Still More
Butch Cassidy, Thomas Jefferson, Loretta Lynn, Pete Rose, Leonardo da Vinci, Durkheim, Charlie Chaplin
Category: Feature
Wednesday’s Child: Sicilian Defense 6
Comments on last week’s post, fifth in this Sicilian Defense epopee, proved yet again that the reader is astute as he is gentle. “Never let a crisis go to waste!” ironized Andrew G. Van Sant…
Thoughts on Churchless Easter 2020
A year ago I attended Midnight Mass at St. Michael’s Abbey of the Norbertine order in Silverado out here in Orange County. It began with a procession with candles, then continued with the beautiful liturgy going back many hundreds of years.
Ask Mr. Autodidact: Secular Catechism
My question is about your thoughts on what Tim Keller has described as the Catechism of Secularism. These beliefs have so completely dominated our culture that they are like the air we breathe.
Reflections on Plagues by James Patrick
Disease and sickness, whether forestalled temporarily or not, are the heralds of death, which is both a divine punishment, given so that rebel mankind will not live forever, making up good and evil for himself, eternal beings given to evil, and at the same time death is Satan’s masterpiece.
Wednesday’s Child: Sicilian Defense 4
The title of the present series of posts, as I’m confident the gentle reader realizes, refers to a popular chess opening whereby Black, who by the rules of the game is a move behind, essentially cedes to White control of the center, using its energies to build up a rival alternative until the timing may be right for a Sicilian Vespers. The Sicilian’s motto, “lie low,” is writ large upon this strategy, and the knack of invisible resistance to domination by central government – whether Arab, Norman, or a myriad others leading up to the present day – is dormant...
The Athenian Plague witnessed by Thucydides, Part One
Thucydides account of the plague that struck Athens during the war with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League is among the most cogent and relevant descriptions of a pestilence.
The Literature of Plagues, I: The Plagues of Egypt
This is a story that requires no retelling. Anyone who is not very familiar with the account in Exodus (basically chapters 5-12) will at least have seen the Cecil B. De Mille movie.
Ten Good Things to Come from the Virus Crisis
When Prohibition was imposed in America in the 1920s, G.K. Chesterton, himself a famous bibber, quipped it was a good thing because it would bring families together to make beer and wine at home. My late father, born in 1917, remembered helping his father make wine in their basement in Detroit. I don’t want to downplay whatever is overtaking America, medically and economically, from the coronavirus. I recently got a takeout burger at a restaurant in Costa Mesa. The manager said the day before he had to personally call 60 employees to “terminate” them, an unfortunate but necessary technical term...
Heroes and Villians: Julius Caesar, Part Two
In which one of history’s greatest men is viewed from the perspective of his enemies.
