I’m pleasantly surprised by the performance of my recent post, the first in two years. Thank you all for reading and especially to those of you who decided to subscribe. I’ll be around here more frequently going forward. I hope you don’t mind.
I’m using my name now. With that big step behind me, here is a brief description of what I believe and what you can expect from me going forward.
I am a Roman Catholic husband and father. I have been Catholic since I was a tiny baby. I remember being small, a little boy around the time of my first Holy Communion or shortly thereafter, and having an overwhelming sense of love and belonging. I loved God deeply and simply, as a father who keeps His promises. I aspire to that faith in adulthood. I seem to fail endlessly.
I believe God made the world, but I do not know how. I think, and I’m trying more and more to learn and to trust, that Genesis is right and the world He made is good.
I believe that done things are praiseworthy above all else, and I despise the self-sickness of our age, though I share it. What you will find here are my best arguments, reveries, rhetorical flourishes and impassioned bargains against that self-sickness.
I believe the issues facing our nation and culture and race and way of being in the West are multivariate and complicated, and I don’t believe that makes me a dupe or a coward. I haven’t read Spengler or Evola and I probably won’t any time soon.
I think we are facing demographic catastrophe and replacement. I think we have, quite possibly, never faced a more dangerous time physically and spiritually as Christian men, especially those of us who are western and “white.”
I am a servant of lost causes. I think this is because I’m hot-tempered and love peace. I agree with J.R.R. Tolkien when he said, “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”
I believe love and art are worth creating and fostering, despite seeing myself as peculiarly talent-less in both fields from the outset. All I have is my effort and my interest, and if I could make myself into anyone, I would make myself into a lover and a servant of beauty for love’s and beauty’s own sake. I expect always and everywhere to fail, but perhaps I can remind some reader of a hint, tune, reminiscence or scent of the beautiful and loving and good things they have known or hope to encounter.
I believe we are faced with a moral, physical and spiritual battle.
I believe there are naturally-wrong and physically-wrong enemies and enemy strategies opposing us which we should fight for natural and physical reasons, including tyranny, un-health and the ravages of a new barbarian scientism.
I believe there are spiritual evils that present themselves as the expertly-conducted assaults of the above, inexplicably-clear plots against goodness itself which seem to scream across our epistemological and ethical categories to convince us of metaphysical evil, cementing the demonic in our age. As Flannery O’Connor said, I believe when people are deaf, God needs to shout. I, for one, hear Him.
I believe we are all born into our places and peoples and times and we have burdens we never chose and those we did. I believe these accumulate for each of us for a reason.
I am interested in history, philosophy, literature, classics, politics, theology, and the news.
If you hang around, God help you, you may hear even more. About once every two weeks is my goal.
Please leave while you can.