This begins a series on the morality of revenge, drawn from the current text of Properties of Blood, Vol. II: The Reign of Hate. If you have not purchased Volume I: The Reign of Love, you have only yourself to blame.
Chatterton, a late 18th century poet, is more famous as a legend–the teenage poet who died at 17–than as a writer. The Romantics, French as well as English, lionized him. His best known poems are the medievalizing verses he attributed to a 15th century poet, but his talent for painting satiric portraits is evident in “Apostate Will”–a fine sketch of the clergy on the make,
Nonetheless…if there is one thing we Americans take seriously, it is money But even on that most vital subject, we cannot bring ourselves to tell the truth.
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
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.
Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, so-called palaeoconservatives (a term that has lost all utility) might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality. Instead, they have been more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition
As human animals with large brain and capacity for conscious thought, we have senses that are attuned to the natural world.
My subject for this series is the Great Revolution that has obliterated our knowledge of human nature, eliminated the distinctions between man and beast, male and female, adult and child, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly, and re-invented the human race as a hybrid, part invertebrate and part robot.
At this point in John’s narrative, even a reader as obtuse as I am should begin to see the connection with Chapter 8, in which the Pharisees had denounced Jesus as a Samaritan and a demoniac.
As a child in the 1950s, my father–not a conservative but a Democrat–discouraged us from going to Disney movies, though he did not object to anything about Duckburg and its citizens.
