"If all men are created equal, that is final"

Calvin Coolidge on the 150^th anniversary of Independence Day:

.... It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed. ….

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. ....

Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence | Teaching American History

Therapy speak

Via Prufrock, from "Nobody Has A Personality Anymore":

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same. ....

Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. .... (more)

Freya India, "Nobody Has A Personality Anymore," June 26, 2025.

"If they do exist, they shouldn't"

I haven't posted much here recently because I simply haven't come across things that interested me enough to go to the trouble. But today I found an essay by Philip Jenkins that I liked a lot. He is an historian with widely ranging interests who has recently been writing about American history in the 1890s. Most of this essay is about social movements during that decade, including the American Protective Association. From "1893: Crash, Crisis, and Anti-Catholicism":

...[T]he American Protective Association (APA) began as a marginal grouping dedicated to defending Protestant interests against the machinations of Catholics, who supposedly followed secret directions dispatched by the Vatican. Allegedly, the Vatican planned the takeover of the US through armed insurgency, mainly directed by the Knights of Columbus. According to some accounts, the Catholic conspirators intended to massacre all heretics, a scheme proven by the many bogus documents then in circulation. These were over and above the very lively world of bogus confessions and exposés purporting to reveal the sexual depravity of priests and nuns. Self-described “ex-nuns” could count on a flourishing lecture circuit at this time, and for many years afterwards. On the Protestant side, the anti-Catholic “resistance” was largely a Masonic affair. The APA’s founder was Henry F. Bowers, a Freemason, who structured the movement on Masonic lines, with regalia, oaths and initiations. ....

In numerical terms alone, it is difficult to think of a more successful mass political movement in American history, and the obvious parallel is suggestive: this was the rabidly anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan of the mid 1920s, which might have hit five million members, albeit very briefly. The Klan likewise drew heavily on Masons and the other fraternal orders. ....

...[G]enerally, we study what we like. We approve of heroic radical or civil rights group, while we hate the haters. The problem is that this approach means that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to some very important movements.

I offer a personal example. Back in the 1990s, I was very interested in social movements, which were and are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention: How do they organize, how do they propagandize, to whom do they appeal, why do they rise and fall, how do they combine national and local activism? From all these points of view, I turned my attention to the Pro-Life movement which was then so active, and which integrated street activism with political agitation. To be clear, that interest did not reflect any ideological commitment on my part...

Around that time, I was chatting with a colleague who was then offering a course on Social Movements in American History, and described the various such groups I had studied. We got along fine. And then I mentioned the Pro-Life example, and suggested it might be a great topic for his course. Mere horror does not begin to describe his response. Obviously he would do no such thing. He would be studying feminist movements, civil rights movements, and gay rights activism, with all of which he was in total sympathy, and I am sure he would do an excellent job on all of them. But what about those other groups which were undoubtedly social movements driven by real passion? It seems they don’t exist. And if they do exist, they shouldn’t.

A subsequent conversation with another colleague about such movements introduced me to a common academic taxonomy of social movements. It seems that there are authentic ones derived from the grass roots, and then there are bogus ones generated by sinister interest groups to pretend they command mass support. These are not grass roots but rather “astroturf” movements, a term that dates from 1985. Further conversation revealed that my colleague viewed basically all left or liberal movements as “grass roots,” and thus authentic, while any and all conservative or reactionary counterparts were “astroturf.” To say the least, that is a convenient perspective, and one that carries a lot of weight in an academic world that leans heavily to the left and liberal. .... (more)

Philip Jenkins, "1893: Crash, Crisis, and Anti-Catholicism," Anxious Bench, June 26, 2025.

Building bridges

I taught middle school and (mostly) high school social studies and history for thirty-six years. During that time, the curriculum evolved in positive ways. And in ways that were absurd and destructive. This sounds like a pretty good corrective for the bad while retaining the good. From FAIR:

The American Experience Curriculum offers what every educator, parent, and student desperately needs now: a balanced, rigorous approach that explores America’s rich cultural heritage while emphasizing our shared humanity and founding principles.

