Dear [organizing team of the Christ Renews His Parish retreat I attended last weekend], I go back and forth on whether to actually write to you honestly, because so many women love this weekend, and if it works for them, who am I to second-guess it all? And, after all, I participated a decade ago, and even came back as a member of the team the next year, and really enjoyed being the “liturgist,” and planning the liturgies and prayer... Read more
(I’m not sure if this article is behind a paywall or not, but if so, you can access it by googling any of the quoted text.) . . . according to an article in the L.A. Times (reprinted in the Chicago Tribune), which features young men and women who were raised, for a time, in the United States, but have since either been deported back to Mexico or returned voluntarily, individuals such as Daniel Arenas, 25, who returned to Monterrey... Read more
So I’m in the middle of reading and note-taking on a Harvard report on housing for older adults, and aiming at another go at trying to convince my parents that maybe, just maybe, living in a “senior residence” with skywalk-access to recreation and fitness activities is a better alternative to sitting around watching TV all day, but I thought I’d take a break with a little piece on “cultural appropriation,” inspired by a snippet in the National Review on students... Read more
I really, really want to write this quickly before I start work today but here it is: I was all set to write about how internet “fast” and “slow lanes” — that is, giants like Netflix paying the major internet service providers in order to have its content delivered more quickly, or have its delivery slowed if they don’t pay up — are the wrong solution but that the underlying problem is real: why should the user who spends their... Read more
Presented for comment: from The Federalist, “Trouble In Transtopia: Murmurs Of Sex Change Regret.” I’d read similar “people with sex changes come to regret it” statements before, though I don’t know if there are studies in the scolarly literature about the topic, and certainly, the “official” line, that you’d get from LGBTQ “experts” who run the show, is that transexuals are cured, instantly, by sex-change surgery, end of story, and it’s therefore discriminatory and just plain unacceptable to in any... Read more
Ann Althouse linked this morning to an article in the New York Times on Mormon polygamy which, much as my Mormon friends are great people, is something that I don’t know how they reconcile, and on the NYT site was a further link, to an article titled, “U.S. to Focus on Equity in Assigning of Teachers.” Now, in some countries, schools are administered at a state or other regional level. But here, each local school district hires its own teachers.... Read more
This morning, Ann Althouse linked to an article about a couple who, as a form of agri-tourism, had been in the practice of renting use of their farm for wedding. In 2012, a lesbian couple asked to book their wedding there, and (acting, again, as “testers”) recorded the conversation and filed a complaint when they were denied. The state agreed with the couple that this family farm was a public accomodation, and required to provide services to gay/lesbian and heterosexual... Read more
That’s the title of an article by Amina Luqman, in today’s Trib but originally from the Washington Post: “Why are fairy tales so white?” asks the Trib article’s headline, “In the land of make-believe, racial diversity is a fantasy,” announces the headline at the Post. The author’s complaint is that Harry Potter and a whole raft of characters in children’s fantasy are white: namely, characters in Brave, How to Train Your Dragon, The Lord of the Rings, Charlie and the... Read more
Or the day after, depending. I wrote before that my memory is of following the news reports, as East Germans left via Hungary and protested within their own country, and especially the morning news, the next day, reporting on the momentous changes. Later I wrote about the fall of the wall, and this dramatic change from the Cold War I had grown up with as the basic organizing principle of geopolitics, in the context of Obama’s verbal tic about History... Read more
This is a post which is likely, due to its subject matter, to be of interest to only a small segment of my readers, but I’ll try to make this more broadly interesting (since, after all, one of my stated reasons for blogging is to practice at writing things that are interesting to other people rather than just myself). In any event, it’s a long one, so please bear with me. . . Elizabeth Scalia, “The Anchoress” at Patheos, wrote... Read more
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