Some items related to recent posts and/or comments:

Reader rjp linked to this piece by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., on the inapplicability of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" to most of life's questions. "There is, in the end, something beyond liberal and conservative. That is the truth of things according to which we have a criterion that is not constantly changing between liberal and conservative..."

My initial reaction to this is, "well of course—that's obvious." But it probably needs to be restated now and then. I tend to get a bit impatient when the topic is political and social trends and someone makes an objection along the lines of "truth is neither liberal or conservative." Again: well, of course it isn't. I take that as axiomatic. In fact, I would put it a bit differently: There is something that precedes liberal and conservative, something that a Christian at any rate assumes, or ought to, before he opens his mouth about politics. This is so fundamental to me that I don't bother saying it. To me it seems like halting a weather forecast for an explanation of why "the sky" is not an actual thing and not actually blue.

But maybe it does need to be said once in a while. So, for the record: "liberal" and "conservative" are like "left" and "right," positional descriptors that don't say anything about the essential nature of whatever they're applied to. But their usage is conventional in discussions of politics and culture, and they have a comprehensible meaning in that limited context. If I say "the conservative press" you know roughly who I'm talking about.

And, speaking of the conservative press: I belittled The American Conservative as "cranky" the other day. No sooner had I done so than I looked in on their web site and found really good stuff about condition and future of conservatism. There's a lot I could say about their diagnoses and proposals, but I'll limit it to one observation: they are tending to turn conservatism from a socio-political movement into an all-encompassing world-view. And I've already got one of those.

On the topic of evolution: Francesca sent me a piece on the subject by Stratford Caldecott which I had hoped to read before writing about evolution on Sunday. I wasn't able to, but have done so today. It's a bit long for online reading but very much worth the effort. I won't try to summarize it, but will say just that I am very pleased that my inchoate wonderings about viewing the Fall as some kind of ontological, not historical, event resemble some things that serious thinkers have come up with. However, I also have to note the point that I made in my Sunday journal: there is some pretty abstruse philosophy here, nothing easily communicable in any kind of concrete way.