BUCKET O’ RANDOMNESS: Blogwatch, mailbag, and a couple quick-hit reviews.

Rick Brookhiser impersonates various Founding Fathers on issues of our day. I expect this to be a lot of fun, just b/c Brookhiser’s biographies (I’ve read the ones on George Washington and Alexander Hamilton) were quick, incisive, purposeful, and great.

Gimme Your Stuff: “Cultural exchange” via blog. Basically, if you are in Texas, and you crave products from your Australian upbringing, or you want to check out home comforts from Hong Kong, or what have you, you can go on the blog and make a request, and get matched with someone who wants stuff from where you are. A neat idea.

The Rat posts an example of Allan Bloom’s maxim that you can’t have great sex without great books. …At least, not if you’re a cowboy.

75 years of Analog SF covers!!! Via, in a nod to libertarian stereotypes, Hit & Run.

Doublethink, the magazine of the America’s Future Foundation (and home of my first published short story), is having a subscription drive (20% off cover!) and a release party for the new issue. Ramesh Ponnuru, Joseph Bottum, KA Mangu-Ward, and many more fun folk throng its pages. Why not check it out?

An anonyreader writes, in re St Anselm:

…There’s a particular book that helped me to understand St. Anselm in a similar way to your blog entry. It’s by Fr. Sokolowski at CUA, and he’s a professor of philosophy–phenomenology, specifically. The book is called “The God of Faith and Reason” and while it’s certainly not the easiest book I’ve ever read, I think it delves into the same ideas you have here. Perhaps you would enjoy reading it. I think you are already on a similar path.

And from reader TH:

On Thursday, you wrote: “but why was the Church so attractive to the philosophers?” One very likely answer is that Christianity answers perhaps the most important question, which especially the Neo-Platonists struggled with: I know what i ought to do in order to be happy and good. Why don’t I do it?

Christianity has an effect on the philosophers similar to Augustine’s reading of Athanasius’ Life of Anthony (in bk 8 of Confessions). Here’s this uneducated monk who is at the absolute height of the philosophical life. How’s he do it? (ans: grace of the Holy Spirit). This is also how Monica’s witness eventually works on her son, too. Anthony and Monica know nothing of Cicero or
Plotinus. Yet, they are the best, happiest, holiest. Augustine comes to believe that, where the pagan philosophers pursue wisdom in philosophy, Christians actually possess Wisdom and true philosophy in Christ (Logos).

Thanks to both readers….

Quick reviews–TV, disc 1 of “The Sandbaggers”: 1970s British spy-bureaucracy fun. British people being politely furious with one another; interdepartmental turf wars; killing Commies; all kinds of good stuff. Highly recommended. I think I found out about it through Jim Henley or a commenter at his site. …Possibly esp. interesting for Cacciaguida?

Book–Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. Um, if you want a strongly Catholic Wilde biography, this is the one. Pearce has a deep and obvious love of Wilde’s work (although he also seems to like the poetry and very early stuff–with the exception of “Reading Gaol,” I think Wilde’s poetry is cliched and sub-Keatsian) and a great deal of charity for the various players in the Wilde drama. There’s an air of table-pounding at times–I mean, I do think Pearce’s interpretation of Wilde’s life and work is more accurate than most; but even if you have a hammer, you don’t need to hammer quite so loudly. …Basically, if you hear “Catholic, art-oriented perspective on Wilde’s life and work” and think, “Where do I sign?!”, then get this immediately. If not, you’d be better served re-reading the fairy tales and plays. I got a lot out of it.