How is it, we may ask ourselves, sexuality is widely deemed something fluid, unless its fluidity runs towards heterosexuality, and then all of a sudden sexuality becomes a binary phenomenon that cannot undergo any change?
As I knelt to pray my rosary before the Blessed Sacrament, I was struck by the astonishing confidence required to build Sacré-Cœur. In 1789, France, the Church’s eldest daughter, declared herself no longer a disciple of Jesus Christ but an apostate.
The life of the mind is fundamentally dangerous when divorced from the world. Indeed, intellectuals have a moral duty to seek out ways of encountering reality—the thing out there—if they are to avoid becoming a tremendous nuisance to others, a trait so common among their kind.
I have dedicated much of my life to studying the great philosophers and scholars of our civilisation, but from none have I learned as much about true human flourishing as I have from the peasant girl of Nettuno.
As the Season has drawn to a close, I have been reflecting on the meaning of hunting. Some hunts this Season have transported me into a timeless experience into which, no doubt, many hunting people have been taken.
The most terrible thing about a culture that treats children as if they are the most important people is that the children are not only unlikeable, but they are unhappy.
We need stories. It is not enough to have a conception of virtue; we need to witness a virtuous person. It is not enough to know truths; we need truths embodied, for embodied are we.
My ‘microaggression’ was met with what might be deemed a ‘macroaggression.’ Whereas I was seeking no confrontation and sought not to make her or anyone else feel uncomfortable, she confronted me directly, specifically to make me feel uncomfortable—and she succeeded.
Catholics are surrounded by the upside-down chatter of ecclesiastical newspeak, and it is here to stay, that is, until a rediscovery that the Church derives her purpose from the Great Commission—the mandate to make disciples of all nations, and this cannot be substituted.
What Augustine witnessed in his friend—that interior opposition between fidelity to the peace of Christ and addiction to violence—Joseph de Maistre presented at the societal level. Why was it that, prior to the arrival of Christianity, every culture practiced sacrifice, including human sacrifice? The reason, for Maistre, was that every society was seeking in nature what could only come by supernatural intervention.
It seems that both the architects of the Brave New World and the serfs who live in it actually fear the state of nature found in the Rousseauian paradise. In fact, we have a profound aversion to nature. Rather than acting like animals, we feel a kind of queasiness not only when we witness the more animal-side of human life, but even when we witness animals acting like animals.
The Midwit Meme claims that the uneducated and the very educated are natural allies. The real problem is found with those towards the centre of the spectrum, the slightly educated lot.
We are, then, in a rather odd situation. It seems that conspiracies are deemed believable when they arise in fiction. It also seems that conspiracies are thought to have really happened, and are considered an essential component in even a superficial understanding of history. But anyone who suggests that we may be in the grips of a conspiracy now is a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ a pejorative term that denotes a person who does not assent to all he is told by mainstream media outlets.
Establishing anew the cause of nationhood by situating its defence in the moral life of its members was one of Scruton’s achievements. The conservative movement of the future would do well to concentrate on this facet of his philosophy.