“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
In my latest Convivium article I say the people playing at holding a Black Mass in Ottawa weren’t serious… which is.
“‘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
“Water is bewitched, so that it always goes downhill. Birds are bewitched, so that they fly. The sun is bewitched so that it shines.”
G.K. Chesterton, “A Fairy Tale,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
In the winter forest “There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was as mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.”
Jack London White Fang
“History presents many occasions for citing Charles Peguy’s aphorism that God writes straight with crooked lines.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things August/September 2000
“These old wild images [of centaurs and mermaids, noble in their human parts] included a crucial truth. Man is a monster. And he is all the more a monster because one part of him is perfect.”
G.K. Chesterton “Questions of Divorce,” in Alvaro De Silva, ed. Brave New Family Brave New Family: G.K. Chesterton on Men & Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage & the Family
In my latest National Post column I tell the Church of England that putting a miniputt in venerable Rochester cathedral means you’re not serious about religion.