Mass rape, bride burnings, the brutal disfigurement of young girls in Afghanistan and wife beatings – who is responsible for these things? Not criminals, but Christian clergy who have never hurt a fly. It is religion that “creates the context” for any crime anywhere in the world perpetrated against a woman. Anytime a woman is slapped in the face or paid less than a man, the evil of faith is to blame, unless of course it is a New Age faith.

Such is the claim of the preposterous, babbling King Lear of modern politics, Jimmy Carter, and his New York Times fool, Nicholas Kristof, who wanders with the former president on the windswept heath of advanced political dementia. Religion is one of the “basic causes of the violation of women’s rights,” Carter said not long ago, and last week Kristof echoed this refrain in a column. (more…)

Fitzgerald writes:

This article by Jennifer Roback Morse posits several excellent points about the deeper implications of endorsing same-sex unions. Most women have no intention of becoming lesbians regardless of creed or culture. But I can definitely see the young women our feminized culture is churning out going for the concept of a two-parent household under the cover of a same-sex union to further game the system. (more…)

Hannon writes:

Your portraits of marriages are always singular and moving. They seem to cast a special light on the fact that two different people, two souls, inhabit a marriage. This is a special notion that deserves more reflection. The idea that they all end– husband, wife and bond– often seems haunting to me, in a strange nostalgic way. (But then you do not write about prosaic couples!). (more…)

At a dialogue with the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager Peter Gelb that was partly broadcast on public radio today, directors of controversial new productions spoke of the small-mindedness of audiences that have the audacity to boo.  Bartlett Sher, director of the new Les Contes d’Hoffmann, called booing “a self-interested expression of ownership.” Gee, that’s weird. I thought booing was a self-interested expression of contempt. (more…)

Craftsmanship is more than skill. It is a disposition, a state of mind, and a stance toward the world. The crafted object is idea and spirit made manifest. Robinson Crusoe was the craftsman par excellence. No one has more vividly described the inner world of the craftsman than Daniel DeFoe in his classic tale of the shipwrecked man on his island. Crusoe cured his solitude. He cured it with manual effort and small acts of creation. The most radically isolated of men, he lived in peace. 

Here is DeFoe on Crusoe’s work to make an umbrella:

“After this I spent a great deal of Time and Pains to make me an Umbrella. I was indeed in great want of one; I had seen them made in the Brasils, where they are very useful in the great Heats which are there. And I felt the Heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the Equinox; besides, as I was oblig’d to be much abroad, it was a most useful thing to me, as well for the Rain as for the Heats. I took a world of Pains at it and was a great while before I could make anything likely to hold; nay, after I thought I had hit the Way, I spoil’d two or three before I made one to my Mind; but at last I made one that answered indifferently well: The main difficulty I found was to make it to let down. (more…)

In an excellent essay at Upstate Conservative, Thomas F. Bertonneau explains why ‘gnostic’ is an appropriate label for today’s liberal. As defined by Eric Voegelin, gnosticism stands for religious, and profoundly anti-spiritual, political radicalism. No other word encompasses this toxic combination of religious fervor and existential disappointment. Bertonneau writes:

The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse.

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Kristor writes at VFR:

It seems to me that when Darwinians express awe or reverence for nature, they are not so much dishonest as inconsistent. Honestly and straightforwardly carried through to their logical conclusions, their principles make a mockery of such feelings. Yet they cannot help having these feelings that they do have. They have these feelings because it is bliss to be alive, bliss to exist; it is bliss to know, and so to know is to love, to adore, and willy nilly to worship. (more…)

The blogger Justin at Truth Shall Set You Free  argues that Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid is a perfect introduction to female psychology for young boys. He writes:

… The Little Mermaid contains everything you need to know to understand women. It is exactly the movie you would want to show your sons, and make sure they fully understand its lessons. Which may seem odd at first, because it is usually identified as a girl movie, being, in fact, one of Disney’s big five Princess Movies.

