I read someplace, years ago, that the object of science is, laboriously and at great expense, to confirm the commonplace. Here’s my favorite illustration: Shakespeare gave us (perhaps transmitting Plato)… Read more The Kindness of Prejudice →
I rescued this juvenile chipmunk from a neighbor’s cat. He seemed to be in shock, so I took him inside and gave him some diced apple and maple spinners. After… Read more A Mother’s Fierce Love →
We have been studying why liberty must be more than an idea or speech. Part I considered how ideas are inflected or corrupted by incompatible habits; a bureaucrat, for example,… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part III →
Culture—understood as something not only thought, but enacted and embodied—shapes our articulation of values. Liberty, I have suggested, wears a different aspect under the present centralized bureaucracy than it did… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part II →
The Declaration of Independence tells us that government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed” who lay “its foundation on such principles and organiz[e] its powers in… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part I →
Fundamentalism, as I have said elsewhere, is a faith in a compact doctrine “which is unprovable but unchallengeable by facts or by argument external to that faith, and which claims a universal application.” Pastor John Piper’s recent contra-Trump article provides a good example of a fundamentalist mode of argument. The essentials of Piper’s argument are I think adequately summarized as follows. Trump, he suggests, exhibits certain “sins mentioned in the New Testament…that destroy people,” including “unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai) [and] strife-stirring… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, BLM: Part V →
Many people now know that social media providers suppress content at odds with certain political or ideological goals. What’s seldom discussed is that so long as content is irrelevant to those goals, social media will complacently allow it to destroy lives. Here’s a story about that. A few years ago a middle-aged, unemployed, do-nothing internet maven took to Facebook to assert, outlandishly and falsely, that my clients, their six children, and a portion of their church had organized a sex cult and were grooming and preying upon minors. His post… Read more Sex Cult and Facebook: How the Communications Decency Act Amplifies Obscene Libel →
Addresses the newly religious and intolerant left, and its opposition to the “counter-majoritarian features” of the U.S. Constitution.