State of the Culture
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Black Sabbath On A Friday Night Because my youngest daughter plays in the band, my wife and I have been going to high school football games for the past few years. The season is almost over, and as our daughter is a senior this year, the remaining few games will probably be our last. Although…
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What was Caelum et Terra all about? An exchange on the Caelum et Terra blog prompts me to bring up a question which often presents itself to me: what was the magazine all about, really? Perhaps the most frequent description I’ve heard is that it was an agrarian publication (agrarian and Catholic, of course). I…
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Simply Dispose Of Them I noticed a change in the language of the pamphlet that was inserted in today’s bulletin for Respect Life Sunday. In place of the phrase we’ve heard for some years, that human life is sacred and to be protected “from conception until natural death,” the pamphlet has “from natural conception until…
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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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Advice to Parents(?!) Now that all but one of our children have left home, and the last is about to begin her senior year of high school, I’ve attained the de facto status of old-timer at the Catholic child-rearing game. That, and my association with the counter-cultural Caelum et Terra, cause me to get the…
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Independence Day and Indian Larry I occasionally watch a couple of TV shows, American Chopper and The Great Biker Build-Off, which, in case you don’t know, involve building custom Harley-style motorcycles. I guess I have enough Anarcho-American in me to be susceptible to the romance of motorcycles, and actually owned a couple of small ones…
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Distracted from Distraction by Distraction The phrase is Eliot’s, from the Four Quartets. I’ve always thought there was a certain amount of jive in Eliot’s work, as much as I love it, and until recently might have offered this line as an example: does it really say anything more than “distracted”? Yes, I think it…
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Patriotism and the American Creed Last week I mentioned patriotism as one of three things (the others being religion and love of family) to which a person of conservative temperament naturally inclines. Thinking about the different senses which many people may give to the word “patriotism,” I thought I ought to say a bit more…
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The End of Temperamental Conservativism By “temperamental conservatism” I don’t mean a moody and irritable conservatism, but conservatism as a temperament, as opposed to a set of convictions or an ideology. And there has always been a touch of paradox in being any sort of conservative in America, but especially in being conservative by temperament.…
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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…
Light On Dark Water 