Prophecies

I’ve listed below just a few prophetic words from people I hold in high esteem. Each of these brief comments seems, at least to me, applicable to our current situation. That situation is a movable feast of sorts, but an indigestible feast rushing quickly to something truly demonic. We will soon reach a point where human actions will be unable to save us from a worldly future driven by those captivated by evil. That’s when God will step in as he has again and again. What He will do, how He will rescue us…well, that’s likely to be quite a surprise. But like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God calls on us to plead the case of the faithful ones [See Gn 18]. 

In the meantime, we must do our part and never fear speaking the truth, not only among family and friends, but also openly in the public square. But first we must come together prayerfully as the people of God filled with hope. And remember, hope isn’t just wishin’ and dreamin’ — not at all. Hope, as a theological virtue, is our firm confidence that God will answer our prayer and fulfill His promise to care for us and pour out His peace on us, all over us, and into our confused and troubled hearts. "Peace be with you" Jesus says to the confused and doubting.

Keep in mind that prophecy involves the proclamation of God’s Word and only occasionally addresses future events. Prophecy, then, is simply the revelation of God’s will for us. That said, read these comments and consider their truths:

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.” ~ St. Paul [2 Tim 4:3-4] 

“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.” ~ Pope Benedict XVI, 2005

“The hero can never be a relativist.“~ Richard M. Weaver, 1948, Ideas Have Consequences

"I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right" ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

“For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.” ~ Anthony Esolen

“Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.” ~ Russell Kirk, (1986). “The Assault on religion: commentaries on the decline of religious liberty”

“The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.” ~ Richard M. Weaver

"We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us." ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

“When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed, and by whom, one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived at all.” ~ Hilaire Belloc

“It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.” ~ Charles Williams, Descent into Hell

“When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.” ~ T. S. Eliot

“We’re surrounded by a lot of noise. The world tries to drown out God’s voice. How many never take the time to listen for God’s call, or even believe He’s calling them?” ~ Me (2022)

"Rather than shivering in the cold, modern man has preferred to set the house on fire, and dance for a moment in the final conflagration" ~ Roger Scruton

Springtime Reading

Every so often, someone asks me: "What are you reading lately?" Most often the question comes from a friend or acquaintance who's visited our home and has taken a peek into my so-called den. Often enough this messy room shocks visitors who for some reason expect me to be more organized. I could include a photo but would prefer to avoid the embarrassment. I'd rather just drop a few hints and leave the rest to your imagination. 

Most of the walls of this room are hidden behind six tall overflowing bookcases. More books rise up from the floor in semi-neat stacks. The storage of books is a process of continual evolution and even a cursory look suggests no real system of organization. The result? Searching for a particular book usually turns into an adventure. I'm not proud of this, but organization takes time. Perhaps every couple of years, the chaos reaches a critical level and I devote most of a day to rearranging books by subject matter, separating others I intend to give away, and moving some to the many bookcases in other rooms of our home. This task, driven by necessity, is far from enjoyable. But it must be done because I lack the discipline to return books to their proper place and tend to stash new books wherever they fit. Yes, indeed, my lack of discipline and organization leads only to chaos.

But even chaos can bring its rewards. Yesterday, while looking for a particular book, I found another I had not yet read and had forgotten. Buried at the bottom of one of those stacks on the floor, it called to me, demanding to be read. Since I tend to have three or four books going at the same time -- something that Dear Diane finds strange -- I simply added it to my current reading.

When do I read? Whenever I have the time. Multiple ministries have no respect for personal schedules and make it difficult to set particular times for other activities, including reading. Fortunately, I read rather quickly, thanks to a speed-reading workshop I attended in graduate school back in the early 70s. Unless the book is a particularly dense theological or philosophical text, I can usually finish it rather quickly.

Anyway, if you are interested, here's a sampling of what I'm reading now, or intend to read, in the springtime of 2022.

Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? by Hans Urs von Balthasar (1986). 

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), one of the great theologians of the 20th century, wrote this book not long before his death. Although I first read this book in the mid-90s, its publication had already generated so much controversy, I wanted to read it myself and see what all the furor was about. And now, as I am much closer to the end of my life, I thought perhaps it was time to read it again.

Although I was (and still am) no theologian, I found the book to be thoughtful, measured, and scripturally sound. I could never understand why von Balthasar and his book became the target of so many attacks. God's plan for the salvation of humanity, particularly for the salvation of each individual, remains a mystery. Can we not hope for the salvation of all?

Von Balthasar examines sacred Scripture and brings to light many of the passages that encourage Christians to hope that God will bring all to salvation. He neither ignores nor denies the more "threatening" passages that obviously argue against this. In his follow-up "Discourse on Hell" (included in the book and written as a response to his critics), he simply says:

"I claim nothing more than this: that these statements give us a right to have hope for all men, which simultaneously implies that I see no need to take the step from the threats to the positing of a hell occupied by our brothers and sisters, through which our hopes would come to naught."

