by Thomas Storck. What is needed is a real debate on religious questions providing a rational public apologetic for the faith. “For we were not following fictitious tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his grandeur.” – 2 Peter 1:16 The… Read More The Catholic Faith Is Not a Noble Lie
“The Russian intelligentsia produced a faith based upon a strange syllogism: ‘Man is descended from the apes, therefore we must love one another.’” — Vladimir Solovyev. On Lenin’s desk in the Kremlin there stood, for most of the years he worked there, a strange bronze statue of an ape gazing with an expression of profound… Read More Lenin, the Ape and the Skull
Note / SH: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Harold Laski were prominent members of the Fabian Society, which aimed to promote socialism, abortion and euthanasia through gradual reform rather than revolution. They were influential intellectuals in the early 20th century, contributing significantly to political and cultural discussions of their time. Their legacy impacts us… Read More The Great Liberal Death Wish. Malcolm Muggeridge.
American Idol: On Nietzsche in America. The Nation. Why early twentieth-century Americans—from anarchists to crazed Baptist ministers—fell for the Do It Thyself philosophy of Nietzsche. [Note: What follows here I think is a true enough interpretation of what is, in no small part, the general American philosophical context, which explains our interminable evolution of so-called… Read More American Idol: On Nietzsche in America
By Thomas Merton. ONE of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders… Read More A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann
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
“Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal”—Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio,” meaning “Faith and Reason,” is an encyclical by Pope John Paul II published on September 14, 1998. It emphasizes the essential relationship between faith and… Read More Encyclical Letter ‘Faith and Reason’. Pope John Paul II.
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
“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”—John Lennon Perhaps it is one of those curious fearful symmetries that the words of John Lennon quoted above are found in the Beatles’ album titled ‘Revolver’…and that he was finally gunned down, shot multiple times in the back by a “fan”. I grew up reading Kerouac… Read More John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing
Updated / Apostasy is cruel. Not only does it walk “the broad way which leads to eternal destruction” (Matthew 7:13), but increasingly, in an age of bewilderment and despair, it leads straightway to temporal destruction as well, whether from AIDS, Fentanyl, euthanasia, or death by one’s own hand. Apostasy is cruel because, as St. Paul… Read More Of UFOs, Apostasy, and Death
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
By Solange Hertz. The world is showing all the signs normally associated with old age. If it appears to be going mad, there is every reason to believe its madness is the senile dementia of the superannuated rather than the crazed exuberance of youth. Compared with the children of adamic times and the patriarchal progeny… Read More Life Among the [Moral] Ruins
When the heretic Hans Kung met with Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, Kung said it was a deeply personal conversation. Benedict said he “respected” Kung’s “path” (without agreeing with it all). He urged Kung to teach students in regard to world religions and in other areas; and so, again, an ominous pluralism was seen to… Read More Hans Kung and Benedict XVI
“I appeal also to philosophers, and to all teachers of philosophy, asking them to have the courage to recover, in the flow of an enduringly valid philosophical tradition, the range of authentic wisdom and truth — metaphysical truth included — which is proper to philosophical inquiry — John Paul II, Fides et Ratio # 106… Read More John Paul II’s Battle Against Nihilism
“We’ll get you through your children.” —Allen Ginsberg, 1958 The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin. Disclaiming book-learning and theological subtleties, they rejoiced in direct knowledge of God- indeed, they… Read More The Beat Generation… cultural catastrophe. By Roger Kimball
“God is dead but given the way of men there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we will have to vanquish his shadow, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 109 At the very dawn of the 20th century, on 25 August in the year… Read More “Straying, as through infinite nothingness”: The Collapse of Nietzsche
Pope Leo XIII Apostolici Muneris, December 28, 1878. As the nature of Our Apostolic office required of Us, We have not omitted, from the very outset of Our Pontificate, addressing you, Venerable Brothers, in Encyclical Letters, in order to advert to the deadly plague which is tainting society to its very core and bringing it… Read More Socialism, Communism, Nihilism: Encyclical Letter. Leo XIII. 1878.
Apropos of everything: Because Martin Heidegger forsook his early roots in Thomistic [objective] Christian philosophy, the unapologetic Nazi who enjoyed philosophy was forced to create a new and eccentric philosophical superstructure [undecipherable and irrelevant to most human beings] to dodge the consequent existential void. It was necessary because his system toppled the Holy Trinity in… Read More Being and Bunk.
