There’s a new edition up of The New Pantagruel.
I haven’t delved in yet, but there appear to be some goodies, including:
- “Harsh Medicine” by Wesley J. Smith
- “Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism” by Mark C. Henrie
Also, speaking of vaguely countercultural online Christian journals, Harbinger directs us to the latest edition of The Other Journal, featuring an essay on capitalism by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.
A tidbit:
[C]apitalism is wrong not only on account of its failure to aid the poor and needy, but also because of what it does succeed in doing, namely, deforming human desire. As Augustine noted long ago, humans are created to desire God and the things of God. Capitalism corrupts desire. Even if capitalism succeeds in reducing poverty, it is still wrong on account of its distortion of human desiring and human relations. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted, “although Christian indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. . . .Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize.” Capitalism is wrong not simply because it fails to succor the impoverished, but also because where it succeeds it deforms and corrupts human desire into an insatiable drive for more. Capitalism makes a virtue of what an earlier era denounced as a vice, pleonexia or greed – a restless, possessive, acquisitive drive, but which today is celebrated as the aggressive, creative, entrepreneurial energy that distinguishes homo economicus. Diagnoses and critiques of this cancerous desire and its effects abound and need not be repeated here.
I don’t agree with everything in Bell’s essay, but it is well worth reading.
A Thinking Reed 
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