God and Man at the Marriott

This year’s national meeting of the Philadelphia Society was held just outside of Chicago—not, to my disappointment, within, as usual. Since the meeting’s theme was “Religion in the Contemporary Free Society,” perhaps the Society’s impresario, Commodore Don Lipsett, reasoned it might be wise to keep a bit of distance from the town that Billy Sunday could not close down. In any case, the Marriott O’Hare provided comfortable accommodations—although at one point, late in the evening, as the membership gathered in a room upstairs for an innocent carouse, I found myself explaining to a curious guest across the hall that all these decibels were being generated by a group of conservative intellectuals. I stopped short of telling him what the theme of the convention was.

Keynote speaker John MacCormack, of St. Mary’s University (Nova Scotia), briefly reviewed church-state theory from the ancient Hebrews onward, lingering somewhat over his favorite century, the fourteenth. If you had been there, he would have made the fourteenth your favorite too, if it isn’t already. It was then that the metaphysics of Occam and Aquinas bore political blossom, Aquinas paving the way for constitutional monarchy, Occam for a despotism in which will and reason divorce. MacCormack laid the doctrine of the divine right of kings to Occam’s influence.

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Joseph Sobran

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This year’s national meeting of the Philadelphia Society was held just outside of Chicago—not, to my disappointment, within, as usual. Since the meeting’s theme was “Religion in the Contemporary Free Society,” perhaps the Society’s impresario, Commodore Don Lipsett, reasoned it might be wise to keep a bit of distance from the town that Billy Sunday could not close down. In any case, the Marriott O’Hare provided comfortable accommodations—although at one point, late in the evening, as the membership gathered in a room upstairs for an innocent carouse, I found myself explaining to a curious guest across the hall that all these decibels were being generated by a group of conservative intellectuals. I stopped short of telling him what the theme of the convention was.

Keynote speaker John MacCormack, of St. Mary’s University (Nova Scotia), briefly reviewed church-state theory from the ancient Hebrews onward, lingering somewhat over his favorite century, the fourteenth. If you had been there, he would have made the fourteenth your favorite too, if it isn’t already. It was then that the metaphysics of Occam and Aquinas bore political blossom, Aquinas paving the way for constitutional monarchy, Occam for a despotism in which will and reason divorce. MacCormack laid the doctrine of the divine right of kings to Occam’s influence.