Christopher Isherwood once compared Oscar Levant to a character out of Dostoyevsky: “completely unmasked at all times.”  This piece, masquerading as a review of some newly released recordings, gives a taste of what that means.

A nice profile of Sr. Helen Prejean, of "Dead Man Walking" fame.

A history of the Plague.  Did you know there have been three "great pandemics" across human history that we know of?  The Justinianic (6th-7th centuries AD), the Black Death (14th century on), and the as yet unnamed "Third Pandemic" of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Yikes.  

A really good blog post – – essay, really – – about how historical scholarship on the history of sexuality in America does and does not take account of religion.  It contains a good lit review of the scholarly work, and concludes with a model syllabus! A bit old now, from 2014, but still good. 

As ever, infrastructure is a vital topic, though rarely discussed outside esoteric engineering and city planning circles.  For people like me, who live "in" rural areas (but actually in a very developed town in the midst of an otherwise rural area), this is something that is felt quite directly; kids in the same high school have different levels of access to web-based resources, and even class assignments.

What is the future of conservativism?  Well, what is the current status of the GOP as an institutional host for conservative blocs?  Not good, it seems.