Fishing

It appears that in a few years, contrary to all all understanding, and mind-bogglingly, there might be more salmon in the Seine, than in the Fraser.

Reading

A great little series on recommended books from the National Post has appeared this week. Nothing too grandiose, just bits of recommendation from a few of their commentary writers. Good reading:

Here's Barbara Kay with some thoughts:

As the Sesame Street song goes, "one of these things is not like the other."
Only three of the four temporal benchmarks in this series -- early
childhood, adolescence and old age -- present challenges common to
Everyman.

Every child must venture from home to negotiate a timid path into the world. All
adolescents are plunged into a common hormonal and social maelstrom en route to
autonomy. The aged are preoccupied with "the distinguished thing," as novelist
Henry James termed death. So I found it relatively easy to choose books with
universal relevance in those categories.

The great middle swathe of life, though, is individuated: by disparate luck,
resources, domestic commitments (or lack thereof), as well as by the fruits of
consciously applied values (or vices). Mid-life's themes and challenges are
unique to each man and woman.

And here's the irascible George Jonas, with some beauties:

Reading is enjoyable and useful for people whose mind is structured so that it's suited to reading. For them, it's perhaps the most enjoyable and useful thing there is.
(Yes, it beats bowling or billiards. No, it doesn't beat sex, but thanks for
asking.)"

Mrs. Krudy looked at me coldly. "My late husband," she said, "read Dante at nine."
"Have we got a book by Dante?" I asked my father later that day. The walls of
the underground shelter were shaking as the Russian artillery kept pounding the
besieged city. "Don't worry, son," he replied. "The seventh circle of Inferno is
just around the corner. We don't need to look it up."

"When children are too young to read about sex," my father replied, "it bores them, so they don't. When they're interested, they're not too young. God set it up like
this so even the dumbest parent can't miss it. It's foolproof."

And here's Fr. Raymond de Souza recommending the good book:

If there's one book for all seasons, the Bible would have to be it. People actually do read it at all ages, from children's Bible stories to the final moments of life when,
no matter how sublime The Divine Comedy may be, scholastic theology set to verse
is not really the thing.

Hutterites and the law

It is a violation of religious liberty. The Hutterites lost. It's hard to see who won.

I agree.

Why bother with art?

But then what good are the arts? Why would artists spend time collaborating, spending days working on something that would not be well paid, or pay nothing at all, without anyone to stop to take it in? But we should note that this wasteful excess is being exercised in many hidden places, in homes where a child protégé plays his violin, on the canvases of self-taught artists, or on a humble square table filled with poetry. They may or may not turn out to be Joshua Bells, or Grandma Moses or Emily Dickinsons, but the prerequisite for the arts never seem to be a guarantee of an audience, or income. Artists are clearly not driven by mere monetary capital, but they are driven by another form of capital - creative and relational capital, the discovery of new ideas and thoughts and cultural geography.

Makoto Fujimura

This is such wonderful writing, and so encouraging.

Keep this in mind this fall

The next election is shaping up as a duel between two men, each of whom desperately hopes you will concentrate on the other guy.

Paul Wells

Four years ago today

Solzhenitsyn once asked why the bloodthirsty Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered millions. He answered: Macbeth had no ideology. So far as we can tell, neither does Putin. Today no one tries to remake human nature. For the time being, and however precariously, the human spirit survives.

-here-

Currently reading

Charming...

The pretense of irreligiosity, or if not quite that then even an explicitly purposive silence about one’s own religion (what are you doing on Sunday?), can very quickly become habitual, and just as faith breeds works and works themselves breed faith, so can lack of works lead faith itself to lack. There is surely something to the distinction between public and private that’s operative here, and it’s a distinction that’s appropriately put to work in quite a lot of cases, but these are nevertheless dimensions of one’s life that it is really quite difficult to keep so neatly apart from one another; something’s going to give, and when that’s so one hopes that it’s public image rather than “private” faith that has the greater flexibility.

Via, the American Scene. A brilliant post, referencing a most fascinating discussion.