Watch Out for Nice People

Last updated on: July 15, 2014 at 12:45 am By David Mills

Apparent good news for writers and others on the cranky end of the personality scale: “Those who are described as ‘agreeable, conscientious personalities’ are,” according to a study in The Journal of Personality reported on news.mic, “more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while ‘more contrarian, less agreeable personalities’ are more likely to refuse to hurt others.” . . . People who were normally friendly followed orders because they didn’t want... Read more

Lewis & Orwell on Language

Last updated on: July 9, 2014 at 11:53 am By David Mills

In Broken Families, Broken Words, I quoted C. S. Lewis’s insight into what happens when words are eliminated. If you dislike a reality, you should try to make it hard to talk about. The quote’s one I used in an essay exploring these questions, To See Truly Through a Glass Darkly, subtitled “C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, & the Corruption of Language.” It begins: Even well-educated people are often startlingly insensitive to language. One reads, even in the better magazines,... Read more

Broken Families, Broken Words

Last updated on: July 9, 2014 at 11:54 am By David Mills

“When . . . you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for,” Lewis wrote in 1944. “Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.” Writing as a guest on Elizabeth Scalia’s weblog, Irish Catholic (and Irish Catholic) writer Ben Conroy explains what happens when “family” is one of those words and what challenges this presents when the family is broken.... Read more

Build a Better Bible

Last updated on: July 6, 2014 at 4:51 pm By David Mills

Leah Lebresco mentions an attempt to find a more readable Bible (physically readable, that is). This leads me to mention an already created more readable Bible, or at least the gospels. Here is a review from the Bible Design Blog of Chad Whitacre’s The Gospels. As you flip through the Whitacre Gospels (for lack of a better title), you’re stuck by how novel-like the layout is. If it weren’t for those numbers along the inner margin, you could be reading... Read more

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

Last updated on: July 8, 2014 at 10:20 pm By David Mills

A friend, writing in an e-mail string lamenting the liberalization of the Anglo-Catholic movement of the Episcopal Church, wondered why some very wealthy parishes are so liberal when they could afford to be more conservative, mentioning one very very wealthy parish in particular. In the Episcopal Church, wealth buys latitude. That may be the reason they’re liberal, I wrote. Remember what clientele the parish you mention serves. See for example the just deceased Richard Mellon Scaife, who, though as far... Read more

The Rabbi’s Indirect Care

Last updated on: July 7, 2014 at 9:14 pm By David Mills

R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe and leader of the Chabad movement, who died twenty years ago, was one of those people who inspire among his followers and others outside his circle an unusually deep devotion and respect, and in The Tablet Susan Handelman, one of the others outside, helps explains why. He had a gift for indirect pastoral care, for one thing. The father of one of the rabbi’s biographers, Joseph Telushkin, had been his accountant and suffered... Read more

Why So Many Millenials Are Living at Home

Last updated on: July 3, 2014 at 9:45 pm By David Mills

Do not, says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic:, freak out: a huge percentage of young people are not living with their parents, despite the many stories you’ve read in prestige media like the New York Times, Salon, and the like. The percentage of young people the Census says are living at home is at an all-time high, true, but only because the Census defines this to include living in dorms. Obviously many journalists forgot to read the fine print and most... Read more

Readings (7 July 2014)

Last updated on: July 2, 2014 at 9:33 pm By David Mills

The Continuing Mysteries of the Aleppo Codex, from The Tablet. The codex, “the perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible,” long kept safe by the Jewish community in Aleppo, now resides in Israel and owned by an Israeli foundation, which the author argues is a problem in itself, and is also missing the Torah, which is an even bigger problem. Read more

Normal Paedophilia

Last updated on: July 6, 2014 at 4:36 pm By David Mills

The Telegraph‘s sub-editor chose the provocative headline ‘Paedophilia is natural and normal for males’ with only the easily missed quotation marks to tell the reader flipping through the newspaper or website that the newspaper was merely reporting and not declaring. Attention the headline would draw. The writer, Andrew Gilligan, is quoting a Philip Tromovitch, a professor at Doshisha University in Japan who was speaking at a conference held at Cambridge University last July. You may have thought that this was one thing... Read more

Readings (3 July 2014)

Last updated on: July 2, 2014 at 9:11 pm By David Mills

Filmmaker Scott Derrickson on Horror, Faith, Chesterton and His New Movie, by Steven Greydanus, from the National Catholic Register. Greydanus asks the director of the new movie Deliver Us From Evil, a Protestant Christian, if he agrees with Roger Ebert’s claim that “When it comes to fighting vampires and performing exorcisms, the Roman Catholic Church has the heavy artillery.” I think there’s some truth to it. Catholicism is so steeped in imagery. It’s one of the many reasons Catholicism has given birth... Read more