IT'S A WISE CHILD...: Saturday night I watched The Return (Возврашение), a recent Russian flick in which two boys go on a camping trip with their recently-returned, long-estranged father and his dark secrets. It's a small movie which punches far above its weight class due to the very true-to-life performances of the two boys, whose relationship undergoes multiple shifts in power dynamics over the course of the movie, and to the color-drenched cinematography. Russia looks just gorgeous here, alive and young and scary. The movie is shot in a way I realized I associate with contemporary horror movies: Everything is bleached or drenched, lots of sickly yellows and drained grays and deep, plush blues. The textures are so finely-notched that you can feel them under your fingertips.

IT'S A LONG ROAD FOR A BOX OF CHOCOLATES: Words from a champion... skier? Possibly a skier. I don't sport.

...All of this means it’s the ideal occasion for the “Long Road” speech. As in, it’s a long road we’re traveling, people. As parents cheering from the sidelines we can’t help but want our kids to succeed at everything they do, on every outing. We understand that real progress is often a barely perceptible crawl, and that what we really want for our kids is long term success in life, not in a silly sporting event. But still, we secretly hope for success every time. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the good days and put off the agony of defeat indefinitely, or at least until adulthood?

I can say from experience that the fantasy of child stardom is not all its cracked up to be. The pros are, of course, an early sniff of glory and an instant endorphin hit of success. Up into my early teens I won every ski race I entered. I fell and got up, and won. My boots got stolen from the car so I borrowed a friend’s mother’s boots, and won. A big kid in ski boots stepped on my bare toes and broke them the day before a race, and the next day I won. You get the picture. Yay me.

But then one day, I didn’t win. And I kept not winning, like it was my new job, until it felt my world had crumbled. I had three close friends who resided solidly in my rear view mirror during my young days of untrammeled fabulousness. All three of them scooted past me and made their ways on to the US Ski Team while I ground my gears. They were teaching me the lesson I had taught them long ago—that sooner or later you’ll get your butt kicked, so you’d better know how to deal with it. I did not appreciate the lesson. ...

Not that true success has anything to do with “making it” in a sport or not. There is no “it”, no achievement that confers success on you. It really is all about finding what matters to you and going after it with all you’ve got. How often do we get to do that?

The long-term view is a very tough perspective for a young person to have. One kid going through an exceptionally frustrating bout of character building summed it to his parents as follows: “I know that this is making me a better person. But right now it sort of sucks.”

He’s right. And there’s no way around it. Dwelling on disappointment is neither healthy nor productive, but disappointment in itself isn’t such a bad thing. It means you have some skin in the game. Coaches and parents may seem to be discrediting the right to be disappointed, and diluting the value of a competitive spirit with default comments like “just have fun,” and “keep smiling.” I still cringe a bit when I interpret those words as admonishments. But as a quasi grown up, I get the broader intent, the reminder to keep your eye on the bigger prize, on enjoying the process. Enjoy the things you get from having the dream, making the effort and going out each day with a goal to get just a little better.

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"FAILURE WEEK" AT TOP GIRLS' SCHOOL TO BUILD RESILIENCE. This actually sounds like it could be pretty great.

Ratty asked if they would be showing A Boy Called Charlie Brown--a terrific yet depressing movie, in which the uplifting moral is not, "Second place is still worth celebrating!" or "You worked really hard and learned a lot--good job!" but rather, "At least you're not dead."

The best-ever death metal band out of Blogwatch...

Real review of, seriously, maybe seven or eight Mountain Goats cds once I've finished listening to them. For now you get a blogwatch.

"How to Become an Author, In Five Incredibly Difficult Steps." The usual Cracked.com disclaimer, but I loved #2 a lot, and the point about needing a huge amount of research in order to write fiction is also really good. #1 should be skipped unless you really, really want to feel bad about your bank balance.

