YES!

I have been waiting for this ever since Phil Hartman died. The first two seasons of News Radio are out on DVD. Only $30.

You Call This a Year Off!!!

Princeton just sent me a notice saying that applications for 06 are ready. I just re-read my thesis to see if I can salvage any of it for my writing sample. I just got a rough draft of my personal statment done. I am looking for fellowships to apply for. I am still waiting for my visa to get to my house so that I will be able to get into the UK. I am deciding which classes I want to take starting the 26th. Also, I have less then two hundred dollars in my bank account, and I am living like a monk. It feels like I'm still in college.

This is Going to be Fun

I am going to New York City on the 14th, and I just found out that The Hitch and George Galloway are debating th war in Iraq that very night at Mason Hall at the Baruch College Performing Arts Center. For those who don't know who George Galloway is, he is the rebid anti-Bush-Blair-ex-labor-MP, and current Respect MP. I imagine that Respect is an ultra-far-left party that would make Edward Said go into sexual bliss. I think this because Galloway's invectives against Bush, Blair, and the War in Iraq would make Said, Arafat, and bin Laden all have terrorgasims. What is better, The Hitch and Galloway hate each other. Every time they see each other Galloway calles Hitch an Alcoholic ex-Trotskyite (which I think is true) and Hitchens writes scathing articles about this man who sounds clinicaly insane. Sounds great; anyone want to come?

NB: I did not meet Hitch when he was out in Denver, so this is my big chance. Also, "terrorgasims" could be the best neologism of the year!

Harvey & Harvard

At School many of us, without any reason, took a superior attitude to those "Top Ten" universities that dominate American higher ed. We did this, I think, because all of us wanted to go to Harvard (or Princeton, Stanford, Dartmoth, etc.) but could never get in. So in our our minds we made TAC the new Harvard, or more truely, the new Oxford, Paris, Salimanca or Tunbigen(spelling?) . We thought of ourselves as the true heirs of those students who would come to class in the acedemic gown and listen to Aquinas give a lecture on being. This fantasy was feed by many a guest lecturor and tutors who told us that is exactily what we are. However, we live in the twentey first centery after Christ's death, and not the fourteenth, and we are not the heirs of the medivel Cathediral Schools or Town colleges. We do not have their values (in a cultural not religious sense) nor there prejudices. Nor where we the heirs of the great scholars of the nineteenth centery; to argue so would be silly. For the true heirs to the Victorian universities are the modern universities, and the Victorian univeristies are the true heirs of the medivel ones (in name and in spirit). Thus, I would argue that Harvard is closer to Aquinas' Paris then TAC ever could be. Would Aquinas ever be teaching the same texts year after year in a provicial shit hole? Or would he be on the cutting edge of new findings? A look at his life forces us to say he would be doing the latter. Aquinas would be teaching (nay doing research) at Harvard, and not teaching at TAC, if he where alive today.


What does this have to do with anything? Well Harvard is reviewing its ciriculum, and they asked the great Harvey G. Mansfield (as well as other profs) what views of liberal education he had. So I brought up my Alma Mater because I want to show that our idea of liberal eduaction (one that I love, and put $80,000 behind) is not the only one, nor necessarily the best. Mr. Mansfield (now in his seventies) looks back at the history of Harvard to see "what went wrong".


He finds that the Core is a popularity game, and the contestants are the departments themsleves. The biggest departments, English for example, getting the most amount of Core requiments. Further he sees a problem with choice, that is, there is too much of it. "Give out condoms and you imply, don't you, that there will be generous opportunity to put them to use? It's the same with courses. Despite the almost unbelievably large number of courses offered, finding that fourth course every semester gets harder and harder for students as they move towards graduation." Before you get smug Mr. Mansfield says that Harvard shouldn't "want to become another great books college".


I think Mansfield rejects the great books college idea (at least for Harvard) because he has seen too much and done too much research. Could he ever write those, now classic, books on Machiavelli and Hobbes if he had to teach Euclid every day?


Read the essay, In fact this post was going to be a collection of qoutes from the essay. I want to point out a few things first. Both the Harvards and the TAC have there place, and TAC is not better than them, and fromif the qualifications of the teachers are idicitive of anything we are much much worse. Harvard and TAC have the same mission; to give America a population with a liberal education. There are many ways to do this. One way is the great books (the one I chose over and above the research univerityI could get into viz. Colorado at Boulder). However the research university is as ligitimate way of giving students a liberal education as any other. It shoud not suprise us that Harvard needs reform any more then when some one at the Rocks stands up and says "you know what TAC needs ...".

