The Autodidact Remembers
Once upon a time I decided to learn Japanese. I had none of the usual practical reasons: no business interests that would take me to Japan nor even an academic project comparing Noh plays with Attic tragedy.
Author: Thomas Fleming
Poetry: George Meredith
Meredith is best known as the author of such novels as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist, but he was also, at his best, a fine poet. Unfortunately, much of his poetry is more like fiction in verse.
The New Index, Revised: Deleting the Bad Great Books
Reading Rousseau can be entertaining and at times ennobling, but it is a bit like practicing white magic or playing with Tarot cards. We are inviting the demon into the house of our mind. Fugite hinc. Latet anguis in herba.
Resisting Evil, IV: The Duty to Defend
Christ’s equation of physical violence with internal anger raises questions that juries often have to face: What are the circumstances that might justify the use of lethal violence in self-defense? Specifically, when an argument leads to a violent altercation, does the one party bear any responsibility for the consequences if, though the other party struck the first blow, his own anger was a contributing factor?
Resisting Evil IV
When a Christian engages in lawful homicide, either as executioner or soldier, it is the ruler and not he who is morally responsible for the killing. The soldier or judge is merely the instrument of a ruler whose power comes from God, as Christ informs Pilate during the interrogation.
Jerks 0.C: Diversity
Diversity breeds moral confusion, which is aggravated by the high population density that encourages a comfortable sense of anonymity. Anyone who has lived 50 or 60 years in North America can understand what has happened
Resisting Evil III
The admonition to resist not evil is not aimed at army commanders, kings, and emperors, much less at settlers in a violent wilderness or urban homesteaders, but at members of a face-to-face community of the sort that Jesus had experienced in Galilee and in which Christians are going to live as members of a parish and diocese.
Summer Seminar 2022
The theme of next year’s Summer Seminar will be Augustan England, which we are defining as the period between The “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 and the death of King George I. These were the years of William III and Good Queen Anne, the Duke of Marlborough’s victories and also the age that saw the emergence of two distinct political parties and ideologies.
Resisting Evil, Part II
Christians have interpreted Christ’s injunction to turn the other cheek in different ways. Over the centuries Catholic authorities have generally and consistently upheld the righteousness of self-defense, just war, and capital punishment, while the Orthodox have been more prone to view all war, just and necessary as they may be, as nonetheless sinful and requiring absolution. When a Byzantine emperor asked his Patriarch to proclaim as martyrs all the soldiers who died fighting Islam, he was refused. Neither Church, it goes without saying, instructed its followers not to resist the aggression of evil men…. The injunction to turn the...
