thoughts in and out of season
A result of the abolition of culture through commercialism, ideology and modern understandings of justice and rationality is that people get deprived of worthwhile ideals of conduct. From the standpoint of the New York Times and the weblog Gene Expression, it therefore appears that the choices for young people are (1) nerdishness, which is … More ...
Bonobos seem to be going the way of the Samoans and Mayans. It seems that exotic groups who live in some far-away tropical paradise and are renowned for their peace-loving and sex-positive ways tend to fall from grace on further investigation.
Big changes in popular habits are no doubt part of a whole network of other changes, so it’s hard to point to specific causes and effects, but isn’t there a distinct connection between young adults’ acceptance of multiculturalism and their total lack of interest in public affairs? To me it seems glaringly obvious that multiculturalism … More ...
Our sympathy to the French on the 218th anniversary of the riots and lynchings that led to the unfortunate state of affairs there.
A correspondent sends the following extracts from Lesson 10, “The Virtues and the Gifts of the Holy Ghost,” in the Confraternity Edition of the Baltimore Catechism, published in the late 1940s. Within living memory, it seems, there were people who did not identify God’s Kingdom with an inhuman secular utopia:
… More ...Love for our neighbor, to
To descend from the sublime to the not-so-sublime, it’s worth noting that a recent Barna Group study finds that Catholics have become mainstream America. There don’t seem to be discernible differences between Catholics and other Americans, except that Catholics take religion and the more austere demands of morality less seriously. They’re more into pornography, … More ...
When I was in law school I knew nothing about Richard Posner, but it seemed obvious from the sneering remarks of my professors that what he had to say was very important and probably well-founded, at least within the world of late-20th-century American legal scholarship. I still know very little about Posner, but so far … More ...
According to Robert Conquest, everyone is conservative about what he knows best. When it’s something people not only know but love, like sports, they become downright traditionalist: for proof, see Steve Sailer’s note on the old gaffers they have as sportscasters out in LA.
I’ve been watching the Polish TV miniseries The Decalogue, directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. It’s really extraordinary, the ultimate category-buster as far as TV miniseries go.
As the name suggests, there are 10 films or episodes, each based (somewhat loosely) on one of the 10 Commandments and each about the lives and moral struggles of … More ...
I was struck by a quotation from an essay by feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether mentioned in an article about a Catholic-connected conference in which she’ll be taking part:
… More ...“All racist, sexist, classist, and anthropocentric assumptions of the superiority of whites over blacks, males over females, managers over workers, humans over animals and plants must