Belief is not about intellectual assent to a creed. Belief—Emmunah—is about existential trust. ... Emmunah offers a middle way between the fundamentalist intuitions of the anti-rational and baby-out-with-the-bath-water rationalist skepticism. We can’t get it when we’re in the desert, being carried by God and Moses. We have to cultivate it as our... See more

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism: A response to Nathan Pinkoski N.S. Lyons 10.23.2024

What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.

The Enclosure of the Human... See more

it is the task of a holy life to seek knowledge and to bring it into our hearts. Any knowledge that we don’t fully live, and that doesn’t fully motivate us, is a kind of vanity. Not only should we avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain, but we should avoid letting our book knowledge be in vain. The Torah does not say “Be erudite, for I the Lord am... See more

Mattei’s point ties in with the history of the commons, from Garrett Hardin’s famous article on The Tragedy of the Commons, often taken to be a rallying cry for privatisation (or, though it is rarely mentioned, for total government control), to its refutation by Elinor Ostrom (Mattei points out that Friedrich Engels had already demonstrated the... See more

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Noted the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky, “God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

Decoupling beauty and truth: Lichtwark’s Education of the Eye John Hartley 9.20.2024

More than anything, Christ Crucified is a revelation to humanity that God is love. However, it teaches us that love is not coercive. The philosopher’s God is expected to selectively coerce, controlling evil and rewarding the good. The scandal of the Cross is that it reveals the weakness of God who, in love, suffers Himself and His creation to... See more

And justice? Is justice possible under capitalism? Not according to three renown metaphysicians, to steal a quote from an ex-everything of mine:

(1) “There can never be justice on stolen land” (Krs-One)

(2) “All Property is Theft” (Proudhon)

(3) “Every man has a property in his own person” (Locke)

Therefore, the very existence of human beings and... See more

Just four years after that conflict concluded with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Sir Walter Scott defined Robin Hood for Britain’s era of peak nationalism, in his epic three-novel reimagining of 12th-century England, Ivanhoe: a text that arguably made an equivalent contribution to Victorian Britain’s self-image as the cowboy myth did in... See more