A Review of Pandemic of Lunacy in Catholic Culture by Dr. Jeff Mirus
One of the most troubling aspects of arguing with those who hold all the standard popular errors is that false positions are so often advanced and defended based either on personal “feelings” (for which we can often read personal “desires”) or on what “everybody knows”, meaning that counter-opinions are instantly categorized as both inadmissible and personally vicious. Moreover, the intellectual and spiritual darkness is so willfully pervasive that it is hard even to get in a position to open a window to shed some light. And that is precisely why J. Budziszewski has done us all a service by identifying thirty such errors, mostly torn from this same old cloth, in a single extraordinarily useful book: Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy.
Budziszewski (pronounced Boojee-shef-skee) tends to go by the first name of J., and is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. A convert to Catholicism and an author of some twenty previous books, he has made a substantial contribution to sanity for many years. It is a delight to visit his website, The Underground Thomist, where you will find his books, talks, articles “Office Hours” dialogues and “Ask Theophilus” letters. Few have done as much in the effort to restore (or at least make room for) sound thinking in today’s world.
In his latest work on our pandemic of lunacy, Budziszewski treats thirty dominant errors and confusions in our society, unsparingly called delusions and lunacies, which demand clarification, refutation and rejection.
