SEE this about a 35-year-old mother of four in today’s Daily Mail. These are gruesome images. Please don’t look at them while children are nearby. Notice how the woman justifies her appearance because she suffered domestic abuse. She may very well be the victim of beatings or torture. She has gone on to inflict horror on others.

By the way, the recent discussion of tattoos continues. In that entry, I responded to a photo sent by a reader of a tattoo that is particularly tasteful, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tattooed monster above. However, I said I did not find the far more tasteful image beautiful. (Leaving aside the obvious reality that a woman who has gone to such lengths to ornament her torso is unlikely to keep it private, as the photo proves.)  I wrote:

I don’t find the image beautiful because it is on skin and thus calls to mind 1) the pain involved in receiving or removing the tattoo and 2) the inevitable appearance of this tattoo 30 years from now.

The skin is the most sensitive of human organs, the medium of exquisite contact with the physical world and with other human beings. It is sensitive to pain and pleasure like no other part of our bodies. There is nothing more beautiful in the young. It records time and change as if a sculptor was assigned to each one of us. I cannot understand leaving our own inferior impressions, however tasteful or artistic they may be, on what is so finely and mysteriously wrought. We must experience some injury to our awareness of what skin is or, by some misfortune of fate or congenital deficiency, never have possessed it in the first place, before we are tattooed.

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IN A DISCUSSION here last September on Pastor Terry Jones’s plan to burn the Koran, I expressed disappointment that he had not. It is inspiring that he has since gone ahead and to read of his remarkable, no-nonsense defense of his decision to do so. At VFR, Dean Ericson writes:

Terry Jones’s action has been the single most bracing and courageous act of rebellion against the suffocating, mindless liberalism that infects nearly every American mind. In one dramatic gesture Jones proves that Islam is not a “religion of peace.” In one clarifying act he has demonstrated the utter futility of our Islamic nation-building folly. He has shown how shaky is the house of cards built by liberals–so shaky that one obscure man can make the whole pile of lies tremble.

In the discussion from last year, Thomas F. Bertonneau wrote:

Here is a partial list of societies and civilizations that ceased to exist when Islam, a violent cult-like creed whose ethos entails absolute intolerance of all other creeds, destroyed them –  Read More »

J. writes:

I am a third-year college student and am struggling to survive the college environment. I do enjoy lectures in philosophy and reading philosophy and other subjects but I can’t stand the students and the “college lifestyle.” As someone who believes in the values espoused on your website, for example, I am completely nauseated by the behavior, clothing, arrogance, hedonism, alcoholism, etc. of the students and avoid them completely, often to pursue my own reading and interests. Read More »

CONSERVATIVE evangelical pastors met recently in Iowa to affirm their opposition to same-sex marriage. Who was among their speakers but Newt Gingrich himself, the walking embodiment of American Christian hypocrisy on the subject of marriage. How can one defend marriage anywhere near Newt who left two of his wives and admitted to having an affair with his current wife, Callista, for years while married to his second wife?

If the primary purpose of marriage is self-fulfillment then same-sex marriage makes sense. Read More »

A MEN’S ONLY club of the powerful and influential is an outrage. A women’s-only club is proof of progress. The Belizean Grove is “the world’s ultimate old-girls club.” Here’s what they do at their gatherings, according to The New York Times:

They spend mornings in panel discussions based on the retreat’s particular theme; in recent years, those themes have included “Complexity,” “Shaping Our Future” and “Wisdom and Spirit.” At the sessions, Grovers showcase their areas of expertise, opining on issues as diverse as military strategy, marine life, philanthropy and how revolutions in the Middle East may affect the geopolitical balance. Read More »

SEBASTIAN C. writes:

I must take issue with your casual dismissal in the entry on the British TV series “Downton Abbey” of employers exploiting their female house maids with the line “But sexual abuse of young women today is rampant among those who grow up with their mother’s boyfriends.” I don’t think the analogy holds. There is a difference between something happening occasionally as a consequence of another phenomenon and something that is institutionalized and ritualized. Let me explain. 

In his ancien regime and the revolution, Tocqueville includes an appendix (or the editor to my French edition includes them, I don’t recall) quoting from some of the Cahiers de Doléances. These were the detailed grievances of the peasantry and provincial shopkeepers against the aristocracy. One of the main complaints is that the aristocratic men routinely helped themselves to the prettiest French peasant girls, usually raping them, sometimes simply kidnapping them. This is so entrenched in French culture that by the 1970’s there were a number of soft-core porn movies centered on this theme. Even non-Marxists historians of the revolution like Francois Furet (who was my own professor at Chicago) have written that the sexual tension created by the presence of young male aristocrats in the countryside contributed to igniting the terror.  Read More »

THE REV. James Jackson, FSSP, of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Littleton, Colorado, offered his reflections on the subject of tattoos to his congregation in his parish bulletin last year. He wrote:

If the tattoo extols what is base or ugly (remember beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but is an objective reality), then it is contrary to the virtues of modesty and purity. Rejoicing in or promulgating what is ugly is also against the proper order of creation and the Creator.

His entire essay is reprinted below. Read More »

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Daniel Mitsui

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WOMEN, because of their natural empathy, make better doctors than men. An article in today’s New York Times illustrates why this widely-held belief is false. The entry of large numbers of women into the medical profession has diminished the level of dedication and personal care. Doctors who are mothers are empathetic. But they are empathetic to their children too. They don’t want to work the hours demanded by the traditional medical practice and prefer bureaucratically-administered hospital or clinical jobs that come with regular shifts. 

