The Paragraph Farmer

Last blog post

2010-11-12T08:55:00.005-05:00

It's time for me to let the Paragraph Farm lie fallow. Hours of blogging before and after work, as well as on lunch breaks, have taken too great a toll on many other things I should be doing, such as helping my wife.

It makes no sense for me to write about theology while avoiding or giving short shrift to the full measure of Christian service that is properly mine as a husband and father. Moreover, the car accident that my daughter Jane and I were in last summer continues to affect daily life for our entire family. Jane was most traumatically injured and still suffers from often-debilitating head pain. Son Thomas's entrance into full-fledged puberty was complicated by jealousy over the attention that his little sister needed so much of and still gets. Cathleen lost a significant amount of work time while tending last summer to Jane and more recently to lingering medical and insurance paperwork, on top of all else she does to run the household.

As for me, bad habits I had even before the accident were aggravated by it. I'm ashamed to admit that I concentrated on working and blogging rather than family life because the my job and this blog were familiar and -- unlike that horrific accident and its aftermath-- controllable.

But I've come to realize that even if he's taking a sledge hammer to American foundations, what the president does matters less than whether I install window screens without help, make sure that we have adequate insurance, and guide precious children while they are still malleable.

I have faults that urgently need to be addressed, so I'm shelving this digital farm in order to address them properly. "Orthopraxis" matters as much as "orthodoxy."

If you've been a regular reader, you have my heartfelt thanks. If you were a friend, you still are. And if you pray, please pray for us. These are hard but hopeful times.

Perfect for Halloween

2010-10-29T12:05:00.005-04:00

Pikabu, formerly the world's greatest housecat, shuffled off this mortal coil three months ago, after a happy life.

She would sometimes amuse herself by hunting birds and mice, but it was her prowess at scorpion killing when we lived in Scottsdale, AZ, that cemented her status as "senior critter" in the O'Hannigan household.

An unofficial member of the neighborhood watch in four different neighborhoods, she was black as night, blazing fast in a sprint, affectionate on her own terms, and too smart to be a Halloween prop even though she did an admirable job of acting that way more than eight years.

Speaking of All Hallows Eve, while Elizabeth Esther makes the common mistake of confusing "tracts" with "tracks," her Halloween thoughts are still worth reading, not least because she knows it's not a "Pagan Holiday"

Strange brew

2010-10-28T12:25:00.007-04:00

Did you see Andrew Romano's recent swing at the Tea Party piñata? It was an attempt to enlighten Newsweek's rapidly-dwindling readership about the multitude of ways that the Tea Party allegedly gets the U.S. Constitution wrong, and while declaring that the Constitution should not be confused with "Holy Writ," Romano missed the point.

People like Frank Warner have already done a yeoman job of fisking Romano's essay. Warner was amused by the way that Romano accused Tea Partiers of "not sweating the details" while writing approvingly of an administration whose economic mantra seems to be "Don't bother designing a system that pays for itself; just close your eyes and borrow." Warner also pointed out that it's hard to pin labels like "authoritarian" and "delusional" on the Tea Party without noticing that "expanding the size and power of government also embraces a fundamentally authoritarian idea and imaginary benefits." Goose, gander, sauce: you know the drill.

Wanting in on the fun, Michael Tennant, writing in The New American, took Romano's mendacious critique as further proof that the Tea Party has the establishment in a panic. It need hardly be said that the establishment includes "career politicians" of both major parties.

Tennant noticed that Romano's notions of what political positions are "divisive" and "fundamentalist" are remarkably one-sided. "Under the progressive approach, which we have endured for a century now, have Americans really become more united?" Tennant wondered. "The government programs and taxes and regulations that Romano champions pit the old against the young, the rich against the poor, the black against the white, the male against the female, the corporation against the taxpayer, the employer against the employee, and so on, ad infinitum."

"Moreover," wrote Tennant, warming to his rebuttal, "it is precisely the policies that progressives favor that have brought us to the current precarious position, degrading our currency, running up insurmountable public and private debts, and creating a dependent class that will likely take to the streets — as the French and Greek dependent classes have already done — before it gives up a single penny of its ill-gotten gains." Tennant then went to his whip hand for the final furlongs: "Had constitutional originalism held sway for the last 100 years, the United States would still be on a very sound footing, as it was prior to the Progressive Era."

Between them, Warner and Tennant gave the bum's rush to Romano's thesis. To be fair, however, Romano left his thesis vulnerable to rebuttal by making some big mistakes: any argument about the U.S. Constitution that aspires to high-mindedness should not waste its first three paragraphs on an "ad feminam" attack, as Romano did by going after Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Once past that peculiar introduction, Romano flashed his condescension, and then conjured up the "religious right" as a strawman-in-waiting. By the time Romano hit his stride, he'd unwittingly announced himself as an apprentice torturer, hoping to put various fundamentalists (The aforementioned O'Donnell, plus radio talker Glenn Beck and the ever-frustrating Sarah Palin) on the rack of his imagination. It didn't work any better than touting Cass Sunstein as a "centrist" legal scholar, or pointing out that Tea Partiers are not the first to speak reverently of the Constitution, which Romano also did.

Romano made his own biases vividly clear by asserting, embarrassingly, that the Constitution is a "relentlessly secular document." Talk about a failure to communicate. While the Constitution does not -- for example -- come embroidered with the old Jesuit abbreviation "A.M.D.G," which is a Latin initialism meaning "for the greater glory of God," it's a far cry from that to the contention that the document is "relentlessly secular."

How many secular documents time-stamp their own births by noting the "Year of our Lord" in which legislators who crafted them signify assent, or assume that the gifts that liberty bestows upon a people are "blessings" rather than mere "advantages"? How is it possible to ignore the text of the Constitution while you're trying to prove that the Tea Party twists that text?

Ironically, it may be progressives (rather than originalists or Tea Party types) who treat the Constitution as though it were Holy Writ, thanks to their overweening fondness for genuflection in the direction of an endlessly-malleable (read "living") Constitution (Romano: "The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. It’s a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today...") Progressives approach the Constitution (and government generally) the way pre-Christian druids approached trees. Originalists, on the other hand, contend only that its words mean what their authors intended them to mean. In metaphorical terms, the opposing camps might be described as the shamens and the engineers-- and guess who's more likely to cloak even blatant disregard of the Constitution under the color of authority?

Having mistaken the lack of explicit references to "God" or "Jesus" for Terminator-style secularism in our federal charter, Romano then interpreted the election of Barack Obama as "a provocation" for "the forces of orthodoxy." Not for Romano the more thoughtful argument that "taxed enough already" resistance started brewing under George W. Bush, back in the halcyon days of the original "Troubled Asset Relief Program."

Hunting desperately for hypocrisy among Tea Party people and those who sympathize with them, Romano pointed out that "in the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution," including flag-descrecration and balanced-budget amendments. By his lights, "none of these revisions has anything to do with the document's original meaning." But does that mean, as Romano infers, that Bachmann and her ilk are not the originalists they think they are? Hardly, because the Constitution provides mechanisms for its own amendment. Whether Bachmann backs a losing cause is another question, though I trust her far more than I trust a politico like Harry Reid.

Romano may not be what Bugs Bunny used to call a "maroon," but as an archeologist studying the Tea Party movement with barely-concealed revulsion (NYT columnist Tom Friedman knows all about that, BTW), he manages to write like a maroon. Echoing President Obama's dismissal of "bitter clingers," Romano asserts without a scintilla of evidence that Tea Party fundamentalists "seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture."

How would Romano know this, exactly? A preponderence of "analysis" like that is what eventually gets your magazine sold for a dol -- Oh, never mind. The only scripture I know is the one that calls us to be charitable even to our enemies.

Systemic fraud?

2010-10-27T12:16:00.000-04:00

Elsewhere in North Carolina, a Donkey Party sympathizer rigged a voting machine, maybe (is this what they mean when Get-Out-the-Vote mavens talk about a political "ground game"?):

A Craven County voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

He's not alone, and not in Nevada (whre SEIU members are up to no good). Yet some people still wonder why voter fraud is a concern across the country.

The quotable Mister O'Rourke

2010-10-25T12:09:00.004-04:00

P.J. having fun is always incisive and frequently hilarious (the wording below is P.J. O'Rourke's but the Greek Chorus of hyperlinks comes from me):

"Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option."

Making it wail

2010-10-22T17:13:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Orrin Judd for this find (apparently the harmonica player's name is Ted Welter):

In praise of NIMBYism, writ large

2010-10-22T17:04:00.001-04:00

Krauthammer:

"Even as we speak, the social-democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. It's not just the real prospect of financial collapse in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, with even the relatively more stable major countries in severe distress. It is the visible moral collapse of a system that, after two generations of increasing cradle-to-grave infantilization, turns millions of citizens into the streets of France in furious and often violent protest over what? Over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62!

Having seen this display of what can only be called decadence, Obama's perfectly wired electorate says no, not us, not here. The peasants have seen the future -- Greece and France -- and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama's proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world's foremost exemplar of that model -- Europe -- is in chaotic meltdown."

And how did you think he'd react?

2010-10-21T18:48:00.002-04:00

Ace is too profane to quote at length, and glides right past the personality profiles that National Public Radio still does better than any other broadcast outfit, but his righteous indignation seems well-deserved:

"[Juan] Williams shouldn't be fired for making utterly noncontroversial statements about Muslims being more worrisome on airplanes than Lutherans even if he hadn't "saved" himself with the feel-goodery [...] NPR is a left-liberal's idea of "diversity" -- a taxpayer-extorted fantasyland showcasing diverse opinons all the way from the center left to the hard left."

Two for tea

2010-10-20T08:47:00.002-04:00

Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell both made waves the other day, but -- with a few honorable exceptions -- mainstream reports about why have been irredeemably stupid. Palin did not confuse 1773 with 1776, and O'Donnell wasn't so much "questioning the separation of church and state" as asking her opponent to explain why he (wrongly) thought that the First Amendment's "establishment" clause was a sop to militant secularism. Investor's Business Daily offers a history lesson in response to the resulting brouhaha.

UPDATE: Speaking of history, let's not flush this mendacious bogus Lincoln quote down the memory hole.

