Current Affairs
-
About ten years ago Rod Dreher interviewed me by email for his book Crunchy Cons. On the subject of politics, I said something I'd said before and have said since: that the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the difference between an enemy and an unreliable ally. The Republican party has never been a…
-
"Well, and so everything's falling apart…. Everybody sees that it can't go on like this. It's all too strained and bound to snap," Pierre said (as people have been saying as long as governments have existed, once they look attentively at any government whatsoever). –Tolstoy, War and Peace I finished War and Peace a couple of days…
-
It is a great loss. Everybody has heard about Scalia's dissent in Obergefell vs. Hodges, in which the court discovered that marriage has nothing to do with sex. I had read a few quotes from the dissent, but not the whole thing until today. It's very much worth reading. Here is one powerful excerpt. This…
-
When some calamity like this happens, I generally don't remark on it here or on Facebook. Unless I personally know someone affected, it seems like an empty gesture. Does anyone reading this care one way or the other if I express my sympathy for the victims? I doubt it. But of course I have been reading…
-
I mentioned in the previous post on this topic that I had seen something somewhere comparing speeches made by Francis on his recent visit to some made by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Whatever it was I saw, I couldn’t find it again. So I compared speeches made by all three at the U.N.…
-
I discern a pattern in my reactions to popes in the news. I'm so irritated by the political weaponizing of everything he says or does that I pretty much have to ignore the hullabaloo while it's in progress. I've been told that his speech to Congress today was good, but I think I'll wait at…
-
Thanks to Rob G for the link to this piece at First Things connecting Laudato Si and the thought of Wendell Berry. I am one of those whom the author mentions as being disappointed by a number of Berry's recent statements on same-sex marriage, not only the content but the tone. Nevertheless, one must try not to…
-
Image magazine comes out in favor of the same-sex marriage. I'm really less surprised by the writer's opinion than by his admiration for Justice Kennedy's prose. I wouldn't go as far as the person who said the ruling sounded like something a 17-year-old would post on Facebook, but on the basis of this sample (I…
-
…as the course goes on, the movement becomes centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow. —Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences No way to delay That trouble coming every day —Frank Zappa, "Trouble Every Day"
-
I saw this headline on Google News yesterday: Huge New Holes In Siberia Have Scientists Calling For Urgent Investigation Of The Mysterious Craters and immediately thought "Someone will blame it on global warming/climate change." I clicked on it and read the story, at the Huffington Post. Sure enough: The leading theory is that the holes…
Light On Dark Water 