thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Here’s the latest script for interfaith understanding, produced and presented with the help of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: swipe a draft of Mel Gibson’s script for The Passion, get some revisionist scholars to look it over, and leak their report to the press. The result of the effort is that what … More ...
What does it mean that the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators, the only comprehensive compilation of statistics regarding trends in the American Church before and after Vatican II, gets mentioned only 32 times on the web, mostly in connection with a WorldNetDaily column Pat Buchanan wrote last December? I suppose the answer is that … More ...
In a usenet discussion group I mentioned that Humanae Vitae is one of the reasons I became Catholic: “Why is it,” I asked myself back then, “that the only man in the world who has an idea how to make human sense of sex is an aged celibate?” One of the other participants asked for … More ...
It’s been known for years that sexual activity outside marriage cannot succeed in expressing love in a way that measures up to the meanings implicit in the act itself. “This is bigger than both of us” is an overwhelming but deceitful fantasy unless the activity helps constitute something objective and permanent that does not depend … More ...
I just finished reading Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. The point of the book is that the West—Greece, Rome, and the societies founded on the ruins of the Roman Empire—has always been superior militarily because of a Western way of war that emphasizes decisive shock … More ...
The kind of principles that now govern news coverage: Guidelines for Countering Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling, adopted by the Society of Professional Jounalists shortly after September 11. Some basic rules: don’t call Islamic terrorists “Islamic terrorists,” constantly remind the reader of bombings by white supremacists, and if you have to show a U.S. … More ...
A lifelong Jewish Republican complains about Socially acceptable bigotry: A primer in discrimination against us GOPers. Meanwhile, an exhibition of anti-Catholic “art” at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton draws comment from NRO on the theme of They call it art: The last acceptable prejudice.
The pieces are more interesting for their facts … More ...
Get the State out of intimate personal relations—so goes the slogan. The real point of social liberalism, however, is to abolish intimate personal relations, or at least denature them and make them incapable of interfering with anything serious. Hence the sex ed that trains children to think of sex as a consumer good, the redefinition … More ...
Joe Guzzardi at Vdare put together an interesting assemblage of stuff about “diversity” in business and scholarly efforts to find out whether it does anything for the bottom line. Seemingly it doesn’t—the main study cited concludes that it can’t be shown to hurt or help much, although the finer print refers to problems created by … More ...
The conviction that there’s something odd and repellent about making distinctions on grounds of religion, race, sex and the like calls for explanation. How come no one used to think it’s a problem and now everyone does? And why are such distinctions so much worse than distinctions based on the fact that someone’s a fundy, … More ...