter (on "Glaucon’s Republic") of the amiable Prof. Ranasinghe’s brilliant, challenging, and edifying The Soul of Socrates (Cornell 2000). (Well, it’s not new is it, but it is new to me, and maybe to . . . . Continue Reading »
So this is my ‘much-anticipated’ rejoinder to Freddie . The best way I know how to do this is like sewing a button. I want to sew Freddie to my fabric of understanding (but not so close that he, the button, is too tight to the fabric to be usable as a button!). The back of that fabric, . . . . Continue Reading »
In his daily article today , Rusty Reno quotes Paul Griffiths as saying that “the term [limbo of the fathers] is not found in the 1992 Catechism, nor in the Catechism of the Council of Trent,” the implication being that neither text supports Pitstick’s claim that (in Reno’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Secondhand Smokette was on CNN’s Reliable Sources yesterday, and she brought up a point in the Ayers/Obama controversy—the particulars of which are not relevant here—that was worth the price of tuning in. When Howard Kurtz asked her to justify her remark that a NYT story on the . . . . Continue Reading »
I have remarked previously that too often, scientific studies are actually ideological advocacy tracts in disguise. Or, a scientific study is misreported without the nuance contained therein by media toward the same purpose and effect. Or, a study one day says A and the next day on the same topic . . . . Continue Reading »
This is an unusual month — polls, pols and so on. But this is an unusual paragraph too. How quickly can you find out what is so uncommon about it? It looks so ordinary that you may think nothing is odd about it, until you actually match it against most paragraphs this long. If you put your . . . . Continue Reading »