Author: John W Gillis

Politics & Economics

Free Speech and the Peaceful Public Order

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I arrived home from my sister Mary’s funeral Saturday evening, and saw that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several other people had been shot during some kind of meet-and-greet in her congressional district. I’d never heard of Giffords, but was discouraged that such a thing would happen – it’s hard enough just given our political process to get good people to run for public office, and it was of course a terrible tragedy for the people involved. It seemed to me that it had been a long time since something like that had happened. As I read t...

Scripture

Magi from the East

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Since today is actually the great Feast of Epiphany – despite what the bishops say! – I thought I would celebrate it by posting a short essay I wrote several years ago on the first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel – especially the Visit of the magi, which forms the central mode of our celebration of this feast in the Latin world. Jesus’ genealogy is a little dicey, and Matthew makes an obvious point of it, recognizing among his ancestors the Canaanite Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law Judah into impregnating her while she posed as a prostitute; Rahab,...

Politics & Economics

I can’t image that socialists are very good chess players.

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Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 6th, 2011: Some pseudo-anonymous commenter calling him/her/it-self “rabbit,” commenting on David Thompson’s blog, on a post about an article written by an English genius who is advocating what is for all intents and purposes the public annexation of spare bedrooms in “under-occupied” English houses: I can’t image that socialists are very good chess players. They can never seem to see more than one move ahead. Priceless. Don’t even ask me how I ended up reading that post – never mind the comments – but this com...

Learning

Revitalizing Catholic Education?

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On this feast day of Saint John Neuman, the great champion of Catholic education in America, I want to give a shout-out to St. Jerome’s Catholic Classical School in Hyattsville, Maryland. This school, like so many other modern Catholic parochial schools, was facing almost certain closing not long ago. A recent article from insidecatholic.com tells the story of what happened after the archdiocesan consultation at the parish in consideration of the school’s future: Multiple parishioners approached [school principal] Donoghue and [pastor] Father Stack, argu...

Family Life

Wait, it’s my kids

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A few days before Christmas, I was coming home late after being out attending to some delicate family matters, and I stopped at my favorite local Chinese restaurant for some food to bring home for supper. After placing my order with the manager, I decided to sit at the bar and wait for my order. There were two young professional women, perhaps into their early thirties, sitting in conversation near the south end of the small bar, so I walked to the north end, sat down on the corner where I’d have a view of the door leading to the kitchen, and ordered mys...

Religion & Society

Mobilizing Useful Idiots Around the World to Take Up the Cause

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Quote of the Day for Wednesday, January 5th, 2011: Stephen Kinzer, writing in The Guardian on December 31, on the professional Human Rights movement’s loss of direction since its emergence some 40 years ago or so: The actions of human rights do-gooders is craziest in Darfur, where they show themselves not only dangerously naive but also unwilling to learn lessons from their past misjudgments. By their well-intentioned activism, they have given murderous rebel militias – not only in Darfur but around the world – the idea that even if they have no ho...

Church

The only treasure that the Church really has to offer

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Quote of the Day for Tuesday, January 4th. 2011: Rev. Thomas G. Guarino, of Seton Hall University, in an article at FirstThings.com entitled The Priesthood and Justice, reflecting on the U.S. bishops’ handling of priests accused of sexual misconduct, in the wake of the dismissal from the priesthood of a 73 year-old monsignor in the Archdiocese of New York at the end of last year: Various actions taken against accused priests suggest that current policies are straining the theology of the priesthood. This may have the short-term advantage of preventing li...

Politics & Economics

Frum’s Dismissal of Libertarian Genealogy

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Every now and then, the political blogosphere gets itself excited over the precise parameters of the relationship between contemporary Libertarianism and the worldview of the American founding fathers. David Frum has recently contributed a perspective on the question that I think is generally quite good in its analysis, through which he essentially concludes that the question is silly.  It is. It’s not that I agree entirely with Frum throughout his argument – I don’t – but the article is worth reading for the sake of considering a corrective to the ...

Media & Culture

Our whole society shares this stupidity

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Quote of the Day for January 3rd, 2011: John Sommerville, from an article in the October 1991 issue of First Things, entitled: Why the News Makes Us Dumb:  The News can’t be fixed. There is something about daily publication, all by itself, that distorts reality. That is why the addiction to News that so many of us share has brought on a kind of stupidity. Our whole society shares this stupidity, and so we have a hard time recognizing it. Catching up on some blog reading I missed last week, I noticed that Joe Carter had penned a piece at FirstT...

Life in Christ

God Did Not Make Us to Remain Within the Limits of Nature

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Quote of the Day for January 2nd, 2011: Henri De Lubac, writing on the nature of the Church, in The Splendor of the Church, p. 237 in the 1999 Ignatius edition: God did not make us “to remain within the limits of nature” or for the fulfilling of a solitary destiny; on the contrary, he made us to be brought together into the heart of the life of the Trinity. Christ offered himself in sacrifice so that we might be one in that unity of the divine Persons (Jn 17:19-23). That is to be the “recapitulation”, “regeneration”, and “consummation” of all things, and...