Category: Culture

Russell Shaw has a piece on Flannery O’Connor commemorating the 40th anniversary of her anthology Everything That Rises Must Converge.

For those who may not be famliar with her, Flannery O’Connor is commonly regarded as one of the greatest American Catholic authors of the 20th century.

Her own stories contain chills as horrible as those of H. P. Lovecraft’s–made more horrible by the fact that hers aren’t supernatural. Also unlike Lovecraft, her horrors are redeemed by her staunchly Christian and Catholic worldview.

Quoth O’Connor: "All of my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it."

GET THE STORY.

Russell Shaw has a piece on Flannery O’Connor commemorating the 40th anniversary of her anthology Everything That Rises Must Converge.

For those who may not be famliar with her, Flannery O’Connor is commonly regarded as one of the greatest American Catholic authors of the 20th century.

Her own stories contain chills as horrible as those of H. P. Lovecraft’s–made more horrible by the fact that hers aren’t supernatural. Also unlike Lovecraft, her horrors are redeemed by her staunchly Christian and Catholic worldview.

Quoth O’Connor: "All of my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it."

GET THE STORY.

Today in 1949 George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 was published.

Man! Was it that long ago?

1984, I mean, not 1949.

I remember growing up in the years before 1984, when Orwell’s novel was still a dark prophecy of the future. There was no way that the world would really resemble the novel come that year, but the number "1984" was still an ominous and emblematic number, filled with cultural resonance.

Guess the passage of time took the edge of it.

The novel’s still a classic, though.

LEARN MORE.

Now, you may be wondering why I’ve got a picture of Joseph Stalin in this post. The reason is that 1984 was written in significant measure to illustrate Orwell’s disappointment with Soviet Communism and, if you read the novel, it’s hard not to see Joseph Stalin (who was in power in Russia at the time) and all the Soviet propaganda posters of him as the prototype for Big Brother and all the IngSoc ("English Socialism") propaganda posters of him in turn. Realizing the political context of 1984, it’s hard not to imagine Joseph Stalin’s face on all those "Big Brother Is Watching You" posters.

The rainbow used to be the very symbol of simple, innocent beauty. Noah’s Ark, the Wizard of Oz… heck, Kermit the Frog – these are the kinds of things that used to come to mind when we thought of rainbows. As an artist, the rainbow represents all the possibilities of the limited palette; from these few colors, you could paint anything.

Nowadays, though, the rainbow has been co-opted for more nefarious uses. From GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the rainbow has been adopted as a symbol to give a veneer of happy innocence to the twisted causes of these groups.

Now, the rainbow is being dragged even more deeply into the muck. A new book, Rainbow Party, tells the story of a group of teens who engage in a fairly new form of group sex involving girls wearing different colored lipstick (so, if your kid is ever invited to a rainbow party, just be informed that they will not be doing crafts for entertainment). The book itself would be less irksome if it were not written by an author of juvenile fiction and published by Simon Pulse, a division of Simon & Scuster that specializes in books for teens.

Michelle Malkin comments on the book in the Houston Chronicle, and points out why it is closer to sex-ploitation than to education. Under the guise of "educating the yutes" it will doubtless be showing up in school libraries before long. It reminds me of Reefer Madness, a classic exploitation flick which was designed to generate ticket sales and controversy, but was billed as being for educational purposes (it was re-released at one time under the frantic title Tell Your Children!).

GET THE "COLORFUL" STORY.

Michelle did the blog book meme a piece back, and now Revolution of Love has tagged me for the book meme that’s going around the blogosphere, so here goes:

1) Total number of books I own –

A quick estimate of that based on shelf counting, etc., puts the number at about 4,000.

2) The last book I bought –

According to "My Account" at Amazon.Com, that would be

INTO THE TWILIGHT, ENDLESSLY GROUSING by humorist Patrick McManus

3) The last book I read was –

Read all the way through? Well, I just finished (listening to) one today so I s’ppose that would be

THE MAKING OF MODERN ECONOMICS: THE LIVES AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT THINKERS by Mark Skousen

4) Five books that mean a lot to me –

The five books (or sets) that mean the most to me would be the Bible, the Catechism, the Summa Theologiae, the collected decrees of the ecumenical councils, and the collected encyclicals of the popes, but those wouldn’t be very interesting for me to use to answer this question since they are all standard works directly related to my profession.

