Commentary
Over the course of our lifetime we have been speeding toward one of the most dysfunctional and hopeless episodes in modern history.
According to Catholic scholar Rusty Reno, our present condition wasn’t just brought on by misguided ideologies. In the June/July edition of First Things Magazine, Reno said we are suffering from a “general decay of authority” in Western culture.
“How have we come to this?” asked Reno, the editor of First Things.
Reno’s reply was linked to the thought of British poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Reno pointed out that Coleridge was influenced by the critical philosophy of Emanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel. In his famous treatise, “On the Constitution of the Church and State,” the Romantic era savant drew on Hegel’s notion of society as a perpetual contest between competing paradigms….