The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
The 2016 Presidential campaigns have proved to be unusually entertaining, but the emergence of Donald Trump as front-runner represents the first serious challenge in decades to the hegemony of the Democrat-Republican party state. Original Air Date: March 28, 2016 Show Run Time: 1 hour 5 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): James Easton The Fleming Foundation · From Under the Rubble, Episode 2: 2016 Presidential Campaigns From Under the Rubble℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2016. All Rights are Reserved.
Anything I might have to say on this most blessed day of the year would be at best superfluous. I do, however, want to draw attention to the beautiful collect in the Old Mass. Many of these prayers are capable of inspiring a good deal of reflection, if we pause a moment to consider them: Deus qui hodierna die per Unigenitum tuum, aeternitatis nobis aditum, devincta morte reserasti, vota nostra, quae praeveniendo aspiras, etiam adjuvando prosequere. Per eundem Dominum etc. This is Englished in various ways, but this version, drawn from the Father Lasance Missal, puts the gist of it...
Aristotle and Plato Although it is fair to describe Aristotle as the most important Platonist of all time, he parted company with his teacher on many important points. This is a difficult topic, complicated both by Plato’s dialectical methods that sometimes make it hard to know what his position was and by his changing positions. Plato’s first attempt to find a divine and enduring basis for our ever-changing realities is his theory of ideas or forms, which he either later or alternatively reconceived more in terms of number. Aristotle fully acknowledges the truth of Plato’s insight into the problem—that for...
The day before the Easter we celebrate in the West, my thoughts go out to Christians in the East who once endured the horror of Islamic rule. I wrote this piece in September 2001, and it was published n December. “You’ve never been to Nish?!” My friend was incredulous. How can someone who has traveled, it sometimes seems, every inch of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Kosovo, not have found the time to go to Nish? The lady is far from being a local chauvinist, but when I first met her and asked (as I had been taught by a Belgrader) if...
Last week Alfredo, my closest friend here in Sicily, was arrested on charges of mafia association. Manlio, a friend Alfredo and I have in common, had suffered exactly the same fate some twenty years ago; after a year in jail awaiting trial, and many another of a ruined life, he was in the end acquitted of all charges imputed to him; by then, however, this former mayor of Palermo was a broken man. Now it’s Alfredo’s turn to serve as a film extra in a political production known as the war against the mafia. When Mussolini wanted to wipe out...
Here is Hillary Clinton’s response to the terrorist attacks on Brussels: “Calling for 12 million immigrants to be rounded up and deported. Demanding we turn away refugees because of their religion, and proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the United States…America should be better than this, and I believe it’s our responsibility as citizens to say so…If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.” Ms Clinton actually made her remarks at an AIPAC meeting where she spent most of her time attacking the Republican front-runner, but...
The one figure who defines modern thought is Aristotle, not of course because modern thinkers have followed him, but because since Galileo and Descartes and Bacon, scientists and philosophers have defined themselves by their opposition to Aristotle. That is my first introductory point, as obvious as it is true. Let me add a second point, no less true but more controversial: In all that is most important, Aristotle is more often right than wrong, and consistently right on those points where he has been most attacked. Life Aristotle was born in 384, an Ionian Greek in Stagira in Chalcidice. His...
In Genoa I spent several hours talking with the philosopher Pier Luigi Zampetti. In his book His book La Sfida Del Duemila (1988), Zampetti blames our spiritual malaise as well as environmental catastrophe on modern consumerism. Materialism has become the dominant philosophy both in the West and in the East…. Capitalism, as we know, is the economic system of the entire contemporary world. East and West are worlds bound by capitalistic systems, even if of different types. But, how is man considered in these systems? Can he express himself, his free and responsible choices; in other words is...
This is the revised first part of an essay I published in 2000 in a magazine I used to edit. I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist. I spent much of my childhood walking on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings. I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries with my sister, or helping friends with their traps. Until we moved near Charleston, I had never seen a city that did not deface the landscape, and to...
My son is in his last year at Oxford – drinking, mostly, as far as I understand from his sporadic communications–and so, when I see a news story with the university’s name in it, I take note. There was one just the other day. “Serial Killer Uses European Human Rights Law to Sue for Compensation Because Prison Makes her Tearful and Upset.” Oh no, sorry, wrong headline. The right one was no less absurd, and the gist of it was that a bunch of students… We pretty much know who they are, because for the last fifty years, in...
