Last week, I had occasion to cite the glorious old Hollywood flick, It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), in connection with a discussion of morality. My argument was that the reason such movies work so well is that something deep inside all human beings responds automatically and joyously to goodness. We get a vicarious [...]
* * * Rick Santorum is taking a lot of heat for some things he said about higher education in America last week. In this speech, he made two basic points: Not everyone is suited for book-learning; so it ought to be possible to earn a decent living with one’s hands. Colleges and universities in [...]
It is only the illiteracy of the current generation of atheists that leads them to think religious practitioners must be stupid or thoughtless. Were Augustine, Maimonides [left] and al-Ghazali—to mention only religious thinkers in monotheist traditions—lacking in intellectual vitality? The question is absurd . . . So says British political philosopher and public intellectual, John [...]
Yesterday, we looked at what happened when Joe Money left Fishtown (Charles Murray’s iconic decaying working-class neighborhood in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010). It was nothing personal; the shareholders of Money Enterprises could get better returns in China. Nearly half of young men, who could once have got work at Money, Inc., [...]
Steady Eddy worked for Joe Money. Joe wasn’t a great guy but he paid good and proper on Thursdays. And, for all that Eddy griped, he was on shift at Joe’s Fishtown plant the day it closed. Business gone to China was all the bosses said. True, false, who knew? Years later, weeds grew round [...]
I don’t usually comment on partisan political matters in this space, but New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd’s recent anti-Santorum screed, entitled “Rick’s Religious Fanaticism” (Feb. 21), requires a rebuttal. In this piece, Dowd calls Santorum a “small-town mullah,” and refers to him repeatedly as “Mullah Rick.” Now, to my knowledge, Santorum has not [...]
“There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew.” That’s the title of a glowing write-up in the New York Times Science section two days ago (Feb. 21) about the latest in a series of book trumpeting a supposed solution to the mystery of existence. The book under review is Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (Free [...]
In my previous two posts—Part I and Part II—I briefly examined the historical background of the contemporary assault on traditional morality, and looked at the claims of two new books purporting to give scientific and philosophical reasons for rejecting the notions of sin and vice, in favor of a strictly hedonistic conception of the human [...]
Yesterday, in Part I, I discussed some of the efforts that various authors have made over the past 100 years to put guilt behind us once and for all—especially with regard to sexual behavior. But the “progressive” forces can never rest on their laurels, because the human conscience is immortal and always reasserts itself if [...]
Someone should write a book someday about all the effort expended over the past 100 years to relieve the human race of its guilty conscience. You might wonder why I speak of the past 100 years. After all, satire has always been with us—and a good thing, too. But the great satirists down through the [...]