My First Things column this week draws on the coarse and destructive hook-up culture that has been not only embraced by women but is in some ways being driven by them: Writing for The Atlantic in September of 2012, Hanna Rosin argued that the “hookup culture” so prevalent on college campuses and in the lives of young adults is “an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.” She wrote: To put it crudely, feminist progress right... Read more
So, Katrina is in one of her hissing moods, tonight, and I have decided that what she needs is to listen to the incredibly sweet tone of the Benedictines of Mary, whose latest album, Angels and Saints at Ephesus has debuted at #1 on the Classical music charts. Why am I doing this? Because that’s just the kind of gal I am, and also because “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast”, and for soothing the savage there is... Read more
Peggy Noonan has it just right when she writes: The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. Lately, when I watch the president act like no one tells-him-anything-why-he’s just-a-shocked-observer-of-his-government-and-its-agencies-and-he-sure-hopes-someone-gets-to-the-bottom-of-whatever-it-was-happened–because-really-he’s-all-about-creating-jobs-and-impeded-by-these-distractions, all I can think of is Mr. Chow, from “Hangover”, and the disdain in his dismissal. But it is Obama’s “pro’lem”; whether he... Read more
My Photo, 1991 Over on Facebook, Melanie Bettinelli — the wise and graceful blogress at The Wine Dark Sea — posted this article from Psychology Today on Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD, or at least not the way American kids seem to have it. To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child’s social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not... Read more
We’ve joked that our new Pontiff and I seem to be enjoying an unusual bit of synchonicity on the issue of idolatry. In his wonderful talks and homilies he touches frequently on the issue, enough so that Brandon Vogt — the hardly sleeping and inventive Brandon Vogt — took the time to create this amusing photoshop for me: Here’s Pope Francis this morning: “The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the... Read more
If you look around our landing page today, it might seem like we’ve got sex and abortion on the brain, here at PatheosCatholic. It’s not true; we also talk about music and tv and baseball and gardening and books and politics, of course. But Calah Alexander, who is dealing with pneumonia, managed to write a barn-burner of a post yesterday about the ill-advised trend in abstinence-only education, that equates a teenage girl’s imperfect chastity with filth and worthlessness: You can’t... Read more
Lisa Hendey posts on an interesting study on why Catholics skip mass. I’ve written over at First Things about a brother of mine who goes to Mass every day of the week, but never on a Sunday; the noise and the over-busyness of Sunday liturgies is beyond what his fragile nerves can endure, and rather than spend an hour being uncharitable, impatient or panicked, he just avoids mass on Sunday, and trusts that between God and his pastor, he’ll get... Read more
I say this with a little sympathy and fully recognizing that the being press secretary to any president is a horrible, horrible job. The only job more thankless and trouble-prone would be “Catholic Bishop.” But I can’t get the image out of my mind — what it must be like to be Carney right now, as he walks toward the White House Press Room: UPDATE: Jay Carney’s Waterloo Read more
Interesting that this morning it seemed unlikely that a verdict would come, and this afternoon, on the Feastday of Our Lady of Fatima, suddenly the jury decided: The jury in the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell returned a verdict and found him guilty on three of the four first-degree murder charges he faced. Gosnell was found guilty of killing Baby A, Baby C and Baby D and found not guilty of killing Baby E. He was also convicted... Read more
Photojournalists love to capture politicians with backlighting, or standing before round seals and symbols; it helps the subject to stand out, of course, and where presidents are concerned the dramatic halo effect might be making a sincere or ironic editorial point. I wonder if there is something subconscious about it, though; do we need to see our president regardless of party, as someone with a connection to the divine? Politicians are as susceptible to believing their own hype as anyone... Read more
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