Throne and Altar

Christian tradition enjoins us to recall often that we are each fated to die. Cicero and Montaigne consider it the point of philosophy “to learn how to die”. During Advent, I have devoted...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2023/12/23/cross-post-learning-to-die/

How can one know a source is trustworthy? One could do it by independently confirming everything the source says, but if I can do that and am willing to do that, then the trustworthy source is us...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/cross-post-how-do-i-know-the-catholic-church-is-infallible/

Some say that the conservative veneration of authority is mere nostalgia, an outdated model of society, or even anti-Christian. I strenuously disagree-authority is a core category of the social w...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/cross-post-in-defense-of-conservative-authoritarianism/

What does it mean that Satan is the prince of this world? I take it to mean that the world is fundamentally hostile, that holiness is “moving uphill” and sin is “moving downhill”. In part...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/cross-post-the-prince-of-this-world/

Barfield takes the true nature of things as they are in themselves (as opposed to things as sensed and conceptualized by us) to be what is revealed by physics. The precise nature of this revelati...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/a-first-reading-main-points-of-barfields-saving-the-appearances-as-i-understand-them/

The arguments that slavery per se is immoral are very weak, something one doesn’t notice only because no one is allowed to challenge them. They usually either prove too much and would condemn a...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/no-one-really-believes-that-slavery-is-intrinsically-immoral/

Political reactionaries and orthodox Catholics are often accused of engaging in nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The accusation is peculiar, for similar reasons as the accusation that American cons...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2021/07/08/the-romance-of-the-middle-ages/

I oppose reform, not just this or that ill-considered reform, but reform in general. I’ve brought this up before with regard to the Catholic Church, a much reform-ridden entity, but reform is p...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2021/06/02/what-it-means-to-be-against-reform/

By this I mean a marked increase in statements like “X is not who we are” or “there is no place in this city/state/country/organization for people who believe/practice X”. Such statements...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2021/04/26/the-rise-in-exclusionary-rhetoric/

If we were allowed to speak on our own behalf, we would prefer to have non-white quotas than diversity thought policing at work (including “diversity statements” from applicants and humiliati...

https://bonald.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/if-only-someone-were-negotiating-on-whites-behalf/