He goes on to write: 

"I do not wish to contradict anyone who, as a Christian, cannot be happy without denying the universality of hope to us so that he can be certain of his full hell: that was, after all, the view of a large number of important theologians, especially among the followers of Augustine. But, in return, I would like to request that one be permitted to hope that God's redemptive work for his creation might succeed. Certainty cannot be attained, but hope can be justified."

Von Balthasar then adds the following, suggesting the Church, in its wisdom, has long understood this:

"That is probably the reason why the Church, which has sanctified so many men, has never said anything about the damnation of any individual. Not even about that of Judas, who became in a way the representative example for something of which all sinners are also guilty."

I've just completed (I think) my third reading of this book and strongly recommend it, especially if you find the idea of God bringing all to salvation highly improbable or even impossible. As for me, I've always been a sucker for hope, the theological virtue that promises me so much more than I deserve.

Eliot and His Age, by Russell Kirk (1971). 

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was perhaps the most eloquent, influential, and solidly conservative man of letters of the 20th century. I attribute the genesis of my own political beliefs to his book The Conservative Mind which i first read only months after its publication in 1960. At the time I was a high school junior who was searching for some solid foundational ground to support the beliefs I instinctively held. 

Kirk (photo left) was a prolific writer, and many of his books have pride of place in my personal library. I had known of his fondness for T. S. Eliot, with whom he shared a personal friendship, but I had never read this remarkable work. I'm now about halfway into it an already consider it essential reading for anyone truly interested in understanding the great poet's life and works, as well as the ideas that stimulated his timeless writings.

If you're a fan of Eliot (photo left), you'll know that his essays and other prose works are almost as important as his poetry. Indeed, his ideas are perhaps even more meaningful to our society today than when they were first written. Kirk, writing of Eliot's influence in the early 1920s, stated:

"Of missions to the masses, the twentieth century knew too many; Eliot's mission was to the educated classes. The drift toward Marxism, or toward some other totalist ideology, was apparent already among literary people: Eliot would offer them an alternative -- in philosophy and religion, in humane letters, in politics." [P. 81]

And while you're at it, pick up a copy of Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, a wonderful essay containing such profound gems as this:

"...in a society which has ceased to be Christian...I would remark that there are two points of view...The first is that a society has ceased to be Christian when religious practices have been abandoned, when behavior ceases to be regulated by reference to Christian principle, and when in effect prosperity in this world for the individual or for the group has become the sole conscious aim. The other point of view, which is less readily apprehended, is that a society has not ceased to be Christian until it has become positively something else...I believe that the choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture and the acceptance of a pagan one." [P. 10]

By the way, my copy is a first US edition (1940) for which I paid all of $2.00 in a used bookshop some years ago. 

Of yes, and don't neglect the great poet's poetry...perhaps more on this in some future post.

I'm running out of time (and steam) and still have two homilies to write for Mass and a Baptism on Saturday. Here's one more suggestion, a bit of a change of pace since it's a work of fiction.

There Are Doors, by Gene Wolfe (1988). 

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) might well have been one of the best modern American writers of fiction. Sadly, his work tends to be overlooked because it is usually classed as science fiction. I suppose it is, but it's really so much more. Just the fact that I rarely read the genre -- except for books written by Wolfe -- might convince you to give him a try.

Every so often I find one of his books in a used bookstore or turn to Amazon and search for one I haven't read. This book is one of those Amazon purchases. A used copy, it arrived on our doorstep a couple of days ago and I just started to read it yesterday evening. It took only about 30 seconds to grab my attention, although after about 50 pages I realized it was too late to continue reading since I had to get up at 5:30 this morning. I'll probably finish it tonight.

Wolfe once wrote that "A great story...is one that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure." Believe me, this describes Wolfe's stories perfectly.

If you've never read Wolfe, I would suggest turning first to his novel, A Soldier of the Mist (1987). (The link takes you to a double novel that includes this book and its sequel.) The novel tells a remarkable story set in 479 B.C., a time when "the gods walked the earth with men." The hero, a Greek mercenary soldier named Latro, suffered a head would in battle and became separated from his fellow soldiers. As a result of his wound, he experienced severe memory loss that included his ability to remember from one day to the next. He is forced, therefore, to live in a constant present. His only aid is a daily written record which he reads each morning to give his life some continuity. But his wound has also given Latro a gift of sorts: his sense can penetrate into the supernatural world that surrounds him. He can see and communicate with a wide variety of beings, from gods and goddesses to ghosts and demons.

Another of Wolfe's books that received a lot of critical attention is among my favorites: Pirate Freedom (2007). I just love the plot. It's a time-travel story of a Catholic priest, Father Christopher, who finds himself transported back in time to the age of piracy in the Caribbean. There he becomes Captain Chris, a rather successful pirate. An absolutely fascinating story -- I won't reveal the ending -- that examines the relationship among love, faith, and morality.

Wolfe was a Catholic whose deep faith permeated his works, often in the most subtle ways that no doubt had a significant influence on many of his readers.

___________________

In addition to the books mentioned here I'm currently reading a few others. Perhaps I'll take the time to mention them in the near future.

God's peace and happy reading.

