On the Square Today

In his latest On the Square column , Joe Carter take on a deformed view of Biblical masculinity:

My manly bona fides : I’ve spent sixteen years in the Marine Corps and sixteen seconds (cumulatively) riding bulls. I’ve spent my summers in 104-degree weather baling hay, shoeing horses, castrating hogs, and running laps for sadistic football coaches. I’ve fixed pump jacks in Texas oil fields and made auto parts in a Missouri factory. I’ve changed avionics on F-18s, tires on Humvees, and a carburetor on a ‘76 Gremlin.

I’ve hunted for snipe and fished for shark. I’ve eaten rattlesnake, alligator, and the pork patty from an MRE. I’ve stoically endured tornados, typhoons, and a two-year-old toddler. I keep a .40 caliber Glock under my pillow. My hero is John Wayne.

The counter-argument to my manliness: I own a lot of Celine Dion albums.

Also today, George Weigel praises Father Robert Barron’s new DVD series on Catholicism :

Over the next four decades, I wondered whether someone, somewhere, at some point, would do a “Civilization”-like series on Catholicism itself: a Grand Tour of the Catholic world that explored the Church as a culture through its teaching, its art, its music, its architecture—and above all, through the lives it shaped. That has now happened. The result is the most important media initiative in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.

The man responsible for this feat is Father Robert Barron, a priest of the archdiocese of Chicago and a faculty member at Mundelein Seminary.