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Reader Larry B. asks this question:

Who suffers more: a perfect being in an imperfect world, an imperfect being in a perfect world, or an imperfect being in an imperfect world? 

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N.W. writes:

I’ve often wondered how one can take joy in a thing which the one who made it took no joy in making. For instance, which of these two toys would a child prefer to be given: 

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Before the 1972 Oakland A’s hit the field, it was rare to see baseball players with beards or moustaches. The A’s brought a whole new look, one that continues in various forms to this day.

Team owner Charlie Finley offered a $300 prize to the player who could grow the most interesting facial hair and held “Moustache Day” at the park, offering free admission to anyone with a moustache. (Hey, it was the seventies.)  Rollie Fingers, shown below, won the prize. The fact that the A’s went on to win three World Series didn’t hurt their look.

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Apropos of the recent discussions of beards and men, I was wondering why so few men in the 40s and 50s had facial hair. The reason was obvious, but I didn’t see it.

P.W. writes:

One of the main reasons that beards fell out of favor in the 20th Century was for military reasons, especially during the World War I years and beyond. 

This is because of the invention of poison/nerve gas. Men with beards and a lot of facial hair (mustaches, etc) are not able to obtain an adequate seal on their gas-mask, thus beards were abandoned first by the military so that their gas-masks would work correctly. Beards were discarded by the military for purely practical reasons and that trend then trickled out in to the general populace. 

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In a review at Frontpage Magazine of Precious, a new Lee Daniels film about a black welfare mother, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

At one time, black Americans had the edifying art of Negro spirituals, infused with religion, with which to escape the trappings of undignified lives. Now they have mediocre films and stories that moralize, but fail to inspire. If Daniels had let Mary sing “Motherless Child,” instead of performing her grotesque confessional, the magnificent spiritual would have transcended her grievance.

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A return to traditional family values may sound nice, but it makes no sense economically. The world has changed. We can no longer afford many children; women must devote themselves to work; and institutions must take over child-rearing.

This is the common objection to any proposals for restoring the traditional family. But it is a myth. In fact, the opposite is true. We cannot afford to go on as we are.

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  A Coast Guard cutter in Guantánomo Bay rocked back and forth when the earthquake in Haiti struck even though the epicenter was 200 miles away. The scale of the disaster is unimaginable. My heart and prayers go out to all Haitians.

OLIVE CHANCELLOR, the bluestocking feminist in Henry James’s The Bostonians, is a classic gnostic, if one draws on the definition of Eric Voegelin. “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough, inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was iniquitous.” Olive dreams of martyrdom and, as Thomas Bertonneau pointed out in the previous thread, she appears to view herself as a descendent of Hypatia, the Neo-Platonist scholar in early fifth century A.D., whom a Christian mob murdered during the burning of the famous Musaeon, or Library, at Alexandria. The gnostic is radically dissatisfied with the world at large and nevertheless retains hope that it can be changed. If that means going down in flames, as Olive does in her own way, that is the price to pay.

Lawrence Auster writes:

Your summation of the six characteristics of the gnostic is good. I am excited to see people picking up on the recent discussions and trying to bring gnosticism into ordinary usage as an accessible concept and analytical tool which can help us understand so many contemporary belief systems.

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Miss Birdseye is a delightful character in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. Or let’s say the elderly activist and irrepressible humanitarian would be delightful if she weren’t so vividly and painfully real. I have known Miss Birdseye in various young and old incarnations, and perhaps you have too. The problem with this woman is that she is fundamentally decent. She is just so blind to human nature. She is lost, astray in her grandiose fantasies of rescuing the dispossessed and fanatically prejudiced against her own people. Here is a description of her early in the book:

She was a little old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom noticed – the vast, fair, protruberant, candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for with unsuccesful irrelevant movements. (more…)

An article in the University of Maryland’s Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly argues the evils of homeschooling. It states:

The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.

Izzy Lyman offers an excellent rebuttal at the website Big Journalism.

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