(It is almost 2:00 am and I don't want to spell check this, so forgive me.)

Dr. Wiker, EWTN, & Darwin

Dr. Wiker is on EWTN right now (you know that guy who left TAC before we ever got there). He sounds like all the other Tutors, "All the moderns are evil, Darwin is evil". Now I do like EWTN, and I like Dr. Wiker (at least what of his articles I have read), but when they start making specious arguments against may man Chuck I get a little peeved. After all I cannot understand how anyone can have a liberal education, or be an ex-Tutor, and be anti-Darwin. There are three great Philosophers that we read at TAC, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Darwin. Further, they are blaming the Rawanda Genocide on Darwin, and I would like to point out that they haven't yet mentioned that Rawanda is 80% Catholic.

Europe: The Next Christendom?

Wow, the best thing I've read about the JPII generation and the World Youth day going on right now. It is by Paul Belien (and after you read this post, read a few more of his posts), and its from a great blog site called Brussles Journal (link to the left).


Will Europe’s Youth Bring It Back to Christendom?

My 16-year old son is off to the World Youth Day gathering in Cologne, where Pope Benedict XVI is addressing young people from all over the world next Saturday. He left by train from Brussels with a group of friends and will spend a week in prayer and meditation before the Pope’s address and also a week after. He clearly belongs to the generation that Time described last week as the “John Paul generation.” Says Time: “Young people today are more likely to attend mass weekly, pray daily and trust their church than their parents’ generation. More than 50% of young Catholics attend mass weekly, compared to 39% just a generation ago. Nearly 90% believe that religion is important, compared to 77% from the prior generation.”

Time was referring to the data in a study about young Americans. Europe is a far less religious society where only 15% of the people attend a place of worship once a week, compared to 44% of Americans. I have no figures to prove this, but, judging by my children’s friends, I suppose that on the old continent, too, young Europeans are more religious than their parents. Though young Christians in secular Europe clearly belong to a minority they have more openly Christian friends than my wife and I used to have in the 1970s. The cynicism of the previous generation – widely referred to in continental Western Europe as the “1968 generation” after the May 1968 student riots in Paris – seems to have worn off. The only example of this poisonous skepticism that I could find in the Time article was a mean remark by the cynical German Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the Bishop of Mainz, about the previous World Youth Day in 2004 in Rome where he said that “the girls in St. Peter’s Square who cheer the Pope have the pill in their pockets” (however would he know?), implying that these youngsters are hypocrites like himself.

Through my 22- and 20-year old daughters I happen to know some of these girls. And, no, I do not think that they have the pill in their pockets whilst they cheer the Pope. And, no, I do not think they are hypocrites on a par with Cardinal Lehmann and some other “princes of the Church.” The sourness of the latter is understandable. At the very time when they thought they could claim victory in the campaign to secularize the entire Western Church, young conservative Catholic laymen, in a resurgence of faith, begin to reclaim the Church from their grasp.

Newsweek, also, had a lead article in last week’s issue on the indications that we might be on the verge of a return of Christendom to Europe. The continent is “shaken by terrorism and almost existential social uncertainty” which may have a cathartic influence, making it receptive for the Church’s crusade against what Pope Benedict recently called “the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations.” Conservative American Catholics, such as Michael Novak and George Weigel, observe this process of re-Christianization in modern Europe with particular interest. Society cannot exist without a shared set of moral values. Typically these are provided by religions. Failing this the state usurps the role of religion and governments will impose moral standards. We have been witnessing this phenomenon in Europe throughout the past three decades, during which governments aided by supra-national organizations like the EU and various UN organizations have begun to impose a doctrine of relativism and multi-culturalism.

European Exceptionalism

Since the demise of Christianity, the moral clash has been one between these secular “values” of the state and the morals of the millions of Muslim immigrants that began to flock to Europe when the religious vacuum created by the (near) suicide of European Christianity also led to a demographic implosion. George Weigel, who wrote biographies of both Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, the present Pope, says in Newsweek that the latter’s mission to re-Christianization Europe is very important for the United States, as America, according to Weigel, might follow Europe’s godless example. I do not know whether Weigel is correct in this particular fear. True, the worst enemy of the Church is active within its own ranks and the American episcopacy has its own cynics in the mold of the German Cardinal Lehmann. In America, however, these cynics must overcome the deeply entrenched religiousness of American society. America is not a secular society and hence secular clerics (though they have done – and are doing – a lot of harm) have not been able to cause as much havoc as in Europe.

