May 2020
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Some weeks ago I was asked about a remark attributed to Pope Francis by that journalist he talks to from time to time, Eugenio Scalifari. According to Scalifari, the pope said that the resurrection of Jesus did not actually happen as a physical event. This was one of those conversations with the 90-plus-year-old journalist who…
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Was it really?…yes, it was, over a month ago that I talked about the HBO series The Leftovers. See this post. Here's the basic idea: It's a strange and interesting premise: what if a great many people suddenly just vanished, right in the middle of ordinary activities, poof, there one moment and gone the next? Something…
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Perhaps you've heard of a little controversy involving First Things. It seems that the editor, R.R. Reno, issued a quarrelsome Twitter post or two in which he called people who wear the masks prescribed as COVID-19 preventatives "cowards." I was aware that he has been skeptical and even scornful about the way the pandemic has been…
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I really enjoyed it this time. (See this post from a week and a half ago for background.) It's been over ten years since my first viewing of it. Wondering now about my mostly negative reaction then, I vaguely recall that we (my wife and I) were watching it at night and I was sleepy…
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NOTE: the essay itself has been removed for the moment. Explanation later. As some readers of this blog know, I've written a book which is part memoir and conversion story, part cultural history of the phenomenon we call "the Sixties." I have a certain amount of evidence that the attempt is not really successful. It's…
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I just finished this wonderful book. You should read it. I'm busy with, among several other things, trying to put a mobile-friendly design for this blog into operation, so I'm not going to say a whole lot about it. I'll let the blurbs at the publisher, Slant Books, do that job for me: click here. …
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No doubt avid readers of this blog will recall that eleven years ago I wrote about being disappointed in the Sergio Leone westerns ("I Have Failed to Become A Sergio Leone Fan"). The topic came up in the recent discussion about Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and I started thinking I might give Leone another…
Light On Dark Water 