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  3. Chairman's Blog

Chairman's Blog

    13/01/2021 - 14:56

    Woke philosophers vs. Kathleen Stock

    Prof. Kathleen Stock is a 'gender critical' feminist and a philosopher at the Univesity of Sussex. She has been involved in the controvery about proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act which aimed to make it possible for anyone to change gender without any formal process: she is against this. I'd say the mob has come after her, but it's a mob of academic philosophers, and I wonder what the appropriate collective noun is. 'Shower', perhaps. They've written a joint open letter criticising her; there is a counter-letter in her support here, which I have signed myself. One of the leading names is Prof Peter Singer. Anyone familiar with philosophical ethics will enjoy the irony of his and my name appearing together under the same letter. Then again I'd not normally group myself with Stock either. This is about the freedom to disagree, not about defending our specific philosophical views.

    I've written about the issue on LifeSite; here's a key passage.
    ...there is something very odd about a group of philosophers gathering to condemn a fellow philosopher for holding certain views without regard for the cogency of the views themselves. Surely, that must come into it. Surely, if Stock is correct, then any possible harmful fall-out from publicizing these opinions should be managed in some way other than by publicly shaming her? It is almost as if these critics are not confident about the force of their arguments, but hope to win the point by weight of numbers, joined with the fashionable nature of their own position.

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    09/01/2021 - 16:56

    Same-Sex Marriage isn't working
    My latest on LifeSite. A key paragraph:


    The 

    Daily Mail reports that “divorces” among same-sex couples increased from 428 in 2018 to 822 in 2019, and of the 2019 figure, almost three quarters are lesbian couples. (There were also 107,599 actual divorces that year in the U.K., an increase of 20% on the previous year.) Drew ran a clinic to help women in lesbian couples conceive children, and, as she told the Daily Mail, “a third of the 586 lesbian couples [sic] she helped to have babies between 2011 and 2015 have split up.”

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    06/01/2021 - 11:49

    Stay sane in 2021
    My latest on LifeSite

    As the U.K. and much of Europe head into ever-stricter coronavirus lockdowns, Americans can look forward to something similar from the likely incoming Biden administration. This isn’t quite the vaccine-protected, hopeful new year we were promised, and our short-term ways of dealing with the situation may be getting a bit tired.

    In a similar way, some people who were worried about Pope Francis comforted themselves with the thought that his approach, which in certain obvious ways contrasts so strongly with his predecessors’, was unlikely to last long. The Italians have a saying: a fat pope is followed by a thin pope. As time has gone on, I’ve become less sure this is how things will be. They don’t seem to make cardinals like Joseph Ratzinger (elected as Pope Benedict XVI) any more.

    In any case, it seems to me that in this bright new year we should be thinking about adaptation, rather than either hibernation, waiting for better times, or the hyper-activity of a response to an emergency. We can’t afford either the loss of time from the first, as months of crisis lengthen into years, or the stress of the second.

    Read the whole thing.

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    05/01/2021 - 10:00

    Schools conceived of as care-givers undermine the family

    My latest on LifeSite.

    During the Coronavirus epidemic high-profile British soccer-player Marcus Rashford called for the extension of free school lunches over the school holidays. School meals are free in the U.K. for the children of poorer families, and Rashford thought that it would make sense for this concept to be extended to the time when schools are out. Prime Minister Boris Johnson caved in to the campaign in the summer, giving poorer families vouchers to use in supermarkets, but refused to do so again for the Christmas break, though a lot of volunteers did step in with offers of free cooked meals, and the government promised help through the normal channels of the welfare system. In the meantime Rashford was given an honor—“Member of the British Empire” (MBE)—usually given to people who have spent a lifetime volunteering, at the age of 23.

    Rashford’s initiative was prompted by a commendable compassion, but there is something slightly troubling about the terms in which his campaign took off. Feeding the very poor is a fundamental category of good work, but what have schools got to do with it? It was difficult to shake off the impression that Rashford was benefitting from an unfortunate idea which seems to have taken hold: that schools are primary care-givers. If they are, the periods of time in which schools are not in session, for whatever reason, become problematic. Who is going to look after the children then?

