Petrushka

Stravinky's 0riginal costume design for Petrushka


Original 1911 set design for Petrushka

When I was a child my grandmother gave us a record with stories from famous ballets, including musical excerpts from Petrushka. We were entranced by it; my sister and I tried dancing to Petrushka when we were very small; from what I have read since, we were not alone in being swept up into the drama. Composed by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Petrushka debuted in 1911 at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris. The mysterious, magical tale of love and revenge unfolds at a Russian Shrovetide fair, centering around a puppet called "Petrushka," who in Pinocchio-style comes to life. To summarize:

Petrushka ("Petey") is the story of three puppets - the forlorn and homely Petrushka, a beautiful ballerina, and a mysterious and gaudily dressed Moor - brought to life by their showman master at a Russian Shrovetide fair. Petrushka tries to express his love for the ballerina, but she has eyes only for the Moor. The frustrated Petrushka is subdued by the scimitar-wielding Moor, but the puppet's ghost has the last laugh by thumbing his nose at everyone. All this takes place within the context of the fair, full of dances by nannies, coachmen, masqueraders, crowds and even a dancing bear.

In Russian culture, the puppet character of "Petrushka" was rather like "Punch," a rude, comic Everyman, the butt of every joke. Stravinsky endows him with human feelings; as Petrushka attempts to rise from his baseness, his strivings lead to his destruction, only to gain immortality in the end.
Stravinsky's music captures the carnival atmosphere of Maslenitsa, the Russian version of Mardi Gras, with all its color and passion. As one commentator describes:

Subject and music appear to reflect the Russian nature. Gogol and Mussorgsky are there. Everything is reflected in the score with a sure and reckless mastery —the movement and tumult of the crowd; the gait and aspect of each leading figure; and the grotesque agonies of the helpless one. A shriek of...trumpets in different keys is the motto of Petrouchka's protest. The composition is permeated with Russian folk-melodies and also street songs marvelously treated.

"Fair"

In his day, Stravinsky was considered avant-garde since his music was a bit different from what had gone before. His work was part of the explosion of creativity that brightened the last days of imperial Russia, called the "Silver Age." On one level, Petrushka is an echo of a time that is gone; on another, it conveys the spirit of the Russian people which Communism was not able to destroy. I enjoy listening to Petrushka more than ever, especially during Shrovetide. 

Listen HERE.

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Minneapolis: America's Destruction Lab

 From Candeloro's Substack:

To understand the fire, meet the arsonist.

Saul Alinsky wasn’t merely a “community organizer” — that label functioned as cover for an architect of modern political guerrilla warfare. In Rules for Radicals, he laid out a worldview that now plays out on American streets: morality is disposable; the only real objective is POWER.

Minneapolis isn’t an accident. It’s the manual in operation.

Forget “spontaneous outrage.” What you’re watching is calibrated social engineering: a provocation, a verdict delivered before the investigation, emotional hysteria replacing evidence. The goal is to force institutions to violate their own rules under the banner of “compassion.” Once they yield, the violation becomes precedent. When they resist, the pressure escalates. Compromise doesn’t resolve it — it accelerates it.

Look at the post-2020 policing climate: in many major cities, proactive enforcement pulled back — not because crime vanished, but because the political cost of doing the job exploded. Officers don’t act from duty; they operate under the threat of professional annihilation. Exactly as Alinsky prescribed: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.”

And who runs this laboratory?

Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor — the same figure Kamala Harris tapped as her running mate in 2024. During the George Floyd unrest, Walz signed an order activating the National Guard on May 28, 2020 — yet the core criticism was never “did he sign a paper,” but whether the response matched the speed and scale of the collapse on the ground.

Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’ mayor, provided the city’s most revealing image: publicly kneeling and weeping at George Floyd’s casket while precincts burned and civic authority disintegrated.

This wasn’t mere incompetence.

It looked like managed permissiveness — a posture where the state hesitates just long enough for chaos to rewrite the rules. (Read more.)

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Should Queen Isabella I of Castile be Canonized?

 From The Catholic Herald:

Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes, Archbishop of Mexico City and Primate of Mexico, has publicly defended the cause for the beatification of Queen Isabella I of Castile during a formal visit to Spain.

Speaking in Valladolid during a meeting with the diocesan commission overseeing the cause, Cardinal Aguiar said that sustained historical and spiritual study had led him to a firm conviction about the personal sanctity of the Spanish queen and the importance of making her legacy better understood. “We want the essential facts of her life and spirituality to be known,” he said, stressing that the process required time, seriousness and balance rather than polemic or nostalgia.

The Mexican cardinal highlighted in particular Isabella’s Royal Decree of 1503, which stated that the indigenous peoples of the newly encountered territories in the Americas were to enjoy the same rights as subjects of the Spanish Crown. He described the decree as “an extraordinary position for its time”, arguing that it reflected a deeper moral vision rooted in Christian anthropology rather than political expediency.

The meeting in Valladolid brought together senior figures from the Spanish and Mexican Churches. Cardinal Aguiar was received by Archbishop Luis Argüello García, who is also president of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, alongside members of the commission for Isabella’s cause. The gathering was held at the Archdiocese of Valladolid’s spirituality centre and was described by participants as both cordial and substantive.

Archbishop Argüello said that Isabella’s life was marked by fidelity to Christ and the Church’s missionary mandate, which in turn shaped her political vision and her concern for unity rooted in shared faith. The Valladolid visit also formed part of the Intercontinental Guadalupan Novena, an initiative launched in 2022 to promote devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe while encouraging renewed reflection on evangelisation and social renewal across the Ibero-American world. (Read more.)

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"A Woman Determined to Protect Her Family"

 From Amy at Novels Alive:

A woman determined to protect her family must make calculated decisions amid turmoil in 17th-century England.

Author Elena Maria Vidal delivers a compelling look at Queen Henrietta-Maria in Generalissima, marking the second installment of the Henrietta of France Trilogy.

The author applies a layer of historical fiction to enhance the challenges faced by the royal family, most notably the civil wars. Through historical detail, the author recreates a time period of unrest, not limited to the anti-Catholic movement.

As the second in a series, it is challenging to fully appreciate the author’s work without reading it in sequence. Queen Henrietta appears to be a sympathetic character, especially pertaining to her children. The scene involving Mary’s wedding night at age 9 is only one example.

Generalissima expounds upon the complexity of Queen Henrietta-Maria and the mark she leaves behind. (Read more.)

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Senator Kennedy on Who Really Controls the Democrat Party

 From The Vigilant Fox:

Kennedy argues that moderate Democrats are no longer in charge but are being controlled by the radical “Karen” wing of the party.

The Gateway Pundit reported that in January, the House of Representatives voted 220-207 to pass a Department of Homeland funding bill, which funds the TSA and ICE.

Fox News reported that the seven Democrats who voted with Republicans did so “despite opposition from their own leadership over unmet demands for additional guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.”

The DHS bill will be bundled alongside three other spending bills, totaling a combined $1.2 trillion in federal spending. The entire package’s passing is a significant step toward averting a government shutdown come Jan. 30.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted on two separate packages on Thursday afternoon. One groups together three spending bills to fund the departments of War, Education, Labor, Transportation and Health and Human Services. The second is a standalone bill funding DHS, which includes ICE.

Jacqui Heinrich asked Kennedy about Democrats who opposed leadership, including Congressman Tom Suozzi (D-NY), after sharing a clip of Suozzi being heckled at a town hall by an anti-ICE activist.

“So, Tom Suozzi was one of seven Democrats who voted with Republicans, and that’s the reception he’s getting at home. What does that tell you?” Heinrich asked.

Senator Kennedy replied, “It tells me that the Karen wing, the Loon wing, Bolshevik wing, whatever you want to call it, Jackie, is firmly in control of the Democratic Party.”

“And whether we ever pass a bill, a budget for the Department of Homeland Security will require our Democratic leadership to embrace adulthood, because that’s what this discussion is all about.”

“It’s not, as it should be, a discussion of the efficient use of taxpayer money and funding ICE and DHS. It’s just the Karen wing of the Democratic Party wants to defund ICE.”

“They believe in open borders.”

“They also wanted to defund the cops, defund police.”

“We know how that vampire movie turned out. Now they’ve moved on to defunding ICE, and the Democrats, the leadership anyway, not people like John Fetterman, but the Democrats are scared of them.” (Read more.)

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Is Romance Dead or Delayed?

