…you are about to become a better person. He writes: FUN FACT FOR TODAY: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote the words “Elementary, my dear Watson” in his life. Both halves of the phrase appear separately throughout the Holmes stories, but never in this exact form. The first person to write it out in its now-famous and oft-repeated articulation: Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, in his novel Psmith, Journalist in 1915. NOW YOU KNOW! Read more

In which we continue our look at the Hail Mary. Read more

I felt compelled to share this. For a while, I was a member of Regnum Christi. The families and group I knew were devout Catholics. I had recently returned to the Church after a very long absence, and I did so with great enthusiasm and fervor. Then this information began to surface. I left RC quickly when I heard the mere hint of this kind of evil. You see, the reason I left the church to begin with was sexual... Read more

The slaughter of 400 Nigerian Christians that I mentioned yesterday has more complex causes than mere Islamic aggression. A reader writes in my combox: “It is a classic conflict between pastoralists and farmers, except that all the Fulani are Muslims and all the Berom are Christians,” said Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja to explain that “the violence was rooted not in religion but in social, economic and tribal differences” — Vatican condemns Nigerian slaughter. Sadly, there will be Catholics... Read more

Zakh Price is an eleven-year-old boy from Fort Smith, Arkansas with various disabilities including mental retardation and autism. When the following occurred, he was in the fifth grade of a mainstream school, in a small special needs classroom. Despite repeated requests from his family, the school had refused to provide him with a full-time aide or a behavior plan. Instead of following his grandmother’s instructions as to what to do (and what not to do) when Zakh got overwhelmed or... Read more

This piece on Lepanto is well-written and interesting, but at the very end the author makes connections to Catholics serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan. On one hand, I’m quite glad that throughout history Christian armies have checked the Islamic advance, preserving Western culture and Christian faith from what I regard as barbarism and infidelity. (Think of all the areas once Christian where Islam was never beaten back: Asia Minor/Turkey, the near East, Egypt, north Africa…) On the other hand,... Read more

here and here. Next on deck: the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Read more

Check out Wright’s very interesting wrestling match with the question of how you classify sundry SFF genres (with a nifty recommended reading list if you happen to be interesting in what might be called “pre-Tolkien” fantasy). Fun! Read more

Today, my minions, I command you to read this little response by John C. Wright to a critic who cannot tell the difference between a Christian and a Stoic. Interesting and insightful (and suggestive to me that, as our culture dissolves into post-Christian paganism, one of the little riptides will be that different sorts of post-Christian pagans will go about sniffing out the suspicious scent of Christianity in one another). Wright, of course, is now a Christian and even a... Read more

Just got a call from an old friend who had left the Church eight years ago, partly due to the Scandal and partly due to a long and lingering difficulty with The Mary Thing. He had worked through his problems with the scandal (since that’s just due to human sin and not due to anything in the essence of the gospel) but was still hesitating at the thought of returning to the Church because of the Mary Thing. Long story... Read more