Category: Free Content

The press have been beating down my door and besieging me by telephone and email to find out my positions. My crack team of specialists and eggheads is preparing a package of proposals that I intend, as every good candidate does, to ignore.

I can’t say how many times I have heard some bishop or diocesan official or other representative of the pro-life movement explain solemnly that being “truly pro-life” means you won’t just be concerned about abortion.  No, we also need to be committed to alleviating the plight of migrants, the homeless, Third World babies in need of adoption, those on death row, and for all I know the polar bears. 

On a previous website, I used to list, periodically, what I happened to have been reading.  I think it is worth reviving, but this time, I invite others to comment on the books listed and to share their own recent adventures in literacy. I am not including With Fire and Sword.

As I explained in a comment, Curtin was a famous folklorist and historian of the Mongols, whose  death was lamented by Teddy Roosevelt.  He can be long-winded and takes for granted a breadth of reading which not everyone possesses.  Nonetheless, his introduction is very useful.

What is most astonishing in Garrett’s narrative technique is his generosity to the narrators.  While most novelists write from a single point of view, whether their own or that of a fictional character or of liberal philosophy’s impartial spectator, Garrett allows his people to speak for themselves and to justify their (often miserable and sometimes worthless) lives. 

I have decided, more or less, to abandon Facebook.  I told my virtual friends  I’d give it a month of one-way silence, and I intend to do that, but social media are a terrible distraction.  I’d rather read my stack of old Braccio di Ferro comic books.  It is not just that most FB posts are stupid–they are–or ill-informed–even more so–but the invitation to people to admire their own ill-considered thoughts, to stare into the mirror they have created and admire their own imperfect complexions.