THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

From my employer, SUNY Oswego, I receive only “holiday” greetings.  From my remote colleague at the University of Tehran, where I have supervised a dissertation, I receive honest-to-God Christmas greetings.  I have also received Christmas greetings from the student whose dissertation I oversaw.  She, like the colleague, is Muslim.  Truly the world is standing on its head.

IN THE ongoing discussion of antidepressants and violence, Zippy Catholic, who has also commented on the issue here, writes:

As for myself, although I’ve never been on psychotropic drugs, I’ve personally seen people who were not violent or suicidal become violent and suicidal on SSRI’s, and then lose those characteristics when carefully weaned off of them. Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Not content to destroy the armed forces of every Western nation, subvert all of the churches in every Western nation, shut down worthy boys’ and mens’ sports teams nationwide, and distort news reporting and entertainment everywhere by imposing their bizarre worldview and slate of grievances, feminists now train their sights on one of the few remaining institutions in the West that so far had seemed free of their depradations: the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

As The New York Times reports, Mormon women of the feminist persuasion are expressing their desire to change their church to be more accommodating of women by wearing pants to church.  Read More »

IN AN essay posted at Tradition in Action, the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira examined nativity scenes by 17th-century Portuguese artists. He wrote:

At a first glance, [a scene by the sculptor Joaquim Machado de Castro] might create an impression of disorder in some observers. We are accustomed to the disciplined and soulless crowds of large modern cities, the masses who file silently into movie theaters or grimly and hurriedly cross the streets when a traffic light or policeman’s whistle stops the flow of cars to let them pass. These crowds have become so soulless and standardized that at huge public gatherings they applaud as if they were one huge entity, in which the individual personalities were dissolved like drops of water in the ocean.

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OATH KEEPERS has offered to provide free self-defense and firearms training to school teachers and administrators. Stewart Rhodes, the organization’s founder, writes:

Children deserve to be defended. And the teachers and staff who are responsible for children during the school day deserve to know how to defend them – effectively, decisively, and at the very outset of an attack. And they deserve a fighting chance to defend themselves as well. It is not enough to tell them to sit tight and wait for the police to arrive. All too often, by the time the police get there, it is too late.

Teachers and school administrative staff need the tools and training to put a stop to the killing themselves.

Read More »

IN THIS previous entry on Adam Lanza, Perfesser Plum writes:

Take everything evil in human history, every iconic villain, every sin and character defect of our mournful species; squeeze them into one body and soul, and you get the modern mass killer of children in the guise of a young adult. Read More »

A READER from Hillsdale, Michigan sends a Christmas note. He writes:

It is a joy to be able to offer a contribution to The Thinking Housewife, a site which is itself a joy. Change is constant, but as a society we seem to have surrendered to change and lost the ability to retain those “permanent things” spoken of by Russell Kirk, instead descending into a nihilism worthy of Nietszche’s statement “without God, all things are possible.” The Thinking Housewife has been a journey back to normalcy, taking into account changing times, and a vehicle which regularly inspires me to recommend it to people.

Read More »

THE DISCUSSION of the role of psychotropic medications in the increased incidence of mass shootings continues. A reader cites this article by Peter R. Breggin in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine. [Note: Another reader takes strong exception to Breggin’s work. See below.] Breggin wrote:

All antidepressants cause mania and mania is an acknowledged adverse effect in the FDA-approved label of all antidepressants. Preda et al. [66] carried out a retrospective study of 533 psychiatric hospital admissions over a fourteen month period and found that 43 (8.1%) could be attributed to antidepressant- induced mania and/or psychosis. Read More »

TERRY MORRIS writes:

Everything you and your commenters have mentioned as factors in the Adam Lanza case all involve one, inescapable fact: parental neglect. All of it, including the drugs, the violent video game playing, and the issue of protecting him from negative consequences of his own misbehavior involve parental neglect.

