Culture
In a This I Believe – RI segment on WRNI, Jim Stahl, the former publisher of the children’s magazine, Merlyn’s Pen, talks about the creative wisdom of children. Me, I don’t believe this notion of the wise youth. Almost by definition, wisdom is impossible for the young. To the extent that children seem wise, it…
It’s odd how details can lodge in the memory. On an annual basis, my parents would take me on the short trip over the border from our home in New Jersey to The Renaissance Faire in New York state. Each ended with a joust and hand-to-hand combat over a noble lady’s honor, and the children…
In response to an essay in which David Goldman suggests a connection between current events and recent trends in the popularity of horror films, Fr. Benjamin Sember, of Wisconsin, produces the following wisdom: Rather than trying to attach the recent rise of the horror genre to September 11, 2001, your article ought to have looked…
To some degree, the theological principle that Bruce Marshall describes here can be seen as a core division point of human ideology: If God had remitted our sins by sheer forgiveness—sent them away or simply declared them nonexistent—then our sins indeed would be gone, and we no longer would be sinners. We would, however, be…
Thomas Sowell: …It may seem strange that so many people of great intellect have said and done so many things whose consequences ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic. Yet it is not so surprising when we consider whether anybody has ever had the range of knowledge required to make the sweeping kinds of decisions that so…
Somehow, one is not surprised that this instance of governance has not sparked the shock and outrage that accompanied the decision of Swiss voters to ban minarets: … the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has ruled that the government of Italy must remove crucifixes from public school classrooms throughout that country. According…
The fourth letter to the editor of First Things in this set surely expresses the perspective of many Westerners now entering middle age and finding the unexpected light of adulthood opening their eyes: Meanwhile, I have gravitated to a certain type of mommy-blog: one written by a stay-at-home mother, lovingly grateful to her provider-man, capably…
Yup. That’s the habit of academia… always in need of correction for favoring men: A federal civil rights agency investigating possible gender discrimination in college admissions will subpoena data from more than a dozen mid-Atlantic universities, officials said Thursday. The probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is focusing on whether some colleges favor…
Annalee Newitz finds a cultural thread in the plot of Avatar: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into…
Shortly after commenter BobN mentioned Guido Beach in response to my post on reality TV, I came across this related post by Ed Driscoll. Driscoll points the way to this early/mid-’90s video about Wildwood, New Jersey, which as it happens was the specific site of my own early-’90s Jersey Shore romps. It’s all coming back…