Over Hill and Dale

“When Christ and the apostles preached, the established religious authorities were on the scene asking what appears to be their favorite question” ‘By what authority?’ John the Baptist was an eccentric hill preacher, Caiaphas had better establishment credentials than Jesus, and the Sanhedrin was amazed that men so obviously uneducated as the apostles could say …

Genesis of Domestic Violence

“It proved far easier in the event to remove sexual restraint than to overcome each individual’s desire for the exclusive sexual possession of another; and it takes little effort of the imagination, even if we would rather not make it, to understand the result.” (Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice, p. 108).

A Special Form of Naivete

“One convention has been replaced by another. When I attended a bourgeois bohemian funeral in Paris recently, it was I who stood out in my dark suit and tie—so provincial, so conventional! Everyone else looked as if he or she had just popped into the cemetery after a bit of shopping in the local grocery …