Further travel news.… Read the rest

More travel news.… Read the rest

I just wanted to call your attention to this post on Normblog. It’s his reaction to yet another of those helpful lectures on how impoverished and pathetic secularism is and how we have to give up and admit that we ‘need’ religion. Of course, as always, the writer makes the case by 1) pretending that religion is the only possible source of things like meaning and solidarity, and 2) by redefining religion. Okay. At that rate – if there’s enough taking away combined with enough redefinition – I could be brought to agree with that idea too. But what of it? Of what use is it to assume that secularism is something it isn’t and that religion isn’t what … Read the rest

Travel news.… Read the rest

I love this. There are those who think that people like me who insist, whether petulantly or earnestly or flintily, that Shakespeare (as it might be) is quite a good writer and better in many ways than quite a few other writers, are ‘elitist’ and snobbish and mindless enemies of all of popular culture. But ’tis not so. It’s just that I insist in the same kind of way there too – some of it is better than other of it, that’s all. I don’t love all of popular culture. But then I don’t love all of the putative ‘canon’ either – some of it I think is over-rated. Gatsby, for instance.

But one bit of popular culture I do … Read the rest