Current Affairs
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The Social Justice Challenge One of the unhappy effects of the attack from within the Church itself on Catholic doctrine is a tendency for the orthodox to be almost as much occupied with preserving the faith as with practicing it. I think it is becoming possible for us to move past this, now that the…
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Report from the Hurricane Coast I made an overnight visit to New Orleans this weekend, and it left me wondering whether the city can ever recover fully. What struck me most forcefully there was not the physical damage done by hurricane Katrina, for which I was more or less prepared, but the fact that, as…
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Rosa Parks, RIP I was only a child at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott. I didn’t know what it was, but I was old enough to read, and I remember seeing the word “boycott” in newspaper headlines and being puzzled by it. Obviously it had to do with boys, but beyond that I…
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The Storms that Herald the End? The subject of the end times came up at dinner the other night, apropos of the recent hurricanes: it seems that one of my daughter’s teachers suggested that they might be a sign of the end. I doubt that, myself. For one thing, hurricanes of this strength are far…
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Is There Such a Thing as Price-gouging? As usual when there’s a hurricane, the topic of price-gouging has come up, and, also as usual, I’ve come across a few columns by libertarian free-market purists saying, in essence, that there’s no such thing, and that what we may call price-gouging is just the natural operation of…
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A Few More Hurricane Notes I haven’t felt much like writing since the hurricane, and still don’t. I don’t, in fact, feel like doing very much of anything. I realized a couple of nights before the storm, as we made merry in a restaurant after a high-school football game, that the discomforts I kept feeling…
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Call Me Shiftlet Some years back there was a widely reproduced frame from the Peanuts comic strip which showed one of the characters—I think it was Lucy—with a look of consternation saying “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand.” It comes into my mind frequently when some event, large or small, a local case of…
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The Cardinal Prophet The buzz of the week has been the report that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is the, or at least a, leading candidate for the papacy. I don’t think this is very likely, for reasons including his age and the fact that he was a member of the Hitler Youth and was drafted into…
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Journalists Baffled by Commutative Property For about thirty seconds last week I had the idea of keeping a count of all the news stories about John Paul II which included some variant of the motif that he was “liberal” (a good thing) on many broad political issues but “conservative” (a bad thing) on questions of…
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Culture War, or Holland With Nukes? It’s being said, quite rightly, that the Terri Schiavo case is forcing us to face fundamental questions about the value of human life and the conditions under which positive action may be taken to end it. When I emailed several of my children this excellent piece by Fr. Rob…
Light On Dark Water 