With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Tranquillitas Ordinis

The Turquoise Serpent

The Turquoise Serpent

Alexander Palacio's The Turquoise Serpent is R. E. Howard's Conan transposed into a demon-haunted pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and it is awesome. I imagine a certain fraction of my audience will know exactly what that means without elaboration, but for the rest of you let's dive

Thrawn's Vision

Saint Thomas and the Common Good

In Catholic Social Teaching and Catholic political philosophy, the common good is a key concept. But, it often seems to us moderns like an impossibly gassy abstraction. Yesterday, I came across a nice summary of St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on the common good, which I think can help. See’s

The Long View 2008-12-29: Happy New Year

John J. Reilly was a big proponent of public order, or what post-liberals right now term the common good. John was in favor of universal healthcare because he deemed it a public good, rather than a right. Building, and perhaps more importantly, maintaining all the vast infrastructure of manufacturing and

The Long View 2008-11-29: Mumbai and the Tranquility of Order

In retrospect, I have criticized John and a lot of other people for the things they said or the courses of action they took in the years after 9/11. However, if you get yourself back in the mindset you might have had at the time, something like the 2008

The Long View 2008-01-28: Iraq as Parable; The Grossraum Fallacy

I do find it interesting that John J. Reilly’s comment here on a primary function of government, the promotion of just order: The Iraq War might stand as a metaphor for the whole episode of Movement Conservativism in American history. It started well enough, and it got rid of

Stryker's War Book Review

What use is the valor of brave men in the service of evil goals? Stryker’s War is the most gut-wrenching book in the Order of Centurion series so far because it takes a good hard look at the reality that not everything that can get a soldier killed is