How would a cat react if deprived of sleep? How does a car perform when deprived of oil? What happens to babies if no one holds them? I don't know how the cat would react, but I bet it would grow highly irritable and eventually violent. The car,

Never a truer passage about contemporary politics has been written (a slight, but only slight, exaggeration): > Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). Hofstadter ascribed all dissent from the Cold War-Great Society consensus, whether on left or right, to mental illness. This was a gentler

From the Notebooks To understand how liberalism's ejection of God contributes to aimlessness, it helps to understand the “genealogy” of the institutional permanent things as found in the Christian tradition. First, there is the Triune God, the very first Permanent Thing. From God comes what I call the

"I get so impatient at times that I have to go off by myself and read St. Francis de Sales' letters to calm myself." Dorothy Day, Diaries. Great idea. I don't have his letters, but I do have Pauline Books' nifty Courage in Chaos,

From the Notebooks The liberal intuitively wants aimlessness and the resulting banality. Aimlessness is the opposite of rootedness, and rootedness is the trait of a person whose feet are in the soil of the permanent things, and the permanent things ultimately stem from God. Liberalism, by definition, is the effort

Just a minor sidelight of the major socio-economic rape-disruption that was the English Reformation: > When Henry VIII dissolved monasteries monks applied their trades commercially, including monastic distillers & created commercial distilling > — Drunken History (@DrunkenHistory) March 29, 2016 [https://twitter.com/DrunkenHistory/status/714962889661157376] Neat: > Ketel

Amen. And it pertains to every governmental welfare program: > When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel. > — HL Mencken (@HLMenckenBot) March 30, 2016 [https://twitter.com/HLMenckenBot/status/715181824729870337] Kinda tough but accurate: > “To be a Christian

"I had a friend named Henry Clune who lived to the age of 105. He was a well-known novelist and newspaperman. Until he was in his late nineties, Henry ran wind sprints on his front lawn every day. Even at 105 he still wrote in his diary every

Fr. Schall, discussing a topic I have long found confusing, soothing, and potentially sinister, all at the same time: social justice. > Is Social Justice a Right? https://t.co/K0yuPxZNAl > — The Daily Eudemon (@TheDailyEudemon) March 26, 2016 [https://twitter.com/TheDailyEudemon/status/713859999110471680] Excerpt: > The principal agent

Miscellaneous Rambling R.I.P., Mother Angelica. Died on Easter Sunday. With a $50 million annual revenue nonprofit as a legacy. Surely you heard the words from Matthew 25:23 yesterday. Happy Easter Monday. * * * * * * * And welcome to some pretty good weather, until this weekend, when a nasty cold front is