O'Connor and Powers were from an earlier generation than I, though I suppose in some regions — certainly the South back then — there were Protestants who looked down on Catholics. But I had Protestant friends as a kid.Interesting, I believe when I set up a panel in college to discuss our theology course, and invited a Protestant minister and rabble to join us, I became the first person to bring non-Catholic clergy to the campus. No one complained, though.
Thursday, July 08, 2021
Hmm …
… O’Connor and Powers: Catholics among Protestants.
I don't think we're supposed to know this …
… The new taboo: More people regret sex change and want to ‘detransition’, surgeon says. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Those wishing the reversal, Djordjevic says, have spoken to him about crippling levels of depression following their transition and in some cases even contemplated suicide. “It can be a real disaster to hear these stories,” says the 52-year-old. And yet, in the main part, they are not being heard.
Poetry and tyranny …
… Flogged, imprisoned, murdered: today, being a poet is a dangerous job | Poetry | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person,” Czesław Miłosz tells us in “Ars Poetica?”. Khakhar went from being a Modi enthusiast to calling him an emperor with no clothes. Brecht’s support of Stalin’s show trials is unforgivable but it has not stopped us from endlessly quoting him during this pandemic about how in the dark times there will be singing about the dark times. Poems don’t murder people. Dictators do. But poetry brings us close to death, demands that we witness, take stock.
Something to think on …
All the brains in the world are powerless against the sort of stupidity that is in fashion.
— Jean de La Fontaine, born on this in 1621
Wednesday, July 07, 2021
He’s right, of course …
… Neurosurgeon Ben Carson on critical race theory: ‘It’s a bunch of garbage’.
A religious studies prof who thinks God is a white racist has the temerity to direct a racial slur at the man who became Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in 1984 at age 33 and has had many major achievements in his field shouldn’t be teaching anybody, if only because she’s obviously got some wising up to do. Despicable.
This is likely to offend many …
… The Babylon Bee Presents: The Top 10 Countries | The Babylon Bee. (Hat tip, Felix Giordano.)
Good …
… Trump will announce class action lawsuits today against Facebook and Twitter | Daily Mail Online.
Dorsey and Zuckerberg are living proof that you can become a billionaire and still be a horse's ass (my apology to horses). Why can't these clowns grasp that just because people signed up for your platform doesn't mean they expected you to oversee the discourse, let alone approve of same. That's why I canceled my Twitter account. And I don't do Facebook.
Blogging note …
I canceled my doctor's appointment. We were expecting a deliver of a new mattress today and I couldn't leave Debbie by herself to handle that. Naturally, since no good deed goes unpunished, I just got a call from Raymour and Flanigan telling me that the delivery wouldn't be until tomorrow. So I'll be blogging for a bit.
Wow ¬
… Chicago shooting spree ends after man with concealed carry license takes down attacker - TheBlaze.
The violence came as a part of a particularly bloody Fourth of July weekend in the Windy City as more than 100 residents were shot and 17 were killed. Sadly, the holiday violence was only a continuation of what Chicagoans have been experiencing for over a year.Yet in the face of soaring crime, Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot has continued to blame guns and systemic racism for the city's woes and has called for increased gun control to help curb the violence. However, in this case, taking the gun out of a good guy's hand would only have led to further violence.
This sure ain't the Chicago I lived in for a while in the '60s, a city I really liked.
Check these out …
After many months of work, we're excited to report that the last six episodes of the second season are now in release this summer on a biweekly basis! This new sextet ties many of the story strands we've been gradually stitching together over the last two seasons. The first of the six new episodes, "West with the Light," picks up with Miss Gaskell, who is fending off boredom (and the Receptionist’s peppy interventions) while trapped in an interdimensional waiting room. But a number of unexpected new visitors provide vital new clues to her purpose and journey, which will become clearer by the end of the season. We've also just released "Marching Orders," a story set in 1911. A young British gentleman dukes it out against the austere whims of his Edwardian-minded father. But two travelers reveal that his role in the universe is much bigger than he ever could have imagined.
David McCullough is a nice guy …
… Beyond Necessity : Separating myself from the cabbages through curiosity.
I once had lunch with David McCullough at BookExpo America. He wearing an Adams for President button. He talked about John Adams as ifhe had known him personally.
In case you wondered …
… Why was “Joan of Arc” Mark Twain’s favorite.
The answer is well worth learning.
Enlist now …
… The Culture War Must Go On - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Those journalists and intellectuals who haven’t gone woke need to be encouraged and reminded that they are not alone. Argument and humor must be regularly deployed against the absurdity of woke language and slogans. Diversity, inclusion and equity—put them all together, they spell DIE, and death to much that is best in American life they bode.
