Announcement

The website has moved to http://www.theordealofconsciousness.com/

Please come and join me there.

Best,

DB.

The Arkes-Miller debate

A very interesting debate has appeared at Public Discourse following the publication of Hadley Arkes’s essay, Recasting Religious Freedom (subscription required) in the June issue of First Things, between Arkes and Robert T. Miller. The central issue involves a dispute over the best defense of religious freedom in an age shadowed by secularism. Arkes believes the best defense here, given the modern tendency to assume the beliefs of religionists are intrinsically irrational,  rests upon a positive account of the reasonableness of the views held by religionists (or non-religionists) rather than upon the sincerity with which they are held. Miller, however, argues that the views of religionists are a special case, and that we should avoid the requirement of judges inquiring into their reasonableness unless absolutely necessary.

The order of the debate is as follows:

Professor Arkes and the Law

Judging Beliefs and Shaping Laws: A Reply to Robert Miller

What Reason can Know and Government Should Legislate: A Rejoinder to Arkes

I will provide an update if Arkes responds to the rejoinder.

The Rule – A Documentary

There is a wonderful article in the City Journal, It’s Hard to be Saints in the City, on a new documentary on a preparatory school for minorities run by the Benedictines in Newark. Malanga writes:

Decades later, St. Benedict’s is still there, and its recent history is a remarkable story of educational success under extraordinarily challenging circumstances. The Rule, a documentary by Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno opening this Friday in New York and next week in Los Angeles, recounts the improbable tale of priests and brothers living under a nearly 1,500-year-old monastic code, and the Newark kids whose lives they have transformed.

The monks shape the whole learner by not only inculcating them with a great intellectual inheritance but also situating them within a community bound by obligations, to themselves, other students, teachers, and, in turn, their family:

“How do I measure success?” he asks. “You’re able to graduate St. Benedict’s, have a mortgage, deal with your marriage, deal with your family, stick it out. How do I measure success? I got a father working with his son, in his son’s life.”

Amen.

Indeed. The Rule opens this Friday, September 5, at Quad Cinemas, Manhattan, on September 12th at the Laemmle Encino, Los Angeles, and airs nationally on PBS starting September 25.

h/t: Ellen of Tasmania

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke

Anyone familiar with conservatism as an intellectual disposition should be familiar with the work of Edmund Burke. He has come to us, arguably, as the paradigmatic figure of an intellectual movement that arose in defense, not of the status quo,  but of a manner of living that was both appreciated and enjoyed that had become threatened by the revolutionary political and social movements of modernity. It is then a welcome occasion that David Bromwich should have written The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence, reviewed by David Womersley, William Byrne, and Daniel McCarthy in order to help us recollect the man and his thought anew.

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction

William Carroll, and Christopher Morrissey, both provide very good reviews of Edward Feser’s new work, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, to which Feser has warmly replied, respectively.  I have just purchased my copy and must say that the reviews are definitely hitting the mark. I heartily recommend the work, but would suggest Feser’s The Last Superstition as a helpful introduction to the themes that will be covered in detail in Scholastic Metaphysics.

Update Sept. 10: A further review has appeared in the NDPR by Paul Symington.

Update Sept. 12: Feser replies.

Weekend Reading

Some long-overdue linkage:

Roger Scruton, Why Iraq is a Write-Off

Robert Royal, It’s So Enlightenment

Philippa Foot interview

Christopher Dawson, Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind

Longenecker on Brideshead Revisited: The Villain of the Piece

Bill Vallicella, The Gardener’s Racism?

Peter Leithart, Tradition and the Individual Theologian

Podcast: Dale Ahlquist on Chesterton’s Democracy of the Dead

Film Review, The Scandal of Calvary

Video: Desire of the Everlasting Hills

In Memoriam. h/t: CL

 

 

 

Weekday Reading

Linkage to fine reading and listening has been long overdue. Here is a selection collected over the last few weeks:

Feser – Where’s God?

Rachel Lu – Why I don’t use Contraception

Karen Swallow Prior – What we talk about when we talk about ‘Birth Control’

A. G. Gancarski – James Garner: Anti-Authoritarian Everyman

Samuel Gregg – Immigration: A Principled Catholic Approach Avoids Emotionalism

Dale M. Coulter – The Good Historian resembles an Ogre: Jacques Le Goff and the Long Middle Ages

The OFloinn – In Psearch of Pschye: Some Groundwork (This is a great introduction to Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics).

Robert Stacy McCain – Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the Long Shadow of the ‘Lavender Menace’

Daniel McCarthy – Why Liberalism means Empire

Charles E. Stokes, Amber Lapp, and David Lapp – A Bit of Religion Can be Bad for Marriage

Peter Wehner – The Nobility of Politics

Podcasts: Eric Cohen, Yuval Levin, and Meir Soloveichik discuss Burkean Zionism

Richard Reinsch talks to Philip Hamburger about the latter’s new book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Film Review: Eve Tushnet reviews Polanski’s new film, Venus in Fur.

Book Review: Wilfred McClay reviews Roger Kimball’s The Future of Permanence.

Enjoy.

The Form of the Argument regarding Marriage

Some people criticizing aspects of the argument of last week’s post, guest-posted at Catallaxy Files, don’t seem to appreciate the flow of the argument re marriage. Let me outline it.

 

Firstly, the argument begins with an attempt to distinguish marriage from other types of relationship by reference to their orientations. There are many types of relationship in any society (i.e. transactional, civil, enterprise, friendship, familial, tribal, and so on) and the process of distinguishing involves comparing and contrasting each type in order to find what orientation or set of orientations each has that differentiates each from the other. So, the argument begins but does not end with marriage as we have found it historically – thus, the argument is not from tradition. As I’ve said, marriage is distinguishable from other relationships we might find in a society by its orientation towards (a) unifying the persons and (b) the children that may arise therein from such a relationship. Again, all this does is distinguish marriage as marriage from friendship (where each is orientated toward the good of the other) as friendship, and so on.

What is Marriage? A Reply to David Leyonhjelm

In the Australian Financial Review (13/7/14) – you can find a copy of his essay here – DL outlined his argument for removing the qualification that marriage is exhaustively a relationship between the sexes. What is his argument? Well, it is actually difficult to grasp.

He begins his essay by comparing ‘arranged’ marriage with ‘modern’ marriage and invites us to consider how the former is any different an interference than our existing situation where marriage is defined as a relationship between the sexes. He presses this claim by then arguing that just as arranged marriages might have been a norm of the past, so too now can we say that marriage being a relationship between the sexes is also a norm of the past. However, what DL fails to do is distinguish between aspects of marriage that are accidental/incidental (changeable) and those that are essential (unchangeable).   

Secular celebrants in Indiana

Given that a government official was available this is just silly:

(RNS) A federal court has ruled that humanist couples in Indiana can be married by their own “secular celebrants,” something that until now was illegal under state law.

In a unanimous ruling, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said denying humanists the right to be married by celebrants who share their lack of belief in a deity is a denial of their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion.

Under a law dating to the 1850s, Indiana required marriages be conducted by religious clergy or government officials. The humanist plaintiffs argued this denied them the right to be married by celebrants who share their philosophy and gave preferential treatment to religious people.

I’m sorry, the absence of a particular belief does not constitute an identity. If they held or shared a set of positive beliefs about the world that they admitted constituted a set of religious beliefs one could see their point. In the absence of that they just appear to be aping people the typically criticize.

h/t: The Anchoress