Sunday Night Journal 2005
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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…
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Local Heroes I once heard a music lover who lived in Manhattan say that he no longer bothered to go to concerts very often. Regarding the New York Philharmonic he said that it was more trouble than it was worth to get to Lincoln Center to “listen to Mehta do another pedestrian run-through of standard…
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Self-Anointed Solomons Always ready to detect any alarming trend, I must say that one of the more alarming was in evidence this past week, in the form of the Supreme Court’s decision finding it impermissible to impose capital punishment for crimes committed when the perpetrator was under the age of eighteen. I have no quarrel…
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Fear and Loathing in Aspen I was never much attracted to the writing of Hunter S. Thompson, and accordingly never read much of it beyond a few excerpts from the two Fear and Loathing books that appeared in Rolling Stone many long years ago. I had at the time enough difficulty maintaining my own equilibrium…
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Inhumanism and the End of Ethics I once said to my boss, by way of making an excuse for a long and rambling email I had just sent her, that sometimes I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written it down. Sometimes the act of writing takes me a step beyond that, to…
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Lost Weekend This being the second Sunday of the month, I had planned to continue my not-very-well-established second-Sunday routine of writing on the subject of music. My subject was to have been the music, or rather say the work, or rather say the post-1982 work, of Tom Waits. I even had in mind the title…
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Clock and Dragon The Catholic world is a bit off balance, with Easter and therefore Ash Wednesday coming so early this year. Backing up from there, Epiphany was hardly over before the Mardi Gras festivities started. Last weekend my wife and I attended our first-ever Mardi Gras ball, at the kind invitation of the parents…
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Folly Chasing Death One last note on the general lack of repentance on the part of the cultural revolutionaries of the late ‘60s, after which I plan to leave the subject alone for a while: I haven’t yet mentioned the evangelization for drug use that was as prominent in its time as the sexual revolution.…
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Change, Liberal and Conservative As if to continue and confirm the premise of my comments last week on the terrible consequences of the sexual revolution, I came across this article, The Frivolity of Evil, by Theodore Dalrymple, a name which will be recognized by anyone who reads the conservative press but is perhaps not much…
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The Confidence of Fools A wise man feareth, and departeth from evil; but the fool rageth, and is confident. —Proverbs 14:16 Writing last week about the persistent sympathy for Communism expressed, by people who ought to know better, for the political program of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” I found myself thinking of a column I wrote…
Light On Dark Water 