"Love and marriage"

As a quasi follow-up to my previous post on marriage in contemporary U.S. culture, I ran across this study on the subject via J. Taranto of The Wall Street Journal:

• A Brookings Institution study by George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen, "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States" (August 1996).  This paper was earlier published in May 1996 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 

"It's an institute you can't disparage"

For Frank Sinatra, 

Love and marriage, love and marriage / Go together like a horse and carriage ... 

Love and marriage, love and marriage / It's an institute you can't disparage ... 

Try, try, try to separate them / It's an illusion 

But according to this February 18 front-page report in The New York Times, "For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage," in the United States apparently neither love nor children goes with marriage like a horse and carriage.  Rather, as sociologist Frank Furstenberg tries to make sense of the phenomenon, "[m]arriage has become a luxury good."  

Diversity as a Requirement of Justice

This op-ed contribution in The Wall Street Journal -- "Judicial 'Diversity' and Justice" by Jamie Whyte -- is bound to be controversial, but the author is asking important questions about prudence, human nature, identity, and justice:

Blind Justice (bronze)

Once you believe that humans cannot achieve the degree of impartiality required to administer the law, it makes no difference if the judiciary is composed entirely of white men or perfectly reflects the mix of the population. Either way, the law will not be administered justly.

What is a society to do in its admirable pursuit of justice if it assumes that people are always irredeemably and unjustly partial along racial, gender, religious, and ethnic lines?


(A login may be required to read the full column.)

Leviathan & Liberty

Whatever one's ultimate opinion about any number of contemporary topics -- from the Affordable Care Act to the limits of executive power, from government regulation of health care to the promotion of individual and religious liberty -- The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer made some keen observations about ten days ago with which everyone should wrestle.

Reflections on the Grammar Wars

I have wondered at times if many people disregard proper grammar because they devalue clear reasoning.  

Upping One's Grammar Game

Not everyone values correct grammar as much as I do.  For those who do or who wish to up their game, see the well-done and practical "20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes" by Jon Gingerich.

Introducing a new blog experiment

I am a reluctant blogger.  The future of this page may demonstrate that.  I have, however, succumbed for the moment to the medium, despite my continuing conflictedness, because I have been encouraged to share some of my thoughts with a slightly wider circle than a few close friends.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

This blog is about cultivating wisdom, prudence, practical virtue.  In Aristotle's ethical vocabulary, that is phronēsis.  In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes phronēsis from sophia as, to put it crudely, universal theory differs from everyday practice.  Both are integral in his view to the pursuit and attainment of aretē, or virtue.  Aristotle aims not at virtue alone, but activity in accordance with virtue.  And that ultimately is what I hope in this blog to explore.


I approach this exploration as a person with many interests and a slightly varied background.  Both (the interests and the background) help to explain the polytropos term in the blog's title.  Homer applies the term to Odysseus, the many-wayed one, to signify in a single word with a broad semantic range the pluriformity of the Ithacan's journeys, experiences, wiles, intelligence, and, yes, practical knowledge.  The author of the New Testament book to the Hebrews uses the term to describe the variety of ways in which God's previous revelatory self-disclosure unfolded.  In terms of this blog, the term polytropos captures well both the position from which I begin this blogging experiment and my intention to traverse more than one or two narrow topics as part of the ultimate cultivation of phronēsis.

Odysseus blinding Polyphemus (Odyssey, bk. 9)

Nevertheless, I anticipate that certain patterns, or pockets, of interest will appear as time passes.  Some clusters of topical reflection will be more extensive than others.  In particular, I expect that many links and posts will be of a political and economic nature.  This is for the basic reason that phronēsis is about the daily, practical outworkings individually and in community of our collected knowledge.  It is about knowing how best to assess the right aims or ends, particularly the end of living well as humans, and how to make real progress toward realizing those desired ends.  


In one sense, politics is -- or, rather, should be -- the intersection of applied prudence and community life.  The ultimate aim of Odysseus's knowledge, shrewdness, and journeys is the restoration of practical relationships in his home and his city-state.  Just as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is a natural precursor to the Politics, so the exploration of phronēsis is just a dotted-line divided from political reasoning.  The borders are porous.


It will take many turns to feed this healthy appetite for practical wisdom.  And in some cases it will in fact require these twists and turns simply to create a hunger at all for phronēsis.  It is not something highly valued in general in our culture, and it is not something that comes naturally to us.  Pursuing these paths from different angles is the purpose of the following blog experiment.