Kütahya Last month, after having lunch with a friend in Dumbo, I decided spontaneously to take a tour of the Watchtower buildings – the Jehovah’s Witnesses World Headquarters in Brooklyn Heights. It’s one of the things you grow up with in New York City – you tell the time and the temperature by it whenever you’re […]
Category Archives: Right Thinking
Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing […]
In monotheistic folklore – meaning the folktales of Christians and Muslims, and I bet in Talmudic Judaism as well, though I have not seen it for myself – there is a persistent theme of a powerful king persecuting a good, peaceful believer. Among the Christians the persecutors are typically Nero and Diocletian, and their victims […]
I was born Catholic, and I remain so, but I do not believe I became a real Christian until four years ago, when I had what we may as well call my conversion. It happened as follows. Some young men have difficulty measuring up to their fathers. My brother and I have had something of […]
Merrie Olde England.
06-May-12A nice interview about the ever-interesting 18th century. The most remarkable thing to my eyes: We have very good data on births outside marriage and births within seven months of marriage, which is a pretty good indicator of people having had sex before marriage. These are aggregate statistics covering the whole [of England], and show […]
Of all the Hitchens videos posted recently, this is my favorite. He is eloquent without stint after a slow exordium, chronicling various ecclesiastical offenses, moving from ones the hierarchy acknowledges to fresh and contemporary outrages. “I don’t know I think I’d like to hear more shame about this. I’d like to see a bit more […]
An unusually bad essay crossed my computer screen the other day, by Peter Kreeft, who is apparently a kind of figure in Conservative Catholic circles. To give a sense of what sort of person he is, supposedly he was asked whether a Catholic could be a liberal, and he said it was “a very challenging […]
Reading a fair amount of Plutarch recently, the lives of Timoleon, Aemilius Paulus, Pelopidas, and Marcellus. What a superb man. Below is very nearly a summa of the highest, deeds-oriented (as opposed to eloquence-oriented) Classicism. You can hear how much he shaped the writerly outlook on Montaigne fifteen centuries later – what a thought, that […]
Saint Charles Gray of Eugene.
31-Oct-11One of my all-time favorite people and one of the people whose example I continually return to in my thoughts – a saint indeed. He came up in a conversation with a friend about Occupy Wall Street, so I post this fine little obituary. I thought I had posted it before at some point, but […]
Apologia Pro Carolo Gustavo Jung.
08-Jan-13purchace isotretinoin online There are some rules in the intellectual world which are pretty reliable for detecting bloviating stupidity, or blathering solipsism (or however you want to render b.s.), and one of them is this: if someone launches a five-thousand word attack on a noted author, and almost never quotes a line from the voluminous works of that […]