“the waters are always smoothest and even most polished when they pour over the precipice.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) [with particular reference to those topics on which polite society and the Establishment stifle debate]

“Al Gore prefers to say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition...’ As a rule, folks with a faith tradition tend not to call it such. At Friday prayers in Mecca, the A-list imams don’t say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition we believe in killing all the infidels.’”

Mark Steyn's “Happy Warrior” column in National Review Dec. 13, 2004

“When the art of controversy comes back, it will not come from the world of sceptics and iconoclasts. It will come rather from the world of believers and of dogmatists. It will not be the work of men who merely ask questions, but of men who believe that they have found answers. It will come out of the clash of real convictions, which are positive and not negative; not from those who say: ‘What is truth,’ but from those who can still say: ‘This is truth’; not from Pilate but from Paul.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 8, 1922, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.

In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that optimism is a psychological condition and generally fatuous, while hope is a theological virtue, in public affairs as in life more generally.

In my latest Epoch Times column I ask where the campus protests and encampments are over dreadful treatment of women and gays under in Afghanistan… even if you don’t get to blame Jews.

In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.

“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”

Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].