Cordelia Comforting King Lear in Prison, George William Joy (1886)

THIS website is a labor of love, with pennies of profit for each hour that goes into it. I want to be able to continue to serve this community — and that’s what it is in the best sense of the word, a scattered community of individuals with a spirit of inquiry and an appreciation for the common good.

To continue, I need your help. So, please, let me know what this site is worth to you by donating, be it a dime or a dollar a day, or a dime or dollar every time you find something worthwhile, or whatever you think you could spare to keep the site alive.

With your help, I will be able to continue to do my part. Thank you to all those who have given.

GOOD FRIDAY is normally a dark, grief-stricken day. In my family history, one Good Friday stands out as sadder than all others.

I had a great aunt, Ann, who was completely deaf from early childhood. She was in her early twenties. After having attended college for a year, Ann was resigned to living at home with her widowed mother. She helped my great grandmother care for her elderly father, known by my mother as Grandfather Rafferty.

Grandfather Rafferty had a long white beard. On the afternoon of Good Friday 78 years ago, he was in the parlor smoking his pipe and Ann was upstairs. No one else was at home. Grandfather Rafferty fell asleep in his chair with the pipe still in his mouth. His beard caught fire. He presumably called for help but Ann could not hear him. He died the next day. Read More »

HERE IS  the recipe for another dish in my Easter menu. It is what I call Gruyére Potatoes, but is otherwise known by the French as Gratin Dauphinois. It is taken from Patricia Wells’ excellent French cookbook Bistro Cooking.  I have made this many times, and everyone – children and adults – has liked it, except for one person who categorically rejected potatoes.

Generously salt the milk and water in which you cook the potatoes. I prefer Yukon Gold potatoes in this recipe because they do not fall apart. Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Peter S. approvingly quotes Carl Ernst on the urgent “task” of contemporary Islamic studies, which is none other than “to humanize Muslims in the eyes of non-Muslims.” Ernst – and, as we may assume, Peter S. – can only be of the opinion that Westerners chronically and habitually dehumanize Muslims, but this is an absurdity. On the contrary, Westerners have romanticized Muslims since the eighteenth century, and Western elites are even more prone to such romanticism today than their bien pensant precursors were three hundred years ago. In evidence I cite the never-ending palaver about “the religion of peace” that President Bush II inaugurated within days of 9/11. Read More »

ALAN ROEBUCK writes:

Peter S. desires to counter the demonization of Muslims and Islam. But this demonization is at most a peripheral point. The basic problem with Peter S.’s essay is that he fails to acknowledge that Islam is both a false religion and a comprehensive sociopolitical threat. That being so, he is most concerned that we treat Muslims fairly, even if it means that we lower our guard against their manifest threat.  Read More »

MUCH OF the inspiration for this website comes from my own happy childhood. Here is a photo of me from my days as a scheming, plundering, lawless barbarian. Not long after I became a mother 22 years ago, I made an unsettling discovery. Childhood is fast disappearing. It is not the same cultural institution it was when I was young. For one, it is not conducive to the sort of reckless abandon, the freedom from constraints within the confines of unwavering structure, that I knew. Travel along the streets near my home, and you will see. There are no children outside playing. I spent hours outside, a suburban anarchist plotting for the overthrow of boredom, reveling in the scent of boxwood and rotting crab apples, making little puddings and stews from mud and berries. I spent hours playing inside too, endless idle, exhilarating hours as a strict mother forcing vegetables on her dolls or a debutante attending balls or Anne Frank in her bedroom. I even pretended to be a cashier at a grocery store, such was the variety of interesting roles to play. Whatever I did, there were always other children to play with and to be annoyed by, with mothers nearby to disobey or subvert.

Childhood has changed for many reasons, and there are far more serious issues than the lack of time or opportunity for children to play in an unorganized and unregimented fashion. Some of the change has been brought on, as Neil Postman argued, by the sheer force of the technological revolution. The written word has lost its central position as the means of communication. And, with that, there is much less of a clear need for childhood. 

Technology has changed our lives. But only a moral revolution can make our world more welcoming to children. Please give to this website so that I may continue to articulate the principles necessary to recapture innocence and the institution of childhood. Childhood has been destroyed by the enemies of all that is good. The goal is nothing short of more scheming, plundering, lawless barbarians. Let anarchy loose upon this sad and beautiful world.

IN 2007, all Boy Scout groups in Britain were ordered to accept girls. The result? The boy scouts are now becoming the girl scouts. A majority of new recruits are girls.

When a traditionally male activity is opened to girls, it instantly becomes less appealing to boys, no matter how much pretense there is of preserving its masculine nature. That is a law of life. That law will never change unless science turns us into androgynous robots.

In order for masculinity to survive in any meaningful cultural sense, there must be groups that are strictly all-male.

