Archive for Meddlesome

Time to Say Goodbye

May 16, 2015 Featured One comment

When I was graduating from high school, Green Day’s song “Time of Your Life” was starting its interminable lifespan as our nation’s Theme of Commemoration.  I hated the song right from the get-go, though part of me greatly appreciated the irony of my classmates and others featuring it predominantly in various collages .  Most of them evidently never bothered to listen to the song or even to learn its actual title:  “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).”  Among the lyrics included in the song, the observant listener will hear: So take the photographs, and still frames in your mind Hang

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Rascally Rabbits

May 9, 2015 Intellectual Formation, Moral Action One comment

The Catholic Church and Her faithful are often the subject of potshots from the secular culture.  Jokes and quips have been launched against the Church both in good-spirited jest and unbridled hostility.  There is a tendency for Catholics, particularly of a traditionalist or conservative bent, to leap into the role of victim or wannabe martyr, but such a proclivity strikes me as being rather misguided.  Indeed, the eagerness to take offense at jokes made at the Church’s expense can often cause us to fail to consider both the resilience of our Holy Mother in the face of adversity as well

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Something Good From Wisconsin

May 2, 2015 Moral Action No comments

While I am not wrong often, I am nonetheless man enough to admit it when I do stumble into an error once every decade or so.  For many years I had stated nothing good ever came from Wisconsin, but I now concede this to be an erroneous proposition thanks to the people of Red Letter Media.  Based out of Milwaukee, Red Letter Media began making a name for itself with a series of feature length reviews on the Star Wars prequels (I’m not kidding, the three reviews combine for a total of roughly 270 minutes complete with their own stories and

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A Good Edition of the Good Book

April 25, 2015 Intellectual Formation No comments

When I made my confession this past Monday, my confessor assigned me a rather wonderful penance.  To pay back my debt to God, the good Father assigned me the responsibility of memorizing the 24th verse of Psalm 119.  This is not the first time my confessor has required me to memorize something from the Bible, nor even something from the Psalms.  As I left the church and got into my car, I knew that of all the English translations available for memorization, I would fly to the wonderful one gifted to us by Msgr. Ronald Knox. “The Knox Bible,” as

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The Deification of the U.S. President

April 18, 2015 General Interest 2 comments

A couple of years ago, a friend and I took a road trip to Washington, D.C.  It was my first time touring our nation’s capitol and, although I was well aware of the District’s famed crime and poverty, I was nonetheless eager to see some of its more monumental landmarks.  Not too long after entering the City of Magnificent Intentions, as Charles Dickens coined it, the two of us made our way to the National Mall.  The weather was beautiful and the stroll was pleasant, save for the outrageous price for a hot dog. The most striking moment for me as

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The Clinton Dynasty’s Next Matriarch?

April 11, 2015 Intellectual Formation One comment

Evidently Hillary isn’t the only Clinton launching a new campaign, as daughter Chelsea is gunning for the limelight in the new issue of Elle.  I could not bring myself to finish reading the article as I was struck by the following sentence summarizing the interview in its opening paragraph:  “Their discussion topics ranged from whether she’d like her daughter Charlotte’s grandmother to be the first female president of the United States, to the pressures she feels as a woman in a leadership role…”  I couldn’t bring myself to keep reading after realizing that both Chelsea and her interlocutor actually think that

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The Blessed Sabbath

April 4, 2015 Intellectual Formation No comments

  By no means can I claim expertise in the evaluation of Caravaggio’s corpus, but nonetheless I do find myself drawn to his The Deposition of Christ (aka The Entombment of Christ) more than any of his other paintings.  There is a wide mixture of emotion and, indeed, even mystery within the figures as they lay the dead body of our Lord into the unused tomb.  I’ve used this painting as a resource in prayer on many occasions, finding myself contemplating the  significance of that period between Christ’s Crucifixion and His Resurrection. Holy Saturday is sometimes referred to as “the Blessed Sabbath,” for it

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71 Is the New 100%

March 28, 2015 Featured One comment

One of the interesting questions in the realm of film philosophy centers on the question of genre.  Generic texts, whether written or filmed, pose a quandary insofar as they should prove to be boring to audiences, as the form and formula of the text must have a certain consistency across the various iterations of the genre.  Indeed, if a film lays claim to being part of a genre, audiences will punish it should it venture too far off the track.  Yet, should a film do nothing more than effectively connect the dots of its genre, audiences will lambast it for

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Get Out the Vote or Get the Vote Out?

March 21, 2015 Intellectual Formation, Moral Action, Security One comment

President Obama made waves once again this week by stating, at a Cleveland town hall meeting, that it would probably be beneficial for America to adopt mandatory voting.  “It would be transformative if everybody voted,” the president opined as he listed the people who don’t typically turn out to vote (most of whom, if they did, would fall into the Democrats’ rank-and-file).  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that our president is valuing tactics in this suggestion more than political philosophy, which has spawned a rather strong rebuke from conservative pundits.  Liberals, sharing the president’s penchant for voting, have hesitated

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What We Conserve

March 14, 2015 Intellectual Formation No comments

“You can never plan the future by the past.”—Letter of Edmund Burke, 1791 While the 2016 presidential campaign is not officially under way, it nonetheless is beginning to take shape.  The Democrats have a clear frontrunner in Hillary Clinton, while the Republicans seem to have a trio of men (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker) leading their hopefuls.  Pundits and citizens are offering their two cents about how to craft a winning campaign.  I honestly do not know what will win one party the White House in our next national election, but I do wish to offer the following

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