In the magazine this month
April Edition
This months Coracle is all about the upcoming Holyrood Elections with polls suggesting the SNP will remain the largest party - 2nd place appears up for grabs at the moment. When we as Christian are considering who to vote for we should look beyond the sound-bites and media stunts - finger pointing and rebuttal. How should we vote? Is there a better politics out there and if so could we be a constituency that it could find a home in? To contribute an answer we looked into the thought of French philosopher Jacques Maritain, Scottish/American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre and we playfully reimagine what a radical Right might look like - not to mention James Bundy on truth in politics.
Stephen Watt playfully imagines what a radical Right in Scotland might look like. His piece produces a potential manifesto calling for a serious and intellectual radical Right that in challenging the dominant progressive analysis makes our overall political system better.
It is entirely possible that Scotland faces a grim economic and political future: civilisations flourish and wane, and there is no reason to suppose that we are immune to this pattern. But all of us have value and a place in society. The modern demand for equality is a pale shadow of the truth of solidarity: each of us, in different ways and according to our different abilities, has a role to play and no one should be abandoned.
Jacques Maritain and the Cosmopolitan Knighthood of Democracy: Naucratic Expeditions on a politics of human flourishing beyond market forces and the ever engorging need of growth.
‘The eschaton will not be the aggregate result of human effort but the life of faith and the practice of theology is always political: we only have the choice of what kind of politics it will be. Politics, in turn, can never break out of the orbit of theological mysteries into an autonomous realm–even if it thinks it can[…]
Catholics young and old have a choice: reignite the war against equality, democracy, and liberation or join Jacques Maritain in working for a critical Catholic modernity–a Catholic modernity that prophetically refuses the inhumanity of money over persons, the cynicism of empire and state-enforced religion, and the pseudo-mysticism of ethnonationalism.
Dignity in the public discourse
Elizabeth Drummond Young, one of the founders of the Albertus Institute in Edinburgh, writes on a dignity combined with love and friendship. Dignity as Alasdair Macintyre warned us:
Dignity is the sham culmination of western humanism because it carries a shocking indifference to others – Alasdair MacIntyre
James Bundy writes on the importance of a truthful politics with politians and institutions not afraid to tell the electorate the truth so that we can better deal with the problems and issues affecting our country.
The instinct is to reassure, to present a manageable picture of progress, and to avoid the political cost of candour. Opposition parties, by contrast, are tempted in the opposite direction: to present every failure as total, every shortcoming as systemic, and every problem as the sole responsibility of those in power.
Neither approach serves the common good. Constant reassurance erodes credibility when reality intrudes. Constant denunciation dulls public sensitivity, until even serious failures struggle to command attention. In both cases, politics becomes reactive and performative, an endless cycle of signalling and rebuttal, rather than a serious attempt to grapple with underlying problems.
From the Archive
As a magazine we have been going a mere blink of an eye but in those 6 years we have amassed a signifcant archive. Below is one from February 2023: