No, Greek Orthodox Man, That’s Not Why You Were Denied Communion, by Rod Dreher. A response to an Orthodox man who took to the Washington Post to attack his own church for what he took to be its bigotry in expecting him to live by its moral rules. Rod spots the problem: [Gregory] Pappas doesn’t even attempt to make a theological case for his position, or to lay out the Church’s teaching, and why he believes he can dissent from it... Read more
On this Fathers Day, I’d like to share with readers a reflection I wrote on my father’s death, of cancer, in a hospice ten years ago, Real Death, Real Dignity, published in First Things in 2011. One of the blessings of writing is being able to pay public tribute. Read more
I don’t think this is quite right: Brent Bozell, writes Alvino-Mario Fantini in an American Conservative review of Daniel Kelly’s Living on Fire, was no marginal figure in the American conservative movement. He was — along with Russell Kirk, Frank S. Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham — a “founding father,” as his one-time National Review colleague Neal Freeman writes in the foreword, and one of conservatism’s most talented exponents. I’m reading the book to review it for Modern Age and would commend this... Read more
Trojan Horse debate: We were wrong, all cultures are not equal, by Allison Pearson, from the Daily Telegraph. Responding to the news that five Muslim schools the government had declared “outstanding” will teaching radically anti-Western versions of Islam, the writer points out that cultures are not equal. A Muslim girl who winds up in Bolton or Luton should thank her lucky stars she doesn’t live in Sudan – or Pakistan, where, only last month, a woman was stoned to death... Read more
“I can’t see mainline protestant denominations surviving. They will not be influential,” says retired Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, speaking to the Anglican journalist David Virtue. Virtue had said, “the global scene it is being said that Christianity, the world’s first global religion, will devolve over time into two forces – The Roman Catholic Church and Pentecostalism. Liberalism will die out having run its course. Do you think this is an accurate picture?” Nazir-Ali replied: I think that is true. I... Read more
“Thanks to a Twittermob constantly on the hunt for things it might feel ostentatiously outraged by,” the Irish nuns dump dead babies in septic tank story shot round the world and is still held as true by millions. Others have posted links to news articles giving the real story, but Spiked!‘s Brendan O’Neil offers a good summary in The Tuam tank: another myth about evil Ireland. Clearly this isn’t about news anymore; it isn’t a desire for facts or truth that... Read more
The Catholic channel’s fearless leader, Elizabeth Scalia, has written a very kind welcome, which I much appreciate. It’s a pleasure to write a weblog for Patheos and I am grateful for her invitation. I’m not sure about that “buttoned-down” business, though there may be something to it. All my shirt collars are buttoned down and that may be symbolic of other tastes and tendencies. Some years ago, while my wife and I were reading the newspaper, she looked up and... Read more
One could feel guilty when reading articles like this one on Home Trampoline Danger, if you have, as we do, a big trampoline and have had one for almost all your youngest child’s life. Who is, as I write, bouncing on it. Children can get hurt on trampolines and hurt badly. Got that. I see the argument against trampolines. They’re dangerous, children don’t need them, they can get their exercise in other ways, they’re dangerous, some children will do stupid... Read more
“For the most part,” explains David Mikics in a review of a new biography of Aribert Heim, best described as a lesser known peer of Josef Mengele,” we think that there are two kinds of perpetrators of war crimes.” We are, he suggests, wrong about this. There is the ordinary man (or, very rarely, woman) who lapses into, or becomes habituated to, killing, and there is the brutal monster. There might be some cases in between, though, and Heim could... Read more
“When we decide to stop having hot sex” is one of Pia de Solenni’s friends’ answer when someone asks them when they’re going to stop having children. We had only four children, but when they were small strangers would accost my wife and many of them were not just impertinent but vicious. The people who did this were almost always later middle-aged women and they almost always struck in the grocery or in a department store where she couldn’t get away from... Read more
David Mills
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