Catholic Exchange

No Borough Called “Reality”

• Archives
• Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
• Eric Scheske

Have you heard of this development? New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificates.
Here's how it works. If you're a man but feel like a woman, you can… Read More

On Sebastian Flyte

• Archives
• Thursday, November 2nd, 2006
• Eric Scheske

The early pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited describe the drunken antics of students Lord Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder (the narrator). Ryder makes the later observation that he himself “got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits,… Read More

The Family Man

• Archives
• Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

I’ve been reading some Nock. Albert Jay Nock, one of the premier American essayists of the early twentieth century and one of the founders of modern conservative/libertarian thought. A weighty man, that Nock.
But also a disturbing man. In a… Read More

Right Thinking and the Poor

• Archives
• Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

In the past six months, my family and I have watched two movies set in the Depression era: Cinderella Man and Sea Biscuit. Great movies, but the intense poverty portrayed in them unsettled my children.
After both movies, the kids… Read More

Mafia Discourse

• Archives
• Wednesday, October 4th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

I like books and movies about the Mafia and organized crime. GoodFellas is one of my favorite movies, and I almost subscribed to HBO, just so I could watch The Sopranos as the episodes came out.
One thing I’ve always… Read More

Appetites Run Amok

• Archives
• Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

While out with a group of guys the other week, I heard an interesting conversation. One guy (in his forties) mentioned that a couple of local high school girls in the junior and senior classes are very good-looking. The other… Read More

The Perfect Piece of Knowledge

• Archives
• Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a magazine and ran across a fascinating observation.

Our surroundings call forth certain behavior. We tend to act like students when we step in a classroom, and we tend to act like… Read More

A Dangerous Abstraction

• Archives
• Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

“What a Bedlamite is man!” That’s Thomas Jefferson, lamenting man’s inability to make progress despite his seemingly endless capacity for improvement.
I appreciate the sentiment, but the statement doesn’t make much sense. If a person is crazy, he or she… Read More

Prospecting and Pithecanthropus

• Archives
• Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
• Eric Scheske

Pithecanthropus? The word probably looks familiar to you. It’s a man’s name.
Pithecanthropus is the ape man. He's also known as the Java Man and the Peking Man. Latin-loving scientists call him Homo erectus, Homo modjokertenses, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Pithecanthropus robustus,… Read More

The Peasant Sentiment

• Archives
• Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
• Eric Scheske

I watched The Greatest Game Ever Played last week. It’s a true story about an unaccomplished young golfer, Francis Ouimet, at the turn of the century, and how he beat the world’s top two golfers in an 18-hole playoff at… Read More