IN THIS previous entry, I discussed Susannah Cornwall, the British academic who has written a lengthy, well-funded academic paper stating that there is no conclusive proof that Jesus was male. According to Cornwall, Jesus could have been an “intersex” person (the latest fad in the Gender Confusion Movement) and possessed characteristics of both sexes, as do some rare human beings. Thus he may have been outwardly a man, but still anatomically a woman.
Lawrence Auster points out the logical implication of this remarkably inane theory: We cannot be sure of the sexual normality of many historical figures. Virtually any man could have been a biological freak. This is a dream come true for feminists. The prophets, the geniuses, the male artists, the famous statesmen — perhaps many of them were women.
PAINTED in 1474, Antonello Da Messina's Portrait of a Man is striking for its naturalness and luminous quality. The face is of an unknown man in a setting with a plain black background, no landscape or vista behind him. "The sitter's gaze meets our own, establishing a suggestive dialogue," says the Galleria Borghese's catalogue of its finest masterpieces. Da Messina's portrait is far more beautiful where it hangs in the famous Roman gallery than it appears here and yet the pleasure of establishing a dialogue with this interesting, subtle face remains. You can also see a better version of it here at Art Renewal.
WRITING at The Orthosphere, Kristor examines a rhetorical weapon highly effective against modern liberalism. He writes:
Utopians are almost always intoxicated by some grand, glorious and beautiful vision, so that they tend to make sweeping statements of perfect generality. This tendency makes them, and their ideas and proposals, quite vulnerable to a rhetorical technique known as retortion. Retortion applies a doctrine to itself, to see whether it survives the treatment. If it does, the doctrine is more likely sound. If not – well, then it is dead. A doctrine that does not survive retortion is autophagic: self-devouring. (more…)
IN A recent article at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Thomas F. Bertonneau considers the relevance of the parable of Plato’s cave to higher education today. He writes:
The Parable of the Cave presents some truths that the contemporary academy, steeped in egalitarian ideas and committed to blandness and relativism in everything, mainly avoids facing. (more…)
THANK YOU to those who have contributed so far to my latest fundraising drive. I greatly appreciate your generosity. For those who would still like to contribute, they can make a donation to help keep this website in existence here.
LAST MONTH, we discussed the publication of two disturbing articles by British female academics. The ethicist Francesca Minerva argued in an academic journal that it is not immoral for parents to put to death newborns with cognitive problems. And, another ethicist, Anna Smajdor, wrote in a prestigious journal that because pregnancy is unfair to women and prevents them from attaining equality with men, the development of artificial wombs is necessary and good.
Now, as if all this wasn’t enough to prove the bankruptcy of British intellectual life, another shallow, unprincipled, and hopelessly juvenile feminist professor makes her mark.
Susannah Cornwall, a theology professor at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, argues in a lengthy paper for the Centre for Religion and Political Culture that there is no proof that Jesus was a man. He may have been an “intersex” person, neither fully male nor female.
Cornwall, (I know she looks like a waitress at the local sports bar, but she is a certified theologian), writes:
JONAS HIMMELSTRAND, a well-known Swedish family activist, has left his native country to escape heavy fines for homeschooling his two children, according to Caroline Moynihan of MercatorNet.com. Homeschooling is illegal in Sweden.
Himmelstrand is the founder of Mireja, a pro-family organization critical of Swedish family policies, which offer generous parental leaves for parents of babies and heavily subsidized day care. As discussed in this previous post, Himmelstrand contends socialized child care has caused an increase in childhood psychological problems and an inability by Swedish parents to discipline their children. He has spoken widely in Europe and North America. At Mireja, Himmelstrand writes: (more…)
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WAVE, or Women Against VAWA Excess, is an excellent resource for those who want to know more about the domestic violence bill, the Violence Against Women Act, which costs taxpayers roughly $500 million a year and is currently up for reauthorization by the Senate. A new version of the bill would extend benefits to illegal immigrants and homosexuals.
In the latest post at WAVE, Wendy McElroy writes about the false notion that men are the sole perpetrators of domestic violence. In fact, more than 200 studies have shown that women and men are equally guilty of verbal and physical aggression in the home. Domestic violence against women is extremely serious and women are injured and murdered by their spouses or intimates more often than men. But conflict is often initiated by women. McElroy writes: (more…)
SEE my comments on the Violence Against Women Act at U.S. News and World Report. Readers are able to register their agreement or disagreement with me by clicking one of the boxes to the left of my entry.
