When a young person attending this week’s UN Youth Conference stood to ask a question and identified himself with a pro-life NGO, the moderator of the side event informed him that the panel was not interested in hearing his perspective. Such disinterest in discussion with youth characterized the closing meeting for the UN’s International Year of Youth, themed “Dialogue and Mutual Understanding.”
The only new thing about the light in church is that light is currently provided by electricity, a relatively new development. Perhaps that’s what this song is about: it’s really a hymn to Thomas Edison. It makes sense. After all, Edison is mentioned by name exactly the same number of times as God..
The problem is structural: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. Developed nations have 30-year-old students and 50-year old retirees, and then wonder why the shrunken rump of a "working" population in between can't make the math add up.This is why Steyn is, as Rhino would say, "Be-awesome."
The report stated that many teachers lived under a “culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation” where instructors were rewarded for cheating and often humiliated or terminated for refusing to cheat. One principal commanded a teacher whose students’ scores were low to crawl under a table in front of other teachers as punishment. Teachers who objected were told that “the door swings both ways” and “Walmart is hiring.” One teacher said that Atlanta’s public-schools system was “run like the mob.” [...]
To these condescendingly anti-intellectual idealists, school is a place where children come to live and explore and create and be inspired and touch and smell and dance and feel and have their self-worth validated—it is most definitely NOT a place where they should learn to read and write and add and subtract. And what dizzy bastard came up the demented notion that school is a place where children are administered tests?
"When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter, Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And all I can say about my love of God, is, Lord help me in my lack of it. I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat."
Kitchens should be an expression of individuality and comfort, not places of sameness, repetition and rigid geometry." [...]
Most people who take out a fitted kitchen complain that they have too many cupboards filled with useless items that they would rather get rid of".And how! I used to think I didn't have enough storage space. Now I think I've got too much, and it's all crappy (hard to reach etc.). I'd rather have a few good shelves and drawers holding a few frequently used items and have some space to breathe in my kitchen, than be suffocated by cabinets. When you have wall to wall, floor to ceiling storage, it eventually fills up with appliances and pots you never use, eight million yogurt containers (some without matching lids), and stuff like Tupperware jello ring moulds.
So how do we resemble God? We have free will. And that’s what’s at stake here, when we’re struggling with either vanity or self-loathing: Now that we’ve seen ourselves, what do we choose to do next?
I just know that Uncle Horace is in heaven right now, handing out peppermints to the angels, that he always carried in his pockets..
Some Catholics think that pretty much any time a man sins against chastity, it’s a woman’s fault. And so we have the ludicrous “pants are for harlots” argument. We have women who think that dressing dowdily is a virtue. We have men working themselves into a righteous froth over a woman in shorts, for instance, as if it’s her fault that he has a thing for legs.
Here’s the problem: first, dressing with utter, lust-proof modesty is literally impossible. There will always be some man somewhere who manages to lust, no matter what you’re wearing (just ask a hijab-wearing rape victim).
Second, an extreme “better safe than sorry” argument can lead to foolish and dangerous attitudes toward women. There is nothing pious about treating women like some kind of pestilent instrument of spiritual warfare, designed to infect innocent men with lustful thoughts by her mere presence. At some point, the woman’s responsibility does end, and the man’s begins. This point varies widely from culture to culture, age to age, region to region—and man to man.Women are designed by God to be attractive to men, because this attraction leads to all sorts of good things: protective behavior, fidelity, hard work, and babies, not to mention happiness. Our goal isn’t to reject the notion that women are attractive to men, but to channel it in a way that benefits everyone.
So, yes, modest dress is an onus that is put mostly on women —just as self-control is an onus that is put mostly on men. This difference is not because life is unfair or inherently sexist, but because men and women are made differently. Men and women both have the responsibility to contribute to the decency of the world—in their own ways. There’s no sense in pretending there is no difference between them. Just as importantly, there is no sense in pretending the tension will disappear if either men or women just tried harder to be good.
