I’m not sure whether Fordham University is the first Catholic college to develop a program for international humanitarian action, but it had better not be the last. According to The New York Times, the number of schools offering degrees in respose to natural and man-made disasters has more than tripled over the past ten years — from 70 in 2001 to 232 today. The programs emphasize various aspects of disaster relief, including psychological first-aid for survivors to . SUNY New... Read more
I make Robin Williams look like a reptile. If you don’t believe me, check out my picture, to the right. That thing on my neck is not a tarantula. It’s not that I’ve making a principled stand against depilation. If a man thinks hiis pectorals deserve air to go with their exercise, then by all means, lay on that wax with a will, sir. I’m just too cheap to have the job done professionally and too clumsy to tackle the... Read more
The Pew Research Center reports that millennials — adults aged 18 to 29 — think parenthood is more important than marriage. According to a poll taken last year, 52% of respondents said that being a good parent is “very important”; only 30% say the same about a good marriage. For years now, I’ve watched Baby Boomers glancing over their shoulders at millennials as they shuffle off toward their reward, wondering, “What is up with these kids?” Some call them “young... Read more
According to the Times, “a small group of determined, self-described conservatives” must have thought so. Banding together and dubbing themselves the #bornfreecrew, they “took it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be ‘schoolgirls’…urging them publicly to stay away from [Representative Anthony Weiner]”: By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the... Read more
Today, we celebrate the birth of pundit, deacon and Gemini, Greg Kandra. Greg’s one of my personal heroes, for three reasons: 1) he is sincerely and completely committed to serving God; 2) he’s worked as a real, live media guy; and 3) his blog, the Deacon’s Bench, gets hit like a ten-dollar hooker. For him, I offer this classic tribute from the golden age of black-and-white film: ((The “Happy birthday” stuff starts at about 01:30) Anyway, like Alfalfa and the... Read more
Change your maps: Connecticut is the Khyber Pass; America’s suburbs are Pakistan’s tribal areas. The children of America’s hipster moms are paying off their parents’ blood debts.* As an anonymous woman writes to Slate’s Emily Yoffe: I enrolled my two boys into an exclusive private school in our new hometown. At a school event I bumped into an attractive woman whom I didn’t recognize. She came by and asked if I remember her. It turns out that she was someone... Read more
How to remonstrate with a bishop? The Church is not a democracy, nor even a constitutional republic. Catholics dissatisfied with Church leadership can vote with their feet — and about one in three do — but with their voices gone, the dialogue, such as it is, coems to resemble an echo-chamber. A few propose alternative ecclesiological models that make the clergy directly accountable to the laity, in one way or another. But these typically make no impression — or at... Read more
I weep for Anthony Weiner — not a big, blubbering flood of tears, mind you, but one or two. Picture a Native American contemplating a crumbling ecosystem, and you’ll get the idea. All the evidence of Weiner’s cyber-flings — the pec-flashing photos released by Andrew Breitbart, the the explcit Facebook messages now in the hands of Radar and the Star — show him doing something that few people can do with real dignity, and that is make love. I use... Read more
A few days ago, in attacking the apparently hateful caricatures of Jews in Foreskin Man, the comic drawn out by anti-circumcision “inactivist” Matthew Hess, I cited the 1940 German film Jud Suss. The film’s poster, from which a bearded Jew glowers at the viewer, was obviously an ancestor, so to speak, of the comic, which features the bearded and slavering Monster Mohel. Remembering that the film is available on YouTube, I resolved to watch it, and found the thing grimly... Read more
Change your maps: the YA section is the new Gommorah, at least according to Meghan Cox Gurdon. In the Wall Street Journal, she asks: How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18. Gurdon goes on to warn of... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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