Try telling the woke that the official name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Since they tend to be sympathetic to socialism, they claim that the Nazis were not really socialist, but just appropriated the name. Which didn't stop Hitler from giving speeches extolling the virtues of socialism. (He thought his brand was the antidote to bolshevism, though the the full name of the Soviet Union, of course, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Go figure.)
Something to think on …
Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.
— David McCullough, born on this date in 1933
Blogging note …
I have to take off shortly for a doctor's appointment. I may be able to blog a bit in the waiting room, but otherwise I won't be blogging again until this afternoon.
Tuesday, July 06, 2021
The mother of beauty …
… The Beauty and Education Offered by Cemeteries.
When Professor Curl first published on cemeteries and funerary art, a magnificent legacy in danger of destruction by deliberate neglect and wilful condescension towards it, his interest was regarded as bizarre, morbid, almost as a kind of intellectual perversion. This was the very reverse of the truth in my opinion: to the contrary, it is the avoidance of all that has to do with death that is perverse.
The title of the post is taken Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”:
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
Blogging note …
I will be taking off shortly to move Debbie back home. No blogging until much later.
Something to think on …
Life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art.
— Claude Simon, who died on this date in 2005
To the rescue …
… Woke Schooling: A Toolkit for Concerned Parents | Manhattan Institute.
Critical pedagogy has been germinating in our schools for decades, but its recent explosion has galvanized many parents to action. If you are with them—if you, like them, believe that the solution to racism and intolerance is not the further entrenching of ethnic stereotypes and division by race—then this toolkit is for you
Something of a mystery …
… On Taste - Claremont Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… the very notion of taste contains within itself two ideas in constant tension. First, taste is always personal: a judgment, but one’s own judgment. The idea derives from our physical sense of taste. It takes no great powers of observation to notice that different people prefer different foods. I like cilantro, you do not. As the Latin tag has it, de gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing about tastes.
Monday, July 05, 2021
Appreciation …
… Doctor’s Son. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
O’Hara’s personality was almost comically Irish. Like his father, he was touchy about his ethnic background even as he sometimes seemed eager to embody its worst stereotypes. Even his eventual break with the New Yorker, the magazine that published much of his best work, seems traceable to the early loss of his father, the bad temper and sense of perpetual grievance mingled with an underlying sensitivity. No matter how much success he had—owning Rolls-Royces, winning a National Book Award, and cultivating celebrated friends—he was haunted by a shadow life he could never achieve: Yale; gentlemen’s clubs; the Social Register. Those grievances gave him the energy and drive to achieve but not the equanimity to enjoy his achievements. Poor John indeed.
Recommended …
… Christian America’s Must-See TV Show. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Chosen’s Jonathan Roumie plays Jesus as someone you’d actually like to hang out with, projecting divine gravity accented with easygoing warmth. He cracks jokes; he dances at parties. “What The Chosen has done well is give us kind of a robust portrait of a highly relatable Jesus that moves beyond some of the holier-than-thou, untouchable, unapproachable portraits of Jesus in the past,” says Terence Berry, the COO of the Wedgwood Circle, an investment group that finances faith-based media. (A Wedgwood member backed Silence—Martin Scorsese’s sparse and serious 2016 movie starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson as 17th-century Jesuit missionaries.)
I've seen some of it.It is excellent. (Interesting, that phrase "Christian America." When I was growing up, America was presumed to be Christian.)
Blogging note …
I am about to take off with my honorary daughter Wendy to her Mom’s for a cookout. Blogging will resume later. There is more to life than blogging.
Something to think on …
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
— Georges Bernanos, who died on this date in 1948
Q&A …
… ‘We have to seek out ideas that make us uncomfortable’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This is partly about the rise of emotional safetyism. That’s the notion that if you hurt me emotionally, it’s the equivalent of hurting me physically. Offending me is a form of violence. For example, people say that misgendering someone else is violence. They don’t say it’s like violence, they say it is violence. Violence is a human-rights violation, so this implies that free speech is, too.
Sunday, July 04, 2021
Oh, for such a one today …
… Meet the Only US President Born on the 4th of July - Foundation for Economic Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Earlier this year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute published a beautiful new edition of The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, providing present-day readers an opportunity to get reacquainted with him. The book is accompanied with a timeline of Coolidge’s life and accomplishments, commentaries by two relatives of the president and a former Vermont governor, several of Coolidge’s speeches, and an Introduction by editors Amity Shlaes and Matthew Denhart. All these components blend to reveal a man of more sophistication in his thinking than he is usually credited with.
A cautionary tale indeed …
… How Twitter can ruin a life. (Hat tip, Linda Lowe.)
Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.
