LAURENCE BUTLER, who has contributed excellent commentary to this site from time to time, married earlier this year. He and his wife, Maria, are birders, and they received as a wedding gift a copy of John J. Audubon’s journals, published in 1897. At his blog, Butlers Birds and Things, which features stunning photography, Laurence is writing about Audubon’s [...]

  FRANK BORZELLIERI, outrageously fired as principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx last summer because of his conservative writings on race, examines the state of the Catholic Church in an article at Alternative Right.  ”It is an absolute mystery why liberals hate the Church—for liberals are the Church’s master!”  he writes.

  A GOOD DEATH, said St. Robert Bellarmine, depends upon a good life. But a good life depends on dying to the world, “a business of the greatest difficulty and importance.” Bellarmine (1542-1621), wrote The Art of Dying Well (De arte bene moriendi) in 1620 and it contains profound reflections on the world’s most neglected and most significant subject. In his [...]

  THE LATE Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote of the psychological experience of giving birth to Christ in this essay posted at Tradition in Action. He posed a very simple and obvious question: What were her thoughts? He wrote: Before the Incarnation, Our Lady had a great union of soul with God and, therefore, a [...]

  KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT writes about the busy married life of Chelsea Clinton here and here.

  A READER shared this card from his own personal mailbag:

  THE BOYS CHOIR is one of the few artistic endeavours in which a masculine esprit de corps still survives. In a boys choir, a boy can sing like a girl and yet not be a girl. See this lovely 2008 version of O, Holy Night  from the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral with James Orrell as soloist.

  LAST MONTH, I wrote very briefly about Kevin Neary, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania whose life changed irrevocably in November. His story, as familiar as it seems, is haunting. Neary was walking home in the Northern Liberties neighborhood on Nov. 15 when he was approached by a black thug. The man asked Neary for money. He then fired a bullet into Neary’s neck, [...]