Habits of Liberty: Part III
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 →
Habits of Liberty: Part II
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 →
Habits of Liberty: Part I
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 →
Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, BLM: Part V
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 →
Sex Cult and Facebook: How the Communications Decency Act Amplifies Obscene Libel
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 →
Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, BLM: Part IV
Addresses the newly religious and intolerant left, and its opposition to the “counter-majoritarian features” of the U.S. Constitution.
Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, BLM: Part III
Religion and politics organize power by means of narrative and of narrative’s embodiment in emplacements on the high and holy places. To be effective over time, a mobilizing narrative must be enacted and represented in concrete form. The importance of liturgy and symbol cannot be overemphasized; culture is not “soft materials poured in from the top.” Statues, monuments, churches, and temples have a function far beyond the ornamental. The destruction or removal of any of these amounts to a partial delegitimation of the narrative which they represent. Martin’s Religion and… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, BLM: Part III →
Dos and Don’ts of Auto Accident Lawsuits
The United States’ more than 200 million licensed (and sundry unlicensed) drivers blithely operate, at high speeds, passenger vehicles each weighing more than a mature rhinoceros, while eating, sampling intoxicants,… Read more Dos and Don’ts of Auto Accident Lawsuits →