Friday Links
St. Brigid by Patrick Joseph Tuohy
January 31, 2025
“Uses of Water” by A.M. Juster
Kazuo Robinson reviews Ali Smith’s Gliff
Constellation of Genius: Miłosz, Camus, Einstein, and Weil by Cynthia L. Haven
Student recounts five days of flames by Avedis Maljanian
How Should Catholics Respond to the Immigration Crisis?
“Uses of Water” by A.M. Juster
A lovely poem from A. M. Juster for the feast of St. Brigid, which, of course, is offers another opportunity for the Irish media to make their perennial and entirely predictable claim that a saint is actually a pagan goddess and Christianity co-opted everything from the pagans and turned into a religion used to control the masses.
Kazuo Robinson reviews Ali Smith’s Gliff
The narrator of Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff, is a thirteen-year-old named Briar. Various critics have thought Briar to be either male, female, or non-binary, and some have declined the question and referred to Briar as “he or she.” This confusion is intended by Smith. In any case, Briar and a younger sister named Rose live somewhere in the future, seemingly Britain, under totalitarian arrangements, though with only intermittent adult supervision because they are separated from their mother and her boyfriend, Leif. Their brave mother blew the whistle on her employer, a weedkiller company, and now Briar and Rose, evicted from their home, are “unverifiables,” people with no records who are nonetheless watched and, as much as possible, controlled. They give false names and watch for where the cameras and microphones are; smart phones and watches are now more blatantly instruments of volunteered surveillance, and some civilians are vigilantes.
Constellation of Genius: Miłosz, Camus, Einstein, and Weil by Cynthia L. Haven
Beavers were hunted to near extinction in Europe by mid-century, but in America, they thrived. For the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, they would have held an obvious fascination. They are muscular animals; they can carry their own substantial weight when building a lodge, which can total three tons. And though they are, to all appearances, dumpy, heavy rodents, when they plunge into water, they are as sleek as otters. One of these odd creatures moved Miłosz to make perhaps the most significant decision of his life, though he would see that only in retrospect. He would write about it years later in France—but he was far from Paris on that day, on one early winter morning before dawn in the winter of 1948-49.
Student recounts five days of flames by Avedis Maljanian
The news cycle has moved onto other things, but the devastation of the California fires has not come to an end. The suffering was, and remains, immense. In this article, Hillsdale student Avedis Majmanian recounts his family’s experience.
My family’s phones screamed with alerts at about 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7: The nearby Eaton fire required the immediate evacuation of our Altadena neighborhood. We’re used to wildfires in California and our neighborhood is often afflicted by the foul smell of smoke, but this night was different from anything we’d seen before — and it would change our lives forever.
We initially assumed the message to be a precaution. When we saw the flames racing toward us from the mountains above our neighborhood, however, we realized the fire was more dangerous than we’d thought.
How Should Catholics Respond to the Immigration Crisis?
James Hankins offers one take, of the many, many takes that are out there, on how we might respond to the illegal immigration crisis:
The issue before us now is no longer whether it was right to “break into our country” in the first place—it was not—but what is the most humane way to treat the huge number of persons now unlawfully present. Can an illegal act that previous administrations and some state governments left unpunished, and even tacitly encouraged, be turned to a good purpose? Can we find a common sense solution that benefits our country?
