Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came
My title comes from a saying of 1960s antiwar hippy protesters, as Bill and Hillary Clinton were before they started all their wars.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Nice
If a Russian priest can do anything, it’s to find himself a wife. We stayed in Father Vadim’s house for several days, before and after little Vasily’s christening, and I was able to observe firsthand what a force of nature a good popadya, or matushka, or priest’s wife, becomes when pushed to extremes.
An Apology from the Editor
The website has been neglected for over ten days. Initially, the cause was the Summer Seminar, which went beautifully–more on that in a day or two. The past five days, another round of COVID, this one comparatively mild, has taken me out of the picture. Today, I am no longer content to lie on the sofa, coughing and groaning as I listen to a reading of The Day of the Jackal, but I am actually doing proof-reading and and attending to business that is not too taxing to my befuddled brain.
Abortion and the Laws of Nature, Part II
On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
Laurence Tribe Wants to Ban Trump from Running Again
“And should Trump get an encore, look to pre-World War II Germany for a mirror. A failed coup in 1923 taught Hitler a better route to dictatorship nine years later.
The Joke’s On Whom?
So Joe Biden got caught actually reading the script instructions his handlers had given him. In claiming it was a joke, they are asking us to believe Joe is capable of telling a joke.
Abortion and the Laws of Nature
The obligation to care for one’s offspring is a human universal, like the incest taboo or the prohibition of murder. Human and primate mothers, as a rule, devote themselves to their children, and mother-love is regarded conventionally as the most selfless and irrational forms of human attachment.
Wednesday’s Child: The Serb Way
“Not those eat caviar who can afford it,” goes a Serbian proverb of what I have always thought is great perspicacity, “but those who are accustomed to eating it.” In some roundabout way, this saying explains why the less money I have in the bank, the more unanimous the general opinion that I am and have always been rich.
Unholy Dying, Part II: Viability–The Receding Horizon
No argument can be put forward for abortion that cannot be applied to infanticide. When does a woman’s right to control her body stop? If she gives birth in the wild, does a mother have a moral obligation to nurse a newborn and warm it with her body?
The Great Revolution: III: Equality, Part D, The Liberal Tradition
By Liberal Tradition, I am referring to an intellectual current that begins in the Renaissance, takes ideological shape in the 17th and 18th centuries and is decked out as a complete ethical, political, and economic theory by such writers as Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, and ultimately spawns its socialist mirror image in Marx.
