Jean Honore Fragonard, The Swing; 1766

THANK YOU to the small number of readers who have responded to my latest fundraising appeal. I am grateful for your support and especially for the support now and in the past of some who have given repeatedly. There are those who understandably cannot give anything.

A free press is never really free. There are always serious costs, mostly in labor and time, to producing any kind of ongoing publication. For magazines, the cost of the paper and mailing are small compared to the cost of labor. One of the hallmarks of anything done well is that it appears effortless. I like to think that is the reason so few readers help to sustain this particular garden of ideas. They mistakenly believe it doesn’t require great personal sacrifice on this end. Read More »

MONTHS ago, I informed readers that I was involved in an effort to start the American Traditionalist Society. Serious progress has been made on this project. One of the main purposes of the society is to bring together in various ways those who share many of the views expressed here. Unfortunately, I have to put aside my own involvement in this effort for now. I apologize for not being able to make this a reality yet. Organizing people is not one of my strengths. Others have great abilities in that area that I do not possess. Also, in some ways, I do not conform to the commonly agreed-upon definition of traditionalism.

Even so, if I were wealthy, I would buy an island off the northern coast of Maine and establish the headquarters of the American Traditionalist Society immediately. There would be no seminars, fancy conference rooms or PowerPoint demonstrations on this island. Our meetings would be strictly anti-modern in form and even the gulls, normally undiscriminating, would decline pizza. Instead, people would come in small numbers to walk and listen to the ancient vespers of the sea. Read More »

HERE is a terrific post by the blogger Matt Walsh on the “hook-up culture.” He writes:

Casual sex has liberated us, yet casual sex produces so many regrets. The landscape is rife with people who have felt the sting of our “hook-up culture.” Read More »

T.S. Eliot in 1934

LAST YEAR, Thomas F. Bertonneau posted an excellent series of essays on the disintegration of modern education at The Orthosphere. With his generous permission, I will be posting all four of the essays, which focus on T.S. Eliot’s writings on the subject. The first essay is below.

           T. S. Eliot, Culture, and Higher Education, Part I

Thomas F. Bertonneau

In the fall semester of 2012, beginning in September, my longstanding interest in what I call modern non-modern dissentient discourse found its articulation in a senior-level seminar on six authors whose work centrally constitutes the critique of modernity in the twentieth century.  These are, Nicolas Berdyaev, T. S. Eliot, René Girard, René Guénon, José Ortega-y-Gasset, and Eric Voegelin – thinker-writers whom contemporary college students likely never have encountered.  The main aims of the seminar were several: To alert students to the existence of the coherent, two-century-old tradition of dissent from the liberal-materialist worldview that they take almost entirely for granted and that the higher education establishment actively discourages them from questioning; thereby to introduce into their curriculum and, as I hope, into their education, actual intellectual diversity; and to demonstrate that the prose of criticism can be philosophically rigorous and spiritually challenging without relying on neologisms, the tropes of “transgression,” or hortatory phrases that, despite their intoxicating hyperbole, really amount to no more than slogans for rousing the rabble.  Read More »

ANTHROPOLOGY LIFE magazine reports an exciting and potentially ground-breaking discovery. Scientists have come across a remote South American tribe that has never eaten, or been exposed to, pizza. The Zuga-Zuga of the Amazon rainforest are believed to be the last people on earth to remain untouched by the Pizza-Industrial Complex. Tribe members have never even seen a stuffed mozzarella stick.

Scientists view this as a rare opportunity to study the effects of pizza consumption. Over the next two years, the Zuga-Zuga will be slowly introduced to a pizza diet. The tribe, which will be trained to use cell phones for quick delivery, will be divided into three groups. One will eat Domino’s, another Papa John’s and the third Giordano’s Tropical Delight Stuffed Pizza with Canadian Bacon and Pineapple. If after two years, tribe members demonstrate some of the same thickening of brain cells and midriffs common among American pizza-eaters, there is the distinct possibility that Obamacare will provide three hot meals a day in a three-star French restaurant to anyone addicted to pizza. If not, the Amazonian tribe members will be given a lifetime’s supply of coupons for the brand that wins out in a phone survey of their preferences. Scientists have spent years looking for anyone on earth who has not had a slice. This thrilling discovery is the talk of deliverymen everywhere.

JEWEL writes:

This piece by Randy Engel is perhaps the definitive, most exhaustive case against the normalization of sexual perversion. Enough with using the word “gay” or even “homosexual.” It’s perversion, period.

Interestingly, a number of other Catholics have denounced Engel for all the usual reasons for her criticism of Pope Francis, calling her slanderous and histrionic. My reading of this document is that she is on sound territory. My own experience with lesbians is that they are violent. They are angry, bitter and violent. I really think that it comes from not being with men in traditional marriage. I will give you an example.

Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

Next week, the nation will find itself wrapped up in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy. Anyone who watches television or enters a bookstore or supermarket will immediately confront the multiple books and magazines showing pictures of the late president and his family. Read More »

NOTICE the basic indifference with which the Hispanic woman interviewed in this video reacts to the alleged rape, beating and kidnapping of a white girl by a group of black teens in Hollywood. The woman blames the incident on “circumstances” and says the assailants’ lives were ruined too, as if there is no difference between being a victim and a violent criminal. If anyone publicly expressed sympathy for a gang of whites who brutally raped and kidnapped a black girl, he would see crowds of protesters at his door.

SAM writes:

The article you quote about women who find casual sex unsatisfying is illustrative of a moral outlook that exhibits all of the worst traits associated with the illiberal “vice” of “Puritanism.” The term “Puritanism” as liberals use it is difficult to define, but it often means something equivalent to “willingness to inflict or allow gratuitous pain and suffering in the interests of some trivial moral aim.” And here we have feminists exhibiting it in spades. Read More »

FROM a talk by the nineteenth-century priest Fr. Arnold Damen, S.J.:

In the sixteenth century Protestantism did away with the authority of the Church and constituted every man his own judge of the Bible, and what was the consequence?  Religion upon religion, church upon church, sprang into existence, and has never stopped springing up new churches, to this day.  When I gave my Mission in Flint, Michigan, I invited, as I have done here, my Protestant friends to come and see me.  A good and intelligent man came to me and said:

“I will avail myself of this opportunity to converse with you.”

“What Church do you belong to, my friend,”  said I.

“To the Church of the Twelve Apostles,”  said he.

“Ha! ha!”  said I, “I belong to that Church too.  But, tell me, my friend, where was your Church started?”

“In Terre Haute, Indiana,”  says he.

“Who started the Church, and who were the Twelve Apostles, my friend?”  said I.

“They were twelve farmers,”  said he; “we all belonged to the same Church, the Presbyterian, but we quarreled with our preacher, separated from him, and started a Church of our own.” Read More »

“We must remember that if all the manifestly good men were on one side and all the manifestly bad men on the other, there would be no danger of anyone, least of all the elect, being deceived by lying wonders. It is the good men, good once, we must hope good still, who are to do the work of Anti-Christ and so sadly to crucify the Lord afresh…. Bear in mind this feature of the last days, that this deceitfulness arises from good men being on the wrong side.”

—   Fr. Frederick Faber, Sermon for Pentecost Sunday, 1861

FEMINISTS have yet to figure out a way to make impersonal, dehumanizing sexual encounters “equal.” Men seem to have more fun. Why is this so? One sex expert offers her opinion:

Part of the problem … is that women still may be stigmatized for having casual sex.

The idea that women are “stigmatized” for having casual sex is just plain laughable. In fact, they are stigmatized for not having casual sex.

But a sex expert is not a rational creature. In her eyes, even though women are not, on the most basic animal level, enjoying casual sex, they should be encouraged to have more casual sex.

The world of sex science is not scientific at all. It is grounded in superstition.

ALEX writes:

The keepers of the Revolution are trying to figure out how to deal with the astonishing rates of “domestic” abuse among cohabitating homosexuals and lesbians. That’s a real problem when there is no straight male to be the a priori guilty party.

Read More »

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

Such are the inexhaustible riches of the spirit that they can be the property of all and yet satisfy the desires of each. Indeed, only then do we possess a truth completely when we teach it to others, when we make others share our contemplation; only then do we truly love a virtue when we wish others to love it also; only then do we wholly love God when we desire to make Him loved by all. Give money away, or spend it, and it is no longer yours. But give God to others, and you possess Him more fully for yourself. We may go even further and say that, if we desired only one soul to be deprived of Him, if we excluded only one soul — even the soul of one who persecutes and calumniates us — from our own love, then God Himself would be lost to us.

— Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ways in the Spiritual Life

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Paradise Inc., in Plant City, Fla., is the nation’s largest producer of candied fruit and peels.

JANE S. writes:

This is the season when my mother and I undertake our annual ritual of producing one of the most hated things on earth: fruitcake. If you’ve ever looked at that luridly colored candied fruit in the stores and wondered “who buys that stuff?”—it’s us. The only time I have ever had a supermarket clerk make wisecracks about my groceries, it was when I was buying ingredients to make fruitcake. Fruitcake-hatred is passed down as a family tradition. People are taught to hate it even if they’ve never tried it.

Fruitcake is so ancient, its origins are unclear. There are stories that the Egyptians and Sumerians packed it away in tombs for people to enjoy in the next world. Roman soldiers are said to have carried fruitcake on military campaigns and medieval knights took fruitcake along on Crusades. One wonders how something so hated has managed to survive for such a long time. Read More »