My kids have been using their spare time to bone up on the Essential Marvel Comics. I know — this makes me a bad parent. Of course, when I was their age, I was poring over MAD Magazine. (I can still recall the cartoons — and the awe-inspiring sound effects — of Don Martin … Read more
One of the themes that sometimes pops up in Catholic reflections during Easter is the idea of the Resurrection as a sort of divine practical joke. There are grounds for it from both a human and from a supernatural perspective. As Garrison Keillor points out, the disciples on the Emmaus Road were the happy victims … Read more
If you examine an icon, you will notice that the figure in it will often be breaking out of the frame. Sometimes the hands, sometimes the halo, sometimes both are outside the border framing the image. That’s no accident. It’s part of what iconography is trying to get us to see: that the supernatural is … Read more
Recently, the Mainstream Media (MSM) got itself all in a tizzy about "the Vatican" supposedly issuing "seven new deadly sins." As one particularly egregious headline put it, "Recycle or go to hell, warns Vatican." Given this view of the Faith, discussions in the press then break down into inane prattle about mortal and … Read more
Me? I like my beer cold, my cars fast, and my Catholicism — thank you very much — crunchy.   “If we took the bones out, it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?” — Monty Python, The Confectioner’s Sketch  Me? I like my beer cold, my cars fast, and my Catholicism — thank you very … Read more
As a long-time fan of Star Trek, I have to say that the Prime Directive is majorly stupid and incoherent. Now, I realize I risk alienating a large number of people simply by speaking seriously about Star Trek. So I will hasten to add that I’m not one of the “Get a life!” people who … Read more
Here in Seattle, the Land at the End of History, all you have to do to induce complete credulity in the average Seattleite is preface whatever quack junk you are palming off on our highly sophisticated urban post-Christian crowd with “the Ancient Chinese art of” [insert quack junk]. After all, as we Seattleites all know, … Read more
The Beginning of the Gospel of Barack Obama, the Son of God (According to Mark Shea) 1:1 As it is written in the AP Manual, “Behold, I send my press corps before thy face, who shall prepare thy way.” And so it came to pass that pundits went forth into all that country, preaching a … Read more
One of the curious side effects of my line of work as a Catholic writer is that people will sometimes confess very odd phenomena they normally wouldn’t discuss with people who aren’t known for believing in miracles. Some years ago, a woman I know cleared her throat awkwardly, looked very sheepish, and asked me: “If … Read more
If David lived today, I have a feeling not a few modern-day Perfecti in the blogosphere would respond to Psalm 51 with something like the following . . . Â If David lived today, I have a feeling not a few modern-day Perfecti in the blogosphere would respond to Psalm 51 with something like the … Read more
Recently there has been a flurry of books from the “New Atheists.” Such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have been holding forth to state . . . well, not anything new. Â The reason there is nothing new to say is that there cannot, by the nature of the … Read more
It’s not that our Chattering Classes have no actual opportunities for courage. It’s that they assiduously avoid them wherever possible (after all, you could get hurt!). Case in point: this “No, I’m not making this up” blurb for atheist Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation: I can’t sign my name to this blurb. As … Read more
Most of us modern Christians congratulate ourselves that we’re tolerant and not judgmental. All that Old Testament brimstone is old hat. We’ve advanced and evolved. We’re more forgiving than our ancestors. But then a story like this catches our eye: Shouting, "This is YouTube material!" a 27-year-old British man urinated on a dying … Read more
Glenn Reynolds (aka "Instapundit") is the blogosphere’s resident libertarian transhumanist. We owe him a debt for leading the charge in making the blogosphere an important counterweight to the Usual Stuff from the mainstream media. And he has lived that belief personally by becoming the single most influential member of the New Media, simply by setting … Read more
In early August 2006, the Global War on Terror reached a new and disturbing phase, when it was discovered that Terror has now recruited certain liquids as deadly new allies in its bloodthirsty campaign to wipe out our freedom. As this dramatically heightened threat shows, Terror knows no bounds in its resourceful ability to find … Read more
C. S. Lewis once remarked that he was a converted pagan living among apostate Puritans. Our culture is, if anything, even more redolent of curdled apostate Calvinism than it was in Lewis’s day, and that fact can be seen everywhere. On a whimsical note, it is discovered in an NPR broadcast I heard a few … Read more
A culture of death is a culture of fear and ours is a culture of death. Fear is a sort of background radiation, a certain slant of light coming through red, lowering clouds and casting a strange pall over what used to be called “normal life.” The signs of it are everywhere. Here’s some Muslim … Read more
People with limited horizons tend to go for small and utterly implausible conspiracy theories. Blokes with some theory about the assassination of JFK are a dime a dozen. And for just that reason, they tend eventually to cancel each other out, leaving me simplistically thinking Lee Harvey Oswald was a trained marksman and a jerk … Read more
You may find Bill Donohue of the Catholic League a bit loud at times, but you have to admire his forthrightness in pointing out something so bleeding obvious that only a functionary for the USCCB film review office or a highly trained theologian could miss it. He writes: In the current Newsweek, Pullman lashes out … Read more
One of the leading Republican candidates for president — a Christian no less — recently made the following comment: Well, let’s remember that all law establishes morality. That’s what law does. The law of speeding is saying that it’s immoral to go at 85 miles an hour. The morality is that we have established a … Read more