Category: Fleming

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Feature / Fleming

26 Apr, 2018

Eating With Sinners, Conclusion

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I think I first began to appreciate the problem presented by American individualism, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with a family of eccentrics.  They had little or no connection to the small community where their house was located–they had picked the town, decades earlier, by throwing a dart at the map, and most of them had long since scattered across the country.  They had picked their religions with almost the same insouciance: one was a Buddhist, another an atheist humanist, another (the only apparently sane member of the tribe) an Episcopalian, and another–a girl I had known in graduate school–a...

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Fleming

13 Apr, 2018

To Marry or To Burn: The Question of Celibacy

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Although the revolution did not take place all at once, the Christian doctrine of “one flesh” influenced virtually every aspect of marriage.  Celibacy remained the highest ideal in the Middle Ages, but marriage was an institution created by God for the procreation of the human race, though the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake was condemned even in marriage. 

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Feature / Fleming

9 Apr, 2018

Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, Conclusion

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Early specialization has eliminated the common culture that could produce a D’ Arcy Thompson or an Anthony Powell or a Douglas Young, and we are left with an intellectual life dominated by trained savages who can do their job, understand (perhaps) some little corner of the universe (and, in the case, of cosmologists, that corner is very tiny, indeed!), but they cannot integrate what they have learned into a larger picture.  Read popular books by scientists, and whenever they step outside their field of specialization, they either fall back on the platitudes of the Durants or, what is worse, rely...

19

Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

17 Mar, 2018

Jeremiah’s Job

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What should be the posture of a solitary reactionary, who disagrees with every progressive policy promoted by both parties—or at least promoted by the one and resisted feebly by the other?  I shall not presume to give advice, but I would invite our attention to an ancient parallel case:  The people of Judah in the time of Jeremiah

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

13 Mar, 2018

Truthers, Birthers, and Russhers

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The left breaks out into these fits, it seems to me, when they have been temporarily frustrated in that long march toward moral anarchy and political tyranny that my late friend Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny.  Not to worry, as they say.  They can be as sure of their victory as Jeremiah was sure of the Babylonian triumph over the faithless people of Judah.