“‘My friends, I have no more against work than the next man,’ Bobby [O’Brien, who was totally lazy] would reply. ‘In fact, nothing fascinates me more than work. I can sit here and watch it all day, if you’ll only give me the chance.’”
“The Week of Sundays,” called just “this old tale”, in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [but it owes a lot, perhaps too much, to a similar line from Jerome K. Jerome]
“In 2011, a cartoon of Muhammad appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. The following year he was depicted crouching on all fours, his genitals bared. The mockery would not cease, so Charlie Hebdo’s editor vowed, until ‘Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism’. This it was, in a secular society, for Muslims to be treated as equals. Except that they were not being treated as equals. Only those who believed in the foundation myths of secularism – that it had emerged as though from a virgin birth, that it owed nothing to Christianity, that it was neutral between all religions – could possibly have believed that they were. In January 2015, after two gunmen had forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and shot dead twelve of the staff, Muslim sensitivities were repeatedly weighed in the balance by a bewildered and frightened public, and found wanting. Why the murderous over-reaction to a few cartoons? Why, when Catholics had again and again demonstrated themselves capable of swallowing blasphemies directed against their faith, could Muslims not do the same? Was it not time for Islam to grow up and enter the modern world, just as Christianity had done? Yet to ask these questions was, of course, to buy into the core conceit of secularism: that all religions were essentially the same. It was to assume that they were bound, much like butterflies, to replicate an identical life cycle: reformation, enlightenment, decline. Above all, it was to ignore the degree to which the tradition of secularism upheld by Charlie Hebdo, far from emancipation from Christianity, was indelibly a product of it.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“His [Cicero’s] incredible vanity appears more amiably here [in his letters] than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes…”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that politicians becoming too slick for words is a classic example of improving something until it is utterly ruined.
“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
C.S. Lewis The Magician's Nephew
“The portrait of mankind as painted by the cynical evolutionist is a dreary one. Draped in a ragged costume of skin and bones, driven by primeval instincts and chemical imbalances, this poor excuse for an organism provides us with little cause for celebration. They litter the continents with war and with industrialization, pollute the atmosphere, and eternally suffer under the horrors of famine and bloodshed. Yet the eyes of G.K. Chesterton spy wonders even in the midst of chaos.”
Monica Larkin, “Essay Award Winner, Chesterton Academy of the Twin Cities” Class of 2024, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how – since colonization – marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.”
Bethany Letiecq in the Journal of Marriage and Family, “an official journal of the National Council on Family Relations”, quoted by Mark Pilon in “News with Views” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024); Pilon adds “GKC, on the style: Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say ‘The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,’ you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin ‘I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,’ you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word ‘damn’ than in the word ‘degeneration.’”
“Have you ever been traveling on a remote stretch of rural highway hundreds of miles from a big city, surrounded by farmland, when suddenly you pass a group of houses that look like they were magically transplanted from a city suburb? Have you ever wondered why every time you get off the interstate – any interstate – you see the same collection of chain restaurants, gas stations, and chain hotels? Most likely, you are encountering the ‘galactic city.’”
Study Smarter website [https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/human-geography/urban-geography/galactic-city-model/]