January 29, 2015
PAUL writes:
Although Huckabee is lame overall as a presidential candidate, he often gets it right such as his criticism of the profanity used by females in his former workplace at Fox News. I never use profanity in the presence of a female using profanity even though my brain screams to hit her when an argument has begun. Men do it to one another to avoid a fistfight, unthinkable with a female. It is a big turnoff for me when a woman curses.
July 21, 2014
AST, Balthasar van der
Still-Life with Plums, Cherries, and Shells
c. 1628
ALAN writes:
My grandmother led a poor, pitiful, colorless life.
These are some of the things my grandmother never did:
— Shop in a supermarket permeated by rock “music”
— Set foot on an airplane
— Ride on a motorcycle
— Ride in a souped-up car
— Travel more than 150 miles from home
— Drink anything stronger than coffee
— Work in the workaday world
— Visit a “theme park”
— Set foot in a shopping mall
— Celebrate Feminism
— Wear pants
— Wear tattoos Read More »
June 30, 2014
LAURA E. writes:
Two of your blog’s recurring themes from the past few weeks merged in this article published in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. Apparently the Defense Department estimates that 71 percent of American young people, aged 17-24, would not qualify for military service if they tried to enlist. The most important reasons, as described in the article, are excessive body weight and tattoos.
I read so many journalistic pieces that echo the themes on your blog that I could make it my part-time job just sending you interesting tangential links :-) Nevertheless the mainstream press goes out of its way to avoid linking these phenomena, drawing the obvious conclusions, and then blazing a path to a better world. I have to turn to your blog for that synthesis. Keep fighting the good fight.
June 30, 2014
PHILOSCRIBE writes:
I thank Dr. Thomas F. Bertonneau and Laura Wood and the other commentators for the recent posts on the rising prevalence of tattoos and scarification among people in our society. It so happens that I had been thinking a lot about this lately.
I live in the rural northeast, in a part of the country that decades ago was hallowed out by the disappearance of manufacturing, leaving communities abandoned and mired in borderline poverty and families barely hanging on to a decent existence. Many of my neighbors and their families live in trailers. There is a segment of the population that is affluent, but the “middle” is nearly gone, leaving the communities polarized by extremes.
This is the background from which I write.
June 29, 2014
THIS essay by the Rev. James Jackson, FSSP, of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Littleton, Colorado, posted here in 2011, is worth revisiting in light of recent posts on the subject:
I was asked some time ago to give some guidance on tattoos, and though it took far too long to get to this, here is my advice on the subject.
In the Old Testament we read the following: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh, for the dead: neither shall you make in yourselves any figures or marks. I am the Lord.” (Lev. 19.28)
With that being said, we Catholics are not fundamentalists (may it please God) and it would be wrong to condemn everyone everywhere who has a tattoo, or even many tattoos. It so happens that in some cultures, marks on the flesh are quite acceptable. Ethiopian Christians tattoo the cross on their foreheads and I understand this to be an ancient custom. I’m not advocating cultural relativism here, but there is a social element to this morality.In Western societies however, a tattoo would serve a very different function e.g., mere decoration. So when would the decoration be unacceptable? Here are a few guidelines:
June 25, 2014
A Maori chief with tatttoos
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
Aristotle remarked in The Poetics that man is the most imitative of all animals. Two-and-a-half millennia later, picking up where Aristotle left off, René Girard developed an entire “Fundamental Anthropology,” drawing on Greek tragedy and the four Gospels, which argues (among other essential propositions) that the thing that people are most prone to imitate is the delusory impression that other people enjoy a degree of pure being greater than their own, which, as with all “mediated objects,” they strive to appropriate. Old sayings express the same observation. Thus “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” That is, my neighbor is better off than I am, and I can’t bear it. Biblical morality, as Girard notes, enjoins imitation, as in the Tenth Commandment and for the good reason that imitation unchecked runs to covetousness and so gives rise to conflicts in the community. Biblical religion, especially Christianity, offers consolation for the ascetic gesture of opting out of the wicked deliciousness of coveting things. It encourages people to develop their internal, or spiritual, resources. All of traditional Western high culture has the same aim – through ritual, philosophy, literature, and the arts to cultivate the soul by cultivating the virtues.
What has all of this to do with tattooing and the current craze for it?
April 28, 2012
BEN writes:
Alan wrote: “I suggest that “graffiti” is a word so drenched in mendacity that we should abandon it entirely. It is a buzzword favored not by decent men and women or by those who produce Art worthy of that name, but by Modernist Art racketeers and their flunkeys. Spray-paint vandalism is and should always be treated and described as a criminal act, not as any kind of “art.””
I’ll second that. In one of my classes at college the professor said something about tagging and graffiti being a form of art. I responded saying that only when done where it is welcome could it be considered art. Read More »
April 5, 2011
SEE this about a 35-year-old mother of four in today’s Daily Mail. These are gruesome images. Please don’t look at them while children are nearby. Notice how the woman justifies her appearance because she suffered domestic abuse. She may very well be the victim of beatings or torture. She has gone on to inflict horror on others.
By the way, the recent discussion of tattoos continues. In that entry, I responded to a photo sent by a reader of a tattoo that is particularly tasteful, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tattooed monster above. However, I said I did not find the far more tasteful image beautiful. (Leaving aside the obvious reality that a woman who has gone to such lengths to ornament her torso is unlikely to keep it private, as the photo proves.) I wrote:
I don’t find the image beautiful because it is on skin and thus calls to mind 1) the pain involved in receiving or removing the tattoo and 2) the inevitable appearance of this tattoo 30 years from now.
The skin is the most sensitive of human organs, the medium of exquisite contact with the physical world and with other human beings. It is sensitive to pain and pleasure like no other part of our bodies. There is nothing more beautiful in the young. It records time and change as if a sculptor was assigned to each one of us. I cannot understand leaving our own inferior impressions, however tasteful or artistic they may be, on what is so finely and mysteriously wrought. We must experience some injury to our awareness of what skin is or, by some misfortune of fate or congenital deficiency, never have possessed it in the first place, before we are tattooed.
April 2, 2011
THE REV. James Jackson, FSSP, of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Littleton, Colorado, offered his reflections on the subject of tattoos to his congregation in his parish bulletin last year. He wrote:
If the tattoo extols what is base or ugly (remember beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but is an objective reality), then it is contrary to the virtues of modesty and purity. Rejoicing in or promulgating what is ugly is also against the proper order of creation and the Creator.
His entire essay is reprinted below. Read More »