“American exceptionalism” is the name which the American Catholic sociologist Father Richard John Neuhaus gave to the phenomenon of American religiousness (which, by the way, had already been perceived by the French author Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century as the major difference between the “new” and the “old” continent). Unlike in Western Europe, religion “is in maddeningly diverse ways, vibrantly alive in America, despite the fact that America is a modern, perhaps the most modern, society.” Today, Neuhaus prefers to speak of European exceptionalism, or at least of Western European exceptionalism. “While Germany, France, and the Netherlands, among others, seem to be in thrall to a numbing secularization, around the world – in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere – there is a resurgence of religion, with all the cultural and political consequences that attend such a resurgence. This is the reality examined by Harvard’s Samuel Huntington in his much controverted, but I think essentially accurate, ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. I am inclined to risk going a step further and say that, if the proverbial man or woman from Mars asked about the most important single thing happening on planet earth at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a very good answer might be the de secularization of world history.”

Europe’s American RootsIf

Pope Benedict XVI, aided by the young generation currently assembling in Cologne, succeeds in re-Christianizing Western Europe he will at the same time be making it more similar to America. In an earlier article in The Brussels Journal I pointed out that “Europe should find its roots in America.” North America was colonized by freedom loving people. Many of them had left Europe because they longed for the freedom to live according to their own conscience instead of the conscience of the centralist absolutist rulers in power across Europe.

American traditions were rooted in the political decentralism of the late Middle Ages and the Aristotelian philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Aquinas [biography by G.K. Chesterton – warning: protected by copyright outside of Australia] and his followers, the Scholastics, reconciled reason to religion. Chesterton wrote that Aquinas’ contribution to theology “might be called the appeal to Reason and the Authority of the Senses.” “Reason,” Aquinas said, “has a right to rule, as the representative of God in Man.” Pope Benedict agrees with this. Last week’s Newsweek points out that “Ratzinger argues that reason and humanism are at the very core of Christianity, and that is precisely why, beyond the obvious historical facts, Christianity is the true foundation of European culture and values.” It is this foundation that has been preserved in a truer form in the United States than in Europe itself, where from 1789 (the French Revolution) onwards, the state has begun to replace God. It did so, ironically, by contrasting reason to religion. Reason was seen in this sense as the need to centralize and uniformize society.

Newsweek perceives in Pope Benedict a certain “nostalgia for the Middle Ages.” This is true where it refers to a longing for a Europe that does not cut itself off from its (medieval) roots but builds on them, instead of continuing the fallacy of 1789 that has led Europe along the path of the three “G”s – Guillotine, Gas chambers and Gulag (three phenomena which America has escaped, not by coincidence) – to the present abyss at the edge of which it teeters. It is time to walk away from this abyss and return to Europe’s roots. That is what the Pope will be saying later this week in Cologne. He could also say it in different words, which he will not employ because they would be perceived as too political, but which amount to the same message: If Europe wants to regain its freedom and its sanity it should learn from American conservatism.

On the Feast of the Assumption

There is something sublime, and wonderful about going to confession on the feast of the Assumption, as I did today. The Assumption itself is the most sublime of all the Church's feast-days. For it points to a practicle application of the Resurection; which is the mystery of the Church, the sine qui non (is that right?). But the Resurection is in a way an ideal, a special case; after all we are not the Godhead. But the Assumption is a particuler of this ideal, a this Resurection of this person. In other words, it is the future that we all, God willing, will have. Further, it is a feast that manifests that God is the actor, and we only react. After all the other great mysteries are about God acting as God, like the Transfiguration. This one is about God acting on man! Man and his salvation are what is important today. Our Salvation! This is the feast that ends the story that started with the words "Let Us make Man ...". For after the Assupmtion of one of us comes the glory of all of us. Just as Christ glorified Jerusalem by walking in Jersusalem, work by doing work, and death by dying. So our approaching God is glorified by letting his mother approach Him. The Assumption is the happiness that we forget lives in the doctrine of predestination (or as the protestants say justification).

So it is obvious why confession is so wonderful today. Because this Sacrement is so clearly God acting, and us reacting. I, in going to confession, am doing nothing, but God is restoring order to the cosmos is his granting forgiveness to myself. In justice all my sins where forgiven through the cross, and in mercy I am brought up to God in his grace. I am assumed into the company of the blessed, (at least for now, let us hope forever).

Its Not Easy Being "Dildo" Dan

I think that title needs some explanation. But I'm not the one who is going to do it.

