A new generation of voters will go to the polls this year with no memory of 9/11. What knowledge they might have of it has been given to them in classrooms sodden with ideological agendas and careless of history. Careless of the truth of things. In American Thinker this morning Pamela Geller asks: Twenty-one years […]

Political Violence: Hatred As A Cleansing Flame

Maureen Mullarkey

August 23, 2022

The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool. The attempted assassination of Justice […]

America Magazine: A Sentimental Education

Maureen Mullarkey

August 3, 2022

America bills itself as the go-to publication for “thinking Catholics and those who want to know what Catholics are thinking.” Distressingly often, the Jesuit flagship puts me in mind of the hookah-smoking Caterpillar who shouts to Alice “I’ve something important to say!” Sometimes it really does. Other times I wonder if St. Ignatius has his […]

Marginalia on Dobbs and Roe

Maureen Mullarkey

July 4, 2022

The Dobbs decision has been thoroughly analyzed and discussed elsewhere. What appears here are notes jotted in the margins. Begin with the anarchic trajectory of Justice Kennedy’s “mystery passage” of thirty years ago. Roe v. Wade invented a Constitutional right out of whole cloth. Planned Parenthood v. Casey exalted the grounds of that invention. The […]

Pronouns As Weapons

Maureen Mullarkey

May 24, 2022

Biden’s new appointment to the Department of Energy is a strutting, non-binary drag queen. He is also a packmate in the leather subset of “pup handlers.” You can bone up on the culture of puppy love later. For now, pay attention to Sam Brinton holding forth on the ethical necessity of role-playing of another kind: […]

Call Me They

Maureen Mullarkey

May 20, 2022

I have not brought myself to pay this year’s dues on my long-term membership in AICA-USA, the United States section of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art. Founded in 1950 in Paris (hence the acronym), it presents its mission as “elevating the values of art criticism as a discipline, and acting on behalf of the […]