IN OCTOBER,  I briefly wrote about the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca by Swiss director Luc Bondy, who succeeded in desecrating this lush tragedy with pornographic gestures and swipes at Christianity. If you recall, Bartlett Sher, director of another Met production, subsequently called the act of booing, which had been freely engaged in by fans at the Tosca opening, “a self-interested expression of ownership.” Bondy sniffed, “I didn’t know that Tosca was like the Bible in New York.”

For those interested in a more thorough examination of the production with similar criticisms, I recommend Daniel B. Gallagher’s piece in the Catholic magazine, New Oxford Review. (It costs $1.50 to read in its entirety.)

And, in today’s issue of The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau, a commenter at TH, examines recent productions of Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens, an epic based on Virgil’s Aeneid. Berlioz’ heroic themes are also transformed by postmodern nullity. Bertonneau looks at a production by conductor Sylvain Cambreling and scene-designer Herbert Wernicke in which the Trojan soldiers are dressed in what appear to be Nazi uniforms. Bertonneau writes: (more…)

SANDRA WRITES:

I have been following your blog from the very beginning and I like it very much. You come across as a very intelligent, well-educated person. There is a question I’d like to ask you, concerning your thoughts on traditional family as you are one of the few voices on the Internet defending housewives. 

It seems that housewives nowadays are attacked both from left and right. Feminist attack on housewives is nothing new, of course, but during the recent years there emerged a new generation of bloggers who claim to be antifeminist, but attack the traditional homemaker quite viciously nonetheless. 

Their arguments can be summed up as follows: (more…)

RECENT FERTILITY statistics show something that has been widely noted for years: Women with lower educational and income levels are much more likely to have children out of wedlock and to enter into a life of single motherhood. They are also much more likely to get divorced. Fifty years ago, college-educated women were slightly less likely to be married than their less educated counterparts, and the majority of women at all education levels exhibited the maturity to enter into and maintain marriages early in adulthood. The difference today in marriage rates among the classes is often known as the “Marriage Gap,” a subject which author Kay Hymowitz and others have explored. (more…)

James H. writes about the previous post on blue collar men:

It’s not the smoking, the Brylcreem, the vodka or whisky – it’s the attitude. It’s being comfortable in your skin. It’s understanding where center is. It’s being your own man and not giving a damn about political correctness, progress, sending the kids to the right schools, keeping up with the Joneses, going to the “best” restaurants, having the most expensive toys or making the most money. It’s all about getting the job done and living within one’s means. Marrying a good woman and staying married. It’s about finding enjoyment in the simplest things. It’s about being easily pleased. It’s about being grateful. It’s about raising good kids – not the smartest or best athletes, but good. It’s about finding as much to appreciate within 50 miles as most can find within 5,000 miles. It’s about accepting responsibility and towing the line. It’s about duty. It’s about treasuring tradition, ritual, custom and convention. It’s about family and friends. It’s about not pursuing happiness or perfection in oneself, others or society. It’s about doing the best you can.

(more…)

  THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU WRITES: Regarding the “Michael Jackson Cult," the religious impulse is constitutive of human nature and never goes away, but the same impulse has a context or it does not. In our contemporary situation, relentlessly secular and hostile to tradition, not least to religious tradition, the religious impulse simply has no context. It remains “unschooled.” The human tendency to seek transcendent reference, to orient itself hierarchically, therefore operates haphazardly. Anything conspicuous strikes the naïve or “neo-primitive” seeker as – let us say – the equivalent of transcendence. Because the grotesque is always conspicuous, grotesqueries become the focus of wayward religiosity. It is not only the late (and by me unlamented) Mr. Jackson, it is the entirety of entertainment culture, which combines the bizarrely reductive with exaggerated sexuality and narcissistic egomania. The essence of all primitive gods is being, expressed as power or as charisma – which attracts attention and provokes the desire to imitate the divine model. Entertainers, by monopolizing public attention, appear to embody being; so they become models, icons, idols, and foci of a primitive type of worship.  The “Michael Jackson Cult” tell us that we have descended culturally into a new primitive phase. Primitive cultures endure many agonies – and we are likely to endure many agonies, until we achieve maturity again.

MARKUS WRITES:

I remember this type of man among my dad’s friends when I was little kid back in the late 70’s. As some of the commenters on the article mention, these men are still around, but up country in small towns, and Vancouver has moved away from being so dependent on forestry, mining and fishing. These are blue collar men through and through, an IT/white collar environment doesn’t need them any more, so they’ve retired to their small acreage out of town to live out the rest of their days.