    Read the whole thing.
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    04/01/2021 - 14:37

    A New Year's idea: a reading group for Socratic dialogues

    As we face heaven knows how much more time cooped up under every kind of pressure, I feel the need to get away from it all, not so much imaginatively (I'm not a great reader of romantic fiction) but intellectually. 

    I want to go somewhere where there are no fashionable causes demanding our agreement to an ever-changing collection of insane propositions. Where I can consider something, in company with others, not indeed without relevance to ordinary life, but abstracted a little from the urgencies of today, in a calm atmosphere. And where this consideration can be reasonably prolonged and serious.
    The suviving works of ancient philosophy invite us to do this, and above all, the early dialogues of Plato seem to me ideally suited to it. They tend to be short, and address specific concepts, often virtues (piety, courage, friendship). They are artfully constructed to show up confusions hidden in  common beliefs and usually end on a note of paradox, leaving readers to decide for themselves where to take the argument next, whether in a way hinted by Plato, or in a different direction.
    They are ideally suited to beginners in philosophy as they don't assume too much prior knoweledge or use too much technical vocabulary. They are an introduction to philosophy in the sense that they have had an immense influence on later thinking, both in terms of their arguments (which were considered again in Plato's later writings, by Aristototle, and by many others) but above all in their style of argument.
    The discipline of philosophy, it is often said, is not a body of doctrine, but a method. Plato's early dialogues are the greatest exemples of this method in the history of philosophy: all later philosophy is directly or indirectly indebted to their model, in which concepts are discussed and broken down, definitions proferred and counter-examples considered, in a conversation among civilised people--not always friendly, but always driven by Socrates, with patience and irony, in the service of the truth.
    The early dialogues are likely to appear a bit dense at first and are set in a thought-world (of ancient Athens) rather different from our own, so an encounter with them is best done in the company of a guide. They are also designed to generate group discussion, and have not lost their power to do so.
    I therefore invite expressions of interest in a course of online seminars on the early dialogues (in English!) to be led by me, for a reasonable fee. My thought is that a small group (between two and five people) could read one dialogue a week and spend an hour on Zoom discussing it after a brief introduction to the argument by one member of the group.
    Timing and other details to be confirmed, but I'd suggest starting with a series of four, on the Euthyphro, Ion, Lysis, and Laches. The texts are all online.
    I've put more information about the project here.
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    24/12/2020 - 09:43

    A Happy and Holy Christmas to all my readers!

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    23/12/2020 - 09:42

    On cancelling Christmas
    IMG_1302
    Sung Midnight Mass (anticipated at 6pm) in SS Gregory & Augustine's, Oxford. Despite everything
    it will take place again this year.
    My latest on LifeSite. A key paragraph:
    You don’t have to be a believing Christian to take part in this cultural phenomenon, but it is a cultural phenomenon built, not simply on a Christian festival, like having a long weekend and chocolate eggs at Easter, but on a Christian story. It is the Holy Family, in their journey to Bethlehem, in the birth of Jesus, and the visits of the shepherds and kings, who are at the heart of the commercialized indulgence, even if this heart is sometimes hidden. In our shopping streets they can be glimpsed in the music, the decorations, and the nativity scenes. In the most secular household they are still there too, in the idea of homecoming, family, and the exchange of gifts: and in the very idea of hope at the darkest time of the year. Without Christmas, the English winter would be nothing but dark, wet, and miserable.

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    22/12/2020 - 10:00

    Thoughts sparked by Joseph Sciambra
    St Joseph, from Wikipedia Commons

    I've wanted to say something about Joseph Sciambra's important essay, 'Remaining in a Church That Hurt(s) Me', for a while, and now I've written something for LifeSite about it.
    Sciambra is a victim of clerical abuse who was consistently told to accept the fact that he was homosexual by priests.
    Here's a key paragaraph of my article:
    What we are being told is that this [the standard approach] is the compassionate thing: that any other approach is judgmental and wrong. But what Sciambra found is that the “born that way” message is a gift to abusers, because it imprisons young people not only in a category of person, but in a pattern of behavior. Those told they are gay are then told, by many Catholic priests, along with much or all of the medical and cultural establishment, that they should be acting out in certain ways, as their only path out of loneliness and self-loathing to fulfilment.