As to the last in that list, watch a few documentaries about famous American serial killers and you will see that this is very common among them – their parents were always running interference for them everytime they got themselves into the slightest trouble with authorities as children, and even into adulthood. But I’m one of those no-nonsense kinds of parents who believe with all my being that even so-called “child safety locks” – those gadgets many, many parents mindlessly place on their lower cabinet doors to prohibit their children from getting into them – are, ultimately, psychologically damaging to children.

Jill Farris in the previous entry makes good points about Lanza’s upbringing that are worth repeating here: Read More »

THIS photo, posted and discussed at Galliawatch, shows a French child holding an obscene sign in favor of homosexual “marriage.” This child’s participation in the rally, and the fact that the demonstrators find it entertaining, says much about the cause this rally espouses.

At root, homosexual “marriage” is an enemy of childhood innocence. Amid all the talk of love is callousness and scorn for the child. Whoever is in charge of this boy’s life should be thrown in prison.

DON VINCENZO writes:

Who can be legitimately called a saint amongst us? What is a saint? How does the non-saint know when he is in the presence of one given the full measure of God’s grace?  Does the saint openly radiate that grace, because in the last analysis, Catholics know – or should – that only God can make a saint?

Michael Gerson, a columnist at The Washington Post, wrote of the recent vote by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to advance the cause of Dorothy Day’s claim to sainthood. It is an interesting column about an interesting woman, but I am reminded of the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. Read More »

JESSE POWELL restates the rationale for chivalry in an age of feminism here. As he puts it, the abuses of feminism do not justify a rejection of masculine protectiveness, a rejection that is so often advocated by men’s rights advocates.

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THE REV. James Jackson writes:

Here is a good quote by Walker Percy which describes the horror and evil of Sandy Hook:

“I am perfectly willing to believe Flannery O’Connor when she said, and she wasn’t kidding, that the modern world is a territory largely occupied by the devil. No one doubts the malevolence abroad in the world. But the world is also deranged. What interests me is not the malevolence of man — so what else is new? — but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the “normal” denizen of the Western world who, I think it fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing.”

JIM GOAD at Taki’s Mag cites the medication history of killers who have gone on shooting sprees:

• An autopsy concluded that Columbine killer Eric Harris had the SSRI antidepressant Fluvoxamine in his bloodstream at the time of his death.

• Jeff Weise, who killed nine people and himself at a Minnesota high school in 2005, was taking increasingly high doses of Prozac at the time of his spree.

• Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people and himself at an Omaha mall in 2007, reportedly “had been on antidepressants” at the time of his shooting. He allegedly had taken antidepressants since he was six years old. Read More »

PAUL writes:

Last night another Christmas movie was on: The Christmas Hope (2009). The star was Madeline Stowe. It was about a couple who lost their son during the last year and were then faced with deciding whether to care for a young unrelated girl around Christmas. Madeline Stowe’s character read to the child from a children’s book one night.

This had great meaning to me.

There once was a young mother who held her infant son in her lap as she rocked him. She told him that she would always love him. When he began school, she would tell him she would always love him. When he began high school, she would tell him she would always love him, and he had become embarrassed about it by then. She continued until she was too old to tell him, which was when he took her in his arms and told her that he would always love her.

I often make sure I tell my mother that I will never leave her, which is her greatest fear. But tonight when I visited my mother (as I do every day), I took her in my arms (as I began doing when I first detected her dementia, years before anyone else did) and told her that I would always love her.

IN THE Atlantic, of all places, an Evangelical Christian writer describes how feminism nearly ruined her marriage and how she came to discover a radical solution: Respect for her husband. I can already hear the Internet-wide tantrums that will result from this piece. Nina Roesner writes:

I grew up as a product of second-wave feminism, having learned from the media that men were oppressive, foolish, and incompetent. Perhaps as a result, I spent nearly the first decade of my own marriage “fighting for my rights” with my husband. I criticized him and bossed him around. It wasn’t that he was such a bad guy, but rather I was trained to spot potential oppression and domination by the male gender. I took personally his lack of attention to detail around the home or with the baby. I made a practice of letting him know his failings on a regular basis, expecting his behavior to change.

Read More »