Guest posters at Megan McArdle's site:

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro made an important contribution to the social sciences. His unexpected declaration that the port of Mariel would be temporarily open to any Cubans seeking to flee the island served as a natural experiment that has helped labor economists understand the impact of immigration. In his now classic paper, economist David Card convincingly showed that the massive influx of 120,000 Cubans increased the labor force of Miami by 7% yet had almost no impact on the employment or wages of natives.

This result is probably shocking to many, and certainly runs contrary to the popular but unfortunate myth that immigrants "steal our jobs". But while this study is an important result in the literature, it is not an isolated one. Most research on immigration shows small or zero impacts on unemployment and wages. This, however, does present something of a puzzle: if immigration increases labor supply, then why didn't wages fall and unemployment rise? How was it that the labor market in Miami was able to absord so many new workers?

more; mostly interesting to me because I care about Mariel, but that of course raises the question: Does US growth depend on immigrants a) fleeing sufficiently-fleeable-hell and b) not assimilating to our awful demographics once they gain some economic success?

Sublimity Now:

While she was doing this, she went on for a while about how lucky she is, given that some people get shingles all over their bodies, and she only has to deal with an useless right arm, and apologized profusely for not being able to prepare a duck dinner for my brother before he ships out to Quantico.

Please remember her in your prayers.

it is okay she eats so slow--at least she eats!

and even moreso:

Point is, my father thought I was literally plowing a field instead of being vaguely emo. He is the best. May we all strive to think so well of our loved ones!

context, but why?

The Groom's Family:

This sentiment, i suspect, is due no less to the sheer fact of my being a Jew than to my personal biography. Any Jew, with the questionable exception of the generations born in Israel, is always an immigrant, caught in a complex relationship between a home from which he is distanced by both space and historical time, and a current residence from which he is separated by a paper-thin but surprisingly resistant mental wall. He has no choice but to be a cosmopolitan, and there are three general ways in which this cosmopolitanism may manifest. ...

The religious Jew, as the monk, is a cosmopolitan in that he makes do everywhere and belongs nowhere.

The progressive secular Jew is a cosmopolitan in a very different way. Like his religious brother, he never has the pleasure of belonging to a place; as the Nazi episode among others illustrates, his decision to treat a place as his home means very little to others and to history. Unlike his religious brother, however, he does not see his loneliness in the midst of the nations as a prelude to salvation; it is rather a source of confusion and often pain that he must learn to mitigate.

more; emphasis added because I genuinely believe that sabra Jews often carry the marks of displacement without the humility forced by the humiliation of needing to understand others' perspectives in order to survive--or, to put it more bluntly, I sometimes think that growing up in Israel is bad for Jewish children. Jews must raise their children in a Jew-hating world; ideologies of Jewish superiority are one obvious path. (And, for contingent 20th-century reasons, often an atheist path which leads to dissolution of Jewish identity in the later generations.)

The Rat:

It reminded me of some of the things we were taught in hospice training; and also of a line from Paul Claudel that MFB quoted to me in a letter well over a decade ago, but that's stuck with me ever since (even though I'm not Christian): "Jesus did not come to remove suffering, but to fill it with His presence." The principle holds whatever your religious affiliation (or lack thereof), and also seems to me one that might be particularly useful in this country, where even the most well-meaning people—Christians included—can often have trouble negotiating secondhand tragedy. We're a nation of fixers, and also of Pelagians—plus there's so little guidance out there about this kind of thing.

There are so few things we can ever really do for another person, however much we like to think we can, and however many fairy tales/Hollywood scripts/etc. are themed around rescue. If you know a survivor (esp. a recent survivor) of trauma, do have a look at this list, and others like it

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MY SOUL IS BEING DRAGGED TO UTTAR PRADESH! ...TO UTTER DESTRUCTION I MEAN. Diana Wynne Jones, RIP.

She is one of my most beloved children's authors. Everybody has a unique list of favorite DWJ novels. I'll talk a little bit about mine, here, and also try to indicate what made her writing so fantastic overall.