JAMES P. writes: The Daily Mail has some photos of America in 1940. WARNING: Modern readers may find the images of clean, well-dressed white people with large families shocking and offensive; they are rated "NC-17" (Not Correct for readers under the age of 17). Note also the article's obsessive interest in Japanese-Americans, who were a tiny fraction of the 1940 population.
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These are not questions that address the actual legal swamp/thicket that Dharun Ravi was placed in during his trial for hate crimes by the New Jersey state prosecutors office. That is a whole can of worms, which begins in the legislature, and which involves such noisome organizations as “Garden State Pride” – I checked their website after this wretched verdict, and it reeked of preening triumphalism. (more…)
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THIS DETAIL from Federico Fiori Barocci’s Flight to Egypt (1570) depicts Joseph, whose feast day is today, in an unusually carefree pose as he playfully hands an olive branch to Christ.
Joseph, most faithful and most courageous, mirror of patience and lover of poverty, watch over us.
MISS UNIVERSE Canada has accepted a “transexual” male as a contestant in its beauty pageant, according to the pageant website Missosology. Given that Jenna Talackova is legally female even though he is a man, pageant officials concluded that it was inappropriate to exclude him and by the logic of radical equality and homosexual liberation, they are correct. (more…)
IN THE entry on the Democratic Party’s sinister, idiotic and thoroughly baseless allegations of a Republican “War on Women,” I stated that it is actually liberalism that has conducted a war on women for decades. By every conceivable social indicator, with the exception of how much money women earn, females at large – and that includes children – are worse off than they were prior to the 1960s. This is not to exonerate the Republicans, who are typically supporters of feminism too and haven’t the conviction to defend themselves against such claims. My intention is merely to point to the irreversibly warped state of mind behind the Democratic campaign.
To a reader who said liberalism’s freedoms, presumably sexual and economic freedoms, cannot possibly be construed as anti-woman, the reader Jesse Powell, who is a man, responds:
When a man says to a woman “you are free” he is at the same time saying “you are on your own.” Women’s liberation equals male abandonment. From the man’s point of view the purpose of liberating women is precisely to enable and justify abandoning women. (more…)
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Lucas Cranach the Elder depicted the Silver Age. Will any artist capture the Age of Pizza?
THE website Dashoffers a brisk history of pizza in the United States, culminating in the Pizza Society, with 65,000 pizzerias (that’s an understatement; there are 65,000 pizzerias in my town alone) and 100 acres of pizzas consumed every year.
Dash points to the emergence of the artisanal, wood-fired pie in recent decades. It’s true, pizza at its best is one of the world’s most sublime foods. However, pizza in America is generally not at its best, not anymore. The elite dines on charred, organic pies while the common man, who no longer has a real family or a real home, feasts on greasy slabs of fiberglass covered with mock cheese, a substance that haunts his dreams and creates a leaden, ineffable awareness that something – something — is profoundly wrong.
Dash forgot to mention the children who carry cold slices in their school lunch day after day; the college students who gorge on pizza late at night, bewildered by the transition from normal life to a depersonalized, pagan subculture of binge drinking and serial hook-ups; the divorced fathers who can’t afford anything other than pizza for dinner and the empty cardboard pizza boxes piled in corporate offices, where employees sit at their desks struggling silently with Pizza Impasse Disorder, indigestion that comes in both acute and chronic forms.
The history of pizza is no longer cause for celebration. Only slick advertising can erase the truth. The Greek poet Hesiod identified five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age. We are immersed in something he could not have foreseen: the Pizza Age. Someday even our rivers will turn red with excreted tomato sauce. There will be so much pizza in our bloodstreams that doctors will have to open de-mozzarella-fication clinics. As people sit in reclining chairs, the cheese globules painstakingly extracted from their veins by sophisticated technology, they will see their internal horizons gradually expanded and restored. Their souls and bodies will return to a state of innocence they never knew existed.
Dharun Ravi, the 20 year old former Rutgers freshman, has been found guilty of most counts in the peeping Tom “hate crimes” case in which his roommate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. I opined last month that the case seemed very weak. The application of the still-new category of “hate crime” to Ravi’s behavior, under the even more questionable sub-category of “bias intimidation,” seemed so strained that I thought the jury would reject the charges. (more…)
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Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, the Catholic priest who refused Communion to a lesbian and has been suspended from pastoral work, does well to warn priests of what is likely to come for the faithful among them. It looks like it is taking heroic fortitude for this priest to stand firm and not violate his conscience as it relates to his simple duties as a priest. (more…)
