I’ve always loved Camus. But his shadow side must be faced. In his novella, The Fall, the Algerian-French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus stops lamenting social injustice for a moment as well as the “meaninglessness” and “absurdity” of an empty Nietzschean universe in general, and turns instead to biography, specifically to his own cruelty. Camus was a… Read More The Falls of Albert Camus
When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, “well, we’ll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times.” Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself… Read More Susan Sontag: a Prediction by Roger Kimball. 2004
(Originally published in Journal of Anglican Studies, 2005, 3 (2), 181–96 originally titled Doubts about Doubt: “Honest to God” Forty Years On. N.T. Wright.) N.T. Wright. Honest to God, published in 1963, was one of the most public religious bestsellers of the twentieth century. Because it was written by an Anglican bishop it was especially controversial. Yet there are questions… Read More Doubts about Doubt: “Honest to God” by N.T. Wright.
It was a dream. Needless to say, it was not a vision. If I ever had a vision I would likely run for the psychiatric couch, not to a pope. I cannot remember whether it was a day or a night dream. The city hung heavy over us all. I was lifting a lantern before… Read More The City and the Cross
America… “not in any sense Christian” “….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain of scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57. Every four years, truths in America can change from one thing to another, even as the center – left’s quest to be the global hegemon… Read More America and Seductive False ‘Liberty’.
Or, where the Left would take us. by Roger Kimball.The New Criterion. On The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Michel Foucault’s personal perversions involved him in private tragedy. The celebration of his intellectual perversions by academics continues to be a public scandal. The career of this “representative man” of the twentieth century really represents one of… Read More The Perversions of Michel Foucault
“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun.”— Joseph Pearce Note: I do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to have been perfect. Which pope in history was? Even Pius XII allowed the infamous Teilhard de Chardin to remain a priest in the… Read More Benedict XVI by Joseph Pearce
Good Fences, Shared Bounty. Can it ever be wise to separate compassion, reasonable limits and common sense? If you have followed the immigration debates in the West in recent decades you will have long ago gotten a glimpse of the fears, greed, fanaticism and wars which, often enough, make many peoples in our post 9/11… Read More Immigration, Birds of a Feather and Trojan Horses
NOR editor, Pieter Vree, writes, “The NOR was contacted by a neocon foundation — right out of the blue” …”As my father wrote, “We at the NOR are glad to be independent of the ideological bigwigs. We don’t have to run around on the New York and D.C. cocktail-party circuit. We don’t have to kiss… Read More New Oxford Review’s Finest Hour
Aldous Huxley on the Technocratic Dictatorship seeking to be born. “…democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old… Read More Aldous Huxley on an Emerging ‘Scientific’ Dictatorship…
Updated. What is the political Left hiding? “The French Revolution is the model”. In this long-overdue episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host Dr. James Lindsay takes you through the main body of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: preface, chapter one, and chapter two. In a subsequent episodes (Volume Two in this mini-series) he will… Read More There is a Spectre Haunting Europe and the UK Again
It is stunning that a truism should be stunning. But given the last four years of the Biden administration, President Donald Trump, by reaffirming the exclusive male-female binary at the Federal level on day 1 of the second term of his Presidency, has done a marvelous thing for the entire world. This is something Leftists,… Read More Trump and IVF. Just the Facts.
Samuel T. Francis+ wrote, “… [M]odernism denies or ignores God and concentrates on secular knowledge and action. Human knowledge then can be only empirical; moral statements can be only relative or factual, there being a dichotomy between fact and value; and human action cannot be modeled on transcendent or spiritual gods that either do not… Read More Modernism & ‘Science’s’ One-way Street.
