This month we lead with my review (being an editor has some perks) of Abigail Favale’s 2022 work The Genesis of Gender. I’m afraid this review was a bit delayed as I lost my original notes from my first reading of the book and so had to start from scratch. In fact the book deserved a second reading because of it’s depth of analysis of a phenomenon that continues to dominate our age: Gender Ideology. Sometimes I do wonder if the West is entering (or have even already entered) a new totalitarian system on a par with that of the Marxism which held Russia and so many other countries in thrall for the greater part of the twentieth century. Certainly many parallels are already perceptible: the quasi-religious character and appeal of the two ideologies Marxism and Gender Ideology; the fanatical animus both inspired against their opponents; that Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular being the one institution which holds its ground against this ideology – and pays the price for doing so. I would like to have my fears proved unfounded, but there is nothing yet that makes me feel that it is the case.
Michael Kirke in his In Passing column this month presents the thought of the great French intellectual Rene Girard. Interestingly Girard presents the attacks on Christianity (which is the hallmark of ideology) as an effort to restore a mythical pagan world. Favale too distils the essence of Gender Ideology down to a worldview completely antithetical to the Judea-Christian view of creation as gift before which the human response must be receptivity.
James Bradshaw takes a look at the recently published The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020 by Diarmaid Ferriter – “an outstanding historian, though “at times it appears that some RTÉ producers mistakenly believe he is the only Irish historian of our time” – which looks like an impressive work which is left flawed by the author’s personal basic assumptions which lead him to fail to interrogate “the massive increase in the number of women in the workforce from the early 1990s onwards” and to present a (predictably) one-sided treatment of secularisation in Ireland in the period examined.
We haven’t carried many reviews of books of a more scientific nature (though I am still in the process of reviewing the rather mammoth Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer) but this month Fr Patrick Gorevan has reviewed a very interesting book on what modern science has to say on the existence of God and of the soul: Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death by Fr Robert Spitzer S.J. Spitzer shows the overwhelming evidence that an intelligent creator is required to produce the kind of universe that modern science increasingly reveals to us to inhabit. In the words of the one-time atheist Sir Fred Hoyle: “some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom”.
Unusually we carry reviews of two (very different) films this month. One, Matt Walsh’s Am I a Racist?, occupies the strange genre of a comedy-film-documentary in the same vein as his earlier What is a Woman? In this latest production “Walsh plays a bespectacled and bewigged character, ‘Matt,’ who goes on an antiracist journey of self-discovery and self-improvement, infiltrating various DEI-themed gatherings along the way. The hilarity and cringe that ensue are poured out in turns, and in equal measure.” Having seen the film myself I can confirm that it does hilariously unmask much of the insanity (and venality) of the Woke movement in the USA though with many moments of almost unbearable cringe. And the deception used to trick unsuspecting adherents of Wokeness into appearing in the film left this viewer at least feeling a little uncomfortable.
Our second review is of a film which is much closer to home, and one which I for one will never subject myself to: Small Things like These in which Cillian Murphy plays a native New Ross in 1985 who unwittingly stumbles on the horrors of a local Magdalen Laundry. Having seen the trailer was enough to know that this film would be well worth missing – however I do recommend you do read James Bradshaw’s excellent analysis of the film to know more.