A few days before the last of the Vatican’s three climate workshops, the Italian parliament sped up the divorce process. The new law cuts the time Italians have to wait for a divorce: from three years to six months in uncontested cases; one year in contested ones. It was approved with a breathtaking vote of 398 for, 28 against (6 abstentions), Until now, Italians in a hurry to decouple had to be clever. Resourceful mates could establish false residences in other EU countries, and file for divorce where strings were looser. Continue Reading

The Toxic Legacy of Rachel Carson

Maureen Mullarkey

April 27, 2015

. . . the fraudulence of Silent Spring goes beyond mere cherry-picking or discredited data: Carson abused, twisted, and distorted many of the studies that she cited, in a brazen act of scientific dishonesty. So the real tragic irony of the millions of deaths to malaria in the past several decades is that the three central anti-DDT claims made by Carson and other activists are all false. Robert Zubrin, Merchants of Despair

To only a few chemicals does man owe a great debt as to DDT.

Iconography of Power – Soviet Propaganda Posters

Maureen Mullarkey

April 24, 2015

Propaganda posters are a fascinating genre in their own right. Early Soviet posters are graphically compelling, and among my favorite works of art. It is a topic to come back to on a later date. But let me just touch on it for the moment in response to readers who emailed to comment on the reproductions in the previous post. The earliest, ranging from 1918 to 1929, were heady with exhilaration for the fledgling workers’ state, and the aspirations of Bolshevik internationalism. Continue Reading

Notes On An Idol

Maureen Mullarkey

April 21, 2015

The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

A great many of our attitudes and principles which we adopt as Christian are nothing but products of our subjection to the world.

Guardini’s Mob

Maureen Mullarkey

March 31, 2015

For all the anecdotes recorded in the Passion chronicle, there seems a lacuna at the heart of it. Something goes missing. Something in the text lacks explication. The politics of it are plain enough. But is there not a rupture in the psychology of the crowd, an unaccountable fickleness? Why the discontinuity between Jesus’ reception into Jerusalem and the calls to crucify him days later? Were the Jews that mercurial and unstable? Romano Guardini anticipated the question and answered it in The Lord. Continue Reading

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Church, Zero; Zeitgeist, Two

The Toxic Legacy of Rachel Carson

Iconography of Power – Soviet Propaganda Posters

Notes On An Idol

Guardini’s Mob

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