I’ll call her Lara Lipschitz, even though that’s not her real name. Her real name doesn’t matter. In her professional life as model, artist, EFL instructor and go-go dancer, she generally goes by a pseudonym. That pseudonym isn’t “Lara Lipschitz,” but it is unmistakably Jewish, so “Lara Lipschitz” seems like a fair enough substitute for me. Why Lara — who is Russian, and a gentile, and living in a pious section of town a scant hundred yards from a mosque,... Read more
A few days ago, my Patheos colleague Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked fellow Catholics to lay off the Crusades apologetics. The piece he links to by way of example — Professor Thomas Madden’s First Things review of Jonathan Kiley-Smith’s The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam — dates back to June, 2009. But I appreciate PEG’s dismay at seeing it enjoy a new vogue on Facebook. Enlightenment and 19th-century historians may have blackened the Crusaders beyond recognition, but that doesn’t mean any 21st-century Catholic... Read more
If Moses had brought a donkey or two up Mt. Horeb, God might have sent him down with a dozen tablets inscribed (on both sides) with the text of something titled A Treatise on the Nature of Good and Evil, and on the Covenant Between the God of Abraham and His Chosen People. Instead, the Old Testament assures us, God gave Moses two tablets inscribed with ten commandments. The size of the font has been lost to scholarship, but we... Read more
They frown. They squint. They knit and raise their brows. They purse and chew on their lips. They glower. Students’ faces are the masks of cannibal priests but their eyes are the eyes of martyrs. Except cannibal priests don’t collapse face-down on a pillow of their own crossed arms in the last hour of the seminar, and martyrs don’t get calls on their iPhones. When I was a sophomore at ASU, I studied medieval history with a white-haired professor who... Read more
I loathe self-promoting – not because I’m modest, but because I wasted years of my life selling things. Depending on the year and the company I happened to be working for, my wares were debt reduction plans, adjustable-rate mortgages and online university degrees. I was a loser sustaining himself parasitically by pitching empty dreams of upward mobility to other losers. I came away convinced that nothing worth having needs selling; that worthwhile things effectively sell themselves. But this is true... Read more
It seems a terrible waste in a man whose name is basically a dirty limerick waiting to be written, but Mike Huckabee frowns on cussing. On an Iowa radio program, after assuring listeners that “In the South, or in the Midwest, there in Iowa, you would not have people who would just throw the F-bomb and use gratuitous profanity in a professional setting,” the former Arkansas governor confided: “In New York, not only do the men do it, but the... Read more
Don’t tell anyone I’m writing. I’m supposed to be beavering away on a new curriculum for advanced EFL students. Compared to most of the other jobs I’ve held, it’s more useful, less venal, and engages much more of the gray matter. It’s also deathly tedious. Unless I seize the odd chance to use language — as opposed to decanting it for people who are going to receive it with squints and frowns and all sorts of ungainly, half-comprehending faces –... Read more
Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, Colonel, USMC (ret.) was fond of promising, “Show me a hero, and I’ll prove to you he’s a bum.” He didn’t except himself from this rule. Commanding a Marine Corps fighter squadron in the Pacific, Boyington destroyed 26 Japanese aircraft, a feat that made him an ace five times over and won for him both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. Both before the war and after, Boyington was a belligerent, blackout drunk whose excesses... Read more
Dear Readers: After a long hiatus and a lot of hard thought, I’ve decided to close up shop here at Patheos. With all the loyalty and generosity you’ve shown, you’ve earned an explanation, so here it is: I’m not enough of a Catholic to blog about being a Catholic. At best, my faith is an on-again, off-again thing — nothing I can evangelize for with a straight face. This has been true, more or less, since I first started blogging... Read more
Oh, hi. Yeah, it’s been a while. I’ve backed off writing for several reasons. The first is strictly practical. Creating three-hour PowerPoint slide shows on the passive voice and modals of possibility takes a lot out of a guy. If you think you’re a tough readership, try addressing people who speak English at an upper-intermediate level. In order to make any point, I have to turn language into algebra, with formulae, constants, and variables. Sometimes I’ll slip in a cute... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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