Mar 07 2010
A marvelous piece on the morality behind music and the problem with much of pop music, from Roger Scruton. Excerpt: “The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.†So wrote Plato in The Republic (4.424c). And Plato is famous for having given what [...]
Oct 18 2009
Here’s a shocker: Public finance is a matter of morality. The most fundamental currency when we engage in international finance and inter-temporal trade is our word. With our money we make and trade in promises. The systems constituting America’s debt market are not trading in money per se, but legal contracts. Options are legal contracts [...]
Oct 14 2009
A combination of things has had me thinking about aesthetics and beauty of late. First was my summer obsession (which has only been sidelined until I finish the two 50-page papers I’ve to do before January) with the relationship between musical aesthetics and theology. Then, more recently, I had a late night discussion with Nathan [...]
Sep 27 2009
Take Allan Bloom’s analysis of modern music, dip it in Christianity, and enjoy: We can recall the Dionysiac type of religion and its music, which Plato discussed on the basis of his religious and philosophical views. In many forms of religion, music is associated with frenzy and ecstasy. The free expansion of human existence, toward [...]
Jul 13 2009
Over at Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deneen has posted the two parts (1 and 2) of a lecture he gave a couple years ago titled, “The Alternative Tradition in America.” I’m posting it below in its entirety as a perfect and poignant example of my political and social views. Enjoy.
Jul 08 2009
I’m finally catching up reading all the back-and-froth between the Front Porch Republicans and the Post Modern Conservatives. For the record, I’m on the FPR side, while co-blogger Nathan [thinks he] is on the PoMoCon side. If I can scrounge up the time, I might post some thoughts on the matter later. For now, reading [...]
Jun 04 2009
From a fantastic piece on Burke’s intellectual fatherhood of conservatism: Third-and this subtends and modifies the two principles above-Burke is not really a Whig in a particular sense. Unlike so many of his contemporaries and antecedents (one thinks of John Locke), Burke sincerely and consequentially holds that belief in the Christian God precedes and informs [...]
May 04 2009
An interview with Jean Bethke-Elshtain, one of my favorite professors from UofC, on the works and thought of Vaclav Havel: So we have in a sense politicized the private and privatized the political, and it’s very hard for us to think about what is of authentically public concern, about what concerns all of us in [...]
Feb 12 2009
An argument for an originalist/intent of the founders reading of the Constitution: View it as a will. When we write a will, we do it so that we may control what others, in the future, do with the product of our life that we leave behind. We dictate how the gains we’ve produced are to [...]
Jul 20 2008
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he cites the requirement of leisure for the good life, the life of contemplation and virtue. Since then various and sundry scholars have further explored this idea, examining the relationship between a life of abundant means and the opportunity for magnanimity of thought and deed. William F. Buckley may be the [...]
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Protestant Pontifications
(CC) 2010