New Year’s Day has not always been January 1, for during the long Middle Ages it was the Feast of the Annunciation on March twenty-fifth that marked the New Year. On that date the Angel Gabriel visited the Blessed Virgin Mary with the good news that, enwrapped by the Holy Spirit, she would become the mother of him whose name is Emmanuel….
I have received a number of queries about different aspects of my most recent book, and, rather than answer each one privately, it seemed a good idea to make it a public forum. I may soon transfer it to our Forum section, but I shall begin it here on the front page.
Among the more childish fantasies of the American Right is their obsession with Cultural Marxism. They quote Gramsci as if his second-rate and derivative writings were Holy Writ, and they boldly prophesy that once they have slain the beast of Cultural Marxism we can all get together in an orgy of American Greatness.
The first and greatest hurdle Christians have to get over is the engrained delusion that marriage is a creature of the state, which has the power to define, redefine, or even regulate this natural and divine institution.
This work has taken me by surprise. The Greek is far more primitive than I had anticipated, though some of the stories are told with great vividness. Ioannes appears to be something of a simpleton, but he has an unusually coherent grasp of certain of our own philosophical concepts.
Henry VIII’s divorce was only a prelude to his subsequent divorces and remarriages–to say nothing of the judicial murders of two of the women he claimed to be his wives, and it was a symbolic beginning of the mischief, when political rulers, in pursuing their own interests, seized power not just over the church but over the institution of marriage.
For decades I have been studying the institution of marriage, and when, about a dozen years ago, conservative Republicans began agitating for laws defining and strengthening marriage, I attempted to make an argument, rooted in human history and biology and framed by the Christian tradition, that government intervention would only make matters much worse.
For anyone who has the time to read a good work of English fiction, I have started to reread Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. I’ll post an occasional comment and perhaps also put up a very old piece of mine on Trollope. After this, we shall certainly do Plutarch’s dialogue on the Delay of Divine Punishment
In the midst of war and rumors of war, the ongoing soap opera of “The Sussexes” seems hardly worth mentioning, but if–like some future archeologist, holding his news and sifting through the middens of a 21st century….
I have reposted this piece from four years ago and made it free to everyone at the request of a friend who is now reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
