North Western Winds

Scruton and Sartre The National Post yesterday published a lengthy essay by English writer and philosopher Roger Scruton on Jean-Paul Sartre, who was born 100 years ago this June 21 st . Scruton, who I enjoy a lot, does a good job of bringing pompous and bombastic Sartre into the light of day, showing him for the fraudulent narcissist and scoundrel that he no doubt was. If I had written this piece, the word genius would appear in scare quotes, but Scruton is perhaps more subtle his use of the scalpel than yours truly. This article originally appeared in The Spectator . Scruton opens by summarizing what Sartre is best remembered for - claiming to be cut off from anything and everything; for anti-bourgeois rhetoric that is cloyingly bourgeois itself. If Sartre ever grasped the irony of this position, he seems to have kept that knowledge to himself. Writes Scruton: It is fair to say that Sartre's anti-bourgeois rhetoric changed the language and the agenda of post-war French philo...

U.K. bloggers Reading blogs from far off locales is always interesting and on day like today it really drives home the interconnectedness of the world we live in. Blogger Bull Moose suggests any blog with sympathy for the UK post a union jack . If you haven't read a blog from the UK today, here's some to get you started. Europhobia has a live chronicle of events , as does Tim Worstall . Blimpish offers two posts on the matter . Pictures are available here . Praise of Folly quotes Winston Churchill. Can you even begin to imagine Paul Martin holding a machine gun? Finally, as usual, Belmont Club has good analysis of events like this, helping to make a bit of sense of it all. What do you do with people like this ?

Some Federal MPs who voted for SSM have been denied communion . Wouldn't you just know it? They're shocked. Hurt. Angry too. A complete list of catholic MPs who voted yes to C-38 is here . Greg points out that they have not all been denied yet . Two bloggers have given very good responses thus far - Angry in the Great White North , and John the Mad . They've got it pretty well covered and I don't see a need to add anything much. Well, maybe just this: I don't see how these MPs can spin this as 'look what they did to us.' What would happen was as clear as day . This article contains snips from commentary from my own Bishop . The MPs actions brought this about and no amount of lying will change that. In fact, the two quoted in the article were given about as much leeway as could be given (and maybe more). They persisted and got a response. Quelle Surprise . My guess is that the somebody somewhere is going to sue, claiming that they have a 'right' to ...

Mark Steyn poiting to what a gem of a blog Small Dead Animals is, and the launch of this promising looking blog - Intellectuelle - has got me wanting to highlight some of the blogs by women that I read. I'll admit, most of what I read is written by men, but there are women bloggers who are not to be missed , including: Church of the Masses - Barb Nicolosi is a Catholic who works in Hollywood Irish Law - Irish Law is a law student and a Catholic attending Ohio State. A favourite! The Anchoress Dawn Eden's Dawn Patrol - Dawn is a copy editor for a NY newspaper ( not the old grey lady) True Grit Relapsed Catholic - there's always something going on here... Rantastic - Tellin' it like it is from the province of Alberta Amy Wellborn - published Author Happy Catholic - a family blog that's always interesting Wait, there's one more... it's... um... oh yeah, this one . What's happened to Scattershot ? I hope she's just moved and not give...

You scored as Roman Catholic . You are Roman Catholic. Church tradition and ecclesial authority are hugely important, and the most important part of worship for you is mass. As the Mother of God, Mary is important in your theology, and as the communion of saints includes the living and the dead, you can also ask the saints to intercede for you. Roman Catholic 100% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 75% Neo orthodox 75% Classical Liberal 61% Emergent/Postmodern 46% Modern Liberal 36% Reformed Evangelical 32% Charismatic/Pentecostal 18% Fundamentalist 14% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

Blogger John Hawkins has an interview with Mark Steyn and Steyn, as fate would have it, has lots of things to say. Things worth, I dunno, reading in a conservative daily. Perhaps? Hmm? John Hawkins : In your opinion, why is it that Europe has become so much more secular than the United States, where Christianity is still strong? Mark Steyn : The short answer is separation of church and state - and I use that phrase as it was intended to be used: The founders’ distaste for "establishment of religion" simply means that they didn't want President Washington also serving as head of the Church Of America and the Archbishop of Virginia sitting in the Unites States Senate - as to this day the Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church Of England and the Archbishop of York sits in the House Of Lords. Most European countries either had de jure state churches, like England, or de facto ones, like Catholic Italy. One consequence of that is the lack of portability of faith: in Ameri...

