For Archbishop Welby, confirming traditional moral teaching is not a question of truth, but of practicality and prudential policy— considerably diminishing the moral significance of his letter.
Locals, forestry experts, farmers, and ecologists all agreed that the principal problem is bad forest management, which is best countered by a return of rural life and its traditional activities, particularly extensive cattle farming. But it’s easier said than done.
As lovely as it is to see far-flung hamlets of stone houses reinhabited, it is also sometimes difficult to find in their tenuous revival a genuine re-founding of the traditional Europe of which they were originally a part.
One of the terrible features of modernity is that we measure everything by the criteria of productivity and success. But we were not made to be productive, nor to be successful, at least not as our world understands such terms. We were made to flourish.
Far from what the label suggests, humanist weddings do not free spouses to live in accordance with truth. The reconquest of freedom is at the heart of Christian marriage, which for centuries has been one of the original features and strengths of Western civilisation.
“No adult group escapes the eye of Them Before Us. It is an organization that insists that all adults—single, married, gay, and straight—all sacrifice for children. No adult gets a pass. Every adult has to do the hard things, so that children’s rights are protected.”—Katy Faust
Today we are far from understanding carnival, precisely because we live in a continuous carnival, a constant inversion of norms. But if revolution is a parody of carnival, the totalitarian control that follows is a parody of Lent—and we can already see those austere masts on the horizon.
I spent part of the Christmas Season in the American state where I spent most of my childhood: Vermont. Known today primarily for its left-wing political culture and socially progressive Washington delegation, it wasn’t always so. And the tragic story of Vermont farmer, Romaine Tenney, encapsulates the fate of the little state nearly perfectly—while serving […]
In the wake of the Anglican Church’s move to phase out the parish system, an informal group called Save the Parish is asserting the importance of local worship and of retaining sacred places set aside for devotion.
One cannot be a ‘citizen of the world,’ and the sense in which it is invoked often tends to accompany a vexed gesture meant to cast off the weight of provincialism, thick accents, and attachments.
Senior clergy persistently talk about the primacy of ‘pastoral care,’ implicitly presenting themselves as exemplars. Now they refuse to extend such care to those who want nothing more than to worship God as did their forefathers in the Faith.
Tim Stanley is often seen as a ‘moderate’ conservative, but in his new book, he argues convincingly that the moral confusion and historical amnesia of the West can be traced back to the loss of an understanding of the place of tradition in society.
