by Roger KimballThe 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 the biggest con jobs in recent intellectual… Read More The Perversions of Michel Foucault
Damian Thompson associate editor of The Spectator writes, “Ludwig van Beethoven had a profound faith in God. He was born and raised a Catholic and on his deathbed he asked to receive the Last Rites. He told the priest, ‘I thank you, ghostly sir – you have brought me comfort.’ One of his closest friends,… Read More Why didn’t Beethoven Go to Mass?
By far the most important book on Western revolutionary culture I’ve read in over a decade. Indispensable. A REVIEW OF THE LONG MARCH. BY ROGER KIMBALL. Encounter Books, 2000.By Bill Muehlenberg In many ways the cultural revolution of the 60s has been as influential and momentous as other great social upheavals, such as the Industrial, French or… Read More The Long March by Roger Kimball
Updated. Cardinals Mueller and Burke on the German Synod and beyond. “Bishops are accusing brother bishops of schism and heresy — and it’s all over the most fundamental and crucial doctrines of the Church.” Signs of the times. “Desecration is the act of depriving something of its sacred character, or the disrespectful, contemptuous, or destructive… Read More Multiple Desecrations and the Tragic Pontificate of Francis 10 Years Later
“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.
Critical Information Concerning “Brain Death” and Organ Transplantation: “For over forty years there has been a deadly code of silence pertaining to “brain death.” Behind closed doors a controversy raged. Many of those in the medical field opposed this reinvention of death. The controversy continues… “Brain death” was invented for the sole purpose of organ… Read More Days of Noah. Killing for Organs
Francis X. Maier writes. , “… We live in unsettled times. Elites in the developed world have been shedding Christianity like dead skin for decades. Their grip on our popular entertainment, news content, and emerging technologies has dragged many millions of otherwise good people along with them. Big corporations wield inordinate political power. Unelected government… Read More Not Comfortable but Free
Oscar Wilde the would-be saint and Oscar Wilde the woeful sinner were in deadly conflict, one with the other… By Joseph Pearce|Liberal Learning, Literature. Oscar Wilde’s life is more scandalous today than it was during the Decadence of the 1890s. In fact, it is so scandalous that a current exhibition of his life and legacy… Read More Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Secret
“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
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Avant-garde were given powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and in some degree Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the binary… Read More Rehabilitating Rockwell from the Culture of Kitsch
—First, Ross Douthat. What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada. And: Yuan Yi Zhu: “Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for… Read More Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
In No Speed Limit, author and cultural analyst Steven Shaviro writes, “In his science fiction novel Pop Apocalypse, Lee Konstantinou imagines the existence of a “Creative Destruction” school of Marxist-Leninist thought. The adherents of this school “interpret Marx’s writings as literal predictions of the future, so they consider it their mission to help capitalist markets… Read More The Creative Destruction school of Marxist-Leninist thought — Or, dreams come true
By Solange Hertz. The readers of Time magazine were assured in the summer of 1992 that “within the next hundred years … all states will recognize a single global authority.” The author of the article was Strobe Talbott, member of the CFR, former Rhodes Scholar and President Clinton’s roommate at Oxford. Mr. Talbott, at that… Read More The Family’s Threat to Utopia
“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
The Telegraph, UK. Utopian solutions for saving the planet are doomed to failure – and worse. We must wake up before it is too late. Jordan Peterson 28 October 2022 •l This winter, millions of British citizens, including children, will be tipped, or dumped, into energy poverty severe enough to risk permanent damage to their health. Cold,… Read More Eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation
The will to power and the privatio boni — St. Augustine “… the worshipers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be… Read More Augustine and the Nihil
Anthony Esolen: “…Every closing of a church is a knife to the heart of a real human community. Here [Canada / Quebec] people feel it more keenly perhaps than in America. There was no school till the Church made one. There were no groups for social welfare till the Church organized them, formally or informally.… Read More The Loss of the Heart of a Human Community
Note: One need not care for Hollywood and its often amoral actors in the slightest to have sympathy for victims of addictions in general. Many of us know or love persons who have suffered—and made others suffer— from addictions. Christians are no more immune to it than their enemies. Some jump into it. Other slide.… Read More Johnny Depp and Substance Abuse. What we can learn.
