I feel privileged to be reading the great Alasdair MacIntyre, who just celebrated his CXVth birthday, while he is still with us. Having finished After Virtue, I immediately opened Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Together over 700 pages, they make the case against the so-called Enlightenment and the case for tradition-based inquiry, namely Thomistic Aristotelianism. Next up are Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition and Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues.
"Only dead fish swim with the current." — Viktor Orbán
New Amsterdam?
"A Republican state lawmaker proposes slicing New York into three autonomous regions in order to end the stranglehold that New York City liberals have on the rest of the Empire State.... , one including New York City and its boroughs, a second – dubbed the Montauk region – consisting of the downstate counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland and Westchester, and the rest of the state named 'New Amsterdam.'" — Free New Amsterdam!
Whatabout & Whereabouts
Paleoconservative/neo-reactionary linkage to and occasional commentary on local, national, and global news, as well as Traditionalist School Perennial Philosophy, Austrian School Economics and Human Biodiversity, with musical interludes, begun in self-imposed exile in the Year MMIII in North Kyŏngsang Province and carried on today a stone's throw from the Erie Canal in Smugtown, Burned-Over District, Alleghania, where the author is living the dream with his longsuffering tradwife and kiddoes.
Weltanschauung
"The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age." — G.K. Chesterton
"To see in Catholicism one religion among others, one system among others, even if it be added that it is the only true religion, the only system that works, is to mistake its very nature, or at least to stop at the threshold. Catholicism is religion itself." — Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac, in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
Like Nicolás Gómez Dávila, whom Martin Mosebach said understood "the Catholic Church, which he did not regard as simply one of several Christian confessions, but as the great collecting tank of all religions, as the heiress of all paganism, as the still living original religion."
Economics
“We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values.” ─ Wilhelm Röpke
Politics
"In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism. These concerns came together under the umbrella of the badly misunderstood America First Committee, the largest popular antiwar organization in U.S. history. The AFC was formed in 1940 to keep the United States out of a second European war that many Americans feared would be a repeat of the first. Numbering eight hundred thousand members who ranged from populist to patrician, from Main Street Republican to prairie socialist, America First embodied and acted upon George Washington's Farewell Address counsel to pursue a foreign policy of neutrality." ─ Bill Kauffman in Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism
"Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated 'military-industrial complex.' If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms." ─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics
Ancient Chinese Wisdom
“In a little state with a small population, I would so order it, that, though there were individuals with the abilities of ten or a hundred men, there should be no employment of them; I would make the people, while looking on death as a grievous thing, yet not remove elsewhere (to avoid it).
Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them.
I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords (instead of the written characters).
They should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment.
There should be a neighboring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.”
(小國寡民。使有什伯之器而不用；使民重死而不遠徙。雖有舟輿，無所乘之，雖有甲兵，無所陳之。使民復結繩而用之，甘其食，美其服，安其居，樂其俗。鄰國相望，雞犬之聲相聞，民至老死，不相往來。)
─ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. LXXX, translation by James Legge
"The superior man is catholic and no partizan. The mean man is a partizan and not catholic."
(君子周而不比、小人比而不周。) ─ Confucius, The Analects, 2.XIV, translation by James Legge
Burned-Over District Wisdom
"Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the Book?" — Red Jacket
"The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity." — Martin Van Buren
"Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before." — Millard Fillmore
"A man’s rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box." — Frederick Douglass
"The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization." — Grover Cleveland
"Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter." — Louise Brooks
"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition." — Rod Serling
"When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries." — Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen
"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it." — Christopher Lasch
"Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters." — Camille Paglia
"I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist... I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn." — Bill Kauffman
"If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged." — Philip Seymour Hoffman
Orate pro nobis...
Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States
"[T]he Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men... In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners." — Henry Adams, self-described "conservative Christian anarchist," a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, "with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him,"
St. John Fisher, Patron of the Diocese of Rochester
"St. John Fisher was born in Beverly, Yorkshire, in 1459, and educated at Cambridge, from which he received his Master of Arts degree in 1491. He occupied the vicarage of Northallerton, 1491-1494; then he became proctor of Cambridge University. In 1497, he was appointed confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, and became closely associated in her endowments to Cambridge; he created scholarships, introduced Greek and Hebrew into the curriculum, and brought in the world-famous Erasmus as professor of Divinity and Greek. In 1504, he became Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of Cambridge, in which capacity he also tutored Prince Henry who was to become Henry VIII. St. John was dedicated to the welfare of his diocese and his university. From 1527, this humble servant of God actively opposed the King's divorce proceedings against Catherine, his wife in the sight of God, and steadfastly resisted the encroachment of Henry on the Church. Unlike the other Bishops of the realm, St. John refused to take the oath of succession which acknowledged the issue of Henry and Anne as the legitimate heir to the throne, and he was imprisoned in the tower in April 1534. The next year he was made a Cardinal by Paul III and Henry retaliated by having him beheaded within a month. A half hour before his execution, this dedicated scholar and churchman opened his New Testament for the last time and his eyes fell on the following words from St. John's Gospel: 'Eternal life is this: to know You, the only true God, and Him Whom You have sent, Jesus Christ. I have given You glory on earth by finishing the work You gave me to do. Do You now, Father, give me glory at Your side'. Closing the book, he observed: 'There is enough learning in that to last me the rest of my life.' His feast day is June 22."
Sources
- Aleteia
- American Thinker
- American Greatness
- Antiwar.com
- Arts & Letters Daily
- Big Pulpit
- Catholic Courier
- Catholic News Agency
- Catholic World Report
- Chronicles Magazine
- Crisis Magazine
- EarthSky
- EurekaAlert! Science News
- LifeSite
- National Catholic Register
- Taki’s Magazine
- The Unz Review
- The Wanderer
- Zero Hedge
Choral Ensembles
- Apollo5
- Ars Nova Copenhagen
- Collegium Marianum
- Ensemble Pro Victoria
- Fair Oriana
- The Gesualdo Six
- Intrada Ensemble
- The Mancunian Consort
- The Marian Consort
- Nederlands Kamerkoor
- The Sixteen
- Stile Antico
- The Tenebrae Choir
- TENET Vocal Artists
- VOCES8
Music Channels
- AVROTROS Klassiek
- BR-KLASSIK
- DW Classical Music
- Felices Cantus Baroque
- hr-Sinfonieorchester – Frankfurt Radio Symphony
- ЛУЧШАЯ ХОРОВАЯ МУЗЫКА
- Klassik | SWR Kultur
- Muzyka w Raju
- NDR Klassik
- Netherlands Bach Society
- Südtirol in concert
- Warner Classics
- WDR Klassik
- Wigmore Hall
Reference
- The Catholic Current
- Catholic Encyclopedia (1917 edition)
- Catholic Liturgical Calendar
- Conservapedia
- Examination of Conscience: Mortal Sins
- Examination of Conscience: Venial Sins
- Fr. Spitzer's Universe
- FBI — Table 43
- Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary
- Magis Center
- RocWiki
- Sing the Hours
- The Station of the Cross
- Urban Dictionary
- WION
- WRUR | Different Radio
Must-read Library
- The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam
- Human Universals by Donald E. Brown
- The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World by James Burnham
- A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark
- The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending
- Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan by Franklin Hiram King
- The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk
- Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man by Henri de Lubac
- Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The End of the Modern World by Romano Guardini
- The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guénon
- The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
- Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
- Submission by Michel Houellebecq
- The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
- Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists by Bill Kauffman
- The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why the Church Was Right All Along by Jennifer Roback Morse
- Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
- Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement by Justin Raimondo
- The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud by Philip Rieff
- A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market by Wilhelm Röpke
- Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick
- The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman
- Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman
- How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods Jr.
New Amsterdam Perennialist 