Pushback …
… Inquirer's Take On Columbus: All Tabloid And No Truth | Big Trial | Philadelphia Trial Blog.
… character assassination -- of me, of our historical icons, of defenders of civil liberties like Councilman Mark Squilla or the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations -- will not "break our bones." In fact, their words will never hurt us, because we have the facts and primary historical sources to summarily disprove their unsubstantiated, citation-less lies.
Something to think on …
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on this date in 1804
Blogging note …
I have to take off soon to continue helping Debbie get read for the move home on Tuesday. So once again blogging will be spotty
.
Happy Fourth of July …
… Weren’t We Always Extremists?
When we said humans are entitled to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it became a violation to impede such things. But make no mistake. These notions were not mainstream when our founders threw down the gauntlet with the Declaration of Independence.
Saturday, July 03, 2021
Hardly surprising …
… US Ranks Last in Global Media Trust: Report.
Greenwald noted that “any other industry failing like this would engage in self-critique, asking why.” But, he said, journalists and media executives “never do.”
Something has to be done about these guys …
… Big Tech cracks down on Robert Malone, mRNA vaccine pioneer who warns about their risks | Just The News.
It's the latest allegation of Big Tech suppressing contrarian views on COVID from highly credentialed scientists, even as medical and legal experts call attention to reported risks of mRNA vaccines for younger people, including college studentsand active-duty military men.
Blogging note …
A couple of young ladies are over here helping clean the house in preparation for Debbie’s return on Tuesday. Then I have to head over to where Debbie is to help her pack. So blogging will be spotty today.
Good luck …
… Netflix Tries to Resurrect Fran Lebowitz | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
… there’s one problem with all these glowing encomia: Fran Lebowitz is really not terribly funny.
Something to think on …
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
— Tom Stoppard, born on this date in 1937
Friday, July 02, 2021
Another academic dimwit …
… French food is now racist, according to professor who studies 'food whiteness' and 'food privileges' - TheBlaze.
Higher education is turning itself into a laughingstock. The French are white and their cuisine is accordingly different from that in, say, Ethiopia (which cuisine is quite tasty). Guess we shouldn’t eat Vietnamese food, either, since it was influence by the French.
Dismaying …
… O Tempora! O Mores! (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The anti-Latin mania in today’s Vatican goes against the entire tradition of the Church, which has always regarded Latin as a treasure, especially in the Sacred Liturgy as a sacral language to elevate the minds and hearts of the faithful. That mania also violates a fundamental principle of Christian hospitality and may well be driving despondent and disaffected Catholics into the arms of the Lefebvrists.
Something to think on …
Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
— Hermann Hesse, born on this date in 1877
Klaatu barada nikto …
… Aliens in the age of anxiety. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
But what are we actually looking for? Fellowship in what the 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal called “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces”? We may not find it; there is no reason to think that aliens would be anything like us. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, suspects that organically based intelligence may be a “brief interlude before the machines take over”. So, on a planet orbiting a star much older than our own, we may only find non-biological entities. Or we may not find them there at all; they may have emigrated to space to escape the kind of planetary crises we are now confronting. Rees argues that we would be staggeringly lucky to “catch intelligence” in the brief moment in which it was embodied in flesh and blood.
Thursday, July 01, 2021
Pathetic …
… Tolkien Society Goes Woke, 'Finds' Transgenderism, 'Antiracism,' and Queer-ness in The Lord of The Rings.
What the hell is wrong with these people? Have they tried thinking? I am getting bored blogging. There is so much ignorance and stupidity abroad.
Reactions …
… Book Marks reviews of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino Book Marks. (Hat tip, dave Lull.)
No way to get an education …
… Campus Reform | Bard College course: 'Abolishing Prisons and the Police'.
Bard used to be a good school. Debbie’s son went there. And Leon Botstein is still president.
Time for some common sense …
… In defense of the National Anthem. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
We’ll all be better off if we take an occasional break from being outraged, or fake-outraged. As sung today, “The Star-Spangled Banner” doesn’t celebrate slavery or even refer to it. We kept the parts that work and cut out the res
Something else to think on …
… "Spit and dust" | poem by Charles R. Strietelmeier. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Joshua Henkin’s new novel …
I recently finished reading Joshua Henkin’s Morningside Heights. The post that follows is my review.
When I looked through my copy of Morningside Heights (Pantheon, 304 pp., $26.95}, Joshua Henkin’s new novel, to re-read passages I had marked, I was surprised at how many were about Arlo Zackheim, Spence Robin’s son by a first, early marriage. Spence is the husband of Pru Steiner, and Morningside Heights is principally about them. Pru and Spence have a daughter of their own, Sarah.
