THERE once was a time when the pregnant woman shielded her distended belly from the eyes of the world. She wore loose smocks. Out of modesty and a sense of protectiveness for the unborn, she did not wear tight-fitting clothes. 

Today, this is not the case. Women wear T-shirts and bare midriffs. Most shocking of all, expectant mothers now have their portraits taken by professional photographers in the latter stages of pregnancy. The convention in these portraits is to display the swollen belly naked, perhaps stroked by the father or a sibling.

No one wants to see his mother half-naked and pregnant in a framed photograph on a shelf. No one. These portraits will be disturbing revelations. Children will be forced to view themselves as naked bulges, non-persons. But the expectant mother is not thinking about her child and the awesome responsibility ahead when she poses in this way. She is in love with her primitive fertility. Let the record include her moments as maternal goddess.

The modern woman doesn’t have much left of her femininity, so she glories in what she does have: her body. The more spiritually empty she is, the more triumphantly carnal she becomes.

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JEFF CULBREATH of What’s Wrong with the World goes a step further than I have gone with regard to Pastor Terry Jones and the burning of the Koran. He writes:

That the Koran is a book worthy of mass extermination by means of fire cannot be credibly denied by any Christian who takes his faith seriously. I’ve defended the burning of books many times in the past, and have often made the point that Catholics have no business condemning the burning of books in principle (although specific cases might be condemned on prudential grounds). Indeed, the Church solemnly applauds the destruction of harmful books… Read More »

THE music video “Baby” by Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber has received more than 500 million views on YouTube. The love song, wildly popular among teenage girls, breaks into rap with a performance by someone named Ludacris. The teenybopper gamely attempts to do his thing in the medium of rap, with its throbbing simulation of animalistic copulation.  The video is the story of a multiracial utopia in which the white boy progressively dispenses with his whiteness and wins the girl. Read More »

DEAN ERICSON writes:

It should be said that Koran burning is not primarily directed at Muslims — it’s directed at liberals. Liberalism, that mutant strain of extremist, fundamentalist liberalism, preached with religious fervor by our liberal priesthood, surging as a tsunami in the 1960s and commanding, “Thou shalt not discriminate!” — that’s for whom the Koran burning is intended. Read More »

KRISTOR writes:

I strongly second Dean Ericson’s recommendation of Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. It is one of the most important books of my intellectual history. I sort books that are successful, books I like, into two categories: those that extend or deepen my understanding, and those that revolutionize it. The former sorts of books generally work for me on account of their further clarification of insights gained from the latter sort. Of that latter, revolutionary sort, there are only a few. Pirenne’s is one. Read More »

MAX writes:

You seem to posit that all men, simply by virtue of existing, are obligated to seek a wife, marry, and have children, unless there is a real impediment to marriage (religious vocation, mental/physical illness, inability to financially support a family, etc.) Is this assertion correct? If so, why? I’ve never seen any doctrinal or legal obligations within the church’s tradition stating this, nor have I come across any rational argument for this in the (arguably limited) philosophy texts I’ve read. If I have your view on this incorrect, how am I incorrect?

If the above is NOT your position, and normal men are not obligated to seek marriage just by existing, how does this scenario work: Read More »

RESPONDING to a Muslim reader who protests my praise of Pastor Terry Jones, I wrote:

Eugenia Ginzburg (second row, second from left) at the Tartarstan Communist University

 CAROLINE BECKENHAUPT writes:

After reading your post on Eugenia Ginzburg and Soviet Womanhood, I had to read her memoirs. I finally got Into the Whirlwind from the library. I started it last night, and I couldn’t stop reading. I finally forced myself to go to sleep at 1 a.m. –unusual for me. I’m still reading today, in between kids’ activities and vet appointments. She writes so evocatively, the tears always well up.

I can’t help comparing today with those wretched times. Of course, there are many things different, but one thing strikes me as being similar: scared people lying to themselves, to each other, in the name of a messiah figure, and what was assumed to be “normal” everyday life is turned upside down, and freakish things become mundane.

JIMMY CARTER continues to be one of the world’s most outspoken feminists. Yesterday, he said the exploitation of women was “the most serious and all pervasive and damaging human rights abuse on Earth.” Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

One of your readers wrote, in respect of the Muslim period in Spain and the enthusiasm of the Reconquista: “A few voices of rationality managed to save some key texts which among other things introduced Europe to Greek and Roman knowledge.” 

Another one of your readers wrote: “The Muslims were responsible for some great civilizations, exquisite art, the transfer and preservation of classical philosophy, and a civilization of tolerance (in Spain) for hundreds of years.” 

This notion that the West owes its civilization to Islam is a complete falsehood notwithstanding that many otherwise intelligent and educated people continue to believe it.  The continuity from Classical Mediterranean to Western European Medieval Civilization is patent, which is to say that knowledge of the Greco-Roman tradition never vanished, even though at times it contracted to a few monasteries and scriptoria.  Many scholars have understood this since the nineteenth century, but a French researcher, Sylvain Gouguenheim, has recently and brilliantly restated the facts in a remarkable book Aristote au Mont-St, Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chretienne (2008).  Regrettably Gouguenheim’s book has not yet been translated, but readers of The Thinking Housewife may access my review of it, at The Brussels Journal, here.  In that review, I wrote:  Read More »

Peeling potatoes, Henry Hetherington Emmerson

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JEFF W. writes:

I’ll share with you a thought I had this morning.

I have been thinking about how the Internet is a slum. Google, whose business purpose is to gather eyeballs for advertisers, provides easy access to all sorts of trivial, time-wasting garbage, as well as pornography. Facebook encourages the worst in self-centered behavior. The young billionaires who run Google and Facebook are slumlords.

There is one part of the Internet, though, that is not a slum, where civilization and good manners can be found, and that is at The Thinking Housewife authored by Laura Wood.

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HERE IS a recipe I half-invented the other day after an unsuccessful attempt to make homemade Chinese dumplings with homemade wonton wrappers. This case of spectacular cross-cultural hubris resulted in a decent sandwich. If you find ground chicken breast too expensive or too hard to make, ground turkey would work too. The burgers are an adaptation of the curried chicken dumplings in Susanna Foo Chinese Cuisine. Read More »

AS HAS been discussed here before, there is a movement by men in Western society to reject marriage because of the widespread phenomenon of unilateral divorce by women and its accompanying injustices, including the appropriation of property and children. The roots of this movement are understandable. But the prescribed cure, if it involves the refusal to marry and have children to avoid the possibility of divorce, is as harmful as the wrongs it seeks to redress.

Here’s a useful analogy by Alan Roebuck. He writes: Read More »

According to a new report based on 2010 Census numbers, the population of white children dropped by 4.3 million, or about 10 percent, in the past ten years. The number of Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million, or about 38 percent. White children are in the minority in ten states.

Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine of 12-year-old Addie Card in a Vermont cotton mill

A READER writes:

While reading your recent entry on child labor and seeing the picture of the child chimney sweep, something began to stir inside my memory. It has taken a few days but my dear Grandma telling me of going to work in the silk mill as soon as she was able has finally bubbled to the top!

I know why it took so long to surface because she talked in such an animated way about how she could hardly wait until she was old enough to work there. She talked about being so excited to finally be bringing in money and to have the joyful responsibility of buying all her own material for her clothes which she made herself starting at age 12. Read More »

The End of a Happy Day, Thomas Faed

 FROM one of my favorite blogs.