Having grown up in North America, I was largely unaware of the (likely) manufactured Britpop battle between Blur and Oasis in the early 1990s; however, looking back at the two bands now, I would have to say that Blur was the superior pop/rock band in terms of musical talent and versatility, to say nothing of their ...

In the UK, at least, "pilgrimages" (including to "Recognized" Christian sites) have in recent decades become popular among churchy people and the secular-intellectual middle class more generally, and are often depicted in the mass media.

Since Christianity continues its steep decline and top-down destruction; this ...

Over in the comments at Leo's blog, Bill brings in the recent Jason Statham movie A Working Man with reference to my supposed laziness. I guess I'll take this as a bit of vindication from the sync fairies on that ridiculous charge, since Statham, who plays the titular working man, is closely associated with me. I ...

Every time the demon-serving Establishment come up with a new Litmus Test for The West, there are a lot of new fails that follow a standard pattern of self-justification by a this-worldly-expedient, materialist, Satanic trope of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

We saw it with the Birdemic: the lockdowns, social ...

Last night I dreamed that a cup of hot black coffee with no sugar was called “an Adolf Hitler.” That was just what it was called, and everyone used the name. I walked into a coffee shop and ordered one but was told, “Actually, we call it a Churchill now.”

The dream felt so real that when I woke I was left ...

I have argued that the future of Christianity lies in direct knowledge rather than submissive obedience to external sources of Christian authority (or any authority).

​This does not entail that all sources of external Christian authority must be indiscriminately jettisoned; however, such external sources should ...

My last post, “A thin man ran out of the library,” reminded me that in the original running Arnold meme, he is leaving not the Reality Temple but a Barnes & Noble bookstore, which is conceptually adjacent to a library. Arnold can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a “thin man,” of course, but ...

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Whatever you say or do: AI just keeps-on coming at you...

I don't know whether you have ever felt that somewhat despairing sense of the weariness of mortal Men, when engaged with simulated-human/ pseudo-intelligent "AI" programming - mechanisms that, very much like demons, do not fatigue, and ...

An observation on the unusual character and taste of Frodo; over at The Notion Club Papers blog.

As I was reading through Lord of the Rings this time; it struck me that Frodo's conversation with Faramir about the history of Men (in The Window on the West chapter of The Two Towers), is something that I cannot imagine occurring with any other Hobbit than Frodo.

Of course, Bilbo and Merry are also unusually ...

Following on from my earlier post; I'd like to add a comment on the absurdity of that oft-repeated claim or insinuation that the (undoubted) triumph of the New Left in the West; was planned and driven by some kind of blueprint for a "long march through the institutions" - a scheme devised by intellectual theoreticians ...

The phenomenon by which people who (perhaps) began life as cynical radicals or supposed-revolutionaries; later become successful and highly rewarded and decorated bureaucrats, managers, executives, politicians, and committee people - yet still regard themselves as radical - has been noticed (and sometimes mocked) for ...

I dreamed last night that I had a large strip of paper (about a meter long) on which was printed "Too bad! We go." (A more printable version of "Fuck it, we ball"?) I took it across the street to the printer's to have it laminated. I then returned to my school, which was empty, and went up to the library on the fifth ...

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Carl Gustav Carus

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A decade ago-plus; I wrote a couple of posts about the English novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980); and this is just to say I have continued to re-read these on an approximately two-year cycle ever since.

I never seem to tire of her early novels; and every new reading brings a delight all the ...

I find it odd how rarely trad-ortho Christian bloggers criticize or challenge hostile, belligerent, and irreverent posts written by other trad-ortho bloggers featuring titles like the one above.

You know, the same sorts of trad-ortho bloggers who challenge me publicly because they think my posts are dangerous, ...

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i understand misusing words with -logy when there is no accepted alternative without it (like biology or pathology - although one could always say bios or pathos). but saying psychological when it should be psychic, or mythological instead of mythic, makes my heart ache.

the Japanese tried to build a small ...

Most people who are interested in Indian spirituality will be familiar with Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic philosophy whose principal exponent is Sankara. This is a profound but flawed system of thought which I have written about on several occasions, chiefly to point out its flaws. See posts under the ...

God is an answer to the problem of our existence in reality.

The Christian God is a personal creator; and as such provides the possibility of purpose and meaning, if we choose to align with the divine.

This God loves us each as a parent loves his or her child; and therefore we may have a personal role in creation ...

Ever since I began regularly blogging some 15 years ago; I have cycled around this distinctively modern problem of demotivation. Modern Western people are strikingly lacking in powerful motivators, compared with earlier generations - and this is the reason why we are so lacking in courage, so cowardly.

The deep ...

This morning, one of my young students made a very strange request: she brought me a book with a simple version of the story of Snow White and asked me to read it to her, but to substitute the word ants for dwarfs. So in this version of the story, Snow White goes to live with seven ants. I'm not sure where this idea ...

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I am re-reading Geoffrey Ashe's fascinating study The Virgin (1976), which is focused on Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ (Ashe was a Roman Catholic) - but takes in the broader perspective of goddesses throughout history, in a non-hostile - indeed sympathetic - fashion.

He makes the stimulating ...

By my evaluation, traditional Christians are being consistently dishonest about what their faith actually entails.

They talk and write that real Christianity is about humble obedience to the obvious and necessary truth of that external authority which is The Church.

Meanwhile, all the time, top to bottom they are ...

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I recently read my old colleague Ed Dutton's biography of a "radical Right" political figure called Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012); which has just been published.

I had never heard of Bowden until after he had died, and was not interested by what I discovered. His ideas were seemingly derived from ...

Christians who question or challenge orthodox/traditional/conventional ideas?

Arrogant, spiritually prideful individuals who require humility.

Christians who pugnaciously and unrelentingly assert that the orthodox/traditional/conventional ideas they champion are the only possible Christian truth?

Paragons of ...

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It seems worth noting that this is Lady Day - March 25th, officially the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the day that Jesus was conceived on his Mother by the Spirit of God.

Lady Day was greatly celebrated in Merrie England, and was indeed - until 1752 and the imposition of the ...

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The alien Marvin (the Martian), asserts objective reality

Modern alienation is a very real thing: which is to say the experience of being cut-off from God, reality, this world, other people... is inescapable as a subjective experience, and this has profound religious, social and political ...

My last post, "Alex Schwarz and Arnold Strong," ended with the tentative conclusion that I needed to investigate the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unlike most Hollywood celebrities, he's only had one to date: Maria Shriver, to whom he was married from 1986 to 2021.

I had a dream with Maria Shriver in it back in ...

On the evening of Saturday, March 22, I was teaching an English class for teenagers, and we were doing some exercises where they have to listen to a brief recorded conversation and answer questions about it. In one of these dialogues, a man named Alex Schwarz is trying to check in at a hotel, but they have no record ...

For those who haven't seen it already on Bruce's blog, David Earle, who runs the New World Island Romantic Christian blog aggregator, has a very clean, easy-to-use searchable Bible and Book of Mormon (King James Version and current LDS edition, respectively). This is extremely helpful, since there aren't really a lot ...

This is a subject I return to now and again because it lies squarely at the heart of the modern deviation. It's not the cause of the deviation. That is the rejection of God and the natural order of creation, but it is one of the major symptoms of it and a big contributory factor to the ongoing rupture from ...

I have often noted that there can be no political Right that is genuinely distinct from the Left; unless it is rooted in religion.

In other words, what people call the Right (including the "far Right" - whatever that may be) are from a Christian perspective and at root, just a type of Leftism - that is, they are all ...