“Never has there been a more hectic prodigality or specialized erudition—in literary studies, in musicology, in art history, in criticism, and in that most Byzantine of genres, the criticism and theory of criticism. Never have the metalanguages of the custodians flourished more, or with more arrogant jargon, around the silence of live meaning” (George Steiner, …
Candy Prizes at a Kids’ Party
The next chapter of Dreher’s Crunchy Cons was really, really good. I say this because he went after some pet peeves of mine with a meat axe. The chapter was entitled “Home,” but a more informative title would have been something like “The Architecture of Home.” “Drive through a historic district of any town or …
Cultural Impact of Worship
For good or ill, the church leads the way in our culture. Long before feminism became the force it is in our general culture, the feminization of the church was already old news. Long before subjectivism became a way of life for most Americans, Christians had been groping around in the closets of the soul …
One or the Other
“In the spring of 2002, I met many Arabs who believed simultaneously that (a) September 11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim people” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 17).
True “Soul”
“We are told, in tones of punitive hysteria, either that our culture is doomed—this being the Spenglerian model of rational apocalypse—or that it can be resuscitated only through a violent transfusion of those energies, of those styles of feeling, most representative of ‘third-world’ peoples. Theirs is true ‘soul,’ theirs the beauty of blackness and eros. …
My Mistake
Yesterday I posted an Amazon link to Letter from a Christian Citizen, which I took down this morning. The reason is that it wasn’t an Amazon link from the publisher (which is in the works), but rather from an individual bookseller. To avoid confusing things, I need to wait until the next link comes up …
Enjoying Our Stuff
Cotton Mather once commented that the faithfulness of the people begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother. Put another way, we may state it as a general principle that whenever Jeshurun waxes fat, he kicks. In some ways the irony is a perpetual one. When a man comes to Christ, and begins to obey …
Feminist Hatred of Women: Exhibit 178
“The Muslim critique of the West—that we’re decadent vulgar narcissist fornicating sodomites—is not without more than a grain of truth. But when the fastest-breeding demographic group on the planet is also the one most resistant to the pieties of the social-democratic state, that presents a severe challenge, at least for the Left. In their bizarre …
Hell Made Immanent
“The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever regime, are Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface. They are the deliberate enactment of a long, precise imagining.” (George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p. 54).
That Doesn’t Sound Like Much Fun
“We must rather wrong ourselves by thinking too well of them than wrong them by thinking too ill of them. This would help exceedingly much to bring peace” (Burroughs, Irenicum, pp. 139-140).