What makes FAIR’s curriculum revolutionary? It achieves what others haven’t:

• Applies pluralism concepts to help students navigate competing goods vs. simple right/wrong thinking
• Develops civil discourse skills that students need for civic engagement
• Teaches character strengths that transcend cultural boundaries
• Combines constitutional foundations with the experiences of diverse ethnic groups
• Addresses complex perspectives on racial and ethnic identity
• Meets Ethnic Studies standards without the polarization
• Brings students together instead of dividing them

.... While other curricula choose sides, the American Experience chooses students. We’ve created academically rigorous content that builds bridges instead of walls and teaches America’s complex story with honesty and hope. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s leaders, and they deserve a curriculum worthy of that responsibility. (more)

"FAIR News: The Solution America’s Classrooms Have Been Waiting For," June 20, 2025.

Health advice

The Telegraph's Health page offers "Why over-60s should have four coffees a day." I continue to follow this health advice daily. From the article:

.... A recent study published in the European Journal of Nutrition claims that regularly drinking four to six cups of coffee a day has been linked with a reduced risk of frailty. And because, for many of us, coffee is craved and revered, it could now mean we can enjoy those daily cups of Costa Rica’s finest, while feeling reassured it is supporting our health…

There is growing research which advocates the benefits of moderate coffee drinking. Its unique components each play a role in making it a positive addition to your diet as you age. The caffeine content acts as an “adenosine receptor antagonist”, which in laymen’s terms, means it helps reduce fatigue and enhance alertness. Plus, caffeine can improve muscle movement, thus supporting mobility and reducing weakness. The polyphenols (natural plant compounds) have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties which ward off age-related muscle loss, swelling, and support overall function. While a lesser-known compound, trigonelline, may sustain cognitive health and improve memory. ....

...[A] straight, black, filtered coffee...is the healthiest.

I'm always pleased to learn that at least one of my habits is approved.

Jenny Tucker, "Why over-60s should have four coffees a day," The Telegraph, June 19, 2025.

Churchill and books

Writing about Winston S. Churchill and books, Patrick Kurp quotes from an essay by the great man:

‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate, handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition. (more)

Patrick Kurp, "Let Them at Any Rate Be Your Acquaintances," Anecdotal Evidence, June 19, 2025.

Pointing our gaze upward

Trevin Wax on certain welcome trends in Christian worship:

...[T]here’s a clear movement among younger generations toward rooted, established forms of worship—often termed “high church”—with a focus on liturgy, sacraments, and ritualistic elements. Stories abound of young men drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy, increased interest in Roman Catholicism among young Brits, and even Baptists rediscovering liturgical worship.

Simultaneously, a different wave is drawing young people toward passionate, exuberant contemporary worship, in multiple denominations that now display elements often associated with charismatic or Pentecostal circles. ....

Until recently, I had a hard time reconciling these countervailing trends: Why would young people flock both to highly traditional liturgical services and lively charismatic worship? ....

The answer became clear recently when my friend Glen Scrivener shared his thoughts on the quiet revival among U.K. youth. Glen identified the common thread connecting the allure of both low-church charismatic services and high-church liturgical experiences: The attraction is precisely their “churchiness.” Although the forms differ, the substance is similar. Both expressions stand radically apart from secular culture by embracing mystery and transcendence. Whether it’s the fervor of Pentecostal worship or the rhythm of sacramental traditions, both resonate deeply in a flattened, disenchanted world. ....

At their core, both the growing high-church and low-church movements provide a response to an inward-focused spirituality; they offer the possibility of genuine transcendence, a mysterious encounter with God. In many cases, seeker churches end up reducing spirituality to inspirational tips, treating God like a supportive life coach in a self-fulfillment project. ....

Although the “be true to yourself” script of 21st-century America may have succeeded in convincing us we’re at the center of the universe, as if each of us is our own sun, with everyone else (including God) as planets revolving around us, it fails in the existential application. God’s “God-ness” is too glorious to remain on the periphery. The reality of transcendence is too bright to be darkened. ....

The church points our gaze upward. The church beckons us into the mystery of God and the glory of the gospel. The church gives us not a shallow spectacle but scriptural spectacles through which we see the Lord and see each other. The church is rooted. The church is real.

Churchy or not, the great appeal of God’s people is not in becoming more like the world but in pointing clearly beyond it. (more)

Anyone who has followed my blog knows that I am more stmpathetic to the more traditional forms of worship but I welcome any "through which we see the Lord."

Trevin Wax, "Churchiness Is Back," TGC, June 10, 2025.

"Old fat spider can’t see me! Attercop! Attercop!"

The post title is from The Hobbit. The spiders may not have been able to see Bilbo, but I'm not invisible.

I just finished the first application of Miss Muffet's Revenge this year, a very effective spider killer/repellent that lasts three or four months. I usually spray every surface a spider might cross getting onto my balcony.

