My recent essay for The Imaginative Conservative, titled “Suicide and Secularism on a Wednesday Afternoon”,  was posted, fittingly, this past Wednesday. It reflects on the tragic story of “the tragic suicide of Tara Condell, a twenty-seven-year-old Manhattan dietitian who hanged herself in her apartment after posting a note online that is, in so many ways, a damning indictment of the widespread lie that health, a good job, a comfortable life, and an eclectic range of interests and pursuits are sufficient to provide meaning and purpose in this life.”

I write:

In Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer (which won the National Book Award in 1962), the young movie-going Binx Bolling states that “the malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.” Ms. Condell, for her part, readily admits having “a great life on paper,” filled with good meals and wide travel, but confesses: “However, all these facets seem trivial to me. It’s the ultimate first world problem, I get it. I often felt detached while in a room full of my favorite people; I also felt absolutely nothing during what should have been the happiest and darkest times in my life.”

Percy, like Eliot, recognized that the core problem is not one of mere morality—even though the jettisoning of basic Judeo-Christian morality is a key symptom and “an ontological impoverishment”—but a failure to really know what it means to be human. Secularism assumes that comfort is a necessity, but the Judeo-Christian tradition warns that comfort and the belief that one has “arrived” are often just strains of an undetected poison. The average person, wrote Percy in the essay “Diagnosing The Modern Malaise,” “has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon… What does this man do with the rest of the day? the rest of his life?”

Read the entire essay.

At 3Arena, the music of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith sounds as pristine as ever
— Read on www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/tears-for-fears-review-sad-bangers-from-a-brilliantly-gloomy-band-1.3778833

Only better with age!

Is Your Heart Full of Joy?
— Read on www.ncregister.com/blog/elliott/is-your-heart-full-of-joy

Winston Elliott continues his brilliant streak of writing. Enjoy and be filled with joy.

February 13th & 14th were the 68th anniversary of one of the cruelest allied acts of World War II, which most Americans still consider our Good War. On Tuesday evening, February 13, 1945, and for much of the next day, British and American heavy bombers pulverized the defenseless city of Dresden, Germany. The destruction was complete, worse even than the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is till much dispute over the number killed in Dresden, and why it was ordered, and how it can or could be justified. Winston Churchill, who must take responsibility for the bombing, if not necessarily for its extent or precise timing, himself called it an act of terror a little over a month later, and then tried to minimize it in his memoirs of the war.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/02/willson-bombing-of-dresden.html

One of America’s horrific crimes.

An abandoned airport terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport has been reborn as the TWA Hotel, a stylish stay channeling the jet age. While the once-groundbreaking Trans World Airlines ceased operations in 2001, and the terminal closed in October of that year, the luxe hotel pays homage to the original architecture of the 1962 building designed by architect Eero Saarinen
— Read on www.dwell.com/article/twa-hotel-jfk-airport-eero-saarinen-open-for-reservations-d4ac1649

Yes, they were. Yes, we were. There were some rotten choices to be made in Latin America, from the point of view of the U.S. government, and there were often not many democrats on offer. But the Reaganites’ record is honorable, even laudatory, and this silly, ignorant House freshman, though she did not intend so, has given us the happy opportunity of lauding them again.

— Read on www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-honor-of-elliott-abrams/

I must admit, when I read recently about some advice-giver on Netflix claiming that a home should have no more than thirty books, I was horrified. I suppose there are people who grow up with few books around them, and, frankly, I pity them. Not only is the art of making a book sacred, but, when done well, the words within those books are sacred as well. After all, Christ came as the Word, and words, when properly understood, reflect His eternal glory and dignity, even if confined to ink on a page.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/02/on-loving-words-bradley-j-birzer.html

Depending on several factors, Hulu could potentially give Marvel’s Netflix shows a new lease on life.
— Read on www.cbr.com/hulu-open-to-reviving-marvel-netflix-series/

How is the faithful Catholic to respond to the disturbing signs of the time? What is the “solution” to the problem of reigniting lukewarm Catholics and stoking the fires of those who wish to dedicate their lives to Christ and his Church? Pope Benedict XVI said “we are in need of a new evangelization—if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works… this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life—he who is the Gospel personified.” We must rely upon Christ, the one who has life.
— Read on www.ncregister.com/blog/elliott/lord-to-whom-shall-we-go

My great friend, Winston Elliott. Stunning piece.

As important as that truth is, it is easily misapplied. In practice it has meant that conservatives emphasize certain “cultural” forms of argument without seriously confronting the hard questions of politics or economics—as if worldly matters will take care of themselves if only our rhetoric is elevated and our intentions pure. Sometimes this leads to a politics of cant. Sometimes it leads to political quietism or a drift toward literary utopianism. And sometimes it just leads to ham-fisted attempts to produce “conservative” films or other forms of popular culture, in which the political message is almost always more conspicuous than the artistic merit.
— Read on www.firstthings.com/article/2019/03/a-new-conservative-agenda