Historic Mass of Institution for newly created Catholic Ordinariate on Feb. 12
See also this article.
The Holocaust
39 minutes ago
There is a vast middle ground. I favor doing the best one can to re-localize life by patronizing local businesses, living in a localist manner, and so forth. That will necessarily look different for different people, depending on their circumstances. I think it’s a good thing that extending broadband to rural areas will make it possible for a number of folks to move (or move back!) to those areas, or to never have to leave in the first place. Where I live, West Feliciana Parish, there aren’t now enough jobs to enable everyone’s children to stay here if they wanted to. Broadband access, and the move towards working at home, has the potential to expand the economy here. The place still needs a more diverse economy, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
All of which is to say that I generally agree with Ballor that given the world that we actually live in, the localism and the kind of conservatism I favor will in many cases only be feasible through the Internet. When I was growing up, one reason people moved from small towns to the big cities was the lack of something to do. The lack of movies and bookstores were a big deal to me as a kid. We still don’t have theaters or bookstores in St. Francisville, but Netflix and Amazon.com mean that sort of thing need not be an impediment to choosing small-town life over city life. Now, if you never leave your house, and instead just sit inside watching TV and not getting to know your neighbors or your town, you haven’t really accomplished much. Still, it’s good that books and movies are easily available electronically. And of course I am grateful that the Internet makes it possible for me to sell my product to a wide audience. But if the day comes when I cannot do that, I’m either going to have to find another line of work, or move to where the job is, whether I want to or not. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you are dependent on economic forces no locality can control.
A Toast to Local Farmers with Michael Shuman from Robert Russell on Vimeo.
Mad City Chickens - trailer #3 from Tarazod Films on Vimeo.
DocumentaryIn the name of the fathers
I promise you that the supposed reforms aimed at giving divorced fathers more access to their children will not work. Our anti-fatherhood state and courts will simply fail to implement them.
And so our national tragedy drags on, with its growing millions of small victims.
Last week, Pennsylvania State University academics exploded the myth of the ‘good divorce’ and showed that children suffer however the parents behave.
The answer’s simple. More than 40 years ago a slapdash Parliament was lobbied by liberal fanatics into making divorce ridiculously easy.
Since then the courts have handed down a series of judgments furiously prejudiced against fathers and husbands.
Parliament has very little to do between now and the 2015 Election. It should put its back into a thoughtful and thorough recasting of the rules of divorce.
And that, surely, is a job for the bishops, instead of taking Trotskyist positions on welfare reform or rowing about the few dozen homosexuals who – bizarrely – wish to get married in churches.
If they really do, let them, provided the law also lets heterosexuals marry in gay clubs. I suspect the take-up will be about the same on both sides.
Although best known as the father of “containment,” the mainstay of American Cold War policy, Kennan first revealed his radical decentralist tendencies in his 1993 book entitled Around the Cragged Hill. “We are…a monster country…And there is a real question as to whether ‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.” He also noted “a certain lack of modesty in the national self-image” of the U.S. He proposed decentralizing the U.S. into a “dozen constituent republics” including New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Middle West, the Northwest, the Southwest (including Hawaii), Texas, the Old South, Florida, Alaska, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. “To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect – large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”