Objective v. neutral There is an interesting read to be had here . The author is J. Budziszewski, a teacher at University of Texas in Austin. Many educators believe that the right way to handle issues of conscience is to be neutral among competing convictions. I disagree, because there is no such thing as neutrality. As Joseph Boyle has observed, any ground on which conflicts between moral perspectives can be arbitrated “will in fact be some moral perspective and the illusion that it is neutral will have the effect of disregarding [some] moral views.” (Joseph Boyle, “A Catholic Perspective on Morality and the Law,” Journal of Law and Religion 1 (1983) 233-34) To put this another way, neutralism is merely bad-faith authoritarianism . It is a dishonest way of advancing a moral view by pretending to have no moral view. The question of neutrality has been profoundly obscured by the mistake of confusing neutrality with objectivity. A most interesting point is that this mistake is made by...

Live 8 Mark Steyn on the vapidity of pop stars , the zombies who follow them, and the rest who really care mostly about us knowing how much they care... and about how very trendy they are. as Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd put it: "I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the Third World. It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations." No, it's not. It's no more crazy than Linda McCartney giving such a paltry percentage of her estate - ie, 0 per cent - to Gordon Brown [Britain's finance minsiter]. And, while Britain may be a Bananarama republic, it's not yet the full-blown thing. Africa is a hard place to help. I had a letter from a reader the other day who works with a small Canadian charity in West Africa. They bought a 14-year-old SUV for 1,500 Canadian dollars to ferry food and supplies to the school they run in a rural vi...

You scored as Yoda . Yoda 67% Clone Trooper 47% Anakin Skywalker 44% Mace Windu 44% Darth Vader 42% Chewbacca 42% Obi Wan Kenobi 33% Padme Amidala 31% C-3PO 28% R2-D2 25% Emperor Palpatine 17% General Grievous 17% Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

R Koons has an interesting post at Right Reason , in which he makes a point that I can't seem to make often enough. His topic is conservatives reproducing via biology and liberals reproducing via communications media, and how this affects worldview and future prospects. Koons writes: which worldview is more likely to represent cognitive attunement to reality: the viewpoint of those most directly involved in the indispensable processes of human life -- making and selling things, raising and nurturing children - or the viewpoint of those whose business consists primarily in simply talking to each another, whose livelihood depends entirely on the autonomous assessment of their peers? In the first case, the constraints of reality ensure that thought cannot deviate too far from the truth, since success in supporting and raising viable and competent human beings depends on genuine knowledge of human nature and the natural environment. In the second case, there is nothing to prevent the ...

A gin-swilling blasphemer, mystical and private Trevor Lautens used be a columnist in the Vancouver Sun when I was a kid. I used to deliver it door to door back when it was still an afternoon paper (back when there still was such a thing). The Western Standard has reprinted his Canada Day column for this year. Reading it over reminds me why I always liked him. It reminds me also of how my grade eleven English teacher wrinkled his face when I told him that. Lautens concludes the column with this: Dismiss all this as an old man's grumbling if it makes you feel better -- or the mutterings of one who confuses happier times with his youthful self, an argument I grant has some merit. But, when not in danger of being overheard, people of my generation agree with me that it's not just rosy nostalgia for youth. Objectively, life in Canada really was better before the Hippies and the Me Generation and Generation X, and even, amazingly, human rights commissions and liberal judges ...

Thread preservation and commentary in which I will attempt to alienate everyone I'm happy to have had two readers - Jonathan and The Holy Fool - engage in a terrific discussion of the merits of SSM. Since Haloscan will eventually delete all their work, I'm posting it here in order to preserve it. If you haven't already, I encourage you to read it over. They do a fine job of outlining their views, smartly and civilly. Reading it over, I am of the opinion that Jonathan's view best describes why we are at the point that we are at. That is to say, his view explains the actions of a lot of people who know nothing of his Gnostic faith but unwittingly find themselves holding bits and pieces of it. To no one's surprise, my own views are in line with The Fool's, and also with a new blogger I discovered just today: Dreadnought . I have added a few more comments and observations of my own view at the end of this post. Here, now, is the preserved thread. In places...

C.S. Lewis and The Green Book Delcan's post about a book he's plumbing at the moment brought to my mind C.S. Lewis' short little book, The Abolition of Man . Lewis wrote it as a response to a modern English primer for school children. Modern, in this case, is the early 1940's. His insights are good and because the book is so short, I'm always recommending it to people when I suspect they are being taken up with the sort of ideas in what Lewis called The Green Book (in an effort to avoid embarassing the authors). This post is something of a continuation of my comments on Delcan's thread today. What Lewis calls 'The Tao' can be likened to what a Catholic would call the Natural Law and Lewis himself points out that he uses the eastern term in an effort to point to the universality of that which he speaks. From The Abolition of Man : This conception in all it's forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth r...

Still on the subject of the Liberal Party's folly , here is something from C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man : [Reformers] will be found to hold, with complete uncritical enthusiasm, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated [persons] of the professional classes. Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values; about the values current in their own thought they are not nearly sceptical enough. And this phenomenon is very usual. A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional or (as they would say) 'sentimental' values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. That brings me to a post at The Western Standard that I'd like to echo: What will the Conservatives do once same-sex marriage is law? Will they go so far as to actually fight to have it repealed? After all, it's one thing to oppose the granting of a "...

