Sunday Night Journal 2006
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Handing Over the World The older of my two daughters was married last night. She was beautiful, wearing a simple and elegant dress made by her mother. The groom was handsome. The church, an old one by the water, was, to my taste, a more than adequate foreshadowing of the ambience of heaven. The choir
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What Happens The other day I ran across a set of parodies of the contenders for England’s Booker prize. Although I’d never heard of any of the books or their authors, and thus had only a slight grasp of what was being satirized, I still found the parodies funny. Here’s a sample: It is January,
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Torture: Safe, Legal, and Rare? I dare say not one American in a hundred really understands the legal and diplomatic niceties surrounding the interrogation and detention of suspected terrorists. That in itself ought to be cause for grave concern, because if any people on earth ought to know the mischief that can be done by
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Gospel of Terror You thought I was going to talk about Islamic terrorism, didn’t you? Sorry—I’m thinking rather of the Gospel of Mark, the verses from chapter 9 which all Catholics heard read at Mass today. They include the warning that it would be better to have a millstone fixed round one’s neck and be
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Though the Heavens Fall How many status points do I get for attending the Alabama premiere of a movie? Not that many, I suppose. But that’s what I was doing Sunday evening, at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival in Birmingham. The name of the film is Heavens Fall, and the reason there was an Alabama
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Snapping the Thread Living in a not particularly cosmopolitan area of the U.S., I haven’t come into contact with many Muslims. As far as I can remember the first one was a young man I met at some sort of social gathering quite a few years ago—sometime around 1980, I think. I can’t place the
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Eventually, Like Napoleon: My 9/11 Column When I heard the news of John Kennedy’s assassination I was sitting in tenth-grade biology class. When I heard the news of the 9/11 attacks I was on my way to work, crossing Mobile Bay on I-10. These are the only two major news stories of my life for
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Betjeman, Slowly Strolling Back All right, let’s concede that Eliot captured most definitively the anxiety and disorientation of the early 20th century for intellectuals and artists. Let’s grant further that the latter groups were more conscious than most people of dramatic changes in progress, and more interested in and capable of articulating that consciousness.
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A Fit Instrument? Thus, in this age which boasts of its atomic power, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice. –John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (1963) At least as far back as Pacem in Terris, and as recently as certain remarks
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Provoking the Provocateurs “The artist is a provocateur.” Surely this all-too-common claim has done a great deal of harm to the arts. It appeared in our local paper a week or so ago in connection with the lionization of a flamboyant artist at the opening of an exhibit of his work here. Not everyone was
Light On Dark Water 