Burying the Dead, Raising Cain
World
The Age of Paine
“Where liberty is, there is my country,” declared Benjamin Franklin, to which Thomas Paine replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine.”…
Radical Conservatism: Thinking Through V.S. Naipaul’s Haters and Counterparts (Pt. 2)
Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.
Taicha, Tenebrae and Corpus Christi
Dear Family and Friends: I don’t know if you have ever seen a child without a face.
The Living Jesus and the “Monk’s Alphabet”
Jesus had a way of looking at things that was very far from the ordinary, even contradictory to common sense.
All of his careful teachings and powerful examples served the purpose of helping us to see clearly, to understand, and to discern as if our lives depended on it, because they do. Even beyond the grave.
Quintessential Mesopotamian Protests
My old friend Charlie Keil emailed me–“See why you like Kanan Makiya. Love those lions.”–after he read Makiya’s recent piece in the Kenyon Review, “The Dying Lion.”
(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue
First contributor Ty Geltmaker steered your editor to “The Life of Gad Beck”—a graphic biography of a gay Jewish hero who fought Nazis in Germany during World War II (and survived). (The image below is from the body of the work…)
None Dare Call it a Sex Scandal
