pomo update 23.0
Nick Leeper, pride Masses, & America250
announcements
Join Plough Quarterly for
“Another Life is Possible: Living Well in the Age of the Machine,” a conference featuring friends of pomo like Susannah-Black Roberts, Matthew Gasda, Chris Arnade, and Stephen, from 7/10-12. Get tix here.
The launch event for their Summer Issue in Central Park on 7/15 at 5 pm. More details to come.
Check out our friend Colin O'Brien’s awesome RedBubble shop where you can get cool stuff like this:
too reel
Check out our latest reel from our interview with Julie Bindel about why Americans are OBSESSED with being on the right side of history:
latest pod
Nick Leeper SJ joins the pod to discuss his recent art exhibit, Andy Warhol, being a Jesuit, what constitutes sacrilege, and plays a round of "hot or not" with us. Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
pomo people elsewhere
Emmett Rensin reviews J.D. Vance’s new book in The Dispatch
Histories have been written about the great political conversions: Constantine to Orthodoxy for victory in battle; Henry VIII to Anglicanism for a divorce; Henry IV, of France, to Catholicism in order to ascend the throne in Paris. But J.D. Vance may be the only political leader in the history of the known world to convert to Catholicism in order to become Protestant.
Valerie Stivers asks if violent incels dream of orgies in the sky in UnHerd
The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless.
Stephen on
how the infamous Pride Mass is more an example of puritanism than heresy in No Pomo
Americans can’t bear the idea of anyone saying—or even thinking—that they or even their behavior is immoral. When the reality is that yes, you often are behaving immorally. Sometimes you are not in a state of grace. You are a dirty sinner. Join the club! God still loves you anyway, and you can go to confession at some point.
what Pope Leo XIV can learn from Greek communists about what sexual ethics has to do with social justice in First Things
Pope Leo XIV is right to insist that Catholics should not harp endlessly about sexual ethics, to the exclusion of witnessing to more essential aspects of our faith—the redemptive love of Christ crucified and the joy of the gospel. Yet Catholics must beware the false dichotomy between sexual ethics and social justice. Eleven years after Obergefell v. Hodges, Greece’s rogue leftists, Day, and Leo XIII offer a compelling counterpoint.
on why zoomers are less supportive of gay marriage than previous generations in The Dispatch
In the face of state and corporate endorsements of all things LGBT, the idea that more and more young people—who, by virtue of their age, are more likely to be contrarian—are rejecting the idea that gay marriage is “normal” is a bit more comprehensible. Yet we can’t chalk up these statistics to mere countercultural posturing.
It appears that part of the newfound indifference or opposition to gay marriage transcends matters of politics or economics. Namely, the youth are tapping into something about the nature of homosexuality.
from the archives
Stephen, Matt McManus, and a few other friends of pomo were recently invited to speak at Sublation Media’s event on America’s 250th anniversary. In addition to going on a tirade about how the excessive use of air conditioning is emblematic of everything that is wrong with American liberalism 250 years later, Stephen explained his love/hate relationship with his home country, drawing upon:
our pod discussion with Mr. McManus, in which he tried to convince Stephen that liberalism is good, and that democratic socialism is the best way forward
Stephen’s follow-up essay reflecting on how Matt almost convinced him that liberalism is good
Stephen’s review of Shadi Hamid’s book in Metropolitan Review, in which he explain why he, as a millennial snowflake, can’t bear to celebrate anything having to do with America…while also conceding that American liberalism is kinda a necessary evil
I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing American flag-themed apparel, let alone flying the flag in public. I go out of my way to make sarcastic, biting jokes about America’s hypocrisy on national holidays, and scoff at my parents — loyalists to the Democratic Party — when they repeat the well-known bit about how “despite its many flaws, this is still a great nation.”
Yes, I’m a millennial. How could you tell? Like many of my peers, I’m prone to a deadly combination of pessimistic cynicism and utopian idealism. To most of us, the claim that corruption and injustice are bugs and not features of the American Project is a mark of being démodé, in denial of the truth, and insufferably cringe.