Happy Mothers’ Day

A happy Mothers’ Day to all our readers who are moms!  May you not have to cook today, may your children praise you, may Dad do the dishes and may you have a fun day!  My mother departed this world a quarter of a century ago and there is not a day that I do not think of her.  There are a million reasons why particular mothers are loved, but fundamentally mothers are held in the highest rank of human esteem because so many of them are capable of this type of self-sacrificial love.  We learn our first lesson in love from our mothers, and it is doubtless the most important lesson we ever receive.

Sex in 1984: Orwell and Catholicism

Having recently re-read one of the most insightful critiques of the socially destructive effect of mass pornography I have ever come across, I was struck by how the central message was actually present in George Orwell’s 1984. The article is titled “The Politics of Porn”, authored by Robert R. Reilly, and the important message to take away from it is summarized in the following lines:

No matter how democratic their institutions, morally enervated people cannot be free. And people who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants.

The mass production and consumption of pornography, Reilly argues, has “morally enervated” the American public and poses a serious threat to the true foundations of liberty – personal virtue.

Thankless Task

Angels and Demons, the latest round of the ceaseless efforts of Dan Brown, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks to make mountains of money off the potent combination of anti-Catholicism, declining educational standards, paranoia and bad taste, opens in theaters on May 15.  Fact checking Dan Brown is rather like examining the career of Madonna Louise Ciccone for breaches of taste, but someone has to do it, and in a thorough article here, Steven D. Greydanus has risen to the challenge.