June 2024 – Anthony G. Flood

Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity

This post continues a series on Christianity and intelligibility (Parts I, II, and III) which focuses on Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of presuppositionalism, the position I share with (albeit at a great distance from) Greg L. Bahnsen and his teacher, Cornelius Van Til, whose distinctive approach to Christian apologetics Bill has been studying.[1]

As I’ve been arguing here (and in Philosophy after Christ), unless one presupposes the Bible’s worldview, one’s thinking—including the thinking informing the post under review and the counterexamples Bill adduces in it—reduces to absurdity. Why? Because non-Christian thinking is groundless—it floats in a void—and if it displays any cogency, it’s because it surreptitiously borrows from the biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity”

Civilizational decline via institutional capture

In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.

North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:

Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3] Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”

Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance

“I mean, there’s a lot of layers.” Wé Ani (before her American Idol performance of “Ain’t No Way” @0.38)

Imagine a ten-screen movie multiplex, each showing an Anthony Hopkins film. In one, he’s Nixon; in another, Hannibal Lecter; in a third, Zorro; fourth, Odin; fifth, C. S. Lewis; sixth, Pablo Picasso; seventh, John Quincy Adams; eighth, Alfred Hitchcock; ninth, Pope Benedict XVI; and on the tenth screen, Richard the Lionheart. Hopkins is their only commonality; each can make one forget the others (at least for a few hours). He’s all of these characters . . . and none of them.

Wé Ani is her performances’ only common thread: each “theater” in her audiovisual multiplex shows off a distinctive vocal texture into which no other intrudes and which often sets up an expectation that is (pleasantly) disappointed. Each performance also displays a unique dramatic persona.

Perhaps the better metaphor (although it’s by now a cliché) is: a palette of many colors.

If you compare several bars from each of, say, seven (randomly chosen) tracks, then unless you already know who’s singing, you may reasonably doubt that the singer on the first track is the one on the second (or any other). And that’s because of the vocal color she chooses for any song she interprets.

Every great singer has variability in range and textural quality but Frank Sinatra always sounds like Frank; Ella Fitzgerald, Ella; Stevie Wonder, Stevie. That’s what their fans expect. Not so with Wé, however: you may expect Aretha but get Nina; Etta but hear Whitney; and so forth. Continue reading “Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance”

“The Annotated Napkin”: a memento of Murray

The napkin on which Murray Rothbard sketched for me a diagram of an aspect of the structure of production on July 1, 1986, now on display at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Among the books I donated two years ago to the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama was my copy of Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature (Libertarian Review Press, 1974) the one that its author, Murray Rothbard, had given to me almost thirty years ago when we went out for dinner at Argo Coffee Shop, located at 90^th Street and Broadway, Manhattan, just two blocks from his apartment building.[1] While elaborating on the intricate “latticework” (his metaphor) of a market economy’s production structure, he grabbed a napkin and diagrammed his insight on both sides of it.

Normally, a restaurant napkin wouldn’t last long, but this one had a different destiny. I tucked it inside my library’s newest acquisition, where it remained safe for 28 years until I sent it to Auburn.

Yesterday the Institute’s archivist made my day by sending me a photo of the napkin on display in a plexiglass case, noting that it’s “really enjoyed by our students and visitors.”) The exhibit label reads: “The Annotated Napkin, July 1, 1986, Murray N. Rothbard, Gift of Mr. Anthony Flood.”

Continue reading ““The Annotated Napkin”: a memento of Murray”