Why Barack Obama will never write a good vampire novel

2010-10-19T06:18:00.005-04:00

As some other people noted early in his political career and right after the inauguration, our president has no respect for ritual, and you need that (among other things) to write a good vampire novel. That's my thesis in a new essay for American Spectator Online, anyhow.

Twilight redeemed

2010-10-18T18:51:00.003-04:00

The Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Asheville, NC.

It's done in Spanish Renaissance style, but has at least a few windows from Munich.

Culture shock

2010-10-18T16:41:00.003-04:00

A conversation with my 11-year-old daughter:

"Whatcha got for homework, pumpkin?"

"I have to read The Tempest."

"Shakespeare? Cool!"

She pulled a pint of Ben & Jerry's "Chunky Monkey" ice cream out of the refrigerator and sat down to start reading the paperback. Several spoonfuls later, she got indignant.

"Hey! Ariel in this book is a boy!"

"That's because The Tempest was written before The Little Mermaid."

"But Ariel is a girl's name!"

"Not always."

Cuba Gooding, call your office

2010-10-18T10:47:00.006-04:00

Kevin D. Williamson with that rarity, the economics-themed bon mot:

"We just basically set a $1 trillion pile of money on fire and roasted marshmallows over the flames. That is why Nancy Pelosi is about to become the first female ex-speaker of the House."

In related news, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat dispels some myths about the Tea Party movement. And from the North (in case the thought of a "show me the money" trifecta appeals) comes this tale of the "Rent-an-Eskimo" racket funding the write-in candidacy of Lisa Murkowski.

A little night music

2010-10-17T23:50:00.003-04:00

Street musicians play on a corner in Asheville, NC, where we went this past weekend to do some leaf-peeping along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Asheville is a neat town. Any place with a "Tupelo Honey Cafe" and a functional but slightly smaller version of New York City's Flatiron Building must have something going for it.

The Mast General Store is pretty nifty, too.

Provacateur

2010-10-15T08:13:00.002-04:00

John C. Médaille explains why he is a modern-day monarchist, politically speaking:

"Tyranny is a degeneration of proper monarchy and generally happens only in degenerate times, and even then, the king has to be speaking for some other and greater force, such as a strong army or a commercial oligarchy. A king, no less than a president, must consider the forces and interests in his kingdom. But a king is free to judge the justice of the arguments; a president is free only to count the votes. And while the president might attempt to engage in persuasion, in the end he himself can only be persuaded by power, that is, by whoever controls the votes, which is very likely to be the one who controls the money. A king may also be persuaded by power and money, but he is always free to be persuaded by justice. And even when a king is a tyrant, he is an identifiable tyrant; much worse is when a people live in a tyranny they may not name, a system where the forms of democracy serve as cover for the reality of tyranny. And that, I believe, is our situation today."

C is for cookie?

2010-10-14T12:57:00.002-04:00

Now what would be entertaining is for the First Lady to try the same thing on Sully from Monsters, Inc.

Joseph Lawler has a related thought, as does Tom Maguire and even -- tangentially-- one of the folks at HotAir (with an assist from a federal judge)

John C. Wright et. al. on Evil in Spooky Stories

2010-10-14T12:46:00.000-04:00

Ha! I was just writing about the same subject myself, only my own essay has yet to see the light of publication. It turns out that John C. Wright and I think along parallel lines, but he is funnier.

Wright's essay was sparked by a thoughtful rant from Leo Grin.

Both essays are worth your time, as I hope mine will be, if the crew at American Spectator Online sees fit to publish it.

The Good Samaritans

2010-10-13T08:26:00.005-04:00

Jeff Hart and a handful of other drilling engineers from Colorado have friends all over Chile now; it was their yeoman work over 33 days that bored a hole wide and deep enough to accommodate the ongoing rescue of trapped miners.

33 days, 33 miners, one 625-meter escape shaft with a 28" diameter. Gotta love it.

UPDATE: They're all safe; the shift supervisor volunteered to be the last man up. And Sebastian Pinera, president of Chile, also acquited himself well.

See also this essay from Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. Just to whet your appetite:

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Quietly heroic

2010-10-12T11:51:00.001-04:00

The inspiring pro-life activism and odyssey of Lila Rose.

Ignorant and hypocritical?

2010-10-12T11:32:00.004-04:00

As "October Surprises" in a midterm election year go, the Obama administration's public tiff with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over whether the latter takes foreign money illegally seems a small potato, but also perhaps a hot one.

Nonpartisan fact-checking discredited the original charge almost as soon as it was made. True to form, however, the vice-president -- he who implied recent visits to a long-closed eatery in his home district -- was a little slow on the uptake.

As to why the tiff is a stupid one to have in the first place, well, there are positive and negative reasons. Let's remember that business members of the Chamber of Commerce actually create jobs. Moreover, one of the things I encountered while perusing an angry new book (Pamela Geller's The Post-American Presidency) was this very interesting quote from Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. In May, 2009, Stern bragged to Michael Mishak, reporter for the Las Vegas Sun, that "We [the SEIU] spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it."

Given that admission and the name of the union, would it be uncouth to wonder how much of its own dues were a) foreign and b) illegally used to influence an American election? (If SEIU collects no dues from foreign members, then in what sense would it be "international"?)

(The book, by the way, is worth reading, although flawed by indifferent editing and Geller's penchant for hyperbole. There is considerable evidence to back Geller's overall assessment of the Obama presidency, but I could never figure out why a rogue paragraph about fraud in global warmism dropped unexpectedly into a discussion of sharia law on p. 25, for example, or why Geller describes Obama's presidency as "lethal for Israel" rather than simply "dangerous" to that ever-beleaguered country; one can only hope she's not prescient about Israel's fate. But flaws like those are easily forgivable in an otherwise-useful compendium of offenses that does a slow boil through 300 scary pages and is vouchsafed by heavy hitters like John Bolton and Robert Spencer.)

Quote of the day

2010-10-08T11:58:00.004-04:00

A tip of the chapeau to Joseph Susanka for finding this gem from Flannery O'Connor:

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."

(Why yes, I do believe there is a link between that assertion and the underrated, entertaining, and surprisingly moral "Nacho Libre.")

Remembering the Battle of Lepanto

2010-10-07T12:01:00.004-04:00

The Dominican order of Catholic priests apparently has a web site devoted to stamps that it has influenced, including the one at left commemorating the unexpected Christian victory over a Turkish naval armada in the last conflict between oared warships.

The outcome of the October 7, 1571 Battle of Lepanto bought Christianity in the West time it would not otherwise have had, and checked what up until then had been inexorable Muslim military advance.

By way of expressing gratitude for the result for which he and many others had prayed fervently to the mother of Jesus, Pope Pius V -- a Dominican priest who was the first to forego vestments of "cardinal red" so he could keep the white robe of his order after being elected to the papacy -- added "Our Lady Help of Christians" to the (Marian) Litany of Loreto, and declared the first Sunday in October a feast of the rosary.

Mark Shea has pertinent theological thoughts posted today, and I commend them to you.

Meghan McCain copying Jan Brady

2010-10-06T12:02:00.001-04:00

Meghan "one-woman revolution" (giggle) McCain has Jan Brady's signature complaint down cold: "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! It's always about Marcia!"

Like a poker "tell" for the Hispanic Caucus

2010-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Es la verdad.

"So what accounts for [President] Obama's eagerness to semantically superimpose Mexican people onto our early territory? There are convincing reasons to believe that Obama meant that today's Mexicans are descended from the rightful owners of part of this country. Allowing them to return via illegal immigration and lax enforcement is simple fairness -- geographic reparations."

BUT -- and you knew there was a 'but'--

"The problem with that [geographic reparations] theory is that the people who were here first were not Mexican. There were warring tribes with no Mexican national identity whatsoever, who had themselves been fighting and displacing each other. The brutal territorial conquests of the Iroquois and Osage long predated Columbus. For the president to say that "Mexicans" were here "[l]ong before America was an idea" is a historical fable. He is trying to delegitimize our claims to sovereignty and to make us ashamed of our territorial boundary. From these absurd premises the left builds an entire house of cards, including an open-borders immigration policy."

Just in case you thought the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was old news.

Because the story was archived under "zeitgeist"

2010-10-05T16:42:00.004-04:00

This from the Paragraph Farm's unofficial European Bureau Chief, as found in the English-language edition of a publication (Spiegel) that he can read in its original German:

Visitors to the Munich Oktoberfest this year drank their way into the history books by downing an unprecedented 7 million liters of beer, beating the previous high of 6.94 million reached in 2007, the organizers said. The impressive list of lost items includes a set of dentures and a live rabbit.

Papa Ratzi

2010-10-05T11:24:00.004-04:00

Sometimes blog post titles just write themselves.

Seriously, thanks to Elizabeth Scalia for the pointer to "Venerable Bead's" takedown of Richard Dawkins, not least because Bede -- although himself an atheist -- performs the useful service of pointing out that Dawkins habitually misuderestimates the pope, whose arguments he utterly fails to refudiate.

A sample:

"Reason is not a wall that doesn't need defending, or a talisman incapable of perversion or misuse. It needs rigorous vigilance and bravery to safeguard it from without, and a larger context of legitimisation to prevent corruption from within. Left to fend for itself in the marketplace of ideologies it can never hold its corner against more basic passions, bigotries and appetities. If Dawkins wants us to believe he has not this knowledge, Ratzinger is rather braver, telling the Italian senate in 2004, "reason is inherently fragile", and ideologies based in the claim either that it can function without morality, or comes with morality attached, "become easy targets for dictatorships".

This, he explains is what happened in Nazi Germany -- and that is what Dawkins and his cronies choose to misread as blaming atheism for Nazism. I wish it were only stupidity, but Dawkins is not stupid, so it can only be cowardice.

But compare Ratzinger's rigorous analysis of the "loss of an awareness of intangible moral values" in a culture that "sees in its own history only what is blameworthy and destructive [and] is no longer capable of perceiving what is great and pure" with the ghastly fluffy-bunny 'consciousness raising' of Dawkins's recent sermons and decide for yourself in whose hands your future would be safer."

