Friday Links – March 2 2018

Forget horror, is the mystery novel too much for Catholics to handle? "As gritty as the worlds of Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe were, and as tough as these P.I.s could be, they weren’t nihilistic, having a strong sense of justice and a code of honor. In the Detection Club of the 1920s-1940s, whose members included G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and John Dickson Carr, there was a consistent moral code and 'play fair' ethos, with rules devised by Sayers, Carr, non-member S.S. Van Dine, Monsignor Knox, even outsiders like A.A. Milne and T.S. Eliot."

If you have an appreciation for flags and the battle of Lepanto, Fr. Z has just the thing for you. "A group dedicated for the defense of persecuted Catholics around the globe (Ordo Militaris) has designed a faithful reproduction of the famous flag of Lepanto to raise funds for their organization."

Hannah Arendt reminisces about meeting W.H. Auden. "In the 1940s there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether."