“The first duty of the modern intellectual, wrote George Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls..’ Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that mesmerized the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them from accepting the most obvious and evident truths …
The Devil’s Stragglers
“For example, the biblical pattern of evangelism was not at all like our modern method of picking off the devil’s stragglers, but rather a pattern of bringing the good news to household after household” (Mother Kirk, p. 236).
Can’t Cause No Trouble No More
When the movie Amazing Grace came out, for various reasons Nancy and I were unable to see it. But it has just recently been released to DVD, and we just now finished watching it. The movie tells the glorious story of William Wilberforce and his fight against the slave trade in the British Empire. For …
Rejected Pop Tart Flavors
And there’s more to be found here.
Billy Collins and Other Sentimentalists
Just finished reading The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins (and other poems, the subtitle helpfully adds), and was struck by how metaphor handles are on everything, and how you just need to know how to find them. Most people just look at things right side up, but others — poets, madmen, and Chesterton — …
Our Very Own Massive Contradiction
“No doubt future social historians will find the contradiction between our concern about sexual abuse, on the one hand, and our connivance at and indifference to precocious sexual activity, on the other, as curious as we find the contrast between Victorian sexual prudery and the vast size of the Victorian demimonde” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at …
Which Explains a Lot
“The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 146).
The Poor Are a Gold Mine
“Indeed, homelessness is the source of employment for not negligible numbers of the middle classes. The poor, wrote a sixteenth-century German bishop, are a gold mine; and so, it turns out, are the homeless. For example, in one hostel for the homeless that I visited, located in a rather grand but disused and deconsecrated Victorian …
Good-Humored Berserker Bagpiper
Around the time of our city election a week or so ago, you may recall that the news broke that a list of Christ Church businesses was being circulated for purposes of boycotting them. There has been some fallout from all that which you might be interested in. This is not everything that happened, but …