Here and There

• “Submission”: The Crumbling of the Secular West, by Jane Clark Scharl. The Imaginative Conservative A straightforward reading of Michel Houellebecq’s book shows that the author wants to consider the possibility that religion—not spiritualism, not some kind of therapeutic deism, but true, practiced, day-to-day religion—soothes our longings and grants us some measure of peace and satisfaction, a measure withheld by secular liberalism.

• Michael Novak: A Model for Social Scientists, by C.R. Pakaluk. Public Discourse 11/09/17. The “real human person” was the persistent subject of Michael Novak’s life’s work. Novak wanted real, gritty, ordinary persons, in ordinary life, and he wanted a political and economic order for those real, gritty, ordinary persons.

• Who Are You? Alt-Right "Identitarianism," Violence, and the Intellectual Roots of Western Civilization, by Jordan Wales. Public Discourse 12/20/17. By making our common humanity irrelevant to the question of identity, Richard Spencer sets himself in diametric opposition to the intellectual roots of the “Western” civilization to which he would lay claim.

• Romano Guardini’s Diagnosis of the Modern World, by Jeremy Knee. The Imaginative Conservative 11/27/17. "As one looks at the modern landscape, one sees that each of these men is still with us. Man is no less lonely, less technologically-minded, or less oriented towards the mass than he was in Guardini’s time."

• Free Love, But No Lovers Wheat and Weeds 11/30/17:

  Among the things that make me sad about the apparently bottomless pit of unseemly revelations about our celebrities (in every field) is that for all of "free love's" promise of beautiful, healthy, unrepressed sexual experiences, the actual experiences people are having are ugly, tawdry, solipsistic, and self-ruining.

• Clocking Out, by J.D. Daniels. N+1 :

  FILE UNDER DIONYSUS the feelings a rock concert aims to induce: careless ecstasy and careless unity, dissolving in the careless crowd. Is Dionysus all-embracing or is he instead all-consuming, all-digesting, reducing all to homogenous shit-stink? Why has no one mentioned that John Lennon’s “I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one” is a sentiment suitable for chanting at a Nuremberg rally?

  The solution to mass-market Dionysianism is the obvious corrective tilt toward the Apollonian. Apollo is the contrary principle of form, clarity, precision, and individuation. Sculpture is the art of saying No to the rest of the mountain.

  Apollo and Dionysus need one another, but only Apollo seems to understand this; Dionysus is busy vomiting into the toilet ...

• Andy Warhol’s [Catholic] devotion was almost surreal Catholic Herald 02/09/18. The Vatican Museums exhibition will be something of a homecoming for the artist.
• Who would have predicted that Slayer fans would have the Catholic church to thank, for rescuing Dave Lombardo's parents from the Castro regime? -- Revolver magazine on Dave Lombardo's Emotional Return to Cuba after 50 Years 03/22/18. Original Slayer drummer left the country of his birth when he was 14 months old. He recently traveled back for the first time to reconnect with his roots.