Education is in crisis not because standards of literacy or mathematics have fallen, but because we have no coherent vision, as a society, of what education is for or what it is meant to achieve. We have assumed that, if it is not merely a cage to keep our young people off the streets, its [...]
…Stand up and keep your childishness: Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures; But don’t believe in anything That can’t be told in coloured pictures. Chesterton would not have liked many of the stories told in coloured pictures by American comic books, which these days tend to dystopia and sado-eroticism—an all-too predictable reflection of the [...]
The sequel to Beauty for Truth’s Sake has been published by Angelico Press. Called Beauty in the Word, it completes the retrieval of the seven liberal arts begun in the earlier book by examining the first three, the “Trivium”, which Dorothy L. Sayers made the basis of Classical Education in her famous essay, “The Lost Tools of [...]
G.K. Chesterton was once described as a “Conservative” thinker. He responded as follows: Because I want almost anything that doesn’t yet exist; because I want to turn a silent people into a singing people; because I would rejoice if a wineless country could be a wine-growing country; because I would change a world of wage-slaves [...]
In a recent series of articles Michael Black argued that the Corporation can only be understood theologically – further, that the modern economic crisis is a crisis of the Corporation. But what about the “Market”, which is the other big player in the economic game, along with the State and the Corporation? In economic theory the corporation [...]
Modern society is based on the idea of economic growth, a continually expanding cycle of expectation (which supplies the motivation to drive the economy forward), trade leading to income, income leading to consumption and investment. This expansion is made possible by improvements in technology making possible cheaper production (machines replacing slaves and eventually workers) and [...]
We seem to be haunted by the fear of our machinery and what it is doing to us, or what might happen when it goes wrong. According to landmarks of popular culture such as the Terminator and Matrix movies and Battlestar Galactica, sooner or later the machines will turn upon us. They will use us [...]
The recent furore over the publication by a reputable medical ethics journal of an article arguing that infanticide should be permitted because there is no moral difference between an embryo and a newborn, and the other fuss about the discovery that women in the UK are regularly given abortions on the NHS simply because they [...]
In the US, the so-called contraception mandate proposed by the Obama administration has been bitterly contested by the Catholic bishops and others—such as Steve Krason of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists in his “Call to Action”, and President William Fahey of Thomas More College in his “Open Letter”. Requiring Catholic employers to provide (or [...]
But what are the four (or five) elements that T.S. Eliot was so interested in (see previous post)? The idea that the world is composed of just a handful of basic elements is common to all the great traditions, and in both the Egyptian, Greek and Indian traditions these elements are given the names Earth, Air, [...]
An important book by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr, Aethereal Rumours: T.S. Eliot's Physics and Poetics, does for The Waste Land and the Four Quartets something of what Michael Ward does for the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis in Planet Narnia. In his book, Michael Ward shows that each of the seven tales of Narnia was intended [...]
In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict tells us that “if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper [...]
Stratford Caldecott Cardinal Angelo Scola, speaking in Venice recently, discussed the phenomenon of the expansion of the notion of ‘rights’ in the context of modern political discourse without any agreed philosophy underpinning them. We are faced with a paradox: a hitherto unprecedented circulation and expansion of rights in tandem with a degree of [...]
Thank you to Stratford Caldecott from The Economy Project for this very generous recommendation of The Imaginative Conservative: A new and rather impressive blog has made its appearance. The Imaginative Conservative seems to be the main forum right now for intelligent discussion of social and cultural issues from the vantage-point of the cultural or “paleo”-conservatives [...]