Sunday Night Journal 2018
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I said last week that the big contemporary corporate or government employer is "not meant to produce free citizens. And it doesn't want them." Later I started thinking about how different our biggest corporations–Google and the like–are from their counterparts of thirty or forty or fifty years ago, and yet how similar. Once upon a time there was much…
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After posting Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" a couple of weeks ago, I found myself remembering other bits and pieces of his poetry, so I got out a couple of old textbooks and went looking for them. Principal among these fragments was this, which used to be widely quoted: Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The…
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The world is changing. Those words recur several times in The Lord of the Rings, and they keep recurring to me about these times and this country, and in particular over the past few weeks about the gun control debate. It seems to me that a slow transformation in the way Americans think about their country,…
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Billy Graham's brand of Christianity was not mine; it never has been. Even apart from the vast doctrinal distance between his evangelical Protestantism and my Catholicism, simply as a matter of what you might call style or culture, it was not for me. There was a time when I more or less despised him as…
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I seriously considered not going to Mass on Ash Wednesday. In fact I came pretty close to not going. My reason was partly that I just didn’t want to bother, and was possessive of the time involved, because I had some other things I wanted to do that day. But the strongest reason was my…
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I've listened to Beauty Will Save the World (the album by The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus), several times now, and I like it a great deal. It may not be everyone's cup of tea. It's certainly not a pop music album in any sense. The description I quoted from Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago…
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You can change your opinions, even your most deeply held beliefs, but you can't change your basic personality. I was thinking about that the other day as I read one of Rod Dreher's columns. As you know if you read him much, he has a tendency to view current events as leading in a sort…
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When I was young–not just younger than I am now, but actually young, around twenty or so–I placed something close to a moral value on aesthetic judgment. That is, if someone had what I deemed to be incorrect aesthetic judgment, I considered it a personal defect. If not an actual sin (though I would not…
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I've been having some unusually vivid dreams lately, and some of those have stayed with me longer than dreams usually do, and were more coherent than dreams usually are. One from a week or so ago can justifiably be called Kafkaesque: I was about to be executed for no reason that I knew of. I…
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I finished the two remaining Charles Williams novels (see the November 26 post) a week or two ago, and I'd better say something about them while I still remember them well enough to do so. They are The Greater Trumps and Shadows of Ecstacy. The short verdict is that it was fitting that I read them last,…
Light On Dark Water 