It’s no secret, my stand on vampires, and my utter disregard for modern vampire literature, and especially for the received wisdom about what Dracula means. There’s no stopping a good meme, I suppose, but perhaps this will be the stake in the heart of modern chic vampire lit: Christian vampire novels. If Christian genre writers …
The AP headline is certainly startling: “41% OF NON-CHRISTIAN AF CADETS CITE PROSELYTIZING” My goodness, the reader is invited to think. What’s going on in Colorado Springs? Are little bands of dogmatists policing the halls like a pro-Jesus Taliban, seeking out bearers of Christopher Hitchens books and wearers of Linkin Park t-shirts to press against …
The problem with political science professor Corey Robin’s claim that warmongering is woven into the DNA of conservatives is that he can’t seem to define his subject. One minute a conservative is a Burkean, the next he’s a tea-partier, then a neocon, then a Republican politico. Richer still, Robin represents these British-American country-clubbing anti-marxist quasi-literate …
Filing off the plane with our recalcitrant roller bags, our ponderous satchels. Ahead on the jet bridge, an elderly woman stumbles and goes down hard, face first. A young woman drops her own bags and kneels beside the old woman, who is disoriented, who is bleeding from her face, who should not be traveling alone. …
More evidence of the paucity of literary education in high schools, from professors at the University of Arkansas, and reported by Mark Bauerlein: “First, the content of the literature and reading curriculum for students in standard or honors courses is no longer traditional or uniform in any consistent way. The most frequently mentioned titles are …
Another reason nobody reads anything worthwhile any more Read More »
An organization of which I’ve been a big fan for years is the Institute for Justice, a team of Davids repeatedly taking on Goliaths who use the powers of government to keep small businesspeople from competing with them. IJ’s defense of monks who make and sell cheap, sturdy caskets, against a mortician’s lobby that wants …
Adam Roberts begins a five-part manifesto on why you should be reading poetry: “I remember, as a young person, being posed the question, ‘what kind of music do you like?,’ and coolly, sensibly replying, ‘everything but classical!’ Now, as a graduate student and adjunct professor, when I ask my students what they like to read, …
I think the cook at a local eatery gave me an e coli burger because he didn’t like my hat. That’s the theory I’ve been operating under the last 48 hours. We went to the pumpkin patch as planned yesterday regardless, and it was lovely. I was miserable, but it was lovely. It’s good to …
Tonight is the night she shuddered out her last breath and left us holding the shell of a girl. I thought for a time it was to make me better, consumed as I am with me, and I thought maybe it was because God leaves no joy unpunished, and I reasoned there must be some …
Susan Stiffelman writes at ParentDish about the indignation some readers of mamapundit felt upon learning that, in the midst of writing about parenting, she was privately coping with a teenaged son’s drug addiction, which recently took his life: “The shame of exposing our truths to one another keeps many parents in the closet, hiding the …
I’ve begun reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to the boys. It’s by Kate DiCamillo, author of Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Despereaux. She had me at the verse with which she begins her novel, excerpted from Stanley Kunitz’s “The Testing-Tree:” The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is …
Leo has hydranencephaly. This is some of what his father has to say: “From the beginning he has asked me to put my desires to death, so to speak. What I want for him is basically out of reach. I find that my desires remain but as my child he is telling me that I …
Several people in the office have come down with the pinkeye. I always thought it came from poopy hands, which makes me think less of everyone afflicted. When I mentioned this to Wife, she said I was wrong, that pinkeye can come from lots of things. We went to WebMD to resolve our dispute. Of …
Six year-old Isaac had a running argument with three year-old Isaiah for a few weeks, on the question of who owns Isaiah’s car seat. Isaac, more than any of my other children, has seized on the God trump card in arguments. “You’re not the boss of me,” he will declare to one of his older …
Seton Hall history professor William Connell offers an informative defense of Columbus Day: “The holiday marks the event, not the person. What Columbus gets criticized for nowadays are attitudes that were typical of the European sailing captains and merchants who plied the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in the 15th century. Within that group he was …
A gymnasium strewn with upturned tables for barricades, a child-hearted husband and wife instigators of the fracas. Boys with single-shot pistols, automatics, rifles, rocket launchers, gathering to compare armaments. The older ones show the younger how to modify their weapons for greater velocity and range. Foam rounds fall from their pockets and collect around their …
Evert Cilliers on lousy, pretentious, self-celebratory modern film and fiction: “Urban Intellectual Fodder. Neither original nor path-breaking, this art is derivative hommage; postmodern commentary around the edges of art. It is art born of attitude, not passion. It is art that postures but doesn’t grip. It is art created by those who are more passionate …
If only busted-up soil can be planted, the flat-tilled earth bereft of rocks before it can yield life, then what of the heart, the hard-hided, boulder-strewn heart of man, of this man? If only the soil of the broken heart will bring forth fruit, then perhaps we ought welcome it, and the tear-dropping rain that …
Jonah Goldberg, on how the despicable Fred Phelps and his entourage might have been dealt with in an earlier, more “hands-on” era: “If this country worked more properly, if you saw a whole bunch of battered, bruised and bloodied people in an emergency room, you might ask “What happened to them?” Then someone would say, …
I’ve been thinking on the incongruity of sharing a name with the saint who went into the desert to wrestle demons and aloneness and thereby work out salvation. I sat at an oval window this morning and looked on the sunfired clouds below and wondered into what wilderness I am once again hurtling, and whether …
“Hey Worm, did you see old Crumbliss in the paper this mornin? What’s he done now? They found him about six oclock this mornin under a tree in a big alfalfa field. He found the only tree in the whole field and run into it. They said when the cops come and opened the door …
I’m not overly prudish. I can appreciate a form-fitting skirt, a cool glass of whiskey, Everclear turned up good and loud. I’ve even been known to drop an expletive or two. But one thing I cannot abide is this trend, which took wing with Linda Blair’s exploitation in The Exorcist, of bathing children in filth …
Some of you might appreciate my essay at Comment, a magazine/webzine out of a think tank called Cardus in Canada, which has taken me by surprise with its fresh writing, and in which I’m honored to play a part this issue. Here’s an excerpt: “I’ve had no heart for building sandcastles when my thoughts are …
