The lifeless body of the 2 year old Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a beach has caused outrage around the world (I have shown him here alive and laughing, as he may well be in heaven as I write). Little Aylan was drowned with his brother and their mother as they tried to make […]
Today’s Gospel on the memorial of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist recounts the story Herod, Herodias, his unlawful wife (who had been married to his brother), Herodias’ daughter, Salome, and, of course, John the Baptist, at this point confined in prison. We all know the gist: The Baptist was imprisoned for condemning […]
The Crusades are, in general, vilified, an example of Eurocentric, Anglo-Saxon and, worst of all, Christian imperialism turned fanatical, bloodthirsty, imposing their view of God and civilization on peaceful Arabians, who just wanted to build up their own civilization based on the tenets of their own religion, Islam, whose main premise is peace and […]
Following my previous post, I see that the first two females have graduated from the rigorous U.S. Army Rangers program, which has the reputation for the toughest training regimen out there. Well, we may presume that it just got a little less tough, for I have difficulty believing that the women can do everything the […]
The call-in show over lunch today on the CBC, as I enjoyed my very first kefir smoothie (quite enjoyable, in fact, made more so as I thought it was not invented by, nor named after, Kiefer Sutherland…somehow, I connect him with the CBC, perhaps going back to that anti-Catholic CBC screed of a movie he […]
I must admit when I have been mistaken. Well, not completely mistaken (at least in this case!) but perhaps seeing things from the wrong point of view. I have been rather harsh on the public servants of our country (and our neighbours to the south), for their high wages and benefits, implying that they make […]
There is an old saying that the three rules of real estate are ‘location, location, location’. A similar rule applies to public speaking: ‘brevity, brevity, brevity’. And, we may also apply an analogous principle to teaching: ‘clarity, clarity, clarity’. The ultimate point of teaching is to transmit the truth that is in the teacher’s […]
In the college at which I teach, we believe in the ‘Great Books’, going back to the primary sources of our religion and civilization, the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, the Greek and Latin classics, the teachings of the Church, Dante, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, the great philosophers and literary geniuses. By reading original works, […]
As readers of this blog may have ascertained, I consider police officers, along with firefighters, teachers, politicians, the myriad of bureaucrats in offices across this fair land, and a host of other government employees in the main overpaid and overcompensated. Not just salary-wise, but also in terms of early retirement, gold-plated and inviolable pensions, manifold […]
There is a lot of confusion amongst people in this fair land that law and morality are the same thing. Not so, as recent history has taught us. What is moral is not necessarily legal, and what is legal, not always moral. The problem is that law works two ways, pedagogically, by teaching us the […]