-- The takedown excerpted above ties well with musings by Joe Carter about faith and reason among America's Founding Fathers.

See also this headline from Orrin Judd, and this palate-cleanser that I found at Julie's place.

Wisdom from the late Joseph Sobran

2010-10-04T09:00:00.002-04:00

Like P.J. O'Rourke (who is still with us) and Michael Kelly (who has gone to glory), Sobran was a fearless columnist. James Antle found a quote from Sobran that's 18 years old and still appropriate. Sobran saw the Tea Party movement before it had coalesced into what it is now:

"The real opposite of a legislating party is not a foot-dragging party, but a party of repeal. What we need is a conservative Congress whose chief business will be chopping down the jungle of bad laws that oppress us, laws that range from misconceived to iniquitous and unconstitutional."

Little did I know while cleaning out the garage...

2010-10-03T07:05:00.003-04:00

This feast day slipped by while I was delivering real estate flyers for my wife, losing a virtual football game of "Madden '10" to my son,, and admiring the "Twilight" perfume that my daughter found someplace.

Book Review: 102 Minutes

2010-10-01T17:26:00.003-04:00

New York-based writers Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have been around the block a few times, and it shows. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers is a masterpiece of investigative reporting in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. That its authors had the resources of the New York TImes at their disposal helps a lot, but it's no easy thing to build a coherent narrative from hundreds of interviews, as they did in this book, which also includes a handful of helpful diagrams and photographs.

Dwyer and Flynn write with an appealing combination of urgency and studied professionalism about what is probably the most soul-searing event ever broadcast to a mass audience on live TV. What keeps their narrative relevant even now is its detail and its unflinching honesty. This work will be around long after other titles in the "Current Events" section of your local bookstore have been remaindered by the passage of time. I came away from the book grateful for the selfless heroism displayed that day, and frustrated by the all-too-human lapses in design, culture, and communication that made the carnage worse than it might otherwise have been.

If this account is not required reading for first responders, building inspectors, architects, and municipal planners everywhere, it should be.

Friday frivolity

2010-10-01T12:03:00.004-04:00

It's almost wabbit season.

Apropos of something else entirely, Margaret Cabaniss noticed the "sad song" survey done by a British tabloid, and decided to have some fun with it. Naturally, I had a few suggestions.

R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" is okay, but I think the only reason it's a survey winner is that people forgot about (or never heard) the magnificent weepers by Alison Krauss, Ray Charles, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, and even ABBA.

That list doesn't even get to the Rolling Stones' "Angie" or "As Tears Go By," much less Dire Straits' "Tunnel of Love" or Roy Orbison's "Crying."

Yes, I'm a sucker for the sad stuff. Even Maurice Jarre's instrumental score for the movie "Witness" is (was) cathartic-- anyone else remember the soaring synthesizer of "Building the Barn"?

Cowboys and Indians

2010-10-01T09:07:00.002-04:00

Not what you think, though, because you won't find Louis L'Amour, Crazy Horse, or even George Armstrong Custer in situ (as one cynic put it, "the stupid with this administration is epic.")

Would Pope Gregory the Great count as a cowboy?

A catechism riddle I had not heard

2010-09-30T12:16:00.004-04:00

Pat Gohn, musing in an essay about human dignity:

Q: What are the only man-made things in heaven? Take you time. Puzzle it out. We can wait…

Answer: The nail prints on the hands and feet of Jesus, and the scar in his side.

Why?

Jesus still has a human body. The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent almighty Savior of the World still has a human body, albeit a glorified one. [...] Even now, that mystical Body is united with the Trinity. The body of Jesus was not some kind of disposable earthly transport vehicle. No. Jesus completely united himself to humanity in a permanent way.

After that Gohn harks to Genesis 1: 26-27. It's good stuff.

Elsewhere in the theology corner, I should have mentioned this yesterday. And if you're in the mood for a longish but gripping biography of a good man too-little understood, go read Eric Metaxas' sympathetic, inspiring treatment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is easily the best biography I've read in years.

Overreach

2010-09-30T12:10:00.001-04:00

The federal government wants New York City to change lettering on 250,000 street signs from ALL CAPS -- which the signs have been for years -- to mixed-case.

Like signs in New York are federal business. Sheesh!

The lyin', the switch, and the wardrobe

2010-09-28T12:16:00.003-04:00

Elizabeth Scalia defends the practice of vowed religious men and women wearing distinctive habits. Were it more widespread, the Pew research finding now making waves might have turned out differently.

Apart from what it implies about the poor or spread-too-thin quality of Catholic catechesis, I'm sanguine about findings that many people are ignorant of their own faith, because I think Brian Saint-Paul is right:

Expect to see plenty of "Atheists Know More About Religion Than Christians" -style headlines, and while that may irk, it is in one sense true. In a country as heavily religious as the United States, the atheist must make a conscious choice to go a different route, and that requires some knowledge of what he's rejecting. That's not the case for the mainline Christian who finds his nominal and ill-informed faith fits easily with the nominal and ill-informed Christianity of American culture.

Think pieces

2010-09-24T11:56:00.005-04:00

I got nothin'. But Robin of Berkeley has perceptive thoughts about stress in her town, Michelle Malkin is underrated as a Stossel-class investigative journalist, and Anthony Esolen has a dispassionate look at why politics is more likely to spawn hatred than (Christian) religion is.

Kudos to friend Gary for the trip down comic strip memory lane at left.

Rudder orders and Tiller orders

2010-09-23T12:36:00.005-04:00

Some fascinating history about why the Titanic sank, from the novelist granddaughter of its only surviving officer, who goes way beyond "the ship hit an iceberg":

"Titanic was launched at a time when the world was moving from sailing ships to steam ships. My grandfather, like the other senior officers on Titanic, had started out on sailing ships. And on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as “Tiller Orders” which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way. [So if you want to go left, you push right.] It sounds counter-intuitive now, but that is what Tiller Orders were. Whereas with “Rudder Orders," which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. It gets more confusing because, even though Titanic was a steam ship, at that time on the North Atlantic they were still using Tiller Orders. Therefore [First Officer] Murdoch gave the [course change] command in Tiller Orders but [Steersman Robert] Hitchins, in a panic, reverted to the Rudder Orders he had been trained in. They only had four minutes to change course and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins’ mistake and then tried to rectify it, it was too late.’"

She goes on to explain why a subsequent decision also helped to doom the ocean liner.

Impressive counterspin

2010-09-22T11:57:00.004-04:00

Please go read Ace on what the Left will say about revelations in Bob Woodward's new book, and why the Left is wrong.

The flaming skull graphic Ace used to accompany his rant is probably unwarranted. As a friendly critic notes, Ace is "debasing the coin a bit," because what the president said to Woodward about our national ability to "absorb" the 9/11 attack and (hypothetically speaking) others like it is standard Democratic parlance.

On the other hand, Ace is right to seethe about how terrorism-related discourse has come to this "ain't American resilience grand?" juncture with blessings from the man in the Oval Office. Ace understands what talk show host Alan Colmes does not: that faith in the "true grit" of the American people and the blessings of American geography is not the same as the arrant nonsense that belittles even ambitious terrorist activity as a small price to pay for the righteous thrill of appearing magnanimous to the so-called "international community."

The best of the comments on the Ace rant: "Hey, on that basis we could let the Pacific Fleet get sunk again." Runner-up: "And let us not forget that we 'sucked up' not less than five different terrorist attacks under Clinton's watch, and the worst we did in response was to blow up an aspirin factory."

As for this cockamamie idea that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is sound policy, the "bitter clingers" are appropriately scornful, in an "I can see November from my house" kind of way:

Dirty Bomb in Downtown Chicago = Just Something We Have To Deal With.
Incandescent Lightbulb = A Clear And Present Danger To The Planet

If dying is no big deal then why do we need Obama-care?

Wow, I guess Biden wasn't kidding when he said "Gird your loins."

And from this from "Chief Brody" for all the movie buffs out there -- "We can absorb the lack of a bigger boat."

Sing it, Kermit

2010-09-21T16:12:00.002-04:00

German Shepherd meets Saint Bernard

2010-09-21T12:10:00.001-04:00

Photo from Life magazine online via the Lucianne.com news aggregator. It pairs well with this assessment from self-described "free church evangelical Protestant" Fred Sanders, who offers both his own thoughts and two cheers for clever protestor Toby Guise.

Quote of the day

2010-09-21T09:51:00.001-04:00

Jonathan Witt, amended slightly:

"Intellectual rot [among U.S. Democrats] has a pedigree, of course. It reaches at least as far back as President Bill Clinton's talk of building 'a bridge to the 21st century,' as if the river of time had run dry and we could only ever reach the new Millennium through the sage and centralized planning of political mandarins on the left."

And you should see him dance the tarantella

2010-09-20T18:34:00.002-04:00

James Taranto hammers Nick Kristof:

Kristof draws a false and offensive equivalence between Islamic extremists and American "extremists." The latter, when something in the newspaper offends them, complain in a "courteous and polite" fashion, according to the Portland editor. The former, as in the case of cartoonist Molly Norris, issue religious edicts threatening death. (President Obama, champion of the First Amendment for Muslims, remains conspicuously silent about Norris's plight.)

Wrapping up coverage on the papal trip to Britain

2010-09-20T12:31:00.007-04:00

Damian Thompson is one of the many people who had something to say about Pope Benedict's trip, and while his insights aren't startlingly original, I do enjoy the zest with which he posted them:

History
Personality
Liturgy
Aftermath

Thompson's pugnacity ("Compare the protestors to the Catholics in Hyde Park: old Polish ladies, tweedy gents from the shires, African hospital cleaners, self-consciously cool teenagers, Filipino checkout assistants and, as one of my friends put it, 'some rather tarty-looking traveller women who’d obviously had a glass or two'. They don’t call it the Catholic Church for nothing: if not a universal cross-section of humanity, it was a damn sight closer to it than the humanist smugfest") is the flip side of the exasperation felt by Margaret Cabaniss, and (to put the whole visit in context) this CNS report does a nice job of describing the Mass at which John Henry Cardinal Newman was formally recognized as "Blessed."

Ross Douthat adds his typically thoughtful perspective on the visit over in the pixels (and presumably pages) of the New York Times, while Joanna Bogle writes from England.

