Author: Tim

• Healthcare is Frankenstein

  Healthcare is an almost unique combination: once a technology is invented, it must be used.  The physician has no morally acceptable — or legally tenable — ground upon which to say no.   So, every available technology must be offered to every patient.   

• All. Governments. Will. Torture.

  No democratic state will take a course that opposes the moral consensus of her people.  This may seem like a tautology to you, but a surprising number of people — and pundits — think that one function of the apparatus of policy is to keep a country on a certain moral track, which it might…

• Cultural Diversity As Powder Keg

  There are substances that cannot mingle without exploding.   There are forces that cannot mingle but in a tornado.  Two such forces, in the Western democracies, are so-called cultural diversity, and centralized governments.   These inevitably explode in violence. “Cultural diversity” is the opiate, the mantra to certain minds.   It evokes visions of rainbows.…

• Theodore Dalrymple: The False Apology Syndrome

  The habit of public apology for things for which one bears no personal responsibility changes the whole concept of a virtuous person, from one who exercises the discipline of virtue to one who expresses correct sentiment. The most virtuous person of all is he who expresses it loudest and to most people. This is a…

• The End Begins When Balancing Becomes Swapping

  When the federal treasury is large the founding premise of our system of government is gone.    The incentives reverse, like a turning tide,  and it cannot last. The original congress had limited powers and minimal money.  So they came together to vote the interests of their states, all of whom wanted the central government…

• Isaac’s testimony

  Out of the blue he turned to me and said: “Daddy, yesterday in church I read the story of the Good Samaritan, and I felt Jesus enter my heart and my mind was filled with good thoughts. ” March 22, 2009

• David Bentley Hart: “…actus essendi subsistens…”

  http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/beyond-disbelief-1081 In purely theoretical terms, the question of the transcendent source of reality is an ontological—not a causal—question: not how things have come to be what they are, but how it is that things exist at all. And none of the customary post-Christian attempts to make the question of being disappear can possibly succeed: even…

• Charles Murray: “…to make observed human nature compatible with theoretical schemes…”

  But what is it that we have learned that is truly new about human nature in the 20th century? I submit that the body of even the best work consists overwhelmingly of commentary on insights first expressed centuries ago. Indeed, if I were to characterize the role of the behavioral sciences in the 20th century—and…

• We Know the Garden In the Act Of Drawing It

  The first proper object of our knowledge is the Creator.  He made it all, including my organ of knowing, and this “all” that He made is the Garden.   The entire world here below is the Garden, seen from from far away, in exile. Normally, we observe the world via reason but we do not…

• Conversation: Pericopes Shorten

  Of course our talks have gotten shorter.  And even our sentences are shorter.    Your one sentence charms my thoughts for week, and mine, yours.  This is language at home, in the garden of paradise.  Words are food. Think of the desert, and how the monks were not silent but were succinct. The cenobitic rule of…