More thoughts…

Just some more spontaneous thoughts that come to me as I sit for four hours in a very uncomfortable chair waiting for dentists to finish their work on Dear Diane. These dentists at the University of Florida are a wonderful, competent team of professionals, and the long sessions have taught me how to deal with what promises to be hours of near fatal boredom. Interestingly — and why it’s interesting will become evident shortly — Diane’s dentists earned their undergraduate degrees abroad.

My subject today probably came about because I’m sitting in a building in Gainesville, Florida surrounded by other buildings of this major university. Perhaps these thoughts penetrated my aging brain through a kind of osmosis. Anyway, here goes…

Parents today, who pay huge amounts of money for their child to attend an Ivy League college, or really almost any college or university, are throwing their money away. Our colleges and universities, sadly with only a few exceptions, have completely abandoned their role as institutions of higher education. Not too many years ago colleges and universities actually educated their undergraduate students, providing them with a firm foundation in the “liberal arts.” Students learned to express themselves orally and in writing, to understand our place in the history of humanity, to become acquainted with the philosophies that formed that history, to recognize the greatness and the weakness in the lives and work of those who came before, to grasp the fundamentals of mathematics and science, and to appreciate the world’s great literature and art. This liberal education provided students with the knowledge and skills needed to live productive lives in a free society and prepared them for further professional education or specialized training in a variety of fields. In other words, they learned to think and to reason, and to do so with discernment.

Russell Kirk (1918-1994), the great conservative thinker, wrote that liberal education “defends order against disorder…works for order in the soul and order in the republic. Liberal learning enables those who benefit from its discipline to achieve some degree of harmony within themselves.” And St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) stated that through a liberal intellectual discipline “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom, of what…I have ventured to call the philosophical habit of mind.” 

But today, many of our colleges and universities have completely abandoned liberal education and instead have devolved into mere indoctrination centers where young minds, already preconditioned by the ideological garbage they’ve been force fed in many high schools, become thoroughly radicalized. Lacking a real education, college students instead become Lenin’s “useful idiots” who can easily be led and controlled by those who seek power. With breathless adoration too many of today’s students unquestioningly accept whatever their radical professors tell them, and zombie-like they follow their handlers into the streets. By the time they graduate, useless degrees in hand, they despise the civilization that allows them to express the hatred they’ve been taught. 

Most parents, however, don’t have a clue and will continue to fund this first phase of societal suicide. Their children may be “woke,” but parents are the ones who need to wake up. Unfortunately too many have been willing to abdicate their responsibility for the education of their children and willingly allow others to teach their children to hate not only their nation and Western Civilization, but also the parents who foot the bill for all this.

What other options do parents and their children have? Maybe I’ll offer a few off-the-wall ideas about this soon in a future post…assuming I remember to do so.

A Prophecy

One look at the titles in my home library and you would notice, with a few exceptions, most of the fiction was written by writers who are no longer with us. The exceptions include such novelists as Mark Helprin, Gene Wolfe, Dean Koontz, V. S. Naipaul, Michael D. O'Brien, and a few others. I enjoy the work of authors who write well, who accept the reality of objective truth, and who believe in what T. S. Eliot called the "permanent things" that make us human beings what we are and lead us to what we are destined to become. You will find few atheists or relativists among the novelists residing in my modest library. I hear enough from them in the popular media.

Jane Austen and The Cottage in Chawton, Hampshire

I've written often of my fondness for that early nineteenth-century moral theologian, Jane Austen, a woman so unlike those dark, brooding Brontes. And I continue to enjoy and reread the work of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Anthony Trollope. In truth, these days I don't read Trollope but instead listen to him during my early morning walks, thanks to the good folks at audible.com and the Apple engineers who made my iPhone. Trollope is really quite listenable. And then there are the writers whose stories and novels make me laugh again and again, authors like P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) and H. H. Munro (aka, Saki, 1870-1916). I've also come to enjoy the somewhat strange novels of the late Alice Thomas Ellis (1932-2005) and the ghostly stories of Russell Kirk (1918-1994). I remember my surprise when I learned that Kirk, one of the intellectual fathers of the American conservative movement, also wrote these wonderfully spooky tales. 

A Young Mackenzie

All of this talk of authors and books has brought me to Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), another writer in whose works I delight. I first encountered him about 30 years ago when I picked up a used copy of his farcical novel, The Monarch of the Glen, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. Since then I've probably read a dozen of his novels. But one day, while browsing in the aisles of my favorite Cape Cod bookstore -- Parnassus Books -- I picked up a copy of Volume 3 of Mackenzie's My Life and Times. I soon discovered that his autobiography was a massive work, filling ten volumes -- yes, that's right, ten! Each volume covers an "octave," eight years of this man's remarkable life. 

Since reading that third "octave", I have searched for and purchased the other nine volumes and, believe me, few lives are more interesting than Mackenzie's. He knew everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to Winston Churchill, from T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence, from William Faulkner to Lawrence Olivier. The child of a theatrical family, Mackenzie graduated from Oxford, was a lifelong Scottish nationalist, converted to Catholicism, and developed a deep distrust of invasive government. He also liked cats, a odd trait which I can overlook.

