Defending the 12th century since the 14th; blogging since the 21st.

Catholicism, Conservatism, the Middle Ages, Opera, and Historical and Literary Objets d'Art blogged by a suburban dad who teaches law and writes stuff.


"Very fun." -- J. Bottum, Editor, FIRST THINGS

"Too modest" -- Elinor Dashwood

"Perhaps the wisest man on the Web" -- Henry Dieterich

"Hat tip: me (but really Cacciaguida)" -- Diana Feygin, Editor, THE YALE FREE PRESS

"You are my sire. You give me confidence to speak. You raise my heart so high that I am no more I." -- Dante

"Fabulous!"-- Warlock D.J. Prod of Didsbury

Who was Cacciaguida? See Dante's PARADISO, Cantos XV, XVI, & XVII.


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Widdy-Watch

I love British Tory MP, Catholic convert, and former Home Office minister Ann Widdecombe! (Here's her web-page, The Widdy-Web.)

Recent Words of Widdsdom (or, Ann's Bans):

Daily Telegraph, 3/30/04:
The Tories' first pro-gay summit ran into trouble yesterday when only five MPs turned up and Ann Widdecombe attacked it as "misguided".

Miss Widdecombe, a former Home Office minister, said the Westminster meeting with voluntary groups and young homosexuals sent out precisely the wrong message about the party's values.

"Here we are, supposedly the party of the family: we are not offering a family summit; we are not offering a fathers-separated-from-children summit. What we are offering is a homosexual summit. I am not going to say that there may not be one or two problems we should be looking at. But it is a misguided order of priorities that we are sending out to the electorate."

She also has a real butt-kicker in The New Statesman about The Passion, which earlier today I could bring up on the screen, but now TNS is insisting that money change hands before they'll let me see it again. So I'll just summarize it:

Look, I (Ann W.) have taken heat for defending Ariel Sharon when some of you were heading for the tall grass, so don't shake the A-word at me. And I say, grow up. Not that I'm into apologies for misdeeds by one's ethnic or religious forebears -- on the contrary, I think they're dorky -- but no one has an absolute exemption against having those misdeeds recalled when relevant to a story that is worth telling on other grounds. I'm sorry the 1st century Sanhedrin acted the way it did, but I can't accept that this means Christians can't tell the story of the Passion in public.

That's only an approximation; the real thing is punchier.
posted by Cacciaguida at 11:27 AM