IN THIS excellent 2009 piece, “The Cult of Ugliness in America,” Fr. Anthony J. Brankin correctly locates the real source of the hideousness of modern architecture and American life in general. The problem is spiritual. He writes:

[T]he cult of ugliness is so pervasive, so all around us, in every nook and cranny of our lives, that we stand the risk at every moment of missing it, of no longer being able to see it or even be repelled by it.

He laments the extreme ugliness, not just of strip malls and contemporary clothes, but of church architecture. He writes:

Look at some of our newest churches and cathedrals. Many of them are stunning and awesome — no, not for their homage to tradition and the Catholic sense of beauty. They are stunning and awesome in their utter inhumanity, their complete lack of scale, their thorough and total sterility, and their horrifying proportions. There is not an angle that could please nor an arch that could comfort. Not a piece of molding that could hold us in its shadow. Not even a little statue before which we could light a slender taper. Like the gaping mouth of the pagan, child-sacrificing furnaces of Moloch, some of our new churches will consume their people in holocausts of visual horror.  

It would be better to pray in catacombs than in these inhuman structures.

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RESPONDING TO the post, “The Men Who Created Feminism,” Lydia Sherman writes:

When I was still in my teens in the middle 1960’s, before the hippie movement in the U.S. or rather, before the moral rebellion, I moved with my family to a foreign country, where my father had a job for four years. That country would have been considered backwards by U.S. standards, because young people still lived at home until they married, women married young, and they had to have both families’ approval before marriage. The economy was family-based, with the father’s place of business held in a shop near the street, while the family lived upstairs. When the children started marrying, the parents would buy them a home. In turn, the young married couple would save up their money and help the next member of the family who married, buy a home. Credit cards were rarely used, although you could get credit in a store.  Read More »

IN A PREVIOUSLY posted interview by James Kalb, the mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros makes interesting comments about the distinction between science and technology. Salingaros argues that we live in an unscientific age.

He writes: 

Our educated world remains ignorant about the distinction between science and technology, unfortunately. Science helps us understand the universe and ourselves. Technology applies scientific results to master processes that we can manipulate so as to better our lives.

To the degree that technology denies human nature, it is unscientific.

Salingaros’ point is made in connection with contemporary architecture and its dehumanizing qualities. Architects have denied the need for complexity in our visual environment. He writes: Read More »

ALL LIBERALS are messianic about education. David Brooks of The New York Times is no exception. His column today is about the need to restore the “vigorous virtues” in America. Instead of noting that the decline of virtue parallels the growth in Big Schooling, Brooks calls for more public spending on education. He even calls for “prenatal education,” which normally means health education for mothers but in this case I suspect Brooks means real prenatal education. Perhaps the differential between American and Japanese test scores could be eliminated by educating those in the womb. There is that eternal optimism. To a school fool, there’s nothing a school can’t do. Brooks writes: Read More »

GREG JINKERSON writes:

You may be interested to see some good discussion going on today at Chronicles under a column by Thomas Fleming. In one of his responses to readers, he gives some sharp analysis of the roots of feminism, and points out that it is primarily the white male figures of the 18th-century Enlightenment who are to blame for the revolution, rather than the usual suspects like Mary Wollstonecraft. He attributes male willingness to embrace the feminist ideal at that time to a proto-Playboy philosophy and easier access to women. I had never seen the connection made, either, between today’s feminism and Renaissance-era, anti-Christian humanism, but it makes a lot of sense. The relevant passage is found at Comment #13.

Let us never forget that white males created and promoted feminism, that feminism is a male ideology. The women feminists were inconsequential eccentrics-compare the negligible influence of Mary Wollstonecraft with that of her lover Godwin, for example. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other harridans they cite so often were regarded as freaks by both sexes. Read More »

A PENNSYLVANIA  judge has ordered a traditionalist Anglican priest to vacate the premises of his church on Philadelphia’s Main Line. The decision comes years after the Rev. David Moyer was defrocked by the Episcopal Church because he agreed to become a bishop for the Traditional Anglican Communion. A priest at the Church of the Good Shepherd for 21 years, Moyer refused to leave the parish after he was ordered to do so.

Moyer objects to the ordination of women, homosexual clergy and homosexual “marriage,” all of which are accepted and approved of by the Episcopal Church. In recent years, he would not allow Bishop Charles E. Dennison, of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, to preach or conduct confirmations at his parish. The diocese, a withering institution with magnificent buildings, has only 55,000 members left. Moyer is now seeking to join the Catholic Church. His determination and refusal to kowtow to the totalistic demands of modern liberalism are heartening. Much of modern Christianity is not Christianity, but an entirely new faith. Moyer is leaving an anti-Christian institution behind.

One wonders what will become of Good Shepherd’s beautiful stone church building, a vestige of Philadelphia’s Episcopalian elite. Perhaps someday, after the limited attention span of liberals runs its course and the novelty of Rev. Jane or Rev. Heather wears off, it will be a restaurant or a fitness center. Perhaps a pizzeria. Wood-burning ovens would be nice.

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AT American Thinker, Mary L. Davenport reports on the largest analysis done to date on the effects of abortion on mental health. The study shows that women have a 155 percent increased risk of suicide after an abortion. Synthesizing the results of 22 studies involving close to a million women, Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green University came up with findings that are remarkably at odds with the official stance of the American Psychological Association, which recognizes no link between depression or suicide and abortion. 

