Horoscopes from Camelot

December 11, 2014 By David Mills

An @woofboy responding to a friend’s Twitter comment pointed us both to this editorial from Theology Today in 1982: Meyers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies.” As described by the writer, Thomas G. Long, it began (this is my summary) in a utopian hope combined with a modern American faith in technology and desire for the easily applied and painlessly effective technique. Plus the experts say it’s not actually very helpful. Plus it gives people an excuse for being jerks, as Long suggests... Read more

The Tale of Princess Kaguya

December 10, 2014 By David Mills

A fascinating essay by Michael Toscano on the Japanese director Isao Takahata, whose latest and last movie The Tale of Princess Kaguya Michael praises. He writes in The Purest of Lines: Since his directorial debut in the early 1960s, Takahata has distinguished himself as a powerful dramatist and a visual adventurer who enjoys thematic sleight of hand. It’s not a Hollywood “twist” that he works; rather, it is the careful, Yasujirō Ozu-like revelation of the sub-themes as a film’s innermost drama. His... Read more

Free Market Catholics Lose Faith

December 10, 2014 By David Mills

If I read the signs aright, many politically conservative Christians, Catholics and Evangelicals both, are now shifting in their attitude to the state, to a new assertion not just of the limits and dangers of the market but of the need for a welfare and regulatory government. They haven’t become old-fashioned socialists or even social democrats. They still believe in a capitalist economy, but want to restrict, temper, and even direct it in a way much more “liberal” than their... Read more

Particular Loves, In This World and the Next

December 10, 2014 By David Mills

We could see his sister in the next room, standing up straight, alert, obviously happy to meet the stranger who had unexpectedly asked to see her. He stood in the room facing us, shrinking back a bit, with a nervous look on his face, watching us carefully while he peed on the floor. It was a little awkward, with the person who had introduced us leaning against the door and grinning, hoping we’d hit it off, as the puddle of... Read more

Delivered From All Stain

December 8, 2014 By David Mills

“Yeah, right” is the way the more irenic of my Evangelical friends react to the Immaculate Conception. A few will go so far as to say something like “Whatever floats your boat,” while others react with something like horror or disgust. Very few, in my experience, have a good idea of the dogma to which they’re reacting. The ones who react with horror may well have a better idea than the irenic ones, and fair enough. “It says that Mary doesn’t... Read more

Mary, the English, and the Muslims

December 8, 2014 By David Mills

Among all the many good meditations on the Immaculate Conception being offered this day, may I commend two by Father John Hunwicke, a former Anglican minister now a priest of the Ordinariate in England. The first is a sermon he preached when an Anglican, in which he analyzed the English fear of the Mother of God. “Have you noticed,” he said, that there’s a certain sort of churchperson who twitches rhythmically at the very phrase ‘Mother of God’. If you explain... Read more

Mugged By a Ratings System Designed for Someone Else

December 6, 2014 By David Mills

The English journalist Jon Ronson, best known here as the author whose The Men Who Stare at Goats the Coen brothers turned into a movie, asks whether a small great books college deserves the Washington Monthly‘s criticism that it’s the worst college in America. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Shimer College in Chicago and know about it only I’ve just read in Ronson’s articles and a few pieces found in a quick google search, but it seems to have... Read more

Hurting Thumbs

December 6, 2014 By David Mills

From our son in New York: “A little kid on the train today just told his mom he wouldn’t be able to read his book anymore because his thumb hurt from all that page turning. I think I may have witnessed the Guinness Book of Records’ ‘laziest person’.” Read more

Russell Moore on Race, Particularly Eric Garner

December 5, 2014 By David Mills

“I had an African American pastor talk to me about working though his son’s applications to college. And that he was praying over some of those applications, that his son would not be accepted into those schools, because of where they were located and he was afraid that it would not be safe for his son. That,” says Russell Moore, “was one of the most impressive conversations I’ve ever had, because I realized that I will never be in a... Read more

Enlightened Racism

December 5, 2014 By David Mills

Of current relevance, if I say so myself: My Jeremiah and the Enlightened Racist, published a few months ago by Ethika Politika. It begins: “The problem,” writes Nicholas Kristof, “is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.” This problem seems obvious to me, but many people —... Read more