Non-Stop Nonsense: Hollywood and Islamic Terrorism

by William Kilpatrick
Crisis Magazine
 

The Sum of All Fears is a 2012 thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name. In the book, Islamic terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb at a Baltimore football stadium. In the movie, the terrorists are transformed into white supremacist neo-Nazis.

The recently released film Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit depicts a terrorist sleeper cell in Dearborn, Michigan which aims to detonate a nuclear bomb under Wall Street. Dearborn, which is home to the largest mosque in North America, has the highest concentration of Muslims per capita of any U.S. city. It is jokingly referred to as “Dearbornistan.” You would expect, therefore, that if there were a sleeper cell of terrorists in Dearborn, some of them might be Muslims. Uh-uh. In the film, the terrorists are Russian Orthodox Christians operating out of a Russian Orthodox Church. That may seem odd, but once you remember that Hollywood has the highest per capita concentration of politically correct panderers, it all makes sense.

Non-Stop is a newly released action- thriller about an unidentified terrorist on board a trans-Atlantic flight who begins to murder one passenger every twenty minutes. When the terrorist is finally identified and dispatched before he can blow up the plane, he turns out to be—are you ready?—an American combat veteran. Not only that, but an American vet who lost his father in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and therefore has an urgent need to wake up Americans to the lack of security at airports.

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 William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including Psychological Seduction; Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and, most recently, Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West. 

Professor Kilpatrick’s articles on cultural and educational topics have appeared in First Things, Policy Review, American Enterprise, American Educator, Los Angeles Times, and various scholarly journals. His articles on Islam have appeared in Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Saint Austin Review, Investor’s Business Daily, FrontPage Magazine, and other publications. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation.

Rosemary’s Baby: A Warning to the Curious

by K. V. Turley

Unexpectedly, I came across a reference to NBC re-making Rosemary’s Baby into a four-hour mini-series; press reports suggest that shooting has already begun this month. With this news, a fear began to grip as my thoughts returned to the original.

Strange tales grow up around movies. Like many before and since, Rosemary’s Baby has had its fair share. There is one, however, regarding that 1968 movie that to this day, continues to disquiet, revealing as it does a tale seemingly darker than that which transpired upon the screen.

Sharon Tate was one of the “faces” of the 1960s—like Christie and Bardot; she too had “the look.” Her star has somewhat faded now, but she was fast becoming an intrinsic part of that decade. Born into a middle class Catholic family in California, she was to hear Hollywood’s siren call—from then her path was set. At precisely the same time as another was making his way there with a similar goal, albeit from a very different place.  A Polish Jew named Roman Polanski had forged, with one film, a reputation as a director of promise in his native land. Now, with an eye to the international stage, he was coming to London, just as Tate was arriving in England to film her first major role: playing the part of a witch in the Eye of the Devil (1966). Decisively, their paths were to cross.

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K. V. Turley is a London based freelance writer and filmmaker with a degree in theology from the Maryvale Institute.

Lawless: Obamacare and Federal Power

by Anthony Esolen

When referring to the nationalizing of medicine known as the Affordable Care Act, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the law to see what’s in it.”

“[Law] is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated,” said Thomas Aquinas, defending the claim that promulgation is one of the essential characteristics of law (Summa Theologiae, Ia.IIae., q. 90, a. 4).

We should not suppose that promulgation is necessary only as a practical matter, since it is not possible to be certain that one is obeying the law unless one knows what the law is.  It is also necessary because law is meant for rational beings.  It is not something extrinsic to the lawgiver or the law-receiver, for “the proper effect of law is to make those to whom it is given, good, either simply or in some particular respect” (q. 92, a.1), by the virtue it inculcates.  Since virtue is a habit in accord with reason, the law must be capable of entering into the minds of those who must obey it, not so that they may deliberate about it, since the deliberation will already have been completed, but so that they may order themselves by it.  For example, “the natural law is promulgated by the fact that God has instilled it into man’s mind so as to be known by him naturally” (q. 90, a.4).  Jonathan Swift understood the point, writing in Gulliver’s Travels of the well-governed Kingdom of Brobdingnag, whose laws could not exceed in words the number of letters in the alphabet, “wherein those people are not mercurial enough to discover above one interpretation.”

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   Professor Anthony Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. A senior editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, he writes regularly for First Things, Magnificat, This Rock, and Latin Mass. His most recent books are The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery Press, 2008); Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press, 2010) and, most recently, Reflections on the Christian Life (Sophia Institute Press, 2013). Professor Esolen has also translated Dante.

