I’ve sort of been surprised that he hasn’t become trendy again.  For my father’s generation he was, for good or ill, one of the principal models of American manhood.  By the end of his life, he was still a box office draw, but was rapidly being rejected by the move toward Alan Aldafied models of sensitive American males.

I am ambivalent about him, since the image of manhood he presented was emphatically that: an image.  In the hands of a skilled director, the nobility of that image could be seen (and I think there were things of real value that have been lost with the broad cultural rejection of that image).  On the whole, I think our culture could do with a bit more of the things that...READ MORE

...is becoming the Thing That Used to Be Liberalism.

The only thing weirder to me than the sudden elevation of an obscure lefty rabble-rouser named Saul Alinsky to the status of Prime Bogeyman by the Crazy Right has been the rush by some of the most repellent figures on the Crazy Right to imitate him.

Some blurbs for ‘Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America’:

“A manual for the counter-revolution.” — Ann Coulter

“The Art of War for conservatives.” — Rob Long, contributing editor, National Review

“A deadly—and deadly funny—dissection of the people who brought us to this critical moment in America’s history”—Mark Levin, author of Liberty and...READ MORE

A reader writes:

I am a frequent reader of your blog and I really enjoy it.

I thought you might be interested in knowing about an experience I just had at my home parish.

Our Catholic Parish and my Pastor are without a doubt a parish of good intentions, but generally not bold in proclaiming the truth.  Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be a concern to check if the materials we use follow the teachings of the Church.  To be fair, I think that most of the misleading materials were put in place years ago by different people.

Anyway, I just got involved in our Adult Faith Formation Committee and started reviewing the materials in different areas.  I found that the materials in our “Catholics...READ MORE

A reader writes:

Here’s another fine example of our sexually deranged culture.  According to a study done by the University of Iowa published in USA Today, casual sex is A-Okay!
 
Refreshingly, many commentors over at USA Today found this “scientific” study to be a bunch of nonsense, but of course there were the usual suspects railing against the “Bronze Age folklore” (aka the Bible) that has kept us from experiencing the joys of bed hopping.  Now that Science has once again disproved religion, we are finally freed from the shackles of those old fogey religious teachings on chastity! Three cheers for promiscuity!

All kidding aside, these kinds of “studies” make it harder (at least for me)...READ MORE

Show me a culture that despises children, and I will show you the face of evil. Excerpts:

As you already suspect, the childfree movement has its roots in the 1970s. After Paul Ehrlich’s (now discredited) Population Bomb became a sensation predicting hundreds of millions of deaths as the planet convulsed from overpopulation, clubs such as the National Organization for Non-Parents and No Kidding! sprang up. But what was once a hippy-crank affectation has in recent years become a wide-ranging attack on the societal machinery which supports and encourages baby-making. [...]

It is a quirk of the movement that while the most committed childfree people tend to be women, being childfree is not...READ MORE

So the other day, my son sends along this trailer for a little film called Wordplay, about the world’s greatest crossword puzzler:

I love stuff like this because, as a dyed-in-the-wool Chestertonian, I like things like small hobbies, people who do great things in quiet ways, and the general theme of “He has lifted up the meek and the lowly”.  i dislike the cult of celebrity, but strongly favor the cult of Quiet Heroism.

The cult of celebrity is evil because it teaches ordinary people, possessed of a dignity given to them by God most High, that they are nothing and can only find happiness and fulfillment through identification with those people who typically represent the very worst the...READ MORE

A reader writes:

I have a friend who is a recently converted Catholic and a longtime believer in limited government.  He insists that his approach to government mirrors that of the Catholic Church and that to be a Catholic one has to be a believer in subsidiarity.  In this view he argues, government has to decentralize as much as possible.  He feels that to be a good Catholic, one must adhere to this view.  Is this accurate?

No.  It’s not.  Not that he’s wrong about subsidiarity.  It is most certainly an aspect of Catholic social teaching.  Basically, subsidiarity means “The people closest to the problem should, as a general rule, take care of the problem.”  So, for instance, instead of...READ MORE

There is much bustle as the papal visit approacheth.  One reader writes from Ireland:

You would almost think it was all choreographed to chime with the Papal visit.

In general, over time, over years in fact since Benedict’s election, I’ve noticed the drip drip of articles and how they have been positioned by BBC, usually at weekends before a Sunday - mention of priest/cardinal/pope in some attack/scandal/crime/prejudice etc. I mean recently a bishop was burgled here and they just had to mention the ‘stolen rosary beads, his wallet and two bottles of alcohol’ as the items stolen. And then this quarky proclamation:

Is it some press release or some zealous journalist seeking to debunk the...READ MORE