…. and Fr. Gerald Murray on the new “altar” of the new Notre Dame Cathedral. If the altar is absurdist, “unworthy, unsuitable, modernistic” does it not mock the very beauty which is supposed to enshrine it? Making war on the Catholic Tradition. Catholic thinker and apologist Trent Horn writes, “Pope Francis announced that he would… Read More Pope Francis and The Two Minds of (Cardinal?!) Timothy Radcliffe
Fetaltissue.org. 2021. | “Fetal tissue vaccines are the everyday means by which pro-lifers unawares develop some complicity in an industry they oppose. Our aim is to accessibly summarise the relevant facts regarding fetal tissue vaccines — which are obscured behind a veil of academia and technical jargon, concealing from the public legitimate moral & ethical… Read More Fetal Tissue Vaccines: 12 Faulty Assumptions
When Scripture’s creation-based, anthropocentric revelation is rejected, and an evolutionary animal continuum (from amoeba to man) is presupposed as the only reality, then human beings begin taking their cues for behavior from the animal-insect world. This rationalization has reached tragically absurd levels today as witness postmodernist writer Steven Shaviro’s longing for the sexual autonomy of… Read More From Creation and Family to the Petri Dish
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
Learning the First Notes All Over Again. In Fellini’s film “Orchestra Rehearsal” the Conductor found himself in the midst of a revolt. The musicians had long murmured against he Conductor on account of his rigorous methods, demands and practice sessions. The exchanges between them and he were bitter. Time did not heal this rift but… Read More Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal.
Due to Original Sin, apart from grace we inevitably fall back into “the lust of of flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (1 Jn 2:14-16) and into idolatry, just as the children of Israel grew tired of waiting for Moses, for God’s very Word, and so collapsed into the abyss… Read More The Golden Calf Our Default Condition
It is alleged. Democrats are stuck with Kamala Harris as their nominee against Donald Trump and are working hard to whitewash her record. Google Search Engine put on notice. Kamala Harris has *extensive* communist ties. Author and Filmmaker Trevor Loudon writes, “I have conducted painstaking research into Kamala Harris, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee. My… Read More Red Diaper Baby?
“While the Catholic Church clearly differs from the popular culture on the issue of sexuality and sexual identity, at the same time the moral teaching of the Church is steadfast in promoting and protecting the dignity of every person as a child of God. We can respectfully disagree with someone when their opinions differ from… Read More Clear Difference on Moral Issues…
The Real Mao and China. Steven W. Mosher knows Maoism well. “As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.” This is certainly true of the leaders of… Read More An Interview on Mao’s Evil. Steven W. Mosher.
What good is “progress” in the wrong direction Chesterton asked. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates… The Jetsons fantasy. After Oppenheimer? Really? But, the Progressives retort, it’s only crazy reactionaries who oppose Penicillin —or Planned Parenthood (as if these were morally equivalent) who oppose Progress. No specious rationalization can justify R&D technology for… Read More Localism — or what?
…and an attack on the Created Order of the world. And, sadly, it makes the American “Mothers Day” an hypocritical national Joke. Tragically America is ever-evolving, via something akin to the Hegelian dialectic, farther and farther away from Christ. “Male and female he created them, and he blessed them”— Genesis 5:2 “The Biden administration’s Department… Read More Eliminating official use of ‘mother’ isn’t inclusive — it is waging war on Family
See Dr. Mark Miravalle talk below. Pope Leo XIII wrote, “… as soon as the constitution and the spirit of the masonic sect were clearly discovered by manifest signs of its actions, by the investigation of its causes, by publication of its laws, and of its rites and commentaries, with the addition often of the… Read More St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Popes & the Masonic Sect
Updated below. In his recent debate with Joe Biden, Donald Trump said, “We brought it back to the states and the country is now getting back together,” Trump said. Repeatedly, he said that “everyone” supported repealing Roe. But less than a year ago (2023) Donald Trump Called a 6-Week Abortion Ban a ‘Terrible Mistake’. Is… Read More 2023 – 2024. Trump’s Head Spinning Moral Schizophrenia
This is no ordinary talk / book (perfectly narrated here). It is extraordinary even by Fulton J. Sheen’s standard. Lay persons and clergy both need to hear its message in our troublesome time. A time which assaults our very souls: “Day after day, Christians struggle to do good, to avoid evil, and to take up… Read More Spiritual Warfare: Victory Over Vice by Archbishop Fulton J Sheen
Research associate at The Heritage Foundation Emma Waters weighs in on the ‘girl boss’ vs. ‘trad wife’ on social media. CC Note regarding radical feminism: “The corporate strategy has largely been: make children and families appear to be ‘oppression’ (the home a jail instead of a nest) and keep everyone f–king every which way (even… Read More Rise of the Tradwife: Gen Z Bringing Back Gender Roles
Though they take the credit, feminists, radical or otherwise, actually had little to do with the progress of women in the latter half of this century. The trends that would of themselves produce today’s results were in place at least by the early 1960s. Once such things as the right to vote and the right… Read More Remaking Human Beings. Robert Bork.
