Mondays are for student letters – or at least letters from young people -- and yes, this was a real letter.

Question:

The evidence is his persistent employment of the second person plural.  For example:

“The God of peace be with y’all.”  (Romans 15:33)

I am speaking in Tucson Thursday night

Political slang used to be a lot more fun.  In the days of the big-city political machines, Progressives who fancied themselves advocates of “good government” were called Goo Goos.

I am speaking in Tucson tomorrow night

“... and the Lord went before them to show the way by day in a pillar of a cloud.”  Faith, similar to clouds, is opaque with its mysteries, dissolves when it gives way to vision, and moistens by arousing devotion.

If I say that euthanasia should be illegal because murder violates the law of God, then obviously I suppose that there is a God, that He has a law, that this law ought to be obeyed, that it forbids murder, that euthanasia is murder, and that He requires human authority to back him up on such a point.

If any Underground Thomists are in Tucson on the evening of Thursday, February 26, you may be interested in an autobiographical talk I’ve been asked to give at a Veritas Forum at the University of Arizona.  The title is “Why I Am Not an Atheist.”

"Man is obviously made for thinking.  Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.  Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end.”

-- Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Political theory is a branch of the theory of how to live.  If God is our greatest good, then of course the truth about Him will make a difference to how to live.

The expression “self-deception” is not to be taken literally; what happens is that I try not to think about certain things, and I try not to think about the fact that I am trying not to think about them.