“This, then, is the great white paradox: Whites claim to adore “diversity,” but they make every effort to avoid it. They make every important decision in their lives — where to live, whom to marry, where to send their children to school, whom to choose as friends, which church to attend — as if it were made for racial reasons, but deny that race had anything to do with it. As one wag put it, in their mating and migratory habits, liberals are no different from members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

                 — Jared Taylor, A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century (p. 325)

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A POEM by Mark Signorelli .

Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s essay on youth can be found here.

GRETCHEN writes:

BROTHER NATHANAEL, a Jewish convert to “Orthodox” Christianity, writes about the interior world of Jews in a three-part series called “How Jews Think.” Obviously, these are generalizations, and generalizations, if one accepts them, are what they are, they don’t apply to everyone:

HAVING GROWN UP AS A JEW and having gone to an upper middle class synagogue throughout my childhood up through my young adult years, I am uniquely qualified to do an expose on the inner workings of the Jewish mind. Now that I am an Orthodox Christian, having converted in 1971 to Christianity, I can see very clearly how the Jew thinks: Read More »

The Annunciation by Bl. Fra Angelico at the Convento di San Marco, Florence

FEMINISM, which is the hatred of womanhood and manhood embodied in the myth of feminine infallibility, could never take root in a culture that truly loved and honored the Mother of God. Feminism has been the most virulent in those nations — Britain, America and Russia — which have spurned Mary and rejected national veneration of her. Feminism could never reconcile its theories of history and male oppression with true devotion to this one woman or explain why women were queens and abbesses, virgins involved in great charitable and intellectual enterprises and mothers who owned property and businesses during the age when Mary was accorded the most respect. She is the lodestar of feminine excellence. Her humility is towering strength. It crushes the serpent underfoot.

Today, on the Feast of the Annunciation, we honor the day when this poor Jewish girl was approached by an angel and assented to the unimaginable. “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” she would later say to her cousin, Elizabeth. Is there any greater rebuke to feminism’s claims? Read More »

A FEW DAYS ago, on Sunday, I was driving on a highway about an hour away when I passed by one of those mega-sized Protestant temples, a mammoth structure surrounded by acres of parking. It was one of those places where the sanctuary is filled with seats like they have in movie theaters and on the stage there’s a screen with a large image of a cross.

Almost immediately afterwards, I passed two billboards. One was for bariatric surgery. That’s the procedure whereby doctors mutilate the intestines to try to save the patient from gluttony. The other was an enormous billboard for chicken wings. It was a vivid image of chicken wings, somewhat like the one above but even more vivid.

It occurred to me then, as I thought of that temple filled with people who believe Lenten fasting is unnecessary and even decadent because once you believe in Jesus Christ you are SAVED no matter what you do, no matter how many chicken wings you cram down your throat, that Protestantism leads to a culture of obesity. People who are so large that they must travel the aisles of Walmart in scooters are the victims of a theological hoax. They have not been told the truth about gluttony and salvation and have probably never been encouraged to fast not to lose weight but to please God.

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SJF writes:

“During the preceding four weeks, we have noticed how the malice of Jesus’ enemies has been gradually increasing. His very presence irritates them; and it is evident that any little circumstance will suffice to bring the deep and long-nurtured hatred to a head. Read More »

THE VAST majority of people in our world have retained some kind of conviction, however shadowy, in the immortality of the soul. “Well, wherever he is now, I’m sure he’s happy,” people might say at a funeral (or a “celebration of life,” as they call funerals today). This conviction is the legacy of centuries of a Christian social order that no longer exists. Very few Westerners believe in reincarnation or total oblivion.

However, most also believe that it is only just and fair that someone who was basically decent should be happy in the afterlife. By basically decent, I mean someone who fulfilled many duties to family and friends, never broke the law, had minor defects but was good-hearted. It greatly offends modern sensibilities to think that this kind of niceness and decency is not rewarded by God or that it is even punished.

The problem with this view is it’s not what God has revealed about eternity. It substitutes human judgment for divine reason.

It also doesn’t make sense.

Heaven is not earth. It is a supernatural state. In order to pass from the natural into the supernatural sphere, we must acquire supernatural virtues. In order to qualify for the Olympic Games, to use one analogy, one must meet certain athletic qualifications. The belief that someone can get to Heaven because they have been generally decent and good is similar to the belief that someone who is a great software engineer should be able to compete in the decathlon.

