Pope Francis is delivering another robust denunciation of liberal transgender ideology sweeping the West, declaring it was the “ugliest danger” while urging the world to embrace the differences between men and women.
“Erasing differences is erasing humanity,” the pontiff declared Friday in Rome. “Men and woman, however, are in a fruitful tension.”
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“It is well that war is so terrible; otherwise, we should grow too fond of it.”
– Robert E. Lee
“Wars and rumors of wars,” to borrow a well-known Biblical phrase from Matthew 24, seem all too commonplace these days. Is that because more wars are going on now than in the past, or because mass media brings us word of them ‘round the clock? It’s a debatable point.
This much is eminently clear: War dates back as far as the day when Cain slew Abel. It’s doubtful that there ever was a time on Earth when nobody was at war with anybody. It’s a depressingly familiar curse.
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Maybe I am on a new year high, but as I consider the West’s cultural renewal, I sense an optimism in the air I haven’t felt for years.
In 2023, we saw a growing public awareness about the dangers and futility of transgender surgery. Alongside that, many woke up to the hypocrisy of the climate alarmists. And building on the success of Roe v. Wade’s demise, many states have now passed heartbeat bills, providing robust protections for many of the nation’s unborn. Surprisingly, pollsters even picked up on a decline in support for same-sex relationships.
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Many years ago, I attended West Forsyth High School near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Though our sports teams then were generally mediocre, at basketball and football games our cheerleaders would inevitably break into a chant: “WEST IS BEST! WEST IS BEST!”
That cheer came back to me while reading “The Decline and Fall of the Descendants of the Roman Empire.”
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I would have thought myself immune to all this. American public life has been a circus of lies for a while. Outright lies (“I did not have relations with that woman”), carefully parsed technical truths that meant to convey lies (the 50-odd members of the intelligence community, law enforcement, military, and the like who wrote that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation) — take your pick, we all have our favorites. I was at first completely dismayed, but now, it’s already baked into the price, as they say on Wall Street: Rather than wait for the crash, the value of the discourse is already steeply discounted. Such is our politics.
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The usual suspects have weighed in on recent belated efforts to enforce U.S. immigration laws.
Our now bankrupt media, the corrupt government of Mexico, and the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion apparat have damned a series of laws recently passed by the Florida legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that enforce existing federal immigration laws.
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Forty-five years ago, anti-communist dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn caused a stir at Harvard with a famous commencement speech deploring the decadence of the West. The rivalry of the Cold War was not as neat as it appeared, he said.
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So here we be, again. On the cusp, I would say. Four thousand years of Western Civilization at risk. On the verge. The eve of destruction, as the song says. The best that mankind has to offer is in the balance. I say “the best” because the West has set more men free than any other iteration of civilization, and freedom is the only standard by which we have to judge ourselves for what we are, or what we are capable of becoming. Being able to comply with the dictates of others is only the standard of a slave.
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Marriage and families are the cornerstone of not only civilization but of nature itself, without which humans would have never survived as wandering nomads and early farmers, let alone building cities, an economy and governments to represent the people in state-to-state relations.
Without families as a basic building block, children are not nurtured, educated and empowered to raise and sustain families themselves, and the human race could not continue, always being but one generation away from extinction.
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by George Rasley Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican’s prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, has issued a stark warning to all inheritors of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture: The “West will disappear” as a result of mass migration and “Islam will invade the world” and “completely change culture, anthropology, and moral vision” unless we bend the arc of our culture back toward its Judeo-Christian roots. Cardinal Sarah’s new book, Evening Draws Near and the Day is Nearly Over, is causing controversy because it explicitly identifies Muslim migration as a harbinger of the collapse of the West. “If the West continues in this fatal way, there is a great risk that, due to a lack of birth, it will disappear, invaded by foreigners, just as Rome has been invaded by barbarians,” said Sarah in a video interview, “My country is predominantly Muslim. I think I know what reality I’m talking about.” Commentators on the Left have been quick to focus on Cardinal Sarah’s remarks about Islam, but the Cardinal’s analysis of the precarious state of Western civilization was much deeper and bears further study by all those who wish to preserve the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage.…
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by Michael Novak Capitalism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment–the eighteenth century–and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism. Max Weber located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but today’s historians find capitalism much earlier than that in rural areas, where monasteries, especially those of the Cistercians, began to rationalize economic life. It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian Randall Collins, that put in place what Weber called the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings. The Protestant Ethic without Protestantism The people of the high Middle Ages (1100—1300) were agog with wonder at great mechanical clocks, new forms of gears for windmills and water mills, improvements in wagons and carts, shoulder harnesses for beasts of burden, the ocean-going ship rudder,…
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