And yet, Robert George recommended this...

That's the world, especially academia. "Scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours..."


Sexuality and Gender Studies: Practical and Political Sources, Theoretical Frameworks, and Recent Debates
July 18-22
Berkeley Institute, Berkeley CA

Featuring Neville Hoad, who looks like a true believer in queer theory and the like, and Candace Vogler, who started her academic career as a feminist. Did she have a conversion experience, or does she remain a feminist in analytic Thomist's clothing?

The Anti-Church of Antonio Gramsci by George J. Marlin

Michael Sandel's Liberalism

From Oz Conservative: Hank Pellissier criticises male-identified males

In the preface, Sandel defines the liberal conception of the person this way:


According to this conception, my dignity consists not in any social roles I inhabit but instead in my capacity to choose my roles and identities for myself. (xiv)

Do all academic liberals believe this, and are they this blunt? Amazing -- no obfuscation here, and Sandel deserves to be labelled an enemy of the true and good.

Justice With Michael Sandel
faculty page


Playlist
itunes



Michael Sandel on Markets and Morals

Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures.
Chautauqua Institution

Qui non est mecum, contra me est; et, qui non congregat mecum, spargit.

Matthew 12:30

Yesterday at school I was struck by the absence of God during the school day -- that is, He is not mentioned at all. It is what you would expect at an American public school, but how can this be acceptable to any right-thinking person of good will? The other day a student said, "Oh my God," and I told him not to say that. Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to explain to him way, that we should not take His name in vain; we should instead reverence it. (I wouldn't want to give him the impression that being a secularist or anti-theist is the norm.)

At any rate, man can come to know that he has a duty to pay due homage to God as Creator of the universe, to perform the acts proper to the virtue of religio. This is a precept of the Natural Law, even if it cannot be fulfilled perfectly without from grace and charity. Our public schools, in ignoring God and refusing to discuss Him (as opposed to teaching about "religions"), thereby belittle His importance and foster the lack of proper respect. God has no place in the daily life of our public schools, and students are habituated accordingly -- much potential spiritual growth for beginners is hampered with God is effectively excluded for half of the day (7 or 8 hours out of the 16 during which we are awake). If we are already living as if God is not important to us, then how can we take His commandments seriously when we are confronted with severe temptation?

False religions, those which teach polytheism or atheism or monism, may be tolerated, but they should never have been granted equal status with Christianity. The reaction against Christianity entails a rejection of God (or right monotheism). One cannot preserve the latter in a formerly Christian society.

Standmickey: The “innocence” argument and the Consistent Life Ethic

It is important to remember that Catholic teaching on the dignity of man is not contingent on the degree of innocence or guilt with which a soul is burdened. In a literal sense, none of us is “innocent”; even the unborn carry the stain of original sin that must be washed away by the waters of Baptism, and obviously the rest of us have to answer for a multitude of personal sins. Every human being, the unborn child as much as the mass murderer as much as you or I, is in need of redemption.

Literal sense? Yes, someone has thus reinforced the belief of some American Orthodox that the Romans subscribe to some belief of "inherited guilt," which they correctly find repulsive. Innocent/and guilt, used with respect to original sin, cannot be used but equivocally.

My point in saying this is not that abortion, torture, capital punishment, and the like are justifiable by virtue of the guilt that we all share (nor is it my intention, obviously, to pass any kind of judgment on the fate of the souls of unbaptized aborted children, a question that is best left to God in His mercy). My point is exactly the opposite: the Church teaches, based on the example of the life of Christ, that human dignity is not earned, either by good deeds that we have committed or evil deeds that we have not committed (i.e. crimes that have been committed by prisoners but not by unborn children). Nor does an individual forfeit his or her human dignity by the commission of evil acts. Rather, such dignity is intrinsic to every human being and shared equally by all individuals, because every individual is created by the Father, redeemed (or has the potential to be redeemed) by the Son, and sanctified (or has the potential to be sanctified) by the Holy Spirit.

