So I said something to this effect to a fellow Berean a few months back. As I had watched some of the craziness on the far left, especially running up to and after the election, it seemed to me that many of them felt almost a moral buzz as they could get angry at those […]
Archives
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President Trump’s new immigration Executive Order (EO) was issued. You can read it at the New York Times of March 6, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/trump-executive-order-immigration-text.html The order is a variation on his earlier January 27 order which was stopped from taking effect by a Federal court and the Federal Ninth Circuit. How is this one different? First, […]
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The Examined Life–With Some Help
17 Feb 2017
Why do people still read Plato? Aristotle? The Bible? Augustine? Thomas Aquinas? John Locke? Immanuel Kant (well, maybe not so much)? What unifies them? It isn’t religion. Plato and Aristotle were most certainly not Christians. Augustine and Aquinas would have disagreed on the extent of man’s capacity to know and to will the good. The […]
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Immigration: A Partial Response
14 Feb 2017
My colleague Bert Wheeler wrote a recent piece on Bereans addressing more than one issue related to President Trump. The one that caught my attention was immigration policy. Bert expressed his concern (rightly) about Trump’s policies on that front. I assume from his use of the word “concerns” meant that he might or did have […]
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Executive Orders and “Extreme Vetting”
29 Jan 2017
President Trump issued a very broad executive order yesterday, banning immigration for up to 120 days, and including so-called “Green Card” holders, holders of permanent visas. This order was effective immediately and almost immediately protests erupted. Moreover, several Federal judges have issued temporary injunctions against the order’s application to certain individuals. Political types on roughly […]
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The Trump(et) Sounds
21 Jan 2017
Well, Donald Trump is now officially our president. He delivered an interesting and a bit controversial inaugural speech yesterday, which I would like to try my hand at analyzing. Before I do, may I mention others’ comments on it. George Will called it “a most dreadful inaugural address” (National Review Online, January 21, 2017) and […]
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The City of Man
15 Jan 2017
I am sitting in the San Antonio airport, waiting for my flight back home, reflecting on an excellent Values and Capitalism retreat here and–the subject of this blog–my walk yesterday. My goal was to walk to a bookstore about two miles from my downtown hotel. I had mapped it out using Googlemaps and set out […]
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I have written on this blog before about the importance of the liberal arts, but I now have an interesting negative example of how universities have been marginalizing not only the liberal arts but also American civilization in particular. Let me begin with a quote from this article by Ian Tuttle in the National Review […]
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Fake News: Hint, this blog is not fake news
07 Dec 2016
Well, it appears that at least some people have now found a new pet peeve, so-called “fake news,” to be useful in attacking news stories they don’t like. The term of course is new, but the fact is not new at all. Various media throughout the centuries have engaged in propagandistic writing in various forms, […]
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Elitism and Elitism
02 Dec 2016
Am I an elitist? Does the fact that I support the continued existence of the Electoral College make me elitist? Does my sometimes suspicion of democracy in its raw form make me elitist? And, is being an elitist all bad? Or is there some distinction between being an elitist and a pernicious brand of elitism? […]