Last evening, while reading Volume 8, which covers the war years (1939 to 1946), I came across something Mackenzie had written late in 1940. This was a most difficult time for the British. In 1939 Stalin and Hitler had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, an agreement conceived in hell, one that would last until broken by Hitler in mid-1941. It would be well over a year before the United States entered the war after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. At the time Mackenzie was writing, Britain stood virtually alone against the most powerful army the world had ever seen. And that army had just blitz-krieged its way through France and the Low Countries forcing the British troops and a contingent of allied forces to evacuate at Dunkirk. Were it not an island nation, Britain too would have fallen, probably quickly.

Mackenzie's comments were published as the forward to a volume designed to raise money for a charity called the War Orphans Fund. Given that they were written almost 80 years ago, in the early years of World War Two, they are both insightful and prophetic. I have included some excerpts here.

"If would be more comfortable to believe that this great war was merely the result of the last Great War. We might then feel fairly certain of achieving a real peace, for we have learnt a lesson and are in the mood to benefit by it. If this war is part of an evolutionary struggle, whatever the result we cannot hope to see the world securely re-established, because our victory must in time be challenged again but our defeat would be final, at any rate for too long a period to make speculation worth while. 

"I believe that we may soon be witnessing the death agony of that habit of thought and system of economy which is too loosely called capitalism, too loosely as it seems to me because it overstresses the economic aspect and I am not a dialectical materialist who can accept Marx's theory that man's circumstance is entirely determined by this. I regard our period as the beginning of the reaction against the trend that was given to Western development by the Renaissance and the Reformation and the discovery of America, which led to an exaggerated conception of the rights of the individual and an insufficient appreciation of his duties. The process has been accelerated by the abuse of mechanical progress from printing to flying, by the corruption of the ideal of popular education, by the substitution of humanitarian theory for religious practice, by the continually growing power of money, and by the encouragement of an illusory freedom of thought at the cost of real freedom of action. The result has been that never in recorded history was the ordinary man so completely at the mercy of his environment as he is today. The liberty that seemed within his grasp at the beginning of the fifteenth century is now farther away than ever, and is likely to recede still farther as long as man elects to be the slave of self rather than the servant of God."

At this point Mackenzie refers to a drawing of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt and writes:

"They too were refugees...but they are refugees at this moment. What that Holy Family stood for mankind is even now being driven more brutally into the desert by material progress than ever by Herod's violence...

"After the Great War of 1914-1918 people sat back and declared that another great war would mean the end of civilization. Pamphlets were published to warn the world what appalling weapons and poisons would obliterate humanity. Pacifism was feverishly preached on the text that war was too horrible; its missionaries forgot that only experience teaches and that a younger generation would be excited but not warned by books like All Quiet on the Western Front. Meanwhile for two fatal decades audiences sought a deliberate thrill from gangster films and plays and readers procured themselves a kick from tough novels.

"And then suddenly in September 1938 audiences and readers woke up to the fact that the thrills and kicks they had been administering to themselves, thrills and kicks more pernicious to moral stamina than any hashish or cocaine could supply, were expressions of such a zeitgeist as not even the far-sighted Goethe discerned upon the wing...

"In one last desperate effort to travel out of the respectable past into the disreputable present Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to allay the whispers of politicians who had betrayed their country out of laziness because it was easier not to disturb an electorate with warnings of a storm which after all might not break. To politicians willing to betray their country out of laziness it did not seem a grave offense to betray what Mr. Chamberlain called a 'remote country' like Czechoslovakia out of cowardice. Not that such cowardice was not immediately justified, let it be quickly said; war was impossible for Britain and France. Neither was ready..."

Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler in Munich

Mackenzie goes on to address the muddled thinking of both the Left and the Right in the years leading up to the war, and then writes the following:

"The seat of the trouble was that confused thinking which led to the failure to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were only different expressions of the same basic evolutionary drive as inspired Communism. Black ants or red ants, they are both ants. The initials of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité provide the first three letters for the LEFT, and T stands for Totalitarianism...

"The Communist secure in a positive material creed declares the condition of Europe to be evidence that the death agony of capitalism has begun. The Catholic equally secure in a positive creed which transcends materialism .declared the condition of Europe to be the logical result of turning aside from the way of life God Himself indicated when He was Man..."

Interesting stuff by a man who served actively on foreign soil in British Intelligence during World War One. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts as he describes life during the war years.

Mackenzie who wrote upwards of 100 books, also penned a four-volume memoir of those years as an intelligence officer in and near Greece during Word War One -- something else to search for...

God's Peace, the only True Peace...

Ghost Stories

I have a confession to make -- a minor confession, but a confession nonetheless. I like ghost stories. When I mentioned this to an acquaintance the other day, he winced and said, "You're kidding! You're a Christian. You're a deacon. You can't possibly believe in ghosts."

His reaction and his failure to understand what I had just told him are symptomatic of the difficulties associated with communication these days. This failure -- on his part, not mine -- forced me to clarify what should have required no clarification:

"I never said I believed in ghosts. I said only that I like ghost stories."

