First, I was given the great privilege of recording the official audio version of the Holy Father's new book, Light of the World as published by Ignatius Press, which can be ordered on audio CD or downloaded here: http://www.ignatius.com/Products/LIWO-H/light-of-the-world.aspx And I said two weeks ago to Jim Morlino, my co-reader for the audio book, "The Pope's [...]
So, Lord, I’m supposed to do this? I’m really supposed to write some sort of Philosophy of Acting? I mean, yes, there’s what I ran into a few weeks back and posted on, the rejection of humor by the Puritans. And indeed I realized that there’s more there than just a lesson on comedy and humility. [...]
John C. Wright has written several posts lately beginning with this one ( http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/11/superman-and-dehumanity-part-i/ ) in which he, among other things, claims that post-modernist drama is an oxymoron, that drama can not be an art form for a post-modernist: no dehumanizing thinker can create dramatic art. He's right, of course, because drama is all about the consequential. [...]
My first hint was the fact that they were opposed to Halloween. Foolishly, I ignored this until he sat down before me with a kind of stolid contempt. “You call yourself a Christian?” he said to me, peering. “How can you be a Christian and perform this kind of comedy?” I had driven over an hour [...]
With success comes danger. Case in point: as Cardinal Newman was beatified last month in England, the left had to do something; they couldn’t just ignore Newman and they weren’t about to read him. So what did they do? They co-opted him, they made him not only a theological liberal (the one thing he never was), [...]
There is awash in the world today a kind of idealism that’s loosed from its moorings. I suspect this is because the cynicism against which the idealism reacts is so strong and entrenched that it’s provoking reactions that are unrealistic. A case in point is James O’Keefe, a young man who spoke at this year’s American [...]
Below, Sophia Mason has written an Inkdesk piece in which she both pans and praises Facebook. How I empathize with Sophia! As regular readers know, Facebook and I have had a tumultuous relationship. She and I have split a few times after ugly public shouting matches, she pushed me down the stairs once, I have accused [...]
It occurred to me what the thread is, not only in people arguing unreasonably on the internet, but on a number of things we encounter in our lives.The thread is Bad Faith.When a fellow becomes a Facebook “friend” only to post a nasty and superficial attack upon the Catholic Church on my Facebook “wall”, and then [...]
Hilaire Belloc, in “The Great Heresies”, pointed to a disturbing feature of the Modern Attack on the Catholic Church: the attack upon Reason.Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than on the internet - yes, on Facebook in particular, but also everywhere on the internet. And though I have written about Facebook before and my on-again off-again [...]
“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. This is hard for readers to grasp, for O’Connor’s stories are so shocking, violent, and disturbing that we wonder how they can be about grace. This [...]
