When I happened across this clip a few days ago, I immediately thought of Zoe’s recent post on the smartness (and potential “personhood”) of dolphins: For those who might not recognize the narrator immediately, that’s Sir David Attenborough. He’s the “star” of the twin BBC productions, The Blue Planet and Planet Earth. They are absolutely fantastic; I … Read more
Last week, I considered the phenomenon of Envy infecting our spiritual aspirations. Envy, as you might recall, is the one sin St. Thomas Aquinas considered entirely devoid of anything good. He defined this vice concisely as “sadness at another’s good.” Put that way, this vice seems to amount to an almost pure form of malevolence. … Read more
Matt Smith, writing at Catholic Advocate, gives the most asute assessment of the Scott Brown victory I have seen. I especially like Smith’s comment on the reaction of White House aides like David Axelrod: They must have been watching the American Idol try-outs in Chicago instead of the returns. The vote in Massachusetts was about … Read more
A group of chefs, businessmen, and civil servants in Louisiana have devised a clever plan for dealing with an invasive fish: Rename it and stick it on retail shelves and restaurant menus. Asian carp was brought to the U.S. from east Asia in the 1970s to be used to help manage ponds and lagoons. As … Read more
I know–something must be wrong; I’m writing, and it isn’t a Sunday. So. A Catholic friend and I were discussing novelists the other day, and the name Walker Percy came up. I hadn’t heard more than his name before that time, but he sang his praises to the sky. Novels like Love in the Ruins, … Read more
Zoe can stop buying those lottery tickets — turns out that (surprise!) money can’t buy you happiness. In fact, many of the things society associates with happiness — health, good looks, career success — are not as important as our relationships with one another, says Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times: Men are no … Read more
My best friend still makes fun of me for something I said on a liquor-tilting night last century. Fired by some undergraduate combination of sudden conversion and Southern Comfort, I misexplained to her, “It’s just that my worldview is so unified!” This is one temptation of a certain kind of bookish Catholic. (Cradle Catholics … Read more
With 75% of the Massachusetts returns in, Martha Coakley conceded her defeat to Republican Scott Brown. Coakley was 7 points behind. The last time a Republican held the Senate seat, recently vacated by Ted Kennedy, was 1953! This election is for the Democratic Party what the 1755 Lisbon earthquake was to Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire … Read more
This post over at the The Anchoress today is a must read. A missionary friend, writing from a city 30 miles from Port-au-Prince, paints a grim picture. They have received no aid, no help. As the Anchoress notes, reading the personal account is like reading a modern-day psalm. Also interesting is the info there on … Read more
This story has been getting a lot of attention today: Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found. Oh boy. One sentence in, and already several questions are raised. Where to … Read more
Now this is embarrassing: Two years ago, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report claiming — among other things — that the glaciers of the Himalayas would melt by 2035. Unfortunately, it appears that the researchers didn’t do a lot of actual, you know, research. In the past few days the … Read more
Writing for Catholic Advocate, Matt Smith deconstructs Sen. Barbara Boxer’s admission the Senate health care bill fully funds abortion, in spite of the accounting procedures that purportedly keep separate money for health insurance from money for abortion. Boxer Confirms Senate Bill Does Not Restrict Abortion January 20, 2010 By Matt Smith A buyer’s … Read more
Last week, I chronicled something of the bafflement that ensued as I was confronted with the weirdly malleable term “neo-Catholic.” Judging from the combox discussion that followed, many readers share the tremendous confusion surrounding the term. Did it denote converts or those who loathe converts? Was it code for “neocon” or for non-neocon? Was it … Read more
The Challenger disaster, the shooting of Ronald Reagan, the fatal crash of Ayrton Senna, and the assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II — I remember exactly what I was doing for these events. But while I don’t remember exactly where I was when I heard of the pontiff’s forgiveness of Mehmet Ali Agca, I … Read more
God has blessed my wife and I with five wonderful, wonderfully rambunctious boys. By necessity, I find myself more than passingly familiar with the struggles and rewards that accompany the “Nine and Under – Exclusively Male” crowd. A home as heavily testosterone-laden as ours provides unique challenges, and in a society that seems to struggle with just exactly what … Read more
In the second week of October 1942, Stalingrad was still standing, if cruelly battered after 80 days of siege and starvation. Ottawa announced that U-boats had torpedoed eleven vessels in the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Polish newspaper Nowy Swiat noted that the Germans had forbidden priests to wear crucifixes, since such was “not in harmony … Read more
Pope Benedict paid a visit to Rome’s main synagogue yesterday, where the canonization cause of Pope Pius XII — something of a sore spot in Catholic-Jewish relations these days — was almost guaranteed to come up. (Some in the Jewish community feel he didn’t do enough to combat the Holocaust, but others counter that he … Read more
Here’s a fascinating article by Ethan Watters in the New York Times about how mental illness is being exported from the West to other parts of the world: For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world… There is now good evidence … Read more
As pro-lifers head to the nation’s capital this week, they are united in their opposition to abortion funding in the health-care bill. But, as they gather for the 37th annual March for Life, pro-life leaders are divided on the merits of the Personhood Initiative, a nationwide effort to establish legal “personhood” for the pre-born from … Read more
Last week, we met Uncle Harry, who had inherited an American castle-and-personal-museum from his grandfather, and his nephews Jody and Will. Uncle Harry disappeared at the end of the episode. This 1960 serial comes from Catholic University’s online archive of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact. To be continued…