Your Blogger
An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Iosue Andreas Sartorius lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, his home of more than a decade, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. Mission creep has transformed an overseas assignment for his alma mater into a foreign entanglement in the Far East now well into its second decade. A Gypsy quadroon, he has also lived in Chile and what was British Malaya, offering perhaps some insights not only into the Confucian but also the Latin and Islamic civilizations as well.From what he likes to tout as self-imposed exile, he has written for LewRockwell.com, Nolan Chart, OpEdNews.Com, The Seoul Times, Spero News, and Traditional Catholic Reflections & Reports, as well as the sixth chapter of Ron Paul: A Life of Ideas. Contact him at westernconfucian@gmail.com.
Baptised into the Methodism of his maternal grandmother, who had been excommunicated from the Southern Baptist Church, the tenets of Catholicism were first imparted to him by the High Church Lutheranism in which he was raised in the Quaker-founded village of Orchard Park, New York. After having stumbled upon Anglo-Catholicism, he was not long after received into Holy Mother Church on the memorial of Saint Andrew the Apostle, his patron, in 2002, in Korea. This blog's title, a name used by Matteo Ricci, S.J., the great missionary to China, to describe himself, reflects that the blog is written by an unapologetic Westerner happily living in North Kyŏngsang Province, the Confucian heartland of what is often described as the world's most Confucian society.
He sees Confucianism, condemned as "reactionary" during the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as a political philosophy that has many cognates with both American Paleoconservatism and Paleolibertarianism, superficially in its Antimilitarism, but at a deeper level in that its twin pillars, Li (Etiquette) and Jen (Benevolence), posit reverence of tradition, ritual, and antiquity on the one hand and governance by moral example rather than force on the other. Indeed, the Harm Principle is presaged by the Confucian Golden Rule: "Don't do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." Similarly, Taoism, if applied to political-economy, is echoed in its core tenet of Wu-Wei (Non-Action) by Austrian School Economics, while at the same time the Agrarianism of the Tao Te Ching is paralleled by Anti-Federalism, Jeffersonianism, and Distributivism, and its Isolationism by the America First Committee.
Said Confucius, "I transmit but do not innovate; I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity." This blogger's aim is not to create any novelties, but rather to transmit ideas from others, especially those that pay proper homage to antiquity, mostly in the form of annotated links. It should be remembered that this is a weblog, whose raison d'être it is merely to share information; therefore, the presence of a link anywhere on this site should not be construed as an endorsement of the opinions, content, or veracity therein. Fair use rights are claimed and freely offered on all material appearing on these pages.
"The farther you go, the less you know."
─ Lao Tzu
The Sage
Confucius─ James Kalb from Confucius Today
This Blog's Namesake
Servant of God Matteo Ricci, S.J. (利瑪竇)─ Hahn Moo-Sook in Encounter
This Blog's Patroness
Mary, Mother of God─ Ave Maria in Sino-Korean mixed script, my reconstruction
This Blogger's Parish

─ Hahn Moo-Sook in Encounter
This Blog's Geopolitics

─ Bill Kauffman in Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism
"Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated 'military-industrial complex.' If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms."
─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics
In Exilium

