3 things

Back from a trip to visit kids and new grandkid! 

As a way of easing back into the routine, I'll review some recent articles that seem interesting to me. 

The American Conservative has a spate of them. Foremost, Wartime Without End, War Powers Without Check. If this country had healthy and useful debates during election years, this issue would be in the forefront. Some of us were old enough to remember when military incursions/occupations were a hotly debated matter. 

Executive usurpation of Congress’ role in matters of war is not an obscure point of constitutional law. It goes to the heart of our warped and destructive foreign policy. It subverts our republican form of government, and it makes a mockery of democratic accountability. For seventy years, Americans have entrusted the decision to make war to the branch that can be trusted least with that power, and a long record of bloody, desultory warfare has been the result. Restraining the executive is not a panacea for all of the problems of U.S. foreign policy, but it would significantly limit the damage that the U.S. can do to itself and to other countries.

You might expect Congressional elections to serve as referenda on such momentous matters as America's wars, but instead our elections are largely diversions from these issues. 

At Touchstone Magazine, we have Anthony Esolen's No Option: Clear Out the Rubble and Rebuild. This article amounts to a true Conservative's Lament, and it is difficult to excerpt with brevity. The following lengthy quote comes after an engaging discussion of the philosopher Boethius, who serves as Esolen's model for how to live during a period of decline.

Now think of the young man of our time, in his cave. He is not exercising what Rod Dreher has called the Benedict Option: he is not part of a community of prayer. He is not exercising the Boethius Option: he can hardly conceive of the virtue of piety and the demands it makes upon the good man and citizen. He is a mass man, and options have been exercised for him, not by masterminds and overlords, but by the immense weight of a system of social manipulation. He believes in choice, and he has nothing of any great moment to choose.

Unlike Boethius, he is alienated. Let us consider the ways in which this is so. I often receive letters from young people, more men than women, angry for having been cheated of their heritage of arts and letters. They sense, somehow, that it is not natural for man to be severed from his past. Man is not a dog or a cat, that God has made to live in the present moment, without history, without the great taproot of piety that drinks from the springs of what we have been given from our forebears long ago.

These young people know, somewhat abstractly, but also as a feeling of not being settled, that they are missing something, and they try by what must be artificial means to recover it. They ask for reading lists. They watch some classic movies. They are often unchurched, and hardly know where to begin to heal that wound, if they begin at all. They are like people who have been shut up indoors all their lives, pallid, weak, stunted, half smothered in the imagination, who then step outside and see the sun, and try a little bit, every day, to take a walk or turn a spade or sit on a rock somewhere. It is a lot better than nothing.

But are we living in a period of decline? I rather think so. I may have more to say on this in a future post. It's a long article, and after discussing the "Boethius Option" and nodding toward Dreher's "Benedict Option," Esolen presents the "Bosco Option," named for St. John Bosco of Turin. This is all well worth reading. The problem, as Frost said, "is what to make of a diminished thing."

Or (and let this be the 3rd thing of this "3 things" post), as Beth Moore said recently in a Tweet, "the thickest part of the plot is what we do with what was broken."