I have not been posting lately as I've been embroiled in the midst of the Torture Wars. More on that later. Meanwhile, Theater of the Word Incorporated has hit the road again, with lots of shows this month. We've just come from a Chicago tour and will soon embark on a long and busy Ohio tour. And my [...]
Belloc said the primary moral fruit of modernism is not sexual license, but cruelty - for such was the primary moral fruit of paganism. I am reading about the North American Martyrs, who endured unimaginable cruelties and tortures at the hands of the Indians. The paganism of the natives was bloodthirsty and savage and infernal, with [...]
With Pavel Chichikov writing about Hamlet, I thought we needed to counterpoise the poetry with some hard-nosed science. This is from a report I made a while back.This just in: As many of you know, eight billion years ago at the Big Bang, a highly sophisticated scientific experiment was begun in which an infinite number of [...]
She’s almost 30. She’s been promiscuous, but not more so than other secular women her age. She’s seen the movie “My Cousin Vinnie”, in which actress Marisa Tomei performs the “Biological Stomp”, telling her marriage-resistant boyfriend that her biological clock is ticking and emphasizing that fact with several stomps of her foot. She is beginning to [...]
I’ve been looking into cults lately and have found that one of the techniques they use to attract their needy and vulnerable members is something called “love bombing”. This is showering the new recruit with praise and a kind of intense but artificial intimacy. “I’ve never had friends like this before! What love I’ve found!” the [...]
I just finished reading a paper online by Brian McCall on usury and the damage it is doing to the modern economy (see http://works.bepress.com/brian_mccall/6/ ).This is a dense paper to get through, but it’s worth it. Using St. Thomas Aquinas and the history of usury from ancient times onward, McCall presents a thorough explanation of a [...]
There is an ugly flipside to all our talk in these posts about reclaiming the culture. And that is the sad fact that many people who make an attempt to create a culture or a work of art from a Catholic perspective are somehow dishonest about it. This is a difficult phenomenon to describe, so bear [...]
This is from a newsletter I send to our Upstage Productions Murder Mystery fans. It's an article I wrote ten years ago about an experience I had with HBO. I am not making any of it up! As I’ve boasted in previous newsletters, we were invited to perform for what I was told were a group of [...]
There is an interesting secular take on Chesterton's book "What's Wrong with the World" at the U. K. Guardian, a wonderful example of damning with faint praise. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jan/08/gk-chesterton-world-whats-wrong and pay particular attention to the combox battle. I have been engaged into defending Chesterton and the Church by a rather condescending anti-Catholic, and I'm doing my [...]
Although this isn’t technically a new decade until 2011, we can still pretend, and so I found myself musing on where I was ten years ago, before the apocalyptic Y2K bug was about to bite us all. On December 31, 1999 my actress and I were at a swank New Year’s Eve party at the Missouri [...]
