RJN: The Hemingway is good, but then his prose always did move toward compression. The "short-short"¯a short story of no more than a paragraph, and often only a sentence¯has emerged as a genre in its own right over the last decade, particularly among mystery writers, who always . . . . Continue Reading »
Wellington Mara’s father bought the Giants football team in 1925, and the son stayed with it for eighty years. Wellington Mara died Tuesday at age 89. I did not know him well, but those who did testify to his being an extraordinary gentleman of the kind that seems increasingly rare. He was a . . . . Continue Reading »
John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, writes that the trial of Saddam Hussein poses difficult questions of law and morality. Saddam may be responsible, as seems to be the case, for as many as a million deaths. He ordered mass killings of Iraqis, and hundreds of thousands were killed in the . . . . Continue Reading »
I mentioned the annual Erasmus Lecture. This year’s lecture on Monday, October 17, was given by Dr. Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. His topic was the men who shaped modern evangelicalism, and it is an understatement to say his lecture was well received . . . . Continue Reading »
I called it quits at midnight but have considerable sympathy for the Astros fans who stayed into the early hours of the morning to see the White Sox win in the longest game of world series history. In response to protests received, my favoring the Sox has to do with a soft spot for Chicago, and a . . . . Continue Reading »
I will be in Minneapolis this Friday, October 28, to give the annual Paul Holmer Lecture at the University of Minnesota. That’s at 7 pm at the MacLaurin Institute of the university. Friday at noon I’ll be saying Mass in the St. Thomas More Chapel at the University of St. Thomas Law . . . . Continue Reading »
The famously cool George Will goes unhinged in his Sunday tirade against the nomination of Harriet Miers. Among his wild and sweated swings against all who disagree with him, there is this: “Miers’s advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her . . . . Continue Reading »
Recriminations abound. At Immaculate Conception down on First Avenue and 14th Street, where I say Mass regularly, I was this morning required to adjudicate a near-violent dispute between a young black man and an elderly Irish regular at daily Mass. Did or did not George Steinbrenner betray the . . . . Continue Reading »
“True enough, but he made the trains run on time.” We are all familiar with that defense of the dictatorial buffoonery of Benito Mussolini, who hardly belongs to the A Team of twentieth-century monsters such as Hitler and Stalin. As many scholars have since noted, he, in fact, did not . . . . Continue Reading »
“The Lion of Muenster,” Clemens August von Galen, was beatified at St. Peter’s on Sunday. Departing from the practice of John Paul the Great, Pope Benedict did not preside at the beatification ceremony but showed up at the end to hail the “heroic courage” of Cardinal . . . . Continue Reading »
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