“the remarkable way [Stanley] Hauerwas makes friends by arguing with people.”
Stephen H. Webb reviewing a Festschrift in Hauerwas' honor in First Things #160 (February 2006)
In my latest National Post column I remind readers that the purpose of a government-run school system is to instill state-approved values in young people, and we should support or oppose it on that basis with our eyes wide open.
“All serious political and moral philosophy, and thus any serious social inquiry, must begin with an understanding of human nature. Though society and its institutions shape man, man’s nature sets limits on the kinds of societies we can have. Cicero said that the nature of law must be founded on the nature of man (a natura hominis discenda est natura juris).”
James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature
“With G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring, I never differed—except in opinion.”
John Buchan, quoted by Roger Kimball, in The New Criterion September 2003
In my latest National Post column I say if the press take a “UFO expert” seriously we contribute to a general atmosphere of idiocy in public discussion.
“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”
Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley Brave New World
In my latest National Post article, part of the “Right Now” series on “What does conservatism mean in Canada today?”, I argue that it must mean serious attention to the deep constitutional and historical roots of our rights, our security, our prosperity and our open society. And yes, by that I mean Magna Carta.
“the best assumption with regard to the men and women of the fifteenth or any other medieval century is that in essentials they were like-minded with ourselves. We should not be deceived by different conventions, or by contrasts which may be only superficial. Both the pomp and artificiality of court life in the fifteenth century, and the extravagances of the baronial households, often commented on, had a logic of their own in the circumstances of the times; they were far from being the product of men and women whose motives were very different from our own. Life may have been more colourful, unrestrained, and uncertain, in the fifteenth century than at later times; but this did not really change the inner nature of the men and women of the age.’”
Bertie Wilkinson Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Wilkinson was my grandfather)