Sunday Night Journal 2005
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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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The Children’s Choir It’s no secret that the quality of liturgical music in the typical Catholic parish runs the gamut from bad to mediocre. I’ve certainly done my share of complaining about it over the years and there’s no need to repeat any of those complaints. The subject pops up from time to time on…
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Sunday Night Journal — May 8, 2005 My father died on September 13, 2001. That day and those that followed were not only sad but disorienting, what with the images of the falling World Trade Center playing constantly in the background of our mourning. Since my father had been in and out of consciousness and…
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Lucy In A Bind With Pancakes We have two dogs, Andy and Lucy. How a family in which the wife does not much care for dogs came to have two of them is a long story, like the story of how we came to have four cats; suffice to say that it is a testimony…
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What Did We Do To Deserve This? I’ve been spending far too much time looking at a computer screen and have developed some fairly severe pain in my neck and shoulders. Since I have to do it all day in my job, I’m going to have to greatly reduce the amount of time I spend…
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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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A Captain for the Storm Although I’m a lot older than the millions of people under thirty or so who remember no other pope than John Paul II, I did not become a Catholic until a couple of years into his papacy. So I’m like these young people in that my entire life as a…
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The Storms Are on the Ocean A fairly violent thunderstorm came through my town during the Easter Vigil last night. There had been rain earlier in the evening, but it had mostly stopped by the time the Vigil Mass began. The Mass begins outside the church. A light rain was still falling when we gathered…
Light On Dark Water 