Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

I have an additional piece on the topic up at Catholic World Report. The basic point is extra ecclesiam nulla subsidiaritas. You’re not going to get subsidiarity apart from an understanding of the world that doesn’t seem to exist in secular public thought today.

That’s the issue considered in my latest column at Catholic World Report. The big question today is whether the expression means much of anything.

That’s the original title of my latest piece at Crisis Magazine. It says that the dispute between progressive and traditionalist Catholics is a dispute over whether the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church has an essential nature.

Crisis has published the second part of my two-part piece on inclusiveness.

That’s the topic of my latest column at Catholic World Report.

Crisis Magazine has published the first part of a two-part piece on inclusiveness that gives a thumbnail sketch of the argument of my recent book on the topic.

That’s the subject of my most recent piece at Crisis Magazine.

That’s the title of my latest column at Catholic World Report. It tells us that Christendom is always with us.

A common claim among dissatisfied men is that American women are the worst. European women, it is said, are are more feminine, less self-centered, and less concerned with their careers than their American counterparts.

The differences between the sexes I discussed a couple of posts ago come out in the differing uses of “starter husband” and “starter wife.”

Changes in sexual mores resulting from the lesser practical importance of marriage in a radically commercialized and bureaucratized society make the situation described in the last post quite a bit worse.

The single most suggestive thing I’ve read about the sexes is this press release from some neurologists. Basically, it says that intelligence in men mostly matches up with gray matter in the brain and intelligence in women with white matter. So when men and women feel the uncontrollable urge to put the word “brain” in quotation marks when speaking about the opposite sex there’s something to it.

Within living memory it was possible to talk about the sexes in an intelligent and civilized way. As proof here are some pages from The Viking Book of Aphorisms, edited by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger. The collection was published in 1962, the year before sex was invented (according to Philip Larkin). It’s hard to imagine it could have come out much later than that.

What’s with the sexes these days?

Questions about sex and the sexes are never really answerable, but people do notice things, and some of them seem illuminating, so an occasional comment is in order.

A correspondent referred me to a post by a “progressive Christian” blogger as a sign of a new frontier in inclusiveness. The post picked up on another blogger’s claim that “the self is inherently violent.” The example used was blogging, which involves self-assertion that comes at the expense of other bloggers.

That’s the topic of my latest piece at Crisis Magazine.

Not quite, but I do have a new column up at Catholic World Report on Sex and the Public Order.

The following review of Robert P. George’s Conscience and Its Enemies appeared in the October 2013 Chronicles:

There have been a couple more reviews by bloggers of my new book Against Inclusiveness, one by Kidist Asrat at her site Reclaiming Beauty and one by Jeff Culbreath at the group blog What’s Wrong with the World.

For some reason people find my new piece at Crisis optimistic. I’d say rather that it refuses to be pessimistic: disaster is never absolute, it doesn’t last forever, and it may not go as far as feared, so don’t give up.