One of the things I like about Thomas Aquinas is his distinction between the delectable good and the arduous good. When I first began to read him it puzzled me that he considered the things I called “emotions” to be movements of “appetite” or desire. I considered desires, like the longing for the beloved, altogether different things than emotions, like anger and hope.
A reader responds:
I don’t think you’re wrong that socialists like Bernie Sanders supporters may have materialistic motives, but I wouldn’t be so quick to forget the genuine idealism of youth. They would like to get things for free, but they think everybody else should too!
“[Irony] is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, or be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”
-- The main character, Patrick, in Edward S. Aubyn’s novel, At Last
Up until now, we have been shielded in our country from many of the usual misfortunes. Now we have begun to experience what hitherto we have only read of in books, like the Cult of the Leader. In the advent of the current president we saw it in its God-Emperor mode; in the advent of another unmentionable person we are seeing it in its Swaggering Thug mode.
Question:
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.
Question:
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.”
