Not being a fan of Glenn Beck’s, plans for his “Restoring Honor” rally flew rather under my radar nearly until the day was upon us. I wrote to a friend who is more attentive to Beck than I, asking, “What is this about, really, I’m not sure I get it.” Her answer was uncharacteristically vague and inarticulate… . Continue Reading »
BP, the company that caused the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, has opted to funnel tens of millions of dollars through state governments rather than private charities doing the bulk of the work in the Gulf Coast region… . Continue Reading »
There, the sign that says “Sharia,” the hand-drawn letters dribbling down in streaks as though they were bleeding. And there, another sign”this one reading “No Mosque at Ground Zero” in patriotic red, white, and blue. And there, the off-duty policemen come to join in, and there, the bikers up from Pennsylvania, and there, the microphoned speakers crying out “This is our cemetery””“This is sacred ground.” … Continue Reading »
Jennifer Aniston’s big new movie made headlines this week”for flopping. The Switch, a romantic comedy about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated, brought in embarrassingly low ticket sales of only $8.4 million on opening weekend. Hollywood reporters have tried to think of all number of reasons for why it flopped so badly, ranging from the myth of lazy August filmgoers to the theory that Aniston is a blockbuster buzzkill… . Continue Reading »
Under the avalanche of commentary on the new translation of the Ordinary Form of the Mass, just approved by the Vatican, I poke my head above the erudite criticisms, to speak as a man whose entire priesthood has been in parishes… . Continue Reading »
A friend asked. I was almost taken aback by my answer: “I don’t really care.” I can’t muster a great deal of concern about the proposed Islamic center in New York near Ground Zero. Maybe I’m callous. Maybe I’m out of touch with the American people. But the more I think about it, the less I care… . Continue Reading »
Barack Obama won the presidency by making his mantra, “Yes, we can.” It seems downright un-American to say, “No, you can’t,” but it is getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the American economy is the little engine that couldn’t… . Continue Reading »
If a classic, as Mark Twain claimed, is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read, then William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale is the epitome of a conservative classic. Few who have read it (and they are indeed few) would dispute its importance to the founding of modern conservatism… . Continue Reading »
Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child abuse… . Continue Reading »
Assigned the task of silencing debate on the Park51 project, the press and the center-left punditry have decided to haul out the overused tar-brush of racism, by which they mean to depict 65 percent of all Americans”Americans who’ve lived quite peaceably with our Muslim population, with no mass lashing-out against women of cover, no desecration of mosques, no random acts of violence in the years following the attacks of 9/11”as “bigots,” “xenophobes,” and “Islamophobes.” … Continue Reading »
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