Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

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Here is the final college-football ranking. What a game last night! Georgia dominated the first half; Alabama dominated the second half. The Crimson Tide won, 26-23, in overtime. The freshman quarterback for Alabama has a great future ahead of him.

Danny Westneat’s recent piece, “With Trump, ‘Lie of Year’ is obsolete,” struck a nerve. We have seen the incredible tallies of President Donald Trump’s lies. But the most serious one is the denial of climate change. That denial is a paramount lie because it carries profound consequences if solutions are not undertaken soon.

When this president fails in this dangerous way, it means that we the people need to step up. The solutions are there. The most effective is a price on carbon, thus stimulating the economic transition to clean energy that will protect the future for our children and grandchildren. I invite us to join together to create the political will for a livable future. There are elected officials who do understand science and will do the right thing, if we demand it. And we have more power than we realize. Citizens’ Climate Lobby knows how to help us get this work done.

So, instead of groaning under the oppression of a president who is addicted to lies, let us instead envision the healthy, safe, clean-energy economy our families need, and launch 2018 as the year of truth and climate transformation.

Bobbie Morgan, Bainbridge Island

Note from KBJ: I can't think of a single lie by Donald Trump. Barack Obama, on the other hand, was a notorious liar. Remember "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"? Where was Bobbie Morgan when we had an actual liar in the Oval Office?

We are fighting for our farmers, for our country, and for our GREAT AMERICAN FLAG. We want our flag respected – and we want our NATIONAL ANTHEM respected also! pic.twitter.com/16eOLXg6Fi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2018

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Aquinas is essentially a dialectical thinker who engages in careful propositional analysis and who prizes good arguments. The very structure of the Summa Theologiae or of the various disputed questions and philosophical commentaries also show him to be a systematic, critical and rigorous thinker. Since these are the principal virtues of analytical philosophy, I return to my earlier claim that those working in the spirit and in the letter of Thomism should seek to enter into dialogue with this intellectual constituency. Just as Aquinas drew upon the tradition of Aristotle in order to refashion Christian philosophy, and thereby incurred disapproval from those who judged this to be a dangerous diversion from the true way, so Thomists need now to have the courage and the humility to draw upon the best that has been thought and said in the tradition that runs from Moore and Russell to Putnam and Kripke in order to renew Christian religious philosophy.

But I also have it in mind that religious thought needs to take on the task of renewing academic philosophy by bringing it back to its vacation [sic] as the practice of the love of wisdom. If analytical philosophy can offer Thomism intellectual fruits, the tradition that derives from Aquinas is well equipped to offer analytical philosophy spiritual ones. In saying this I do not have in mind an ambition at religious conversion; rather I am thinking of the old idea made much of in recent years by Pierre Hadot, that philosophy is itself a form of spirituality. There is not the space to pursue this further now, save to note that it seems quite unintelligible to suppose that having arrived, as philosophers seek to do, at a general metaphysical account of the nature of reality nothing then follows as to how one ought to feel or live. Not only does the question arise as to how one ought to compose oneself in the face of reality as one conceives and experiences it, but the content of one's metaphysical view should shape the character of one's resulting philosophical demeanour. If analytical thinkers fail to recognise these requirements that shows the extent to which they stand in need of the spirit of philosophical renewal. There is much for Thomists to do along the lines of developing a religious philosophy adequate to the contemporary world; and they and others ought not to be dissuaded by the fact that contemporary philosophy is often disposed to exclude or silence styles of thought that draw upon religion. That disposition is akin to earlier attempts to isolate philosophy from psychology, politics, art and substantive moral enquiry. Like them it expresses a prejudice that must not go unchallenged. The fact that those attempts are now widely repudiated provides reason to be optimistic that the exclusion of religion will not long survive.

(John Haldane, "Philosophy, the Silencing of Religion and the Prospects for Religious Philosophy," Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3 [2003]: 349-68, at 367-8 [footnotes omitted])

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Killer (1971). Still great after all these years.

As I've been saying for many months, Donald Trump is five steps ahead of his opponents and critics.