Leo XIII favored snuff. Before he became pope, he had served for a time as papal nuncio in Brussels and enjoyed the conversation and company of the cultured and easy-going aristocrats there. One evening at dinner, a certain Count, who was a Freethinker, thought he would have a little fun at the nuncio’s expense, and he handed him a snuff box to examine, which had on its cover a miniature painting of a beautiful nude Venus. ‘The men of the party... Read more
“It was moving to see all the different forms of piety focused, concentrated in an area so defined,” Marilynne Robinson says, speaking of Israel. In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, she continues: I suppose a time when the religious significance of the place was not yet felt can be imagined, before Abraham, perhaps. But the extent to which it has supplied humankind with a conceptual universe of value and meaning and holiness is an astonishment. That it is somehow profoundly... Read more
The sign of peace is to kept in the same place at Mass, says the Congregation for Divine Worship, reports Deacon Greg Chandra, writing about it here, and probably many others. Reporting on this decision, the Italian journalist Sandro Magister mentions Benedict’s remark in his apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis: During the synod of bishops was the appropriateness of greater restraint in this gesture, which can be exaggerated and cause a certain distraction in the assembly just before communion. It is important to remember that... Read more
Starting with Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, the Intercollegiate Review presents the Fifty Worst Books of the Twentieth Century. The others in their bottom five are Beatrice & Sidney Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (as Muggeridge noted, in a latter edition they dropped the question mark), Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Reading the list is kind of a blast from the past, given that almost all these books were among the Most... Read more
A useful lesson for writers, scholars, teachers, and anyone else doing some kind of creative work, especially for the clever person, from a famous teacher. It was his favorite subject and he knew it perfectly, but they had sent him to the exam for not having finished an assignment, so he knew passing it would not be easy. He knew they weren’t going to make it easy for him. It was a premonition that proved correct the moment he approached the... Read more
For writers, two cartoons, not hugely funny but amusing: Creative Thinking and The Writer’s Retreat. Read more
How often do you get bitten tells the story of a young man who (as a friend put it) seems to have found his vocation in a way most people never do, and it’s a vocation he can be proud of. Sean Casey, who founded and runs . . . wait for it . . . Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Windsor Terrace, a old-fashioned family neighborhood in Brooklyn, rescues nearly anything, from dogs and cats to guinea pigs to... Read more
One kind of would-be convert, as I wrote in Long’s Commitments a couple of days ago, is drawn to aspects of the Catholic Church but not exactly to Catholicism. Over time he may develop an interest in Catholicism and move closer and then into the Church, or he may settle into a kind of respectful or affectionate fellow-travelling, or he may just lose interest, or he may repudiate the whole thing in reaction, though this last seems to happen rarely.... Read more
Something many readers may have seen, but for those like me who hadn’t, here is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Objectivism, the first in the Harry Potter series as retold by Ayn Rand. Unfortunately the website doesn’t seem to provide a page with a link to all seven. Here is the scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in which Harry sees the parents he never knew, retold: Harry and Ron stood before the Mirror of Erised. “My God,” Ron said. “Harry,... Read more
“[H]is marriage ended, and he began to feel that the church was more his former wife’s than his,” writes Lillian Daniel in the Christian Century of a man who’d told her “”I’m spiritual but not religious” and insisted on explaining why he didn’t go to church. (The article appeared in 2011 but I just stumbled across it.) He told Daniel, a Congregational minister, that “I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the cicadas. I am one with the... Read more
David Mills
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