having stalled out for a moment

I thought I'd suggest that this article is incidentally an exploration of the Thomist recognition of the goodness of being--both what it does and what it does not imply.

 Update:  This passage in another The Catholic Thing article is similarly explicit:

Yet, what does it mean to “read a book with complete impartiality”? It means that we can read the book without our protective mind interfering to prevent us from admitting the truth of what opposes what we want to do. Our society is full of a hatred rooted in envy, in the refusal to acknowledge the truth of our being. We are thus in a revolutionary situation, something similar to what Burke described in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. We have now freely chosen principles of polity that deny elements of goodness in our being. We do not bind ourselves by what is. We withhold praise from any truth that we choose not to live by.