One can like science fiction stories about alien beings from another galaxy and still believe, as I believe, that no such creatures exist. As a child I often read stories about animals that possessed some very human qualities. I thoroughly enjoyed Peter Rabbit and Charlotte's Web and The Jungle Book and yet, even as a child, I knew that rabbits and spiders and jungle creatures were all incapable of conversing with other animals in English or behaving rationally. But these stories were wonderful tales that taught lessons about how to live life well.

I won't bore you with the rest of our conversation which became increasingly tedious as we sparred over the meanings of words and he struggled to accept that I could suspend my disbelief and enjoy something he considered unbelievable. But then he was educated as a mechanical engineer, so perhaps this explains his attitude.

Actually, I probably shouldn't have used the words, "ghost stories," since the stories I most enjoy aren't always about encounters with the more traditional ghosts. "Supernatural stories" might be a better term. Such stories sometimes include ghostly manifestations, but not always. Their real attraction? They force the reader to consider the possibility of realities beyond the material (natural) world. Indeed, such realities are actually at the very heart of our Christian faith which demands our acceptance of the existence of the supernatural.

I suppose my first exposure to the genre was Henry James' The Turn of the Screw which I read in high school. I found it a less than satisfying read because it left me questioning either the reality of the ghosts or the sanity of the main character or both. I still haven't made up my mind. In any event, the novel failed to whet my appetite for more of the same.

About ten years later a friend, who was emptying his shelves of unwanted books, gave me a cardboard box filled with early 20th-century novels. Among them was All Hallows' Eve, a novel by Charles Williams (1886-1945). The gift of this book began my enchantment with the genre and effected a major change in my reading habits.

Charles Williams

I knew of Charles Williams because of his relationship with both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. All three were longtime members of the Inklings, that literary club of friends who met in Oxford pubs to discuss their works and common interests. Although I had read much of both Tolkien and Lewis and owned a book of Williams' poetry, I had read none of Williams' novels. I soon discovered he had written seven, and like All Hallows' Eve, all are supernatural thrillers. 

Williams, an Anglican, wrote his novels during the 1930s. He died in 1945 at the age of 59. I believe the novels were out of print for some years, but then, starting in the 1970s, Eerdmans, the Christian publishing house, reprinted all seven. Once I had read that first book, I was hooked and had to read the rest. All seven novels are still available. Here's a list, with Amazon links:

Shadows of Ecstacy

War in Heaven

Many Dimensions

The Place of the Lion

The Greater Trumps

All Hallows' Eve

Descent into Hell

Although the novels include occasional encounters with the dead, the books are really concerned with salvation and the battle waged between the forces of good and evil. Williams' Christianity comes through loud and strong. If you're interested in digging more deeply into these seven novels I suggest reading Thomas Howard's wonderful little book, published in 1983, The Novels of Charles Williams.

To learn more about the author himself, visit the website of The Charles Williams Society, an organization devoted to promoting "the study and appreciation of the life and writings" of this author and theologian.

Another author who dabbled in supernatural thrillers is Russell Kirk (1918-1994), a convert to Catholicism in his middle age. Known mostly for his scholarly works on political philosophy, especially his classics, The Conservative Mind and The Roots of American Order,  Kirk also enjoyed writing spooky tales.

Russell Kirk

Although Kirk wrote several novels in the genre, I especially enjoy his short stories. In 2004 Eerdmanns came through once again and published a wonderful collection of Kirk's stories under the title, Ancestral Shadows. Its subtitle is "An Anthology of Ghostly Tales" and so it is.

Of Kirk's novels, my favorite is Lord of the Hollow Dark, a captivating tale set in an evil-infested mansion in Scotland and populated with a remarkable cast of characters. It's a difficult book to find at a reasonable price, so if you want a copy, I recommend doing what I did and search the used book stores and websites. Kirk's first novel, Old House of Fear, is another exciting gothic tale, also set in Scotland, and the novel that received the greatest critical acclaim.

Like that of Williams, Kirk's fiction clearly reveals his Christian beliefs and focuses on salvation and the presence of evil in the world. I only wish he had written more.

If you're interested in learning more about this remarkable man, visit the website devoted to his life and work: The Russell Kirk Center.

Gene Wolfe

And then there's Gene Wolfe (b. 1931), a prolific writer of science fiction and supernatural tales whose Catholic faith has certainly influenced his work. Wolfe is also among the best writers of fiction alive today. Best known for his science fiction, he has also written a number of wonderful novels that I'll carelessly lump under the heading of supernatural thrillers. I've listed a few of my favorites:

Peace (1975). Perhaps my favorite of Wolfe's novels, Peace is a powerful story of a not very pleasant old man who possesses a miraculous imagination that can alter reality.

Pandora by Holly Hollander (1990).  Murder, mystery, and infidelity in a Chicago suburb with a modern-day Pandora's Box thrown in to spice up the plot. It is a story narrated by a clever teenage girl whose wealthy family is at the center of the novel's strange events. It also includes a detective who seems to know more about the small town than than any stranger should.

Pirate Freedom (2007). A remarkable, thoughtful and beautifully written tale of a contemporary priest who finds himself transported back to the distant past and into the life of a pirate captain on the Spanish Main. Sounds weird, and it is, but it works.

