Their Definition of Virtue Is Inadequate

Last Thursday, @ProfAbela, Joseph E. Capizzi, Father Gregory Pine, O.P., and @AndrewMYuengert joined the IHE and @TheBuschSchool to discuss “Catholic Social Teaching in Practice.”

Watch the recording here: https://t.co/pjl4LDssn8 pic.twitter.com/dSBvUrqirj

— IHE (@HumanEcologyCUA) February 27, 2024

MacIntyre's After Virtue

I’m really loving this podcast episode about MacIntyre’s After Virtue. They go into some academic sociology about whether and why MacIntyre is a bit marginalized... And also go through the basic points of the book https://t.co/6y1jYqC7ey pic.twitter.com/P9qvqCuY4r

— Meekaale Brockman (@meekaale) April 17, 2021

Patterson Responds to Pinkoski

Law&Liberty: A Strawman and a Scotsman Walk into the Café de Flore by James M. Patterson

James Patterson @McGillPatterson responds to Pinkoski in the Integralism Debates: Part 2 https://t.co/DBeJeRiMBZ

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 11, 2020

Patterson thought it necessary to rebut Pinkoski to show that his brief summary does not implicate him in being historically ignorant of the various movements which he mentioned. Is Patterson accurate in his recounting that part of European history? If he isn't, someone will probably write a response to correct him.

As for the optics of Latin integralists being associated with Franco and thus "fascism," is Patterson really doing integralists (or neo-integralists as he labels them) justice? Or is he just trying to smear them, though not as going as far as a SJW? Did Franco really carry out an integralist program with respect to the promotion of Roman Catholicism in Spain? I am thinking that he didn't go far enough in that respect to satisfy integralists. If there was punishment of apostates and heretics by the Spanish state under Franco, someone please provide a reference.

As to the European anti-Republican tradition, readers of Law & Liberty may need his remediation; unfortunately, I have suffered through the theurgical revenge fantasies of Joseph de Maistre, the dull and repetitious condemnations of Proudhon by Juan Donoso Cortés, the aforementioned bilious and bottomless Jew-hatred of Maurras, and the real genius of Carl Schmitt deranged by his reverence for an anti-Christ. What made these figures anti-republican was their confusion of lack of republican virtue in the nations they studied—France, Spain, and Germany—with the nature of republican government itself. Tocqueville explained this problem in The Ancient Regime, as I mentioned in my original essay.

Should that tradition be styled "anti-Republican" or "anti-liberal" or even "anti-democratic"? If they were anti-Republican, could it be that they didn't think a republican form of government was possible for their countries? Perhaps they approved of republican government in the abstract.


Other than his own personal example of what is parish life, which I have already addressed, if briefly, in my previous post, Patterson relies upon the 20th ce participation of American Catholics in the system (or the state) and in ecclesial and civil organizations as evidence of republican virtue and the training of American Catholics in republican virtue. In that previous essay, he writes:

In the absence of those institutions that had once made America a place of deep faith and committed to liberty, these young men have had recourse to the Internet and attach themselves to the sublime historical experience of sacramental kingship, Iberian Falangism, or straight-up fascism supported by the general ideas purveyed by Vermeule and the like.

If those institutions no longer exist, then how are his opponents to be trained in republican virtue? Parish life isn't enough. And I would argue that the historical institutions which he cites were not sufficient either, as they failed to stop the sort of moral and political decay that the United States has fallen into.Any group or organization that actually inculcated true Republican virtue would be viewed as a threat by the state and stopped, either by the state or its proxies or allies.

James M. Patterson on Roman Catholic Integralism

After Republican Virtue

Too much reliance on Tocqueville for a description and explanation of republican virtues in early America in this essay? But typical of a certain kind of American conservative.

Or tldr?

In the end, this is all integralism really is. It is an internet aesthetic of mostly young men alienated from the public life and consumed with the libido dominandi. In the absence of those institutions that had once made America a place of deep faith and committed to liberty, these young men have had recourse to the Internet and attach themselves to the sublime historical experience of sacramental kingship, Iberian Falangism, or straight-up fascism supported by the general ideas purveyed by Vermeule and the like. The only alternative is for the Church to train and appoint new bishops committed to participating in public life with their congregations and raising them up in the republican virtue that so defined American Catholicism.

The author is wrong to identify some of friendship or social virtue as "republican virtue." Republican virtue will include friendship and the social virtues, but it is more than those two, and his example of parish life doesn't even come close to giving a full illustration of what republican virtue involves and requires. He is correct to criticze the Latin integralists but he is ignorant of his own precarious situation vis-a-vis the state.

Not "Romantics" at Heart?

What would St. Maximos the Confessor and others who think like him of the sadness manifested by lovers who have to part from one another? Sinful? Not fully continent with respect to their emotions, like children, and unseemly in their tears? Can reason permit the expression of emotion out as a sign of how deeply united emotion is to love? Can we say that certain Christian models of the divisions of the soul are too "stoic"? Do we need to concern ourselves so much with the emotions per se, or with their healing and how they are united to agape?

A MV for 孫露: 『離別的車站』 coupled with clips from the Korean Movie, The Classic.

Keunwoo Kwon Reviews Justice as a Virtue

 Reading Religion

While this book is an excellent work crafted by a first-rate scholar, this reader has a minor quibble about an omission rather than a commission. In this volume Porter does not address the issue of “burdened virtue” raised by Lisa Tessman in her 2005 Burdened Virtues (Oxford University Press). Since Porter discusses with nuance the complicated relationship between justice and eudaemonia in chapter 5, it is a little bit of a surprise that Tessman’s well-noted challenge to the Aristotelian moral tradition is entirely absent in this chapter. To what extent would Aquinas acknowledge the contingent connection between virtue and flourishing? Is it legitimate to see the virtue of justice as a mean in an Aristotelian sense, given that there seems to be no mean for an intense sensitivity to others’ suffering in this tragic world? Would Aquinas’s emphasis on supernatural grace and his eschatology based upon the Exitus-Reditus framework somehow help resolve this tension? These questions deserve a serious response from Porter, especially when her work implicitly touches upon the issues treated with care by Tessman.

From 2017: Stephen Brock - "Aquinas and the Life of the Mind"

Dominican Foundation: The Thomistic Institute at NYU

I would hope a video or podcast is forthcoming.

John Haldane, "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life"