Mozart had stopped being Christian, if he had ever been, long before he sat down to compose the Requiem. It is a fact that, from the moment he left Salzburg and Colloredo's employment, he never finished a religious work, not even the Great Mass in C K427 meant for his own wedding. This man of amazingly easy inspiration, who pulled the last three ( Read more... )

I have just realized this, and this is the second sketchy jotting of this association of ideas.

Why is it that the financial colossi, BlackRock and Vanguard, have been actively pushing all the great corporations that rely on them for short-term finance and other financial support for their daily operations, to pursue aggressively woke policies, ( Read more... )

 I had an opportunity to compare these two paintings, separated by over a century but similar in subject and t0 some extent in treatment, when my friend Soren Kjellenberg published them on his Facebook wall, and I found the comparison interesting.


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Everything that is good and beautiful and beloved meets in God. You worship Him. even when you contemplate the loveliness of a few blades of grass. You worship Him when you stand up to applaud a great performance. You worship Him in the tiniest and shortest moments of happiness, of joy, of pleasure. You worship Him when you fall in love, and you ( Read more... )

When people speak of politicians in the plural, it is usually with a sneer in their voice, and a sense that we are essentially speaking of the worst of human kind, of a class of people who sum up the ugly side of homo sapiens. But perhaps it might be more useful to start thinking of politicians as purely a professional class, a part of society, ( Read more... )

There is a frequent, delusional argument, intended to defend bad choices in public and private life, that may be summed up as: "We just have to be right. How could anyone who is in the wrong make the sacrifices we have made?" Specifically, accounts of the history of Communism and associated movements, even by hostile writers, often include a ( Read more... )

Political correctness, wokeism, cancel culture - they all amount to morality gone feral, gone cannibalistic. The original sin of contemporary civilization is to have rejected the very category of morality. "Moralism" amd "moralist" became negative figures. Feeble distinctions between ethics and morality were invented in order not to have a ( Read more... )

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When I think of the pleasure and the good that I got out of school and university, I am not conscious that "having my assumptions challenged" played any great part in it. To the contrary, what gave me delight was finding out more and more things; facts; confirmed, established, truthful statements and descriptions. I pored over maps, accounts, ( Read more... )

The confusion of the present time can be seen in a number of ways, but most importantly in the silences and suppressions that people impose on themselve,s the arguments that they will not touch, the fear of controversy - because in contemporary parliance "controversial" means not "to be debated" but "intolerable and shameful". And that alone tells ( Read more... )