From Joshua

• Edmund Burke, a man straddling the two conservatisms, the ancien régime and classical liberalism, neither a drawbridge fantasist nor a neocon. Not perfect but of interest and worth to Catholics: high-church conservatism.
• American empire vs American people. Now that the people who sort of stood with us the past eight years protesting the war and the loss of civil liberties are making creepy personal plegdes to the O man the empire carries on.
• The culture of pretend: how psychotherapy keeps our communities sick. Our way of life “peaked” many decades ago. As Dreher has written, people were happier then even though the experts say they had no right to be. Empire has been about the task of destroying family and village systems, breaking down our sense of belonging and relatedness, removing opportunities for meaningful work and deep connection to a close-knit community or tribe for centuries, perhaps millennia.

Labels: history, politics