When they find out she’s a minister, Lillian Daniel complains, people on airplanes keep telling her they’re spiritual but not religious. “Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo. Next thing you know, he’s telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach.” She keeps piling... Read more
We’ve had six or seven rabbits, including dwarves and the enormous Belgian bruisers people eat, and I like them, but it would never occur to me to object to anyone eating them. Whole Foods is now selling rabbit and some people are very upset, and upset with that weird and disturbing intensity animal rights activists so often show. Rabbit, the article explains, is, if you’re going to eat meat . . . one of the better options out there, nutritionally and environmentally speaking.... Read more
The main relationship, the relationship you are supposed to root for, moves from dysfunction to rape, which is apparently okay, in fact the thing to do, in Donna Gabaldon’s Outlander series. I’ve never heard of her but apparently her books are a very big thing. Katrina Fernandez (always, always worth reading) is vexed at this “soap opera with kilts.” I don’t have patience for soap operas and detest relationship drama type stories because it glamorizes dysfunction. Fighting all the time. Sexual... Read more
The lead (or lede) of a story from the Daily Telegraph: “Italian police have arrested a fugitive mafia boss whose reputation for cross-dressing and writing eloquent notes to his son earned him the nickname ‘the poet boss’.” Note the logic of that sentence: “whose reputation for cross-dressing . . . earned him the nickname ‘the poet boss’.” Read more
What happened when “fiery street activist” Shirley Chisholm became a congressman and asked the Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson for advice: Conservative racist Southern congressmen tried to thwart the newly elected Chisholm by assigning her to the Agriculture Committee. What could this urban radical who wanted to work on education and labor issues possibly do on the Agriculture Committee? She was dejected and frustrated. She was also the representative from the Rebbe’s area of Brooklyn, and she received a call that... Read more
A sympathetic treatment from the weekly newspaper New York Observer on the news that The Last Daily Latin Mass in New York Is Facing Extinction. The archdiocese of New York plans to close Holy Innocents, a parish in a business district a few blocks from Times Square, well known not only for its Latin Masses but for its pro-life work, and as place for people working nearby and visitors to the city to pray. The reasons cited for the potential closure were that... Read more
The question of ordaining women that has so exercised some Catholics and the mainline Protestant churches since the late sixties seems settled, with a firm if not infallible no for the Catholic Church and a firm and un-retractable yes for the mainline Protestant bodies. Even the conservative groups that split off and started new churches over the issue of homosexuality ordain women. Some of us would think their grounds for endorsing one innovation and so bitterly rejecting another fairly dubious... Read more
On the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, a holy day of obligation for Catholics, because it’s a really big deal, it might be useful to post a few links explaining the dogma and the feast, since it is one of those matters on which Christians find themselves divided. And quite rightly, because it expresses deep differences in the way we understand the Church, read Scripture, see our place in the Communion of Saints, and the like. This being the... Read more
When we lived in Manhattan, our dog, rescued from the pound and we think a Border Collie/Rottweiler mix, but who knows with dogs, was intensely interested in rats. Not small animals in general — we have a picture of one of our daughter’s guinea pigs lying across his front legs sound asleep — but rats, rats he wanted to catch and (I assume) kill. Also squirrels, who are for all important canine purposes tree-climbing rats. When a rat ran across the... Read more
A conference readers may be interested in: The Power of Beauty, being held at the Franciscan University of Steubenville on October 24th and 25th. The description on the website says: “Beauty will save the world,” writes Dostoevsky, yet beauty is seen by many as a weak and expendable arrow in the metaphysical quiver that includes the more robust good and true. Many think of beauty as a mere decoration of human life, a luxury rather than a spiritual necessity. There... Read more
David Mills
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