John Updike once wondered whether people no longer attended church because they’d lost the ability to listen or the ability to sing. Andrew Sullivan attends mass and discovers that what makes Catholic ritual cohere are the physical and communal. In Substack, Sullivan celebrates Catholicism’s teaching of humility – while warning about the civilizational threat posed by the Manichean, uncompromising zeal of pseudo-religions like Wokeness.
The Frigid Isle
Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”