The grandfather of a woman who is a doctor comments on the changes. “My son and I had deeper feelings for our patients than I think Kate will ever have,” Dr. William Dewar II said over lunch at a diner in Honesdale, about 30 miles northeast of Scranton. Munching on a club sandwich, Dr. William Dewar III gestured toward the diner’s owner, who had greeted them deferentially. Read More »

RESPONDING to the discussion in this entry about a high school student being taunted by friends, Paul writes:

No, no, no. No way should this boy allow his “friends” to bully him. He should make these guys respect him or drop them.

For example, I had a longtime close friend who had become more and more sarcastic with me during college. I am not sarcastic, so the match was uneven. At that time, shrugging (mostly) or attacking were my primary responses with others. I called him one night and asked him to come over to discuss something. He did right away. Read More »

SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes:

I just encountered this passage from C.S. Lewis, one which was not familiar to me.  Like so much of his work, it expresses something many of us know but have never given such excellent expression:

Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide-spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. Read More »

THE leaf of the Acanthus plant, pictured here growing in the ruins of the Palatine Hill in Rome, is architecturally renowned. Acanthus spinosus is the model for the stylized decoration on Corinthian and Composite capitals. You have seen it on classical buildings many times. History has it that this Mediterranean thistle was the inspiration for the Corinthian capital designed by the Greek sculptor Callimachus in the fifth century B.C. According to the Roman writer and architect Vitruvius:

A Corinthian virgin fell ill and died. After her burial her nurse placed a basket of her favorite possessions on her tomb and put a tile on top to preserve its contents. The basket was accidentally placed on the root of an acanthus, which grew around the tile, and so formed volutes at its corner.

Callimachus passed by the tomb, saw the basket, and pleased with the form and novelty of this composition, was inspired to construct columns of this style in the country about Corinth, and arranged its proportions.”

I learned these vital facts yesterday while quizzing my 17-year-old son with these excellent architectural flash cards by Gwen Headley.

BRITISH author A.N. Wilson writes in a recent issue of The Daily Mail about the TV hit “Downton Abbey,” the hugely popular BBC Masterpiece Theater series about the lives of Edwardian aristocrats and their servants. Wilson contends viewers gained an overly flattering picture of Britain’s pre-socialist past. That is dangerous. He says the cult of costume dramas is not merely silly or sentimental but “sinister.”

It’s important to note his words. It is wrong and evil to portray the past in a flattering light. Wilson is incensed by remarks by Hugh Bonneville, the actor who plays Lord Grantham, an aristocrat who does not want to lose the family manor because of his love for his ancestral past. Bonneville, who plays opposite Elizabeth McGovern as his wife, the Countess of Grantham, and Maggie Smith as the elderly Dowager Countess, made the following comments on the set of the show:

This country is currently in a complete mess, and the pre-World War I era, rightly or wrongly, was one in which the structure of society worked.

Wilson retorts:

That would seem to suggest that Mr. Bonneville thinks the ‘complete mess’ of our country would be resolved if we went back to pre-1914 Britain. Does he really mean this?

Does [Bonneville] want to abolish votes for women, or limit the franchise to men over 21? Or send homosexuals to prison? Or dismantle the Welfare State, or abolish the National Health Service? Read More »

IT’S WRONG and foolish to make a fantasy of the past, to glorify what was not glorious. By the same token, it is wrong to demonize it. This review from last September of Jane Humphries’ book, Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution fits into the latter category. Annabel Venning of The Daily Mail writes:

While the upper classes professed horror at the iniquities of the slave trade, British children were regularly shackled and starved in their own country. The silks and cottons the upper classes wore, the glass jugs and steel knives on their tables, the coal in their fireplaces, the food on their plates – almost all of it was produced by children working in pitiful conditions on their doorsteps.

But to many of the monied classes, the poor were invisible: an inhuman sub-species who did not have the same feelings as their own and whose sufferings were unimportant. If they spared a thought for them at all, it was nothing more than a shudder of revulsion at the filth and disease they carried.

It is not true that “almost all” industrial goods in Britain were produced by child laborers. Imagine an industrial economy run almost entirely by children while the adults did what? Adult men and women worked even more so. Nor is it true that the monied classes were indifferent.  Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a public outcry and activism on behalf of child laborers. Much of that outcry came from the upper classes, from people such as wealthy heiress and budding socialist Beatrice Potter, and led to the birth of the welfare state.

Starting in the 1830s, laws were enacted to improve the working conditions of children and limit their hours, laws which sometimes made their conditions worse as children sought jobs that were unregulated when larger and newer factories would no longer hire them, as this author points out. The children who suffered the most were the minority who did not live with their families but were kept by “parish houses,” or workhouses. These were government institutions. These were children under government care, abandoned to a system that was outside family protection. Read More »

IN THE foregoing entry, a mother wrote in to ask for advice. Her teenage son is receiving painful physical taunts from friends. This is not a case of harassment by enemies, she said, but of horseplay or teasing that has gone too far.

Here a reader responds when I asked him what she should do. He makes an interesting point. Men today often urge their sons to endure.  Read More »

THESE TABLES, which show the changes in median earnings from 1947 to 2009 for men and women employed full-time, were included in a recent post. I am publishing them again to draw further attention to these remarkable figures. From 1973 to 2009, the median earnings of full-time male workers over 15 years old decreased by an average of .1 percent a year. The median earnings for women during that same period increased by .8 percent per year.

In that 36-year period, the rates of divorce and illegitimacy soared. What is the lesson here? The more economic autonomy women gain, the more families dissolve or fail to form.

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MRS. C. writes:

I was wondering if you could perhaps post this question regarding my thoughts on what I believe to be assault on a 15-year-old boy.
 
My youngest child, a 6’2″ freshman male in high school is on a competitive team, does great academically and is well liked by teachers, coaches, and also friends.  Read More »