Check out this piece in the Dallas Morning News today, in which we asked a group of local folks to write about what they've changed their mind about, and why. You'll find short essays from your CC blog fave raves Erin Manning (who changed her mind about conservative talk radio), Rawlins Gilliland (who changed his mind about how adventurous people are by nature), and of course, Your Working Boy (who changed his mind about the ability of people to resist changing their mind -- how meta is that?).
Changing your mind
Sunday March 16, 2008
Categories: Culture
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Rod's Sunday column linked above is one of the best-written things he's done to date, suggestive of a new depth in waters uncharted.
But once you've written from the abyss of a compelled "Run from Safety" (echoing the title of an unforgettably bittersweet song by the Vancouver band Octoberman),
radio3.cbc.ca/play/band/OCTOBERMAN/Run-From-Safety/
of a "free falling" that's anything but Petty as you take to bed with Full Moon Fever, finding yourself a tenured Uncertainty Principal in the School of Life: vertigo next?
"...dyed-in-the-wool libralism draped in undyed organic cotton."
"...leather-jacketed defiance."
Erin Manning can certainly turn a phrase, can't she. Not that you can't, Rod. I'm just guessing with the homeschooling, writing is not her full time career. Yet.
I read this article in the paper yesterday as I happened to be in Dallas and I have been puzzling over it ever since. To me, this article seems confused. Are you saying there is no objective truth, or there is? That we can know objective truth, or we can't?
All I see you saying is that you lost your faith in the Catholic Church, and you had never expected that to happen. Well, okay but that needs to be fleshed out- what did you lose faith in, exactly, and why? Was it "the Church", or was it some of the people in the Church?
Can you lose the faith you have now in the Orthodox Church? Why or why not? Are the truths you hold now true, or not? Is there a way to know? Does it matter?
Overall, I just don't understand the points you are trying to make here, unless you are saying that all truth is relative and there is no way to know objective truth.
Way back when, I believed in monomania. Or, to use Kierkegaard's title, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (my favorite book of his, though much less well-known than the others.) I also believed that the world goes around because monomaniacs push it.
Now, OTOH, I believe in mixed messages, multiple loyalties, and internal contradictions. I believe it is no more possible to form a life direction from a single principle than to sleep soundly in a hammock hung by a single nail. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes."
[Actually, since I contain only a few multitudes, I am perhaps only half-vast?]
o.K.
I'll remember that if you ever try to convince me of something.
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