Nice, Deb

2010-09-20T12:21:00.003-04:00

(because I found this song parody of the Jason Mraz hit through her)

Bookworm has a clue bat out, also.

L'Ours (1988) - the cougar scene

2010-09-17T13:02:00.001-04:00

John Henry Newman must be dancing

2010-09-16T22:51:00.004-04:00

The Anchoress has a roundup of papal news from England. It's more of a carnival midway than anything else, that post of hers, but it includes a few gem-like paragraphs like this one:

John Paul was a grand, dramatic pipe organ of a pope; you could not ignore him. Benedict is a piano, deftly playing Mozart, and inviting you in, if you like. “Inviting” is the operative word.

Update: John Allen has more.

Bet she can hit a curveball, too

2010-09-15T22:15:00.000-04:00

Ann Coulter sends a pitch from Michael Gross of Vanity Fair downtown, proving that Gross is waaay out of his league.

When political analysis is a joy to read

2010-09-15T05:42:00.008-04:00

I know almost nothing about the Delaware Republican primary, which was just won by conservative "outsider" Christine O'Donnell. But I trust Doc Zero's instincts, and really enjoy his writing, which is invariably literate and rich with metaphor. Here's part of what Doc Zero was saying on Monday night, before the outcome of the contest between O'Donnell and "establishment" Republican candidate Mike Castle was known:

The outcome of tomorrow night’s primary is not the only reason so many swords are being drawn over Delaware. There are deeper issues reflected in both of these elaborately damaged candidates. Supporters of O’Donnell fear the prominence “reasonable, moderate” Republicans like Castle would gain through the media, after the GOP takes control of Congress. The ghost of Jim Jeffords rides through their backyards each Halloween, tossing its severed head between its hands. Cleansing the party of people like Castle isn’t just a mindless obsession with purity. It’s part of presenting a coherent message to voters, and offering a real contrast with the bankrupt lunacy of the Democrats. It will be tough for the party to deliver a rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech to voters while the media’s new favorite Republican capers in the background, waving his Strange New Respect award and calling them extremists.

Postscript about Christine O'Donnell: I've never heard or seen her speak, and so haven't had a chance to take even that cursory measure of O'Donnell, but apart from dispassionate observers like Brad O'Leary, progressive pundits seem to implode when writing about her.

What they don't seem to grasp is that every one of their attempts to paint her as extremist does so by holding some of her beliefs up for ridicule. She thinks the Republican Party has lost its way (gasp!). She thinks macro-evolution is a theory rather than a settled fact (egad!). Sixteen or so years ago, she called masturbation a sin (wow!).

Is that all the ammo that people who think O'Donnell is "nuts" have to go on? Sarah Palin has already dismissed the hysterics and the political insiders with the gracious put-down beloved by steel magnolias everywhere, so let me just add that calling O'Donnell nuts is like saying that the von Trapp family were the only Austrians opposed to Nazis in the 1930s. (alright, fellow movie buffs: let's not forget that Captain von Trapp got a theater full of people to sing "Edelweis" right along with him.)

Pundits who think O'Donnell is radioactively conservative probably never accused Maxine Waters or Barney Frank of being too liberal. But more importantly, they're woefully ignorant of mainstream Christian thought (see, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church). These pundits are likewise unfamiliar with -- or deeply mistrustful of -- evangelical Protestant thought. How sad.

If Christine O'Donnell is "nuts," she has a lot of company, and that's a blessing for our country, not a burden-- about which, more here.

A meeting of more import than many others

2010-09-14T16:10:00.003-04:00

Elizabeth Scalia muses on the upcoming meeting of Queen Elizabeth II with Pope Benedict XVI:

"History has a way of looping, of revisiting past business with an ironic touch, and as we anticipate the arrival of the Roman Pontiff to England’s green and pleasant pastures we can’t but wonder what these great figures of the twentieth century–the last still astride the world’s stage–will have to say to each other, to us, and to the amateur-hour leadership plaguing too-many shores, about unity, common-purpose and co-operation as the Queen of England, descendant of Henry VIII, welcomes the Bishop of Rome, successor of Peter. Their coming together warrants watching with good will, and perhaps a few whispered-up prayers."

Damian Thompson has similar thoughts.

Laced too tight?

2010-09-14T07:32:00.002-04:00

Basketball writer and former pro player Charley Rosen:

"I absolutely, positively hate the rash of serious knee injuries that continue to strike NBA players. Back when I was playing, everybody wore simple canvas shoes and knee injuries were extremely rare. Why is this so? To find an answer, I consulted several orthopedists of my acquaintance — and their opinion was unanimous: Blame the sneakers. By fitting so snugly and being able to be laced so tightly, the boots almost totally immobilize ankles. As a result, the docs say, many of the natural ankle and foot torques that occur in the normal unfolding of a game are passed up to the next joint in line — which happens to be the knee, one of the weakest, most vulnerable joints in the body. “If one spot in your basement is leaking,” one ortho-dude explains, “and you patch that spot, the leak will invariably show up someplace else.” Yes, back in the day, we suffered occasional sprained ankles. But these are entirely preferable to torn ACLs."

Nine years ago today

2010-09-11T10:35:00.006-04:00

Graphic found at the web site of the indispensable Michelle Malkin, who also has a collection of relevant links.

There are many Mulsims of good will, but I'm deeply skeptical of the trope that the president invoked again yesterday and today, i.e., that our fight is not with Islam, but with Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda was formed in the late Eighties, so that conceit does not explain Lepanto or Vienna or the defensive wars we call the crusades, still less Thomas Jefferson's dispatching of U.S. forces to bring the Barbary Pirates to heel in the nineteenth century, or the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran by Muslim "students." Our president and his advisors seem to have fallen again for politically-correct pabulum. Perhaps a Saudi diplomat could set them straight?

Remembering

2010-09-10T13:52:00.007-04:00

This image was in an email message forwarded to me recently by my Uncle Chris.

I'm reading the book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. The book has been on a shelf since my brother-in-law Jerry gave it to me for Christmas of 2005. I should have read it sooner. So far, it's excellent.

Words cannot really capture the import of tomorrow's anniversary satisfactorily, but Julie's take and Glenn's are both worth revisiting, as is the home page for Project 2,996.

Fuss...fuss...I think he likes to scream at us

2010-09-09T05:43:00.004-04:00

Inigo and Fezzik had "President Vizzini" pegged. Pete Wehner adds detail from yesterday's speechifying in Cleveland, Ohio:

Obama also has a habit of deriding not just the policies but also the motivations of his opponents. He almost never acknowledges the good faith of his critics; they are people to be mocked, ridiculed, derided. The only reason they oppose Obama is “politics pure and simple.” Republicans “prey on people’s fears and anxieties,” he said today. There is no room for genuine philosophical differences. It is as if Obama believes his ideas are so transparently brilliant and wise and beyond challenge that only the malicious and malevolent can oppose him.

It's not just "righties" who notice things like this any more, although some people tiptoe into disillusionment and others have already been through it, or never respected the president to begin with.

What she said

2010-09-08T20:59:00.004-04:00

Ann Coulter plays "ripped from the headlines":

But wait -- weren't we assured by Fire Island's head of national security, Andrew Sullivan, that if America elected a "brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy," the terrorists would look like a bunch of lunkheads and be unable to recruit?

It didn't work out that way. There have been more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by these allegedly calmed Muslims in Obama's first 18 months in office than in the six years under Bush after he invaded Iraq.

Also, as I recall, there was no Guantanamo, no Afghanistan war and no Iraq war on Sept. 10, 2001. And yet, somehow, Osama bin Ladin had no trouble recruiting back then. Can we retire the "it will help them recruit" argument yet?

The reason not to burn Qurans is that it's unkind -- not to jihadists, but to Muslims who mean us no harm. The same goes for building a mosque at ground zero -- in both cases, it's not a question of anyone's "rights," it's just a nasty thing to do.

George Neumayr has related thoughts.

Fighting the good fight

2010-09-08T11:44:00.000-04:00

Alveda King, under fire but standing tall

Alternatives to the prevailing spin

2010-09-07T21:03:00.004-04:00

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson made a few waves recently by opining that American voters are spoiled brats, presumably because even he knows that we alleged "brats" are two months from rebelling against our self-appointed babysitters.

In the few days since that Robinson column was published, his progressive fairy tale has been gaining currency among the usual suspects. One of tonight's MSN home page headlines, for example, summarizes an NBC news report as "Video: Voters' sour mood signals blues for Dems."

Doubtless an ombudsman somewhere would defend that headline as straight news, without even a soupcon of partisan bitterness, even though the thing reeks of pro-Democrat spin.

Sour mood?!

As a description of causality, that completely misses the mark. It would instead be true to blame "blues for Dems" on any of the following:

"White House hubris"
"Dismal economic news"
"Impatience with our continually hectoring president"
"Epic failure of economic stimulus and other partisan initiatives"
"Sixth Obama vacation this year"
"Overuse of the adjective 'unexpectedly' in relation to bad news"
"Continued scapegoating of Bush administration"
"State Department's $6M funding of mosque and minaret restoration proects overseas"
"Futile attempts to 'drain the swamp' of corrupt Congresscritters"
"Continued embrace of abortion as an allegedly Constitutional right"
"Aversion to town hall meetings with constituents"
"Feckless disregard for terrorism"
"Refusal to be 'stuck on stupid' "
"Quiet patriotism"
"Widespread disillusion with European-style socialism"

Tobacco Trail philosophizing

2010-09-06T07:23:00.003-04:00

Why settle for a Darwinian view of the world when you can have a Franciscan view instead?

Book review: Between a Heart and a Rock Place

2010-09-04T18:28:00.005-04:00

Between a Heart and a Rock Place by Pat Benatar

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I grew up listening to Pat Benatar. She's in fine voice (ha!) here, and because she's one of the few rockers who also has a plausible claim to being a role model, I'm glad she wrote a memoir. Benatar's love for her husband, her passion for music, and her feminist convictions all shine from these honest, well-written pages.

