thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The second paragraph in a Times story today about the Catholic bishops’ deliberations on the threatened war with Iraq was innocently ironic:
… More ...This is the kind of global concern that used to preoccupy the bishops before this year, when the church was overwhelmed by the scandal over some bishops’ failure to discipline priests who had
It must be nice to be a black bigwig in South Africa and be able to pass off your personal demand for tons of money as something decreed by social justice: Rarity of Black-Run Businesses Worries South Africa’s Leaders. Somehow the personal interests of those making the demands (which are not the same as … More ...
We continue to go through Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy in “RCIA” (in fact, it’s a one-priest/one student affair). I found the historical discussion fascinating, for example with regard to the traditional orientation of Christian prayer to the East because of the association of the rising sun with Christ.
It seems to me that … More ...
This has to be one of the least surprising news stories ever: Women Enjoy Best Sex Within Marriage.
Refusal to see what seems impossible to ignore is not restricted to politics: Danger on the seas as walls of water sink tankers. Apparently, enormous freak waves that can shatter any ship afloat are fairly common occurences at sea. Nonetheless, experts and authorities have shrugged off reports of the waves in spite of the … More ...
Actually, it seems the book might be worth reading as a brief guided tour of certain sorts of contemporary intellectual manipulation: Pooh-poohing postmodernism (on Postmodern Pooh, a long delayed sequel by Frederick Crews to his Pooh Perplex, a 1964 take-off on the schools of literary criticism then current). The man spent two years… More ...
One wonders when and how the EU fantasy will collapse. Even today, some seem dubious about the basic principle of managerial universalism, and if they’re French they sometimes say so: ‘Asiatic’ Turkey is threat to EU, warns Giscard. Among many interesting features of the article, note the response of the right-wing reporter (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) … More ...
The author pours a huge amount of material into The Politics of Family Destruction, an account of what he calls “the divorce industry.” Even though I include links to a lot of men’s rights groups (which are largely concerned with the treatment of men by family courts) in my anti-feminist page, I don’t … More ...
A bit of an oddity: “Women Exploiting Women”. The name of the article is uninformative, but the details are fascinating and I wish there were more of them. It seems that several successful professional women in Northern California took it into their heads to set up a pyramid scheme based on big payoffs, birthday … More ...
Rounding out the conception of “human rights” in a part of the world in which you can be criminally prosecuted for racism if you call Islam “the stupidest religion,” U.K prisoners have won their claim that hardcore porn is a human right. It’s all part of their right to “receive information,” you see. So … More ...