Song For Our Lady’s Assumption As the tower of David art thou, O Mary, And in thee there is no flaw, How beautiful and lovely art thou in the adorning, And the odor of thy ointments Is like the fragarance of Libanus, Above all perfume . . . . Like a dove brooding over swelling waters, Like . . . . Continue Reading »
If you read On the Square with any regularity (which I am sure you do) you are probably familiar with the thoughtful and instructive writings of Denver’s Bishop Charles Chaput . This past Tuesday saw the release of the Bishop’s new book, Render Unto Caesar , which tackles the . . . . Continue Reading »
With the Swiss declaring “plant rights” and castigating the “decapitation” of wild flowers, it was only a matter of time before these ideas came to San Francisco. I can’t prove it yet, but the evidence is beginning to come in. In this morning’s Leah Garchick . . . . Continue Reading »
A belated note about fine reporting in the Boston Globe back in June: Alex Beam’s “Grave Schism on the Death Beat,” an account of the rival factions in the International Association of Obituarists. This year, the splinter group will meet in Toronto, while “the . . . . Continue Reading »
Okay, now we’re cooking with Crisco. Here’s the abstract for an article , in the August issue of the journal Political Theory , called “Sovereignty and the UFO,” by Alexander Wendt (Ohio State Univ.) and Raymond Duvall (Univ. of Minnesota): Modern sovereignty is . . . . Continue Reading »
From the Language Log , a note on Sir William Jones, the great scholar credited with identifying the Indo-European family of languages and founding modern historical linguistics: “At an early stage in his life, Jones’s father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal . . . . Continue Reading »
I did read Lennard Davis’ new essay on Woody Allen—or, at least, I read it up to the point where Davis said that Woody Allen “stares at a world that Dostoevsky could not bring himself to imagine when he said that without God there could be no morality.” But then, somehow, I . . . . Continue Reading »
Most observers agree that education in the sciences in the United States is not where it should be. Commentators like Richard Dawkins think that the lion’s share of the blame must go to that tireless agent of premodern darkness, the religious right. Since the test of intellectual seriousness . . . . Continue Reading »
Earlier today, Keith Pavlischek passed along news that the Democratic Party has dropped its “safe, legal, and rare” platform on abortion. Ironically, the dropping of the word “rare” seems eerily appropriate, as Crain’s reports that 72 abortions occur for every 100 live . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Hitchens has a column in the latest issue of the Atlantic on the short stories of Saki. It’s all right, I guess. Not my favorite account, but, then, any mention of Saki is good, if only to remind readers about him. But how could Hitchens leave out the single greatest Saki story, . . . . Continue Reading »
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