Naturally, there is a sense in which our decline began with Original Sin, like everything else did. But the Incarnation and the founding of the Church countered that. So the question is, when did Christendom begin to unravel? And my proposed answer was: with Ockham

One good place to start if you want to understand how modern secularism is in fact largely just bad medieval theology (voluntarism and nominalism)

Lots of responses to the effect of "But it's more complicated than that!" Guys: Yes, I'm aware. It's a tweet, not a dissertation, for goodness' sake

Every one of the ten points listed remains dead on accurate and indeed urgent. But most in the West remain deaf to them, and even many conservatives would still resist some of them. When will the West at last wake up? Will it be too late?

I see from my notifications that the chin-pulling continues. So, in future, all tweets will first be peer-reviewed, then posted only with supporting footnotes and other scholarly apparatus. Possibly supplemented with proceedings of a post-tweet “Author meets critics” session.

“My view is that conservatism has nothing intrinsically to do with big business but with moral and political values. And if business is antipathetic to those values, you have to fight it, with all the methods that are available.” Sir Roger Scruton

President Joe Biden's assertion that Kamala Harris has the moral compass of a saint is “so manifestly ludicrous that it would be unworthy of [a] comment if it didn’t come from a president of the United States, and a Catholic one at that” - Edward Feser Fr. Thomas Petri, OP Catholic Answers

There is no way that anybody who believes that life begins at conception can defend IVF, except through a massive act of cognitive dissonance.

Whatever the historical details, the basic point Eric Sammons makes here is correct. Social conservatives naively neglect the power that shame and harsh, “judgmental” language have in molding opinion. The Left has ruthlessly used these to tremendous effect in changing attitudes

This is the woman the so-called Catholic Joe Biden characterizes as having “the moral compass of a saint.” In reality, Harris is the antithesis of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who truly loved India and rightly characterized abortion as the greatest destroyer of peace.

Yes, neither the medievals nor the Enlightenment-era thinkers conform to the stereotypes modern people believe about them.

Thomists

As James Piereson notes in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, “in fact [JFK] was shot by a communist and thus a casualty of the Cold War.” But conspiracy mythology has brainwashed millions into the delusion that he was a victim of right-wing resistance to peace in Vietnam,

There are two real monsters of World War II, and they are Hitler and Stalin. Hitler is rightly demonized, because he was demonic. Yet somehow Stalin looms far less large in the public mind, though he was no less demonic, killed and oppressed far more people, dominated far more

I’ve long defended the standard Catholic position that it was gravely immoral for the Allies to attack civilian populations at Dresden, Hiroshima, etc. But it is absurd to conclude that Churchill and Truman were morally equivalent to Hitler and Stalin.

It is unquestionably true that the Japanese Empire’s brutality during the war was extreme and now too often forgotten. But that does not affect my point, because there was no single person to whom it could be primarily traced (Tojo, say, or Hirohito), whereas Hitler and Stalin

Of course, it was always there waiting in the Library of Babel, but kudos to the editors for finding it!

This is in fact essential to being a good academic

Hard to believe it has been ten years since the publication of this book, wherein I provide a detailed exposition and defense of the main themes of Scholastic metaphysics and bring it into conversation with contemporary analytic philosophy. Thank you, editiones-scholasticae.de

“Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created… It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.” Sir Roger Scruton