Notre Dame Des Victoires

I have been following George Will’s thought for a long time. I’m old enough to remember when his column occupied the last page of Newsweek magazine every other week and when he sat in the chair of conservative thought on David Brinkley’s Sunday morning political talk show. I have long admired his graceful literary style and his clipped, smart manner of speech. Will was always especially good when, with lawyerly precision, he would take apart the sloppy thinking of one of his intellectual or political opponents. When I taught an introductory course in political philosophy at Mundelein Seminary many years ago, I used Will’s book Statecraft as Soulcraft to get across to my students what the ancients meant by the moral purpose of government. And so it was with great interest that I turned to Will’s latest offering, a massive volume called The Conservative Sensibility, a book that both in…

Llevo un largo tiempo siguiendo el pensamiento de George Will. Soy lo suficientemente mayor para recordar cuando su columna ocupaba la última página del Newsweek cada dos semanas y cuando ocupaba la silla del pensamiento conservador en el show político de David Brinkley los domingos por la mañana. Llevo un buen tiempo admirando su elegante estilo literario y su manera precisa e inteligente de hablar. Will era especialmente bueno cuando, con precisión quirúrgica, desenmarañaba las sinuosas curvas del pensamiento de sus adversarios intelectuales y políticos. Cuando enseñaba un curso de introducción a la filosofía política en el Mundelein Seminary hace muchos años, usaba su libro Statecraft as Soulcraft para explicar a mis estudiantes lo que los antiguos entendían por el propósito moral del gobierno. Y es por eso que recibí con gran interés la última propuesta de Will, un masivo volumen llamado The Conservative Sensibility, un libro que califica tanto por…

There is, to be sure, a stress within the Biblical tradition that God is radically other: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isaiah 45:15) and “No one shall see [God] and live” (Exodus 33:20). This speaks to the fact that the one who creates the entire universe from nothing cannot be, himself, an item within the universe, one being alongside of others. But at the same time, the Scriptures also attest to God’s omnipresence: “Your Wisdom reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well” (Wisdom 8:1) and “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; . . . If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your…