“It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the spat in France over whether to stick a monstrous modern spire on a restored Notre Dame cathedral reflects a civilization that, cut off from tradition, has lost the ability to believe in anything.
In my latest National Post column I say safe injection sites are too timid an answer to the harm done by the war on drugs.
“Although God is said to test people at times, the reason does not seem to be that He needs to find out something about them. Rather they need to find out something about themselves.”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" Feb. 25, 2019
“A strange strand of eternal pathos runs through dreams which comes from the very loom of life itself. Dreams are, if I may so express it, like life only more so. Dreams, like life, are full of nobility and joy utterly arbitrary and incalculable. We have gratitude, but never certainty.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Meaning of Dreams,” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)
In my latest National Post column I say democracies for all their failings still beat tyranny hollow because we can ask people who want power what they’d do with it and why.
Question from a student: “I’m scared of metaphysics. A friend of mine wrote an essay for another course, in which he denied the persistence of personal identity. According to my friend, since some things about me have changed during the last two years, the me of today isn’t the same as the me of two years ago. We are literally different persons. This is deeply disturbing."
Reply: "... if my personal identity has no persistence, then how could ‘I’ find it disturbing? The problem with your friend’s argument isn’t metaphysical reasoning, but flawed metaphysical reasoning... there must be a real you that persists through the changes. If that weren’t true, then it wouldn’t even make sense for you to say “I have changed” -- because at the moment of the change, “I” would have ceased to exist.... Metaphysics is just thinking carefully about what the real world is like.... Trust me. You exist.”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" July 22, 2019