─ Korean Confucianism
Confucian Westerners
-
"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice and madness, without tuition or restraint."
─ Edmund Burke
"We have heard enough of liberty and the rights of man; it is high time to hear something of the duties of men and the rights of authority."
─ Orestes Augustus Brownson
"The Virgin and St. Thomas [Aquinas] are my vehicles to anarchism."
─ Henry Adams
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."
─ G. K. Chesterton.
"Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within."
─ José Ortega y Gasset
"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
─ C.S. Lewis
"Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington."
─ Servant of God Dorothy Day
"When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries."
─ Servant of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
"Burke was liberal because he was conservative."
─ Russell Kirk
"I am often asked if I am a republican or a monarchist. I am neither, I am a legitimist: I am for legitimate government. You could never have a monarchy in Switzerland, and it would be asinine to imagine Spain as a republic."
─ Archduke Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius of Austria
"What we need is more confidence in ourselves, and a stronger belief in our traditions, so that we never are tempted to initiate force to make others live as we do. If we truly have an economic and political message worth emulating, our only responsibility is to set a standard that others will want to follow."
─ Congressman Ron Paul
News
- AsiaNews.it
- Asia Times Online
- The Buffalo News
- Catholic News Agency
- Catholic News Service
- Daily NK
- Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition)
- The Dong-A Ilbo
- Independent Catholic News
- Joong Ang Daily
- The Korea Herald
- Korea Times
- The Seoul Times
- Spero News
- Union of Catholic Asian News
- ZENIT News Agency
Opinion
- The American Conservative
- Antiwar.com
- Arts & Letters Daily
- Big Questions Online
- Chronicles
- Common Dreams
- CounterPunch
- The Daily Bell
- The Distributist Review
- The Freeman
- Front Porch Republic
- First Principles
- The Hankyoreh
- LewRockwell.com
- LifeSite
- MercatorNet
- The New American
- New Liturgical Movement
- New Oxford Review
- Strike-the-Root.com
- Taki's Magazine
- Western Standard
Blogs
- Abbey-Roads
- Again and Again
- Patrick J. Buchanan
- Caelum Et Terra
- Casa Santa Lidia
- Catholic American Eyes in Korea
- Catholic Culture and Society
- Catholic and Enjoying It!
- The City and the World
- A conservative blog for peace
- Conservative Heritage Times
- cryptogon.com
- Jeff Culbreath
- Andrew Cusack
- Endlessly Rocking
- English Catholic
- Et Lux in Tenebris Lucet!
- Eunomia
- Foreign Embassy 외국 대사관
- Fragmented Obsessions
- Foseti
- From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...
- front-porch anarchist
- The Happy Wanderer
- Peter Hitchens Blog
- I Hope You're Happy, Martin Luther
- Ὁι Λόγοι
- 고은 사람들과
- 歸源 (Kuiwon)
- Liberty vs. Leviathan
- Life in this world
- David Lindsay
- The Marmot's Hole
- The New Anti-Jacobin
- The New Beginning
- The News From Wabu-eup
- Notes from a Common-place Book
- Notes from underground
- Nothing Hypothetical
- Ordered Liberty
- Philokalia Republic
- Rantings of the Biscuitnapper
- Reditus
- Lew Rockwell's Political Theatre
- ROK Drop
- The School of Salamanca
- Shadowlands
- Siris
- Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog
- Tea at Trianon
- Throne and Altar
- Thursday's Notes
- the ubiquarian
- The Useless Tree
- Vox Nova
- Wilson Revolution Unplugged
- Tom Woods
Articles By Yours Truly
- The Anthropology Cartel vs. the Heliolithic School
- Peace, Commerce and Honest Friendship With... North Korea?
- Who's Provoking Whom in the Koreas?
- Holocaust as Religious Dogma
- Hillary, Go Home! Leave the Koreas to the Koreans!
- Tasan, 19th Century Korea’s Confucian Classical Liberal
- America's Permanent, Entangling Alliance With Korea
- Are the Attacks on the Pope a Prelude to Attacks on Iran?
- The un-American Empire
- The Science Cartel vs. Immanuel Velikovsky
- What Would Asia Do Without America?
- Learn the “Scientific Alphabet” While in Korea
- Ritual Is Confucian, Not Shamanistic
- The National Anthem of the U.S.S.A.
- Permanent Entangling Alliances With All Parts of the Foreign World; Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship With None!
- Buffalo vs. the Empire
- Mad Cows, Mad Crowds, and Mad Courts
- Have Korea's Protesting Priests Chosen the Right Fights?
- Why Do American Taxpayers Subsidize South Korea's Defense?
- The Rectification of Political Taxonomy
- Mad Cow Madness and the State Monopoly on Regulation
- Don't Blame the Market for the Global Food Crisis!
- Benedict in America
- The Emperor and the Peasant
- Seouled a Bill of Goods
- Tasan, Nineteenth Century Korea's Paleo-Confucian Classical Liberal
- Anglo-Saxon Anarcho-Traditionalism and the Spontaneous Order of English Spelling
- 'Tis the Season of Interreligious Dialogue
- Enough of the Truman Democrats, Where are the Cleveland Democrats?
- The Empress of the Americas: Our Lady of Guadalupe
- I Survived the IMF
- Emperor Lincoln, America's Ch'in Shih-huang
- You Can't Go Home Again (and Neither Can This Patriotic Expatriate, Literally)
- Why the Left Should Welcome the Resurgent Old Right
- O Korea, Turn Back to the Tao
- Anarcho-Catholicism: Dorothy Day's Day Has Come / Dorothy Day's anarcho-Catholicism: The way of love
- The Feast of Saint Bodhisattva
- America Needs a Crank
- The Tao of Non-Interventionism
- The Holy City of Nagasaki
- Savior meets Sage: Korea's Confucian Catholicism / Korea's Confucian Catholicism
- Ancient Chinese wisdom for the modern Catholic Church
- Ron Paul’s Long Tail
- Ron Paul, Hope for a Reunited Korea
- Ron Paul, the Expatriate's Patriot
- Japs and A-rabs, Not Fellow Christians
- America's Entangling East Asian Alliances
- Anarchy, or Spontaneous Order, on the Streets of Saigon
- Ron Paul Tzu / Ron Paul Tzu
- The world’s most wired country
- Old history, fresh tension in Northeast Asia
- North Korea: "A Living Hell"
Yours Truly in Print
Recommended Reads
Archives
- July 2006
- August 2006
- September 2006
- October 2006
- November 2006
- December 2006
- January 2007
- February 2007
- March 2007
- April 2007
- May 2007
- June 2007
- July 2007
- August 2007
- September 2007
- October 2007
- November 2007
- December 2007
- January 2008
- February 2008
- March 2008
- April 2008
- May 2008
- June 2008
- July 2008
- August 2008
- September 2008
- October 2008
- November 2008
- December 2008
- January 2009
- February 2009
- March 2009
- April 2009
- May 2009
- June 2009
- July 2009
- August 2009
- September 2009
- October 2009
- November 2009
- December 2009
- January 2010
- February 2010
- March 2010
- April 2010
- May 2010
- June 2010
- July 2010
- August 2010
- September 2010
- October 2010
- November 2010
- December 2010
- January 2011
- February 2011
- March 2011
- April 2011
- May 2011
- June 2011
- July 2011
- August 2011
Recent Comments
Visitors Since July '06
Tracking
Subscribe
Subscribe to The Western Confucian by Email





