Here's an interview with Princeton's Robert George. If only more of academia was as sensible as this. Here's a snippet on marriage and why we see so many having trouble understanding it:
WORLD: Why has our conventional sense of marriage become dualistic, with marriage seen as emotional vision, a union of souls, so that what happens with bodies doesn't matter? GEORGE: It's part of a larger trend towards identifying the good or the valuable with pleasing experiences and psychological satisfactions. This helps to explain not only the decline of sexual morality in our culture, but also the widespread use of recreational drugs. Many people (including more than a few Christians) have come to view themselves as consciousnesses (or, for people who retain some level of religious self-understanding, as "souls") that inhabit bodies. Since the body is regarded as merely instrumental, rather than as part of the personal reality of the human being (considered as a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit), moral constraints of any sort on "nonharmful" drugs or "nonharmful" sexual practices of "consenting adults" seem arbitrary and even irrational. This dualistic conception of persons and their bodies underwrites the evils of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. If human beings prior to the development of self-conscious awareness in infancy, or after its loss as a result of old age or infirmity, are not yet or no longer "persons," then what is wrong with killing them when they are inconvenient to us or because their organs can be harvested for transplantation or experimentation? Hence, the erosion of respect for human life in all of its stages and conditions.In City Journal (good reading for good conservatives), Edward Fesser takes Alfred Kinsey out behind the shed and opens up a can of... well. You get the idea. Not for the weak of stomach. If you're reading Fesser and you're not sure who Lysenko was, try this Wikkipedia entry on him. Basically he was a fraudulent Soviet scientist whose phony project led to a lot of problems in Soviet agriculture. Tips for both stories go to The Conservative Philosopher. According to this story, the Nazis had primitive nuclear technology as early as 1944. It was a "dirty bomb" like the kind we hear so much about in today's terror stories. At Right Reason there is a good and brief summary of the the philosophers behind much of modern conservatism. Finally, this post was done with w.bloggar - after the missing post episode of yesterday afternoon I have new appreciation for its save feature. I tried it once before but it appeared very small when I was running at a higher resolution. Now that I've bumped it down, w.bloggar looks fine. It even has some neat features. Thanks to Andrew for the suggestion.
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