An Evil Guest (2008). A strangely wonderful story set in the distant future but with an atmosphere reminiscent of the not so distant past. Like all of Wolfe's stories, it's full of surprises that both delight and horrify.

I've read a lot of Wolfe over the years and I suppose the best way to describe his work is to say that I have never been disappointed. Here's a link to an interesting article about Wolfe published in April 2015 in the New Yorker: "Sci-Fi's Difficult Genius."


There are others, but Williams, Kirk and Wolfe are my favorites. And as I said to my friend, "I like ghost stories," even the ones that aren't about ghosts.

Two Cheers for Political Incorrectness

I have to admit, the politically incorrect can surprise and delight, but I can really give it only two rousing cheers. The first relates to its truth: ironically, political incorrectness is usually far more correct than political correctness. I give it a second cheer because it's often pretty funny. But I withhold the third cheer because it can be uncharitable, forcing me to suppress my laughter. Of course, that's true of much humor.

Political correctness, however, deserves not a single cheer. We joke a lot about political correctness, but it's really not all that funny. Indeed, at the very heart of all political correctness, one finds the lie, and a lie is rarely humorous. Even the phrase itself -- politically correct -- belies its supposed truth and highlights the lie at its core. Something is either correct or incorrect, true or false. There's not a lot of gray when it comes to the truth. Once we modify the word "correct" with "politically" or any other modifier, we're admitting that it's really something other than correct, that it's in some way incorrect; that is, it's a lie. This all brings to mind Pope Benedict's warning about the "dictatorship of relativism." You can read his homily addressing the subject here.

Enforced political correctness, of the sort often mandated throughout our society -- by government at all levels, the educational establishment, many corporations, and much of the media --  is ostensibly aimed at eliminating language that might offend certain ideologically protected groups identified by race, ethnicity, sex and sexual preference, age, disability, religion, etc. Its real purpose, however, is something far less altruistic. What it really does is grossly restrict speech and even thought, all in an attempt to force the individual to say and think only what others believe to be acceptable.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Political correctness, like the "newspeak" in Orwell's 1984, is designed quite simply to impose ideologically acceptable thought on the populace, to protect those in power from ideas that they believe threaten the maintenance of that power.

The very fact that not all groups are protected says a lot. The Catholic Church, for example, is by no means politically correct because its teachings so often conflict with the current Zeitgeist. Indeed, its stances on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, and a host of today's other hot-button issues place the Catholic Church near the top of any politically incorrect list. 

Antonio Gransci (1891-1937)

This is, of course, all driven by ideology, what has been called "cultural Marxism," which has its roots it the work of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, among many others. One of the best books on Gramsci and the other European leftists who so greatly influenced postwar American intellecturals is Michael Walsh's The Devils Pleasure Palace. And if you're interested in digging a bit deeper into PC's roots, read this paper by Dr. Jefrey D. Breshears.

Have you ever noticed that PC folks tend to be as humorless as their beliefs. Such serious people, always on the lookout for slights, for anything that runs counter to their concept of ideological purity. One cannot simply disagree with them. Depending on the subject at hand, one who disagrees must be a hater, a racist, a misogynist, or a Xenophobe...the list of handy labels is long.

Political incorrectness, on the other hand, is almost always good for a laugh, unless, of course, you're so PC that you think nothing is funny. It also demands a certain degree of courage to be non-PC these days, and I suppose that's why I so admire the politically incorrect pundits who point out the lie at the heart of the politically correct. Perhaps his political incorrectness is the reason behind Donald Trump's growing popularity among the American people who have likely grown tired of having to suppress their opinions and beliefs. Trump is certainly not afraid to shout his opinions from today's cyber rooftops. One might consider some of his statements foolish or ill-advised, but they're certainly entertaining. Whether this is a suitable trait for the presidency is another question.

Anyway, all this talk about the ongoing conflict between the PC and the non-PC led me to retrieve some observations I had tucked away for future use. I don't agree with everything that follows, but these politically incorrect comments -- many at the expense of our very PC president -- are certainly good for a laugh or two.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." -- George Carlin

"I recently read a poll reporting that the majority of Israelis believe that Obama favors the Palestinians. Well, duh!, I mean if it's not bad enough that the Community Organizer in Chief curtsied to a Saudi prince, gets angrier about homes being built in Israel than nukes being built in Iran, can't say enough nice things about the religion of our sworn enemies, and denies that we're at war with Islamic fundamentalists, there's the matter of the U. S. Consulate in Jerusalem. It seems that it is dedicated solely to Palestinian interests. It has $530 million with which to fund summer camps, free movies, business classes, and 'promoting and preserving Palestinian cultural heritage,' whatever in hell that might be. Notable suicide bombers down through the annals of history? The programs are translated into Arabic, but not Hebrew. The education finance grants are available to candidates who must be Palestinian residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the Gaza Strip. Is my memory going, or aren't they the same folks we saw dancing in the streets on 9/11?" -- Burt Prelutsky

"The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." -- H. L. Mencken

George Carlin -- Burt Prelutsky -- H. L. Mencken

"A society in which men and women are governed by a belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society -- whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society -- no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be." -- Russell Kirk

