Christ was not tempted in the towns or among the multitudes. During His forty days in the inhospitable void, He allowed himself to be approached. This was no accident. When individuals separate themselves from others, physically or intellectually, they encounter temptation. Satan despises those in the desert. He loathes the emptiness of contemplation. He hates it when we set off on our own.

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Gail Aggen writes:

I was fascinated by the commenter Jake Jacobsen who relayed his experiences working in professional kitchens. From the way he described it, these kitchens are no place for the faint of heart or delicate of constitution. I had not put that together in my mind when wondering why there were so few women chefs. But now that I think back on my own experiences waitressing as a young woman, I cannot remember any kitchen staff being female, including those who wash dishes. (more…)

IN THIS EXCELLENT piece by Matt Labash, Father Rick Frechette buries the dead of Haiti. Labash writes:

Haiti might be the only place where death with dignity entails being buried five-to-a-cardboard coffin. But it is moving and beautiful. Yet, I suggest to Frechette, it seems futile. Why do this? However horrible their lives were, this isn’t going to change that. Why spend so much time and energy serving people who’ll never know they’ve been served?

Frechette thinks about it a long while, then says, “If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”

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    The 1995 film version of Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly, directed by Frédéric Mitterand and filmed in Tunisia by Martin Scorcese, is haunting and beautiful. The Chinese soprano Ying Huang does not look Japanese and her singing is not powerful but she is unforgettable, her character changing from a romantic girl to a mature and principled woman. If you have never watched a full-length opera, this famous tale of the geisha who is bought by an American soldier as his temporary bride is a great place to start. On her wedding day, the fragile geisha realizes she has left her people behind and she enters a lonely realm. Some people complain that Butterfly is anti-American, but one could just as easily say it is anti-Japanese. Cio-Cio-San is sold to the soldier, Lieutenant Pinkerton (Richard Troxell), by a Japanese procurer.

  "Women don't have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time."                                                                                        --- Harry Reid, Feb. 22, 2010 The nice thing about being female is that you are presumed innocent. You can even shoot your brother, as Amy Bishop did, and not face charges. Men aren't born saints, but it's time we laid to rest the view that women are. I recommend Erin Pizzey's memories of growing up with an abusive mother to anyone who believes domestic violence is the exclusive preserve of men.

HERE’S A SURPRISE. Amy Bishop, the woman who murdered three professors at the University of Alabama, did not have adequate credentials to be granted tenure, according to scientists interviewed by the New York Times. Bishop had filed a sex discrimination suit against the university and her failure to win a position as full professor of biology was seen as possible motivation for her crime. (more…)

FITZGERALD WRITES:

Once again, I’m chagrined at the crass content of this Spearhead article, but the author, Dr. Paul, makes two really solid points that stand out and almost demand highlighting. He writes:

“Fake self esteem, like 98% of everything else that is marketed just to females, has become the psycho-porn of the Western woman, with profits that would put a twinkle in Bill Gates eyes. How much profit exactly is anyone’s guess.”

“Psycho-porn” is a brilliant turn of phrase as women all around are ingesting super-sized doses of narcissistic self adulation on a daily basis. I love how he shreds the self-esteem industry and skewers it. (more…)

IF A WOMAN cannot find Mr. Wrong, she can always marry herself. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the fantastically popular Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage,  describes a friend who does just that:

On the morning of her fortieth birthday, my friend Christine went down to the northern Pacific Ocean at dawn. It was a cold and overcast day. Nothing romantic about it. She brought with her a small wooden boat that she had built with her own hands. She filled the little boat with rose petals and rice – artifacts of a symbolic wedding. She walked out into the cold water, right up to her chest, and set that boat on fire. Then she let it go – releasing along with it her most tenacious fantasies of marriage as an act of personal salvation. Christine told me later that as the sea took away the Tyranny of the Bride forever (still burning), she felt transcendent and mighty, as though she were physically carrying herself across some critical threshold. She had finally married her own life, and not a moment too soon.