I readily admit that spiders are generally beneficial, consuming insects and themselves providing food for birds. But I prefer they don't occupy the same living space I do.

Frederick Forsyth, RIP

I did enjoy his novels, especially Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War (both made into excellent films). He also narrated the BBC series Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. I used the first episode of that as an introduction to a unit on the military in an international relations class. From the Washington Post obituary:

Frederick Forsyth, a mega-selling British novelist of political thrillers, cunning spy craft and globe-trotting intrigue who used his own background as a foreign correspondent to inspire such page-turners as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, died June 9 at his home in Buckinghamshire, a county in southeast England. He was 86. ....

For a half-century, Mr. Forsyth was one of the most successful authors of the cloak-and-dagger circuit. He wrote more than 20 novels, short stories and other works, reportedly selling more than 75 million copies in more than a dozen languages. ....

.... Mr. Forsyth, who had mulled for years the attempted assassination of De Gaulle as scaffolding for a novel, spent a little over a month at the typewriter and finished the manuscript for The Day of the Jackal with the aid of many packs of Rothmans cigarettes.

The book was about a French paramilitary outfit that hires a remorseless British hit man known only as “the Jackal.” The tensions build on a collision course between the hired killer and an unassuming French police detective racing to stop him. The first four publishers who were pitched “Jackal” didn’t understand the book, Mr. Forsyth later told The Washington Post: “The point was not whodunit, but how, and how close would he get?” ....

In 1972, Mr. Forsyth won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. An acclaimed 1973 film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, starred Edward Fox as the Jackal and Michael Lonsdale as the French police official. .... (more)

Brian Murphy, "Frederick Forsyth, thriller writer of ‘Day of the Jackal,’ dies at 86," The Washingtyon Post, June 9, 2025.

"Originalism"

Bryan Garner writes about English usage. With Antonin Scalia, he co-authored Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Here he explains "Some Misconceptions About Originalism." Anyone who believes judges should modify their decisions based on loyalty to a person or an ideology doesn't understand how the proper role of judges differs from that of legislators.

.... The idea behind originalism is as old as interpretation itself. In fact, the earliest statute on legal interpretation, from Scotland in 1427, made it a crime punishable at the king’s will to “interpreit...statutes wrangeouslie” or “utherwaies than the statute beares, and to the intent and effect, that they were maid for, and as the maker of them understoode.” ....

The influential Emmerich de Vattel, the Swiss author of The Law of Nations (1758), a book that greatly influenced the Founding Fathers, wrote: “Languages vary incessantly, and the signification and force of words change with time. When an antient act is to be interpreted, we should then know the common use of the terms at the time when it was written." ....

The basic idea has always been that a legal text should have a stable, enduring meaning—not a meaning that morphs unpredictably through time. Daniel Webster, the greatest American lawyer of the 19^th century, said that “we must take the meaning of the Constitution as it has been solemnly fixed.” That was not just the prevalent notion in his day, but the only notion of which any contemporaneous trace can be found. .... (more)

Bryan A. Garner, "Some Misconceptions About Originalism," National Review, May 15, 2025.

Pointless suffering

"Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes" is a review of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein. Excerpts from the considerably longer review:

The ninth of November, 1799—the 18th of Brumaire in the calendar of the French Revolution—is often remembered as the day the Revolution ended. Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Italy and scourge of Egypt, engineered the dissolution of the executive committee of the French Republic. The following day he entered the lower house of the French Assembly with a military escort. The deputies, recognizing a coup, cried “down with the dictator” and roughly manhandled the great general until he retreated. But troops soon cleared the chamber. Napoleon was made first consul and granted expansive powers. A new constitution followed, animated—according to one of its authors, the powerful Abbé Sieyès—by the principle that “power must come from above and confidence from below.” Remarked Sieyès of this new order: “Gentlemen, we now have a master.” ....

For the ancient Greeks, and for millennia thereafter, political turmoil was “revolutionary” in that it was a perennial pathology of cyclical history, bringing only pointless suffering. ....

To the ancients, Mr. Edelstein writes, “the state in revolution was a perversion of the state, a social hell in which the trappings of society remained in place only to mask the unbridled violence and greed…that really governed human affairs.” Revolutions were calamitous “mutations” to no purpose, adding only tragedy to the affairs of men. ....