Inclusiveness: A Harmful Ideology

by James Kalb

We hear a lot about inclusiveness, but the topic is never discussed analytically. The idea seems to be that it’s warm and fuzzy and what Jesus would do, so it’s obviously a good thing. The result is that our world is being remade for the sake of a goal that hasn’t been thought through. With that in mind, it seems sensible to ask what it is, what it does, and where it comes from.

The nature of inclusiveness is fairly simple: it’s the egalitarian welfare state applied to the social environment. It tells us that every one of us has the right to experience his social environment as equally accepting and affirming, so everyone is required to make sure things turn out that way.

With that in mind, inclusiveness demands changes that go to the heart of how people deal with each other. For example, it doesn’t like the idea that particular kinds of people can be more or less suitable for particular positions. More and less suitable means discrimination, and training and job redesign are supposed to take care of whatever issues there are. So if you’re running the Navy you’re expected to put women not only on submarines but in the SEALs. If there seem to be issues, it’s your job to find a way around them.

Nor does inclusiveness want people to rely on complementary qualities when they form functional relationships. Some people don’t have those qualities, and that leaves them out. So specific understandings of marriage and family have to go. Love and connectedness take many forms, and none can be preferred to any other. If you think the natural and traditional view of marriage is better that means you hate people who like something else. Nor does inclusiveness like old boy networks and so on. The idea seems to be that people who live and work together should build relationships based exclusively on common humanity, impersonal qualifications like academic degrees, and common devotion to fairness, diversity, and organizational mission statements.

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James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (ISI Books, 2008), and, most recently, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013).

New Film Puts Christ Back into Christmas

by Anita Crane

Above all, Christmas is about celebrating the birthday of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. While many Christians try to faithfully rejoice, the holidays can be tinged with sorrow for any number of reasons, especially loneliness. Today, however, a sweet uplifting movie premiers. “The Christmas Candle” opens November 22 in hundreds of theaters across the U.S.A., hundreds more in the United Kingdom and still more in Australia and New Zealand. It is distributed by EchoLight Studios of Dallas, whose CEO is the Catholic former U.S. senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum. The film is well made, Catholic singer Susan Boyle triumphs in her big-screen debut, and Mr. Santorum spoke to Crisis Magazine about what makes this movie unique.

“It’s a Christmas movie about the real meaning of Christmas: which is ‘Christ with us’ and I can’t think of a single Christmas movie, other than a biblical nativity movie, that has that message—which is stunning in just saying it,” said Santorum.

Some of my favorite Christmas movies are “A Christmas Carol,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the comedy “Trapped in Paradise.” But like Santorum, I couldn’t think of a single Christmas classic that centers on the birth of Jesus the Savior, true God and true man.

“It’s stunning that there’s not one single movie [set] in post-biblical times depicting the struggles that people have, the importance of faith and the miracle of Christ with us,” Santorum added.

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Common Core’s Substandard Writing Standards

by Anthony Esolen

I’ve donned my boots and leggings, and done what I had no desire to do.  I am examining, with tedious scrutiny, the so-called Common Core Curriculum for literature and English, a new’n’improved set of standards for reading and writing in our schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade.  I have read the essays, written by students, which the authors of the curriculum recommend as just the kinds of things that every student ought to produce.

The best essay by far, for both style and organization, is a report on the economic effects of the Spanish Flu, in the United States after the First World War.  No other essay in the set comes close.  To read the others, after this one, is to stumble down the side of a ravine.  Yet I would not want one of my students to have written this essay, not in a hundred years.

I’ll get to the paper’s troubles in due course, saving the most disappointing and troubling for another time.  First I must show where the battle lines are.  For battle lines there indeed are; it is not that the authors and I disagree about how best to teach students how to read poetry or to write well about the Spanish Flu.  We are not quarreling colonels on the same side in a war.  We are enemies.  The authors believe that the humanities are subordinate to rhetoric.  We read a poem by Keats in order to see, or to pretend that we see, how he uses images or odd words or a cunning series of expressions to persuade us of some peculiar point of view.  The authors do not read poems at all, really.  They read texts, or, as they put it with the air of technicians, text.  When you read a passage by Dostoyevsky, or a poem by Donne, or the maunderings of a politically correct doyen, you are reading text, and reading text requires the same techniques, always and ever, just as there is a correct way to dissect a dead cat on the laboratory table.  But I and my comrades believe that rhetoric is subordinate to the humanities.  We attend to Keats’ words and metaphors so that we will better see what he is saying to us about what it means to be human.  We do not invert the order of ends.  We care ultimately about the good, the true, and the beautiful, and what vision of those that Keats was granted to see.  We read poetry as poetry, and we rejoice in its truth and its beauty, nor do we presume to know all about it.