And the order of creation: “The cradle of society is the family. A nation’s unity starts in the family too.” That extends into the community of citizens of the different regions, social classes and religions, she said. The Government policy therefore is focused on encouraging family formation, the Hungarian President explained. “Let us protect the… Read More Hungarian President on the Family
— As witness, “In Roe v. Wade Comments, Biden Rows Without Both Oars in the Water, Wades Into Error” (National Catholic Register) — Cardinal Robert Sarah: Warning to Europe
The Irish Have Been Bullied Into Making Themselves Extinct: John Waters On The End Of Ireland Fleshing out the deeper meanings of Irish author John Waters’ important book, Give Us Back the Bad Roads, and what has been happening to Western Civilization.
“Straights and Anguish of Dying Christians Who Have Been Negligent During Life About the Duties of Religion“. The “narrow gate”. 2 Cor. 7:10: “For the sorrow that is according to God worketh penance, steadfast unto salvation; but the sorrow of the world worketh death.” By Saint Alphonsus Liguori,Doctor of the Church. “Render, therefore, to Cæsar the… Read More St. Alphonsus Liguori on Presumption in the Face of Death
“Vilified by fellow Victorians for his sexuality and his dandyism, Oscar Wilde, the great poet, satirist and playwright, is hailed today, in some circles, as a “progressive” sexual liberator. But this is not how Wilde saw himself. His actions and pretensions did not bring him happiness and fulfillment. This study of Wilde’s brilliant and tragic… Read More The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. Joseph Pearce.
Andy Warhol’s self portrait (not the first photo seen here, but the purple thing…) sold some years back for $32.6 million. But that’s mere chump change; the highest price I’d seen fetched for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. Imagine. I mean, the pop painter, printmaker and so-called… Read More Perception as Value. Andy Warhol.
In Evelyn Waugh’s stunning classic, Brideshead Revisited, there is a scene which presses on my mind these days as I ponder so many forces gathering against a Church weakened greatly by the sins of her own children, both clerical and lay. All of us. It is the time when Sebastian, Lord Alex Marchmain’s idiosyncratic, drunkard, but… Read More Lord Marchmain’s Long Hate
Aldous Huxley on a possibly emerging Scientific Dictatorship “…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 non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days.… Read More Aldous Huxley on an Emerging Scientific Dictatorship
President John F. Kennedy in the Workers Paradise where all were “equal,” June 26, 1963. Today JFK would likely not be welcome in the new Democratic Party. 10 Most Amazing Berlin Wall Escapes “The Berlin wall was constructed in the early 1960s to divide the city. West-Berlin was capitalist and free, but the East was… Read More In 1963 All Socialists in East Berlin Lived in Affordable Housing
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
“Jesus is a garlic-eating, stinking, little yellow, greasy fascist bastard, Catholic Spaniard.” —John Lennon, Spaniard in the Works, June 1965 Remaking the World. Dionysianism made flesh. I used to think The Beatles more or less existed alongside the 1960’s counterculture, more than they ever led it (they didn’t play at Woodstock after all). But the… Read More The Beatles and Where We Are.
“What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame [Paris] would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter’s in Rome. It’s a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place.’ … Under new proposals confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures will be scrapped for trendy art murals,… Read More Notre Dame reportedly ‘being turned into woke theme park’
Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education. Many want to get their paws on children without legal consequence. James Lindsay, New Discourses. [Skip Ads]. And Part 2… here — Why Woke Marxists Resent and Attack the Materialist Success and Comforts of the West —- Exploiting January 6 for a major Power… Read More Woke Ideology and Targeting the Innocence of Children
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 from 1947, when the… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg
Chasten and Pete Buttigieg shared this image of newborn twins Penelope Rose and Joseph, born August on September 4, 2021.Pete Buttigieg / Twitter
It is said that exaggeration is the ‘honest’ man’s lie. When E. Michael Jones’ tome on the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit first came out, almost long ago now, regardless of some of its bending, distortions or omission of some facts, it was in no small measure a welcome reply to the slanders of people like Daniel Goldhagen,… Read More Towards A Critique of E. Michael Jones
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for‘ (Apropos of the hymn to Obama, ironically, Cornell West insisted Obama was no political Progressive at all. He served corporate interests only, West says, the status quo, especially the Military Techo-Industrial-Banking Complex with gusto. He only subscribed to Progressive values relative to moral issues) “I feel confident… Read More Revolutionary Con Man Saul Alinsky. Inciting “Power Responses”
Catholic Critique 