This memoir is better than Clarence Clemmons' "Big Man," because Benatar and her co-author are more disciplined than Clemmons and his co-author were. It's also worth noting that Benatar is a class act. Her sense of humor comes through even in photo captions, and she has kind words for Blondie and Bruce and Ani DeFranco, as well as lesser-known musicians with whom she has crossed paths.

What kept me from rating the memoir even higher was its unimaginative structure: once past interesting material about her early days, every album in the Benatar catalog is viewed through the prism of her 20-year fight with money-grubbing record label executives. Although she and her husband are on the side of the angels, I wanted to learn more about the records themselves.

Benatar tells good stories -- her remembrance of the Sept. 11, 2001 concert in Napa Valley is especially poignant. The thing is that she should have told more stories. Ditto for the rare arguments with her husband and chief collaborator Neil Giraldo; there's no need to invent conflict that isn't there, but it was fun to hear her exasperation when she pointedly asks him to "write something humans can actually sing." Unfortunately, vignettes like that come few and far between.

Perhaps Benatar has internalized the "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" ethos to the point where she always has her guard up in public. One can't fault her for that (Isn't it a tough life?), but it creates an emotional distance that undercuts an otherwise-absorbing memoir. A rock icon whom you'd actually want for a neighbor could have let her fans in on more than she did.

If you're a Benatar fan (as I am), you'll want to read this memoir, but if you're not, the most resonant thesis in these snapshots of life behind the microphone -- and the video camera in the early days of MTV-- is likely to be "many music industry execs are sleazeballs."

Why Glenn Beck gets partial credit

2010-09-03T16:17:00.004-04:00

I'm not a fan of his show, but talk show conservative Glenn Beck deserves kudos for asking questions about the president's religious faith that other people tiptoe around. Beck, to his credit, is not grinding the "he's a secret Muslim" axe (the president has a dog, after all), but he has said that Barack Obama is the first president steeped in an especially virulent form of so-called "liberation theology." Predictably, the White House spokesperson is not amused.

Spurred in part by Beck's comments, my friend Kyle-Anne has written the definitive account of what the president would have absorbed in 20 years at what was then Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, and it's hardly "mainstream" Christianity.

Beck cannot be trusted to opine with authority on the finer points of Christian doctrine or history, but he's on to something important here-- and Kyle-Anne has sorted it all out beautifully.

Great credo for a songwriter

2010-09-02T10:54:00.003-04:00

"Words are very important to me and finding the optimum way to say what I'm thinking is paramount. I don't sit with a thesaurus in hand; I want to find the word in the same way you might find an exquisite shell on the beach: by accident."

I also liked this, from p. 244 of the same memoir:

"There are lots of famously over-the-top ways for rock careers to end, but seeing as how I've never been one to follow in anyone's footsteps, I'm not about to start now. As the producer for VH1's show Behind the Music once told me-- mine is one of the only stories that doesn't involve at least one trip to rehab. I'm proud to say that like a lot of rock-and-roll truisms, that whole debate about burning out or fading away is bullshit-- the same crap music execs kick up to sell records and make you think that rock music only belongs to people under thirty. A true rocker is going to do whatever the hell she wants to, whether she's a school teacher, a CEO of a large corporation, or someone's mommy. Because that's what rock-and-roll is really about: following your passion with no apologies. Following that sound in your head that only you can hear."

-- Pat Benatar, Between a Rock and a Heart Place

A fistful of zingers

2010-09-01T08:59:00.001-04:00

"To be brutally honest: a lot of people are sincerely angry about what has been happening to their country. They were provoked. The 'transformative agenda' of this Presidency came looking for them, and there is no way to hide from it. There is no option to step away from the politics of an aggressive State, and live your life in peace. You may have considered yourself a moderate who prefers not to get involved in nasty political arguments, a desire I understand and respect… but if you think you should be allowed to buy your own health insurance, you’re a right-wing conservative now. In a few more years, you’ll be an 'extremist.' Your children will be handed the back-breaking invoice for the politics you preferred to stay clear of." -- Doc Zero

"Well, here's the thing, Chris [Matthews]: As a neighbor, I'm sure I'd like Obama. Assuming he weren't president and constantly tying up local traffic.

But he's not just a neighbor, not just a guy I can say 'Hey, he loves his kids; seems like an okay guy.'

He's the president and he's pushing an agenda on the country I find destructive and, yes, anti-American. And I did oppose a much-weaker form of this agenda when it was pushed by the white Bill Clinton." -- Ace from Ace of Spades

"Unlike ABC producers, Americans are not interested in an 'outsider's perspective' on American politics. They can get that from the White House." -- Daniel Greenfield

"Are Americans arrogant? Now and then. Not to put too fine a point on it, but compared to many of the members of the United Nations whose opinions this president and his sychophants believe that we are obliged to respect, this country has, quite frankly, a great deal to be arrogant about.

If Arizona was rounding up illegal aliens and herding them into concentration camps, that would be one thing. But the fact that the Arizona law referenced treats illegal aliens better than they are treated in Mexico, say, is something else again. That Barack Obama considers this law a human rights violation should tell anyone without blinders everything they need to know about the current president and his toadies." -- Christopher Johnson

"There’s a reason why nobody even thought to suggest that a Catholic or other Christian church should not be built near the Murtha building or that any religious structures near the [Oklahoma City bombing] site should be moved. I’m not suggesting that people in the media should be in the business of suggesting that all religions have the same problem with terrorism. But if they are going to do that, they simply need to get a better handle on history." -- Mollie Hemingway

Si, es verdad

2010-08-31T12:21:00.002-04:00

Cassandra has the numbers.

I chose the heading for this post because I can speak "Mexican," too. It's an "in on the joke" kind of thing -- as one southern writer whose name I forget said recently, it's like like shouting "Free Bird!" at a "Celtic Women" concert.

And this is bad how?

2010-08-30T12:12:00.006-04:00

A couple of "progressive" writers conned the New York Times into giving them op-ed space, it seems, and they used it to wish that gender feminists of their own ilk had someone like Sarah Palin to admire.

The key sentence in their argument is pure comedy gold:

"Democrats have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of women in politics."

Don Surber decided to shoot a few fish in that barrel. As DavidL pointed out on Surber's blog,
"Holmes and Traister fret that Mrs. Palin will steal [gender] feminism. Can’t be done; Gender feminism is dead."

The denizens of "Free Republic" also had some fun with the column. Best reactions there:

"It took two women to write an op-ed about one woman" and "In a nutshell, it all boils down to abortion for these leftist hacks. I bet dollars to doughnuts if Palin was pro-abortion, none of the crap that she endured for 2 years would have happened."

I think the point about gender feminism being dead (Ace says drab and unimaginative) has merit, and it's not unrelated to legacy media attempts to keep race-based politicking on life-support (as coverage of the "Restore Honor" rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend demonstrated again, with columnists like Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post claiming "authenticity" in their umbrage because they don't understand people like Alveda King.)

If I may generalize shamelessly, the progressive world view suffers from cognitive dissonance because it speaks often of "equality" but requires winners and losers to provide evidence for its claim that any society short of its own utopian vision must be a zero-sum game for the people in it.

Booklet Review: Be an Amazing Catechist

2010-08-27T15:07:00.007-04:00

In most Catholic parishes, volunteer catechists are the unsung heroes who strive to pass "the faith once delivered to the saints" on to future generations. I was a catechist for two years in a huge parish whose Director of Religious Education does a yeoman job of supplying volunteers with resource books, and Lisa Mladinich's Be An Amazing Catechist would have been a worthy addition to that pile, second only to the New Catholic Answer Bible in its usefulness.

What Mladinich has written is, in essence, a 30-page pep talk. But Our Sunday Visitor's Publishing Division picked it up because editors there recognized the same thing I saw in my review copy, to wit, Be An Amazing Catechist is a spiritually-grounded booklet packed with what Mladinich rightly calls "valuable tools for making your apostolate in catechesis more vibrant, more exciting, and more effective."

In my own brief career as a once and future catechist, my biggest challenge was a class of fifth-graders who had a mixture of auditory and kinesthetic learning styles (yes, Mladinich covers that, too). The girls were sweet and eager to please, but the boys' favorite activity was a weekly game of "stump the teacher," and they never asked easy questions like "What is the Trinity?" or "How come Catholic bible translations have more books in the Old Testament than Protestant bible translations do?"

The question they delighted in tying me in knots with was "Where did God come from?"

I always answered "God didn't come from anywhere, because He made everywhere," but then they'd say "But you said Jesus is God, and He's Mary's son, right?" So we'd have a conversation about the difference between God the Father and God the Son, but whenever I thought I was making progress, the Primary Questioner would say "That doesn't make any sense, Mr. O'Hannigan."

Had Mladinich's book and its 15 practical tips been in my catechism kit back then, I might have fared better than I did while losing that argument with a gleeful 10-year-old and his admiring sidekicks. Some of her suggestions seem blindingly obvious, but the cumulative effect of combining "no-brainers" like "Use the Bible" and "Don't give up on slack-jawed teeenagers" with more innovative stuff like "Try puppets" and "Don't neglect your own sacramental life" is a step-by-step program for doing a better, more joyful job as a catechist. If you're trying to spread the faith, or you're intimidated by the thought of trying to spread the faith, this booklet (only $2.95 for one copy or $17.95 for ten) can help.

P.S. There's more book talk over at Julie's place.

Waterlogged

2010-08-26T09:34:00.001-04:00

Cordoba House supporters meet the Pirates of the Caribbean, over at American Spectator Online.

That one was especially fun to write.

Judge got it right this time

2010-08-24T12:35:00.002-04:00

Gabriel Malor provides context, but (as he also says) the opinion issued yesterday by District Court Judge Royce Lamberth that grants a preliminary injunction against the president's attempt to spend tax dollars on embryonic stem cell research makes a compelling read.

What's immediately apparent is that Judge Lamberth's "findings of fact" are more factual than Judge Vaughn Walker's.

Summer Almanac 2010

2010-08-23T21:19:00.003-04:00

Favorite movie:
The Karate Kid (2010)

Runner-up: What About Bob? (1991)

Favorite book:

The Loser Letters, by Mary Eberstadt

Runner-up: Dog On It, by Spencer Quinn

Most unexpected development:

Neighborhood swim team has an undefeated season (5-0)

Passages:

Our black cat of 10+ years, Pikabu, now hunts in the Elysian Fields. Four weeks after her passing, we bumped the family pet count back up to 3 by adopting a shelter kitten whom we named "Guido."

