Culture
Ed Achorn’s column, yesterday, is more relevant to today’s demonstration than may seem at first to be the case: What’s at the center of [Brown’s Columbus Day] debate, and others like it, is whether we believe in our civilization anymore. Growing numbers of people seem to be losing faith in it. To my mind, Columbus…
The ACLU-type argument for general liberty to engage in destructive behavior for the preservation of a liberal aesthetic is easy to predict, but there’s something new and disturbing in the following argument for the continued legalization of prostitution in the state of Rhode Island: Critics, including Rose Perry, a Providence mother and member of the…
This sort of stuff has been going on for a long time, but it’s still kind of creepy: Now the Gates Foundation is set to expand its involvement and spend more money on influencing popular culture through a deal with Viacom, the parent company of MTV and its sister networks VH1, Nickelodeon and BET. It…
It’s a tragicomic truism that members of the cultural movement, with roots in the “Sexual Revolution,” that presses for the acceptance of ever more licentious behavior, that peppers popular culture with lewd images and innuendo, and that leverages carnal lust as an enticement toward the trap of its radical worldview often accuse those who stand…
Something in the atmosphere of the Redwood Library — and Newport more broadly — taps into subconscious wells of historical and artistic instinct for the writer. The greats feel somehow near amidst the stacks, and conversation among literary fiddlers seems only slightly less grand than the exchanges that one imagines upon a Berkshire evening between…
I find this discouraging, although probably not for the reason one would suspect: Children do not bring happiness. In fact more often they seem to bring unhappiness. That is the conclusion of one academic study after the next — and there are so many that it makes one wonder if researchers kept trying, hoping for…
[Nothing in this post should be interpreted as support for the various proposed bans on the use of cell phones, hand held or other, while driving. Frankly, some of us would like to amend the Constitution, or at least see a Supreme Court ruling, forever guaranteeing the use of cell phones while carrying on the…
Charles Murray’s piece appearing in yesterday’s Providence Journal is sure to spark distinct lines between people of different worldviews: The stuff of life — the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships — occurs within just four institutions: family, community, vocation and faith. Seen in this…
As with the strained morality of modernism, what galls about rationalizations for the invitation of President Obama to be commencement speaker for and to receive an honorary degree from the Catholic Notre Dame University is the dishonesty of the rationalizations: The Obama invitation, [Notre Dame President Rev. John] Jenkins emphasized, does not condone or endorse…
I’ll see Peter Robinson’s Gene Krupa “Sing, Sing, Sing” and raise him one Duke Ellington “Cotton Tail,” although I prefer the faster-tempo version of the latter that Ellington recorded with Louis Armstrong. Speaking of Armstrong, Robinson posted an email from a reader who cited a duet of his with Danny Kaye (“When the Saints Go…