Fire and Hemlock. What's odd is that I've never managed to keep the plot of this retelling of the Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer legends straight, even as I started to consider it one of Jones's best books. It's longer and "older" than most of her stuff--shading into adolescence, rather than firmly embedded in childhood--and there's erotic tension appropriate for the age group. The girl, the "Janet," is self-dramatizing and unpleasant in a way I am pretty sure I was at her age! This is a much less moralistic tale than The Secret Garden (which I also love) but the exposure of the protagonist's flaws is equally unsparing.

Dogsbody. A bullied girl finds solace in her pet dog... who just happens to be the personification of the Dog Star, Sirius, sent to earth to learn humility and reclaim the weapon used by his beloved and treacherous Companion star.

DWJ is often at her best when she's showing a fractured and barely-mended family in which the children have to bond together despite one another. A lot of people have noted how self-absorbed the parents in her books often are, how neglectful or actively harmful. And here we get to see two "blended families": Kathleen and her cousins (her father is an imprisoned Irish terrorist), and Sirius and the cats of the household. We see how the "insiders" have become defensive and cold as a result of the father's neglect and the mother's bullying; we see how the "outsiders," Kathleen and Sirius, bargain for small concessions; and we see, I think, how even the ferocious mother is a real person, with real emotions, whose tragedy is precisely that she exists in her own world and doesn't understand what she's done to her children (and her cats!).

I love this book so much. I identified very strongly with Sirius, with his uncontrollable temper and his sense of how humiliating it is to have to relearn one's place in the world. This is one of the books which shaped me as a person.

Cart and Cwidder. Another patchwork family. Political tensions between north and south (I'm pretty sure those were the terms--?) force itinerant singer Clennen and his kids to make nice with bratty Kialan and his brother, sons of a northern rebel. Again I seriously overidentified with Kialan. He's just so awful!--and yet Jones seems to understand what it would feel like to be the kid who is always doing or saying the unhelpful thing, when everyone around you is being intensely responsible and you feel incapable of matching them. There's an immense amount of wonder in this book, as well, with mountains moving and ancient legends fulfilled.

Witch Week. One of her funniest--even though it includes scenes in which a child imagines what it will be like when he is burnt to death for witchcraft! The backdrop of this story is incredibly dark--it's set at a boarding school in which almost all the children have lost family members to witch-hunting, and all of them fear that they might be next on the fiery agenda--and yet the tone is "school story" and hilarious. Insightful (I used a diary code similar to Charles's when I was a teen) and bittersweet. The adults are unhelpful, but less actively-harmful than in most of Jones's books.

The Ogre Downstairs. Maybe her most forgiving book--although she's a forgiving author, in general. Stepchildren need to learn to work together to manage a magical chemistry set. Tons of fun (the bit where they gild the horrific wedding gifts is priceless), moments of genuine wonder in between things like chocolate bars wandering down the hallway, and huge amounts of sympathy for everyone involved, even the stepfather who is the "ogre" in the title.

Witch's Business. Published in the UK as Own Back, Ltd. A rare Jones with explicit discussion of class conflict! But again, kids band together despite intense personal dislike, and through compromise and sympathy they defeat the adult enemy. Plus, they run a revenge-for-hire business!

Power of Three. Children from three species (basically fairy/normal, human/Giant, and fishything) must band together to lift a curse. Includes some really powerful scenes of what it feels like to be waiting to be caught, as a kid; learning the weakness of the adults whom you love; and discovering that your place in the world is simultaneously more important and much more unpleasant than you realized.

The Homeward Bounders. Probably the saddest children's story I've ever read. Jamie "walks the bounds," crossing the lines between universes, and meets the ferocious Helen and the seemingly-servile Joris (Joris? can't remember how his name is spelled). Includes some of Jones's most horror-show moments, like Helen's cannibal hand or the mud-colored soldiers' uniforms. The awesomely funny bits, like the pantomime horse or the cricket game, only make the final lines more heartbreaking.

Howl's Moving Castle. This is just a confection. Young Sophie is cursed to live as an old woman; she goes to work for rakish wizard Howl, and becomes entangled in his bizarre puzzlebox of a life, as he tries to work free of a curse of his own. A charming, funny, magical book, with John Donne and a soap-operatic scarecrow and lots of hats.