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Professor Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. A senior editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, he writes regularly for First Things, Magnificat, This Rock, and Latin Mass. His most recent books are The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery Press, 2008); Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press, 2010) and, most recently, Reflections on the Christian Life (Sophia Institute Press, 2013). Professor Esolen has also translated Dante.

The Iron Cage of the Common Core?

by Anne Hendershott

Writing in the early 1900s, sociologist Max Weber depicted the coming modern world as an “iron cage” in which a caste of functionaries and civil servants monopolize power over the lives of citizens.  He warned that the emerging bureaucracies would concentrate large amounts of power in a small number of people—creating a technically ordered, rigid, dehumanized society—eventually trapping all individuals in systems based on efficiency, rational calculation and control.

Weber’s warnings are helpful to recall when considering the response by parents to the federal implementation of the Common Core in the nation’s schools.  Since Crisis began alerting parents of Catholic school children that more than 100 dioceses across the country have implemented the Common Core, parents have mobilized—forming Facebook groups, creating advocacy organizations, contacting their parish priests, their bishops, and their diocesan school superintendents—in an attempt to learn more about these new standards that will be driving the curriculum at their children’s schools.  Yet, as Weber would have predicted, many of these parents feel powerless in the face of what has become a huge bureaucracy in Catholic K-12 education.

Unfortunately, parents are getting little help from the educational advocates, lobbyists and policy makers. In an attempt to allay parental concerns, the National Catholic Educational Association issued a position statement on the Common Core on May 31, 2013 reassuring parents that “The Common Core standards in no way compromises the Catholic identity or educational program of a Catholic school.”  Concluding that “the Common Core standards are not a curriculum,” NCEA reassured parents that “A curriculum includes what is taught, when it is taught, how it is taught and what materials to use…. None of these items are included in the Common Core standards. For Catholic schools, all of these elements will continue to be determined by diocesan superintendents, principals, and teachers working to meet the needs of their students.”

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Gay Persecution of Christians: The Latest Evidence

by Stephen Beale

After six years and hundreds of celebratory confections, it wasn’t the economy, the stiff competition, financing, or any of the other usual road bumps of building a new business that caused Sweet Cakes by Melissa—a husband-and-wife bakery in Portland, Oregon area—to close its doors at the end of the summer.

Instead, it was the nationwide battle over same-sex marriage.

In January, co-owner Aaron Klein had denied a request to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding. “The Bible tells us to flee from sin,” his wife and business namesake, Melissa Klein told a Fox News columnist recently. “I don’t think making a cake for it helps. Protests, boycotts, and a storm of media attention—much of it negative—ensued. The couple received death threats. Then, activists broadened the boycott: any wedding vendor that did business with Sweet Cakes would be targeted.

The final nail in the coffin came in August when the slighted lesbian couple filed an anti-discrimination suit with the state. “The LGBT attacks are the reason we are shutting down the shop. They have killed our business through mob tactics,” Klein said. His wife added: “I guess in my mind I thought we lived in a lot nicer of a world where everybody tolerated everybody.”

 Christian Wedding Vendors Under Attack
In 2006, a noted advocate for traditional marriage, Maggie Gallagher, warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to constraints on religious freedom. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Gallagher saw the end of adoptions services by Boston Catholic Charities as a foreshadowing of things to come. (To retain its license, Gallagher explained, the agency would have to abide by the state’s anti-discrimination law, which had been extended to married same-sex couples.) She couched her warning in the form of a question:

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 Stephen Beale is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a former news editor at GoLocalProv.com and was a correspondent for the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he covered the 2008 presidential primary. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN and the Today Show and his writing has been published in the Washington Times, Providence Journal, the National Catholic Register and on MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com.

 A native of Topsfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in classics and history.

The Story Behind Russian’s Gay Adoption Ban

Pictured above are Mark Newton (right) and Peter Truong with their adopted 

son

by Anne Hendershott

During the same month that U. S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was issuing his opinion that the Defense of Marriage Act “humiliated tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples,” Russia’s House of Parliament voted unanimously to ban the adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples from abroad.  The House also voted to forbid single people who are citizens or permanent residents of countries that allow same sex marriage to become adoptive parents or legal guardians of Russian children.

Children’s rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov vowed to do everything possible to “ensure that Russian orphans are only adopted by traditional, heterosexual families.”

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who has already expressed support for the adoption ban, has promised to sign the bill once it is submitted for its final reading during the Russian parliament’s autumn session. Putin has strong support from the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, who sees the recognition of same sex unions as a “portent of doom” and has called upon Russians to ensure that sin is never formalized by the rule of law. In a Sunday service in Red Square’s Kazan Cathedral on July 20th, the Patriarch said “we face enormous temptations when countries start approving sin and codifying it into law in order to justify it.”

