Certainly the gentle reader is by now quite tired of the marionettes in the theater of the absurd to which our editor recently alluded in his post “America – the Picture Show.” So am I, of course. To debate with a puppet, to point out the strings that hold it aloft, to rage at the big lie at the heart of the spectacle – all this was already tedious enough twenty or thirty years ago, when the show first opened, but today it’s just a waste of breath.
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.
The NY Times is the most pro-war paper in the country. Not only strongly boosting the current Ukraine War, but for the Gulf, Iraq and Afghan Wars. It also backed the Vietnam War in its early days; although by the late 1960s the oligarchs it serves had soured on the war, leading to the Pentagon Papers legal case the Times won…Now the Times is attacking military recruiting.
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.
This is the title poem of the only volume of verse Reed published in his lifetime.
Our hero Mark Robarts, then,m is neither devil nor angel, with aptitudes for good and evil. The spectacular insight, given go early in the novel, is that if he had been more conceited, that is, thought too highly of himself, he might have been better able to resist temptation, when it came his way.
Note: This letter and the commentary that follows were found in the lava-covered ruins of Herculaneum. It is apparently a copy of a letter sent by a learned Greek to a young Roman friend of Greek ancestry, the poet Statius. The commentary is the response of an educated pagan upon first reading a Christian text, The Gospel According to Saint John.
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
Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge. Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation. Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will.