Charmed Life. Typically absurd magic (the evil dough stuck to the floor is especially memorable) with a terrifying older sister who is willing to sacrifice almost anything for power. As always with Jones, childhood is no refuge.

The town happens to be asleep right now, the mayor has problems with his heart and lies spread-eagled in his bed, his dentures in the glass of water beside him; in musty rooms omnipotent fathers sleep in nightshirts beside their wives. In the woods above town animals are waking. The actor is saying: Sad to say, you don't know real vodka. The real pure stuff turns everything you see a blue color.
--The Rebels

HOLY CATS! (Sorry.)

I haven't watched the linked YouTube video, since I'm pretty sure it would freak me out even at age 32.

BELATED VALENTINE'S DAY LINK #1: Name a giant hissing cockroach after your Valentine!

I seriously would flip for this--while urban apartment living has made me loathe your common or garden cockroach, the huge Madagascar hissing variety might be my favorite insect. I got to hold one as a child, at the old Natural History Museum Insect Zoo. The hissing is like their equivalent of purring!

For my twelfth birthday my Aunt Harry gave me a one-thousand-dollar bill, a ten-foot-long boa constrictor named Calvin, and a five-year diary.
--Joyce Cool, The Kidnapping of Courtney Van Allen and What's-Her-Name

"THE YEAR KENNY LOGGINS RUINED CHRISTMAS." Via Ratty.

HOME AND DRY: Hello and welcome, if you got here via Andrew Sullivan. You want this post. And now the promised follow-up, in which I talk about what I think the most beautiful argument is in favor of gay marriage: It gives gay people a home.

Sullivan's written about this quite a lot, of course. Both he (in Love Undetectable, I'm pretty sure) and Jonathan Rauch (in Gay Marriage) have described, briefly and without self-pity, really intense childhood exchanges with their mothers. I don't recall the exact wording of Rauch's story off the top of my head, but I do remember Sullivan's. From memory, thus possibly a bit off: He asked his mother if God really sees everything, and she said yes, at which point he replied, "Well then there's no hope for me."

I mean... a little kid.

And I've written before about how I experienced some fairly intense childhood alienation of basically exactly that kind. I felt like I had no place in the world and couldn't have one--shouldn't have one, hadn't earned love or self-respect. Becoming Catholic, I should say, was in part about accepting that I could be loved by Someone who genuinely knew everything about me. In order to be really Catholic you have to accept healing and love, and there are times when that's very hard for me, still; it's still somewhat baffling to think that I might be made in the image of God. (I mean, what does that make God?)

I have no real sense of why I associated that sense of alienation with my sexual orientation. One obvious possibility is homophobia; I certainly don't remember ever hearing anything antigay until I was in junior high, and my parents had gay friends etc etc, but it's impossible to prove that I wasn't somehow affected by subtler and pervasive cultural bigotry. Anyway, point being, I've said many times that it was such a relief to come out to myself because it seemed like I could finally explain that alienation in toto; and because being gay wasn't something I thought anyone should be ashamed of, I could finally put all of that unhappiness and sense of homelessness behind me! I don't know that this relief is especially common for gay teens, but I do think a lot of gay people did have that childhood sense of intense separation, of being cast out.

And since virtually all gay people are raised by heterosexuals, the home in which we grew up doesn't provide obvious models for the kind of relationships we want to form. It's hard for us to know how our own love stories can fit in to our family story, the family model we grew up with. (Yes, I realize that a lot of straight people can say the same thing, but walk with me here for a moment.)

Gay marriage promises that, for those of us lucky enough to grow up with parents in a loving/good-enough marriage, we truly can fit our own futures and dreams into the family story we grew up with. We can step into our parents' shoes. You all know that I think this promise is based on some really false beliefs about sex difference and family structure, but believe me, I feel the power and attraction of the promise.

And this longing for home is one reason the Church's silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you've known were clueless at best and bullying at worst.