Therefore, let me offer five that are special to me for other reasons. Each one of the following affected my life in an important way:

1. THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE? by F. F. Bruce. I read this book when I was a new follower of Christ who had imbibed an awful lot of secularism in high school and college. This book, by an important New Testament scholar, helped me start taking the historical value of the Gospels and the other New Testament documents seriously.
2. MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis. This one further helped me get over the secular worldview by offering a powerful exploration of the concept of miracles and how they can fit with natural law and science.
3. SCALING THE SECULAR CITY by J. P. Moreland. This one was a morale boost to me as a developing apologist because it provided an exemplar of Christian apologetics done with the kind of rigorously-argued approach that I craved. As an analytic philosophy student, I thrived on rigorous argumentation, but so few works out there tried to bring this level of work to the defense of the faith. This one did. It’s a modern classic and represents a kind of apologeics that still does not exist in Catholic circles. (Though I don’t like all of Moreland’s treatment of the kalaam argument for creation.)
4. EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES by J. N. D. Kelly. Though Kelly is not a Catholic, reading his survey of doctrine in the early Church helped show me just how Catholic the early Church Fathers were.
5. DR. ATKINS NEW DIET REVOLUTION by Dr. Robert Akins. This is the book that saved me from getting diabetes. I was insulin resistant with rising blood sugar levels when my doctor recommended this book to me. After going on the this diet, I dropped a hundred pounds without hunger. Even before the weight came off, I felt better and had more energy than I had in years. This book opened my eyes to how completely BACKWARDS normal dieting advice is (and thus why all previous diets I had tried had failed so dismally).

5) I tag – (5 bloggers)

Okay, here is a design flaw in this meme. There is no way, given how far it’s spread, that I’m going to go to who knows how many other blogs and search through their archives to see if they’ve already done the meme. Neither am I going to fire off tags to other bloggers irrespective of whether they may have done this meme.

Therefore, I hereby tag all the bloggers reading this who haven’t already been infected by the meme.

Michelle did the blog book meme a piece back, and now Revolution of Love has tagged me for the book meme that’s going around the blogosphere, so here goes:

1) Total number of books I own –

A quick estimate of that based on shelf counting, etc., puts the number at about 4,000.

2) The last book I bought –

According to "My Account" at Amazon.Com, that would be

INTO THE TWILIGHT, ENDLESSLY GROUSING by humorist Patrick McManus

3) The last book I read was –

Read all the way through? Well, I just finished (listening to) one today so I s’ppose that would be

THE MAKING OF MODERN ECONOMICS: THE LIVES AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT THINKERS by Mark Skousen

4) Five books that mean a lot to me –

The five books (or sets) that mean the most to me would be the Bible, the Catechism, the Summa Theologiae, the collected decrees of the ecumenical councils, and the collected encyclicals of the popes, but those wouldn’t be very interesting for me to use to answer this question since they are all standard works directly related to my profession.

Therefore, let me offer five that are special to me for other reasons. Each one of the following affected my life in an important way:

1. THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE? by F. F. Bruce. I read this book when I was a new follower of Christ who had imbibed an awful lot of secularism in high school and college. This book, by an important New Testament scholar, helped me start taking the historical value of the Gospels and the other New Testament documents seriously.
2. MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis. This one further helped me get over the secular worldview by offering a powerful exploration of the concept of miracles and how they can fit with natural law and science.
3. SCALING THE SECULAR CITY by J. P. Moreland. This one was a morale boost to me as a developing apologist because it provided an exemplar of Christian apologetics done with the kind of rigorously-argued approach that I craved. As an analytic philosophy student, I thrived on rigorous argumentation, but so few works out there tried to bring this level of work to the defense of the faith. This one did. It’s a modern classic and represents a kind of apologeics that still does not exist in Catholic circles. (Though I don’t like all of Moreland’s treatment of the kalaam argument for creation.)
4. EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES by J. N. D. Kelly. Though Kelly is not a Catholic, reading his survey of doctrine in the early Church helped show me just how Catholic the early Church Fathers were.
5. DR. ATKINS NEW DIET REVOLUTION by Dr. Robert Akins. This is the book that saved me from getting diabetes. I was insulin resistant with rising blood sugar levels when my doctor recommended this book to me. After going on the this diet, I dropped a hundred pounds without hunger. Even before the weight came off, I felt better and had more energy than I had in years. This book opened my eyes to how completely BACKWARDS normal dieting advice is (and thus why all previous diets I had tried had failed so dismally).

5) I tag – (5 bloggers)

Okay, here is a design flaw in this meme. There is no way, given how far it’s spread, that I’m going to go to who knows how many other blogs and search through their archives to see if they’ve already done the meme. Neither am I going to fire off tags to other bloggers irrespective of whether they may have done this meme.

Therefore, I hereby tag all the bloggers reading this who haven’t already been infected by the meme.