Author Archives: Gary Potter
Clicking on the Comment Button
Men have always tended to an exaggerated idea of the importance of events that take place in their own time. They have also always wanted to talk about what seems important to them. We can imagine a circle of them, once upon a time, airing their views over a fire in the back of a cave. Today, of course, other means exist for them to … More →
The Fall of Constantinople
To Americans to whom the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 is already a hazy memory and anything before World War II ancient history, an event in 1453 would seem to be one that took place an immeasurably long time ago. People didn’t even have cell phones then. Yet the event, like the first voyage to the New World of Christopher Columbus 49 years later, … More →
Reacting to Pope Francis
I am a convert. If I wanted to be my own Pope, I’d have stayed Protestant. That is to say, I accept that it is the exclusive right of the Church headed by the Pope, not mine as an individual, to decide what is authentic Christian belief and practice. She teaches, I can only repeat the teaching (and try to live by it). One of … More →
Mystery, Obama’s Brain Research Project (and the Pope)
One supposes it may be seen as in questionable taste to cite one’s own work, but that is what I am about to do here. I hope the reader will indulge me. I’m not simply plugging a book. There is a point. Young Tony and the Priest; Coming to Belief in an Age of Unbelief, a novella by me published by Loreto Publications, is a … More →
Why Human Rights Are Wrong
Modernity offers many substitutes for God and for the Christian religion that was the sole foundation of Western civilization and culture for most of two millennia. Some of these substitutes aren’t what they used to be. For instance, racism, according to which men worship their genes and which was very big in the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth, is no longer espoused … More →
A Culture Against the Grain
I am returning here to a theme I’ve sounded the last couple of times I’ve written for the SBC website, but let me state the premise that underlies what I’ll be saying. It is that the Culture War, first named by Pat Buchanan in a speech he delivered to the Republican National Convention twenty-one years ago, has been lost by mainstream conservatives and the social … More →
Glittering Images
My tongue is not entirely in cheek when I say I have never been able to make up my mind about best-selling art critic and social commentator Camille Paglia. Is she really the bisexual leftwing atheist she professes herself to be? Or, is it possible that is a persona she has cleverly assumed, knowing that the views she often expresses would be derided, at best, … More →
What Have We to Offer?
A month ago this website posted some lines by me in which I lamented that the state of formerly Christian society was fallen so low that probably no more than a half-dozen Americans cared that the Christian interest would not be served by whichever of the two principal candidates for President won in the November election. I could as easily have written of the outcome … More →
Vote Fraud vs. Reality
From the corner where I sit, I see much of the conservative reaction to last month’s election as more dismaying than the election itself. After all, whichever of the two principal candidates won, the country was not going to be measurably better off. Certainly Christian interests would not be served, not that more than maybe a half-dozen Americans care about that. It can’t be more … More →
Observations on the Election
What follows are some observations on the outcome of the November 6 presidential election and what it means for the future of Americans, especially remaining non-Hispanic Catholics who are serious about the religion. The first thing to observe about the reelection of President Obama is that it confirmed what already seemed evident in 2008: middle and working-class whites are no longer a decisive factor in … More →
For Sobran Lovers (I’m One)
There are still persons who will open a book and read instead of watching whatever’s on television or fiddling with an iPhone when they have leisure and whether or not the time is planned. (When they are truly devoted readers, it will be.) I know these persons exist because I am one. Some of us remaining readers rejoiced a few years ago when The Library … More →
The Pope’s Lebanese Trip
Pope Benedict journeyed to Lebanon the other week. In what has been for me the outstanding pontificate of my lifetime as a Catholic (I was received into the Church in 1965), it was one of his finest hours yet. If it is not presumptuous of a layman of no account, I want to offer my tribute to him as pope and as a man. As … More →
Paying for Past Sins, Part II
[Link to Part I] During World War II an untold number of non-combatant Germans, Japanese and others were killed when towns and cities in which they lived were leveled by American bombers under a policy set by U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill. The aim of the policy was to terrorize civilians in enemy countries into refusing to support the efforts of their … More →
Paying for Past Sins
Most readers of these lines will not have been around when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs first on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then on Nagasaki three days later. I was myself only a kid, but clearly remember that although folks didn’t celebrate in the streets of my home town, San Francisco, as they soon would when Japan surrendered, bringing … More →
What Does a Saint Look Like?
When Catholics think of someone in modern time who might be a saint, they seem to think first of all of a person wearing a religious habit or the collar, a sister, priest or pope, Mother Teresa, Msgr. Escriva, John Paul II. It’s even the case with martyrs. Thanks to For Greater Glory, the movie, more U.S. Catholics may be aware of the cristeros today … More →
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