ONCE YOU KNOW HOW, YOU KNOW WHO: So I’ve had two problems with St Anselm’s “ontological proof” of God. (You know, the one about how God is that than which no greater can be conceived.) The first is the problem just about everyone has: The proof is like LSD. From what I’ve heard (…I have no firsthand experience here), LSD provokes these crazy visions, and you’re so sure that you have access to ultimate reality, and it’s amazing–and then the... Read more

And with your blogwatch wrapped around your arm, oh sonny My heart, it left with you– What else can I do? Oh, it’s just a cavalcade of rotten today, people. First Things: “A few years ago the English edition of Magnificat (click here) was launched and it has caught on in a big way. It is a handsome little book sent monthly to subscribers and contains a simplified version of the daily office. I’m told that there are now more... Read more

EAMON DUFFY: …In abandoning real and regular fasting and abstinence as a corporate and nomative expression of our faith — by making it optional — the Church forfeited one of its most eloquent prophetic signs. There is a world of difference between a private devotional gesture the action of the specially pious, and the prophetic witness of the whole community, the matter-of-fact witness, repeated week by week, that to be Christian is to stand among the needy. more Read more

BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!: Sean Collins on the greatness of He-Man. I was more of a She-Ra fan (well, actually more of a Cat-Ra fan, which, yes, predictable), but I love this description of why the cartoon worked for Sean: To the young (and old) Sean T. Collins, that was precisely what was so cool about the cartoon: It took everything a young boy digs–superheroes, fantasy, sci-fi, swords, guns, monsters, villains, secret identities, superpowers, aliens, cool vehicles–and smashed them... Read more

A SMALL THOUGHT ABOUT THE TRIDENTINE MASS: The Weekly Standard has this review of a new book on Auden and Christianity. While I’ve just started reading a huge whopping hunka-hunka burnin’ Auden, I doubt I’ll read the biography, just because biographies by their nature are kind of absurd. I mean, people think fanfiction is derivative! Still, I was struck by this passage in the review: …The structure and aesthetics of high Anglican worship were so agreeable to him, not for... Read more

EXTRA DOUBLE SUPER GAY!: Review of David Morrison’s Beyond Gay. (The title of this book makes me giggle.) OK, I actually read this a while ago, and don’t have a copy with me, as I lent it out. But I wanted to do a (mostly) positive review, after the Payne debacle recorded below. So this will be brief, but possibly helpful. When I first finished Morrison’s book–basically an autobiography with generous helpings of theology–I was somewhat disappointed. I’d hoped that... Read more

AS USUAL, LACK OF CHARITY LEADS TO BAD READING: A reader rightly takes issue with one aspect of the big Payne-book-post below: Lewis would have destroyed those letters because at that time (the 1950s) homosexuality was still illegal and its practise could land you in jail, destroy your reputation, embarrass your family, and have any number of nasty consequences. Lewis was a public figure and knew his correspondence would be read by people other than himself and might some day... Read more

I LIKE NICE PEOPLE, THEY’RE THE ONES YOU CAN’T STAND: Review of Leanne Payne’s The Broken Image. (lightly edited version) A couple people had recommended this book to me. It’s, I guess, a guide to healing lesbionicity, or something. (I read it for work-related reasons. I might act crazy, but I don’t smoke enough crack to read this sort of thing for fun.) Yeah… I had a really hard time with this book, even though I also gained from it.... Read more

When the brothers were quite young, probably under five years of age, Lady Wilde took them to stay at a farmhouse in the vale of Glencree about fifteen miles from Dublin. During their stay she met a young convert Catholic priest, Father Lawrence Fox, and asked him whether she could bring the two children to Mass. Soon afterwards, she requested that Oscar and Willie be baptized as Catholics. Father Fox duly obliged.–Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. In praise... Read more

FIELD GUIDE TO COMMON CHRISTIANS. I have no words. My words… this has stolen them!!! Just click. You won’t regret it. A tiny, tiny sample: …[I]t’s hard to be frightened by any group that communicates its message through dance. Goldberg draws explicit parallels between today’s Christians and the Nazis of 1920s Germany,which only makes the whole thing more ridiculous: my own, admittedly non-intensive, study of the Third Reich has convinced me that ballet was generally low on the list of... Read more