The noted psychologist and author Dr. Leonard Sax recently visited our youngest daughter’s school for a talk with parents, focused on his recent book, The Collapse of Parenting. Sax is a leading proponent of treating boys and girls differently, and educating them separately; previous titles of his are Girls on the Edge (2005), Boys Adrift … Read more
“Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church in all its decoration; it is the church’s greatest ornament.” ∼ Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Igor Stravinsky is everyone’s idea of a “modern composer.” The riot that accompanied the premiere of his 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring has … Read more
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., among others, thought highly of Orestes Brownson—indeed, Russell Kirk, who led the Brownson revival in the last century, placed him “in the first rank of American men of ideas,” and his work is of more than historical interest. Reflections on American society as good as Tocqueville? Check. Addressing a devastating critique … Read more
“You’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock n’ roll worse.” ∼ Hank Hill on “Christian Rock” from King of the Hill There are these musical artists who have done some religious music or who have moved from gospel to mainstream or who have dabbled in it, but there is someone else who is not … Read more
John Zmirak makes all the right heads explode. For that alone, we should be grateful. John caused quite an Internet kerfuffle a few years ago with a column called Illiberal Catholicism where he identified and took apart a tendency he spotted among young Catholics who were trending toward a hatred of America, a belief now … Read more
In view of the two recent presidential debates I find these words of Plato remarkable: They think they are having not a quarrel but a conversation, because they are unable to examine what has been said by dividing it up according to its forms. Hence, they pursue mere verbal contradictions of what has been said … Read more
A British explorer ship that sank in the Arctic in the 1840s while searching for the Northwest Passage, was located this year on September 3, remarkably intact under the ice. The HMS Terror was one of the ships that attacked Fort McHenry in Baltimore in 1814. Some of the “bombs bursting in air” may have … Read more
A young boy, 10 years old or so, faces the camera. Like many young boys he is happy to be interviewed. This is war-torn Iraq, however, so he tells of the day ISIS came to his village. What took place, horror after horror, he starts to recount. It is hard to accept that one so … Read more
Maybe it takes a Torah scholar and religious Jew to help us understand the roots of the inverted values that animate Western civilization. For over ten years, author and radio talk show host Dennis Prager taught the first five books of the Bible verse-by-verse at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. According to Prager … Read more
“After remaining quiescent for centuries in the narrow confines of the lands around the Baltic, the peoples of the North suddenly poured forth in a wave of conquering expansion… They had attacked Constantinople and Pisa and North Persia and Moslem Spain, while their settlements and conquests embraced Greenland and Iceland and Russia, as well as … Read more
Outside the narrow and parochial hipster community in Hollywood, practically no one had ever heard of Robert Arquette. Had he not been born into the Arquette acting clan—David, Patricia, and Rosanna—he likely wouldn’t have even been known there either. He had bit roles in a few Independent movies, but mostly performed in Hollywood drag shows … Read more
First there was Bella, then there was October Baby, followed by Gimme Shelter—three films with unabashedly pro-life messages—and not surprisingly all three produced by Christian film-makers in what has become known as the faith-based film genre. This reviewer has been quite open about her opinion of nearly all films created by dedicated Christians—with a few … Read more
In Germany, reality and media-hype are worlds apart when it comes to Pope Benedict’s latest book-length interview called Last Conversations (Letzte Gespräche) in German (and Last Testament in English). Accused of lacking tact, of wanting to interpret his own pontificate when this should be left to others, and of bashing the German hierarchy when he … Read more
Police shootings have been lighting up the media for the last couple of years, with incidents such as Philando Castile’s death in Falcon Heights, MN and Alton Sterling’s in Baton Rouge, LA continuing to raise questions and inspire protests this summer. Hardly had the nation composed itself before blood ran again, this time in Tulsa, … Read more
HBO’s animal rights documentary Unlocking the Cage, now playing in art theaters across the country, is a signature piece for the respected cable outlet. Although it is not the first documentary of this kind, it comes with a pedigree of esteemed filmmakers and a unique protagonist in the form of a Harvard trained lawyer who … Read more
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? ∼ T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock A little over a decade ago, I sat behind a one-way mirror in a nondescript office building outside Denver, watching a focus group go through the motions with a skilled … Read more
Be careful what you read—it may change you, for better or worse. In the case of Joseph Pearce, his early reading made him a violent white supremacist. It also landed him in jail. While there, he continued to read; only this time, he read the works of G.K. Chesterton. It was not so much that … Read more
Egyptian embalmers attributed all emotive response and intelligence to the heart, and so they threw the brain away, assuming that it would not be needed in the afterlife. That life to come was not at all like the Heavenly City that was shown to Saint John, with no need for sun or moon in the … Read more
My wife and I recently decided that we needed to move out of our house. The most pressing reason was that, unfortunately, we discovered mold in the girls’ room. For the sake of our health, we quickly came to the conclusion that the only choice for us was to find a new house. The reality … Read more
Whenever I’m in a diner or a family restaurant, I look around for the most cheerful thing in any day’s experience, and that’s a young husband and wife and their children. Today the two children sitting with their parents at the table next to us were a baby boy and his four-year-old brother. The four … Read more
