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The synod was a forum for dissenters from Church teaching, including a woman referring to same-sex ‘marriage' by saying, 'So, until Rome, the larger Rome, says that … Jesus is love, love is love, and we love you.'GRAND FALLS, Newfoundland (LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Anthony Daniels of the Diocese of Grand Falls, Newfoundland held a series of listening sessions with parishioners from his diocese where members of his flock called for massive changes to the Catholic Church, including an embracing of same-sex “marriage.” The diocese released a video called “Invitation to Synod 2021-2023” that was released May 1. Bishop Daniels, who...

First time I've seen him interviewed, ....discussing destructive cultural trends...... he imagines that Hilary Clinton's life has no meaning even to herself if she isn't running for office....

Luke. Leia. Han. Chewie. Artoo. Threepio. All present and accounted for as StarWars.com unveiled the official cast of "Star War: Episode VII" Tuesday. Here's the full release: The Star Wars team is thrilled to announce the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. Actors John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow will join the original stars of the saga, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film. Director J.J. Abrams says, "We are so excited to finally share the cast of Star Wars:...

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldnÂ’t; and neither, frankly, could I. It wasnÂ’t simply that she had been robbed twice during her last five years, having...

THE riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class. They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Readers of National Review need no introduction to Theodore Dalrymple. Under that byline, or his real name of Anthony Daniels, he is a frequent contributor. There's no one quite like him. He's been a doctor and worked in prisons, really coming to grips with the lower depths. Although he reports terrible things, and sometimes has a little gleam of I-told-you-so when reporting something even more terrible than what's gone before, he refuses to abandon his humane instincts and a belief that it's worth fighting for civilization even if the cause looks lost. His very latest book, just published by Encounter...

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in the West, and in the United States in particular. A combination of democracy and mass prosperity had “solved” the political question that had agitated humanity since the time of Plato. There were to be no more grand and transformative, if woefully erroneous, ideas; all that remained was public administration, with, at...

Since I’ve received no education in philosophy whatever, it is no doubt very rash of me to make a broad generalization concerning the subject, but I shall risk it nonetheless: that in the whole history of philosophy not a single important philosophical problem has ever been solved beyond all possible dispute. I know that the late Sir Karl Popper claimed to have solved the problem of induction not merely to his own satisfaction, but also to the satisfaction of all rational men; alas, I do not think that all rational men have reciprocated by agreeing with him. Pace Popper, the...

Is our society losing its way? An interview with psychiatrist and thinker Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. Bernard Chapin: In your essay, “The Roads to Serfdom,” you refer to a famous quote by George Bernard Shaw, who said, “We are all socialists now.” Are we all on the brink of becoming socialists once again? Why do you think, given the oppressive and pernicious nature of this method of governance, it remains politically viable? Dr. Dalrymple: I think it more likely that there will be an increase in corporatism than in socialism. America will not be socialist, but it might be corporatist (there...

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldn’t; and neither, frankly, could I. snip What, exactly, were the qualities that my mother had so admired? Above all, there...

It is one of the evils of evil tyrannies that they seek to implicate everyone in their system, by means of spying, the granting of privileges, etc. But it is not only tyrannies that do this: modern bureaucracies, even in liberal democratic states, do this also. For example, in the British state hospital system (and no modern state does entirely without public hospitals), doctors undergo a compulsory annual appraisal by a colleague, decreed and designed by the administration, without any evidence that it improves performance in any way whatever. Its purpose is not to improve performance; it purpose is to...

Theodore DalrympleChildhood’s End Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations Growing up in today’s England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. NB: This is a fairly long article. I have taken the liberty of skipping the first half --except the two opening lines-- as it deals chiefly with horrific examples of modern day British "childhood". I urge the reader not to skip it.--YD] Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report;...

Oh, to be in England. Theodore Dalrymple: Childhood’s End - Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations Growing up in today's England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. kate greenaway/Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY Growing up in today’s England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report; but in this case, I think it must be right—not because I...

A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it. Yet the British government will do anything but address the problem, or that part of the problem that is its duty to address: the state-encouraged breakdown of the family. If one were a Marxist, one might see in this refusal the self-interest of the state-employee class: social problems, after all, are their raison d’être.

<p>Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused’s state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?</p>

In his essay, The Empire of the Ugly, the great Belgian Sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys recounts the story of how, writing one day in a café, a small incident gave him an insight into the real nature of philistinism. A radio was playing in the background, a mixture of banal and miscellaneous chatter and equally banal popular music. No one in the café paid any attention to this stream of tepid drivel until suddenly, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet were played. “Mozart,” Leys says, “took possession of our little space with a serene...

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) is a retired English psychiatrist who spent most of his career working on the grounds of an urban prison, an experience that he chronicled in a regular, haunting column for the London Spectator. He recently retired to France but continues to write voluminously for outlets such as the Daily Telegraph, the New Criterion, and the City Journal. He is the Dietrich Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of the slender, devastatingly argued volume In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (Encounter Books). BC: Dr. Dalrymple, would you say...

Separation Anxiety Divorcees are bad for the environment. Do environmentalists care?27 December 2007A small item in the British Medical Journal recently caught my eye. It was a brief digest of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the environmental impact of divorce. Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale.One of the interesting questions that this little piece...

When President Bush described the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as cowardly, he chose precisely the wrong word. (He was not the only person to do so, but he was the most important one to do so.) In fact, it was a very courageous act: for it requires great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded. Not many people have that degree of courage: I certainly don’t. The two Islamic militants whose telephone call was...