Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Now that New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has suspended open firearm carry laws in certain places as a "public health emergency," the whole concept of the suspension of rights under our constitutional system comes up. One case that comes up regarding that is Ex Parte Milligan, which dates from the Civil War. During the …
Continue reading "Ex Parte Milligan, Sam Ervin and the Governor of New Mexico"
Yes, he does: Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who popularized beach bum soft rock with the escapist Caribbean-flavored song “Margaritaville” and turned that celebration of loafing into a billion-dollar empire of restaurants, resorts and frozen concoctions, has died. He was 76. In the process of that famous song he showed a better grasp of responsibility than many …
Recently the North American Anglican took up the issue (quite ably I might add) of the Immaculate Conception. This implies that there are Anglicans out there who actually believe that the Blessed Mother was in fact immaculately conceived, i.e., conceived without sin. As the NAA points out, the church's witness to this is not univocal, …
Continue reading "Is There No End to This Madness? Anglicans and the Immaculate Conception"
The controversy continues: One following the news in the Anglican Communion will know of the steady stream of persons, including clergy, who have moved to Roman Catholicism or to Eastern Orthodoxy. Fr. Alexander Wilgus thinks we have grossly misunderstood the phenomenon’s roots. The moves do not expose a weak self-understanding and feeble self-confidence in Anglicanism’s Protestant roots—traits …
Continue reading "Chasing That Elusive Creature Called “Catholicity” in Anglicanism"
That's been the underlying assumption behind the lament of the way academia has gone: Today, college degrees are utilitarian documents used to secure good jobs. American workism undermines the traditional purposes of higher education, things like the pursuit of knowledge and the development of virtue. John Henry Newman described the goal of a college education …
Recently I did a "link post" to The shadow of Pax Romana —Unherd. It's an interview with Tom Holland about "Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires." In it Holland makes an interesting statement the likes of which one doesn't see very often: I think that the thing that enables people …
I'm surprised that someone would put it this plainly, but they did: In practice, this means replacing our current elites in government, the media, and universities with a class of “self-conscious aristoi.” This new elite will “secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people.” More specifically, this new elite will abolish the …
Continue reading "Changing Our Elites is Where We Start. But From There…"
https://ifphc.wordpress.com/2023/08/08/gustav-h-schmidt-describes-the-horror-of-soviet-persecution-of-pentecostals-in-the-1930s-2/ In 1988, my own church took in 24 Ukrainian Pentecostals for resettlement in the U.S. (Well, they were a mixture of Ukrainians and Russians, but they were from the Ukraine, southwest of Kiev.) It was one of those experiences that doesn't happen often in life. We got to know people who had endured this …
There's plenty of angst: I am happy to announce that the parish vote has reached a quorum with more than an 80% majority in favor of disaffiliation with the Anglican Church in North America and pursuing affiliation with the Episcopal Church with the Diocese of Texas. The last month has been intense for all of …
Positive Infinity 