In light of the square-circle Canada seems set to pass very soon , here's a link to an interesting interview with Jim Hughes , president of the Canadian national pro-life organization, Campaign Life Coalition (CLC). You'll never read this in the Globe and Mail , and rarely will it be heard in National Post . Q: It's astonishing that Prime Ministers Trudeau, Turner, Mulroney, Clark, Chretien and now Martin , all Catholics and most from Quebec, have all, in varying degrees, supported the these radical social changes. How do you account for this? A: Well, I cannot account for it. I hear people saying that the problems occurred on the Catholic side after Vatican II, but in reality the problems occurred and were created by people, such as those prime ministers, who attended Latin Mass, people who were brought up on the Baltimore Catechism learning the truths of the faith by rote. Those are the people who were the architects of all of this stuff. They've rejected their fait...

I've been memed again. This once was started by James Bow , and the tag that got me was from Greg at Sinister Thoughts . The way this works is that I name three people with whom I disagree a lot, and then I find something to admire about them. As I understand it, I'm not limited to other bloggers on my three disagreeables. I am planning to use bloggers, however, because the truth is that I have very little to say about, for example, the leaders of any Canadian party other than the CPC. Now, that hardly means I think Steven Harper and the CPC are the best thing that ever was - although I do like Harper, even with some some admitted faults. I don't have grand, overarching aims for my government. I'm a steady as she goes, kind of guy, and that I think is best represented by the CPC and by no one else, if I'm being honest. I don't try to achieve my personal ragnarok through Federalism. The Liberals, as much as I utterly loathe their current leader and this current ...

This article by Robert P. George reads like a preview of his book, The Clash of Orthodoxies . It should be good reading for anyone who thinks all of religion is defended only by claims to divine command, or "revelation." Yeah, that might cover some of the folks with "hidden agenda" on their tongue whenever the CPC is mentioned. George sets out to take on The Myth: Orthodox secularism promotes the myth that there is only one basis for disbelieving its tenets: namely, the claim that God has revealed propositions contrary to these tenets. Most orthodox secularists would have us believe that their positions are fully and decisively vindicated by reason and therefore can be judged to have been displaced only on the basis of irrational or, at least, nonrational faith. They assert that they have the reasonable position; any claims to the contrary must be based on unreasoned faith. Secularists are in favor of a "religious freedom" that allows everyone to believ...

It's no secret that David Warren is - by far - my favourite newspaper columnist in Canada. Cosh and Coyne can be fun or interesting but perhaps not both at once. Steyn is funny and accurate but sometimes a wee bit too rapid fire for my tastes. Warren also adds levels of maturity and depth that are remarkable in someone who works in the go go world of modern media. Here are snippets from three of his most recent columns, proof that his short rest served him well. From " In Praise of Slow ": Not everything done fast is a mistake. There are flukes. There are geniuses who move at speed with a kind of perfect pitch in whatever form of music they are making. Such people will never be statistically significant. More familiar is the phenomenon of El Thicko moving at speed, to legislate something in the long train from social assistance to no-fault divorce” to “same-sex marriage” -- with a million arbitrary and ill-considered acts of government regulation in between (most de...

There is a terrific post here . It doesn't lend itself to being quoted so all I can do is say it's worth it. Faith is a struggle. It means looking the world square in the eye; all the blood, all the sickness, all the insanity. There is a type of Christian who gives the air of being above, or perhaps beyond all of that. Maybe the turmoil is simply too personal to share, or maybe they feel they can't do it justice. Or maybe there's a bit of pride involved. I think the job of being credible in our conversation with others who don't share the faith is aided by a bit of candour. If we suggest that the world is more spit and shine than it is, who can blame them for thinking that we are loopy dreamers? Dryness does happen. With perseverance it can propel us forward. It can do that, but it isn't easy. ***** For a much funnier story, try this . Thanks to Francis Poretto for both links.

One summer afternoon in the year 1054, as a service was about to begin in the Church of the Holy Wisdom' (Hagia Sophia) at Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert and two other legates of the Pope entered the building and made their way up to the sanctuary. They had not come to pray. They placed a Bull of Excommunication upon the altar and marched out once more. As he passed through the western door, the Cardinal shook the dust from his feet with the words: 'Let God look and judge.' A deacon ran out after him in great distress and begged him to take back the Bull. Humbert refused; and it was dropped in the street. It is this incident which has conventionally been taken to mark the beginning of the great schism between the Orthodox east and the Latin west. So begins an interesting history of the first Christian schism at this site for Orthodox Christians (Orthodox in this case meaning the Eastern Orthodox Church). It's interesting to see this story from another angle. One ca...