Sunday Night Journal 2005
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Hitchens, Franklin, and Our Sundered America I read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography in high school. At least I think I did. I’m sure I must have read at least some of it, because otherwise how would I have such a vivid memory of disliking it? The doubt comes from the fact that I remember nothing specific…
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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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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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Uneasy in the Aftermath The photograph above was taken last year as Hurricane Ivan bore down on the Alabama-Florida Gulf coast. The restaurant survived Ivan with light damage. When I drove by it on my way home the day before Hurricane Katrina, it looked very much as it does in this picture, except that the…
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Not So Calm Before the Storm Yet again, only six weeks after Hurricane Dennis, we are preparing for a hurricane. Although Hurricane Katrina is as of right now (10pm Sunday night) heading for New Orleans, a lot can happen in the next twelve hours or so. And besides, this storm is so large and intense…
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How Guns ‘n’ Roses Came to My House Continuing from last week’s journal the train of thought about the difficulty of keeping the entertainment industry at arm’s length, an anecdote: Although I have a fairly big collection of pop LPs (I didn’t start buying CDs regularly until ten years or so ago), I rarely listened…
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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…
Light On Dark Water 