Category: Activism and Quietism
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SCOTUS and Benedict
In the wake of recent events, Rod Dreher renews his call for the Benedict Option: It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the…
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The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist
An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when…
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Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options
Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which…
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The Retreat into the Private Life
When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life. Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant…
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Sick of Political Acrimony, Reader Goes on ‘News Fast’
This from reader K. W. with my comments in blue: I am taking a break from all news and social media. I will be keeping up with your blog, however, as your most recent treatment on the Incarnation is intriguing. I'm taking a break because I'm tired of all of the vehemence being spewed out…
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A Part-Time Monk’s Solution to Suggestibility
We are too open to social suggestions. We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment. They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say. 'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people. This is the way…
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Call for Vapors: Dead Smokers’ Society to Meet in January in Scottsdale
Mike V. writes, I am hosting the first meeting of The Dead Smokers Society on Monday, January 13th, from 10 a.m. to noon at the stoplight at Scottsdale Community College. I have invited all of my friends to smoke and vape with me on the street on the first day of school. This could be…
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Don’t Retreat into Your Private Life
The temptation is great. If you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left. Plenty more on this topic in the Activism and Quietism category.
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Why Not Stick to Philosophy?
I ask myself this question. Why not stick to one's stoa and cultivate one's specialist garden in peace and quiet, neither involving oneself in, nor forming opinions about, the wider world of politics and strife? Why risk one's ataraxia in the noxious arena of contention? Why not remain within the serene precincts of theoria? For…
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Bread, Circuses, and Decline
This from an English reader commenting on my owl of Minerva post: America's fondness for bread and circuses is by no means singular and all may be well for a while, as Theodore Dalrymple observed, at least as long as the bread holds out. Yet the twilight quickly becomes darkness and after the owl of…
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Chris Mathews, Unhinged, Shamelessly Plays Race Card
Does Mathews really believe what he says here? If he does then he is mentally unhinged. I'll assume he's unhinged just to be charitable. If he doesn't believe what he says, then he is a scumbag. But he seems like a nice guy! Note also the psychological projection. Unwilling or unable to face the hatred…
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The Retreat Into the Private Life
When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life. Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant…
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The Quietist on the Delights of Escapism
There are the undeniable and readily accessible delights of escapism into scholarship, and science, and research and inquiry of all sorts. When 'reality' becomes too much to bear, what is wrong with retreating into an ivory tower? Who can rightfully begrude us our right to peace and quiet and happiness? You say that there are…