The Christian Vanguard

Here is my Amazon review for Sir Roger Scruton's book, On Hunting

People are confused about art, or if not confused, willfully ignorant. You see people trying to be edgy or avant-garde by looking at garbage and calling it art. I don't mean art that is bad in technical skill (like a child's finger painting) or even immoral (I'll use my better judgment and not cite anything here), but literally a thing that doesn't belong to the category of art but that some people want to claim it is. What art actually is, I won't explore in depth here, but I do want to say that realism is a necessary condition for something being art.  I have to be careful about the word "realism" because that's somewhat technical in the art world.  By realism I mean that whatever the subject is in the artwork, it has to capture (or at least attempt to capture) the essence of the thing. And this presupposes that things have real knowable essences. So I mean metaphysical real essentialism. The image must be trying to take a form, something like a...

I saw a little girl on the beach throwing rocks into the ocean. She looked back at her parents for approval, while they cheered her on, telling her what a good job she was doing. This seemingly pointless endeavor was the cause of much joy and amusement. It reminds me of the view of art that art is useless, to take away its unduly emphasis on its utility. Roger Scruton makes a point that if in creating (in something like architecture) you put a things utility first with no regard to its aesthetic worth, it will become useless, because no one wants any part in something that is so ugly. When something is beautiful, then people want to participate in that beauty. Throwing rocks into the water seems to be like one of those things that is completely pointless and has have no utility, but because there is something beautiful about it, we want to do it anyways. It's a gratifying paradox. That children do this more than adults I think clues us into some of the aspects of throwing rocks ...

I see it said often that we need to do something about the "problem of teen pregnancy". I don't think so. What is problematic about pregnancy? Nothing, unless you're a liberal, but I see conservatives say this too, and I'd rather not think they're being inconsistent. Maybe there is something wrong about teen pregnancy, and not just pregnancy itself. If so, what is it? I think there is the assumption that the child cannot be cared for properly, and that is the root of the problem. But I'm wondering, if these pregnancies did not happen out of wedlock, which I think is another assumption being made, would the child be able to be provided for thus eliminating the "problem"? If so, then the problem isn't that teens are having children, it is that there are children being born out of wedlock. And so the solution is the encouragement of marriage, not the encouragement of condoms or something silly like that.  There is the issue of whether teen...

2016 is in the books now. I look back on my life this last year, and if it had a theme, the theme would be "Woman". Women have played a significant role in my life this year. Here are some ways that is.  It should be noted that the absence of male friends was a thing. A lot of this had to do with the fact that many of them got married and moved away, or got married and had become preoccupied with marital life. Their friends ended up being other married friends. As I'm single, I became distant to a lot of them. That's okay. That's life.  The biggest presence, numerically anyways, of women in my life happened early in the year when I got promoted and had to supervise about 50 women at my job. Many of them were old enough to be my grandmother, and I'm sure that had some kind of effect on me. Some of them called me their second son, and I was really nice to a lot of them. As I was running the warehouse, I couldn't really have a sick day. If I didn...