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Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Ambiguity is a dangerously potent tool—and not only in its shorter-term effects, as those who use it regularly can hardly be unaware. Although it may seem to leave the field open, it may also be intended to secure subversive changes in the future: this on “Hegelian” principles. If we call traditional Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage the thesis (T), and call the desired changes to that teaching the antithesis (A), putting the thesis and antithesis together, we get a synthesis (S). In matters of moral doctrine this is a distinctively subversive procedure, since if the antithesis (A) is in radical contradiction to the thesis (T), then the synthesis (S) will itself not only be faulty but will become the basis for further ill-founded deductions.
—John M. Rist
Infallibility, Integrity and Obedience (2023), 187–188
— Politics — Commonplaces #231 — Mar/Apr 2026 —
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