Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Up close and personal …
RIP
Somehing to think on …
— V. S. Naipaul, born on this date in 1932
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
In case you wondered …
… while the pandemic certainly made things worse, the downturn took hold well before it started. Demographics alone cannot explain the scale of this drop. And statistics belie the argument that recent high school graduates are getting jobs instead of going to college: Workforce participation for 16- to 24-year-olds is lower than it wasbefore Covid hit, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, reports.
Talk about conspiracy theory …
They don’t want rosaries to get into the hands of Catholics who oppose abortion.
Well, I say the rosary every day and I also oppose abortion. But I’m not planning to assault anybody.
Something to think on …
Monday, August 15, 2022
RIP …
The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
See also: A Shelf Called Remember: How Frederick Buechner Built Up My Faith.
When I started reading, what caught my attention was a serious Christian who seemed to see what I could feel but couldn’t really articulate: that life is a mystery, a mystery that’s a plotline, a plotline that connects us with the story of Jesus.
These stories, he wrote, “meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that even by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives, we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.”
This is important …
… the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.
Blogging note …
I have to head out shortly to Wills Eye Hospital to see about the state of my cataracts. Will resume blogging sometime later.
Sunday, August 14, 2022
Something to think on …
Saturday, August 13, 2022
Sounds good to me …
Did we say defund? Yes. But we don’t mean simply to cut its funding, as leftists have disastrously proposed for police forces across the country. We mean tear down the entire rotting edifice of the FBI and replacing it with a new agency that respects the Constitution and holds itself accountable to all Americans, not just the woke far left.
I don’t know when the FBI decided to be our version of the KGB, but I don’t like it and want something done about it.
Listen in …
Editor R. R. Reno is joined by Dana Gioia to talk about his article from the August/September issue, “Christianity and Poetr.
Something to think on …
Friday, August 12, 2022
Philly’s Soros DA …
"Krasner is engaging in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination against you," wrote Mark Zecca, a former senior attorney in city of Philadelphia's Law Department.
In case you wondered …
Updike was deeply invested in the form his words would take. In a speech accepting the National Book Foundation medal, he described the dizzy happiness of seeing his words in print and credited Harry Ford, the designer of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, for the “delicious striped jacket and an elegant page format, in the typeface called Janson, that I have stuck with for over forty books since.”
Something to think on …
Thursday, August 11, 2022
Appreciation …
In his later years, Menashe sometimes seemed rueful about his lack of recognition, even as he marveled over his long overdue accolades and the legacy they granted to his work. In a 2005 interview with Adam Travis of the Poetry Foundation, he said that his had been “the opposite of a life buttressed by grants and having a publisher and going to him every few years with new poems. Each time I’ve had to start from scratch.” When asked if there were any merits to obscurity, his reply could not have been more emphatic: “NO! No, no, no, no, no! You want your work to be read. Obscurity means you’re not read.”
Something to think on …
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Something to think on …
Tuesday, August 09, 2022
Well, where was Luther from …
Since the Second Vatican Council, so much been done in an attempt to “bring the Church closer to the faithful.” In the process, the progressivists strip Holy Mother Church of everything that could represent sacredness and hierarchy
Coming to the big screen …
Titled after Beckett’s famous ethos on life “Dance first, think later,” the film is a sweeping account of the life of this icon of 20th-century literature.
Something to think on …
Monday, August 08, 2022
What can I say?
Something to think on …
Sunday, August 07, 2022
Good to know …
Hmm …
… Mark Twain took notice of the writer of awful poems.
A great painter …
Tooker never complained about neglect. He was too absorbed by his own contrarian passions. When other young painters followed Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, Tooker studied the Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca. When the leading critics praised abstract formalism, Tooker emphasized content. His central concern was never style. It was the human condition.I can’t remember when I first encountered Tooker’s paintings, but for me it was love at first sight. Here was a painter who saw the world as it is and didn’t play games.
A prophet for these days …
When addressing the issue of freedom, Sheen notes that the common interpretation of the word is “one’s ability to do anything they wish to do.” Sheen writes that this is not true freedom but rather a pseudo-freedom. True freedom, according to Sheen, is the ability to do what one ought to do, not ability to do what one wants to do.
Something to think on …
Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
— Rabindranath Tagore, who died on this date in 1941
Saturday, August 06, 2022
Poetry and romance …
After Vivien’s death, Eliot had written to Emily that he was shocked “to discover that I recoiled violently from the prospect of marriage.” Wrestling with the issue he declares: “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself . . . to any other person. I do not think that I could survive it, as a person; I cannot bear the company of any one person for very long without extreme irritation and suppression.”
Essential to faith …
The Holy Spirit moves through Scripture and prayer, and yet we gloss over familiar phrases and images as though we already understood them.
Something to think on …
Friday, August 05, 2022
Master of resignation …
A chronicle of failure …
“The CDC was supposed to have spent the last 2+ decades preparing for the specific scenario of ‘What if someone resurrects Smallpox and releases it as a bioweapon’. Now, when faced with a virus that is literally ‘Story Mode Smallpox’ they fail,” researcher Nicholas Weaver observes. Monkeypox “is not hyper-virulent,” he notes, and vaccines, treatments and techniques, such as contact tracing, designed for smallpox work just as well. Yet the CDC has “failed, completely and utterly, to prevent this growing.”
Something to think on …
A monk’s attentiveness …
Most of Steven’s tales are simple, hardly worth the telling. But they’re the kind of tales that are the texture of life, like the stories we recount at the dinner table. Steven’s stories stay with us, moments that remind us of the small delights and instant tragedies of life.
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Well worth remembering …
In his farewell address to the nation, President George Washington warned against the expulsion of religion from public life, declaring that we should “with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”