The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now “The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist,… Read More The Persistence of the Ideological Totalitarian Lie
A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley. JULIA MÉTRAUX, Mother Jones. “Elon Musk’s calls for a so-called “efficient” US government—including wanting to end the already endangered right to work from home, a disability accommodation for many—are less surprising when you view him as a techno-eugenicist. The eugenicists of the early 20th… Read More Eugenics Isn’t Dead—It’s Thriving in Tech
The imaginative evolutionary narrative of history that takes us back to the moral jungle. Elon Musk’s version of MAGA. Also, Musk’s DOGE Holds First Hearing on Government Waste. Opens everyone’s books (good) except his own (not good). This weekend, a MAGA influencer, Ashley St. Clair, 26, alleged on X that: ‘Five months ago I welcomed… Read More Elon Musk’s 13 Babies. Monogamy in Crisis.
So-called ‘Liberals’ have a philosophical problem in this country and beyond. On the one hand they heartily indulge and enjoy the sexual anarchy granted by the succeeding regimes since the 1950’s and 1960’s; on the other hand they tend to deplore the lawlessness of American foreign policy / imperialism / warmaking. They do not see… Read More When the State is Ultimate
Romano Guardini on “The End of the Modern World“. “This frightful destruction did not drop down from heaven; in truth it rose up out of hell!” —Romano Guardini. Mark Malvasi writes, “…absorbed by technology, [Romano] Guardini anticipated the emergence of a new type of human being that was defined by regimentation and conformity. This “man… Read More Disappearing Into the Collective
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
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.
What Fulton J. Sheen saw so clearly that others seek to forget: We are only sojourners here in a strange and foreign land. “Our whole life ought to be one continued penance“. — Frs. Francis Spirago, Richard F. Clarke on Penance. Joel 2:12-13 “Yet even now,” says the Lord, “return to me with all of your heart,with… Read More Repentance and / or the American Dialectic
David Starkey tracks the history and influence of the Dada movement of art and its influence in modern culture and life through his experiences with the Royal Academy. BBC: December 3, 2004. An autographed gentleman’s urinal has been named the most influential modern art work of all time. “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which shocked the… Read More April is the cruellest month
+ Where they would take us. Ingenious in ephemeral things and foolish in Eternal things. By Msgr. Charles Pope. We live in times of great ingenuity. We have a lot of clever smarts. We have been to the moon and back. Our computers never cease to amaze, as we make them smaller and more powerful.… Read More Technological Giants, Moral Psychopaths
LifeNews: The Biden administration is pressuring Sierra Leone to pass an unpopular pro-abortion bill before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, a former senior U.S. government official who has worked in the West African region told The Daily Signal. It is common knowledge among nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, in Sierra Leone that a U.S. foreign aid agency… Read More Biden to Deny African Nation $480 Million in Aid if It Doesn’t Legalize Abortion
Sam Kean examines the dark, restless side of the father of the atomic bomb in The Real Tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer In March 1926, four students from Cambridge University took a vacation in Corsica, an island off France. For ten days, they biked around and hiked the craggy hills and stuffed themselves with seafood in… Read More The Deranged Robert Oppenheimer
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.
Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris, December 28, 1878. As the nature of Our Apostolic office required of Us, We have not omitted, from the very outset of Our Pontificate, addressing you, Venerable Brothers, in Encyclical Letters, in order to advert to the deadly plague which is tainting society to its very core and… Read More Socialism, Communism, Nihilism
Thomas Hobbs writes. “In the introductory voice-over to Woody Allen’s film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), the narrator quotes Macbeth’s lines: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In an interview with Commonweal just after the release of the film Whatever Works (2009) and… Read More Nihilism and Guilt American Style Revisited
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.
Long march through the Institutions… 5/29/24. “… The offenses are all on a ‘do-not-prosecute’ list that was created by former Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins. Rollins, who later joined the Biden administration but resigned amid ethical violations, had advocated for the non-prosecution of more ‘low-level’ offenses… But Wu’s progressive outlook goes even further with the 39-year-old… Read More Boston’s woke mayor claims criminals should not be prosecuted for shocking crimes
“A perfect emblem for modern Ireland” — tho the real pagans of old [my ancestors – SH], whom she admires, would have sacrificed this one in a heartbeat “to make the crop grows”. “Bambie Ray Robinson (born 6 March 1993), known by their[a] stage name Bambie Thug, is an Irish singer-songwriter. They are known to mix numerous genres… Read More They appear to be Legion. Fr. Brendan Kilkoyne on Ireland’s Bambie Thug
Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War Independent, UK. 1995 For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works… Read More Independent, UK: Modern art was Government ‘weapon’.
Updated. “In a new interview, a Catholic Cardinal who headed up one of the top Vatican offices says Joe Biden is a “nominal” Catholic and should be excommunicated for supporting abortion. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who previously lead the Vatican’s highest doctrine office, called abortion “infanticide” and saying those politicians who actively support abortion like Biden… Read More Cardinal Müller Calls for Excommunication of Joe Biden
Catholic Critique 