Illogic in judicial robes

2010-08-23T17:27:00.003-04:00

Matthew J. Franck looks back at Perry v. Schwarzenegger:

"Judge Walker seems to have committed the fallacy of composition—taking something true of a part and concluding that it is also true of the whole of which it is a part. If it is true that “gender” no longer matters as it once did in the relation of husband and wife, he reasons, therefore it no longer matters whether the relation is one of husband and wife; it may as well be a relation of husband and husband or of wife and wife, since we now know that marriage is not, at its “core,” a “gendered institution.” But restated in this way, it is quite plain that the judge’s conclusion doesn’t follow from his premises. To say that the status of men and women in marriage is one of equal partners is not to say that men and women are the same, such that it does not matter what sex their partners are. The equalization of status is not the obliteration of difference, as much as Judge Walker would like to pretend it is."

And butterflies are freeee

2010-08-21T06:32:00.002-04:00

(Photo courtesy of my neighbor Kelly)

Bookmarking

2010-08-20T11:50:00.004-04:00

Serious:

Elizabeth Scalia on The Ground Zero of Our Madness.
Christopher Johnson on why it's stupid to blame people for not knowing what the president believes (see also Spengler, who agrees with Johnson).
Andrew McCarthy exposes "the tolerant pose"; Frank Gaffney bats cleanup.

Interesting:

Steve Skojec visits Mission San Xavier del Bac (white dove of the desert) near Tuscon, AZ.
Jennifer Fulwiler has snapshots of Mount Angel Abbey (St. Benedict, OR)
Lefty Christian organization Sojourners is funded by George Soros.
Mark Humphreys writes an appreciation of Christopher Hitchens.

Entertaining:

John Nolte applauds Sylvester Stallone's latest movie project (which has apparently blown Julia Roberts off the marquee -- and that's a fine thing to do, these days).
Why Elizabeth Esther hated "Twilight" and you should, too.
John C. Wright offers the "5 Definitive Criteria by Which Science Fiction Cinema is to be Judged."

(James Taranto is better at making lists like this one, but he has people who help compile his list items)

Ending Operation Iraqi Freedom

2010-08-20T09:38:00.002-04:00

In case you missed Cassandra's post yesterday, it's worth reading. This is just part of it:

"This is a day I never thought would come. And yet I hoped for it every day, especially when it seemed that the sun would never come out again. I'd like to write something beautiful, something to stir the soul. Something to mark out this day - to etch it in my memory forever. But I can't find the necessary distance. What I will do is something I have asked you all to do so many times over the past 7 years. Please take a moment tonight after you get home from work, perhaps in that quiet moment just before you drop off to sleep, and say a silent prayer for all those who made this day possible.

Their faces have passed in silent review before me all day long: the ones who lifted me up with their courage, who put grief and fear and weariness aside and did what needed to be done. Those who never made it home. And those who came home forever changed; some for the worse, some for the better. Most probably somewhere in the middle. And all those who still keep watch on distant shores."

Caroline Glick has a more dispassionate but equally sobering look at this milestone.

He woke up on the wrong side of the floor, perhaps

2010-08-19T12:59:00.001-04:00

But he sure writes entertainingly on those days.

Horeshoes and hand grenades

2010-08-18T17:14:00.012-04:00

Kathleen Parker has a muddled column up at the Washington Post arguing that the Cordoba House complex should get built precisely because many people don't want it built. She's a prizewinning columnist and a sometime teacher of writing, which is why I found the following juxtaposition in her essay so startling:

"The idea that one should never have one's feelings hurt -- and the violent means to which some will resort in the protection of their own self-regard -- has done harm rivaling evil. It isn't a stretch to say that the greatest threat to free speech is, in fact, "sensitivity."

This is why plans for the mosque near Ground Zero should be allowed to proceed, if that's what these Muslims want. We teach tolerance by being tolerant."

The first quoted paragraph makes sense, although I wonder why Parker hedged her bets with a nod to "harm rivaling evil." (She's not the kind of pedant likely to sniff about how people can be evil but ideas do not have the necessary will, so one is left to ask why she couldn't just have called the violence to which she was alluding plain old "evil." Was it not evil enough?)

Immediately following the caution about giving too much weight to sensitivity, her thesis "this is why..." paragraph tripped alarms in my head. Plans for a new mosque not merely near Ground Zero but in a building rendered unusable by parts of a crashing jetliner should proceed because Muslims have hair-trigger tempers? Surely Parker could not have meant something so stupid.

Having said, in effect, that there is no right to sashay through life unruffled by what other people do (long live free expression!), Parker treats that axiom as motivation enough for Manhattanites to be magnanimous about the new mosque and community center complex. It might be, if you can overlook the extortion implied in her cagey reference to "harm rivaling evil" from people who'd rather demand respect than earn it. But there is no hint from Parker that -- thanks to the indelible events of 11 September 2001 -- magnanimity would run more properly the other way, from Muslims offended by the alleged overreaction of mosque critics to the non-Muslims with whom Cordoba House backers keep saying they want to "dialog" or build bridges.

Parker ends her essay with a beautifully-executed somersault on the moral high ground: "When sensitivity becomes a cudgel against lawful expressions of speech or religious belief -- or disbelief -- we all lose," she writes.

Boy howdy! If there's a better way to cap a column written more in sorrow than in anger, I haven't seen it. But as the late Tim Russert used to say, let's go to the tape: Who in our day is most likely to use sensitivity as a cudgel against lawful freedoms? Whose ideology teaches that the world is divided into the "House of Submission" and the "House of War"? And what peace-loving imam goes out of his way to court controversy?

One problem with Parker's argument, in other words, is that it depends on faulty audience analysis. "We teach tolerance by being tolerant," she says, but she says it to the people who already have a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and a lively appreciation for the separation of powers, not to mention things like NASCAR and "national cupcake day."

Parker's subtext seems to be that the better angels of our nature are always the ones willing to take it on the chin. This actually plays to jihadist advantage in her teaching metaphor, because there are lots of Muslims who look at American decadence with disdain and say "Who are you to teach us tolerance? We don't need no education!"

Another problem with Parker's analysis is that, ironically, it makes too much of sensitivity. Law is not at issue because all involved concede that Cordoba House developers are within their legal rights to build a mosque in the 9/11 debris field, but it's not necessarily "sensitivity" that compels Good Samaritans to come to aid of people being mugged, for example: it's a sense of duty founded on respect for personhood, which itself is part of the cultural patrimony we all received from Jewish and Christian forebears.

Perhaps the dead who inadvertently consecrated even an old Burlington Coat Factory far above our poor power to add or detract deserve such respect as we can still pay by standing up to the people who enabled their religiously-motivated killers -- and yes, although it is careless to generalize, even some "moderate" Muslims did that enabling, not least by trashing American-style pluralism or couching objections to terrorism in careful language that spoke of its "complexity" and made exceptions for members of the Militant-of-the-Month club (Tim McVeigh? Terrorist! Hamas? Not so much-- they've paid their dues, you see).

Memo to Kathleen Parker: Nowhere is it written that "Wilsonian Democrats" are inherently better than "Jacksonian Democrats." Or, to make the same point in more familiar terms, Charlie Brown never stopped trusting Lucy to hold the football for him, but that glutton-for-punishment approach to kickoffs didn't make him better than the philosophical Linus or the acerbic Schroeder. If we're going to face potential Islamists like Peanuts characters, we'd best emulate Snoopy-- that beagle of the boxing glove on the nose, the World War One pilot's wardrobe, the tennis grimace, the early vulture fantasy, the outfielder speed, and the gumption enough to go tearing around with Linus's security blanket whenever its owner got complacent.

UPDATE: See also this from Tom Maguire.

Making satire work

2010-08-16T08:53:00.000-04:00

From an old review of William Goldman's The Princess Bride by Orrin Judd:

"Goldman isn't so much trying to alert the reader (viewer) that the story is fiction, instead he's trying to convince us that it's real, or at least that there is an S. Morgenstern and an original version. He wants us to appreciate, even to love, Morgenstern and his Princess Bride in the same way that he did as a boy, at least fictionally or at least books like this one that the real William Goldman recalls from his real childhood. And this is the little-understood secret to any effective parody/satire/what-have-you: before the irreverence begins, you have to approach the source material with reverence. It's just not very funny to make fun of something that no one takes seriously in the first place (which perhaps explains why comedy is so completely the province of conservatism and why liberals have no sense of humor--taking everything seriously but reverencing nothing, they find no amusement in irreverence). Princess Bride is so funny precisely because Goldman has been so careful to follow the conventions of the fairy tale and because he's obviously thought them through so thoroughly. Thus, for all the fun he has at the expense of the genre, in the end the good guys win, the bad guys are dead or vanquished, true love has been vindicated, and we all fondly recall having our father or grandfather read to us."

Nicolas Poussin paints The Assumption

2010-08-15T14:05:00.005-04:00

(Poussin lived between 1594 and 1665, and if you're so inclined, you can safely take this painting as evidence of what John Henry Newman would later call "the development of doctrine," especially if you remember that the Assumption was not formally defined as a matter of faith until 1950. Catholic Answers has more about the doctrine of the Assumption, both in an online tract and in the testimony of one T.L. Frazier).

Here's part of Frazier's essay:

"To be assumed into heaven is to enter heaven both body and soul, meaning complete personhood and not the soul alone, by a direct act of God. Thus "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him away" (Gen. 5:24; cf. Heb. 11:5). Elijah was assumed into heaven, though in a more grandiose style (2 Kings 2:11). Catholics believe that Mary entered heaven in this same manner, though they generally believe that she died before being assumed. Mary is seen not as a petty goddess, but as a redeemed Christian granted a special privilege through the love of Christ.

On the other hand, to ascend into heaven is to enter heaven by one's own power, and "no one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven--the Son of Man" (John 3:13). Only Jesus, being God, could ever ascend into heaven. Once I understood this distinction, I came a long way toward understanding the Catholic belief in the Assumption.

