Of a Great Man & a Bad Movie

Today in “On the Square,” George Weigel pays tribute to “one of the greatest of American Jesuits and the living embodiment of Catholic liberal learning at Georgetown.” He means Father James Schall, and this is very high praise. (Earned, I will add on the testimony of many others.) Father Schall, he writes,

is a marvelous teacher and a great spiritual director; and he is both because he is a man at peace with the absurdities of the world, which he knows to be part of a divine plan he doesn’t presume to grasp fully. Yet he is no ambiguist: he would rather thrust his hand into the fire than put a thought not congruent with the truths of Catholic faith on paper. I imagine he would happily die a martyr;

To know more about why Dr. Weigel speaks that way of Father Schall, read In Praise of Father Schall .

Also appearing today is The Kids Are Not All Right by Elizabeth Marquardt of the Institute for American Values. She uses the movie The Kids Are All Right . It offers “a sometimes searing exploration of the raw emotions at stake when women who never intended for their children to have a father suddenly find a father in their lives,” but its view of their lives is a fantasy. She shows why, and how Hollywood’s sunny portrayal of another aspect of the sexual revolution is also another disservice to its victims.