The French philosophes, Mr. Edelstein argues, were the first to exchange “a vision of revolution as devastation for one of revolution as improvement.” Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet and others developed a perfectionist faith in accumulative human improvement. They introduced the belief that history progressed and that the “iron law of inequality,” as Mr. Edelstein puts it, could be overcome. Tradition and custom were recast as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Social classes would melt away beneath a future sun.

Crucially, these progressive philosophes also developed a confidence in the capacity of the central state to act as the engine of reform. ....

The Revolution to Come cleaves the much-celebrated “age of democratic revolutions” into two. The French Revolution embodied the new confidence in historical progress and enthusiasm for unchecked power. Its guiding spirit, Mr. Edelstein insists, was Voltaire, the enthusiast for enlightened despots, rather than the radically democratic Rousseau. Napoleon, perhaps even Lenin, emerge as the heirs of Frederick the Great: authoritarian, but no less revolutionary for that.

The American Revolution was of a different quality. It emerged from the British tradition of mixed constitutionalism and what Mr. Edelstein calls “radical conservatism.” “Rather than transforming their world,” he writes, Americans “wished above all to preserve the state.” For Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, pure democracy and revolution remained threats. The American constitution thus sought to manage class conflict and balance governmental powers, both federally and within the central government. ....

...The Revolution to Come is still harder on the “modern” revolutionaries of the French dispensation. In his best chapters, Mr. Edelstein unfolds the despotism and pitiless violence that stains this tradition. Advocating historical progress was one thing; securing popular consensus on the nature of progress was something else entirely.

In place after place, disagreement over the question of what progress meant inevitably spawned factions, strife, conspiracies, and atrocities. The drive to centralize power disabled any constitutional mechanisms that might have tamed this factionalism. The contest to control the single central power—through which the future would be defined—became increasingly ferocious. Purges targeted traditional counterrevolutionaries, but even more, false friends: the quisling moderates who might undermine the cause from within. The only solution was radical, reforming despotism. .... (more)

Jeffrey Collins, "The Revolution to Come Review: Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes," The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.

"Cooler than Cool"

I'm not sure when I first discovered Elmore Leonard, but it was after the time he was writing Westerns (but I do have DVDs of some films based on his Westerns). I believe I own copies of all of his crime novels, all eminently re-readable. I once gave old paperback copies of several of Elmore's books to a graduate student who aspired to be a screenwriter. A new biography of Elmore was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal today. From that review:

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So reads the 10^th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. ....

Leonard’s style was Hemingway-like in its economy and reveled in the unexpected delights of the American language. His stories often began in the middle of a scene, and where they went after that was anyone’s guess. His opening lines, such as this one from 1980’s Gold Coast, were collectible: “One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”

His crime stories, filled with oddball crooks and moody cops, were hard to pigeonhole, but Leonard’s audience grew to bestseller proportions, boosted by screen adaptations and near-idolatrous reviews. Many of his later works—among them LaBrava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), Out of Sight (1996) and Tishomingo Blues (2002)—have been reverently republished via the Library of America. Martin Amis would write that Leonard’s prose rang with the “American rhythms” of Robert Frost and Mark Twain. Ann Beattie compared his fiction, in its moral complexity, to Flannery O’Connor’s. .... (more)

Tom Nolan, "‘Cooler Than Cool’ Review: Elmore Leonard’s Life of Crime," The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025.

At the still point of the turning world.

I've never read Boethius (but I have read T.S. Eliot). Thomas Ward has read Boethius, and Rick Kennedy reviews his book in "The Wisdom of Hope in Boethian Times." From that review:

Our happiness lies in God, Boethius’s Philosophia ultimately argues: “In the sublimest and most difficult image of the whole Consolation, Lady Philosophy imagines God as the still center, or axis, of turning concentric circles.”

This image is the foil to the wheel of Lady Fortune—this “still center” is where the Consolation shows the Christian hope that can only come after Stoicism. Philosophia teaches that “We are creatures of the peripheries, invited to come closer to the center… We have the capacity, not only in thought but through the pursuit of virtue, to ‘seek the center of things.’” Ward then quotes from Lewis’ Perelandra: “We have come, last and best, / From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, / To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.”

Boethius in Consolation, like Dante in Paradiso .... and Lewis in his books, teaches a further-up-and-further-in type of centering on the sovereign, loving, beautiful, and happy God of Christianity. Having transcended Stoicism, Augustine and Boethius stand at the foundations of an Age of Faith. ....

