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The Law of Jante, the law of the East, and Sod’s Law Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Happy Friday friends, And a happy feast of St. Kjeld of Denmark, to all who celebrate. Though I cannot imagine it’s very many of you. I’d never heard of Kjeld myself, indeed, until yesterday, if you’d put a gun to my head I don’t think I could have named a single Danish saint. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of them — I am sure there are — but perhaps they just keep a low profile, as I’m led to believe is the unbreachable social custom in Denmark and more broadly across the Scandinavian countries.  Being undemonstrative, not making a fuss, and not getting above your proper place is, so I am told, something of a code of life there, ...

I am not sure where I first heard the dead-serious declaration, “It’s all about the dress.” Apparently, that is true with prom dresses. But, obviously, that mantra applies to wedding dresses. If you didn’t know that already, you need to dig into the angry, ugly, over-the-top online wars about the wedding dress chosen by Olivia Culpo, a former Miss Universe who recently married NFL superstar Christian McCaffrey of the San Francisco 49ers. Let’s jump straight into the Today Show report on this mess. For her dress, Culpo told Vogue that she “didn’t want it to exude sex in any way, shape or form,” adding that she wanted it to feel “complementing” rather than “overpowering.” She also wore simple makeup for a clean, sculpted face and peach lips. The magazine r...

A long time ago (but not in a galaxy far away), Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin High School had us reading six or seven books every summer. I confess that I never finished some of them; Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond comes immediately to mind. Others continue to give me (re)reading pleasure many decades later. Let me begin with two of those: I must have read Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop a half-dozen times, and this brilliant skewering of journalistic foibles never ceases to satisfy. Waugh’s comic genius is at its most pungent as he pillories his fellow scribblers while they lurch about the African hinterlands, befogged by disinformation and making things up as they go along. Read Scoop as a satirical antidote to media distortions that daily drive us to distraction. A Distant Trumpet, Pau...

Photo by Edoardo Bortoli on Unsplash Anthony (Tony) Sutter’s grin at two years old exposed jagged teeth of various heights, like stair steps leading nowhere but to a brilliant smile. Next to each cheek, he gripped his prized possessions: an airplane and a helicopter.  Aerial toys and airborne thoughts never left Tony’s hands and mind; he wanted to be a pilot for as long as he could remember.  Deliberately he crafted his life around one day becoming a pilot. He played football, not because he liked it, but because it afforded him the best physical preparation for entrance into pilot school.  In his later years, he regarded the physical abuse from his youth at his father’s hands as the building blocks for the physical toughness and mental stamina needed for the comb...

When I sneeze, everyone knows about it. The resulting shockwave wobbles windows, awakens sleeping animals, and sets nearby humans on edge. My partner, who sneezes like a vole hiccuping, insists I do this on purpose. I maintain that the urge to sneeze at this decibel level is irresistible. Why do some people sneeze so loudly?  What happens when we sneeze? Let’s establish one thing first: Sneezing is important for the body. “The nose is an air filter for the lungs,” says Mas Takashima, the chair of the Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery at Houston Methodist Academic Institute. Inside our nose is a tight mesh of epithelial cells (a multipurpose cell found all over the body), tiny hairs, and thick mucus. These elements, says Takashima, “trap particulates so that the lungs...

Two weeks ago, in the shadow of a pair of volcanos in a poor Mexican town, Father Dwight Longenecker was lifted into another dimension that left him wordless. The South Carolina pastor and prolific Catholic author was the latest member of the American clergy to become wonderstruck by an ongoing phenomenon at the free Catholic boarding school in Chalco, a hardscrabble town outside of Mexico City. Like other bishops, priests and religious who had visited before him, Father Longenecker was transfixed when the iron gate to Villa de Las Niñas swung open and he began to understand what many regard as “the miracle of Girlstown.” Is “miracle” too strong a word? “No,” a visiting priest said. “A miracle of God takes place every day in Chalco. Countless children are raised there from seeming deaths.”...

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By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Jul 09, 2024 A few days ago, a Mexican woman who claimed to be a witch attempted to kidnap her nephew’s baby so she could offer the baby as a human sacrifice to Santa Muerte (Saint Death), the patron of drug cartels. When she entered the home with two men to take the baby, the father struck her with a baseball bat, resulting in her death, and the others fled the scene as neighbors became aware of the home invasion and called the police. Such incidents brings us face to face with something we in the “cultured” West generally no longer understand, namely the horrifying existence of pure evil and the corresponding action of evil spirits—that is, of devils. We get a glimpse in this incident—despite the twisted Catholic overtones—of the...

Three years after the promulgation of the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, imposing severe restrictions on the celebration of the Mass in Latin, controversy over the use of the old Latin Mass is as strong as ever. Therefore, if Pope Francis’ text was intended to bring some measure of peace to the liturgy wars by increasing liturgical homogenization around the Mass of Paul VI, it has been a failure. The rise of the popularity of the Mass of St. John XXIII (traditional Latin Mass) was caused, at least in part, by a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the Mass of St. Paul VI (or Novus Ordo) among a broad cross section of regular-Mass-attending Catholics. And the move to suppress the Latin Mass has done nothing to change that entrenched reality, especially in light of the fact that the Vati...

Having nothing in particular against the Latin Mass, and no real opinion on the Norvus Ordo (beyond believing it could be vastly improved with the inclusion of a melodic and singable “Gloria” over the truly awful vernacular versions served up in these parts), I leave the debate on Extraordinary or Ordinary liturgical forms for others. For me, all Masses are good; may their numbers increase and may others fight about it and leave me to my prayers, devotions and faith-based interests and outreaches, Amen. That said, the words “diabolical disorientation” have lately been a distraction. Madness in the headlines I’d heard the phrase uttered years ago, by someone using the prophecies of Fatima to argue with me about the validity of the Second Vatican Council and the “new Mass.” His arguments, th...

We get three examples of how routine can destroy faith — and what we can do about it — in the readings for Mass Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. I like the way a parable about a lighthouse and an island explain the task of being a missionary to people who should have known better but need to be rescued anyway. In the Gospel, Jesus has a hard time getting people he knows to take him seriously. That sounds familiar to many of us. The Sunday Mass readings from the Gospel of Mark are following Jesus’s travels and we hear this Sunday that he “came to his native place, accompanied by his disciples.” He took the opportunity to go to the synagogue on the sabbath to preach his message of repentance and the kingdom of God to his hometown crowd. The crowd seemed impressed at first. “Where ...

The final word on the legacy of John Fisher and Thomas More, and the final judgment (under God) on why we should see them as heroes, is given by G. K. Chesterton, a man who proves in his very self that the killing of More and Fisher did not kill learning, laughter or holiness: “There is this true relation between the martyr and the doctrine for which he died; that he died, not only defending the Pope, but defying the sort of man who wants to be Pope.” O, how wretchedIs that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,More pangs and fears than war or women have;And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,Never to hope again. —William Shakespeare(From King Henry the Eighth) In June 1532, displaying a courag...