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 Anne Hendershott is Professor of Sociology at Franciscan University in Steubenville. Previously, she taught for fifteen years as a tenured faculty member at the University of San Diego. She is the author of Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education; The Politics of Abortion; and, most recently, The Politics of Deviance (Encounter Books).

Rethinking Civil Rights

by Stephen M. Krason

I was recently on a radio program commenting about the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Arizona’s law requiring proof of citizenship when people register to vote. One caller seemed quite happy with the decision because, it seemed, he believed there is widespread racism. I responded that those who make such allegations are bound to provide some evidence, and of course he didn’t and moved on to other comments. He didn’t even seem to think it necessary to explain why the simple act of requiring such proof, since one has to be a citizen to vote, constituted racism. Indeed, when I suggested that he ought to explain what he means by “racism,” he didn’t address that either. This brief episode illustrates a problem that has been around for sometime: All too many see racism, sexism, homophobia, or some other kind of socially condemned discrimination as ubiquitous, as the cause of a whole host of ills. It is, of course, the basis for a “civil rights” mentality that easily becomes the basis for civil wrongs.

We are all aware of America’s past: slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, voter disenfranchisement. One cannot say that our history has been entirely exemplary. We don’t live in the past, however, but in the present and we have to accept the realities as they now are. Of course, there are present cases of unjust discrimination. To claim, however, that this is an era any way comparable to Jim Crow is simply preposterous and often done for crass political advantage—like when the Tea Party movement is accused of racism for defending traditional constitutional principles. Such claims as racism are also used to ignore serious policy deficiencies that actually often have the effect of damaging the dignity of groups they aim to help, as in the case of fostering government dependency and the consequent stifling of personal initiative.

Serious racial incidents and outrages against other groups are seldom officially generated, as in past times, but are perpetrated by fringe white supremacists and criminal hooligans as in the James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard cases. Moreover, our supposed civil rights spokesmen—usually either self-appointed or leaders of some interest group—seldom comment about the discrimination against groups that cannot claim the status of “protected.” This is what we see with affirmative action and outright quotas, as well as in the myriad cases of employers, teachers, and institutions falsely accused of sex or disability discrimination and the like and then raked over the coals of an investigation or legal action. In fact, cases of true official discrimination have become so hard to find that the crusaders for equality have turned to elaborate statistical schemes to supposedly “prove” discrimination. So, we are told that statistical studies show that the imposition of capital punishment is discriminatory because it falls heaviest on certain minority groups (usually not discussed is that capital crimes are disproportionately committed by certain demographic groups—and usually against other members of that group). Now, we see the Obama administration moving against businesses that do criminal background checks because they claim this violates the civil rights of certain minority groups—again, ignoring the fact that statistically people in those groups have committed criminal offenses in disproportionate numbers. It is claimed that certain political structures, such as at-large city council seats, are discriminatory because they reduce the political clout of certain groups. So we have to adopt a certain view of representation that changes the character of the political institutions and ushers in a whole range of unforeseen consequences, including other types of discrimination.

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 Stephen M. Krason's "Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic" column appears monthly (sometimes bi-monthly) in Crisis Magazine. He is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville and co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. His latest book is The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic (Transaction Publishers, 2012).

On Satan’s Ephemeral Victories, The Principles of Evil and Our Response

by David L. Gray

There is a lot going on in the world right now that directly impacts how Catholics will be called to live out our faith in the coming years. The world is becoming more and more unfriendly to what we know is true. I’ve been reading a great deal of articles by religious and secular commentators alike that altogether do a really great job of giving the credit to the devolution of morals (or to the rise of blind acceptance) to everyone and everything, but Satan — the Father of all these lies.

It is much more common for humans to talk about air, than for fish to talk about water, but not much. In ages when tradition was naturally lived and loved by all, theologians didn’t write about it or criticize it. In the ages of great art and music, people absorbed it and listened to it, rather than write about it. Where were all the great faith writers during the age of martyrdom? Likewise, in ages where men were caught up in the snares of Satan, very few wrote about the victories of the evil one. Usually they were too busy blaming each other and distracted with criticizing the symptoms of an undiagnosed sickness.