"There are, of course, millionaires and billionaires who are leeches on society, who bleed our GDP and contribute nothing to the commonweal. There was, for instance, a bright young man who worked all the scholarship angles so that wealthy donors (with their tax-dodging charitable contributions) paid his way through fancy schools. He embarked on an urban scam called 'community organizing.' Then he obtained a large sum for writing a book about his life and accomplishments at age 34 when he didn't have any accomplishments and hadn't led much life. He wormed his way into politics with all its perks and benefits. And now his big house, his stretch limousine, and his luxury jet are paid for out of the public treasury." -- P. J. O'Rourke 

"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right." -- G. K. Chesterton

Russell Kirk -- P. J. O'Rourke -- G. K. Chesterton

"Back in America, the coastal sophisticates joke at those knuckle-dragging rubes who believe Obama is some kind of 'secret Muslim.' But really Occam's razor would favor such an explanation, wouldn't it? That a post-American Middle East divided between bad-cop nuclear Shia and worst-cop head-hacking Sunni was the plan all along. Because there are only two alternatives to that simplest of simple explanations: The first is that Obama and the Z-graders who fill out his administration are just blundering buffoons. And we all know, from Michael Beschloss, that he's the smartest president ever, so it couldn't possibly be colossal stupidity on a scale unknown to human history, could it? The second is that his contempt for American power -- a basic class signifier in the circles in which he's moved all his life -- is so deeply ingrained that he doesn't care what replaces it." -- Mark Steyn 

"They are ready to do such horrible things. When they are ready to fly planes into the World Trade Center, when they are ready to fly planes into the Pentagon...when they have this kind of hatred... and you know they're looking at us and they're laughing at us worrying about water-boarding." -- Donald Trump

"I too was once a male trapped in a female body, but then I was born." -- Chuck Norris

"If I were to say that all men throw a baseball faster than all women, I would be talking about the extension of the terms 'men' and 'women.' That is, I would be talking about each and every man and woman. In that case, my claim that 'all men throw a baseball faster than all women' is clearly false, since there are individual women who throw a baseball faster than individual men. One the other hand, when I say that 'men pitch baseballs faster than women because they have more upper body muscle strength' I am referring to what is comprehensibly true of men and women. And in that case, it is incontrovertibly true that men in general pitch baseballs faster than women in general. The distinction between extension and comprehension is clear, easy to understand, and essential to the proper exercise of our mental powers. This is why political correctness makes us dumb." -- Francis Beckwith

Mark Steyn -- Donald Trump -- Chuck Norris -- Francis Beckwith

Equally interesting are the many comments made by those normally heralded as icons of the left. You won't find the following quotations is today's PC textbooks, or in a professor's class notes, or in the campaign literature of a neo-Marxist presidential candidate like Bernie Sanders.

"I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing [from the West Bank and Gaza] is Arab states do not recognize Israel within secure borders." -- Nelson Mandela

"The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink...[we're] going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing." -- Che Guevara

"I shall never fight in the Armed forces with a Negro by my side...Rather, I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds." -- Senator Robert Byrd (D - WV) 

"We have no compassion...we shall not make excuses for the terror." -- Karl Marx

"We must meet hate with creative love...Let us hope there will be no more violence. But if the streets must flow with blood let it flow with our blood in the spirit of Jesus Christ on the Cross." -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's an odd world we live it, isn't it? Keep your sense of humor, and laugh at those who hate.

Dwarfs on the Shoulders of Giants...

Isn't it remarkable that so many who came before us turn out to have been pretty smart? This is no new revelation; it's been known for some time. Indeed, an early 12th-century reference is attributed to Bernard of Chartres who is quoted as saying that "we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants." We can see and understand more, and accomplish more, than those who came before us, not because we are smarter than they, but because they were such giants and have raised us to greater heights. 

Friederich Nietzsche

Bernard was neither the first nor the last to believe this. Indeed, Isaac Newton said much the same thing in a 1676 letter: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Of course, believing this contradicts today's progressive ideologues who have convinced themselves that our predecessors and their ideas have little to teach us today. This rejection of the accomplishments and intellectual heritage of the past, especially the distant past, is particularly evident when the sources of these accomplishments are dead white European males (or DWEMs as they are arrogantly abbreviated). 

Driven by ideology -- whether Marxist, feminist, multiculturalist, atheist, environmentalist, or some grotesque fusion of several or all of these -- far too many of today's educators increasingly dismiss the works of such greats as Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Can you imagine a college survey course of English literature that ignores Shakespeare? Well, believe me, such courses are being taught in many colleges and universities today. 

Not long ago I encountered something even more troubling. I had the opportunity to speak with a young graduate student who had volunteered to help out at our soup kitchen while she visited her grandparents here in Florida. She'd recently earned a BA in philosophy at a rather prestigious private university. When I asked about her undergraduate course of study, it became evident she had read neither Plato nor Aristotle. "The old Greeks really aren't very relevant today," she explained, kindly substituting "old Greeks" for DWEMs in the presence of this living white male. That's when I decided not to ask her about Augustine or Aquinas or Duns Scotus or any of the medieval thinkers. Whom had she studied? Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Marx, Dewey, Marcuse, Peter Singer, Chomsky...all the usual suspects. 

