Back in spring 1980 I was a Russian linguist in the U.S. Army stationed at a listening post east of Hamburg and just west of The Wall with East Germany. Not the Berlin Wall. This was The Wall that stretched from the Baltic Sea southward and separated East from West Germany. We used to listen to the Soviet Army practicing launching their nuclear missiles. One day I calculated the target position: Our position.
Many an ambitious ruler, seeking to extend his power, has stubbed his big toe on the brute facts of family and kinship, and many an ideological revolution that failed to reckon with the bind forces of greed and competition has been brought down by the primitive passions and instincts they had hoped to eliminate or at least suppress.
Now, “brother” and “friend” are or at least used to be rather exclusive terms. They did not refer to just anyone, much less everyone.
This is the text of a talk presented at a conference, in Waterford, Wisconsin, attended by mostly Lutheran pastors plus a sprinkling of heretics and one papist, arranged by my friend Pastor David Ramirez.
David Hume’s essay on The Original Contract has been added. Passages Added from Plato and Aristotle. In addition to the assigned readings, the following passages and fragments will be referred to. More will be added in the coming days. P
Some decades ago the psychologist Mortimer Adler produced one of his many cultural “how-to” books with the preposterous title, How to Read a Book. If only Adler had first considered the question of how to write a book, he might never have indulged his vanity to the point of telling people they were only permitted to read the way that Mortimer Adler reads.
The “somewhere” is Nafpaktos (which the Venetians, when they acquired the town, renamed Lepanto) on the Corinthian Gulf.
While we are waiting for people to acquire and peruse The Marshall’s Own Case, we can talk briefly about the series. The first novel is as good a way to begin as anything .
A few days ago, in the discussion of the Nashville school shootings, I suggested that if people wan’t to gain a more serious understanding of the transgender world, they might not do better than to read the seventh of Magdalen Nabb’s detective mysteries set in Florence (not South Carolina).
