Category: Free Content

1

The Two-Party Coalition to Destroy Marriage, Part I

For decades I have been studying the institution of marriage, and when, about a dozen years ago, conservative Republicans began agitating for laws defining and strengthening marriage, I attempted to make an argument, rooted in human history and biology and framed by the Christian tradition, that government intervention would only make matters much worse.

3

Book Club: Framley Parsonage

For anyone who has the time to read a good work of English fiction, I have started to reread Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage.   I’ll post an occasional comment and perhaps also put up a very old piece of mine on Trollope.  After this, we shall certainly do Plutarch’s dialogue on the Delay of Divine Punishment

3

America–the Picture Show

In the midst of war and rumors of war, the ongoing soap opera of “The Sussexes” seems hardly worth mentioning, but if–like some future archeologist, holding his news and sifting through the middens of a 21st century….

4

Ancient Vengeance

It is a main thrust of philosophical Liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions.  Any attempt to justify revenge must therefore represent a step back toward the jungle from which we escaped all too recently.

6

Modern Philosophers Against Revenge

No argument drawn from biological necessity would impress philosophers who, since the Enlightenment, have often written as if man were either naturally good or was only weakly endowed with a bundle of propensities known by philosophers as human nature or, by Christians, as “the old Adam.”

0

From Golding’s Ovid

I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.

2

Civilization, by Dr. James Patrick

By

By way of prologue it is important to understand the relation and the difference Civilization and culture, for both are used to describe the complex of ideas and actions that define the life of a particular people in a particular place at a certain time