“I grant you that my children need their meals balanced…. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world.”

Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb

In my latest National Post column I list the sorts of questions journalists should be asking party leaders in the current federal election if they (politicians or journalists) thought elections were a time to discuss serious issues seriously.

In my latest National Post column I say the real scandal in Quebec politics isn’t that too few female legislators are in the pocket of the executive, it’s that too many legislators of all kinds are.

“Wherever you see a culture in decline, that’s lost its vision or sense of the meaning of life, its people always turn to sexuality in the search for meaning. Sexual pleasures are always intense, and when they get caught up in the search for meaning - when they become a substitute for real meaning, they become compulsive and addictive.”

Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, quoted in British Columbia Report December 30, 1996

“After the gleam of exaggerated hopes, what Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings have come back to croak out their ancient saws, whose only merit is that they happen to be true.”

The Economist December 22, 1990

“Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”

C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy

“‘When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power… Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!’”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered