In 396 Ambrose of Milan attacked enjoyment of life, saying that the serpent of Adam and Eve fame was itself “pleasure, slippery and infected with the poisons of corruptions.” Adam succumbed and fell away from the enjoyment of grace. How can pleasure recall us to paradise, seeing that it alone deprived us of it?” The …
Continue reading ‘Roman Catholicism has its roots in being miserable’ »
A recent article by George Will in the Washington Post claimed that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives. Liberals, he says, regard charitable giving as retrograde , "a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes". Democrats, he tells us, represent a majority of …
Fine words, Mr. Obama, fine intentions, Mrs Clinton, but where will you find the good administrators? The Bush administration has been famously populated either by incompetent people who, as the British rather coarsely say, "couldn’t manage a piss-up in a brewery". But this is not just a problem for one political party, it is a …
Continue reading ‘The unseen canker eating away at the West’ »
People wrapped up in themselves make very small parcels. Empty hearts have room for nothing while full hearts always have room for more. From A. C. Grayling “The Choice of Hercules: pleasure, duty and the good life in the 21st Century” Are those who think mainly about money who preoccupied with tax by definition the …
The United States has by far the highest rate of firearms death compared to any other industrialized nation. (Harvard Injury Control Research Center, Harvard School of Public Health. "Racial Disparities and Firearm Deaths Among Youth.") The rate of firearm homicide in the United States is 19 times higher than that of 35 other high-income countries. (Krug …
