Toleration is a virtue.  But it is a puzzling one, because the whole point of it lies in putting up with some things that are immoral, offensive, erroneous, in poor taste, or in some other sense bad.

When I was young, barbarian that I was, I used to think that although some intellects are smarter and some not so smart, at bottom there is only one kind of mind – my kind, of course.  The first shock to that cocky misconception was marriage.  The second was raising children.  My wife and daughters think beautifully, but they think differently.<

A peculiar feature of our intellectual culture is that we don’t believe anything until we can describe it in a language which looks like physics.  The reason the social sciences have not advanced as far as physics is that they are trying to be the same sort of thing.

And so we must give up the project of mere natural law.  There is no such thing as natural law made easy.  There will never be a book entitled Natural Law for Dummies, unless it is written for dummies.  Natural law is as real as falling down the stairs, but that doesn’t make it as simple as falling down them.  We had better be ready for

People who think about natural law consider it in various ways.

The previous post concluded by finding that if “mere” Christianity means merely what all or almost all who call themselves Christians have believed, there is nothing left of it.  Lewis’s book would seem to be demolished.  But it isn’t.  It is a great book.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest defenses of the Christian faith is C.S.

The other day, one of my students suggested that there is no such thing a morality, because to be moral is to be unselfish, and even so-called moral behavior is really selfish at the core.  His example was that even a martyr isn’t acting morally, because he gains something by dying for others.

I closed the last post with a question:  Having abandoned the vision on which the medieval university was built, what are modern universities organized around?  The answer is “Nothing in particular.”

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhart concludes, “Many poorly endowed and undistinguished schools may bite the dust, but America flourished when buggy manufacturers went bankrupt thanks to the automobile.  The cleansing would be good for a higher education system still tied to its medieval origins – and f