A friend commenting on an article I’d commended — Rebecca Hamilton’s The Murder of Innocents is Wrong and Every Human Being Knows It — criticized her use of “the Church” in this passage, which I’d quoted: The arguments which gave legal abortion sufficient moral gravitas to hook into the public imagination were based on real terrors such as rape and the fear of being forced to give a baby up for adoption. These arguments found their traction in the sexual double standard... Read more
Many conservative websites and writers, significant, sane ones, have become more and more critical of the police in the last few years and the number and the force of the comments have increased a lot in just the last couple of years. What had been — for decades — the conservative’s automatic deference to the police’s side in any conflict is no more, and growing numbers of serious conservatives are beginning to react in favor of the other side. This is the... Read more
Writers with some authority frequently say more than they can really say, and it’s a little disconcerting, also disappointing. In a short tribute to the late P. D. James, the English novelist and playwright Nigel Williams says of her Children of Men that it “portrays a world in which human beings are finding it harder and harder to reproduce.” One can’t have read the book and written that, because the book is the story of a world in which human beings... Read more
“You have to wade through a lot of postmodernist/Marxist jargon in the Australian journalist Guy Rundle’s ‘The Meaning of Black Friday,’ but the end is to the point. . . . ‘It was only when the encroachment of Black Friday on Thanksgiving became absurd, a stuffing, a farce, that mainstream media began to sit up and take notice. The fact that this could even occur — that a sales event could wholly encroach on a collective holiday that lies at the root... Read more
The same website that listed Patrick Deneen’s twelve books to read on Christianity and politics includes other lists as well. One gives fourteen books for understanding J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing and another gives six for understanding C. S. Lewis’s writings. I’d mostly agree with the first, while commending only one of Michael Ward’s books and dropping Beatrice Gormley’s children’s biography, which really doesn’t belong on a list of this sort. I’d add the new three-volume collection of Lewis’s Letters, Justin Phillips’ C.... Read more
On the almost always interesting Reformation 21, philosopher Bruce Baugus relays a lesson from Philip Jenkins’ The Lost History of Christianity. In Local, Gritty, and Enduring?, he asks why Christianity in Egypt survived the Muslim invasion while it died in the rest of northern Africa. Whatever the economic and political reasons, Jenkins offers another: Where the African church failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking roots into the... Read more
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, of course. Two of Christopher Lasch’s books, predictable. Alexis de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, well duh. But you may well be surprised at the other eight selections in Patrick Deneen’s list of twelve books on Christianity and politics he thinks you should read, if you’re interested in the subject. Deneen, once of Georgetown and now of Notre Dame, is a leader of what might be called the alternative Catholic politics movement: not traditionally welfare statist or free marketing but... Read more
A useful story, from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (available in various forms here): Boswell: I described to him an impudent fellow from Scotland, who affected to be a savage, and railed at all established systems. Johnson:“There is nothing surprizing in this, Sir. He wants to make himself conspicuous. He would tumble in a hogstye, as long as you looked at him and called to him to come out. But let him alone, never mind him, and he’ll soon give it over.” Boswell:... Read more
The responses to the Rolling Stone expose of the University of Virginia’s sexual responses all say something like — this is from The Jewish Daily Forward‘s daily email — “A recent Rolling Stone article on sexual assault at the University of Virginia has galvanized students to change campus culture. But is it too little too late?” The answers all involve men showing greater respect for women, men learning that no means no, and universities and local police holding rapists to account,... Read more
Jessica Valenti is the Guardian‘s columnist for bog-standard feminism. She recently tweeted: Embarrassed @agolis by booing a crisis pregnancy center ad in the movie theater & shouting GO TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD! Now, the Hunger Games There followed a bright yellow smiley face. A Sean Davis (@seanmdav) responded: @JessicaValenti@agolis Ready to have your mind blown? The institution in that series that sends children to their deaths is the villain. Read more
David Mills
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