Monday

Announcing New Feature

I read over the weekend that Dennis Dutton died. Dutton was the creator of Arts & Letters Daily, one of the best websites in the cyberworld (which he sold in 2002 but continued to edit). For simple elegance (published as a 18th-century broadsheet), it is unsurpassed, and I can always count on finding a good essay or two there every time I frequent it. Dutton was an atheist, but from what I could discern, of the well-meaning variety. He was a smart, a funny, and an original man. In homage, I'm starting a new feature at TDE. It will run every Tuesday: "Catholic Arts & Letters Weekly." It will not be technically formatted like ALD, but it will follow the same prose format: short summaries of good essays, followed by a link, but with a Catholic slant. Like TDE, the slant will be subtle (at times non-existent), but the Catholic worldview will underlie the feature. It will no doubt evolve as time goes by, but for now, you can count on four to ten blurbs that lead to good essays and book reviews. The essays will come from a variety of sources. I welcome recommendations and leads (email link on left). * * * * * * * More Dying Animals: Calm down, everybody. There's nothing to see here. And it happens all the time. And they probably ate too much. And the magnetic polar shifts probably threw off their flight patterns: 200 cows die in a Wisconsin field. * * * * * * * Screw the Poor. A well-intentioned couple starts a food service for the homeless in Houston. The city shuts it down. Why? They need a permit. Unbelievable. I've long asserted that government aid supplants true charity, and here my assertion is painted in the starkest colors. We ought to be happy that anyone wants to do charity for anybody any more. Why should we bother to help? The nanny state does it all. It's the Scrooge's dream come true: Pay taxes so we don't have to be charitable. And my guess is, it's the government's dream come true, too. When people stop doing things, the government can justify its growth.