“In 1142, its [Cluny’s] great abbot, Peter the Venerable, had crossed the Pyrenees, the better to understand what the Saracens actually believed. Meeting with scholars fluent in Arabic, he had employed them on a momentous project: the first translation of the Koran into Latin. Better persuasion than compulsion – such had always been Peter’s model. Sure enough, the translation delivered, he had addressed the Saracens directly, ‘not as our men often do, with arms, but with words, not with violence but reason, not with hate but love’. Yet these emollient sentiments have not prevented Peter from feeling thoroughly appalled by the Qur’an. No more monstrous a compound of heresies, confected as it was ‘from both Jewish fables and heretical teachers’, could possibly have been imagined. Even its vision of heaven blended gourmandising with sex. Cluny it was not. Far from building bridges, Peters translation of the Qur’an had only confirmed Christians in their darkest suspicions of its contents. Islam was the sump of all heresies, and Muhammad ‘the foulest of men’.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Addlescent.”

One of mine, from June 27, 2001 [though I had also taken to calling adults “addleds”]

“The Boomers came of age in the initial, seemingly carefree days of the Sexual Revolution. That revolution’s holy grail, the pill, roared onto the scene in the 1960s. For the first time in history, it appeared, the male inclination to sexual adventuring would now no longer involve tradeoffs or consequences, since sex could be separated from childbearing. Chesterton famously observed that ‘The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.’ The Boomers believed at the time that they were entitled to ignore fact number two. In pursuit of this mirage of ‘freedom,’ they also discarded family ties and responsibilities. Patriotism evaporated and they abandoned God and the church in droves. The sweet Woodstock-infused air of a new Garden of Eden seemed just around the corner. But the Boomers, it turned out, had not heard the siren song embedded in the soothing melodies of the Sexual Revolution, which lured young men and women to emptiness and pain. In that dreamtime, many didn’t appreciate the price to be paid for that illusory ‘freedom’ – the objectification of women and the impaired ability of men to love in the sacrificial ways necessary to promote a rich, rewarding family life.”

Mark Johnson recoiling from Mick Jagger still touring at 80 and doing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [having seen the Stones with his wife in 1989 and her recoiling then].

“Outside Stalingrad, Hitler imposed a complete news blackout on events. Reports of the Russian offensive were published in Germany, but the news articles and newsreels stated that the offensive had been halted. This was true, but no mention was made of the fact that the offensive had not been halted until the 6th army had been surrounded. Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels was unhappy with this decision. He had built his enormously successful career on a platform of blending truth and lies with emotions and prejudice, but his key policy had always been to make whatever he said believable, even if it was actually untrue. Goebbels was not convinced that Stalingrad could be saved and was therefore disturbed by the fact that its plight was not to be talked about. He withdrew to think about how he and the Nazi propaganda machine would handle events.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“What more can we have on our side than the common sense of everybody?”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News 20/6/1903, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? – 5” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

“An old cowhand in Colorado, learning that Jean Stafford was a writer, observed, ‘That’s real nice work, Jean. It’s something you can do in the shade.’”

Clifton Fadiman The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes

“Fr. Paul D. Scalia: ‘Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.’ Perhaps we can hear in these words an invitation to couples to have more children. The young G.K. Chesterton once wrote a bit of doggerel that captures his love of the Christ-child and of childhood in general: ‘I would say to all parents/ Do you take things equally/ How do you know that you are not/ In the place of Joseph and Mary.’ Of course, those two things are profoundly related. Childhood wasn’t valued until God became a child. The ancient world didn’t have the same affection or sentimentality for children that we have. In both Aramaic and Greek, the word for child was the same as for servant. It’s not that the world thought children were delightful, and so God became a child. It’s rather that by becoming a child, God sanctified childhood and children.”

Start of email from The Catholic Thing Sept. 22, 2024

“She’s always late. Her ancestors arrived on the June Flower.”

Top 20 Internet Tag Lines in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)