Heh.
Appalled or Disgusted
I haven’t commented on the presidential campaign in a bit, and now that Obama is over in the Holy Land — I can’t quite make out what he is doing there, but piecing together reports from the media accompanying him, I think he has been walking on the Sea of Galilee — let me offer …
Keeping Dragons Dragony
“The imagination fed on truth knows that the serpent is a symbol of hatred and deceit, of evil knowledge and power without conscience . . . I want [my children] to read plenty of stories in which there are dragons that act like dragons and meet a dragon’s end” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With …
Catechized by Fairy Tales
“Good magic and bad magic in truthful stories correspond to true religion and false religion in our real world . . . True religion is about surrender, while false religion is about control” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With Dragons, p. 29).
A Corker from Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens has written a corker about the Archbishop of C, a corker which I would commend to you here. I am constantly astounding by those who think that fruit can mysteriously continue to show up in crates every autumn after we have chopped down the tree in June. As in C.S. Lewis’ famous observation …
All Three of the Flying Bambino Brothers
This is archived under “Book Review” but it is not really a book review proper. It is more of a statement. Last April I finished reading a short book by David Bentley Hart called The Doors of the Sea, a theological reaction to the Asian tsunami. In my short book log review, I just said …
Shriveling the Inner Man
“We must consider each situation in its own right to get some sense of who or what is responsible for the boredom and what can be done to relieve it. We have seen many influences in our culture and in the individual choices that people make in response to their circumstances that might lead to …
Do We Think That They Think That We Are Influenced by What They Show Us?
“If their techniques for influencing us were not successful, I doubt they would spend millions of dollars for a thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards” (Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment, p. 85).
The Marshmallow Test
“In an experiment at Stanford University known as the ‘marshmallow’ test,’ four-year-olds were brought into a room one by one. On the table in the room was a marshmallow. Each child was told, ‘You can have this marshmallow now if you want. But if you don’t eat it until after I get back from running …
A Culture-Wide Case of the Fidgets
“Those of us who do not hunger for such extreme stimulation can still find plenty of entertainment in the endless shopping malls, restaurants, fitness clubs, tennis clubs, golf courses, gambling casinos, porn shops, strip clubs, movie theaters and late night television. This is the world of the big M’s: the Mall, McDonald’s and MTV” (Richard …