“The culture of Western nations in which humanitarian thinking is dominant is a rentier living off the moral capital accumulated by its predecessors and giving no attention to replenishing it. When it runs out, the horrors begin in earnest . . . Humanism is a philosophy of death” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, pp. 81-82).
The Last Chapter
Never forget that you are a called out people. God is establishing a new nation among all nations, a new people among all people, and a new race of men in the midst of the old race of men. He is doing this with the intention of having this new race of men in the …
Wonder Goose
The last chapter of Schneider’s book was really interesting, and in his epilogue, where he summarized the work of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, he really got my attention. De Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital sounded really intriguing so I made a point of ordering it. Besides, he’s a South American writing on …
Christopher and Peter
Okay. Got home from work, and caught the second part of the Hitchens/Hitchens debate. Christopher posed a set of questions which he claims to have asked a lot, and also to which he claims to have heard nothing in response but the sound of crickets in the distance. His central question here was: can anyone …
A Floating Poverty Line
“Sentimentality, as we have seen, finds expression in autonomous, pragmatically based decisions on right and wrong, and in the refusal to declare absolute standards on all matters, including poverty. What sometimes seems to be an intellectual vacuity in humanitarian polemics is associated with this trait, which we may think of as the propensity to define …
A Socialist Tricycle
Schneider’s seventh chapter concentrates on four “parables of affluence,” taken from the gospel of Luke. In doing this he is tackling the central challenge to his thesis, and he is taking it head on. “All the Gospels agree that a great deal of Jesus’ teaching was on the subject of wealth, and that most of …
Look at the Warts Right
I need to explain the background of this one first. Other than the news and an occasional football game, our family has not really been a big teevee watching family. As a result, my ignorance of the world of sitcoms is nearly perfect, which led to the obvious conclusion — I need to blog about …
Just Say It
“The culture of the West, infused as it is with Christian values, is superior to any other, and all the valid charges against the West are indications that it has betrayed its own heritage. It is not superior because it is wealthy; it is wealthy because it is superior, because it believes that work is …
Ressentiment
“The twisted path from humanism’s soaring tributes in honor of the human divinity to the consequences of modern humanitarianism is best explained by the concept of ressentiment. When Nietzsche wrote his celebrated attack on Christianity, he transliterated this word from the French because he could find no German equivalent . . . When Scheler’s book …
The Font of Lasting Generosity
Schneider’s next chapter undertakes the very important task of reconciling two disparate strands of teaching in the gospels. He does well with this task too. First we find the well-known demands of an all-or-nothing discipleship. “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke …