COMMENTS have been added to the original entry on the 12,000-word mega-interview with Pope Francis, an event of great significance. Here is an additional comment by a reader:

Catherine H. writes:

I am particularly taken aback by discovering how many of my husband’s and my friends and family, who generally agree with us on our “ultraconservative” stance in most other areas, see Pope Francis and this particular interview in a completely different light. Read More »

SERENA HUDSON writes:

Yet another feminist breaks down under the stress of working and having a family and passes the buck to society at large. In this article about Katrina Alcorn and her book Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink, one thing stood out for me:

“If you’re feeling on your edge, you need to figure out how to take care of yourself by any means necessary. I heard a story recently about a mom who took a vacation from her family for a month. She felt she had to completely remove herself and stay with friends for a month and recoup.”

I could not imagine leaving my family for a month! I could not imagine having a husband who would let me either.

Thank you for all the work you do – have a lovely weekend!

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THE front page headline in The New York Times is like something out of The Onion, except wait, it’s actually true: “Pope Says Church Is ‘Obsessed’ With Gays, Abortion and Birth Control.” It can’t get any better than this, except perhaps if the entire Arctic ice cap melted in a day, proving once and for all that Al Gore was right.

The blogger Mundabor dissects the “papal enchilada,” the 12,000-word interview of Pope Francis that appeared in a Jesuit magazine, an interview which hardly anyone is likely to read in its entirety, even though I can honestly say I did. Mundabor wisely cautions readers against defining heresy as a total rejection of orthodoxy. Sure, there are reassuring statements in the interview, but then there are so many whoppers, there is so much rubbery cheese, that this truly did belong on the front page of all the major newspapers. If the Pope’s statements were authoritative doctrine, then the Vatican would be post-Catholic — and for many people, that would be wonderful news.

Mundabor writes:

The sum total of all these assertions – all of them, word for word quotations – and of all that Francis has said, and omitted to say, since the beginning of the pontificate – is clear: don’t fight it. Francis espouses a defeatist line somewhere between Chamberlain and Quisling, with some very worrying streaks of Grima Wormtongue. Read More »

IN a massive, 12,000-word interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro of La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis expounds upon the worldview that has emerged in his confusing statements in recent months. His remarks in the interview, which has no authority as Church teaching and represents his personal views, lack clarity also. But the Pope makes it clear just how deep his liberalism runs. He calls for a “dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today.” Read More »

ALAN writes:

The supine surrender of their legitimate authority by American white men is one of the most sickening spectacles I have witnessed in my life.

One day not long ago my cousin and I were reminiscing about our grandfather, who died many years ago at age 89.  “He was strict,” my cousin remarked when remembering him from our boyhood years. I imagine he meant that remark not as a criticism but simply as an observation.

When I was young, I too probably imagined him to be strict. But “strict” in comparison with what? Was he ever a petty tyrant?  Never. Not even remotely. He was “strict” in the sense of being disciplined and principled. Read More »

IN this recent entry on idiotic, meaningless names, a reader mentions a blogger who keeps track of the names of babies born in Rexburg, a largely Mormon town in Idaho. Parents in Rexburg outdo each other with novel spellings and ugly names such as Sharlee and Jaxson. The blogger, named Jessica, writes:

My husband and I used to live in a little town in Southeastern Idaho called Rexburg. There’s a culture there, and in surrounding areas (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, UTAH) of people giving their children all manner of atrocious made-up and misspelled names. (People outside of Idaho and Utah do too, of course, but these two states are trendsetters – see here if you disagree.) Read More »

ALEX A. writes from England:

From the website for The Experts, a Hewlett Packard contractor that hired Aaron Alexis

Why was a waiter with a string of arrests, a history of violent behavior and a Navy discharge hired by a Navy Yard IT contractor?

ACCORDING to news reports, Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old man who allegedly shot 12 people at the Washington D.C. Navy Yard yesterday, believed he was the victim of racial bias and was angry about it. See this Los Angeles Times report:

Ty Thairintr, 52, a Fort Worth tooling design engineer, said he met Alexis about five years ago, when Alexis was still in the Navy. “He told me he believed he had superior abilities to his co-workers but he didn’t get promoted,” he said. “He complained about the rank and file not giving him respect.”

Alexis felt discriminated against because he was black, he said.

However, it is much more likely that Alexis was the beneficiary, not the victim, of racial bias and that this massacre was due in part to racial affirmative action. How else to explain the hiring of Alexis by the IT company “The Experts” even though he was without significant IT experience, even a college degree. The company gave Alexis security clearance despite numerous arrests for aggressive behavior and despite his discharge from the Navy for what a naval spokesman said was “a pattern of misconduct.” Without the security clearance, Alexis could not have entered the office building yesterday. From the Wall Street Journal: Read More »

MS. FOX writes:

We Canadians have age-old rivalries between the Anglophones of western Canada, and the Francophones of the east. Quebec has, several times over the years, wanted to become its own nation. So far, it has failed in this project, but now it has more pressing concerns.

Islam is one of them. In Quebec, a new “Charter of Values” has been unveiled by the Parti Quebeçois and it would forbid civil servants to wear overt religious symbols such as head scarves, burkas and large crucifixes on the job. According to Maclean’s, thousands of Muslims have protested. It has not been the first incident. Earlier in 2013, there was controversy about Islamic sheikhs wearing headgear during soccer games. According to the official rules, they were not allowed to wear the coverings for their safety and others’, but they did not want to hear it. A protest was launched, and a thousand Muslims wore headgear to a game. Read More »

Nina Davuluri, Miss America

NINA DAVULURI, the beautiful and talented daughter of Indian immigrants, was crowned Miss America yesterday. Some anonymous commenters on social media have criticized the choice of an Indian woman and have been branded racist. Most Americans, if asked, would probably agree that it is “racist” to object. They would not view Indians as “racist” if they refused to choose the white daughter of American immigrants as a national symbol. But cultural pride is for others. Cultural pride is for those who are not white.

Miss Davuluri says she has always seen herself as an American first. But this does not appear to be true, nor should it be true, given that most Indian immigrants naturally feel a strong connection to India. In the talent competition, Davuluri did a Bollywood fusion dance (I did not see the pageant) and her comments afterward suggest that she is proud that the pageant chose her as a symbol of “diversity.” In other words, she is proud that she is not a white American. “I’m so happy this organization has embraced diversity,” she said. “I’m thankful there are children watching at home who can finally relate to a new Miss America.”

But if there are children at home who relate to her purely because she is Indian and not white, then there also must be children at home, namely white children, who do not relate to her because she is Indian and not white. In other words, Davuluri admits that instead of being a universalist, she is for a particular culture. Multiculturalism, as is so often the case, is a cover for the erasure of a specific culture. Davuluri’s platform was “celebrating diversity through cultural competency,” an inherently contradictory statement and an admission of the truth, which is that human beings are incapable of “diversity.”

It is just the kind of political newspeak, however, that one would expect from a Miss America contestant. The increasingly tawdry pageant has always gone with the zeitgeist and with whatever sells in corporate America. Today the contestants brag about their planned careers and wear bikinis. Miss Kansas is an Army sergeant with tattoos. The pageant struggles to hold the public’s interest in an age when half-naked women are no longer a novelty. Unsurprisingly, Davuluri plans to be a doctor, joining the ranks of the many female Indian doctors in America, women for whom education and career are the highest goals in life and who are often ruthlessly pressured by their parents. They belong to a distinct American subculture. They are part of America, but at a deep level they are Indian.

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AT The Orthosphere, in an essay titled “Why You Need Traditionalism,” Alan Roebuck poses the question, “How can you escape the nightmare of the contemporary world?”