Carrying herself across the threshold? And people say feminism has made women happy.

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Now that the Hardvard-educated biologist Amy Bishop allegedly has murdered three professors at the University of Albama, her charge of sex discrimination against the university would seem to be a shut case. But, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a spokesman for the university declined comment on Bishop because of the ongoing discrimination case.

Such is the atmosphere of proceduralism and bureaucratic hesitation created by our anti-discrimination statutes. Bishop had acted erratically and aroused suspicions of insanity in a number of colleagues, the Chronicle reports, and yet she was free to threaten the university with a sex discrimination suit filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Employees are much less likely to speak frankly with supervisors, and employers are much less likely to act on their instincts, in the kind of atmosphere created by anti-discrimination laws. They are not just inherently unfair, they are dangerous. Perhaps it is not too absurd in today’s work climate to imagine a convicted murderer winning a discrimination case.

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  FASTING purifies the soul. It lifts up the mind, and it brings the body into subjection to the spirit. It makes the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of desire, puts out the flames of lust and enkindles the true light of chastity. -- Augustine                                                               

  [NOTE: I originally posted a picture of Amy Bishop here, but I found it too disturbing, I decided to remove it. It is a chilling portrait of an angry human being.]   It is always more shocking when a woman commits an act of extreme violence. The case of Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist who allegedly shot three professors at the University of Alabama last week, is especially troubling. Bishop has a Ph.D. from Harvard and is the mother of four children. Her case raises disturbing questions about a life of ambition and violence. Bishop shot her 18-year-old brother in 1986 in Massachusetts and the death was ruled accidental. She also was previously questioned in a 1993 case involving a pipe bomb sent to a former colleague. Bishop was denied tenure and there is speculation this fueled her rage. She was described by the New York Times as "fiercely intelligent." According to the Boston Herald, Bishop held a gun to a man's chest at a Boston area auto body shop and demanded a getaway vehicle minutes after her brother's shooting 24 years ago. According to the Herald, Bishop's mother was a member of the police personnel board in Braintree at the time of the shooting.

  WOULD YOU, could you love a man who looks like this?  The New York Times describes the latest in men's fashions here. I realize the idea is to create a look that appeals to other men, not women.                        -- Comments -- Lisa writes: "Would I, could I, love a man who looks like this?" That's just it: there are no men who look like that.

MALE AND FEMALE are more than biological realities. They are spiritual essences and cultural ideals. Bonald, a writer who takes his pseudonym from the French  monarchist Louis de Bonald, describes these ideals at his site, Throne and Altar. He writes:

Of course, each nature has its characteristic deformations, but it is always a gross error to identify a thing with its deformation. (more…)

IN THE ANNALS OF surrogate mothering, British nannies and Southern nannies are the most famous, two utterly different species, now mostly extinct. In response to the recent posts on nannies near and far, a reader sends this beautiful excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body about a black slavewoman, “matriarch of the weak and young:”

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  WE HAVE about three feet of snow in our yard here in Pennsylvania. That may seem unexceptional for residents of Buffalo or Syracuse but for us, it's very exceptional. During the blizzard on Wednesday, we lost power for ten hours and a gargantuan  pine fell across our road. At the height of the storm, these words from the Bellows Falls Times in Vermont seemed apt. They were written right after the Blizzard of 1888: "No paths, no streets, no sidewalks, no light, no roads, no guests, no calls, no teams, no hacks, no trains, no moon, no meat, no milk, no paper, no mail, no news, no thing -- but snow."

IN THE THIRD OF a series of essays on the decline in literacy, Thomas F. Bertonneau explores the connection between memory and popular culture. He describes introducing his university students to folk and music-hall songs. He says, “there is a startling difference between the songs that students consume and the songs that their grandparents and great grandparents sang, the memory of which the commercialization of music rudely interrupted, starting about fifty years ago”:  (more…)