If you look more closely at man and this world, it is not unusual for a baby to be OF the charts— whether artificially acquired or naturally inseminated. What happened immediately after the Fall was that there began a systematic alternation between emphatic and unemphatic action, like that between beat and nonbeat.…

What is this Implausibility Clause of the present world? To you moderns, the notion of a continual improvement in the human race is both an axiom of thought and a dogma of faith anyway. An axiom of thought, for if I question it you suspect me of joking. A dogma of faith, for it is what you live by; the glaring tragedy…

I look at your nihilism— excuse me, philistinism (both are narrow, yet complacency reigns in the latter, mere effrontery the former) as I look at a famous beauty in her day who still like to gather around the specimens of her successors, whom, nevertheless, she had resented and possibly even loathed for being still…

I often wonder if my unwittingly secular 15 year-old self would arrive at an ethic of love and social obligation, an ethic no less necessary to the human community even if the larger universe is amoral, through a triumph over the forces of absurdity and random cruelty from the arts. If wayward cinema actually attends…

This is the stroke of divine justice cancelling the debt due from a guilty race. Yet it is only the pageant of self-immolated love. You see, before the rod of Aaron, ready to blossom with the flowers of salvation, there was Noah's ark, the refuge of drowning humanity. In any Kubrick, you only get action as pathetic…

Of course such a raping may seem, to cultures devoid of any substantial polemic excitement, to lie outside of credulity or criticism, but, as is often the case with our present, overbearingly prying society— filled with superficial piranhas and leeches alike, waterways flushed with the daily enema of acid after…

What makes a person to want to become a TV reviewer? Either the person was freckled with self-immolated spots, which seem not unlikely at this place and present environment, or else the person had been splashed with peaty water of societal trash and had neglected to wash, which seem less unlikely in view of the…

You will see that people in this world are not very encouraging to you about your aesthetical prospects. Until you realize this, you will never be a model for others, much less for your (potential) spawn. And what makes matter worse is that your particular generation is, by force of circumstances, a selfish…

The other day, during a curiously moving panegyric from a parish priest to a fellow priest, I had thought about, not without inward tumult of memory, my past acquaintances from work. It was a funeral of circumstance; the mass was Pontifical, the habits of many religious orders graced the sanctuary, and schoolboys'…

We dare to hope that it itches— when a hemorrhoid itches, it is no longer a hemorrhoid. If it is sore then it is a hemorrhoid. You see, there is a propensity to isolate the roof, or a little cluster of roofs, and cling to the terraced slope as it were the symbol of one man's tenacity; this is counterproductive to…

The direct effect of these kind of reactions in stemming the tide of comedic liberalism has been in great part obliterated in America by the America-born American's tolerance for materialism in all aspects of his public life. I think it is true to say that the generation between the turn of the 20th century and the…

I realized that you have not fully grasped the genius of Julia Lipnitskaya. In the figure-skating of Julia, there is a beautiful counterpoint to music, to form, and to the current state of figure skating. Beauty is ever the divine thing that the ancients esteemed. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue. Who can…

You are a neophyte. I can tell you know not very much about figure skating. You know very little about artistry in figure skating, let alone figure skating as a sport medium for art. Whatever you are, you are not a critic. Critics are after something harder and more elusive, pursuing their own reactions down to the…

You know those young girls who have fire in their eyes? Then they become older and that fire is gone. I believe this is what your "hot" connotates. If you will, I am still here in Japan, having just attended the Grand Prix Final of Ladies Figure Skating. As I have seen a number of them scattered around here this past…

I cannot tell: you are either a very ignorant catechist or a superficially lively and fundamentally brainless egotist. But I know for sure you are not a Catholic. If you even WERE a Catholic, you should damn well know the distinctions made in holiness: for Adam and Eve before the Fall, and for Mary by virtue of her…

Now the atheist is all too willing to indulge in sham generosity, mock self-sacrifice, and a relentlessly hounding pseudo-solicitude with regards to his scholarship of Gospel, isn't he? In "Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not of what I will, but what you will", it seems…

As we can see above, the most dangerous kind of ignorance is the ignorance of the educated. Come why the distinguishing "AP," Advanced Placement, has now become indulged: it is a matter of who can spit banalities the shortest distance— in this particular case, yes, it has become a spitting contest, erected since this…

Spoken like a thickheaded, disingenuous non-believer. I wonder if God gave too much liberty, and let human beings put on airs when they had no right to. God forgive me if through any fault of theirs should become mine. This approach which treats sins common to the human race as peculiarities of "our society" often…

In physical sense or poetic sense? It is worth distinguishing for much of the advancement of human race has taken the form of cross-cultural borrowings and influences. HOWEVER, even to say that mankind has advanced, in only in particular spheres, is to say that some ways of doing things— some cultures— are better in…

A series about high school students and not one gawd-damned episode exalting scholastics, yet we are intimated with many "poignant" associations that are bound up with transient no-bodies. Most of these poignancies, if you will, are collected into proverbial manila folders throughout the duration of the series, as if…