Is Jesus Christ a mere symbol of transcendence or the concrete Redeemer proclaimed in Sacred Scripture, “the same yesterday, today and forever”? (Heb. 13:8) After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, he did graduate work in philosophy at Princeton University and holds an MA in Theology from Sacred Heart School of Theology in the… Read More A Paradigm Shift in Catholic Theology? Dr. Ralph Martin.
Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register writes, “Pope Francis appears to open the door to same-sex blessings in his response to dubium no. 2, saying that priests may use their discretion in giving such blessings, so long as they don’t imply a same-sex union is equivalent to a heterosexual marriage: a) The Church has… Read More Francis Appears to Open Another Door
Era of the Traditional Family Over in America Recent Survey Suggests| National Catholic Register “The family used to be the core unit of society. Increasingly, it’s now a lifestyle choice. And troublingly, the Americans who could benefit most from the stability of marriage and family life — working-class individuals and those without a college degree —… Read More Sign of the Times: The Traditional Family.
…the National Lawyers Guild, and the 65 Project. Last Spring famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has been ostracized by many or most of his present and old friends for speaking out against legal violations in what he calls the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump, warned about “what is coming,” saying repression is going… Read More Dershowitz Warns Against Stanford Law Radicals
Note: The State today is massively involved in every aspect of American capitalist society, even to the point of total surveillance of citizens and outrageous mandatory thought-direction. Does this fact make the old paradigms (Capitalism / Socialism) obsolete? Few seem to think so. So as Francis Schaefer once asked, how should we then live? These… Read More Catholic Economics Round Table
From the autobiographical novel of the same name by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and describes a single day in the life of ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov”. Pope Pius Xl: “No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true… Read More Film: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 1970.
Aldous Huxley stated plainly, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption [SH: note that desire preceded investigation]. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with… Read More Huxley’s Faith and Confession
“Do you know that we are tremendously powerful already? … I’ve reckoned them all up: a teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle is on our side. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims … is one of us…. The juries who… Read More Dostoevski on the Revolutionaries
Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register wrote, “The former cardinal-archbishop of Milan [Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini], a favorite of those pushing for heterodox reforms in the Church, had envisioned a permanent synodal Church in which the idea of collegial governance introduced at the Second Vatican Council could be better realized. The Jesuit biblical… Read More Martini’s Endless Dream
“… A year earlier, Jeffries called pro-life Texans a “bunch of yahoos” for passing a ban on abortions once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detectable. Various state and national polls have shown about half of all Americans support heartbeat laws. And new research indicates the law has saved as many as 10,000 unborn babies’ lives so far. Democrat leaders like Jeffries want to… Read More House Democrats Elect Abortion Activist Hakeem Jeffries as New Leader, Replacing Nancy Pelosi
By Dave Carlin.The Catholic Thing. Decades ago, American conservatives used to say that liberalism was “creeping socialism.” It wasn’t true at the time – although it may well be true of today’s liberalism, a very different and far more leftist kind of animal than the liberalism of the old days. From the late 1940s until… Read More Improving the Church
Catholic Critique 