“Chesterton says in The Everlasting Man that murder and hatred of children are always associated with witchcraft, which comes from demons.”
Fred Berg in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“‘Those who can, do,’ but the converse, ‘those who do, can,’ is no less true, for we learn by doing.”
Anthony De Jasay The State (expressly regarding the possibility that we couldn’t spontaneously cooperate any more because we’ve lived under governments for so long).
“Way back in 1938 Walt Disney had some inspiring words about children’s entertainment: ‘everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.’ Going on a hundred years later, the company which he founded seems to have forgotten about ‘that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us’.”
Editor Michael Cook’s note in email from Mercatornet April 1, 2022, teasing to a Kurt Mahlburg article.
On retiring he was planning to start reading and contemplating. But while the contemplative life is important “in what sense could one man’s contemplative life take on such grandiose proportions that it could be viewed as ‘for the good of human society’? Most of the ‘solitary contemplatives’ I know these days are pondering stuff a good bit removed from the ‘good of human society.’… It was at this critical log jam in my thinking that my wife earned her keep, signing me up at church for a ‘men’s group.’ I was initially skeptical, to say the least. Participation in such groups has always struck me as something akin to walking on red-hot coals. I have visions of guys dropping all their comfortable, manly gruff and gusto, squeamishly ‘sharing’ stories of personal picadilloes best kept to themselves, just before they completely unman themselves with a torrent of tears. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. This ‘men’s group’ was instead a first cousin to the bookish life – a Shakespeare reading group, where for three years now our little band of brothers has read from the Bard’s best every Sunday night, shouted hearty toasts over ale, and argued ad infinitum (in a very masculine manner), about the meaning of the very masculine life!”
Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise John Tory for finding the honour to resign as mayor of Toronto, and mean it the second time, instead of denying that character had any relevance to politics like most of those commenting on the affair or whispering or yelling in his ear
In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s actually good news that about two-thirds of Canadians in a poll said they think “everything is broken in this country right now” because we still expect better and have not spiraled into rage, paranoia or, worst of all, resignation.
“Sex… is really a very solemn act; For it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time acted like a man, and therefore the for the first time became fully a man.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Professors and Prehistoric Men” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask, with respect to Jordan Peterson and others, how cancellation of anyone who questions authority became the default option in our society.