For the past 30 years, every Memorial Day has found the Shea family here at our Hidden Island Redoubt in the San Juans, giving ourselves up to pure jollification for Memorial Day weekend. Except this year and–maybe–next year, due to the Pandemic. I have no hard feelings about it. It’s a small sacrifice for not watching those I love and care about–or perhaps a total stranger somebody else loves and cares about, die in anguish as they drown in their... Read more
The Bobs sing “Spontaneous Human Combustion”!: Read more
A little while back I remarked on the fact that, despite the constant complaint of “liberal persecution” from MAGA Christians, the primary thing I noticed from liberal critics of Christians was not hostility toward the Faith, but hostility to Right Wing betrayal of the Faith. As I said then: What has struck me consistently is how people on the Left are not interested in persecuting Christians and how often they beg them to be Christians, to act like Christians, to give balm... Read more
One of the reasons the gospel spread like wildfire among the poor of the Roman Empire (which was most of the Roman Empire, especially in urban areas) was that it insisted that when God had become man, he had joined the least of these in their lot. He’d lived the life of a manual laborer in a conquered piece of land and had wound up, not living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, but sharing in the victimhood that... Read more
Long ago, when First Things was a magazine to be taken seriously, it espoused ideas like human dignity, the sanctity of human life, and “all men are created equal” and so forth. But then, like so much of American Christian conservatism, it hitched its wagon to the degraded post-modern conservatism of the GOP, becoming first apologists for unjust war in Iraq and opponents of two popes and all the world’s bishops in that pursuit. Then it went to war against... Read more
The fear of the Lord, say the biblical sages, is the beginning of wisdom. Lots of postmodern skeptics think they don’t believe that and even think that such sayings are a primitive appeal to servile fear. But then they take a look at the smirking face of a bully like Stephen Miller as he flouts the law to sentence desperate children to deportation and (admit it, guys) long for swift and terrible justice to find this miserable creature. They watch... Read more
I have terrible news for you: As much as you wish it were true, you are not persecuted. You are not a victim. Here is an utterly typical example of the Fake Victim mentality, taken from a vast menu of similar expressions The “professional Catholic” crowd are like “professional” politicians. Each personally enriches themselves off the backs of those they are supposed to be helping. Not much a difference between DC Swamp and the Catholic Establishment Swamp. — Michael Voris... Read more
You are either a moron, a brazen liar, or a moron and a brazen liar. Some entertainment and information for a Saturday in lockdown. Obamagate is nothing other than the liar who is 100% to blame for the pandemic in the US flailing desperately to gin up his Cult with hysteria because he is responsible for what will soon be 100,000 deaths, a new Great Depression, and is losing to a guy sheltering in his home. This criminal is in... Read more
A new form of chickenhawkery has arisen with the Right Wing Cult of Death. The cowards who themselves were draft dodgers but gung ho to send others to go die for them in Iraq 20 years ago are now the same cowards singing the praises of their own “courage” while they eagerly send others out to die for their stock portfolios. R.R. Reno, who contributes nothing to the world but boasts about his courage and demands that others die for... Read more
One of the troubles a libertarianized American faith gets into is the tendency to deal with sin on a libertarianized basis. Case in point: the tendency of conservative American prolifers to read this story and see it solely in terms of this woman’s responsibility and not at all in terms of the failure of our system to provide for the needs of struggling families. Essentially, the story is of a woman who made what she calls “the hardest decision of... Read more
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