Around the same time as the incident I told about in yesterday’s post, the contraceptive mandate came up in another class. I mentioned how strange it seemed to me personally to call artificial contraception, sterilization, and the provision of abortion-inducing drugs “health care,” because pregnancy is not a disease.
A young man responded that pregnancy is a disease.
In The Line Through the Heart you remind your readers that “A truly adequate theory of the natural law will not always be turning into metatheory of the natural law, a theory about theories. It will resist that tendency.”
The real appeal of Bernie Sanders to the young is free tuition. The real appeal of free tuition is not charity, or even the reduction of the debt burden, but the prospect of utter and complete financial independence from parents without having to work for it. The next proposal will be a free living stipend.
You would think the scholars who study the canon of Western literature would agree about what the Great Books say, but disagree about how great they really are. Well, there is a good deal of debate about how great they are, but even more about what they say -- though this is more true of some books than of others.
You’ve been blogging about faculty attitudes toward morality and religion. Let me share an incident from my introduction to anthropology course some years ago. It was a graduate “core” course, but some undergrads took it too; the grads had more work, more reading, and weekly tutorials.
I'm curious whether you know of any undergraduate degrees that are exclusive to the study of natural law. If there are none that you know of, do you know of any program that has natural law as its main emphasis?
The Wisdom books present some surprises – among them, a fair sampling of paradox. Take for example the book of Proverbs, which includes a number of apparently inconsistent sayings colliding head to head. This pair is from Chapter 26:
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.