Courtship was once an almost ritualized part of society. It enabled romance to flourish while protecting virtue. Our young people now have nothing. From Public Discourse:

This gap between desire and ability points to a deeper issue, I believe: one that goes beyond individual willpower and speaks to the zeitgeist of 2026 and how we learn (or don’t learn) about relationships in the first place. According to social learning theory, we develop behaviors by observing and imitating others. But what happens when the examples we see are few and often unhealthy? Many young adults today have grown up without witnessing strong, enduring relationships, leaving them with no blueprint for how to sustain loving, intimate ones themselves. Add social messages that prioritize careers over connection (especially in the college and postgrad years), the influence of the digital age where it’s easier to DM than to initiate a real-life conversation, and choice overload that makes it feel like there’s always someone better just a swipe away, and it’s no wonder that young adults feel anxious when it comes to love, romance, and relationship formation.  

Are we surprised then, by the rise of “situationships” and hook-ups (words our grandparents never heard of)? In a culture that views dependence as weakness, no one wants to ask, “What are we?” for fear of seeming too needy or serious. So casually engaging in one-night stands and having “stayovers” without commitment has become the norm for many young adults. The problem? When we just show up in our bodies, we are dodging vulnerability and visibility; authentic intimacy requires that we show up with our whole selves.  (Read more.)

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Virgin of the Rose Bower

The enclosed garden: “Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee.”

 From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

The painting by Stefan Lochner is among the most concentrated visual expressions of the western iconographic prototype we call the “hortus conclusus”. The phrase is drawn from the Bible’s Song of Songs that begins, “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse…” It has always functioned in Christian spiritual theology as a Marian title, signifying virginity, purity and the inviolate womb in which the Incarnation took place.

In the later Middle Ages, the hortus conclusus prototype was increasingly visualised using the forms of fashionable private pleasure gardens familiar to the aristocracy and urban elite. This convergence allowed Marian images to appropriate the language of cultivated leisure: enclosure, refinement, ordered nature, while reorienting it toward chastity, contemplation and sacred presence.

Our word “paradise” derives from the Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning an enclosed garden or walled park, a term that entered Greek as paradeisos and then Latin as paradisus. Originally denoting royal pleasure gardens, the word was adopted in the Septuagint to translate the Garden of Eden, permanently linking enclosure, order, and cultivated beauty with the biblical vision of divine dwelling. (Read more.)

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10 Great Justice Alito Quotes

 From The Federalist:

During an interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson last year, Alito affirmed that it’s the duty of all judges to ignore the politics of the day and instead focus on properly adhering to the Constitution — even if doing so may yield an unpopular result.

“We are not supposed to do what is popular, we’re supposed to do what is right. We’re supposed to interpret the Constitution and figure out what it means and then apply the Constitution,” Alito said. “We’re basically a democratic country, but the framers want to put some restraint on things that people might do during a particular area because they’re caught up in the emotions that are triggered by the events of the day. So, we have to stand firm on this, and I think we have done a pretty good job on it, but we have to keep it up because challenges will … continue to come.”

When the Supreme Court dismissed a legal challenge to the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans in Murthy v. Missouri (2024), it was Alito who offered a full-throated defense of these challengers’ free speech rights. (Read more.)

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When Sex is Detached from Love, Life, and Responsibility

 From Elizabeth Stone at The Feminist Turned Housewife:

Every single culture all throughout time has built itself around assumptions it no longer questions.

In Ancient Rome it was assumed that some humans were just naturally meant to be owned. During the Aztec empire it was just assumed that the gods required human sacrifice. In medieval Europe social hierarchy wasn’t questioned, etc…

And in our times, one of those givens we don’t question anymore is that sex is primarily suppose to be about pleasure. Everything else is optional.

And this assumption is so embedded that I’ve probably upset some of you for simply mentioning this in the tone that makes it seem like I disagree.

Which btw, I do.

But I am here to explain why this assumption is not only wrong, but has also opened the doors to some of the greatest moral evils of our times.

Zoom out for one minute, and honestly take a look at the cultural landscape all around. Pornography is everywhere, commitment is low, children are treated as accidents, and abortion is framed as healthcare. Something clearly is not right.

And I argue, that all of this has come about because we have separated sex from its core purposes.

Sex has never been historically understood as a one purpose act. Sex carries three inseparable meanings, it bonded two people, it was open to creating life, and it was pleasurable. None of these things should be seen as competing goods, but remove one from the three and the entire house collapses.

So how did we get here?

It all began, when we started elevating autonomy above all else. (Read more.)

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