“You are a sports hero. Why not spruce the place up with publicity stills of you in the old days, signed pictures from great fighters? You could install satellite TV with boxing matches, rassling, hockey, even football. Everyone else has gambling machines. You could make a thousand or two a month.”
“Sure, I’d increase business and make some money. Would you wanna come?”
When the topic of consequential presidential elections in American history is discussed, the elections most commonly mentioned include those of 1860, 1912, and 1932. But there is one election which is often forgotten and yet has had an enormous impact on the United States: the election of 1960. The election pitted Republican Vice President Richard Nixon against Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy.
Most histories of the early Church emphasize its antagonistic relationship with the Roman Empire. There is some truth in this approach, though the truth, when overstated, tends to overshadow another dimension of the troubled relationship.
How the anti-immigrant Lega Nord is once again taking the lead in opposing the Third World invasion of Europe.
The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening’s breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.
I’ve scarcely mentioned the Salisbury poisonings here, though the story is interesting not only from the geopolitical, but also from the social and cultural point of view. Let me fill in some of the blanks.
According to a later Christian tradition, when Tiberius heard of this strange Jewish renegade who alone did not want to kick the Romans out of Judaea, he proposed to the senate that Christ be included in the pantheon of Roman gods. The Senate, so the story goes, objected, declaring the new religion to be illicit, though Judaism was protected by law.
When the armies of the Prophet stormed forth from historic obscurity in Arabia and burst upon the enfeebled imperial boundaries, they knew nothing of the ecclesiastical rivalry between the thrones of Elder and New Rome.
How the rhetoric and reasoning of the “right to life” movement subverts the defense of innocent life.
The Italian government is standing up to pressures from the EU to take in refugees that will not be allowed into France and Germany….
Whether Cicero’s statement [that the family is the seed-bed of the commonwealth] is true or not, political dreamers and social revolutionaries bent on destroying or transforming society have written and acted as if it were. With only a few exceptions, every revolutionary political theory and social experiment of the past three hundred years has predicated itself on either the elimination of the family or on a drastic reduction of its traditional autonomy.