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David L. Gray is a Catholic author, radio host, and founder of DavidLGray.INFO Inc., where he blogs at regularly; giving his fresh Catholic perspective on all things relevant and interesting. DavidLGray.INFO Inc. is a ministry that is consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. "My calling from God is to the John the Baptist Ministry; meaning that I’m here to live in truth, through word and action, and point people to Christ Jesus through the lenses of the Catholic Church." David is a part-time Disneyland dad and full-time father to three beautiful daughters, an ecstatic 2006 Catholic convert, an indifferent 1997 graduate of Central State University, a proud 2002 dropout of Antioch McGregor Graduate School, and a mild mannered graduate student at Franciscan University of Steubenville; working towards a Master of Arts Degree in Theology and Christian Ministry.

Obama Administration Scandals and the Danger of Cynicism

by Bruce Frohnen

Some conservatives, and our libertarian friends in particular, have been rather enjoying hearing about recent Obama Administration scandals. I would not begrudge anyone a certain amount of perverse pleasure in the discomforts of an administration that has been seeking to undermine our culture, way of life, and economic freedom since day one. But I honestly do not think these scandals are good news for our nation, let alone that they should lead us to believe that we will see any political, economic, or cultural improvements in their aftermath. Here I am thinking in particular of Greg Gutfeld’s enjoyable post. Gutfeld argues that “The IRS scandal, if perceived correctly, spells the end of big government.” How so?  Because, according to Gutfeld, it exposes the IRS as an ideologically biased, arrogant bully. By extension, apparently, big government has been shown to depend on thuggish minions and to be serving its own ends, rather than those of the people. For Gutfeld, the true victory in the IRS scandal is that big government is exposed as the untrustworthy, selfish beast that it is.

Would that it were so. It would seem logical that people would cease to look for favors from someone (or something) that keeps constant tabs on them, abuses its power for its own reasons—and, of course, wastes huge amounts of money on needless, even harmful projects. But nothing in our experience, or that of any other nation, should lead us to believe that this will actually happen. The mainstream press’ response to the most recent scandal, regarding “data mining” of our phone records, is more common and to be expected, namely, “so what?” A few civil libertarians are upset at the Obama Administration’s secret collection of data on Americans, but most have assumed all along that governments snoop on their people, and the press is all-too-willing to give a snooper of its own ideological predilections a pass on “information gathering.”

What these scandals are producing, what these kinds of scandals have been producing for many decades, is cynicism. And cynicism does not breed righteous indignation, demands for justice, or even a prudent aversion to petitioning the government for favors. Rather, cynicism breeds self-interested, unprincipled gamesmanship.

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Bruce Frohnen is Professor of Law at the Ohio Northern University College of Law. He is also a senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center and author of many books including The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism, and the editor of Rethinking Rights (with Ken Grasso), and The American Republic: Primary Source.

Onward, De-Christianized Soldiers

by George Neumayr

The liberationist philosophy underpinning Obama’s co-ed, gay-friendly military holds, on the one hand, that sexuality is inherently fixed and thus beyond the control of individuals, and on the other that sexuality is subject to re-shaping “through changes in culture.” The social engineers of the military promised that age-old problems between men and women thrown together in close quarters would suddenly vanish under enlightened training.

It hasn’t happened. Out of the military’s confused culture of loose moral philosophy, strict feminism, and combustible masculinity has come an endless stream of reports on sexual misconduct in the ranks. This week Congress mulled over the Pentagon’s admission that sexual assault cases have spiked 35 percent in the last two years.

“The Pentagon, using anonymous surveys and sampling research, estimated that 26,000 active-duty personnel  experienced ‘unwanted sexual  contact’ last year, up from about 19,300 in 2010, according to an ongoing Defense Department study,” reported the Washington Post.

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George Neumayr is a contributing editor to The American Spectator, and a weekly columnist for Crisis Magazine. He is also co-author (with Phyllis Schlafly) of No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom.

 

 

Something Rotten in the Boy Scouts

by Austin Ruse
  
There’s deception going on in the front office of the Boy Scouts. It includes deliberate misrepresentation of polling data, and threats to pack an upcoming meeting with anonymous and unqualified voters so that the Boy Scout policy on homosexuality gets forced on the majority of Scouts and parents who don’t want it.

The Boy Scouts are considering changing their policy of not allowing open homosexuality in either their Scout or leadership ranks. The policy has placed the Boy Scouts in the buzz saw of the zeitgeist and up until recently they have resisted. There are some weak-kneed leaders who want to throw over the policy and appear willing to violate the Scout Law to do it.

The Scout front office released the result of a national survey and “listening” process that purported to show that the Scouts—boys, parents, leaders and donors—favor a change in the policy. The Boy Scouts say the process reveals great changes in attitudes and that a majority of those at all levels of Scouting “tend to agree that youth should not be denied the benefits of Scouting.”

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 Austin Ruse is president of C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute focusing on international legal and social policy.