American music is characterized by a sense of openness, expansive vistas, expectancy, and optimism, offset by a deep sense of longing, poignancy, and nostalgia. It is not shy of beauty and has rhythmic vivacity. What’s not to like? Think, for instance, of Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, and David Diamond. Yet I would challenge … Read more
Why doesn’t the Latin Rite Church just start ordaining married men again? If men can’t or won’t stay celibate, then why force the issue? Well, I peeked into the future, when married priests are commonplace, and this is what I heard in the pews: “Well! I see the pastor’s wife is pregnant again! What is … Read more
Great news for the city of Baltimore: A federal judge has struck down a law that would require crisis pregnancy centers to post signs saying that they don’t provide abortions, or pay a fine. Steven Ertelt reports: Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the former city council president who is now the mayor, sponsored the measure that the city council … Read more
Hands down, the best coverage of the crisis in Egypt is coming from Al Jazeera English (AJE). I was originally introduced to the news source by an American friend — a conservative Republican and military veteran who has lived and worked in the Middle East for years. “It’s the best news channel in the world,” … Read more
The upheaval in Egypt appears to be a political revolution in its purest form: a united, non-violent effort against a military dictator from across the spectrum of Egyptian people, including leftists, Christians, Muslims, Arab nationalists, Nasserites, and the Muslim Brotherhood. More than 100 Egyptians have been killed, with thousands more injured, and there has been … Read more
After a few weeks of recommendations (Rose is Rose, Manga Bible Stories, and ArmorQuest: Genesis), it’s time to get back to a serial. Among Treasure Chest’s best serialists was Frank Borth (whose stories with Uncle Harry and the monkey we followed throughout much of 2010). Today, we start a ten-part adventure of his from 1952: … Read more
A Bleg All right, all you faithful Catholics out there. I’m about to make a “bleg”; that is, I’m going to beg something of the readers of this blog. I’m going to ask you to spell out, as best you can, in defense of the Catholic faith, the specific arguments from natural reason against a … Read more
Here’s a video of the March for Life making its way around the blogosphere today. Lots of shiny, happy faces — especially young sisters and priests. The pro-life movement is young, and that makes the future a little brighter. [video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0UIxsMdQ4&feature=player_embedded 635×355]
In a recent article at Salon, writer Katy Read admitted something that raised some maternal eyebrows: She regrets having left a respectable job and steady paycheck to be an at-home mom to her two sons for ten years. It’s not the quality time with her children she regrets, but the financial toll she’s now paying … Read more
Good morning! Time for a few Friday links to get the day rolling: Protests against the president in Egypt are heating up — and so is the pushback from the government and police. There are reports now of Internet and cell connections being cut off (social media sites being one of the only reliable ways … Read more
Last week Creative Minority published a story about Ralph McCloud, the director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, revealing that he served as the treasurer of a political campaign during his first year on the job at the USCCB. The candidate, as it turns out, was an abortion supporter. McCloud has responded, and Creative … Read more
As a person who makes his living in the media (and I wouldn’t if I had any marketable skill), I often wonder what is wrong with us. For when I stop looking for events in the media and instead squint my eyes — so that I am looking not through the mirror of the media … Read more
The last thing I wanted to do on a Saturday morning was discuss my husband’s death with 20 women. Not that he had died; neither had theirs. But, encouraged by him, I signed up for a workshop on what to do if suddenly widowed. Leading this sobering examination was a woman whose fate had been … Read more
Aware of my life-long fascination with classical music, Laurance kindly passed along this intriguing Wall Street Journal article, entitled “How Mahler Rewrote the Score for American Concerts.” Surprisingly, the article is not about the significant musical contributions Gustav Mahler made to the classical repertoire. Instead, it focuses on the dramatic, oft-overlooked changes he brought to the ways … Read more
I’ve mentioned IC contributor Tony Esolen’s new book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, here on the blog before, but with all the flap over Tiger Mothers in the past couple of weeks — as well as Elizabeth Scalia’s recent article on encouraging wonder, not just rote learning — I couldn’t pass … Read more
This Wall Street Journal article points to another casualty in the economic slump: churches. Many are having to close their doors because they can’t make their mortgage payments: Since 2008, nearly 200 religious facilities have been foreclosed on by banks, up from eight during the previous two years and virtually none in the decade before … Read more
Contraception is the elephant in the living room of contemporary Catholicism: Everybody knows it’s there, but few people care to acknowledge the fact. Meanwhile, the accumulating pastoral damage that results from this state of collective denial is painfully real. Partly it arises from the circumstance that even churchgoing Catholics today live in a state of … Read more
Last night, the best response to the president’s State of the Union address came not from Reps. Paul Ryan or Michelle Bachmann, but from freshman Senator Rand Paul. Earlier in the day, he released a plan to cut the Federal budget by close to $500 billion. Paul’s budget cuts more than five times as much … Read more
There’s plenty of buzz about the upcoming Anthony Hopkins film The Rite, which tells me that, somewhere, some publicist is going to keep his job. In my long years as an obscure Catholic journalist (is there any other kind?), I’ve gotten regular invites from PR companies that specialize in the “Christian market” to preview movies … Read more
From the Magnificat‘s Meditation of the Day, by Caryll Houselander, on the feast of Saints Timothy and Titus: Christ is that good seed with which our humanity is sown… We are the soil of the divine seed; there is no other. The flowering of Christ in us does not depend upon pious exercises, on good … Read more