Waugh
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Why I am a Catholic: Like Grandfather, Like Grandson
I have written a guest post on Artur Rosman’s blog, in which I brag a little about how Catholic my family is. I mention my maternal grandfather, Philip Burnham, in the post, and in looking for a reference to link on him, I stumbled on the following passage of a book on Catholic social thought in… Continue reading
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Use Values and Corn Laws, Aristotelian Marxists and High Tories
In a reply to Owen White’s comment on my last post I claimed that English Toryism worthy of the name suffered its final defeat in 1846 with the triumph of the free trade movement and the abolition of the Corn Laws. To explain what I meant I want to consider the account of the anti-conservative nature… Continue reading
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Martin Mosebach
Martin Mosebach is well known in the German speaking world for his brilliant, cutting edge novels for which he received the prestigious Büchner Prize in 2007. But he has also written a collection of polemical essays on the Roman Liturgy from a traditionalist point of view–so far the only one of his works translated into… Continue reading
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An Education in Desire
The words “Do not be satisfied with mediocrity!” have been much in my mind of late, and I thought of them again as a read a brilliant thesis on Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited by Elizabeth Quackenbush, a senior at Thomas Aquinas College this year. I suppose I must have been about 14 when I first read Brideshead, and… Continue reading
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Evelyn Waugh on Progress
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin has the typescript of a radio talk by Evelyn Waugh “To an Unknown Old Man.” The following is a wonderfully dismissive passage on progress. (If only the notion were as passé as Waugh suggests). I should like to ask you what it must have felt like to live… Continue reading
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Bonum Prolis I: De Koninck and Guy Crouchback
During a recent discussion involving James Chastek and Arturo Vasquez, I uploaded some texts of De Koninck’s on birth control. The most interesting paper is “The Question of Infertility”, which argues that infertility is sometimes intended by nature as part of the “bonum prolis”, the good of offspring. I don’t want address the main… Continue reading