Anyway, I continue to believe all the stuff I've said in prior posts about gay marriage, but I thought it was important to throw this out there as well. The longing for home is even more powerful to me, and even more beautiful, than the longing for honor which also animates the gay-marriage movement.

UNZIP MY BODY, TAKE MY HEART OUT: I'm still thinking about that conversation on gay marriage between Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan, in which my Busted Halo interview played a supporting role. Specifically, I'm still thinking about this John Corvino column written in response to me and Douthat. I'm still not sure how to structure this post or its argument, so I think what I'll do is put four ideas on the table, and see what happens. The first two are mainly about men and women, and the last two are mainly about the biological connection between parents and children.

1. Some girls are bigger than others. Corvino's main point seems to be, Yes, men and women are obviously different in ways which are very important in marriage. And therefore gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships are going to be different in ways important to marriage as well.

But there are a lot of important differences! A cross-class marriage, for example, will face different challenges from a marriage of two people from similar economic backgrounds. An interfaith marriage faces different challenges from those faced by a Jewish marriage. A marriage of two opposite-sex octogenarians faces different challenges from those faced by two opposite-sex 18-year-olds. And so on.

...And I think that perspective requires one to believe that sex difference is One Difference Among Others, not (I know I always trot out this phrase) la difference. It requires one to believe that sex difference is not iconic, that there is no such thing as what Maggie Gallagher trenchantly calls "bringing the two halves of humanity together," since humanity does not come in two halves. I've written here about why I do believe sex difference is iconic, here about why that belief does not require specific gender roles e.g. boys don't cry, and here about why that belief is (at least in the Bible, and the Catholic faith!) prior to and distinct from the very obvious and important fact of procreation. I genuinely believe that sex difference is sublime in a way that age difference, for example, is not. Its sublimity stems in part, though I think only in part, from its danger, its potential for horror, and its simultaneous potential for exceptional beauty. Acknowledging the role of sex difference in marriage and sexuality is good and beautiful, whereas acknowledging the role of age difference (for example) is merely necessary.

2. Newsweek/Newspeak. If lots and lots of differences are as important to marriage as sex differences, or sex differences are as unimportant to marriage as lots and lots of differences, it's exceptionally difficult to understand how marriage could be an institution which regulates sex at all.

I mean, if "love is love is love," if love makes a family, then surely sexless relationships could be as completely marriage as anything else, no? I don't even think you need to go to the "why does number of partners matter when sex of partner doesn't?" place (although you probably could; the typical Jonathan Rauch-type case against polygamy applies the harm principle, understood as "which kinds of marriages tend toward liberal democracy and which tend toward patriarchal authoritarianism," in a way which invites the government to judge whether e.g. vows to "love, honor, and obey" are anti-American), since there are lots of examples of loving relationships where the harm principle doesn't seem to do any work at all in distinguishing these relationships from marriage: friendship, for example, or polyamory. (The harms from polyamory can be dismissed as speculative just as easily as the harms from motherless or fatherless gay households, by trotting out children who grew up in these families and did just fine. They do exist.)

I think Corvino's approach ultimately leads to the really depressing Newsweek "debate" about marriage, in which all parties agree that marriage means whatever you want it to mean--whatever rules you personally believe necessary to fit the specific needs and specific challenges of your relationship, since no differences are intensely and iconically important. Here, marriage is desirable precisely because it promises honor without regulation. I don't think that's sustainable. But I also don't think it's very admirable.

The obvious comeback at this point is to say that contemporary marriage doesn't meet the unique needs and challenges of heterosexuals and their children. I think that's not entirely true--culture and tradition are more powerful than we think, and I don't think the pro-marriage Newsweek writers will be able to sustain their genderless view of marriage for very long--but it's importantly true. The biggest problem in the USA, I think, is that marriage is no longer viewed as an institution which should regulate sex before marriage. (Here, have some depressing statistics about religious affiliation, beliefs about sex, and premarital sexual activity.) But the obvious comeback-to-the-comeback is that if you care about marriage, or if you care about the children which intercourse bizarrely continues to produce without our consent, you should be seeking rollback rather than mere containment of the non-regulatory marriage culture.