 As the author of the article is a journalism instructor, he probably never was in that blue collar milieu, although he appreciates those guys for what they are. All in all a great article, reminds me of some men at church when I was little, no BS, straight up men. 

(more…)

 HANNON WRITES:

You may have caught a recent PBS program on frogs, called “Frogs: The Thin Green Line.” It looks at the alarming decreases in frog populations around the world. I’ve heard about this strange malady for years and it was an informative experience. What struck me as eerie was that the pitch was for science discovering and solving the problems, and of course our magnanimous role in conserving these wonderful animals in an act that itself is a part of evolution — this was stated explicitly by one of the scientists.

(more…)

SAGE McLAUGHLIN WRITES:

This link  about a New Age Michael Jackson mystery cult is not a parody, and while some people might find it funny- and really, I know why they would-  it strikes me as extremely sad.  

The author encourages readers to believe that “truth is a feeling” and that Michael Jackson is/was some sort of demi-god or spiritual avatar. Imagine the spiritual barrenness and desperation of the person who derives comfort from that. Consider the spiritual blight afflicting the society that produces such delusion.

(more…)

KIMBERLY WRITES:

I’ve been wanting to tell you about something that happened to me recently. It might not surprise you. It didn’t surprise me!

My 18-month-old boy is a sweet, smart little guy. But every now and then, he throws huge temper tantrums. It’s always when he’s told, No, he can’t have something, or No, he can’t go in there. If it happens when I am certain that he’s not tired and not hungry, then I can’t find any reason to allow it. He’s just trying to assert his will, and I’m not going to be a parent complaining about my “strong-willed child.” I think “strong-willed” means “proud fool.” (more…)

Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Josef Pieper

When people become so distracted they accidentally leave their children alone in cars, the question arises. Is it possible we’ve reached some catastrophic overload? Are we distracting ourselves to death?

Technology, many people would say, is the sole cause of the hyperactivity that seems endemic to our world. We can never go back to slower paced times. But this is a strange argument because technology does not use us, we use it. Is it possible people are frantically busy not because of their cellphones, computers and cars, but because energy and activity are our idols? If so, why? Why do we seem to worship effort?

This short and elegant book by the German philosopher Josef Pieper examines this important question. He writes:

Is it possible, from now on, to maintain and defend, or even to reconquer, the right and claims of leisure, in face of the claims of “total labor” that are invading every sphere of life? Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, education, culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.

Pieper wrote the two very readable essays in this book, “Leisure: the Basis of Culture” and “The Philosophical Act,” at the end of World War II. The book was first published in 1952. It seemed a bad time to talk about relaxation, and the same could be said of today. This is no time to consider the need for leisure. The problem now is not rest, but work, and there is not enough of it. But one might as well say this is no time to consider the need for food or love. Pieper uses the word “totalitarian” to describe the claims of the modern sphere of work. He thus gives to the subject the seriousness it deserves and will always deserve.

(more…)

IN THE WASHINGTON POST, Peggy Noonan suggests sex scandal in the Catholic Church could have been avoided if women had been at the helm:

The old Vatican needs new blood.

They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: “Hey, wait a minute!”

Natassia writes:

This struck me as rather sexist…as if there hasn’t been a well-documented history of mothers covering-up the abuse (sexual, physical, etc.) of their children by husbands, boyfriends, or male relatives. (more…)

 JOHN ERB writes:

 After reading this excerpt, I am not so much impressed by Mrs. [Susan Fenimore] Cooper’s conclusions about women’s suffrage, though I am not in disagreement with her conclusion; it is more her comments about Christianity in relation to women that cause me to wonder and question, as the theme she presents about Christianity and women is and has been often repeated, and something about it doesn’t seem quite right to me. (more…)

IN THIS entry, I quoted a college student who is studying Western philosophy. He said:

I find I have a lot to say about the mediocre texts, but not so much to say about the great texts.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Plato and Aristotle tend to leave thoughtful people in a quiet mood, especially Plato, because, to borrow a phrase, they bestride the intellectual world like colossi; they are the wisdom-teachers of the West (alongside scripture) about whom sensible people are most likely to become voluble when the opportunity comes or the necessity arises to explain their merits to the uninitiated.

(more…)