Gürgentepe Buras did indeed have a little downtown, but the shops were all boarded up or abandoned; it did have a library, however, built on stilts. Local government has apparently made the determination that future floods are to be expected. I visited at a Vietnamese coffee shop just to see it, and got a soda in […]
Tag Archives: Catholic Church
The Otters of Saint Ann Empire.
13-May-14Alice Von Hildebrand and the Genders.
14-Jun-13Coyah We all know the stereotypes about men and women. Women cook, take care of children, are emotional and faithful and put flowers on things; men make money, seek power, build things, never cry and are emotionless beasts when it comes to sex and food. To some extent we all have these stereotypes in our head […]
Those of us with conservative Catholic friends had to deal with the usual Facebook nonsense about how it all was coming to an end on Election Night – I couldn’t stop snipping at one of them, “Yes, a terrible night for legitimate rapists everywhere,” which indeed would make it a bad night for a certain […]
This Just Doesn’t Stop.
26-Jan-12The headmaster of the Delbarton School has been accused of sexual misconduct with the school’s boys. There are multiple accusers. The (former) headmaster, Fr. Luke Travers, is a Benedictine monk and was headmaster of the school while I was there. He was slightly creepy, but it is only fair to say that a large percentage […]
Scott Moringiello recalls Simone Weil on Homer and violence: “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force, that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” […]
She Who Dwelleth in the Gardens.
04-Jun-11Reading among the Franciscan writings last night I caught the phrase “she who dwelleth in the gardens,” quae habitat in hortis, and I was curious about the phrase and so poked around the Song of Songs a bit. The Latin Vulgate version is at times obviously mistranslated – there is a passage at the very […]
Taqqiya.
15-Apr-10One of my minor fascinations/horrors is the Islamic concept of taqqiya – which I also see spelled taqiyya – “religious lying.” It is associated mostly with Shiites, who were a minority in much of the Islamic world, and hence concealing their religion when asked about it point-blank was at times prudent. Of course once this […]
National Catholic Reporter.
09-Apr-10For those who, like me, take a keen interest in what will come of the Church’s abuse scandals, take a look at the National Catholic Reporter. They now have an entire section entitled “Church Accountability,” which focuses entirely on this issue. One of their most recent articles notes the (hopeful) possibility of “complete overhaul of […]
In Brief.
09-Apr-10Is it not amazing that lying, deceit, fraud – whatever you want to call it – is not listed among the Catholic Church’s traditional Seven Deadly Sins? And here we see it still cannot shake a scandal whose deeper meaning is obvious: an utterly insufficient commitment to truth, truth at any cost, truth even if […]
Slave to Secrecy.
26-Sep-10The older my former students get, the more astonished I am by them – these people I knew as children now lead lives whose richness and complexity equals or exceeds mine, and it occasions strange thoughts in me – a kind of autumn feeling, watching the harvest come in, so fast, it seems. One story […]