WHEN AN atheist law professor in Australia burned the Koran last year, it did not make for an international sensation. Alex Stewart was, however, suspended from his job and expected to lose his position. At that time, Catholic Bishop Michael Putney, who chairs the Australian committee for ecumenism, said:

“[Mr Stewart] has caused pain in people and may incite anger in people and I don’t think that’s ever acceptable.

That reminds me. What is an ecumenist? An ecumenist is a deist in religious garb. He’s someone too lazy or too fearful to take his own professed beliefs seriously.

VAN WIJK writes:

Peter S. wrote: “The God of Deuteronomy is, of course, none other than God the Father, the first Person of the Triune Godhead. Although this same God is – on the basis of repeated Koranic insistence – the God Muslims understand themselves to worship, nothing of this severity appears in the Koran, which, on the contrary, bears injunctions against aggression in war and towards the cessation of conflict.” Read More »

D. FROM SEATTLE writes:

Peter S. wrote a long essay, but salvation is not necessarily found in so many words. I will pick just a couple of paragraphs to which to respond. 

Peter: “As for the meaning of such an act of desecration to Muslims, the burning of the Koran is not equivalent, in a Christian context, to the burning of the Bible, but rather to the immolation of Christ himself. Read More »

PETER S. writes:

In the preface to the Islamic scholar Carl Ernst’s valuable book, Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World, he makes an astonishing statement:

 [T]he task of Islamic studies could.be described as minimal.  In 1992 I participated in a workshop discussing images of Islam in America.  The educational goal that we finally settled on in the workshop was very basic: to convince Americans that Muslims are human beings.  This might sound like an absurdly simple point, but the Islamic religion is perhaps the one remaining subject about which educated people are content to demonstrate outright prejudice and bias.  Ten years later a workshop on critical issues in Islamic studies came to the same conclusion, but more forcefully: the real issue is to humanize Muslims in the eyes of non-Muslims.  [p.xvii]

In this, as might be judged by many of the recent statements on this blog, he would appear to be entirely correct.  Read More »

Ralph Vaughan Williams

THE MOTHER of the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was a niece of Charles Darwin. Vaughan Williams was seven years old when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. One day the child asked his mother what the famous book was about. According to an anecdote I heard on the radio yesterday, his mother replied: “The Bible says the world was created in seven days. Uncle Charles thinks it took a lot longer. Either way, the world is wonderful.”

If you have never listened to Vaughan William’s beautiful meditation on a bird rising to the skies, “A Lark Ascending,” you can listen to it here.  Vaughan Williams was said to have been inspired by George Meredith’s poem To A Skylark:

O skylark! I see thee and call thee joy!
Thy wings bear thee up to the breast of the dawn;
I see thee no more, but thy song is still
The tongue of the heavens to me!

Thus are the days when I was a boy;
Sweet while I lived in them, dear now they’re gone:
I feel them no longer, but still, O still
They tell of the heavens to me.

Read More »

THIS WEBSITE is produced on a small table in our living room. It’s a wooden game table, a hand-me-down from a relative, with a top that is 19 inches long and 21 inches wide. A chess board is inscribed on the wood. If I remove my laptop, I can lift up the chess board. There are checkers and chess pieces inside. My son sometimes uses the table to play games with a friend. 

From where I sit, I can see out the front window and the back window too. The other day, there was a torrential spring downpour in the back yard. “Look,” my son said. In the front yard, it was not raining at all.

Virginia Woolf was wrong. A woman does not need a room of her own – or even a desk of her own – to have a mind of her own. That’s because truth is everywhere, sending its roots into the ground, watered from above. She needn’t pursue life. It knocks at the front door. The drama of existence is all around. Unimportant things are brimming with importance. 

I am hoping you will support the counter-revolution, the movement that can only arise within hearts and minds like yours. Please subsidize the daily labor that goes into this tabletop enterprise by donating to this website today. Thank you for whatever you can do to keep it going.

JANE writes:

This is a sad story! I’m sending it to you because of the “perfect girl” angle – plasma physics, mentoring other girls, sax player, in the marching band no less – almost a caricature of what I imagine the typical elite college resumé to be – and yet, somehow, someone with long hair allowed near a lathe! Sad. Read More »

IN SOME segments of the economy, women are earning significantly more than men. What will feminists do now? Rest assured, it won’t involve advocating for men. From an editorial in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal by Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum:

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women’s Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before. Read More »

RESPONDING to this post on cultural attitudes toward pregnancy, Sarah writes:

I agree with Mr. McNeill that pregnancy ought to be accorded honor. However, I do not think that maternity bikinis are the way to recapture its lost honor.

In the 1950s, pregnant women wouldn’t dream of baring their midriffs or conducting nude photo shoots. They wore modest clothing, and generally eschewed the word “pregnant” in favor of the more ambiguous “expecting.” And yet, the world treated them with great deference and respect.

Today, on the other hand, one sees pregnant women exposing themselves on magazine covers, talk shows, or Facebook. And now the world treats them with absolute wretchedness. Read More »