I began to see it was very similar to the Evangelical doctrine of the rapture where, at the end of time, Christ snatches living Christians off the face of the Earth, glorifies them, and transports them both body and soul into heaven. The same idea of being physically snatched away into heaven before the general resurrection lies behind both the Assumption and the rapture. There seemed little reason to say that the rapture was scripturally feasible while maintaining the Assumption wasn't."

(The painting reproduced here came from Olga's Gallery)

Love to hear that robin going tweet, tweet, tweet

2010-08-15T08:00:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin:

Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3000 people?

Please tell us your position.

We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade.

If those who wish to build this Ground Zero mosque are sincerely interested in encouraging positive "cross-cultural engagement" and dialogue to show a moderate and tolerant face of Islam, then why haven't they recognized that the decision to build a mosque at this particular location is doing just the opposite?

Over in the chorus, Bill Kristol looks at the language that President Obama used before backpedaling unsuccessfully (if this were just a local controversy --!!-- in the Big Apple, it would have been eaiser to vote "present").

Kristol is often wrong, but when he says that we as Americans aren't "traumatized," I think he's making a small but important point. John Hinderaker would probably agree; he's already looked at the mind behind the White House "Iftar dinner" speech and found it shallow.

What makes the president's fawning attempt to laud Islam for its alleged contributions to the American founding so laughable is, among other things, the dominant strain in Muslim theology, which -- in marked contrast to the Christian thinking with which the Founding Fathers were familiar-- ignores secondary causality and distrusts reason. I'd like to see Josh Barro address those points, but as the reader comments on his heartfelt defense of the proposed mosque point out, he dodges the big questions.

Meanwhile, while Ross Douthat of the New York Times is late to the debate, his thoughts are interesting.

Refresher course on church history

2010-08-12T08:19:00.001-04:00

The painting at left is "Peter Preaching with Mark," by Fra Angelico, which I found at Olga's Gallery after following a tip from Julie at Happy Catholic.

The reprint (repost?) of an old article by George Sim Johnston made me think of it.

Answering friends who assert against all evidence that the primitive Christian church was not Roman Catholic, Johnston points to the historical record:

"In 95 A.D., a three-man embassy with a letter from the fourth bishop of Rome arrived at Corinth, where there were dissensions in the local church. In that letter, Pope St. Clement speaks with authority, giving instructions with a tone of voice that expects to be obeyed. The interesting point is that the apostle John was still living in Ephesus, which is closer than Rome to Corinth. But it was the bishop of Rome (at the time, a smaller diocese) who dealt with the problem.

Then there are the seven letters of St. Ignatius, who was martyred in Rome in 106. Ignatius was the third bishop of Antioch (Peter had been the first) and a disciple of the apostle John. Because these letters, written en route to Rome, are so Catholic, their authenticity was long contested by Protestant scholars, but now they are almost universally accepted as genuine.

Ignatius was the first to call the Church "Catholic." He writes to the Ephesians that "the bishops who have been appointed throughout the world are the will of Jesus Christ…. Let us be careful, then, if we would be submissive to God, not to oppose the bishop." And his letter to the church at Smyrna attacks those who deny the Real Presence: "They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of Our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins…."

It is noteworthy that in addressing the Church at Rome -- a less ancient see than Antioch -- Ignatius's tone changes entirely. He is deferential, praiseful: "You have envied no one; but others you have taught."

The obvious (or so it seems to me) question for any church that claims to be Christian -- especially the original Christian church -- is "what have you taught?" (or, from another perspective, Whom?). When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, he famously summarized the message as "Christ and Him crucified."

Elizabeth Scalia implies something very similar in her recent suggestion that the core of the gospel is that in Jesus, God gives us strength to "walk through fire instead of around it."

That's something I want to remember more often myself.

No dog in this fight

2010-08-11T09:18:00.003-04:00

But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes a lot more sense than the Cambridge City Council person who wants to deny economic reality. Lisa Fabrizio has related thoughts.

Book Review: Frames

2010-08-10T15:00:00.000-04:00

Frames by Loren D. Estleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Loren Estleman is that rare novelist who is worth reading in as many different genres as he chooses to write (at least three by my count), and this breezy little novel about where modern Hollywood meets its own past was a fun read-- think screwball comedy for the digital age.

I especially appreciate that so many of the characters in the book are drawn sympathetically. "Fanta" and "Kyle" and "Harriet" and "Sergeant Clifford" and "Kalishnikov" and Valentino himself are people whom I'd actually like if they were real. Even "Anklemire," the former Marketing Weasel now slumming in UCLA's Information Services department, brims with sleazy good humor.

So why three stars rather than four or five? In two words, "shop talk." What got to me after awhile was Estleman's near-manic insistence on packing the story with film trivia. I get that the lead character and his friendly supervisor are both film geeks, but I also get the impression that Estleman was trying too hard.

This is nominally a murder mystery, but you can't read three consecutive paragraphs in the book without encountering a cinematic reference of some kind. Sometimes the allusions are unobtrusive, but more often than not, they read like what you'd get if everybody in a room were trying to outsmart each other. These characters have a patter. If I may traffic in movie references for the sake of a point myself, "Frames" is like a mashup between "The Pink Panther" and "The Philadelphia Story" -- each a good film in its own right, but bound to lead to confuzzlement when combined, which is why I "refudiate" Estleman's intent while admiring his craftsmanship.

Although Valentino has title billing, the characters that kept me reading were the beautiful law student with the preposterous name ("Fanta") and the emerald-eyed LAPD sergeant whose best scene is an interrogation. Without those two women, the story would drop from "likable" to merely okay. Still, you could do worse in picking a summer read.

Impertinent questions

2010-08-09T07:02:00.008-04:00

I ask a few "impolite" questions while writing today about "the mosque, the masks, and the mayor."

Current events, craven politicians, and song lyrics! Sometimes I just can't help myself.

UPDATE: This from Wafa Sultan is related, as is this news of a Muslim rival to Greenwich Mean Time. Also, and not surprisingly, Nice Deb is on the case, and in for the long haul.

Just to put the cherry on the sundae, Douglas Murray has the quote of the week:

"The U.S. authorities are making the same mistakes, and in exactly the same order, as those that the British government has made. Violent Islam is the problem and therefore some other form of yet to be decided upon peaceful Islam is the solution. Either way, win for Islam. Whatever the question, the answer is “Islam.”

In my experience this is a terrible mistake. The answer to violent Islam is not Islam. And contra every liberal pundit practicing their religion of peace and acceptance speech, building a mosque by ground zero is not a counter-argument to violent Islam. It is an apology, and an offering, to it."

Two sides of the coin

2010-08-08T09:40:00.003-04:00

There is media used poorly (anybody paying for lies about Sarah Palin, this means you), and there is media used well, as it is in this Jeep commercial:

Designated hitter

2010-08-04T20:56:00.002-04:00

Ann Coulter explains Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence as only she can.

She says Hitchens can write

2010-08-04T16:30:00.001-04:00

But I think the Anchoress writes as well or better, at least in this instance.

Hitchens' evocative, unsentimental treatment of the difference between the "land of the sick" and the "land of the well" certainly makes a compelling read.

His command of metaphor remains deft and his choice of adversaries remains daft (Henry Kissinger might be a suitable sparring partner, but Joseph Ratzinger? Please. Is that the kind of hubris that one has to forgive in a guy who picked a fight with Mother Teresa? I'm with Mary Eberstadt in proclaiming that the little lady in the blue-and-white sari won that match handily).

Nevertheless, cheers to Hitchens for noticing that an "astonishing" number of people are praying for him.

One symptom of a bigger problem

2010-08-04T09:20:00.012-04:00

Mark Harris writing in Entertainment Weekly last May about why "American Idol" is "off its game" now:

"The real problem with Idol's class of '10 is that they have absolutely nothing to say. And I don't mean when they talk. I mean when they sing."

[...]

"I don't really blame the contestants. Most 16- to 24-year-olds think everything is about them...But when did it become a gospel truth that the highest value of art is as a form of self-expression? Maybe the fault lies with a hundred thousand middle school teachers who, with the best intentions, try every day to make writing or painting or singing or acting or dancing less intimidating by telling kids that it's all about letting whatever's inside you come out to play. And that can be great advice, but when you find yourself under a spotlight as glaring as American Idol, the line between self-expression and self-absorption is very thin, and the road to pathological narcissism isn't long and winding but perilously short."

This rant about Inception from movie critic James Bowman covers related ground.

Because "dog" spelled backwards...

2010-08-03T11:46:00.005-04:00

Five favorite devotions? I wish I had five favorite devotions. I'd be a better person.

I'm more likely to do these than others, though:

Pray the rosary
Read from the "pocket psalter" in occasional observance of the Liturgy of the Hours
Ask my guardian angel for help with lector assignments
Do "Lectio Divina"
Make the sign of the cross (Although I have been too furtive about that in communal settings where Baptist and Presbyterian friends open meetings with a prayer simply by bowing their heads)

Joseph Susanka has more.

Saved from the memory hole

2010-07-30T17:25:00.007-04:00

The Congresscritters in the District of Columbia are professional spinmeisters, every last one of 'em, but here's something you don't hear every day in "debates" about economic policy such as those resurfacing now that Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire. I pulled it from comments by a reader named Jim at the Ace of Spades blog. Jim's insight was flagged by Laura W., and no wonder:

"I think NOW would be a good time to remind people that the ONLY reason those tax cuts are sunsetting is because Democrats filibustered making them permanent in the first place.

Republicans had to pass the tax cuts through reconciliation as a budget measure which means that they had to sunset per the rules of reconciliation because Democrats refused to even make them IN THE FIRST PLACE.

So yeah, let's TALK about the sunsetting of those tax cuts. I, for one, WELCOME the discussion."

While we're pondering economic issues, let's not forget some lessons that pundit Chris Matthews refused to learn or the bogus job numbers that the White House insists on attributing to stimulus spending. It might also help to remember the moral distinction between simple negligence and outright sabotage.

UPDATE: Nice Deb has a roundup of news about the new Chevy Volt, which fits here because it doesn't make a lot of economic sense.

