Catching up after the silly season

Although we could be tempted to think that, for us, the silly season is now a permanent and unseasonal reality ..

Anyway:

Fr John Hunwicke on the patrimony of Anglican Catholics, particularly as regards the questionable methods of 'modern' biblical scholarship and that elusive but immediately recognisable "Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone." He should know ... [here] 

The recent Ashya King story has raised some disturbing questions as to the integrity of the family in the face of the suffocating  'benevolence' of the modern liberal State. Not a few news reports ran with the underlying theme that this particular family was 'religious,' so inevitably both dangerously weird and automatically in the wrong ...
This is their MEP Daniel Hannan's reaction.

Sadly, priest and fellow blogger, Fr Mervyn Jennings SSC has died. May he rest in peace. He will be very much missed.

Cranmer has had a long series of posts in the last few weeks about the nature of Islam and its own inherent difficulties in combating the contemporary attraction of fundamentalism.

Peter Hitchens makes another plea for restraint and for more of a historical sense from the leaders of the West as regards the escalating situation in Ukraine. After the acres of print used up this year in analysis of the causes of the Great War, it is astonishing how we fail to see parallels or draw conclusions. One wonders how literate our politicians really are .... 

And, a real silly season story - perhaps or perhaps not oblivious (when is self-deprecation ever really meant in the post-modern context?)  to the log in his own eye, the novelist and ubiquitous media presence, the aptly named Will Self attacks George Orwell on the BBC as a 'literary mediocrity.' [here]
You would think he would be able to recognise that when he reads it ... 
But one can't help feeling that Mr Self really hates Orwell, not for his prose style nor his disputable prescription for writing clearly and intelligibly, but for his very Englishness, in certain circles as desperately unfashionable in Orwell's day as it is now ....