thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The suicide of Europe gathers speed: the Convention on the Future of Europe has reached agreement yesterday on a written constitution for the EU. The proposed text provides for
An AP story that displays one aspect of the connection between liberal attitudes toward sex and the view that experts should run everything: Church warned of ‘witch hunt’. The piece, which relates to the pederasty scandals in the Church, is more than a year old. Nonetheless, it’s still worth reading because it carries the … More ...
How much should be expected from “masculinism”? The term appears to be mostly window dressing for the fathers’ rights movement, initiated by men who have been abused by a divorce and child support system that often gives women the power at will to kick husbands out of the house and their children’s lives while … More ...
These, I think, are all the same story:
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 ...