Book Review: The Loser Letters

2010-07-29T17:14:00.003-04:00

I should have known that Mary Eberstadt was capable of the high-wire act that she performs throughout The Loser Letters. Other essayists sometimes defend traditional views enthusiastically (here, for example, is Robert Stacy McCain writing well about monogamy and survival), but Eberstadt has five-octave range. Could a woman who dialed up “scholarly simmer” for the thankless task of alerting the rest of us to “The Weight of Smut” also be convincing in the persona of a recent college graduate?

The answer is yes. Not just yes, mind you, but “Hell, yes!”

In ten slyly satirical letters, “A former Christian” (25, single, educated, perky) takes advantage of free time in what she thinks is a drug rehabilitation program to write letters to prominent atheists. The book-length result is what you might get if you crossed C.S. Lewis with P.J. O’Rourke (the old “Ghostbusters” advice about not crossing separate energy streams comes to mind, but Eberstadt wears her influences lightly, else there would have been no coherent way to describe God as a capital-L “loser”).

At 140 pages and change, The Loser Letters is a supplemental kind of book in the sense that it is not The Handbook of Christian Apologetics, or the locomotive with which Edward Feser flattened postmodern atheism in The Last Superstition. Unlike the authors of those comprehensive and serious books, Eberstadt pays special attention to atheism’s disdain for family life, and parts of three letters on that subject are particularly affecting.

Ignatius Press was smart to buy ads for this “comic tale of life, death, and atheism” on some high-profile web sites (I received a review copy of the book from The Catholic Company after having seen a blurb for it at First Things).

Mindful of the saying that “against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,” Eberstadt serves up a wickedly funny yet thought-provoking little opus, even managing to work a simple plot into her “friendly advice” for atheists.

Importantly, Eberstadt is at home in formal English, but also understands the preferred lingo of atheism and the patois of “the young and the restless.” This being a satire, the atheists in it are “Brights” (not a term that she made up), and the believers, especially Christians, are “Dulls.” Labeling like that could have been fey or clumsy in less skillful hands, but she makes it work.

The Loser Letters is a shining example of what Sarah Palin might call “refudiation,” and like that fortuitous coinage, it has more wit than you might at first suspect. Don’t let the (mostly) cheery tone or the careful use of abbreviations like “BFF” fool you. By the time Eberstadt in an afterword thanks friends of her children for giving her a window into teenage “cadences, energy, drama, and Facebook pages,” any sentient reader will have long since realized that she is smart and observant.

The paperback edition of The Loser Letters retails for about ten dollars. On the “three-dollar cappuccino” scale of value, it would be a bargain at twice the price.

The bumper sticker vexes

2010-07-27T16:51:00.003-04:00

If you've driven in California, you've probably seen it, but I've also seen it even here in North Carolina. Kurt Schlicter explains the problem with "Coexist" in an essay pithily titled "You first."

Sweet spot

2010-07-27T09:21:00.002-04:00

I just like her (update: meaning actress Sandra Bullock, who eventually asked to be edited out of the original ad until questions about its funding were resolved to her satisfaction) that's why. Fortunately, things are looking up.

A grand homeschooling carnival

2010-07-27T09:15:00.000-04:00

We don't talk much about about homeschooling here on the Paragraph Farm, but we're firm fans of the concept, and the Common Room is hosting a nifty carnival about the history of homeschooling in America.

Judith in Manga: A book review

2010-07-26T06:38:00.003-04:00

The Atiqtuq publishing company sent us a review copy of Judith: Captive to Conqueror (vol. 1), with art by Sean Lam and story by Gabrielle Gniewek. I asked Thomas what he thought of this manga-style successor to what Atiqtuq had started doing with the life of Saint Paul:

"Did you like the book?"

"It was great! More violent than the Paul book."

"Is there anything in it that you didn't like or would have changed if you could?"

"Well, in some scenes, there were labels that didn't need to be there. Like whan someone is drawing a sword out of a scabbard and it said 'grab' next to the hand. Duh! What else would that be?"

"Did you learn anything from the book?"

"Yes. I guess so."

"I was impressed with the way the writer worked character development into the bible story, myself. I thought Achior, leader of the Ammonites, looked like a teenager, but at one point in the story, the other characters say he has a baby face, so Sean Lam did a good job of covering his bases."

"The drawings are cool."

Summer fun

2010-07-24T22:53:00.003-04:00

Durham (NC) Bulls, 5; Syracuse (NY) Sky Chiefs, 1 -- and of course we had slushies and ballpark nachos!

Behind the Second Amendment, and more

2010-07-23T13:02:00.007-04:00

Marcus Cole: "I owe a special debt to four black men, and one gun." Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for the find.

Cole's trip down memory lane makes a nice chaser for this thought-provoking essay by Senator James Webb (D-VA) about the dangers of thinking in terms of monolithic "white" culture, the peril of misreading Southern history, and the damage done by affirmative action that differs significantly from Lyndon Johnson's initial policies in that regard. I don't trust Webb, but it's a good piece.

I also like this long essay by Angelo M. Codevilla, which made waves and is chock-full of insights like "Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower." Codevilla also notes that "a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters."

Apart from the essays cited here, James Taranto has the week's most entertaining roundup of news and commentary.

Red Rabbit: A review in haiku

2010-07-21T11:54:00.000-04:00

Three hundred pages to explain the rabbit
Another hundred to see rabbit run
But this is not Updike

Back to the Cold War
with bows for Walesa and Wojtyla
Tom Clancy had fun

Would he-man not know
what symphony conductors do?
That sounds Neanderthal

The Jack Ryan background
Mentioned many times
Ex-marine, they keep saying

Honey-blonde hair
Mary Pat in Moscow
a peacock among crows

Stupid Commie overreach
Strong on detail
Andropov was dangerous

Forecasting on faith

2010-07-20T11:50:00.003-04:00

Big thanks to the Anchoress for inviting me to contribute a few thoughts to that "Future of Catholicism" symposium being hosted over at Patheos. I'm optimistic about the future, and tried to say why in 250 well-chosen words (nice technical exercise, that).

Among the marquee names in the original lineup of contributors, I particularly liked what Hugh Hewitt had to say, although he took longer to say it.

UPDATE: See also "To Infinity and Beyond," which, among other things, puts church history in perspective.

Some perspective on Hawaiian history

2010-07-16T09:25:00.000-04:00

"The story of Hawai'i is not a story of good versus evil. Nearly everyone shares in the blame for what happened to the Hawaiian people and their culture. Westerners certainly saw Hawai'i as a potential bonanza and easily exploitable. They knew what buttons to push and pushed them well. But the Hawaiians, for their part, were in a state of flux. The mere presence of westerners seemed to bring to the surface a discontent, or at least a weakness, within their system that had been lingering just below the surface.

In fact, in 1794, a mere 16 years after first encountering westerners and under no military duress from the West, Kamehameha the Great volunteered to cede his island over to Great Britain. He was hungry for western arms so he could defeat his neighbor-island opponents. He even declared that as of that day, they were no longer people of Hawai'i but rather people of Britain. (Britain declined the offer.) And in 1819, immediately after the death of the strong-willed Kamehameha, the Hawaiians, of their own accord, overthrew their own religion, dumped the kapu system and denied their gods. This was before any western missionaries ever came to Hawai'i."

-- Andrew Doughty, Oahu Revealed (3rd edition)

Family time

2010-06-25T12:26:00.006-04:00

It's swim team season in the South. Cicadas buzz in the bushes, fireflies twinkle erratically on the night shift, and the snack bar at some neighborhood pools sells Cheerwine for a dollar a can. Swim meet volunteers say things like "You have to stand over there, honeybunch," or "Ain't she just a little rocket in the pool?"

One neighbor training a puppy has discovered she can wait the dog out by making it sit and threatening to keep it in that position "until the Rapture."

Another neighbor sold his china cabinet to a man via Craigslist, and was gratified to see that the man showed up at his house with two strapping "young 'uns" in tow to help move the thing.

So summer beckons. I'm taking a blog break. Y'all come back now, ya hear? I'll post new material come mid-July. Stay safe out there. Thank you for reading!

Doctor's orders

2010-06-25T07:05:00.005-04:00

Doc Zero's orders, anyhow (internal links are mine, but the words are Doc's):

"Federal and state governments are riddled with people like Barack Obama, producing a system completely focused on feeding itself, and too bloated to take effective action. It is almost completely insulated from consequence. Its wits are dulled by its perceived lack of budgetary or behavioral restrictions. Its deconstruction will require the conviction and charisma of Sarah Palin, the brilliance of Bobby Jindal, the courage of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and the enthusiasm of the primary winners from Tuesday night. The American people should no longer settle for representatives whose resumes contain nothing but political accomplishments – as if those are somehow worth a damn compared to private-sector experience. It took a lot of accomplished politicians to engineer a government with over a hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities."

Theology (still) matters

2010-06-25T06:59:00.001-04:00

Edward Feser on the Judeo-Christian outlook as the foundation for our notions of human rights.

Wise words about the sacrament of confession

2010-06-23T06:40:00.002-04:00

Some non-theological reasons why having another human being there to hear your sins makes a big difference, from Eve Tushnet.

Sailor man (Paul, not Popeye)

2010-06-22T11:40:00.003-04:00

Charlie with the nautical metaphor and some back story on word choice in the Acts of the Apostles. His post also reverberates with the original words to "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" (Ebenezer makes a cameo appearance-- I hadn't heard that verse before).

Here's a similar verse from the "dance remix" of "Come Thou Font" that I have heard and do like, because it's lyrically much better than the metaphorically confused or repetitive stuff that bedevils our hymnody at the "young adult" Mass on most Sundays:

O, to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee!
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it;
Prone to leave the God I love:
Here's my heart, O take and seal it;
Seal it for thy courts above.

UPDATE: The Anchoress is also thinking in nautical terms, with help from saints John Fisher, Thomas More, and Paulinus of Nola, who share this feast day. Her post mentions a famous letter that More wrote from prison to his daughter Meg but does not link to that letter, so I'll do the linking honors here. It's a beautiful (and in its excerpted part, short) letter that any Christian could profit from reading.