GUIDO RENI'S Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus (1635)

N.W. writes:

I thought you’d appreciate this story my mother told me. A woman asked her 11-year-old son if he knew why the priest wore rose colored vestments at Mass last Sunday morning. After a moment’s thoughtful pause, the boy replied “I don’t know for sure but I think it has something to do with breast cancer awareness, right?” (more…)

  PAINTED in 1474, Antonello Da Messina's Portrait of a Man is striking for its naturalness and luminous quality. The face is of an unknown man in a setting with a plain black background, no landscape or vista behind him. "The sitter's gaze meets our own, establishing a suggestive dialogue," says the Galleria Borghese's catalogue of its finest masterpieces. Da Messina's portrait is far more beautiful where it hangs in the famous Roman gallery than it appears here and yet the pleasure of establishing a dialogue with this interesting, subtle face remains. You can also see a better version of it here at Art Renewal.

WRITING at The Orthosphere, Kristor examines a rhetorical weapon highly effective against modern liberalism. He writes:

Utopians are almost always intoxicated by some grand, glorious and beautiful vision, so that they tend to make sweeping statements of perfect generality. This tendency makes them, and their ideas and proposals, quite vulnerable to a rhetorical technique known as retortion. Retortion applies a doctrine to itself, to see whether it survives the treatment. If it does, the doctrine is more likely sound. If not – well, then it is dead. A doctrine that does not survive retortion is autophagic: self-devouring. (more…)

IN A recent article at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Thomas F. Bertonneau considers the relevance of the parable of Plato’s cave to higher education today. He writes:

The Parable of the Cave presents some truths that the contemporary academy, steeped in egalitarian ideas and committed to blandness and relativism in everything, mainly avoids facing. (more…)

  THANK  YOU to those who have contributed so far to my latest fundraising drive. I greatly appreciate your generosity. For those who would still like to contribute, they can make a donation to help keep this website in existence here.

LAST MONTH, we discussed the publication of two disturbing articles by British female academics. The ethicist Francesca Minerva argued in an academic journal that it is not immoral for parents to put to death newborns with cognitive problems. And, another ethicist, Anna Smajdor, wrote in a prestigious journal that because pregnancy is unfair to women and prevents them from attaining equality with men, the development of artificial wombs is necessary and good.

Now, as if all this wasn’t enough to prove the bankruptcy of British intellectual life, another shallow, unprincipled, and hopelessly juvenile feminist professor makes her mark.

Susannah Cornwall, a theology professor at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, argues in a lengthy paper for the Centre for Religion and Political Culture that there is no proof  that Jesus was a man. He may have been an “intersex” person, neither fully male nor female.

Cornwall, (I know she looks like a waitress at the local sports bar, but she is a certified theologian), writes:

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JONAS HIMMELSTRAND, a well-known Swedish family activist, has left his native country to escape heavy fines for homeschooling his two children, according to Caroline Moynihan of MercatorNet.com. Homeschooling is illegal in Sweden.

Himmelstrand is the founder of Mireja, a pro-family organization critical of Swedish family policies, which offer generous parental leaves for parents of babies and heavily subsidized day care. As discussed in this previous post, Himmelstrand contends socialized child care has caused an increase in  childhood psychological problems and an inability by Swedish parents to discipline their children. He has spoken widely in Europe and North America. At Mireja, Himmelstrand writes: (more…)

  SEE my comments on the Violence Against Women Act at U.S. News and World Report.  Readers are able to register their agreement or disagreement with me by clicking one of the boxes to the left of my entry.                                               

  JAMES P. writes: The Daily Mail has some photos of America in 1940. WARNING: Modern readers may find the images of clean, well-dressed white people with large families shocking and offensive; they are rated "NC-17" (Not Correct for readers under the age of 17). Note also the article's obsessive interest in Japanese-Americans, who were a tiny fraction of the 1940 population.

DIANA writes:

These are not questions that address the actual legal swamp/thicket that Dharun Ravi was placed in during his trial for hate crimes by the New Jersey state prosecutors office. That is a whole can of worms, which begins in the legislature, and which involves such noisome organizations as “Garden State Pride” – I checked their website after this wretched verdict, and it reeked of preening triumphalism. (more…)

THIS DETAIL from Federico Fiori Barocci’s Flight to Egypt (1570) depicts Joseph, whose feast day is today, in an unusually carefree pose as he playfully hands an olive branch to Christ.

Joseph, most faithful and most courageous, mirror of patience and lover of poverty, watch over us.

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MISS UNIVERSE Canada has accepted a “transexual” male as a contestant in its beauty pageant, according to the pageant website Missosology. Given that Jenna Talackova is legally female even though he is a man, pageant officials concluded that it was inappropriate to exclude him and by the logic of radical equality and homosexual liberation, they are correct. (more…)

IN THE entry on the Democratic Party’s sinister, idiotic and thoroughly baseless allegations of a Republican “War on Women,” I stated that it is actually liberalism that has conducted a war on women for decades. By every conceivable social indicator, with the exception of how much money women earn, females at large – and that includes children – are worse off than they were prior to the 1960s. This is not to exonerate the Republicans, who are typically supporters of feminism too and haven’t the conviction to defend themselves against such claims. My intention is merely to point to the irreversibly warped state of mind behind the Democratic campaign.

To a reader who said liberalism’s freedoms, presumably sexual and economic freedoms, cannot possibly be construed as anti-woman, the reader Jesse Powell, who is a man, responds:

When a man says to a woman “you are free” he is at the same time saying “you are on your own.” Women’s liberation equals male abandonment. From the man’s point of view the purpose of liberating women is precisely to enable and justify abandoning women. (more…)