Ward wants his readers to think of the implications of the Consolation’s insistence that “God is happiness.” Seek God. Seek the center. Ultimately, Ward wants his readers to have a reason to pray. “When I pray,” he writes, “I sometimes realize that I am doing the best thing I know how to do, which is just what Jesus taught his disciples to do.” Indeed, the Consolation is an account of a thoughtful person at prayer. .... (more)

Rick Kennedy, "The Wisdom of Hope in Boethian Times," Mere Orthodoxy, May 30, 2025.

Remember us

Archibald MacLeish (1940):

The young dead soldiers do not speak
Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say, We were young. We have died. Remember us.
They say, We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.
They say, We have given our lives but until it is finished
   no one can know what our lives gave.
They say, Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them.
They say, Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing
   we cannot say: it is you who must say this.
They say, We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

"Romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress..."

Occasioned by a new release of Richard Lester's Three Musketeers comes a review of a film I thoroughly enjoyed in a theater when it was first released, and have owned in some form ever since home video became affordable. The review reminded me that the screenwriter was one of my favorite authors. I just ordered Criterion's new edition, coming next week.

Few works have sparked the cinematic imagination as routinely as Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. A hasty count indicates some 40 movie versions (the first and latest from France, in 1903 and 2023) and many more made just for television. But by common consent, the best yet is Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), originally conceived as a single film with intermission but ultimately released as two separate pictures. ....

Three seasoned actors in their prime—Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay—were cast as the world-weary musketeers: Athos, Aramis and Porthos. Michael York, fresh from his central role in the soon-to-be Oscar-winning Cabaret, nabbed the plum part of the callow D’Artagnan (ultimately, the fourth musketeer)....

Raquel Welch, the very essence of feminine sexuality at the time, so her participation—as Constance, the queen’s dressmaker and the object of D’Artagnan’s ceaseless affections—was non-negotiable. Who knew then that this screen goddess, often as not wooden in dramatic parts, had talent as a comedic foil? ....

Landing Faye Dunaway after Bonnie and Clyde but before Chinatown and Network was a coup, and she portrays the ruthless Milady de Winter, an agent of much misery, with such unforgettable hauteur that it’s hard to imagine anyone else inhabiting the role. Christopher Lee lends her lover, the fearsome one-eyed Comte de Rochefort, exactly the kind of menace that made him irreplaceable on screen for so many decades. ....

...[T]he real casting masterstroke was placing Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood’s leading leading men, in the pivotal role of Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind the throne and the figure discreetly controlling most of the saga’s action. Heston plays Richelieu with a welcome light touch, giving just the right weight to sotto-voce comments, asserting authority by never raising his voice and letting an arched eyebrow or a sidelong glance serve his character’s needs. ....

...[T]he Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser, whose early “Flashman” novels, with their outlandish bounder protagonist, served almost as dry runs for his spirited condensing of Dumas’s massive chronicle into two efficient pictures, each running less than two hours. It was Fraser who, when Mr. Lester asked how a particular scene should look, said, “like a Breughel painted by Rembrandt”—a comment the director clearly took to heart.

None of this makes these pictures high art, but they are consummate entertainment. Few of us want a meal of Bergman and Bresson every night. Sometimes, the menu calls for romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress, and, of course, sexy women and dashing men. And when you want to dine out on that, Mr. Lester is happy to serve you. (more)

David Mermelstein, "‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Four Musketeers’: Richard Lester’s Spirited Swashbucklers," The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2025.

Uncle Robert

Among those I think about as Memorial Day approaches is Mom's youngest brother, Robert Levi Bond, killed in action in September of 1944, before I was born, buried in Belgium at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery.

Mom, Uncle Robert, Aunt Bea

Secretary of War Stimson

Thomas More

From a review of Thomas More: A Life

Over the last century, Thomas More has undergone three posthumous transmutations. In 1935 – exactly 400 years after he was executed for refusing to swear that Henry VIII was Supreme Head of the English Church – he was canonised by Pope Pius XI as a holy martyr. This declaration of his sanctity met a frosty reception in Anglican England, where the part More had played in putting Protestants to death for heresy before the break with Rome hadn’t yet disappeared from historical memory.

Then in 1967 came Paul Scofield’s moving performance as More in the film of Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons. Rooted in hagiographical accounts written by members of More’s family, it made him a hero, wise, erudite and humane, a man who chose to die rather than compromise his conscience in the face of tyranny. Yet a twist in the tale remained: the publication in 2009 of Hilary Mantel’s world-conquering Wolf Hall. In Mantel’s exquisite prose it’s Thomas Cromwell, not Thomas More, whose brilliant mind wrestles with the relationship between faith, integrity and power, while More, Cromwell’s opponent, becomes a callous, self-regarding zealot.

