ALAN writes:

OF ALL the Christian denominations, the Eastern Orthodox Church takes Lenten fasting the most seriously. Here are the prescribed rules, which include abstinence from meat, dairy products and fish throughout Lent and abstinence from olive oil and wine for much of it. The Orthodox Lent extends from next Monday to the Friday before Palm Sunday. (more…)

  SEE Mary's excellent comment in this entry about the Penn State coach who has allowed his players to embrace the grunge look. Like the operators of a homeless shelter who stand by while their visitors over-eat, the coach has surrendered.

THE U.S. medical establishment, operating under obvious profit-making motives, now condones the mutilation and poisoning of children and adolescents who say they are confused and unhappy with their innate sex. In the ultimate manifestation of societal hatred of male and female, “gender identity” clinics have appeared at major pediatric hospitals. These clinics have invented a devastatingly effective sales pitch, as shown in this AP story. They tell frightened and gullible parents, who may be suffering from mental illness of their own, that their confused children – boys who fantasize about being girls and girls who fantasize about being boys – may commit suicide if they don’t submit to puberty-blocking hormones and surgery. Girls as young as 16 have had their breasts cut off under the supervision of Dr. Norman Spack, of the Children’s Hospital Boston.

The denial of innate sex differences has reached the point of mass hysteria. We are in the grip of collective mental illness and medical sadism.

(more…)

GRATEFUL READER writes:

On Sunday night, my family served a meal (prepared at our church) at a homeless shelter for women in a wealthy suburban town. My husband and son worked in the kitchen while my daughter and I took orders and served and chatted with the women. (more…)

OF ALL the I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening stories, this one takes the cake. I wish it was satire. I wish I could turn to you, reader, and say this is a spoof or a very dumb joke.

According to Stars and Stripes, a small number of male soldiers in the Army have been asked to simulate pregnancy, complete with fake breasts and distended bellies, in order to better empathize with the pregnant and post partum female soldiers they will be training. Seth Robson reports:

This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers. (more…)

UNDER NEW COACH Bill O’Brien, the Penn State Nittany Lions have dispensed with their former grooming standards and are now permitted to look as scruffy as the rest of the nation. Players can wear baseball caps, bandanas, long hair, goatees and any facial hairstyles they choose. If it looks like a billy goat with earrings, it must be a hard-working athlete.

Joe Ames writes:

Notice studiousness comes as an afterthought in the new coach’s listing of attributes. Blue collar comes first.  (more…)

IN A PREVIOUS entry, a reader wrote about a friend who said that all racial consciousness is wrong. Skin color means nothing, her friend said, and anyone who thinks it does is petty. Another reader wrote to me to say that racial identity has caused too many problems in history and should be suppressed.

The problem is, as I pointed out, those who make these arguments typically do not protest the explicit racial consciousness of non-whites. They are unlikely to be offended, for example, by this recent speech by Barack Obama in which he launched his African Americans for Obama 2012 campaign.

“We are far stronger together than we could ever be on our own,” Obama said. He said that if blacks do not stick together they will not get a “fair shot” economically.

It would be inconceivable for a white politician to make similar statements. His career would end forever.

Why is it permissible for a black to speak this way and not a white person? If whites are truly desirous of an end to racial sensitivity, why don’t they protest?

(more…)

MARK STEYN writes about the supreme irony of government-mandated contraception and abortion at a time of pending demographic disaster:

This is a very curious priority for a dying republic. “Birth control” is accessible, indeed, ubiquitous, and, by comparison with anything from a gallon of gas to basic cable, one of the cheapest expenses in the average budget. Not even Rick Santorum, that notorious scourge of the sexually liberated, wishes to restrain the individual right to contraception. (more…)

DIANA writes:

I wonder if you are aware of “Linsanity.” Just in case you are not, Jeremy Lin is an unlikely basketball star who has recently shot to fame as a result of some wonderful play for New York City’s woeful basketball team. He came off the bench and has become a team leader. (more…)

JEANETTE V. writes:

I’ve been thinking about how to react to a comment left on a group I belong to by a Christian man I admire very much. I guess I’m a racist because not only do I believe race entails some personality traits, but I’ve seen this in action. I’m Hispanic (on my mother’s side) and have a lot of what is often called “Latin” behaviors. I’m loud and quite emotional. So how do I gently disagree with this man without getting banned forever from a group of Christians I admire?

[In his words,] “skin color is an immutable, innate, and inborn characteristic that has nothing to do with behavior. If you believe a person’s skin color is directly related to the way he behaves, that’s racist.” (more…)

AMID A serious push to decriminalize prostitution in Canada, a Winnipeg judge this week ordered a light sentence for a woman who ran a brothel in her home with her young children’s knowledge.

Justice Deborah McCawley accepted the middle-aged defendant’s claim that she ran a sex business, employing a dozen young women and an 18-year-old boy, for essentially humanitarian reasons. The woman said she wanted to provide a safe place for young people to practice the trade. She also asserted it had been the culmination of her girlhood career ambitions. (more…)

Juan de Yepes Álvarez was born into a Jewish family in a small town near Ávila, Spain in 1542. He became a Carmelite priest after attending a Jesuit school and is famous today as reformer, theologian, mystic, poet and saint. St. John of the Cross, in his writings on the progress of the soul, stressed that one cannot approach God except through darkness and confusion. He wrote movingly of the ineffability of God’s love.

To celebrate the new scanner that I hooked up to my computer today, which will make what was ineffable effable, I am quoting this passage from his The Dark Night, which is addressed to his fellow contemplatives:

Contemplation is called “secret” not only because of one’s inability to understand but also because of the effects it produces in the soul. The wisdom of love is not secret merely in the darknesses and straits of the soul’s purgation (for the soul does not know how to describe it) but also afterward in the illumination, when it is communicated more clearly. Even then it is so secret that it is ineffable. (more…)

LOOK at the opening paragraphs of this article at ScienceDaily:

Women with advanced degrees in math-intensive academic fields drop out of fast-track research careers primarily because they want children – not because their performance is devalued or they are shortchanged during interviewing and hiring, according to a new study at Cornell University. (more…)

HE HAD unusually large ears that stood out like satellite dishes alongside his heavily grooved face. He wore a hearing aid nevertheless and a white, blood-stained apron. Three days a week, he worked at the chicken counter, slicing fryers, hacking bones and tossing out giblets.

I started to go the local farmers’ market more than 20 years ago and most Wednesdays I would buy six pounds of chicken bones, as well as other things, at the stand where Bill worked. I made broth with the bones.

Bill and I had instant rapport. I would look for him every week and we usually talked before and after he filled my order, a routine that seems archaic in an age of supermarkets and high-speed commerce but is still possible in some isolated corners of America where retail has not been thoroughly air-brushed and conglomeratized.

It is always smart for a merchant to show interest in his regular customers. But Bill did not own the place. So when I say he always asked how I was with genuine and disarming interest, I should add that this was not salesmanship. It may have been part flirtation, but Bill was not capable of salesmanship. He had a transcendent relationship with the drumsticks and turkey necks before him. They were a help with the bills, but they were also the means by which he achieved the more important business of catching up with the customers.

I know other women enjoyed chatting with him at the counter too and also lit up when they saw him, but I liked to think there was some element of exclusivity in our friendship. Although he was well into his seventies when we first met and had worked as a truck driver for many years, a way of life that would seem to preclude much in the way of common interests between us, he was one of the most charming men I have ever known. (more…)