It's all very sad, watching today's educators limit their vision by refusing to climb onto the shoulders of the giants who came before us. Even worse they are effectively blinded by willfully descending into the ideological pits they've dug for themselves. There they see nothing but the dirt beneath their feet and on the walls that surround them. If only they would look up, they would see the light.

More and more colleges and universities are descending into those pits by eliminating programs that focus on the great thinkers who helped Western Civilization flourish and replacing them with courses designed to undermine its foundations. For example, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Heather MacDonald describes the recent changes to UCLA's humanities program:

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the "Empire," UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

The idea, of course, is to destroy the dominant culture and replace it with some amorphous, politically correct multiculturalism. In other words great literature is being replaced by garbage. And UCLA isn't alone. Instead of studying Bach and Mozart at the University of South Carolina you can take a course in "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame." Or how about a course at the University of California Irvine on "The Science of Superheroes"? Or perhaps you'd prefer a Harvard University course on "Vampires in Literature and Film"? Or you can spend your time at Appalachian State University studying "What if Harry Potter is Real?" Instead of celebrating the greatness of our civilization, we now celebrate its decadence. And in the process education is trivialized.

According to the National Endowment for the Humanities -- and these figures are from 1988, over 25 years ago! -- one could graduate from 37% of American colleges without ever taking a history course, from 45% without taking a single course in either English or American literature, from 62% without a course in philosophy, and 77% without studying a foreign language. Just imagine what the percentages are today. Far too many students, after putting themselves (and/or their parents) into deep debt are graduating uneducated. Some leave these schools with an acceptable level of technical expertise, equipped to handle the basic requirements of their chosen field. They are prepared for work at its most elementary level, but are they prepared for life? They might know how to be a chemical engineer, but do they know how to be a human being, created in the image and likeness of their Creator? 

This did not happen overnight; indeed it's taken centuries. We now find ourselves approaching the end of a 500-year experiment in humanism, an experiment in which virtually all the obstacles, especially the moral obstacles, to the human will have been obliterated. Once we reject God as the source of all authority and reassign that authority to ourselves, everything changes. Once we reject Christ crucified and replace Him with man deified, we can shout, along with Hegel and Nietzsche, "God is dead!" At that point, anything goes, and I'm reminded of the lyrics of Cole Porter's 1934 song...

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos

And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that I'm bound to answer
When you propose,
Anything goes.

Today, 80 years later, "anything" has been expanded well beyond the anything of Cole Porter. The Catholic philosopher and historian, Thomas Molnar, in his 1988 book, Twin Powers, described our society's cultural decay as well as anyone when he wrote:

"Culture has come to mean, of course, anything that happens to catch the fancy of a group: rock concerts, supposedly for the famished of the third world; the drug culture and other subcultures; sects and cults; sexual excess and aberration; blasphemy on stage and screen; frightening and obscene shapes; the plastic wrapping of the Pont-Neuf or the California coast; the smashing of the family and other institutions; the display of the queer, abject, the sick. These instant products, meant to provide instant satisfaction to a society itself unmoored from foundation and tradition, accordingly deny the work of mediation and maturation and favor the incoherent, the shapeless and the repulsive."

Western Civilization has been around for quite a while, and so I suppose its ultimate disintegration shouldn't come as a great surprise. In his 1993 book, America's British Culture, Russell Kirk accurately summed up our culture's current condition:

"If the decay goes far enough, in the long run a society's culture sinks to a low level; or the society may fall apart altogether. We Americans live, near the end of the twentieth century, in an era when the general outlines of our inherited culture are still recognizable; yet it does not follow that our children or our grandchildren, in the twenty-first century, will retain a great part of that old culture."

Russell Kirk

Much has happened in the twenty years since Kirk wrote those words. Certainly the moral and ethical decay is evident to anyone who can see. But the culture has also experienced a broader intellectual decay as many rewrite history to fit the demands of their ideologies. The European Union, in a remarkable display of intentional ignorance, has dismissed the role of Christianity, and especially Catholicism, in the development of European civilization. And here in the United States religious freedom, once thought to be the most fundamental of our freedoms, is under constant attack. Enshrined in our Bill of Rights as the first and foremost right of the people, it is now treated as meaningless by those who hold positions of power thanks to that same Constitution. Yes, the dwarfs still refuse to climb onto the shoulders of the giants who went before them.

Of course, this is all just symptomatic of the disintegration of Western Civilization. If the foundational elements of a civilization are tossed aside, if the cult is excised from the culture, the civilization can do nothing but crumble. When and how this will happen is anyone's guess. Will it occur with a whimper or a bang? Will it happen tomorrow or a century from now? I certainly don't know. But because our Christian faith is universal, unattached to any civilization or culture, I know it will survive and flourish until the end of time. 

Instead of worrying about the future, or trying to predict it, perhaps we should simply echo the prayer at the very end of Sacred Scripture: "Come, Lord Jesus!" [Rev 22:20]