In Thomas More: A Life, her absorbing and deeply researched new biography, Joanne Paul sets out to rescue More from these violent swings of the historical pendulum. .... (the review)

The book review does well what a good review does: describing More's life with all its contradictions in the context of his time, as good history should.

I liked this description of More's most famous book, which I first read in a political theory course:

His best-known work, Utopia, was written in 1515-16, just as he was beginning to be employed as a diplomat by the young king Henry VIII. It's two parts consider the fundamental questions with which he was grappling: how far should a philosopher involve himself in the world, and what form should an ideal state take?

But the conclusions of its enigmatically supple satire have never been easy to pin down. Where does the truth lie in a dialogue about an imaginary republic called “Utopia” – “no place” – described by Raphael Hythlodaeus, a character whose name means “peddler of nonsense”, to a fictionalised “Thomas More”, whose surname in Latin is a pun on the Greek for “fool”?

Helen Castor, "The truth about Thomas More, Henry VIII’s brutal enforcer," The Telegraph, May 18, 2025.

Presentism

Patrick Kurp on "presentism," beginning with a quotation from Robert Conquest:

“History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it unrolls. And only if one is without historical feeling at all can one think of the intellectual fads and fashions of one’s own time as a ‘habitation everlasting.’ We may feel that at last, unlike all previous generations, we have found certitude. They thought so too.”

I heard it expressed by commencement speakers and others in more casual conversation that ours is an unprecedented age of uncertainty and worry. “We have never seen anything like what we’re experiencing now,” said an articulate and highly educated woman. I wanted to remind her of, say, April 1861 in the U.S. and September 1939 everywhere. The phenomenon of presentism is like a disease that causes blindness. We attribute a sort of proud uniqueness to ourselves and our era, an understanding fostered by narcissism and historical ignorance.

The speaker quoted at the top is Robert Conquest in “History, Humanity, and Truth,” the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities delivered at Stanford University. .... (more)

Patrick Kurp, "Fanaticisms and Factiousnesses Too," Anecdotal Evidence, May 12, 2025.

Agree when you can. Disagree when you must.

I am a believer in "honest ecumenism," that is, ecumenism that does not ignore or minimize the real doctrinal differences that do exist, but does focus on real areas of agreement. I've been encouraged by what I've read about Leo XIV. He seems committed to orthodoxy and seems to lack many of his predecessor's more annoying traits. Protestants and Catholics share much in common, but some differences ought not be ignored. Several years ago, Kevin DeYoung explained "8 Key Differences Between Catholics and Protestants."  He began:

Ask a serious Protestant today what is the biggest threat to orthodox Christianity, and he might mention cultural hostilities, the sexual revolution, or nominalism in our churches. But if you would have asked a Protestant the same question a hundred years ago, he would have almost certainly mentioned the Roman Catholic Church. Until fairly recently, Protestants and Catholics in this country were, if not enemies, then certainly players on opposing teams.

Today, much of that animosity has melted away. And to a large extent, the thaw between Protestants and Catholics has been a good thing. Sincere Protestants and Catholics often find themselves to be co-belligerents, defending the unborn, upholding traditional marriage, and standing up for religious liberty. And in an age that discounts doctrine, evangelical Protestants often share more in common theologically with a devout Roman Catholic steeped in historic orthodoxy than they do with liberal members of their own denominations. I personally have benefited over the years from Catholic authors like G.K. Chesterton, Richard John Neuhaus, and Robert George.

And yet, theological differences between Protestants and Catholics are still wide and in places very deep. It’s important to be conversant with some of the main issues that legitimately divide us, lest we think all the theological hills have been laid low and all the dogmatic valleys made into a plain. .... (more, with the differences)

Kevin DeYoung, "8 Key Differences Between Catholics and Protestants," Clearly Reformed, September 12, 2017.

Dirda returns

There are a couple of books I am eagerly anticipating, although publication dates are uncertain. One is Alan Jacobs' biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. His Narnian, about C.S. Lewis is my favorite book on CSL. The other is Michael Dirda's "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain." Dirda's "semi-retirement" was my biggest regret about subscribing to the Washington Post. Today, he returned as a guest columnist. He has been reading a lot, avoiding politics, and working on that book.

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors referenced in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025