From Culturcidal:
ShareTo begin with, it’s worth noting that despite seeing a level of bitterness, rage, and unhappiness that practically reaches off the screen and grabs you by the collar and shakes you, these women do not live in countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, or Yemen, where women are heavily oppressed. They’re also not in a war zone like, say, Ukraine, Lebanon, or Iran. These are women who live in a Western country where they make roughly three times as much as the average person in the world. In other words, these women are certainly not repressed in any meaningful sense, and although they’re probably not doing as well as they would be in the United States, they do live in the top tier of economically successful nations.
Yet, what were some of the words tossed around to describe these, let’s be honest, fairly privileged women in this piece? “Financially cynical.” “Dehumanised.” “Panic and hopelessness.” “Stacked against me, no matter how hard I try.” “Pessimistic.”
They also seem to have pretty stereotypical views of men and marriage for feminists as well. They don’t want marriage, they don’t really seem to want children, and they seem to dislike men, who they view as a “trap” who will ruin their wonderful careers in… what? Podcasting? Middle management? Human resources? (Read more.)
From Hilary White:
ShareThe Dada Manifesto gives an idea of the level of intellectual rigor and competence of the founders of the various movements in modern art. It was written in 1916 by the Cabaret Voltaire’s founder, the poet and failed actor, Hugo Ball (1886-1927). The name, Dada, Ball claimed, was chosen at random from a French-German dictionary and meant anything or nothing as the user chose.
“I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da.”
“It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long…”
Clearly, the content was beside the point.
Ball, who had been raised a devout Catholic, had been a young disciple of Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist, Hegelian and rival of Karl Marx in the International Workingmen’s Association, the movement sometimes called the First International, the umbrella group of radicals, socialists and anarchists that was later to resolve into Soviet Communism.
Like many of the young ideologues of the late 19th and early 20th century, Ball later grew out of his radicalism and reverted to his earlier Catholic Faith living to the end of his short life in obscurity. But the damage was done, and the Dadaist followers he had gathered in Zurich took their “anti-rational” ideology of meaninglessness like a virus into the wide world of culture.
After escaping Zurich and being carried to Berlin and eventually to most of the rest of Western Europe’s cultural centres, Dadaism had served its purpose and fell out of favour. It was replaced with an apparently endless parade of various successive “schools” and “movements,” that students of Fine Arts must now memorize for their exams: Cubism, Modernism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism and all the way to Andy Warhol’s “Pop-Art” soup tins and Tracey Emin’s postmodernist unmade bed. (Read more.)
From Country Life:
There are many things to note about Ashington Manor in Somerset, not least that, in the 16th century, it was the home of Ursula St Barbe, wife of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s chief fixer, whose machinations precipitated the gruesome end of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Although she primped it up with a fancy new façade and oriel windows, it had mixed fortunes in the following centuries until it was stumbled upon by Isabel and Julian Bannerman. The couple are makers of magical gardens, who have cast their spell for The King, Sting and Trudie Styler, Jasper Conran and Keith Tyson, as well as further afield, including in Lower Manhattan, New York, where a garden they designed commemorates the British and Commonwealth victims of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. However, what is remarkable on a crisp morning beneath the mullioned windows of Ashington’s double-height great hall is that it is almost toastily warm, in a way that could never be achieved by even the most generously proportioned hearth.Most people who spend time in leaky, historic piles resign themselves to the fact that if they want to enjoy the heady smell of old oak, the texture of worn stone and the gentle creak of mortise and tenon joints tapped together three or four centuries ago, the price they must pay is wearing thick socks and a gilet all day (and night). They cling to the Aga like a limpet and feel pathetically grateful when handed a hot-water bottle or find, to their delight, that someone has remembered to flick the switch on one of the world’s least expensive luxuries — an electric blanket. (Read more.)
From Tierney's Real News:
ShareIf you’ve never cracked open a history book, the mess coming out of Iran right now probably looks like total chaos with no pattern to it. You’ve got top officials posting contradictory things on social media. You’ve got wild accusations flying back and forth about spies and traitors inside their own government. And you’ve got this desperate scramble to keep Iran’s oil moving toward Communist China while Iran’s entire economy falls apart at the seams. None of this is random. These are the classic signs of a regime that’s cracking under real pressure—the same exact pattern we saw with the Barbary Pirates more than 200 years ago.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the IRGC—and the hardline Shia Twelver Muslim clerics who run things there are behaving like modern-day pirates. They’ve hijacked their own country, holding their own people hostage, just like those North African corsairs once held American sailors captive on the high seas. A corsair was basically a state-backed pirate—not just some random criminal on the high seas, but a sailor who had official permission from his government to attack enemy ships and coastal towns.
President Trump sees it clearly, and he’s responding the same way Thomas Jefferson did back then: with a naval blockade and absolutely no willingness to pay tribute or give in to blackmail. The end is near for this terrorist regime. Let me explain exactly what’s happening, step by step, so you can see how history is repeating itself and Trump is holding the line just like Jefferson did. (Read more.)
