Irony was strained the United Nations’ “Earth Summit” in 1997 when President Clinton and President Chirac and Prime Minister Blair jointly issued a warning about the proliferation of gas. Long before, Charles Dickens coined the phrase “All gas and gaiters.” In days when clergymen dressed better, gaiters were associated with the higher ranks of them, … Read more
For twenty-five years, Francisco Morales delivered milk to the lactarians of El Paso, Texas. This “Pancho,” who died in 1997 at the age of seventy-eight, was the father of the adult beverage known as the “margarita.” Milk and margaritas do not combine. Many of us as children learned the nursery adage, “contraria contrariis curantur“: the … Read more
Any normal teenager who daydreams of becoming a famous feuilletonist will find no theme more promising than the coincidence of men and birds. Wild or domesticated or table fare, there has never been a high achievement without birds in bush or sky above. Keats’ fleet nightingale and Coleridge’s fetid albatross conspire and never go away. … Read more
Bernard Severin Ingemann’s beloved Danish hymn ‘Igjemem Nat og Traengsel,” written in 1825, was published twenty-four years later in the Nyt Tillig til Evangelisk-Christelig Psalmebog and did not appear in English for yet another eight years. The translator, Sabine Baring-Gould, was prolific even for an English vicar. Born in 1834 when the Seminoles were evicted … Read more
Regardless of how frequently we have been inspired by the parliamentary exchanges between Thomas Babington Macaulay and William Ewart Gladstone on the civil disabilities of Jews, one more reading is never enough. Although Macaulay had the upper hand morally as well as rhetorically in the instance, as he also had in the earlier debate on … Read more
On July 29, 1997, a representative philosophe of our abortion culture, retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, was lavishly eulogized in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where the Requiem Mass for President Kennedy had been sung in 1963. Richard Cardinal Cushing was relatively constrained back then, because liturgical depredations had not yet switched into … Read more
Proponents of the theory that aliens from outer space crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in June of 1947 were encouraged by the recent extravagant efforts of the Pentagon to prove a fraud. In a press conference on June 25, 1997, military officials explained the event as the collapse of a weather balloon filled with mannequins. … Read more
“If you bite him again, I’ll disqualify you.” Thus spake the surprisingly contralto voice of Mills Lane, referee of the Michael Tyson-Evander Holyfield heavyweight boxing match in Nevada on June 28, 1997. Tyson had just bitten off part of Holyfield’s ear in a violation of the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, as the Prince of Wales … Read more
The Scots are famously reserved in their habits and modest demeanor, but this has not restrained their substantial claim to be the world’s most intelligent people. In the catalogue of certifiable evidence is this curiosity: Although the Scots comprise less than one-half of 1 percent of the world’s population, 11 percent of all Nobel prizes … Read more
In 1996, the school board of Oakland, California, caused a stir by wanting to teach a dialect of English as a separate language. According to the New York Times, this form, known by the neologism “Ebonics,” has several characteristics, which include the use of a pronoun instead of the infinitive “to be,” dropping standard conjugations, … Read more
In 782, Charlemagne suppressed a Saxon uprising led by the Westphalian chieftain Widukind, and massacred 4,500 captives in revenge for the annihilation of his own army three years earlier at Suntelberg. The fields were drenched in gore for days, and the pagan Widukind quickly asked to be baptized at Attigny. No one gazing upon that … Read more
Among truisms, one of the more contestable is that opposites attract. What is true, say, of magnetic poles is not a universal in human relations. A fair woman may attract an ugly man; the ugly man does not necessarily therefore attract a fair woman. What is far more often true is that opposites are similar. … Read more
Alice was rightly perplexed in Through the looking Glass when the Walrus said it was time to talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings. On this side of the Looking Glass, not the Walrus but the vice president … Read more
The Reverend Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) lived in an age that is commonly caricatured as one of beef and ale and good cheer. But after his rectory burned to the ground, he wrote a lengthy Dissertation on the Book of Job and a collection of poetry entitled Maggots. No one would have mistaken him for Dr. … Read more
A commercial bank near me has been redecorated to celebrate the change of its nane. Several indifferent but well-done oil portraits of Edwardian trustees have been replaced with poor prints of impressionist clichés covered with Plexiglass. Music has been piped in: rap doggerel set to rhythms that Plato did not like, and Barbra Streisand moaning … Read more
It is clumsy to speak of the American Indian as a cipher for one people, for he was a cacophony of tribes and tongues; and if you imagine him like a Remington silhouette scanning a reddened midwestern prairie in the sunset, you might just as well think of him painting a psychedelic totem in the … Read more
The Editor of this journal has asked me to write columns on matters of insignificance, as a respite from so many pages of profundity. He seemed confident that I am up to such a task. The topics then will not touch upon politics or religion, unless they relate to matters of conspicuous insignificance, like a … Read more
With the virtual collapse of the university as a center for intelligence about God, much residual theological discourse has relocated to think tanks. But it is like changing the great leviathans of the deep into goldfish in an aquarium. That was my impression of something called a “Jesus Seminar,” which has become a perverse media … Read more
No Catholic figure, since St. Thomas Aquinas, has matched the creative mind of John Henry Newman. But if he is respected for that today, he is revered for his mind’s identity with his heart, and a heart so great that his heroic virtues have been recognized. He is, as of 1991, the venerable John Henry … Read more
Is there a barrier in American society against the Catholic politician who does not intend to compromise his or her Catholicism in the exercise of official public duty? How dense is the wall of separation between Church and State? Or is there one at all? Separation is not a constitutional principle. It was coined as … Read more
