Sombor I was born Catholic, and I remain so, but I do not believe I became a real Christian until four years ago, when I had what we may as well call my conversion. It happened as follows. Some young men have difficulty measuring up to their fathers. My brother and I have had something of […]
Category Archives: Right Living
The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.
04-Oct-12buy Lyrical dance costumes online I think of Saint Francis whenever I encounter the least of the little creatures around me. Today I found two spiders in my bathtub, who could not climb the slick sides of the tub. Recently someone put up a picture on Facebook of a spider. Half the comments were “gross” and the other half were […]
Jack Kerouac, Man Who Got It.
07-Aug-12From Kerouac’s Richmond Hill journals (the area I grew up in Queens): MONDAY AUG. 23 – Told my mother today she ought to go live down South with the family instead of spending all her time slaving in shoe factories in order to earn just enough money to spend on the system of expenses that […]
Finally, Proof of Intelligent Design.
31-Jul-12Frequent ingestion of semen, either vaginally or orally, before pregnancy may help reduce nausea and vomiting during pregnancy – but only if the semen comes from the baby’s father. The medical research looks at this in connection with preeclampsia and more broadly in terms of the health of the pregnant woman. It always impresses me […]
Merrie Olde England.
06-May-12A nice interview about the ever-interesting 18th century. The most remarkable thing to my eyes: We have very good data on births outside marriage and births within seven months of marriage, which is a pretty good indicator of people having had sex before marriage. These are aggregate statistics covering the whole [of England], and show […]
Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture is online and well worth the few minutes it takes to read. Berry almost always feels distinct from other writers; his thinking has integrity (Latin integritas, “wholeness”). He begins somewhere near the beginning, and so his thoughts feel rooted. He is aware that a human life is transmuted food – an astonishing […]
Selling Toxic Bird Seed.
29-Jan-12This is a real pleasant item from corporate America: On the same week Scotts Miracle Gro tried to buy an image upgrade by sponsoring the National Wildlife Federation, word has come out of a federal court that the company will pay millions of dollars in fines for selling bird seed it knew was tainted with pesticides […]
An unusually bad essay crossed my computer screen the other day, by Peter Kreeft, who is apparently a kind of figure in Conservative Catholic circles. To give a sense of what sort of person he is, supposedly he was asked whether a Catholic could be a liberal, and he said it was “a very challenging […]
Reading a fair amount of Plutarch recently, the lives of Timoleon, Aemilius Paulus, Pelopidas, and Marcellus. What a superb man. Below is very nearly a summa of the highest, deeds-oriented (as opposed to eloquence-oriented) Classicism. You can hear how much he shaped the writerly outlook on Montaigne fifteen centuries later – what a thought, that […]
The Intelligent Idle.
02-Jul-12I did enjoy this piece in the Times quite a bit on busy-ness and idleness. When I have thought about where I belong, and who “my people” are, the best answer I can come up with is that my people are “the intelligent idle,” or perhaps “the idle intelligent.” I feel this used to be […]