The story of Pru and Spence is, one might say, the ground bass of this most impressive novel. And this is a novel that brings to mind musical terms, notably contrapuntal.
Prudence Steiner hails from Columbus, Ohio, but she arrives in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights because that’s where part of Columbia University’s campus is and Columbia is where Pru is going for her Ph. D., having just graduated from Yale.
Spence is one of her professors. He’s popular with his students. He’s on the rise, a rise that will culminate in a best-selling book and a MacArthur grant. Spence and Pru hit it off with each other from the start.
They have things in common. One day, over coffee, Pru tells him she’s from the suburbs of Columbus. “What’s in the suburbs of Columbus,” he asks. “Oh, just another bunch of complicated Jewish families like mine,” she answers.
“Another tautology,” he says.
“So you know about complicated Jewish families,” she replies.
“I come from one.”
This surprised her. With his rangy, slender frame, his pale face and thatch of red hair, he put her in mind of the Irish countryside. And Spence — she thought of Spencer Tracy — not to mention his last name — Robin — well, you could have fooled her.
“My Christian name is Shulem,” he said.
Faith figures in this tale, though in an unconventional way. Pru was raised in an Orthodox household. She attended a school called Torah Academy. As for Spence, “his grandfather had been a rabbi in Lithuania, but his parents’ god had been Communism. He hadn’t even been Bar Mitzvahed.” Now, though, Pru and Spence both consider themselves atheists, but the god they don’t believe in is the God of Abraham.
Nevertheless, after they are married — as they soon are — they attend synagogue.
Part I of Morningside Heights ends with Spence getting his MacArthur. Part II starts after Sarah has left for medical school. It ends with Pru phoning Sarah: “Dad has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “We need to tell Arlo.”
To continue my musical metaphors, Parts l and II serve as the overture. Then we get to know Arlo and Sarah. Arlo had been raised mostly by his mother, an unreconstructed hippie who moved them frequently, usually in pursuit of a man. She once expressed a wish “to poop in all 50 states.” He and Spence talk on the phone and he visits from time to time. Then, in his teens, he comes to live with Pru and Spence and Sarah. At first, brother and sister resent each other, but they come to grow close. While living there, Arlo is admitted to a special school. He has trouble with words, aggravated by his father’s pedantic use of same. But “he had an excellent memory, and when he set his mind to something, no one worked harder than he did. … in the nethermost regions of his mind he allowed himself to believe he was smart.” Though “when his father came home with his vocabulary words, Arlo thought he was just fooling himself.”
Eventually, he and Sarah will go to Reed College, though Arlo quickly drops out. He has other plans for himself. He ends up making a fortune from a computer company he founds. So he is able to move Spence and Pru to D.C. He has arranged for Spence to be accepted into a trial of a new drug that may help with Alzheimer’s. Sarah, who is now a doctor, comes to watch over things.
Pru’s best fried, Camille, introduces her to Walter, Camille’s oldest friend. Walter is a caregiver too. His wife had left him for another guy, but that guy has taken off and Walter’s ex now has Parkinson’s. He takes care of her out of love. Pru and Walter like each other, but Pru loves Spence and will not leave him.
Spence’s inevitable decline is touched upon only intermittently, not dwelt upon. This actually makes you feel it more, since every succeeding incident makes the inevitability of the outcome clearer and more poignant. One night, Pru climbs into bed with Spence, having undressed herself and him, trying to remind him of the physical love they had shared and enjoyed for so many years. The episode is heartbreaking.
Pru and Sarah take Spence with them to Ohio, to celebrate Pru’s mother’s birthday. It is there that the inevitable happens. Spence falls ill with pneumonia.
He’d already stopped eating; soon he stopped drinking too. He allowed the nurse to insert a wet washcloth between his lips, but before long he locked his jaw. He was still Spence; still stubborn. Pru asked everyone to leave. She was alone with Spence, as she’d been at the beginning. She got into the hospital bed and lay there holding him, and she just lay there and lay there and she held him and she lay there.
This is a many-layered novel. Yes, it is about a loving couple facing dreadful circumstances. But the thread of religion that runs through it changes its perspective. Oddly, that is because the protagonists, though not believers, are sustained by the rituals and utterances of faith.
Henkin writes beautifully. His eye for detail is uncanny. Morningside Heights deserves to be a bestseller. It will surely become a classic.
Something to think on …
To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
— Buckminster Fuller, who died on this date in 1983
Doesn’t surprise me …
… New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution | Science | Smithsonian Magazine. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
I was raised by my mother and grandmother — with help from my older brother.
The fullness born of sacrifice …
… New Bathing Suit by Terri Kirby Erickson | American Life in Poetry. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
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