The Moral Urgency of Our Times
We have another private retreat happening this week with 45 highly influential intellectuals who are behind the restoration ahead. Please wish us the best: this is an important meeting.
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame burned one year before most governments in the world closed all churches, preventing the public celebration of Easter and Christmas for nearly two seasons in some places. The fires that ignited this great cathedral – built over 182 years but with improvements lasting many centuries– were experienced in all our lives.
The burning was a foreshadowing and a reminder of the fragility of all civilization, not just the cathedrals we see but the mores, habits, laws, stories, manners, and expectations built into the idea of freedom. Within a year, fires were raging in all aspects of our lives.
And yet here we are five and a half years later and Notre-Dame is reopened, restored, and refurbished, with pressure from the people and the donations of folks the world over. Master craftsmen appeared under the direction of traditionalist architects and designers and made the magic happen.
Let’s let the symbolism roll: may the rebuilding of this great church turn to a rebuilding of all things wrecked over four years (and more). We have another private retreat happening this week with 45 highly influential intellectuals who are behind the restoration ahead. Please wish us the best: this is an important meeting.
We have just a few weeks remaining to donate to the great cause with your contribution to Brownstone Institute. Will you renew your support this week? Thank you for considering.
The West Hartford supper club is December 18, and features essayist and best-selling author Charles Eisenstein. You are certainly invited!
Here is some content since our last email.
Korean Dramas and the Covid Collusion By Bruce W. Davidson. Korean dramas exhibit a parade of corrupt politicians, executives, judges, prosecutors, government officials, doctors, and mainstream news organizations, all on the payroll. The only things they seem to fear are social media attacks and public exposure of their behavior.
Congressional Committee Condemns (Nearly) Every Feature of the Covid Response By Jeffrey Tucker. The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report.
Millions of Entries Erased from World’s Largest Obituary Database By Debbie Lerman. Legacy.com is a website where you can search “the world’s largest obituary database,” with nearly 50,000,000 entries accumulated since 1998. Given the claim that Legacy.com offers a “permanent” space for commemoration, the recent discoveries raise some interesting questions.
The WHO Rallies in Square Formation By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan. In military history, a square formation has been one of the ways infantry defends itself against cavalry assaults. We have watched the ways in which those responsible for the recent social and economic butchery have sought to defend their actions.
The Culmination of Decades of Censorship and Propaganda By Emily Burns. Censorship brought us Trump. No matter what the media wants to claim, the reason people like me voted for Trump was because of our fury over the policies and cultural insanity of the last four years and beyond.
An Accidentalist’s Guide to Denying the Obvious By Josh Stylman. There’s a peculiar comfort in believing that things simply happen by accident. That the powerful don’t conspire, that institutions don’t coordinate. I’ve come to call these people “accidentalists” – those who find refuge in randomness, who dismiss patterns as paranoia.
The Philosophy of Provisionality By Bert Olivier. Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. Every decision represents an acknowledgment that we have to act with incomplete, provisional knowledge, and that more information could lead to a different decision.
Decouple Trade and IP Protection By Stephan Kinsella. IP is inherently statist, an artificial manufacturing of pseudo-rights even as it systematically violates property rights. The West should not foist its destructive IP laws onto developing countries and certainly should not link it to free trade.
The Rise and Fall of Western Science By Tomas Furst. We have to wait now before enough people realize that Science – the central ideology of our civilization – is in ruins. Christianity was saved by the separation of Church and State. To save Science, an equally daring step will be needed.
The Rebuilding Begins By Brownstone Institute. Getting the truth, realizing justice for the wrong done, restoring health, and fighting through the thicket of lies to secure the blessings of freedom now and in the future. This is the meaning of your investment in the work of Brownstone Institute.
Christianity was saved by separating it from the state. That does not mean that Christianity has no role in saving the state from itself. Biblical theology has a great deal to say about the failure of current governance in western societies to produce honest, transparent and life enriching leadership. Government falls under the authority of the Creator just as the church does. Top flight theologians should be addressing these failures in governance from a biblical perspective as efforts are under way to restore our republic from the current chaos to sanity. “The Moral Urgency of Our Times”, is indeed an appropriate title. For additional discussion you could replace the word “moral” with “spiritual”, or you could use both words.