“It is from social prejudice that one learns social virtue. Metaphysical thought and reflection come later” (Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice, p. 83).
A Special Form of Naivete
“One convention has been replaced by another. When I attended a bourgeois bohemian funeral in Paris recently, it was I who stood out in my dark suit and tie—so provincial, so conventional! Everyone else looked as if he or she had just popped into the cemetery after a bit of shopping in the local grocery …
More Postmodern Hooey
“I part company with [postmodern] writers, when they reject the notion of a normative human nature or deny that we can know about such a nature . . . The Enlightenment did not invent the concept of a universal human nature or the notion of a universal moral law, nor did Immanuel Kant or St. …
Warping the Men
“The sex carnival that is college life today is also doing great damage to our sons’ characters, deforming their attitudes toward the opposite sex. I am witnessing a perceptible dissolution of manly virtue in the young men I teach” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 148).
How the Modern University Gangs Up on Women
“It is, rather, that these young men know they can force matters further because the rules and institutional safeguards under which young women once upon a time could take protective cover are gone. Let us not kid ourselves: Coed dorms and apartments work to the advantage of male sexual aggression at the expense of female …
Fog-Cutter
I have finally settled into reading Pierced for Our Transgressions, and am happy to report that it is both a necessary book and a fantastic book. It is necessary because the current zeitgeist wants to drift away from penal substitution without talking about it, and it is a fantastic book because it shows how biblical …
Whitewash for the Sepulcher
“Sentimentality is the feeble attempt of our lax and liberal culture to claim innocence where there is transgression and perversity, to ignore tragedy in the desperate endeavor to feel comfortable” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 61).
Moral Imagination
“If that is the imagination, what is the moral imagination? The eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke first coined the term in his great work Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . The moral imagination is the distinctively human power to conceive of men and women as moral beings . . . Modern …
For Good or Ill, Imagination Rules the World
“The human heart’s desires may not be holy, and the imagination born of these unholy desires may even be demonic. After all, it was the tyrant Napoleon who hauntingly declared, ‘Imagination rules the world’ . . . Where there is no real moral imagination, itself a form of vision, the people will become captives of …
Not Called Limousine Liberals for Nothing
“The first duty of the modern intellectual, wrote George Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls..’ Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that mesmerized the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them from accepting the most obvious and evident truths …