Fencing Bear at Prayer

It's the season of Advent, so you all know what that means: the Dangerous Faggot is back on tour. While our brothers and sisters on the Left repair to their fainting couches and get their smelling salts ready, those of us who think of ourselves as conservatives, more particularly American conservatives, need to start taking notes. The election may be over (please, God, let it be over!), but the culture wars are still going strong. As the bard once put it, "Faint heart never won fair lady." Lady Liberty needs us now more than ever to come to her defense! It behooves us to be ready. Here's the way Milo does it, for those who have ears to hear : 1. Be fabulous . Humility may have been the preferred topos in days of yore, but in these days of celebrity, all it gets you is a modest blog audience (I love you all!). Beauty may be skin deep and in the eye of the beholder, but it is also a source of real pleasure for those who are watching. Milo gets this, which is why (as ...

You all know the story . Kai, the Musk-Ox Warrior, has returned from the Spirit Realm intending to steal their chi from the other animal warriors and turn them into jade ornaments that he can wear on his belt. His original motive would seem to be envy that the pandas taught the Tortoise Warrior Oogway the secret of chi, but his overwhelming desire is to dominate and control. So all-consuming has his envy become that his very eyes glow green. His primary weapons are two glowing green blades, and when he captures the other animal warriors, they turn into small green stones, rendered lifeless by Kai's greed to possess their golden chi. Meanwhile, our hero, the Dragon Warrior Po (a giant panda), has been named Teacher by the Red Panda Master Shifu, but quickly loses heart when his students are injured thanks to his training. Even worse, when Kai shows up in the valley with his army of jade zombies, Po is unable to protect his friends. Po follows his panda father Li Shan (whom he has ...

The short answer is: because I already wear this , but when I posted the photo for my Facebook friends, they did not immediately recognize it as a cross, which just goes to show you how hard it is to interpret most imagery. But the long answer is the same: because I already wear this. This cross I bought from an artist at the annual Hyde Park Art Fair some ten years ago; I wish I could remember the name of the artist, as it is her design. She called it a "Trinity Cross," which as a medievalist I instantly saw as a representation of the Gnadenstuhl : God the Father seated on a throne (the Stuhl ) holding the Son crucified on the cross with the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering in-between. It is intended as a representation of the great mercy ( Gnade ) that God had for his creatures in becoming incarnate and dying for them: all Three Persons of the Trinity participate in the sacrifice. As the artist for my cross has rendered the iconography, the body of Christ is shown as a ki...

Our story thus far... Last Thursday, our hero Milo did an interview with Cathy Newman on British television's Channel 4 News. In the course of the interview, Ms. Newman challenged Mr. Yiannopoulos on some of the headlines that have appeared over his articles published on Breitbart.com, including this one: " The Solution to Online 'Harassment' is Simple: Women Should Log Off. " "You said," Ms. Newman read from her notes, barely able to suppress the contempt that she clearly felt at having to give voice to his prose, "'yes, we will certainly let women onto the men’s internet a few times a year, as long as you follow a few basic rules.'" At which our hero tried to suppress a smile, rejoining, "You can't hear the humor in that?" But Ms. Newman continued to speak over him, clearly finding nothing funny--or ironic--in the claim that, if women find it hard to understand men's "natural tendency to be boisterous, con...

What's in a wall? On Sunday, one of the women in our RCIA group mentioned that she is an elementary schoolteacher and last week the children in her class, shaken by the result of the election, were drawing walls. "They're frightened," she said. "They are worried about what having a wall is going to mean. Their pictures were all about fear of the Wall." Her voice got anxious in the way everyone's voice seems to get these days, as she painted for us a picture of her students drawing pictures about their fear of walls, about their fear of the Wall that the adults have convinced them is going to bring about the end of the world. Nothing good, she seemed to be suggesting, could possibly come of a wall. One of the men made a joke about drawing birds flying over the wall, but even he didn't seem convinced that it was possible to take away the power of the Wall. Walls, my new friends seemed to agree, are bad. Medieval Europeans, particularly town dweller...

Thanks be to God. June 2008-November 2016

People are scared. This is what I have been hearing from my friends and neighbors this past week following the election of Donald J. Trump to be president of the United States. They are frightened, more frightened, the younger ones say, than they have ever been in their lives. They are frightened for their friends, frightened for our country, frightened for our world. I attended two discussions yesterday, one a panel at my Episcopal church, the other a meeting for the RCIA at the local Catholic church, and at both, people talked about being afraid, women and men, black and white. As the women spoke, their voices would typically get higher and higher, a little strained as their rhetoric became more expressive of the extreme anxiety they were feeling. One of the men, an academic colleague, could barely hold back his tears describing his response to the way the voting had gone. At the Episcopal church, one woman other than myself spoke out for calm and the need to listen to why people v...

Of course I have it. I've always known I have it. I grew up in the South, after all, where you hear about it every day. "You kids are so lucky," the grown-ups would say to my siblings and me. They said it when we lived in Albuquerque, where my sister and brother were born, the only blue-eyed babies in the hospital nursery. They said it when we moved to Louisville and the other girls in the neighborhood wanted to beat me up because I was the new girl, somewhat pudgy (they called me "Full Ton"), and reading all the time (the day of The Fight, I was reading in a tree). They said it when my father left my mother for another, much younger woman, leaving my mother to raise the three of us on her own (when my father left, I was 11, my sister 9, my brother 7; we saw him once a year or so after that--yes, you read that right--usually at Thanksgiving). They said it when my mother moved us to Amarillo to be near her parents and her mother died the year after next, leavi...