From The Abbey of Misrule:
ShareThe April weather in the Irish west was astonishing this year, for a while. Two whole weeks of unseasonal heat brought the land out from the finalities of winter. True, the frost still came at night, but by the afternoon I was digging the garden with my top off. Everything on our land awoke. Our field, in which we planted 800 trees nearly a decade ago and which is now becoming a forest, hums with insects heading for the poplar blossom and the whitethorn. The pond is full of frogspawn and the soil is warming. Crocus and cowslip defeat the couch grass in their quest for the light. Sparrows gather moss and straw, the hazel poles are budding. We have set up a beehive in a grove by the hedgerow, and now we wait in the hope that some worker will seek it out and beckon the swarm to follow.
But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.
As the land has sung itself back into life, it is as if I have awakened too from some numbness that overcame me. It was not simply the numbness of winter. For a while, I have felt closed off from my land; somehow an alien as I walked through it. Maybe I was reading too much theology. I always knew that the Holy Spirit sung itself through bud and blossom, but knowledge is not experience. Back in the day, when I was a pagan and a pantheist, I felt the force of nature as an overwhelming power within me. Then I became a Christian, and something retreated.
What was it?
I wondered this, and I concluded that I had misdirected my worship. I had worshipped the trees rather than their creator. I think that this was a category error; still, I missed the feeling it gave me. I missed the sense that the trees were my sisters and the birds my brothers. Those who have never felt this may call it ‘pagan’, as if that meant anything, but they would be wrong. It is not ‘pagan’ to feel, as Adam did, as Eve did, that this place was created to be our home. That we were intended to be at one with it before we broke away and began instead to worship ourselves.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky proclaims the work of his hands. Daily they speak, they never become silent.
Something has happened to me this Easter, though; that old feeling has come back. Now I walk through my growing forest and I feel again that green force that I once felt, and I am overjoyed because I missed it. Is it different now? Yes, and no. I feel the land breathe within me and to me, I see that everything here has its own life, I feel the inscape of it all, but now I feel something beyond it too; something that made it, that sings it every hour, though for this force there is no time. (Read more.)
ShareUnlike [Frederick II of Germany], Louis frequently ignored a practical course of action that would derive a benefit for himself and chose instead one that entailed suffering for the benefit of the Church and Christendom. Of all the problems that beset Christian life, the continual harassment by the Saracens of the Holy Places, the pilgrims and the few hundred knights that protected them troubled Louis the most.In 1248 he embarked on an extremely well planned crusade against the Sultan of Egypt since Palestine at that time was under his control. Once again the crusaders stormed and captured Damietta on the eastern branch of the Nile. Proceeding up the river on the right bank towards Cairo, they arrived at the fortress of Mansourah. Robert of Artois, the King’s oldest brother, crossed the protecting channel, routed a detachment of guards and rode on to an enemy encampment outside the wall where they killed everyone they found. Instead of returning to guard the bridgehead and allow the main body of Louis’ army to cross and reinforce him, Robert impetuously invaded the fortress. That blundering imprudence cost him and 280 knights, most of them Templars, their lives.
With the threat of torture and death hanging over his head, the embattled saint carried himself with such dignity that the impressed Moslems agreed to release him and many other prisoners upon the surrender of Damietta and the payment of a large ransom.
People often cite the fact that the Koran mentions the Virgin Mary with reverence, a fact which never stopped a single Muslim from kidnapping and enslaving millions of Christian women and girls in harems for over a thousand years. And the rape of "infidel" women is not seen as a sin from the Islamic point of view. From Patrick Novecosky:
ShareRelations between the papacy and Islam stretch back more than 1,300 years to the era of Pope Donus in the 7th century, when the rapid expansion of Islam transformed the Christian world. What followed was not primarily dialogue, but conflict. Muslim armies swept through formerly Christian lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Europe responded with the Crusades. Constantinople fell. Naval battles like Lepanto became defining moments of civilizational struggle. For much of history, Christianity and Islam encountered each other not in shared spaces of worship, but on opposing sides of war.
That history does not dictate the future, but ignoring it doesn’t lend clarity to the present.
The Catholic Church’s modern approach to Islam largely dates to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Its declaration, Nostra Aetate, marked a turning point, stating that the Church “has a high regard for the Muslims,” who worship the one, merciful God. It called for both sides to move beyond past hostilities and work together for justice and peace.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church builds on that framework. It teaches that Muslims, “together with us, adore the one, merciful God” and are included in God’s plan of salvation. That’s pretty remarkable language, especially when viewed against centuries of conflict. They reflect the Vatican’s deliberate effort to emphasize common ground and reduce religious hostility.
But they do not erase fundamental differences.
Islam rejects the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, denies the divinity of Jesus, and does not accept the central claim of salvation through the cross and resurrection. These are not minor disagreements. They go to the heart of what each religion believes about God and humanity’s relationship to Him. Any serious discussion of Christian-Muslim relations must grapple with that reality. (Read more.)
From The Collector:
Despite living in New York in the 1870s, most of Winslow Homer’s art doesn’t focus on progress and industrialization. Instead, he portrays rural New England. Homer’s paintings of this period focus on farm life, games, leisure, and a happy country childhood. The lighter color palette and frequent use of outdoor settings and everyday subjects mirror the influence of the Impressionists, whose works Homer might have encountered during his travels, yet his interpretation is entirely grounded in his American surroundings. Winslow Homer often created watercolor studies that he later used as the basis for larger oil paintings. Although Homer never married or had children of his own, children were a major theme in his art. Homer seems to have enjoyed painting them, and their joyfulness made paintings of children a particularly optimistic and sought-after subject after the war’s deprivations. (Read more.)
