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
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation. The phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg by Bruce Bawer, The New Criterion On Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, 1985. I’m so lucky to be nutty.—Allen Ginsberg, “Bop Lyrics” (1949) The very first poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 [1] seems, in a way, to prophesy Ginsberg’s entire career. It is titled “In Society,” and it dates… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg
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
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
To be a Roman Catholic one must believe in miracles. This in itself has been a stumbling block to many. And yet the believer knows that one need only find the earth beneath one’s feet and all other genuine miracles become mere footnotes. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, originally a student of the intractable rationalist, Bertrand… Read More Wittgenstein and Existence.
Born in 1928 to Greek immigrants in Lackawanna, New York, Likoudis’ upbringing began in the Greek Orthodox Church. However, he experienced a profound intellectual transformation at the University of Buffalo’s Newman Club, where he encountered the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Christopher Dawson and other Catholic luminaries. Likoudis converted to the Catholic faith in 1952.… Read More Theologian James Likoudis’ One-year Death Anniversary
Is Zohran Mamdani the tip of the spear we’ve seen too often in history? Rori Stewart and Alastair Campbell gush for the Socialist (see below). Of course they would. Who are his big money backers? Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it… Read More The Lessons of Mao’s Cultural Revolution
… and the New Pseudo Praxis. Perhaps the most critical and classical difference between all forms of Protestantism and Catholicism lay in their respective understandings of the relationship between faith and good works. For Catholics, God’s saving work in Jesus Christ – the fruit of unmerited grace – issues in a changed heart and a… Read More Loving Theology More Than God
Note: Mary Daly died in January 2010. It is good to be tolerant, even of incoherent things, we are told today. The devil himself ought to be given a seat at the table. So the courts have ruled. But that can’t stop us from noticing that Mary Daly represents the meltdown of the dissident transgressive… Read More Mary Daly: The Witch of Boston College
Provocateur extraordinaire By Stephen Hand, editor, Catholic Critique. The 1566 Catechism of the Council of Trent states: “This guilt [for the death of Christ] seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same Apostle: ‘If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory’;… Read More Towards A Critique of E. Michael Jones
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.
It is one thing for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be able to assimilate such a phenomenal amount of information. It’s another thing to be able to parse the information so effortlessly— and instantly? Anybody with a real brain must pay attention. Where is this taking us? To darkness or to mutual respect? That, as I… Read More “God,” Robots (AI), Christianity and Religion in General
Truth does not change with the changes in political parties, current philosophies or trends. ” a thing cannot be and not be at the same time”— St. Thomas (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1, chap. 84) “…reason’s first principle is the principle of contradiction. He who denies this principle affirms a self-destructive sentence. To deny this principle… Read More Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange on Reason and The Law of Non-Contradiction.
Sunday Times Bestseller by Nigel Biggar. A new assessment of the West’s colonial record. “In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its… Read More Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
“The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer – the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace – including some intended… Read More How Evil Thee, Sidney? How Evil We?
Bends over backwards to save ubiquitous travesties. “A few months ago, I visited Lourdes for the first time, and when I saw the mosaics, I groaned out loud. Father Rupnik’s style is immediately recognizable, and my first thought was that the art would forever be tainted… Three years ago, he was even briefly excommunicated …… Read More America Magazine Compares Rupnik Cartoons to Caravaggio.
“Separation of church and state? I can think of a couple of other things I’d like to see separated from the state, or connected with the state in only a slender and indirect fashion. One of them is the school. The other is the home… Americans have largely taken for granted a monstrous bit of… Read More Anthony Esolen on Separation of Home and State
“One of the most famous and most evil techniques of Maoist Marxism is the “struggle session” (dòuzhēng, 鬥爭; or pīpàn dòuzhēng, 批判鬥爭, “critical struggle”; or sometimes just pīdòu, 批鬥; also called “denunciation” sessions). “They were made famous during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but they were utilized in the Chinese thought-reform (xǐnǎo, 洗脑, lit. “wash brain”… Read More Surviving A Modern “Struggle Session”. James Lindsay.
Beyond Independent Thought “In the World State in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, embryos are placed in a social class and conditioned to the careers and peers that best meet the needs of the community … we learn about the social class called Epsilon. Bred to Be Unintelligent. The World State produces five distinct social classes named from… Read More Huxley’s Uniform Epsilons
“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” — Matt. 2:18 Ireland: Irish journalist John Waters, who started his journalistic career writing about youth and Rock ‘n Roll, sadly notes, “There was a moment close to the beginning… Read More Lamentation For Ireland. John Waters
Updated: Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Co-founded by Elon Musk, Max Hodak and Paul Merolla, the company’s headquarters is in the Pioneer Building in San Francisco sharing offices with OpenAI.[5] Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017.[1][6] —Wikipedia Telegraph UK. “His reasons to do this are two-fold. At one level, he sees an… Read More No Thank You, Elon.
