Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

I just published a brace of pieces on that timely topic at Crisis Magazine and Catholic World Report.

My current column at Catholic World Report says that America’s a country and not a cause or creed, so there’s no reason to put Catholicism and patriotism at odds with each other. Indeed, the two go together.

I go into all that and more in my latest at Crisis Magazine.

Another correspondent asks whether I think it’s possible to be pro-gay marriage and pro-life: whether logically, rationally, ultimately, the two positions can be reconciled. She had noticed some conservatives going that way.

It seemed to me you could give multiple answers depending on how you took the question:

A correspondent forwards the following:

Current politics has lost any reasonable conception of the public good. That has to change, and changing it should be central to Catholic political activity. So says my latest piece at Catholic World Report.

My latest at Crisis Magazine. The analysis focuses on the Church and charges of “sexism” and so on, but the implications are broader.

Another piece at Catholic World Report, this one on the difficulties of “business as usual” in the face of radical and inhuman tendencies.

Current at Crisis Magazine, more comments on a topic that’s intellectually quite interesting but people don’t want to talk about. (Which means that obfuscation, sophistry, and bad faith are left an open field).

My latest piece for Catholic World Report is a sort of variation on the Crisis piece below.

I say it does, in my latest piece at Crisis Magazine, because reality matters. The line of thought would, of course, only apply to true doctrine.

[The following review appeared in the December, 2014 issue of Chronicles:]

This is a history of liberalism as it appears to an intelligent, well-informed, and thoroughly convinced English liberal who worked for many years as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. It is useful as a sympathetic exploration of the stages through which the political outlook that rules us today has advanced.

And here’s my latest at Crisis Magazine. I had no idea that something on the traditional Mass would be such clickbait.

My latest at Catholic World Report.

The following essay appears in the December, 2014 First Things:

I have another column at Catholic World Report, this one about the necessity of a settled understanding of human nature, the difficulty of establishing on in global technocratic society, and what to do about that situation.

A correspondent sent me the following passages from Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton:

My latest column at Crisis Magazine says that the Church should be very cautious in supporting secular political projects. It makes bishops feel they’re involved in something important but the ultimate point of the project is likely to be something inhuman because that’s the nature of modern political life.

[I gave the following talk at the 2014 conference of The H. L. Mencken Club.]

My column for October finally appeared at Catholic World Report. (They had been busy reporting on the late lamented or rather lamentable Synod.) It’s a sort of general account of culture war throughout the ages that notes its unavoidability.