Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Patrick Welsh, who teaches in the Washington D.C, school system, has diagnosed the problem of poor academic achievement among black students: Making the Grade Isn’t about Race. It’s About Parents.

“Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?”
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class [...]

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Michael Deacon unearthed Polanski comments about the crime he committed: 
Polanski told Martin Amis: 

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

When [...]

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The merde has hit the fan in the Canadian Church: 

An arrest warrant has been issued for a former Roman Catholic bishop from Nova Scotia charged with possession and importation of child pornography. The Chronicle Hearld reports:
The Ottawa Police Service Internet child exploitation unit charged Raymond Lahey, 69, on Sept. 25, 10 days after he was [...]

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If I may quote from my 1998 book Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church:

Both literary critics for whom transgressive is a word of praise and whose hero is the Marquis de Sade, and psychologists who desire an ever-expanding field of sexual; liberation put forward the idea that sex with boys is the next area [...]

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The abortionist George Tiller was apparently killed by a pro-lifer. This has led to attacks on the pro-life movement at innately violent.
The widespread denunciations of the Vietnam War as illegal, unjust, cruel, and criminal, led students at Brandeis to plot the violent overthrow of the government.

On Sept. 23, 1970, Brandeis University woke up to [...]

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Notre Dame did not anticipate the level of criticism it is getting for its invitation to Obama, criticism not only from grass-root pro-life activists, but also from bishops and cardinals. Those who defend the invitation have been rather lame. They claim that the invitation does not show an approval of Obama’s positions on life; this [...]

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Der Spiegel notes this anniversary: The thousand bloody days of the Spanish Civil War ended in March 1939 when Franco marched into Madrid. The killing was not over.

Probably 200,000 human beings were killed in the name of Franco’s name in the Civil War in in the years after the war. But in their [...]

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White-collar perpetrators of fraud are a popular target of rage, with good reason. I have lost a substantial amount to fraud over the years, including some to Bernie Madoff – and I’m not even Jewish. It is therefore extremely satisfying to see such crooks enjoy the hospitality of the Department of Corrections.

The New York Times [...]

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The future Dr. Svensson of Sweden

One possible source of the Vatican’s lax attitude to sexual abusers in the clergy is that the Vatican is staffed by Europeans who consider America’s harsh punishments of crime barbaric.

Sweden, the New York Times reports, has a convicted neo-Nazi murderer in medical school.

Mr. Svensson…was convicted in the 1999 hate [...]

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I have been reading Augustine’s letters. They reveal a lot of how his mind works; they also contain the good and bad things that he embedded in the Western Church.

Augustine interpreted all Scriptures passages and Church practices so as to narrow the scope of salvation. Humanity was a massa damnata, from which a few of [...]

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In Der Spiegel, Slavenka Draculic, a Croatian, writes of why she cannot visit Belgrade: 

Why had I not visited for all of these years?
Was it about “them”? About what “they” did to “us”? Or about what Serbs did to themselves? If I traveled there I would carry two decades of images and emotions with me, [...]

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