Should we also raise the household debt limit?
If you’re having a hard time understanding the problem with raising the statutory debt limit (yet again), here it is on a family scale:
Giving Gifts, Counting Costs
Rumors are flying. Is she or isn’t she? Will she or won’t she? The subject is celebrity mom Katie Holmes, naturally, and the second child she is rumored to be currently gestating or planning to conceive with her husband, Tom Cruise. Let the talking and stalking begin! I don’t usually pay much attention to tabloid … Read more
Community: A Conversation with Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry, novelist, essayist, poet, and farmer, is a central contributor to the growing renaissance of Christian culture. Although he does not, in his lean careful writing, broach religion directly, he writes as one completely at home with the Christian tradition. His readers are numerous and ever growing, drawn to his scriptural and Aristotelian-Thomistic view … Read more
Hollywood: America’s Heartbreak Town
Over at “The Deacon’s Bench,” Deacon Greg links to a brutally sad GQ interview with Billy Ray Cyrus, the former country music superstar now probably best known as “Miley Cyrus’ Dad.” Fame has not been kind to Mr. Cyrus, nor to his daughter, whose recent escapades have been well-documented and greatly lamented. Her rejection as an “appropriate … Read more
Biblical Evidence for the Perpetual Virginity of Mary
This being V Month, I thought it might be novel to turn our thoughts away from PC obsessions with sex and have a little fun subverting of the Dominant Paradigm. To that end, I thought it might be good to run a little series on the perpetual virginity of Mary, both the evidence for it … Read more
Tackling the third rail of teen pregnancy
Gerry Garibaldi, a teacher at an inner-city school in Connecticut, talks frankly in an article for the City Journal about why his kids are failing in school — and why the problem won’t be solved by more money: Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which … Read more
Time for married priests?
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
Mommy Wars, Schmommy Wars
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
Long Live Absurdity
Everywhere except in the field of jurisprudence, the reductio ad absurdum is accepted as a logical argument. The reductio always takes this form: If you can show that a certain premise leads to an absurd conclusion, then there is something radically wrong with the premise, and you then either have to reject the premise or at least … Read more
A brave new baby-making world
Nicole Kidman and her country music star husband, Keith Urban, welcomed a second child into their family last month. If you didn’t know she was pregnant, don’t worry — she wasn’t. Nor did she and her husband adopt. Here’s the statement they released to TMZ: Our family is truly blessed, and just so thankful, to … Read more
Declaring God “Mountain Dead”
This piece by Joe Carter at First Things prompted me to think about hillbillies. It cites some studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which found “that atheists and agnostics report anger toward God either in the past or anger focused on a hypothetical image of what they imagine God must be like.” … Read more
The Essential Tourist
I have often cited Evelyn Waugh’s solution to living in socialist Britain. Life was possible there, he decided, only on the condition that he think of himself as a tourist. Was this ruse or realism? In a deep sense we are all tourists here, even when trodding the green, green grass of home. Travel is … Read more
Heroic love knows no age
I don’t know if you’ve seen this story out of Queensland, Australia, but it’s about a 13-year-old hero named Jordan Rice. With flood waters about to wash them away, Jordan was stuck in a car with his mother and 10-year-old brother: Warren McErlean, a passerby who tried desperately to save the family when their white … Read more
Within the Pale: The Making of Community
Years ago, when Russell Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind, he defined the towering problem of our time as “the problem of community lost and community regained.” It is natural that we crave community, which is the union we have with others through common affection and spiritual and practical interest. To desire community, especially the primary … Read more
The Long and Whining Road
My husband and I were recently inspired to pack ourselves, our eight kids, and 13,000 Capri Sun juice boxes into our twelve-passenger van and drive more than 1,500 miles to spend Christmas in south Florida. It was epic — if by epic you mean a wildly memorable trip that was “so perfectly worth doing” but also … Read more
One mom’s experiment to reclaim her kids
The Independent has a story about one mom’s decision to bar the use of technology in her family’s house for six months. Susan Maushart was becoming anxious about the amount of her time her three children spent transfixed by technology. Her son was hooked on his gaming console, one daughter was addicted to social networking … Read more
OK, How Is This Legal?
I was just told about www.spokeo.com, a new “white pages” service costing (I believe) $2.95 annually. For free, I accessed my own name, approx. age, address, map location, house photo, phone number, and family members’ names (two of them, anyway), as well as how long I’ve lived in my house. If I were to pay the … Read more
A Different Kind of Christmas Movie
Has there ever been a season that has stood by Hollywood longer or more faithfully than Christmas? From Clarence’s Twain-wielding celestial bumbler to Wallace and Davis dancing their former commander back to relevance; from leggy lamps and BB guns to John McClane’s profane holiday jingles — the list of memorable Yuletide moments is almost endless. Nearly … Read more
Sunday Comics (on a Monday): Rose Is Rose
I don’t know if you’ve ever run into Rose Is Rose, but it’s a fairly long-running strip about a married couple (with a delightful, romantic relationship), their young son, and often his guardian angel. Imaging–a funny strip that doesn’t descend into cynicism and sarcasm! Amazon.com has lots of collections of the strip, and our family … Read more
How not to fail our children
Anyone looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for those notoriously hard-to-shop-for friends and family members should consider picking up a copy of Anthony Esolen’s latest book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. Tony, a regular contributor at IC, has written many beautiful reflections here that comment thoughtfully on the sorry state of … Read more
