"Christmas is coming," my daughter sang in that piercing, glass-shattering treble of eight-year-old girls. "Christmas is coming, my father’s getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat." So I gave her a stern and serious lecture about honoring her parents, . . . . Continue Reading »
If you believe some news accounts, it is all a grab for money and power. The subheading of the Washington Post ‘s story on the excommunication of a priest and six lay people in St. Louis reads, “Archbishop Demands Control of Catholic Parish’s Assets, Property.” Greedy, . . . . Continue Reading »
Ah, Christmas time, that fecund moment most welcome in the bleak of bitter winter! Ah, Advent days, so rich, so ripe, so opulent in golden light, while like a pall of poverty the hoary frost and thin-crust snow lie hard upon the cold-pressed earth! Ah, Yuletide, when for the briefest instant in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Following the no confidence vote in the House of Commons that led to the fall of the minority government of Liberal Paul Martin, the Governor-General of Canada (who is the official representative of the Head of State, Her Majesty the Queen) has called for a parliamentary election on January 23rd, . . . . Continue Reading »
Over on Catholic World News, there is this fellow who calls himself Diogenes, aka Uncle Di. He is, how we shall put it, unsparing. There is, for instance, this : “Your Uncle Di fondly remembers those days of undergraduate study in cosmology and causality, parsing the tight packaging of St. . . . . Continue Reading »
Vetting advertisements for a magazine is always a little tricky. Editors have a financial responsibility to keep the publication going, and it’s a fairly well-established practice in the trade to accept ads that don’t necessarily match the magazine’s editorial line¯I suppose . . . . Continue Reading »
The philosopher Daniel Dennett visited us at the University of Delaware a few weeks ago and gave a public lecture entitled "Darwin, Meaning, Truth, and Morality." I missed the talk¯I was visiting my sons at Notre Dame and taking in the Notre Dame-Navy football game. Friends told me . . . . Continue Reading »
So, Clean Gene is gone , slipping away at age eighty-nine. The death of Senator Eugene McCarthy on Saturday has already touched the newspapers and Sunday morning political-talk shows with the usual obituary moment¯the obligatory hiccup of reflection in which everyone old enough to remember . . . . Continue Reading »
So many little unfairnesses scrape at that raw, angry place in the heart. Money, looks, fame, intelligence. The effortless drape of my neighbor’s elegant overcoat, the easy seductive patter of the man at a nearby restaurant table, the cool grace of some winning stranger’s smile. All the . . . . Continue Reading »
Joshua Skinner is among those researching that troublesome Chesterton quote about those who do not believe in God ending up by believing not in nothing but in anything. He thinks we get pretty close to it in a Father Brown story, “The Miracle of Moon Crescent” in The Incredulity of . . . . Continue Reading »
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