3. Shadows searching for what cast them. I feel like--and this is an intuition, not the conclusion of a syllogism--John Corvino's column comes from a worldview which reduces men and women, in their sexual and familial aspect, to functions. If we can figure out the function of a father, we can replace biological fathers with father figures or male role models and no harm done. A fatherless family need not be a family with anything missing.

I think this worldview denigrates the importance of the body. Our physicality--our incarnation--goes far beyond function. That's why kids who grew up with really amazing, sacrificial stepfathers or father figures or male role models, or adoptive parents, very often express both intense gratitude toward the people who loved and raised them, and intense longing or anger or sorrow toward the biological parents who didn't, or who loved intermittently and from afar. It's possible (I know this, because it happens) to both honor non-biological parents and yearn for the connection of DNA, of flesh. Something is missing when parental love is separated from the fleshly, sweaty, physical union which created the child.

4. I am the least resilient person I know. I know that not all adopted children, not all stepparented children, not all children of single parents feel this loss especially keenly! My point is solely that there are two spectra on which we can assess the emotions and coping strategies of children raised without one or more of their biological parents.

One is resilience. Resilience is a good thing in itself. It signals flexibility, a future-oriented worldview, an ability to "make do" or "muddle through" or "eat bitterness" or focus on gratitude for what is there rather than sorrow for what is not.

But the other is what I'm going to call aesthetic sensitivity. I'm calling it that because I think attention to the meaning of the physical is essentially a function of the aesthetic sense. People who feel the loss of the biological parent most keenly are, I think, expressing an insight--not a weakness, not a handicap created by their culture, but an insight into what it is to be human.

These are two separate spectra. Someone can be both intensely sensitive to the loss of the biological parent, and extremely resilient. Someone can be really flailing or self-pitying, and not at all interested in the biological connection. But just as resilience is a good thing in itself, so a deep sense of the importance of physical, fleshly relatedness is a good thing in itself. The "family diversity" movement tends to praise resilience and downplay or even denigrate what I'm calling aesthetic sensitivity. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that they do this because resilience makes the adults' lives easier and the other thing does not.

"THE END OF THE BEST FRIEND": I cannot possibly improve on Ratty's comment.

(Also, while I obviously support strong and not anti-love efforts to reduce bullying, aren't weird or socially-isolated children the ones who often rely most on their best friends rather than a large and intimidating social group? But mostly yeah, what she said.)

HELL IS FOR CHILDREN: Because my life is one giant roulette wheel and I am the shiny ball, I decided to start my Eastertide by reading a 500-page Hungarian Holocaust novel.

Janos Nyiri's Battlefields and Playgrounds is one of the best novels I've read in a long time.

Personal digression, included because it might be of interest, but skip this if you want to know about why the book is so powerful: I admit that I actually haven't read that much about the Holocaust. I've read both of my grandfather's books (The Uses of Adversity, and also The Pavement of Hell which I recommend highly--and WHOA, Amazon says there's one about the Warsaw Uprising, which I need and am ordering RIGHT NOW) and a few other things e.g. Maus and Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose. But I have the impression, which could be wrong, that when I was growing up there was a concerted movement within American Jewry to move away from focusing on the Holocaust--a sense that Jews needed to ensure that their children didn't see Judaism as defined by attempted genocide. So while I felt really strong personal connections to the depictions of Jewish life in e.g. Stories My Grandfather Should Have Told Me or The Power of Light, I didn't seek out Holocaust narratives or feel especially connected to them. I didn't think about which of the neighbors I could trust to hide me. I'm conflicted about whether that's the best way to address the Holocaust for Jewish children; hatred of the Jews is intense and horrific and longstanding enough that I do think you don't really understand Jewish life unless you acknowledge it, but at the same time obviously Judaism is not actually defined by other people's reactions to Jews, and the Book of Esther is not the only book. To the extent that this whole digression is relevant to Nyiri, it's just to say that I don't really know what's typical for a "Holocaust novel." All I know is that I've never read one like this.

