Bookworm Room

Back at the end of the 16th century, Thomas Hobson ran a livery stable (which, in pre-auto times, was the equivalent of a car rental place).  Unlike other livery stables, he refused to allow his customers free pick of horses.  Instead, they were told that they could take the horse in the stall nearest the [...]

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Pathetic is a very strong derogatory word, but I think it’s apt when looking at Kathleen Sebelius’ defense for the Obama administration’s recent mandate that all employers must purchase insurance that provides their employees with birth control, sterilization and morning-after pills.  A fisking is in order (all hyperlinks in original omitted): One of the key [...]

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I hadn’t looked closely at what Sebelius said when promulgating the new ObamaCare rules that require religious organizations to fund birth control, sterilization, and morning-after pills.  Hugh Hewitt, however, did look — and caught something interesting: The press release that accompanied the new rule didn’t mention “Catholics” or “Catholic institutions,” but was as obviously aimed [...]

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I’m about to wade into theology here, so feel free to beat me around the head (politely, of course), if I’ve committed some egregious doctrinal sin.  Before you do, though, please follow my argument to its conclusion, to see whether I’m on the right track. I got to thinking about evil today. In my earlier [...]

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As part of a larger rumination about religion, Barney Quick looked at the Christian notion of a woman’s submission within her marriage, since the media is going after Michele Bachmann on that point: The recent dust-up over Michelle Bachmann’s statements on record that she feels Biblically commanded to be submissive in her marriage is another [...]

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“Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.”  — Deuteronomy, 24:16. One of the things that always struck me as bizarre about old-fashioned Christian antisemitism was how anachronistic it was.  [...]

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Paying work places its demands on me, but I thought you’d like to see and think about (and perhaps comment upon) an article that tries to imagine what it would be like if the newly discovered gospels reveal that Jesus was an openly gay man.  I find it a bit peculiar insofar as it seems [...]

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Rodney King got his 15 minutes of fame for (a) getting beaten up while resisting arrest; (b) having his name attached to some horrific riots; and (c) plaintively asking “Can we get along?”  The last is a great thought.  I’d like to get along with people better myself.  “Getting along,” though, presupposes that people have [...]

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I keep getting called away by real life, so let me quickly apprise you of two posts I think you’d enjoy. The first is at Wolf Howling.  WH is inaugurating a series examining 15 battles that were turning points in history.  His first post is about the Battle of Chipyong-ni, Feb. 13-15, 1951. If you [...]

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The Archbishopric of Canterbury used to be a pretty important job.  The guy who held that position, going back to the earliest Middle Ages, was the premier leader of the English church, whether that church gave allegiance to Rome or the British Monarch.  The current Archbishop, Rowan Williams is, as best as I can tell, [...]

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‘Tis the season for the usual politically correct attacks on Christmas.  Ecumenical signs, disingenuously trimmed with Christmas holly and ornaments, urge a generic “Happy Holidays.”  Bank inspectors, perhaps seeking an easier task than examining a bank’s books, remove crosses.  Every December, Scrooge takes his steroids and is out in full force. You’d think, of course, [...]

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I struggled for a few minutes to find a clever title for this post that would convey the volume of information I’m about to download from my brain, but realized I couldn’t.  A laundry list description will just have to do. You see, last night, I had the pleasure of attending a Hanukkah party that [...]

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Liam Neeson, who does the voice of Aslan the Lion in the Narnia movies, has upset people by claiming that Aslan could as easily be Allah or Buddha as he could be Christ: Ahead of the release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader next Thursday, Neeson said: ‘Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but he [...]

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I was very surprised to see an AP wire story reporting that Islamic militants (as opposed to mere “militants” or “insurgents”) were holding “Christians” (as opposed to mere “people”) hostage.  Even more surprising, the AP reported that the Islamic militants were probably affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity one apparently couldn’t acknowledge during [...]

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All our weapons — free speech, reason, forbearance — are for dealing with people who are sort of like us.  The existential crisis comes when we find ourselves dealing with people who are in no way like us.  Do we oppose them by being even more like ourself than before (more speech, more reason, more [...]

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I know this will come as a surprise to all of you, but I was not born wise or well informed.  I blush to think of some of the behaviors in which I indulged, and the ideas that I held, when I was younger. When I was a very little girl, I picked up from [...]

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My book club group met the other night to discuss William Manchester’s book A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age. The title is something of a misnomer. It’s only a “portrait of an age” if you want to read a thousand years of medieval history crammed [...]

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Well, I finally got around to seeing The Blind Side.  For those unfamiliar with the movie, it retells the true story of Michael Oher, a profoundly disadvantaged black boy who ended up as a scholarship student at a Christian academy in Memphis.  Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, parents at the school, stumbled across him, and [...]

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Wolf Howling has put together just a stellar post about the ongoing attacks on the Catholic church (along with a very nice link to yours truly).  If this is a subject that interests you — and it should, whether or not you’re a Catholic, because it goes to attacks on a pillar of Western civilization [...]

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I have some familiarity with Church history and doctrine, owing to my background as a European history major.  I am woefully ignorant, however, about modern Catholicism — or, more specifically, modern American Catholicism.  I therefore have a question for those of you who are Catholic:  Does it matter to a critical mass of American Catholics [...]

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I just finished reading a very bad book, although I owe it thanks for leading me down some interesting intellectual paths.  The book is Derek Wilson’s Charlemagne, which came my way through my book club (and it’s because of the book club that I actually finished a book I normally would swiftly have abandoned).  The [...]

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I know that, in the run-up to the to the 2008 presidential election, many Christians said that they could not vote for Romney because he is a Mormon.  I’m wondering if that’s changed.  Romney may be a Mormon but Obama is, well, Obama.  For true Christians, can there be a “lesser of two evils” calculus [...]

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Pastor Martin Niemoeller, after the war, penned the famous “first they came for the Jews,” with regard to the way non-Jewish demographics turned a blind eye to Nazi depredations, confident that the Nazis would stop after the Jews, and then after the Communists, and then after the gays.  But they never stopped. The interesting thing [...]

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It’s been an incoherent day, one that never gave me the opportunity for contemplation and writing.  Instead, I’ve been bopping here and there, and dealing with one thing and another.  Nevertheless, I have been tracking the news, so I thought I’d just write up a mish-mash of thoughts about current issues and events. Gaza The [...]

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It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything this sad. It comes from the Church of England’s own newspaper: If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore [...]

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