His response in part:

Know first that you cannot save yourself. You are too small. You need to discover, believe and participate in something larger than yourself, something that connects you with the realities that the contemporary world denies: God, true religion, family, nation, and so on. You need the traditionalism of your people.

Traditionalism is not just adherence to a tradition, for there must be a reason why we adhere to it. More basically, traditionalism is knowing and living in accord with what many thinkers call the order of being. Contemporary thought holds that the world is only a physical realm in which any meaning or order that transcends the physical is arbitrarily projected by man. And since this order is arbitrary, man can change it whenever he wants. But contemporary thought is mistaken. The world contains a God-given order that pre-exists man, and that he knows primarily through intuition, his faculty of knowing basic truths without a process of formal reasoning.

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GILBERT STUART’S painting of Mrs. Richard Yates (1795), the wife of a New York merchant, is one of the most loved of American portraits. Stuart, highly successful in England and America, is most famous for his unfinished portrait of George Washington and his paintings of five other presidents, but none of his works is superior to this. The greatest portraits aim to show not just beauty or status, but character. On this level, Mrs. Richard Yates, peering up from her needlework, is a triumph. The artist Stan Washburn describes it at his art site:

It could be a portrait of a formidable New England matron I observed as a child, one Miss Twitchell (really), a person of vast sternness. She was obviously not the model for this painting, but body and soul it’s just how I remember her. She was a bank teller in Gorham, a small New Hampshire town. That bank was not, as banks are now, an open, welcoming institution. Upon entry you were confronted with a floor-to-ceiling wooden partition with a small, closely-barred window behind which lurked Miss Twitchell. One day a robber came in, stuck the muzzle of a pistol between the bars, and said, “Gimme the money.” “Won’t,” snapped Miss Twitchell, and dropped to the floor, out of sight. The bars were substantial, the door from the lobby to the rear area was locked; there was nothing the robber could do. He fled, empty-handed.

The Birmingham Mail

THE Birmingham Metropolitan College in England yesterday lifted its ban on the niqab, the full Islamic face veil, after a student petition collected 8,000 signatures opposed to the restriction and a protest was planned. Here from The Birmingham Mail is the statement by the college, a tour de force of dhimmi public relations:

We are concerned that recent media attention is detracting from our core mission of providing high quality learning. As a consequence, we will modify our policies to allow individuals to wear specific items of personal clothing to reflect their cultural values.

Read More »

THERE are several strange facets to Pope Francis’s recent phone call to Anna Romano, a 35-year-old divorced woman in Italy. The woman is pregnant with a child conceived with a married man and the pope offered her only praise. See Margaret Galitzin’s analysis of this latest publicity stunt of the “who-am-I-to-judge” pope.

Read More »

ALEX writes:

In one more step in the march to true equality, the Left has identified another group in need of protection and with a potential for enlarging the Democrats’ voter base: less attractive people, who, of course, are discriminated against in all areas of life in favor of more attractive people:

Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too. Read More »

IN a 2006 post at Gates Of Vienna, Baron Bodissey described the Battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683, when the Christian army under Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland, ended the Muslim siege of the city:

It was then, at the last possible moment on the evening of September 11th, that Jan Sobieski arrived at a hill north of the city, leading a force of 40,000 Poles and their German and Austrian allies. The battle began soon afterwards, in the early morning hours of September 12th. Read More »

The Provencal garden of Jean-Henri Fabre

EVERY DAY, at this time of year, I find one or two crickets in our house. This morning, a dark brown Field Cricket, on the edge of the kitchen sink, waved its comically long antennae, its rear legs poised as always to leap. Who can begrudge a cricket a temporary home? He destroys nothing. He takes nothing, and he chirps with friendly optimism as he sits under the bed or a dresser. In a few weeks, the grass and woods around our home in Pennsylvania will be relatively silent. The throbbing pulse of cricket communication will be gone.

Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist wrote that there are few things on earth more delightful than the sound of crickets. I agree. In his Book of Insects, Fabre wrote: Read More »