Sunday Night Journal
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Scary Stuff I had intended to write about the question brought up in the comments on last week’s journal, that is, the responsibility of the baby boomer generation—my generation—for various unhealthy social tendencies. But I think I’ll postpone that till next week, because I’ve had something else on my mind for the past day or
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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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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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The Laughter of Contempt I’m writing this on Monday night, having thought better of publishing what I wrote last night, a somewhat dark meditation on the subject of accidents and the problem of evil. Maybe some other time. Instead, I’ll say something brief on a question I’ve been thinking about for a while: the meanness
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The Round-Earth Conspiracy I had an unexpectedly hectic weekend that left little time for reflection, but I did manage to write the following letter to the local archdiocesan weekly in response to a rather peculiar letter that recently appeared there: To the Editor: I have not read The DaVinci Code or seen the movie, but
Light On Dark Water 