None of the Crusades would have been deemed just wars if the same methodology were used by contemporary theologians and philosophers that they use to judge contemporary conflicts.
Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Pretending there was no history before 1962 is dangerous. As those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Pretending there was no Guidance from the Holy Spirit before 1962 is blasphemy.
Cowardice reigns, even in the Church. At least it’s not just us. King Charles, you know, the Defender of the Faith, gave a Ramadan congratulatory speech but not one for Easter.
Behold Dr. Feser, an otherwise brilliant man delluded by Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is what happens to arm chair philosophers who have never done any real work in their entire lives for the country in which they live. I used to pay close attention to what Dr. Feser wrote. No longer since he has become obsessed with Trump. I swear: he rents out too much space in his head to the President, and it’s shoving all the good common sense out.
The notion we are ‘stealing the oil’, which has been advanced repeatedly over a period of 35 years, is a fantasy. Preventing Iran from dropping a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv is given the anodyne description ‘advance the security interests of another state’. The other states in the region who want Iran off their back do not interest him.
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You have natural scientists; you have the adepts of mathematics, statistics, computer science, and information science; you have the forensic anthropologists; you have the economists; you have the adepts of foreign languages. These aside, the older I get, the more it seems we’d be better off with no academic intelligentsia than with the intelligentsia we have. True in spades of some among the occupational faculties (teacher training, social work, library administration, the personnel specialists in business faculties, the psychiatry residencies, and wide swaths of professional psychology).
Charles is begging for another Act of Settlement to be passed by Parliament.
Art:
We’ve always had intelligentsia, but until the mad worship of the college degree was embraced early in the 20th century and the cult of the “expert” after the Roosevelt years, they didn’t bother us.
A notable difficulty with the school system is how contrivedly inefficient it is, mostly due to convention and social ideology. I’m remembering 50 years ago my aunt telling my mother that three emotionally disturbed youngsters had been placed in her class and most of her effort during the day was devoted to placating those kids. She asked the principal to remove them and was told no. This wasn’t in some inner city latrine. It was in Fairfax County, Va. I had a friend who landed a job as a notetaker for a deaf student in a regular school. They had a full time employee for one student. You have elementary school teachers with classes full of kids who haven’t mastered basic skills wasting time with all manner of extraneous matters (an issue when I was in school > 50 years ago). You have a refusal to sort students into classes with different paces. You have a refusal to remove badly behaved youths from regular classes because you must ‘teach every child’. We live in a world where a grand total of 2% of the working population is employed on farms and youths under 14 are never expected to have wage employment, yet school is only in session 180 days a year. You had teacher training programs taken up with chuffering about fads in pedagogy a generation ago and now taken up with pushing social ideology today. (Robin diAngelo has an appointment at a teacher training faculty, even though neither her dissertation nor her published work indicates she knows anything abou the mechanics of teaching).
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As for tertiary schooling, Allan Bloom is the only prominent figure of which I am aware who called attention to what you see every day: the complete absence of focus of baccalaureate-level schooling. It was his view that since administrations were unwilling to construct a serious core curriculum, it was time to replace the baccalaureate degree with a two year program with a discrete focus. “You see students sighing up for courses seeming at random to fill the time”. Meanwhile, community colleges have to a great degree decayed into preparatory programs for four year colleges in lieu of providing discrete vocational training and hosting remedial instruction to improve basic skills.
Someone who tells you a war is ‘illegal’ is not thinking clearly.
The contemporary church wants a world without wars or nuclear proliferation.
It can’t always have both. And, for the life of me, if the modern near-pacifism it advocates would ensure the opposite.
And I say that as someone who has misgivings about this conflict.
In regard to war Dale I agree with John Stuart Mill:
“A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
I’ve read enough of Ed Feser’s work to say confidently that he does not have TDS (I have a sister who does, and it’s an ugly mental illness!) That being said, Trump is not someone I hold in very high regard, and I only held my nose and voted for him in 2024 because Kamala Harris is a dangerous woman who lacks the necessary seriousness and intelligence to be president. Prof. Feser poses credible reasons to suggest this action does not meet the church’s criteria for a just war. Reasonable people are free to disagree, and I certainly do not mourn the deaths of Iran’s leadership, but war, while sometimes necessary, should be undertaken for only the most necessary reasons. I’m not sure The Lord would approve of this one.