If you really want to know cheek this out.

Or read this, or this.

And if you want to Know what Dan has to do with all this read this (and don't forget to save the picture).

Mary Anne Glendon is on EWTN tonight, as always she is illuminating and fun, as always she is the smartest lawer who will never be on the Supreme Court.

On another note, I took the GRE today. I did well enought o get into those top five schools I want to go to.

Where There Is Only Rock and No Water

Um, I don't know who to preface this but it comes from an abortion providers' blog.

Our clinic is the kind of place where women can ask, as one did today, if we would bless and baptise her baby. i was able to do that for her. honoring her pregnancy as she herself chooses is part of what we hope to do for each woman. using water (she had planned to bring holy water with her but had at the last minute forgotten it) and saying the words i know from my catholic upbringing, i did as she asked. she had a name in mind for the baby, one that could work for either gender and i gave it that name.

we want to be a clinic that respects life, that honors women's choices. the two are compatible. believe me!

We are all living among the ruins.

Torquemada In America

Over the last few months I have brought up several times my love for all articles writen my Christopher Hitchens. This does not mean that I endorse any thing that he says, only that his arguments are well worth reading. A great example of that would be his article about Waugh in the Atlantic Monthely about two years ago. In all I love his style, knowledge and abrasivness, but when it comes down to content I, and I think most conservatives, part ways on everything except the War on Terror. Here is a link to his latest invective against the Church of Rome. It is like all Hitchens, fun to read but offensive in content.

His arguement is, that maybe we shouldn't let a Caholic on the Supreme Court (J.G. Roberts). And for some reason this all goes back to Cardinal Law being a neo-nazi and the new Pope being a real nazi. I am no deffender of Cardinal Law either, and I hope no one else is, but as Dante points respect is still do to these flawed tools of God's will.

On a very related topic, it is wonderful to think that there will be four Catholic Justices on our court (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas). It is amazing to think that just seventy years ago the a Catholic could not muster enough votes in a presidential election to take any states outside of the north east. Also it is amazing that we have really put the nail in the coffin of those oh-so-superior-WASPs. Now all we need is to get Jeb Bush in the White House (he unlike his family is Catholic), Santorum to be the Senate majority leader, and Mary Anne Glendon to be the new Head Justice of the Court. Then we can start out American Inquisition (which is what we have always wanted ever since the first Catholic landed in Maryland) and burn Ted Kennedy and Nancy Polosi at the stake.

Philip Roth's Masterwork

I have a whole lot of post topics in my head right know, and I don't know which one to write about. So I'll just talk about the latest book that I think you should read because I am reading it. This is what I call "my old standby post".

Currently I am reading American Pastoral by Mr. Philip Roth. I have been hearing about this book, more or less, since it won the Pulitzer Prize, and I must say that I wish I had read it earlier. I have never read one of Roth's novels before, and so I wasn't too sure what to expect. I mean he was the guy who wrote a whole story about a man turning in to a breast. (Kinda of a Kafka for the 1970s post-existentialist-Carter-is-in-the-White-House milieu. (You know, man turning into beast, man turning into breast.)) In fact, all the reviews (of American Pastoral I read said more or less the same thing, "We never thought Roth had a novel this good in him" and his follow up novel all the reviews said the same thing again "we hoped Roth wouldn't revert back to his ways after American Pastoral but of course he did". So I was a little intrigued and I am very glad I started the book. Now for a qoute.

Or maybe he was just a happy man. Happy people could exist too. Why shouldn't they? all the scattershot speculation about the Swede's motives was only my professional impatience, my trying to imbue Swede Levov with something like the tendentious meaning Tolstoy assigned to Ivan Ilych, so belittled by the author in the uncharitable story in which he sets out to heartlessly expose, in clinical terms, what it is to be ordinary. Ivan Ilych is the well-placed high-court offical who leads "a decorous life approved of by society" and who on his deathbed, in the depths of his unceasing agony and terror, thinks, "'Maybe, I did not live as I ought to have fonde.'" Ivan Ilych's life, writes Tolstoy, summarizing, right at the outset, his judgment of the presiding Judge with the delightful St. Petersburgh house and handsome salary pf three thousand rubles a year and friends all of good social position, had been most siple and most ordinary and therfore most terrible. Maybe so. Maybe in Russia in 1886. But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, "It doesn't get any better than this." they may be a tlot closer to the truth then Leo Tolstoy ever was.

Who ever though Roth had it in him?