Extra, extra! News and views for Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Pro-Lifers and Politics – “We don’t fit in either major party. And that’s a good thing.” Pro-life Voters Are Politically Homeless (The Atlantic)

Jew-Bashers – “Candace Owens, a Catholic convert and former pundit at the Daily Wire, has come under fire for anti-Semitic rhetoric, including promoting the ‘blood libel’ charge and linking Judaism to pedophilia.” Candace Owens Doesn’t Speak for Catholics (First Things)

Runaway Public Debt – “America is awash in debt. It is now normal to see a trillion-dollar increase in America’s public debt in 100-day intervals.” David Hume and America’s Debt Disaster (Law & Liberty)

Constellation of Ideas – “Poetry, the oldest and most universal of arts, is increasingly underappreciated. These four poets hope to reverse that.” The Word within the World (Plough)

The Antiself – “’On the Role of Literature in Formation’ is perhaps Pope Francis’s best document of his pontificate. Short, sweet, and full of good lines quoted and written. And yet he remains a “second friend” to many of his flock because they see their own world in some fundamentally different ways than he does.” Reading With a Second Friend: Pope Francis on Literature (The Imaginative Conservative)

A Damning Report – “Coverage was heavily biased against Israel, report into corporation’s output finds.” BBC ‘breached guidelines 1,500 times’ over Israel-Hamas war (The Telegraph)

Catholic Literary Imagination – “In 2013, the poet Dana Gioia published an article in the journal First Things chronicling a decline in the visibility of Catholic artists, particularly writers, in contemporary culture.” How attending the first MFA program centered on the Catholic literary tradition changed my writing (America)

Find One, Lose One – “We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.” Doom scrolling (Works in Progress)

Slanted Alexa – “Multiple owners of Amazon Echo smart speakers uploaded videos to social media this week showing the device’s built-in virtual assistant Alexa appearing to give answers to questions about the 2024 presidential election that favor Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and provide extensive criticism of former President Donald Trump.” Users report Amazon’s Alexa gives praise for Harris and criticizes Trump (CatholicVote)

The Garden State – “I believe New Jersey could be a leader in smaller, local farm production, focused not on feeding the world, but the immediate community. And this example is one to be replicated wherever there is healthy soil, sun, water, and a hungry population for food with taste and health value.” The Future of Farming in New Jersey: Trends, Challenges and Innovations (New Jersey Monthly)

The Continued Power of True Myth – “Cultural Christianity, which used to be the last stop on the way out of the Faith may now be the first step back in. The numbers, so far, are small, but it says something that they exist at all.” The Curious Career of Cultural Christianity (The Catholic Thing)

(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)

Catholic World Report