A Sound of Sheer Silence

1. One of my favorite movies, and a movie I will defend to the death, is The Fountain.   The conventional wisdom is that The Fountain  (2006) was a weird misstep in director Darren Aronofsky's career between the critically acclaimed, commercially successful hits Requiem for a Dream  (2000) and The Wrestler  (2008) (and, later Black Swan (2010)).  That conventional wisdom is wrong-- The Fountain is every bit as good as those films (and I think better than Requiem and Black Swan , though I really like those films).  It is, I will admit, less accessible than some of his other films--it doesn't have a conventional narrative structure, but instead intertwines three related stories.  But if you take the time to work through what is going on, it will reward you. [Also, a quick aside--the soundtrack to The Fountain  by Clint Mansell and Kronos Quartet, is absolutely fantastic.  Even if you don't see the movie, listen to the soundtrack--it i...

As many, perhaps most, of you know, the UK had a rather consequential election last Thursday.  Theresa May and her Conservative Party got a pretty good kicking, as the Brits would say, especially in light of the fact that when she called the election on April 18th the consensus opinion was she was going to win in a landslide.  [As an aside, I cannot possibly express how jealous I am of my UK and Canadian friends that a "long election season" is something like 10 weeks, as compared to the 18 month Bataan Death March that is US elections].  Anyway, May and the Conservatives fell short of a majority in Parliament, and so in order to form a government, she had to look around for coalition partners.  And it appears she found them, in the form of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Now, it is very likely that forming a coalition with the DUP will have severe negative consequences for peace in Northern Ireland , and at the end of the day that is the most i...

In the previous post , I framed question #2 of "how did this sex abuse crisis happen?" as "how did it come to pass that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church covered up the fact that some number of Roman Catholic priests had and were sexually abusing children, either actively or passively, thus facilitating the abuse?"  The answer to that question, in my view, can be answered in a one sentence response--"because the culture of the Roman Catholic priesthood is sick and broken, and the sex abuse crisis is the most visible manifestation of that pathology." It is extremely important here to emphasize the word "culture."  While people contribute to cultures in which they are a part, a culture is a conceptually distinct entity from any particular member of that culture.  There are deeply decent and honorable men who are Roman Catholic priests.  But the culture in which they swim is not decent and not honorable in the main.  And, in what is perh...

Less than a month ago, I said I would stop talking about Roman Catholicism , and I had every intention of sticking to that.  But I am going to break that promise to talk about the release of the report of the Royal Commission in Australia about clerical sexual abuse.  The results are shocking--if the reports are correct, the scope of the problem in Australia was even worse than in the United States or in the UK/Ireland.  To give an example, there was a reference to a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia in which 17.6% of the monks had an abuse allegation lodged against them at some point in the 1950s.  Think about being in a room with a group of monks in which one out of every six of them had someone in the 1950s  accuse them of committing a sexual violation on a minor.  Think of how many complaints were not made  in the culture of the 1950s.  One in six.  My God. I had a twitter exchange last night with Maureen Clarke about the rep...

One of the true joys that has come from writing this blog is that it has given me the chance to make what I call "Internet friends."  These are people that I have not met in person, but people who I have interacted with via Twitter or email as a result of something I written, or something they have written, or both.  Frank Strong of Letters to the Catholic Right   is one such person (by the way, you should absolutely check out his recent post on the goings on in the Episcopal Church , of which he is a member), as is Bill Lindsey of Bilgrimage .  Another one of my Internet friends is Maureen Clarke, a woman who lives in Manchester, England, and maintains an active Twitter feed involving the Catholic Church, UK politics, and healthcare issues in her neck of the woods. On Saturday, Maureen tweeted the following: The debate on LGBT dominated the Synod on the family yet nothing changes.  Why is sin always synonymous with sex?  What about greed power, etc W...