Mere musings on culture, life, and theology by Samuel James
Samuel James on February 28, 2017 As someone who is generally sympathetic to the ideological quadrant from whence arguments like this one come, I am slow, usually, to critique writers who call for more purity, more clarity, and more protection for men and women in the church. That said, I think telling brothers and sisters in the local church that they…
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Samuel James on February 21, 2017 So let's recap: Milo Yiannopolous's career thus far consists entirely of a rhetorical con. He insists that he is a champion of free speech and that people only shut him down because they are scared by the correctness of his ideas. Meanwhile, he is silly, flamboyantly offensive, needlessly cruel, hopelessly recalcitrant, and endlessly self-absorbed. But…
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Samuel James on February 17, 2017 Please don't believe, or write as if you believe, that your personal experiences are a fully reliable path to understanding. Everyone who has life has experiences, and those experiences do shape us in meaningful ways. But here's the problem: Different people have different experiences, and different experiences can yield wildly different, even contradictory, notions of reality.…
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Samuel James on February 17, 2017 Michael Novak passed away today. I owe this remarkable Catholic intellectual a debt of gratitude, because his lecture "Awakening From Nihilism" was crucially formative for me. At the First Things blog, I've written a brief reflection on Novak's insights and why they are so relevant right now. Here's an except from the blog: What I found…
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Samuel James on February 15, 2017 A friend of mine got a (predictably) hostile reaction on Facebook when he recently posted this status: If you are a young man wishing he had a young woman with whom to spend Valentine's Day, the single biggest thing you can do to improve your prospects is to stop playing video games. I am not…
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Samuel James on February 12, 2017 Critics of legalized same-sex marriage have often made the point that many, and perhaps all, of the arguments in favor of what the Supreme Court in Obergefell can also be applied to the legalization of polygamy marriage and plural marriage. Proponents of marriage redefinition have often responded by dismissing this claim as slippery slope scaremongering; Andrew Sullivan's "conservative…
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Samuel James on February 7, 2017 For the last two weeks my social media feeds have burst with punditry on Betsy DeVos. Probably the majority of my feed think her appointment as Secretary of Education is a mistake. The rest wonder aloud when it was that so many people suddenly became education policy wonks overnight. As the conversation around DeVos has continued,…
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Samuel James on February 6, 2017 My favorite read of the day is this article on understanding why progressives, especially millennials in the Obama to post-Obama era, are so in love with using the Harry Potter stories as metaphors for America's current cultural moment. The author has an interesting theory, one that I (mostly) agree with: American liberals love Harry Potter…
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Samuel James on February 4, 2017 Unless you're living under a rock--in which case, well done on getting wi-fi reception--you know the Super Bowl is tomorrow. The odds are good that you are either throwing a Super Bowl party or attending one. For readers in the first group, I'd like you to consider a minor but meaningful step: Consider tuning out…
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Samuel James on February 2, 2017 I like what National Review's David French has to say about the recent violent protests at UC Berkeley. Though I would probably be more sympathetic to the difference between protesters and rioters, I think French is exactly right on two important points. First, no rhetoric, no matter how incendiary, no matter how offensive, merits physical violence…
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