Paul Kingsnorth (born 1972 in Worcester) is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. He wrote about his spiritual journey and conversion to Christianity in a June 2021 essay in First Things. [wikipedia]. [His] debut novel, The Wake, won the… Read More Paul Kingsnorth on the Theological Roots of Transhumanist Projections
“Rarely have voters turned over their country to radicals, socialists, and nihilists. We did in 2020. Once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on the American people.” By Victor Davis HansonNovember 2, 2022. As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we,… Read More The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats
Linking antiwar, anti racism and abortion. Opinion. Bill Ayers and His Media Groupies by Cliff Kincaid. And brought up to date— especially regarding “the Catholic movement” and the abortion connection— in a Spotify podcast below (August 2022). Bill Ayers’ claim that the Weather Underground bombed property, not people, in order to protest the Vietnam War, is two lies… Read More What’s been happening?
By Mallory Millet. Front Page Magazine. Feminist icon Kate Millett passed away recently in Paris at the age of 82. Her 1970 book Sexual Politics, called “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” by the New York Times, had a seismic effect on feminist thought and launched Millett as what the Times called “a defining architect of… Read More My Sister Kate: The Destructive Feminist Legacy of Kate Millett
“The Unspeakable. What is that? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the… Read More Merton on The Unspeakable
“On August 13, 1961, the Communistgovernment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state,… Read More Far Left Power. A New Berlin Wall.
I personally think that Catholic education, combining the teaching of traditional theology, philosophy, the great books and intensive practical skills necessary to build a home, ought to be returned to holy men and women in small orthodox monastic or other communities at comparatively little cost. — Why colleges are becoming cults — Trent Horn reviews… Read More The Quicksands of “Catholic” Education and the Future.
An important discussion on our perilous technological time. Orthodox Christian Jonathan Pageau, Ph.D, writes, “This is my second conversation with Paul Kingsnorth. We talk about his brilliant substack, called The Abbey of Misrule, civilization and control, the power of the state and our technological systems, the matrix, politics, what it takes for communities to survive,… Read More Civilization and Control. Jonathan Pageau
This documentary shows only one tragic instance of the proficient use of propaganda in the 20th century. Of course, the Communists did the same, even if a little more clumsily. But what about us today in the 21st century? Western people today live, move and think in a 24×7 media hall of mirrors. George Orwell,… Read More The Propaganda Machines of Yesterday Should Give Us Pause Today
Major cultural transformation. James Lindsay writes, “We are in the process of transitioning from an analog, objective, real, physical world into a digital, subjective, surreal world. In that transition into a digital subjective world, we are experiencing a transformation of what is accepted as reality, when it isn’t reality: it is synthetic. In this discussion… Read More Synthetic ‘Reality’ Made Flesh
Biden to request $2.6B to promote gender equity worldwide Alex Gangitanohttps://thehill.com/ President Biden will request $2.6 billion for foreign assistance programs that promote general equality worldwide, he announced on International Women’s Day on Tuesday. The funds will be part of his fiscal 2023 budget request to Congress and will double the amount requested for gender programs last… Read More Worldwide? Who Will Define “Equity, Equality, and Gender” Globally?
“One of the great Catholic philosophers of our day reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it, and of the acquisition of wisdom, it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends. Reality… Read More Catholic Philosopher Josef Pieper: Abuse of Language — Abuse of Power
The Christian and Woke understandings of “Equality” could scarcely be more different. But tell that to the naive and sentimental…or to the cynical. Friedrich Nietzsche, we know too well, was hardly a Christian, but the “secret ambitions” in words of “justice” preached by the Woke could hardly be hid from one so brilliant and shrewd… Read More Nietzsche’s Parable of the Tarantula
College is nothing like it once was. “Colleges have been scamming people for a long time and have burdened generations with trillions of dollars in debt. Isaac Morehouse is an expert in this field, and has made it his mission to help people escape the shackles of the Ivy League.” View the Discussion @ Tucker… Read More Tucker Carlson Takes On The College Scam
“Totalitarian?” It took me many years to really believe that we could ever get that bad here, but, just in case, I did vainly hop around the blogosphere scribbling, as I heard that this or that platform was worse or better (or promising to do better!) than the other. Even Julian Assange, after all, held… Read More The Appalling Spy Machines
‘The West believes man’s destiny is prosperity and an abundance of goods. So does the Politburo.” –Whittaker Chambers “…What is happening in the world is that this view that scientific materialism, that men can by means of science solve all their problems and create for themselves a happy, fulfilled life by their own efforts, and… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge: Has America Had It?
The New Criterion. “the real prize in the pronoun wars is not correct grammar but the display of power and exertion of control.” The pronoun wars have been raging around us for at least five or six years now. Like so many toxic developments, this sickness was incubated in the university. We began to take notice… Read More Mostly About Pronouns
National Catholic Registerhttp://www.ncregister.com BALTIMORE — Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles presides this week over the annual fall assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore — a closely watched gathering that will debate a draft document on Eucharistic coherence, prompting some media outletsto claim an escalating standoff between the U.S. episcopacy and… Read More Archbishop Gomez at the Eye of the Storm | & Dr. Ralph Martin
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