The Monthly Salon: April
And some reading for the month
Greetings all. I’m busying myself with various essays and reviews which will be coming up here over the next few months, so today it’s your turn to take the reins. The Monthly Salon is a space where you set the agenda, and talk about whatever you like. Please don’t be shy - especially if you’ve not commented before. New voices keep things fresh.
If you’d like a prompt or two, here is a varied clutch of articles from around the web that I’ve found interesting recently:
Michael Warren Davies digs into the Prayer of St Ephraim the Syrian, which we Orthodox types pray daily during Lent.
Writing on the publication of Britain’s Cass Report into the pushing of gender ideology onto children by … well, just about everyone in authority, Mary Harringon makes the connection which I have made here in the past between transhumanism and what she calls ‘gender leftism.’
On the same topic, Andrew Sullivan wonders if ‘Big Trans’ will ever be held to account for the madness it has helped spawn.
While we’re talking about the ongoing impacts of the Sexual Revolution, Jonathan Van Maren thinks you can know a society why whom it chooses to honour.
N. S. Lyons writes a really interesting little essay-cum-book review on the vexed question of whether the West is ‘re-paganising.’ I’ll be exploring this here in future. His answer is more thoughtful than most.
Yoshi Matsumoto makes a blisteringly entertaining argument for the existence of organised religion.
Finally, over at Unherd, Freddie Sayers has an important exposé of the global ‘disinformation’ industry and what it is really up to, which turns out - surprise, surprise - to be the censoring of ‘unacceptable’ political views.
Feel free to talk about any of these or none of them. Over to you.
A bit marginal, perhaps, but I've found myself unexpectedly *obsessed* by the journalist James Delingpole's podcast The Delingpod.
It's odd, and it won't be to everyone's taste here. But it's fascinating, and I hope you give him a try. James is a former mainstream journalist, right of centre, who wrote somewhat lightweight pieces for several big papers - so, a named columnist with a lot to lose.
But during the pandemic he smelled a big rat, went massively "off-message", found Jesus, and is now fighting what he sees (as many here do, too) as the coming totalitarian night. His journey has been rapid, radical and very destabilising to his own life - but inspiring, too. Some of his views are frankly odd, but others are growing on me fast, and some of his guests are extraordinary. I've been struck in particular by Simon Elmer, Miri AF, Scrumpmonkey, Brian Gerrish, John Waters, but so many others, too. His sessions with his brother Dick are utterly lovely - daft, divagatory, teasing - and they model (for me) what a brotherly relationship could be.
Who knew... that a right-wing gadfly with (ordinarily) an assured mainstream career could find a depth of integrity and grow up into one of the most courageous, fearless and open-minded voices of our dark times. As if PG Wodehouse woke up one morning to find himself morphed not into a beetle but into George Orwell.
I follow Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, both evolutionary biologists, for their critical examination of what is being passed off as “the science”. Covid and gender dysphoria have been among their main topics. Bret also presents compelling discussions of what we are experiencing—a loss of sense making, a distrust in institutions we used to rely on for factual information, a crumbling of what used to be shared values, an insistence that we not believe there are objective truths. Why is this happening, he wonders. If information is power, then information must be made unreliable, even unavailable for some so others can be in control. So we were lied to about covid, scared with misinformation, even threatened. It was an experiment to see how compliant we could be made, and it worked. Even now we have to search for information about the so called vaccine’s adverse effects (it was really gene therapy, but “vaccine” is a much nicer word). Medical institutions deny there are adverse effects and continue to recommend boosting, even though there is plenty of information they are unsafe and should be abandoned. “Gender affirming care” is an abomination, a rebuke of common sense, yet it continues. Why? Are our brains being reprogrammed to accept nonsense? To genuflect to a new reality determined by—-who? And why? Power. Control. “We will own nothing and be happy.”
The only antidote I see to this insanity is trust in God.