Wednesday’s Child: The Glass Veranda
This week my wife is expected to give birth to our child. How can I not recall the moment in my beloved Pasternak’s Spektorsky, when the poet says….
Category: Access
Wednesday’s Child: Devil May Care and Does
As there is little hope that the gentle reader can recall a post of mine from four years ago, I will quote its closing paragraph. That week I had just returned from London from the funeral of a close friend where I came across an old acquaintance – novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of The Girl at the Lion d’Or and other light masterpieces – and this led me to reminisce about our last meeting many years earlier, at a Chinese restaurant of my choosing.
Resisting Evil, V: The Fundamental Things of Life
Instead of plunging headlong into the tedious history of self-defense legislation, let us rather begin (as Plato or John Locke might) by imagining a state of society in which there is no legitimate authority or, at least, no legal power to protect the innocent or punish the guilty. We do not have to dig into the ethnographic accounts of such violent peoples as the Ifugao of the Philippines or the Yanamano of South America. The Celtic, Slavic, and Germanic peoples of Europe provide a rich record of violent periods in which self-help and vengeance were a normal means of protection...
Wednesday’s Child: From an Old Notebook
The other day, sorting through some files, I came across a notebook of mine from exactly thirty years ago, a foppish little thing from Smythson of Bond Street, its robin’s-blue pages and black leather binding lending it the air of authority so becoming an unsuccessful writer in his prime.
Fiona Hill Explains It All for You
I can’t remember the last time a Foreign Affairs article made a stir among the commentariat. But this week it was Fiona Hill’s “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline.”
Wednesday’s Child: A Reckless Fantasy
“Reckless fantasies of confrontation” was a favorite phrase of Soviet propaganda. Washington, went the argument, is a trigger-happy bully and all men of good will, meaning everybody on the Kremlin payroll, must unite in the face of such fantasies if holocaust is to be avoided.
Resisting Evil IV
When a Christian engages in lawful homicide, either as executioner or soldier, it is the ruler and not he who is morally responsible for the killing. The soldier or judge is merely the instrument of a ruler whose power comes from God, as Christ informs Pilate during the interrogation.
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Invade
One of the benefits of Joe Biden in the White House is he can’t give long speeches. I suggest watching all of his Sept. 21 address to the United Nations. It’s half an hour and features the usual hesitations and mispronunciations.
Wednesday’s Child: The Echo’s Echo
Of all the fascinating and historically important details of last weekend’s elections to Russia’s “parliament,” by far the most remarkable is the result in Chechnya, where the Kremlin Gauleiter Ramzan Kadyrov received 99.7% of the vote.
Resisting Evil III
The admonition to resist not evil is not aimed at army commanders, kings, and emperors, much less at settlers in a violent wilderness or urban homesteaders, but at members of a face-to-face community of the sort that Jesus had experienced in Galilee and in which Christians are going to live as members of a parish and diocese.