Of course human dignity is unearned -- any gift from God that is given without our cooperation is unearned. Here we see how problematic "dignity" can be, when it is used not only to affirm that those who are guilty of a crime should not be punished beyond what they deserve, but that certain punishments which were formerly deemed to be proportional to their defense are no longer so, all in the name of protecting human "dignity".

And when we look at this larger principle, it becomes clear that it is not licit for a anyone, particularly a Catholic, to call himself pro-life while supporting (either explicitly or by a failure to condemn) torture, capital punishment, and unjust war. For in the end, the belief in which this hypocrisy is rooted– the belief that victims of such atrocities are “less innocent” than victims of the atrocity that is abortion–is simply not valid.

Once again, "innocence" is used but equivocally. Does anyone "deserve" God's mercy, strictly speaking? No. Should we be merciful to those who have injured us, in certain situations? Probably. But that does not mean that God's mercy overrides the demands of justice, or redefines the notion of justice.

Poor reasoning once again at work at that blog.

God's Answer to the World

This post was begun on June 15, 2009, but it is only now that I have found some links to go with it.
Gabriela Manuela Scherer, who used to write comments at Peter Hitchens's blog, has written a book, God's Answer to the World. "Um, yeah." I'm puzzled as to why the book was able to get published. Publishers are generally aware that people are looking for spiritual writings. They just can't separate the good from the bad. Her comments at PH's blog left me with a bad impression--she could express her thoughts, but the content and the reasoning were lacking.

It turns out that Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd allows authors to "self-publish." That might explain things...

Gareth Southwell of the Philosophy Online Forum will be reviewing the book...

Socialist statists are still with us

The limits of eco-localism: Scale, strategy, socialism (PDF) (from EB)
by Gregory Albo

...The following critique of eco-localism and its conceptualization of a transition to a sustainable economy encompasses five dimensions: (a) the effectiveness of prices for transmitting ecologically sustainable decisions for place-based regulation; (b) the limits of technical and organizational change - apart from issues of distribution and social relations - as a solution to eco­logical problems; (c) the coordinative and ecological failures of bioregional and community-based economic alternatives; (d) the issue of whether all supra-local scales are ecologically perverse; and (e) the scale and role of de­mocracy in any ecological transition that is socially just.

...Political organization also makes more widely accessible - both in knowl­edge and active solidarity - the class struggles of one place with those of other places, thereby accomplishing in practice what conceptual abstraction allows in theory. But it does so in a structured way, so that political mobiliza­tion, reflection, debate and learning can move fluidly across scales. Political organization allows a depth to strategic thinking and action in a way that international justice fairs, although they can be remarkably open spaces for cross-sectoral dialogue, cannot. The internet can generate fantastical amounts of global e-mail information and outrage but this can rarely be backed up, however much it is used to project an organic spontaneity onto the multi­tude, with social mobilization. A developing political capacity is necessary to translate local militancy into wider demands and socio-ecological pro­grammes at other territorial scales of democracy and ecological sustainability.

...The eco-socialist political challenge is to connect particular local struggles, generalize them, and link them to a universal project of socio-ecological transformation, against the universalization of neoliberalism and capitalist markets as the regulators of nature and society.

The politics of eco-localism have been, in a sense, quite the opposite of the agenda just sketched here. Eco-localism projects the local as an ideal scale and conceives communitarian eco-utopias in a politics that is individualiz­ing and particularizing. Under neoliberalism, eco-localism has evolved into a practical attempt to alter individual market behaviours, and to disconnect and internalize local ecologies and communities from wider struggles and political ambitions.

But there is no reason to support, and every reason to op­pose, any suggestion that the national and the global are on a scale that is any less human and practical than the local. This is not to deny the importance of the local in anti-neoliberal politics; nor the importance of the question of appropriate scale for post-capitalist societies. It is to insist, however, that local socio-ecological struggles cannot be delinked from - and are indeed always potentially representative of - universal projects of transcending capitalism on a world scale.