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS get immense mileage out of stating – and overstating – the obvious, and reducing the obvious to one single overwhelming theory of behavior. Catherine Hakim, of the London School of Economics, has discovered that physical appearance matters. Beautiful people are likely to earn more money.

Hakim has written a book about “erotic capital.”  Many interesting things can be said about the influence of innate atractiveness on one’s fortunes in life. But Hakim’s even-handedness is questionable. She states in the above interview: “Women are always undervalued, no matter what they do and no matter what they are.”

How could anyone contemplate the issue of physical attractiveness and come to the conclusion that women are undervalued? Hakim has apparently never visited an art museum.

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A BRITISH journalist has taken feminist political theory to its logical next step and called for a “woman discount” on taxes, utility bills and medical insurance. The idea is to compensate women for lower wages.

Joan Smith of The Independent cites a study by a management organization that shows that compensation of women executives continues to lag significantly behind that of men and is unlikely to catch up in the next 100 years. There is so much pervasive discrimination against women, she says, their bills should be reduced. Read More »

CONTNUING his ongoing examination of the decline of standards in higher education, Thomas F. Bertonneau, in an article for the John Pope Williams Center for Higher Education Policy, looks at the dumbing-down of the college course syllabus, which now must include detailed instructions and a thorough justification for the act of reading assigned books. He calls it “The Amazing Colossal Syllabus.” Bertonneau writes:

Nowadays my course syllabi tend to run to many pages and always include a punctilious day-by-day calendar of the semester stipulating, for example, precisely which pages in what book students need to have read for class. My instructions to students concerning formal written work have also become replete with prescription in a way that I would not have thought necessary even ten years ago. Colleagues concur that instructors at the state-college level can take little or nothing for granted about student preparedness and that everything, absolutely everything, must be spelled out in advance. Without abundant guidance and prescription, students complain of being lost, as perhaps they are, or of “not understanding what the professor wants,” as is perhaps the case... Read More »

OR, to put it another way, college costs as much as day care.

News reports this week broadcast the supposedly shocking similarity between tuition at public universities and a year of day care. The implication was that caring for a baby or toddler should be cheap, as cheap perhaps as parking a car. The news stories did not mention, of course, that the high demand for day care has been manufactured by relatively new cultural norms or that day care is inferior to the age-old organic form of childrearing.

Col. John W. Ripley

COL. JOHN W. RIPLEY of the U.S. Marines Corps was famous for his acts of bravery in the Viet Nam War. The story of Ripley’s efforts to blow up a bridge under enemy fire is legendary. 

In 1992, Ripley, who died in 2008, testified before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. His testimony, posted in its entirety at the website Tradition, Family and Property, is worth reading in light of a Congressional committee’s recommendation earlier this year that all restrictions on women in combat roles be lifted.

Here are some excerpts:  Read More »

KENDRA writes:

I recently received this notice from the Indianopolis Museum of Art regarding their new membership policies. The IMA receives government funding.

This part surprised me: Read More »

The Soldier's Return, Marshall Claxton

This 19th century painting is from the collection at British Paintings, formerly Victorian/Edwardian Paintings.

KAREN I. writes:

Sometimes I have something that is bothering me, but it is hard to put into words until something on your website helps to clarify what it is that I am struggling with. Your recent entry “Anxiety and Weather,” which was about how liberalism induces anxiety, is one of those posts. 

What you write about liberalism with regard to anxiety is correct. It is apparent when it comes to the weather, but as a person with a chronic illness, I see the tendency for many people to seek perfection when it comes to illness. They refuse to accept that sometimes, there comes a point when good enough is the best that can be done. The idea of living with a lifelong illness fills them with anxiety. It is not uncommon for people with my condition (and many others) to search high and low for a “cure” to their upsetting symptoms, despite doctor after doctor saying that these things are part of the illness and they will not go away. Read More »

THE MODERN WOMAN can do anything provided she puts her mind to it. That is the message Allyson Reneau, supermom from Oklahoma City, is telling the public as she heads to graduate school at Harvard University this fall. According to The Oklahoman, Mrs. Reneau owns a gymnastics business and is the mother of 11 children, seven of whom are still at home. She will be seeking a graduate degree in international relations. Her goal is modest: Mrs. Reneau hopes to “empower women around the world.”

Women in the far corners of the globe await Mrs. Reneau’s expertise. The fact that Mrs. Reneau dresses in silly gymnastic clothes should mislead no one.

“It doesn’t really matter how old you are or what obstacles may be in your way,” Mrs. Reneau says, “… If you try, you can do anything.” Those obstacles include children, husband, extended family and community. Mrs. Reneau would have not been on the local news report if she had stayed with her family. But she is in the news because she will be with her children less, pursuing a meaningless degree many hundreds of miles away.

Feminism has given women choice. That’s what we are often told. But everywhere we look, one choice is glorified. In the face of this pervasive message, the modern woman can do almost anything she puts her mind to. Except stay where she is needed.

She is also a willing pawn of institutions that profit from her restless ambition. Yes, Harvard says. Yes. Come and stay awhile. Read More »