The protagonist is a fierce, tough, batteringly self-assured little boy. Seriously, he calls his mother a whore! (Because she takes up with a Gentile after divorcing his father.) He is ferocious and completely convinced of the rightness of his own perspective. The child's-eye perspective felt completely real. Joszka is rarely able to view things from other people's perspectives. That protects him from much of the horror around him--but not all of it.

This is also a Holocaust novel where the actual devastation of the Jewish people takes place off-screen for almost the entire time. The hell-tide is creeping nearer and nearer to his family every moment, and the reader isn't allowed to forget that, but it isn't until very late in the novel that we even see one corpse, let alone a sense of the total devastation which the novel's denouement reveals.

In the final third or so of the novel theology finally rears its ugly head. There's an amazing chapter in which Joszka's profligate, almost entirely absent father (and presumably you can write your own theological parallels there) returns to talk with him about God, and argues that the Jewish way of relating to God differs from the Christian in that the Christian believes in total unconditional surrender. Thus Christianity is a slave morality, and Christians are psychologically trained to view the world in terms of slaves and masters. So they think they are God's slaves and the Jews are theirs. Judaism by contrast, he argues, is a wrestling with God and a treaty with Him. When God blesses the Jews, the Jews can trust Him enough to bless Him back. The novel's characters really vividly portray both the degree to which this is a true portrait of Christianity, and the degree to which this is a false portrait of Judaism. I was reminded of The Trial of God.

This book is amazingly compelling. It's actually fun to read for a long time, since even as the readers' dread never abates we're still mostly following Joszka's attempts to manipulate all the adults around him; and when it stops being fun, it starts being painfully suspenseful. I can't recommend this highly enough.

The notes at the end are in large part a compendium of Catholics Choosing Hell, so there's that, also.

"UNDERGRADUATES ARE THE MOST SINCERE SHOPPERS THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN." Apparently my AmCon piece about Georgetown is now available to subscribers as a PDF here. I... uh... am not a subscriber, so I have exactly no idea what's in this piece. Does it even contain the sentence in the title of this post? I don't know. Anyway, there's probably something about The Exorcist, and my high school drama, and the arduous process of constructing an identity.

YOUR ORCHID-RELATED PUN HERE:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

lots more--really interesting. Via Jendi Reiter.

"HEAVEN CAN WAIT": Me, at Inside Catholic, in which I discuss Hell, American character, slapping your mama, and the centurion who speared the side of Christ:

There's a terrific moment in the TV show House, in which the irascible and brilliant Dr. Greg House is explaining to a lapsed Catholic subordinate why he doesn't believe in the afterlife. House, with all the self-lacerating irony that actor Hugh Laurie can impart to the character, says, "I would hate to think that all of this was just a test."

House is right -- and he's offered a crucial diagnosis of one form of Catholic piety. There's a way of thinking about the afterlife that makes this life, here, irrelevant and even inexplicable. Catholics will sometimes argue against universalism -- the comforting belief that all people must be saved, because God would never be so cruel as to damn somebody's grandma -- by asking, "If everyone is saved, why even bother to do the right thing here on earth?"

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YOU WILL GO DOWN IN DARKNESS BEFORE YOU DIE: Wow, I loved The Descent. edited!--I've moved this review to the other blog, the one where I post spoilery stuff.

ARGH edited to add actual link! Sorry!

"SHELF LIFE." My new AmCon column--which is only available to subscribers online, so check your local libraries and newsstands!--takes a look at Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library. I think this is my favorite DC column so far.

YET ANOTHER POST ABOUT THE END OF "EYES WIDE SHUT" (AND MY CONVERSION):

The fundamental anthropological truth of the Gospel is not that we are sinners, but that we are loved. Repentance is not grasping that I am a sinner, any fool with a modicum of self-knowledge and awareness knows that about himself. No, repentance is knowing in a deep and personal way that I am loved.

(the rest)