Sunday Night Journal
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A Few More Notes on the Question of Doubt This is a follow-up to the journal of August 5 on the mixture of doubt and faith which I, and apparently quite a few others, experience. In passing: it seems to be happening to me more often than usual lately that a spiritual matter that’s on
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Pop Music for the Desert Island (Not sure how this is going to display, so it may be shifting around for a while.) I knew I was going to be pretty busy this weekend, so, just for fun, I dredged up this list. I have always resisted the sort of name-your-top-N albums/songs/artists games that pop
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What Keats Didn’t Say (and May Not Have Known) Ryan C wondered last week about my addendum to the famous line from Keats in my epigraph above. Here is a reflection on the subject in which I’ll try to articulate something that is mostly a bundle of intuitions, so it may not be perfectly coherent,
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Idiot Winds You probably saw the news story that appeared in the past week or so giving an account of a study that claims to have disproved the common notion that women talk more than men. (It’s a common notion among men, anyway—women in general may not agree.) Clio has an amusing yeah! in response.
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An Uneasy Fourth As a member of the melancholic-American community, I don’t generally feel a lot of exuberance on the 4th of July. Quietly reflective is more my style: I usually go down to the bay, a few hundred feet from my house, and watch the fireworks launched from the town pier a quarter of
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Hey, Bishop, Leave Those Texts Alone I knew fairly soon after I became a Catholic twenty-five years ago that I was not going to be the sort who takes a great interest in the intramural affairs of the Church. Vatican politics, the niceties of liturgical rubrics, canon law: none of that interests me very much,
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Movie Roundup I’ve been meaning to do another one of these for a while. The films are listed in the order in which I saw them, or at least in which Netflix sent them. Blow-up: I’ve somehow gotten the impression that this movie is no longer regarded as highly as it once was. Well, if
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A Speculation on Pentecost Today at Mass I had a brief glimpse of what Pentecost might have been like. Two men sitting behind me were annoying me with loud muttering, loud enough to be distracting but not quite loud enough to be understood. Then as the homily began I heard quite clearly one of them
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American Exceptionalism and the Culture War Pardon me if I’m announcing my solution to the equation 2+2=X. I’ve been thinking about the question of so-called “American Exceptionalism,” raised in this post and its comments, and I may have come up with an observation that’s perfectly commonplace among people who study these matters on a regular
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Pacifism in the War of Words I found the Marcotte-Edwards controversy of a few weeks ago extremely disheartening. In case you have a very short memory, here’s a synopsis: John Edwards hired Amanda Marcotte, impresario of a left-wing blog called Pandagon, to run web operations for his presidential campaign; Christians in general and Catholics in
Light On Dark Water 