James Bryson

Had Brand managed to just stay on the right side of the law but otherwise acted the same, it wouldn't have made his character much better. When you make consent, not virtue, the only ethical criterion, the vice you've tolerated will soon ignore the limitations of consent as well

Friends, what is chastity—the second of the evangelical counsels? Though the clergy and religious practice chastity through celibacy, the virtue itself is just as applicable to the laity. Chastity simply means sexual uprightness or a rightly ordered sexuality—and this means bringing one’s sexual life under the aegis of love. As Thomas Aquinas taught, love is not a feeling but rather an act of the will—more precisely, willing the good of the other. It is the ecstatic act by which we break free from the ego, whose gravitational pull wants to draw everything to itself. Notice how the Church’s teaching that sex belongs within the context of marriage is meant to hold off this negative tendency. In saying that our sexuality should be subordinated to unity (the radical devotion to one’s spouse) and procreation (the radical devotion to one’s children), the Church is endeavoring to bring our sex lives completely under the umbrella of love. What would our country look like if, starting today, every Catholic lived out the counsel of chastity? We would make an enormous dent in the pornography business; human trafficking would be dramatically reduced; abortions would appreciably decrease; and families would be significantly strengthened.

Lot of academics woke up today feeling relief at the prospect that they won't have to reform higher ed after all.

Another excellent idea of Hegel: the morality becomes ethic (higher level) in family where the individual sacrifices its freedom to the whole, to the community overcoming him/herself. The marriage is spiritual not the arbitrary contract.

I have started Vattimo’s After Christianity, and I have been struck by his argument that we can understand Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God as Heidegger’s announcement of the death of metaphysics. This may sound very abstract and irrelevant to a lot of people. However, the claim is that the Platonic worldview that underwrites our traditional spirituality dissolved into the mathematic framework of modern physics and that framework leads to “the theoretical impossibility of thinking about human existence with the concepts inherited from tradition.” The worldview given by the standard interpretation of science (and I would argue not by science itself) is a worldview that claims to explain everything objectively except the reality of science itself as a practice done by communities of human beings that care deeply about meaning and truth. This is the blind spot that Frank, Gleisser and Thompson talk about in their recent excellent book The Blind Spot. Vattimo claims that we should note the paradigm shift that is emerging as we struggle to get free from the performative contradiction of a world picture in which we as loving participants of such pictures have no important role. Vattimo argues that this shift makes possible a new relationship with a sacredness that is no longer a static supernatural substantial perfection but instead an inherently participatory inexhaustibility of evolving-living meaning that is one with the on-going disclosure of inexhaustible depths, heights, and ways forward for us.