“Imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one God, saluting one American flag.” —Donald J. Trump So on Monday morning, I posted a video on my YouTube channel predicting a Trump win on Tuesday, November 8. I saw the victory coming from three vantage points, two of [...]
It’s always refreshing to read essays these days that are intelligent and genuinely engaging, principally because such essays are becoming fewer and farther between. One such, which I enjoyed reading even though I ultimately disagreed with it, was Paul Berman’s “Why the French Ban the Veil: The Secular Republic Debates How Best to Contain and Suppress [...]
I have now sat through my mandatory Title IX training, which is to say I spent ninety minutes in an Orwellian swamp of doublespeak, barely hidden bigotry, and will to power, decreed by the Obama Administration and enthusiastically carried out by a combination of mid-level administrators and high-paid legal “experts.” For those of you blissfully unaware [...]
Every now and again a left wing academic (pardon the redundancy) states his prejudices so baldly and unselfconsciously that he provides a highly useful insight into the mind of his class. Such is the case with an essay published in the Raleigh News & Observer by William Snider, a professor in the department of neurology [...]
René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, by Scott Cowdell (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013) The work of René Girard would not seem all that relevant to Thomists. A French literary critic turned anthropologist and amateur scripture exegete, one who identifies ritual murder as the basis of all religion, culture, myth, [...]
In The Great Heresies (1938), Hilaire Belloc wrote of the lifting of the Muslim siege of Vienna “on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history—September 11, 1683.” The date of September 11, if not the year of 1683, would become branded on everyone’s memory after the 9/11 attacks. One wonders, indeed, [...]
During the infamous Brixton Riots of 1981—clashes between the police and the African-Caribbean community in south London—I was driving back to my parents’ house at night and got lost in the fog. I found myself faced with a dramatic scene: the fog illuminated by fire, as the rioters overturned cars and set them alight. I [...]
In a recent post, English priest-blogger Fr. Ed Tomlinson likened the threat of secular modernism in the church to Tolkien’s Balrog. You may remember the great demon pursues the members of the Fellowship as they are fleeing the mines of Moria. The final confrontation is at the Bridge of Khazad-dum. Gandalf defies the Balrog crying, [...]
“Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.” – Neil Postman By now few are unaware of the campus unrest sweeping across the country’s institutions of higher learning. The chancellor and president of the University of Missouri have resigned amid [...]
What is to become of Christianity in the West? When the faithful lose their voice, who will care what they believe? Who will join them, or even know that they exist? This is how religions die. Renaissance political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli castigated Christianity for making its adherents weak. Looking to the next world, he charged, [...]
For B: Bone of my bone July 26, 1985 – May 9, 2015 “As of all foods, bread is the most essential, so the thought of death is the most necessary of all works. The remembrance of death amongst those in the midst of society gives birth to distress and meditation, and even more, to [...]
Secularisation is far more of a challenge to Christianity in England than is Islam, and yet by seemingly strengthening the case for secularism, the issue of Islam has moved centre-stage. I believe that England, or more widely the United Kingdom, has to decide between three possible responses to the growth of the Islamic community not [...]
In a recent article in The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv depicts how Belgium has “embraced euthanasia as a humanist issue.” Not only the terminally ill, or even those in intense pain, but also those suffering from depression may receive “The Death Treatment” and be treated to a “dignified death” through a fatal chemical cocktail. How [...]
It is almost fifty years since the “Spanish Inquisition” sketch by Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first aired on British television. Today its catchphrase, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” has an enshrined place in popular culture. It is, however, ironic that the well-known catchphrase contradicts the grim reality of life in our increasingly secular culture. [...]