I’ve read @megbasham’s book & found it compelling. I’ve read some of the supposed “takedown” tweets & articles.

The Kevin Williamson one was particularly pathetic & point-missing. He flexes his famous verbal repartee, but in so doing exhibits his own ignorance & pride. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but makes darn sure he tells us all how much other stuff he knows.

In this arena, he props up a strawman so he can “play”…like my dogs and their chew toys.

It’s unbecoming.

Job refuses to shake his fist at God, despite the depth of suffering he endures.

“You are morally obligated to to maintain faith no matter what happens to you…imagine that God & Satan conspire against you…then imagine that your reaction to that is to become bitter and... ..and resentful and hostile. Then whatever hell you are in merely as a consequence of a confluence of tragic events, you have opened a whole other hell underneath it. A hell of bitterness and resentment and ingratitude. Well that turns into the desire for revenge very quickly.

I'm 20 minutes into the first episode of Cunk on Earth.

This is instant classic material. Amazing. I'm causing a scene in the living room. Aristotle and "dance like noone's watching..." oh my this is fantastic.

Many colleges are now over 60% female and less than 40% male.

This is a disaster.

The marriage market—gross-seeming but a necessary label—is being rocked and destroyed as we speak.

Yet you won’t hear about the crisis of young men, only more “women in stem” initiatives. Why? Women tend not to marry at or down. I get the sense that we haven’t really thought things through. I don’t know what the solutions are, but pretending men and women are the same is a mistake.

I have mixed feelings about B16, mostly having to do with his 'great refusal' and abnegation. I don't pretend to understand, but when you retire as pope for health reasons & then live another decade, well...

But I leaned heavily on his project for my own sense-making. He was a brilliant mind & I genuinely believed him to be a man of faith.

But watching the reactions from the three papal stooges-- Faggioli, Lamb, Ivereigh--make my skin crawl. They are gleeful because they know that this will mean we are about to go Full Francis.

As for me and my household, we are celebrating Sir Gawain Day, in remembrance of his assay against the Green Knight.

His revelation—that even the great knight of the Round Table needs God’s grace—is for all of us.

We celebrate his apocalypse with great feasting. Pics to come. Prime rib with green chimichurri
Baked Potatoes with green onions
Garlic led Green beans
Pistachio ice cream, & mint chocolate chip

Happy Feast of the Mother of God (and the Circumcision).

This Tate fellow strikes me as a terrible person, and @Louise_m_perry’s male-to-male trans tag is fitting.

However, we should take his rise (and fall?) seriously. Why he has attracted such a following is a serious question, especially for those of us who have teen boys. Masculinity has been vilified so totally, harrowed out completely, and chased from respected spaces. Something has replaced it in two variants, both of which are cartoons: the simp and the chad. These are absurd skin-suits.

It’s ironic that SBF shat all over the Canterbury Tales since he is a grifter right out of the mold of Chaucer’s Pardoner.

I’m kicking myself for not drafting up this piece in light of his BS take.

He is totally a product of his elite formation. If you read his portrait you can tell that he is a perfect grifter, using the idealism of his age as the perfect cover for the ultimate theft.

🧵 on the Fruits of Enchantment without the Belief in Enchantment.

Or, why we want Christianity without tears 1/10 2/The prevailing sentiment of our world is unconsciously predicated on fundamentally Christian presuppositions. Notions of universal human rights and universal dignity are psychological and civilizational technologies.

They are not natural. Look around. Turn on a nature doc.

Crimes of Noticing is a violation against the Church of Winsome.

It is uncouth, for instance, for me to notice these Deathworks. It is to be rigid and uptight and "obsessed" for me to point out these narcissistic displays of mental illness.

Winsomeness is not a strategy.

https://twitter.com/kalezelden/status/1584502703710818304

Winsomeness is the soothing voice of the executioner telling you "it'll all be over soon."

But Dante won't be tone-policed. He says what he sees, as fallible pilgrim.

Being winsome is to fall down on your job to be the adult in the room.

Why is Dante moved to tears when he sees the twisted, contorted, mutilated bodies of men in hell?

He is learning to see.

He is no longer fooled by the parade of idiocy and selfishness and narcissism.

Sin, stripped of its pomp, is horrifying. Witnessing the desecration of the human form, the icon of the living God, the mutilation of the Imago Dei, can only compel a deep sense of loss, and the incumbent sadness.

In the beginning it was not so.

And now we clap and snap at the pantomime.

I love talking with my students about Sir Gawain, Arthur & the Round Table, bc the abstracted notions we have about courtesy, the law, authority, honor, the necessity to try...are so dang concrete and just at the surface.

So much of our world remains atop that infrastructure. the very PATTERN of a knight, for instance is so clear and obvious that it hardly bears repeating. Yet we've become disassociated from the concept.

The knight is no mere warrior. Yes, he is the heavy infantry for the King's forces--think a tank working in concert with infantry,

I've been ruminating this morning about being a child amidst the church's "silly season."

The 60th anniversary of Vatican 2 pieces are flooding the usual sites, and the arguments will continue, despite the exhaustion.

But I've noticed a very curious generational divide. If you didn't go through the clownworld circus it's difficult to convey. We have had plenty of boomer portraits about pre V2, but not enough of the Gen X experience of "normal parish life."

@DouthatNYT’s column is just so dang good today. Quotable and incisive, sobering and devastating. “…all of us are the children of Vatican II, even if we critique or lament the council—or perhaps never more so than when we do.”

I’m ultimately NOT a Joycean modernist, but his critique of a closed and suffocating system is essential reading for anyone wishing to artificially shrink a world in the face of moral and intellectual complexity. The church he was raised in was sick, and it’s sclerosis was killing the people it purported to serve. Trad pretending to the contrary, doesn’t alter the reality.

A thread on where we’re at:

1/16 2/One of my earliest memories is watching my mom watch the news of John Paul II’s election. “Habemus Papem” and all that.

I remember the name “Carol” and that struck me as funny since the name was a woman’s name in my world. But, he seemed cool, and his face seemed real to me…