To take another analogy, in order to live on Mars, we need oxygen. In order to live in heaven, we need spiritual oxygen, which is a supernatural gift — a gift from God which we can refuse or accept — and involves not just works but faith.

As Thomas Nelson writes in his introduction to Liberalism Is a Sin, by Fr. Felix Sarda Y Salvany:

Heaven … is a supernatural state, an end or objective above man and beyond his ability to again, a goal which man on his own cannot achieve. It is the presence of God. It is the eternal vision of God and an eternal sharing in the life of God Himself. But this is not something within the nature of man to achieve or possess. It is rather a special, supernatural gift from God, an unwarranted (on man’s part), gratuitous GIFT OF GOD. We do not deserve it. We can only attain it but the special, supernatural assistance which God has given us through the knowledge of the “faith of God” (Rom. 3:3) and the help of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, the divinely revealed religion. These Sacraments were given by Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, to the Church and are supernatural means to give us supernatural assistance to save our souls and attain Heaven, a supernatural end.

The sad fact is, we can be pretty sure that many “good people” are in hell. Of course, we never know who those people are and we certainly should never presume to conclude that anyone we meet or know will meet this end. Unfortunately, when these common sense points are made the person making them is often accused of somehow relishing the idea that good people are damned. This is a monstrous accusation. It is a form of rhetorical aggression, meant to deflect attention away from the meat of the matter. As Frank Sheed wrote in his book Theology and Sanity:

The gulf between non-living and living is not so great as the gulf between natural life and supernatural. The purpose of this supernatural life … is that in Heaven we may see God direct. But we do not wait until then to receive the supernatural life. It is given to man in this life. Everything else is incidental, on the fringe, of no permanent importance. When we come to die we are judged by the answer to one question — whether we have the supernatural life in our soul. If we have, then go to Heaven we shall surely go, for the supernatural life is the power to live the life of Heaven. If we have not, then we cannot possibly go to Heaven, for we could not live there when we got there. Grasp clearly that the supernatural life, which we call also sanctifying grace, is not simply a passport to Heave: it is the power to live in Heaven. (Fulton Sheed, Theology and Sanity; Sheed and Ward, New York, 1946; p.151) Read More »

SOME PEOPLE maintain that “Pope” Francis is dumb. He is not an articulate man, but he is most certainly not stupid.

Take, for example, his visit to a prison in Naples today in which he will reportedly meet with 90 prisoners, ten of whom are transsexuals. Read More »

PARENTS and friends scaled the school walls to provide students in India with cheat sheets.

JEANETTE V. writes:

Look at the photos of the art recently installed in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s hideous. It looks like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

HANS BADER writes about the Office of Civil Rights and its blatant encouragement of civil rights violations at colleges:

Thanks partly to OCR stacking the deck, it can be much cheaper for a college to expel a possibly innocent student than to find him not guilty. Even before OCR’s recent rules changes, colleges had massive incentives to suspend or expel students who might be guilty of sexual assault or harassment. Read More »

KARL D. writes:

It appears even the dead are not safe from the Eco-Warriors. A disgusting idea has been born called the “Urban death project.” It proposes erecting a giant, tower-type structure that will essentially be used in an industrialized system to turn your dead loved ones into mulch to replenish the earth. The grief-stricken can be given a small box of human mulch!! Read More »

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Larry Elder — that rarity in post-America: a native Angeleno who still lives in LA, and a man I would call a black realist — calls out former National Security Adviser, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Colin Powell for telling George Stefanopoulos on ABC’s This Week he still thinks there is a “dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the Republican Party on race,” a claim Powell first made years ago and appears fond of repeating. Read More »

Portrait of a Young Woman, Gaetano Gandolfo

GUILAIN writes in response to this previous discussion:

A woman’s looks are definitely a priority for most men when it comes to finding a girlfriend or a wife. But I think a man living on a desert island would have different priorities. If such a man could choose a single woman to share his life, her looks would not matter as much as they do in human societies.

Many men want their wives or girlfriends to look good in order to see other men gazing at them with envy. It gives men a feeling of superiority. That’s why they like exhibiting their “beautiful” women in crowded (and ugly) areas such as the streets of a big city. They’re not that much interested in romantic walks in the beautiful (but quiet) countryside. The same phenomenon exists with sports cars, or expensive clothes. You would think that Ferrari owners would want to drive their cars on empty roads, where they can actually use the engine’s power. But actually they often prefer being blocked in the traffic jams of trendy town centers because there they can show the world how important they are. Read More »