GUEST POST WRITTEN BY DANIELLE BEAN I have been thinking about apologies, as both a recipient and a giver of a few different ones lately. In my opinion, the worst kind of apology is the kind that isn’t an apology at all. It’s an excuse. It’s an accusation. Or it’s a shifting of blame. Some examples of apologies gone bad: Fake Apology #1: “I am sorry if you were offended” or “I am sorry if I did something wrong.” Translation:... Read more

GUEST POST BY SIMCHA FISHER: If I were, I would have won this game much, much faster than I did. My six-year-old got bored long before I’d come close to exhausting all the different orders of passage across the river, and the poor goat and the cabbage kept getting eaten, which was dispiriting after a while. Eventually I figured it out, however, so am feeling not that dumb right now. It’s an ancient puzzle, and you probably know the answer.... Read more

As the timeline feature on my iGoogle homepage informs me, Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens was born on this day in 1913. The son of a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave, Owens is of course best remembered as the athlete whose four-gold-medal achievement in track and field at the 1936 Olympics put paid to Hitler’s theories of racial superiority, for which the Games in Berlin were supposed to provide a kind of exhibition laboratory. At those Games, Owens... Read more

(image source) It’s stories like this that make me feel glad I (a) am out of style (b) don’t even generally realize that I’m out of style and (c) don’t read The Wall Street Journal: At model casting calls for New York’s fashion week, which begins today, one of the most coveted attributes is an affront to modern orthodontics: gapped teeth. I’ve actually always found a tooth gap sort of appealing, but making it trendy just ruins everything. “I think... Read more

My digital camera has gone to Germany to see the Oberammergau Passion Play, in company with my teenaged daughter and her overwhelmingly generous grandmother. My husband, a fluent German speaker, has provided this daughter with lifelong language coaching, to the end that she can now say things like “fig” and “silver altarware” and “It’s all the same to me,” which might actually come in useful while she’s over there. In addition to her grandmother, the daughter’s traveling companions include my... Read more

I don’t have anything to say on this terrible anniversary.  Here is something beautiful to listen to.  It’s not relevant, it’s just beautiful, and God knows we need more of things that are beautiful.  And see how these lovely girls enjoy singing! Sto mi e milo Майка Рада Read more

This weekend we’ll be attending the Diocese of Charlotte’s annual Eucharistic Congress, in Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. Last year’s keynote speaker was Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculee Ilibagiza, but  this year it’s a  hometown lineup:  President Bill Thierfelder and Abbot Placid Solari of Belmont Abbey College and Monastery, respectively;  plus Patrick Madrid of the Envoy Institute, based at Belmont Abbey. Last year’s Congress was memorable for many reasons, not least of which was that one of our party, riding down the... Read more

A little while back I gave you a little taste of Disorientation; How to go to College Without Losing Your Mind, and now you can read one of the books essays in it’s entirety, over at Patheos.com: Peter Kreeft’s Progressivism ; The Snobbery of Chronology. An excerpt: The fallacy of Progressivism is peculiarly modern. In fact, as we have just seen, the typically modern use of that very word “modern” to carry a (positive) value judgment is part of the... Read more

Excellent video, Check it out! Also, an English non-Catholic gives us Ten reasons to love the pope Read more