You Export What You Manufacture

“No virtue is contrary to another, but vices have nothing but contrarities and contradictions in them. Men’s lusts oppose and fight against one another in men’s hearts. No marvel then, when there are such stirs within, that they break forth into quarrels and contentions without. If a man is quarrelsome in his family, no wonder …

Stuck in the Seventies

“There is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. It is no more ancient and traditional than platform shoes, bell bottoms, and cheesecloth shirts” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 74).

Crowns Roll in the Dust

“The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair . . . In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom …

Clutching at Novelty

“A dying civilization, Christendom, on a swiftly moving, ebbing tide, clutches at any novelty in art and literature, ready to accept and then almost at once reject whatever is new no matter how perverse or abnormal. We have a ‘weariness with striving to be men,’ as the American critic Leslie Fiedler put it” (Malcolm Muggeridge, …