Wednesday 9:00 E. Christian Kopff: “Ockham and Nominalism: The crucial event in the history of Western culture?” 10:45 James Patrick: “The Fortunes of Rationalism: Unitarianism, Latitudinarianism, and Dissent” Lunch 2:00 Thomas Fleming: “The Ancient Roots of the Conspiracy” 3:30 Frank Brownlow: “King Lear: Nature’s Reformation” 4:30 Brief Dibattito 6:30 Dinner at The Irish Rose First night dinner at Deli Italia
Summer Symposium 2017, Day 1 Tuesday July 17, 2017 4:00-4:45 Registration at Cliffbreakers 5:00 Thomas Fleming, “Ouverture to the Suicide of the West” 6:30 Dinner is served at Deli Italia II on East State Street The Fleming Foundation’s Second Annual Summer Symposium opens today. Speakers include Prof. Frank Brownlow, Prof. E. Christian Kopff, Dr. James Patrick, Prof. Srdja Trifkovic, Captain Christopher Check, and Dr. Thomas Fleming Fleming Foundation Headquarters, aka the crumbling Villa Pipistrelli, getting a facelift.
Not long ago, I poked fun at Ann Coulter as a professionally dumb blond who acted out like an adolescent. The response on this website and on Facebook was mixed. Many who read the piece thought it sound overall but found it a bit unfair to Ms Coulter. After reading Ann’s tweets attacking Delta Airlines, ridiculing its employees, and and insulting chance passengers whose legs are not up to Ann’s standards (“dachshund legs”) all for being deprived of a $30 upgrade to economy plus, I want to take this opportunity to say I am sorry for ever doubting that she is the model of wisdom...
One of the best developments of the first six months of America Under Trump is the growing discontent with the media. Why anyone has ever paid any attention to the New York Times or Washington Post or Fox or CNN is something I have never been able to figure out. The editors are poorly educated liars, and the reporters, columnists and commentators cannot even manage to tell their lies in standard English There is only one reason to pay any attention to the news, and that is to find out what bizarre forms of snake oil the ruling class is forcing...
Volpone was followed by an equal triumph, The Alchemist. This play is once again a comedy about a scam-artist from the Elizabethan underworld. The Alchemist reflects Jonson’s general contempt for superstition and irrationality, though, as he later confessed (to Drummond of Hawthornden), he once took part in a similar magic scam: “He had once cousened a lady, with whom he had made an appointment to meet an old astrologer in the suburbs, which she keeped and it was himself disguised in a Longe Gowne and a white beard.” Jonson’s method is to take stock plot devices from Roman comedy, e.g.,...
Dear Friends and Readers: I have been asked to speak at the 36th annual The American Chesterton Conference being held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 27-29. https://www.chesterton.org/36th-annual-chesterton-conference/ The title of this year’s conference is “The Tyranny of the Learned,” and I’ll be speaking on Chesterton as an amateur ancient historian who often got the details wrong but had a deeper insight than many scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of ancient history. Other speakers include Dale Ahlquist, founder and president of the American Chesterton Society, my former colleague Christopher Check, who is now president of Catholic Answers, Joseph...
In March 2010, I put online an earlier version of this piece: In all the political debates over nationalized welfare and health care, both anti-Christian socialists and Catholics frequently the term “social justice” in their arguments for guaranteed incomes, social welfare, and socialized medicine. In fact, the expression “social justice” is frequently heard from the lips of Catholic traditionalists (including distributists), Marxists, and Greens. Are they talking about the same principle or different principles? Does the expression have any usable meaning? Before going on to sketch out some basic principles of a Christian’s duties to his fellows, we might begin by examining...
Part II The several days we spent at Ulivello vibrate in the memory like an hallucination. Our friend Navrozov has written a beautiful piece about his visit to Ulivello. The reality was a bit grittier and decayed than he described it—less the odor of jasmine than of hay and manure—but no less magical. The food was almost a revelation: pasta, of course, but followed by farm-raised pork, roasted with apples and served with potatoes deep-fried in olive oil. Ulivello had been a sort of farm, worked by share-croppers, and when the Italian government ended share-cropping, the former croppers stayed on...
The Media have taken to describing Illinois as a “Banana Republic”? So today’s question is: How is Illinois not a Banana Republic? I await your answers. My first answer is: Because Banana Republics have beaches and warm winters… And, Banana Republics have distinctive cuisines and excellent coffee not sold by greedy Communists who think the sky is falling…
Long long ago in another galaxy, I wrote a series of pieces looking at the plain meaning of various passages in the New Testament, not as anyone pretending to be a theologian or Biblical scholar, but as a simple philologist seeking the kind of understanding of a Greek text he might get by studying Demosthenes or Sophocles. I am going to try and dig them up and refurbish them, if I can find them. I am afraid I wrote some of them for another website that has by now undoubtedly 86ed them, as they say in commercial kitchens. I tend...
