Josh Bishop Reads

Here you’ll find a hodgepodge of other people’s writing, presented without comment or explanation and tied together only by my own amusement.

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May 29th, 2012
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
G.K. Chesterton, qtd. by Jason Peters in “A Little Something on Chesterton’s Birthday”
May 6th, 2012
The liberty we enjoy in America today is certainly worth prizing and defending, but it is insufficient to produce virtue, stability, or happiness. The free market in ideas, commerce, sexuality, and so forth offers us various possibilities of how to live, but it tells us nothing of how we should behave to live as well as we ought. Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.
Rod Dreher in Crunchy Cons
May 5th, 2012
The older conception of liberty held that liberty was ultimately a form of self-government; in a constrained world, the human propensity to desire without limit and end inclined people toward a condition of slavery, understood to be enslavement to the base desires. This older conception of liberty as self-government was displaced by our regnant conception of liberty, the liberty to pursue our desires ceaselessly with growing prospects of ongoing fulfillment through the conquest of nature, accompanied by the constant generation of new desires that demand ever greater expansion of the human project of mastery.
Patrick J. Deneen in “Against Great Books”
May 4th, 2012
Every new generation needed a renewed education in the knowledge of human limits and the central necessity of virtue. Books themselves were understood to be a storehouse of wisdom from the past, a treasury and repository of hard-won experience and knowledge of these limits. Because the present and future were believed to be fundamentally continuous with the past, the past was understood to be a source of wisdom about our condition as humans in a world that we do not command.
Patrick J. Deneen in “Against Great Books”
May 3rd, 2012
For all their many differences, the Great Books in this tradition argue that there is something in the nature of reality itself – whether we understand it as nature as described by the Greeks, or the created order depicted in the Book of Genesis – that limits human power and ability to transform our situation. The appropriate disposition toward the world is not the effort to seek its transformation, but rather to conform human behavior and aspirations to that order. Hence, the primary purpose of education is learning to live in a world in which self-limitation is the appropriate response to a world of limits. Education in virtue is a central goal – particularly the hard discipline over the human propensity toward excess, particularly in the form of pleonexia or pride.
Patrick J. Deneen in “Against Great Books”
May 2nd, 2012
[T]he Great Books are recommended… because they have something to teach us, and that we should read them for more than merely for a training in ‘critical thinking’ or even because knowledge of these texts familiarizes students with books they should read to be able to claim that they are educated, but because they will have an impact on the way that we live our lives and organize our common world together.
Patrick J. Deneen in “Against Great Books”
May 1st, 2012
While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. We spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more dollars on it a week—and eat a little less of it.
Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
April 25th, 2012
Some people wrongly make an idol of food, or of art, or of sport, or such things. This we must avoid, but we also must avoid the opposite thing, which is to denigrate the body and the material world by assuming that all pleasure derived from the enjoyment of creation is illicit, or at least suspect. When I taste a good cheese, for example, it makes me not only happy, but joyful. The happiness comes from this thought: “How delicious this is!” The joy comes from this thought: “How wonderful to live in a world where such happiness can come from such simple things!” For Christians who see the world through a sacramental lens, the divine expresses itself in part through matter. For those with eyes to see, the cheeses in the picture are radiant with the glory of God. For me, when I taste something extraordinarily good, my first impulse is to say a prayer of thanksgiving. I know not everyone is like this, but for me, moments like this are theophanies — a sudden disclosure of God’s presence in the world, and a reminder that however much boredom and pain we have to bear, God is still present with us, and will disclose Himself in His creation, if we are open to it, and grateful for it.
Rod Dreher in “The Logos of Cheese”
April 24th, 2012
Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason… The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy
April 23rd, 2012
Don’t say, ‘I look forward to that larger religion that shall have no special dogmas.’ It is like saying, ‘I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet.’ A quadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means something that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe.
G.K. Chesterton in “Don’t,” collected in “In Defense of Sanity” and qtd. by Ignatius Press