Category: Personal

Last year, I was trying to find a statue of St. Lawrence for our kitchen. One of our readers in Switzerland (maybe our only reader in Switzerland?) found one, and was kind enough to send it back to the States via a priest-friend of his.
After months of logistics, the statue (which was described here) finally made it to the Johnson home. I had intended to put it into a niche, which I built by hand after designing it around St. Lawrence’s dimensions. Unfortunately, there was something blocking the space where I intended to put the statue, so I ended up building a shelf for him. You can see the result here:


Many thanks to our kind reader, and may God bless you in abundance.

Two congratulations are in order for Pete Vere:
1. Canada has a new Conservative government. Of course, on the American scale, that’s equivalent to a squishy Republican government, but it’s a vast improvement.
2. Pete has a conversion story in the current issue of This Rock, published by Catholic Answers (but not available online, alas.)
Let us all be happy for him.

A merry Christ Mass to you all, and thanks for your prayers during this election campaign. It has been so intense that it will be nice to have a week off to spend with family. As I do every year, I wrote a Christ Mass essay.
This year’s essay is a tribute to a Catholic gentleman named Raymond. It borrows its title from an old New Covenant article called The Gifts Not Under the Tree.

It’s the Marine Corps’ 230th birthday today. Mackubin Thomas Owens has a birthday essay in NRO which is worth reading. Three institutions instilled in my whatever virtue I possess: my family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the United States Marine Corps. I am eternally grateful to them all, but today I will be lifting a glass in honor of the latter along with some of my brothers.
May the Corps continue to protect the United States with vigor and fidelity. May the enemies of freedom continue to fear and hate the name “Marine.”

I know some of y’all out there are parents, and that most of you care about what gets dumped into your kids’ souls. We gave the kids a hand-me-down computer a few months ago, and there are a few Web sites we let them visit. My question is this: What is the best Web-site blocking software? Our needs are simple: we want to block all sites unless my wife or I permit them.
Our oldest child is six, and I seriously doubt he can figure out how to defeat access-control software. The safest thing would be to filter sites at the router, which I could do, but it would be a pain for my wife.
Your thoughts?