    Read my whole article.

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    21/12/2020 - 09:17

    Meet Fr Joseph Quigley, creator of Catholic sex education and paedophile

    This story, as they say, writes itself. Fr Joseph Quigly, author of the Birmingham Archdiocese's first foray into sex education, All That I Am, explained about it:

    "If we talk about sexuality as a gift, clearly we want to introduce them to that at an appropriate level."

    Who could possible have imagined that a man who made it his mission to destroy the innocence of children, who planned, designed, imposed and defended the systematic breaking-down of the natural sexual reserve of nine-year-olds -- who could have possibly thought for a moment that such a man might be sadistic paedophile? I suppose we should all have complete confidence that such an astonishing coincidence is just that -- a coincidence -- and that no-one else involved in the demonic project to sexualise our children is also involved in the demonic project of physically abusing them. Because to connect the two things would be ridiculous wouldn't it? No, it would be far more sane to agree with the sex education establishment that to sexualise children in the classroom is actually a protection against sexualisation by paedophiles. In some way they will I'm sure explain very clearly.

    Me on LifeSite.

    Father Joseph Quigley of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, England was convicted this week of sexual activity with a child, sexual assault, false imprisonment (he liked to lock children in a crypt) and cruelty. One case against him dated from the 1990s, another concerned his actions between 2006 and 2008. 


    The Archdiocese, headed until 2009 by Vincent Nichols, now the Cardinal Archbishop of Birmingham, and since then by Archbishop Bernard Longley, failed to report Quigley to the police when they learned of one set of his crimes in 2008. Instead, they flew him to the United States for “rehabilitation” in a specialist clinic and subsequently allowed him to return to work in the UK. 

    After that, he was supposedly under “restrictions,” but managed somehow to celebrate Mass at a school in 2009, and he was commissioned by the Archdiocese to carry out a school inspection in 2011.

    What were they thinking? Well, as a matter of fact, Quigley supposedly had considerable expertise in education. If he had been diagnosed as a “a sexual sadist and voyeur,” what did that matter? Let me quote the report in the UK’s liberal Catholic weekly, The Tablet.

    At the time that the first allegations against Quigley were made in 2008, he was both director of education for the Birmingham archdiocese and national adviser on religious education for the Catholic Education Service (CES), of which Archbishop Nichols was chair. …

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    20/12/2020 - 09:09

    That Natvity scene in the Vatican
    I see that the Daily Mail ridicules the Vatican nativity scene this year as reminiscent of the Daleks from Dr Who. Has it come to this? The world's one artistic superpower, the Catholic Church, so utterly fails an annual chance to evangelise through beauty as to provoke insults. Is this how we bring people to Christ?

    Me on LifeSite.

    This year, the annual tradition of the large-scale Nativity scene in St Peter’s Square descended into farce when the figures were revealed as childish and hideous products of artistic modernism. The figures were produced over the course of about a decade starting in 1965 and are reminiscent of the mediocre art of that time. One of the figures visiting the crib is an astronaut; others are unrecognizable. There is an angel represented as a bizarre, tower-like object with meaningless rings round it.

    There are a great many reasons why this collection of objects is unsuitable for display as the Vatican’s Nativity scene. I leave it to art historians to decide whether it has sufficient historical importance to gather dust in a provincial museum somewhere. If it were not the season of goodwill, I might suggest it be crushed and used for road-building. But the simple and overwhelming point to make about it is that while it might claim to be religious art — art inspired by religious themes or values, or representing a scene with religious significance — it cannot possibly be described as devotional art.

    The failure to distinguish these two categories is to blame for a lot of en
    tirely inappropriate art in our churches. Consider the images showing the Stations of the Cross. These are designed to assist the user (and, yes, devotional art is used), to enter imaginatively into the scenes of Christ’s sufferings. This assistance to the imagination is the role of all devotional depictions of scenes. To do this effectively, it needs at least to be representational, and not, for example, abstract.

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