1. ON SLEEP AND DREAMS

   by John Wilson7 . 29 . 22
   

We all have our peculiarities, some of which we prefer to conceal while choosing to broadcast others. One of my quirks, if it can be called that, is that I have been fascinated by sleep and dreams ever since I was a small boy in the 1950s. When I was about eight years old, I saw the Devil in a dream so powerful, it left a lifelong impression. In seventh grade, I checked out a Freud omnibus from the Pomona Public Library, digested his interpretations of dreams, and pronounced him ridiculous, a judgment I was never required to modify. Over the years, I have read an absurd number of books about sleep and dreams—most recently, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, by David M. Peña-Guzmán. (By the way, it’s fascinating to compare the title of that book with one I reviewed for The Lamp Magazine last year, When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold.) Some of these are only tangentially relevant (Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, for instance); I just can’t help myself.

In that piece for The Lamp (a delicious magazine that you should check out if you haven’t already), I mentioned that “geriatric” sleep and dreaming get short shrift from researchers and writers, a striking deficiency of which I became aware only when my wife Wendy and I entered our seventies, in 2018. We seem to dream as much as we always have, so far as we can tell, but—as I reported—the quality of our dreaming is markedly inferior. How strange, at a time when so much is written about our aging population (much of it repetitious drivel, to be sure), that this subject has been relatively neglected.

Of course (you may have had the same thought already), in addition to being a compelling subject for research, this could serve as the premise for a satirical novel. True, it would for the most part appeal only to older readers, but as we are reminded ad nauseum, there are a lot of us. Maybe a good but aging novelist could go enjoyably wild and achieve an unlikely bestseller. (When Brains Dream suggests the possibilities: sleep labs! What could go wrong?) And in an entirely different vein, it would be lovely to have a slim philosophical meditation on sleep in old age, to put on the bedside shelf next to Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Fall of Sleep.

As a modest public service, perhaps serving to prime the pump, here are a few mostly firsthand reports. It’s interesting that in my dreams, I am never old (nor am I very young). I honestly can’t remember even a single exception. Rather, I am an indeterminate age, neither “old” (as I am now in truth) nor “young” (as I once was). Wendy says much the same, though now and then she has a dream in which she is a girl. My dreams now tend to be much more fragmentary, less “well-shaped,” than they used to be; often I can hardly remember them when I wake up, whereas in the past I could often remember them in some detail. I do not have as many truly “good” dreams as I used to, but blessedly they do come now and then, leaving a sense of great felicity and thankfulness.

I am convinced that there are times when God speaks to us through dreams, as he did in many instances revealed in Scripture. In the course of a lifetime, I have experienced a few such, which I will not relate here. (I know also that, fallible as we are, we believers are capable of imagining a divine communication that is no such thing.) We have had many missionary friends over the years, who have been serving in a great variety of places; it is striking how many of them have recounted instances in which someone not yet a “Christian” has seen Jesus in a dream and has come to faith thereby. I have several close friends here in the United States who were led to faith by the agency of dreams.

For all the foolishness and deception and sheer twaddle attaching to dreams (we all know that sinking feeling when someone is about to recount a dream to us), it is a great error to dismiss or belittle this dimension of our experience.

John Wilson is a contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at The Marginalia Review of Books.

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Bob Dylan Abuse Accuser 

Drops Case Following Allegation She Destroyed Evidence

The artist's lawyer says it's "outrageous that it was 

ever brought in the first place."

Bob Dylan speaks onstage at the 25th anniversary MusiCares 2015 Person Of The Year Gala honoring Bob Dylan at the Los Angeles Convention Center on February 6, 2015 in Los Angeles. Michael Kovac/WireImage

AAn unnamed woman who claimed Bob Dylan sexually abused her as a child in 1965 has withdrawn her lawsuit permanently, a day after Dylan’s attorneys accused her of destroying key evidence and “irretrievably” compromising the integrity of the case.

In a lawsuit filed last year, the woman alleged that Dylan abused her over a six-week period in 1965, leaving her “emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged.” The artist’s lawyers quickly called the case “false, malicious, reckless and defamatory” and a “brazen shakedown masquerading as a lawsuit.”

But at a hearing on Thursday (July 28), the plaintiff – identified only as J.C. – suddenly asked the federal judge overseeing the case to dismiss it “with prejudice,” meaning it will be permanently closed and cannot be refiled. The move came after she was accused of deleting key messages and threatened with monetary sanctions.

“This case is over. It is outrageous that it was ever brought in the first place,” said Dylan’s lead attorney Orin Snyder of the law firm Gibson Dunn, in a statement to Billboard. “We are pleased that the plaintiff has dropped this lawyer-driven sham and that the case has been dismissed with prejudice.”

J.C.’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.

The unnamed woman claimed that Dylan had sexual abused her multiple times at Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel in April and May 1965. She said he provided her with drugs and alcohol and “exploited” his status as a musician as part of a plan to “sexually molest her.” Such allegations would typically be barred by the statute of limitations, but the case against Dylan was filed just before the closing of a one-year window under a recent New York statute that allowed past victims to sue their alleged abusers.

Rock historians and Dylan experts quickly cast doubt on the allegations, saying they seemed to be refuted by historical documentation that showed that Dylan was away from New York City for most of April and May 1965. The accuser later filed an updated version of the lawsuit, claiming the abuse instead came during “several months in the spring of 1965.”

Thursday’s abrupt dismissal came amid increasing chaos in the case, including stern warnings from a judge about potential sanctions, the sudden departure of the accuser’s attorneys, and, this week, bombshell accusations from Dylan’s camp that she had deleted key text messages and emails.

At a July 15 hearing, Judge Katherine Polk Failla said that Dylan’s attorney Snyder had alerted her that the accuser had failed to turn over emails and text messages by a court-ordered deadline. According to a report by Law360, she warned the accuser’s attorneys that they might face serious sanctions if they did not comply soon: “For the love of god, produce these materials,” the judge told the accuser’s lawyers. “You understand the consequences if you don’t.”

Days later, the accuser’s attorneys notified the judge that they had been fired from the case. The lawyers — Daniel W. Isaacs and Peter J. Gleason – said they had been “discharged by the plaintiff as her attorneys,” but did not include any explanation for their termination. Dylan’s attorneys quickly criticized the move, saying it appeared to be “designed to evade court-ordered document production obligations and the threat of sanctions.”

Then on Wednesday, the plot thickened: Snyder and Dylan’s legal team sent a letter to Judge Polk advising her that the accuser had still not produced “dozens of critical emails we know exist,” even after the threat of sanctions. They said that included key messages in which she was discussing and “casting doubt” about the core allegations in the lawsuit.

Even more serious than a blown deadline, Snyder told the judge the messages in question had been likely been destroyed by the accuser – a massive breach of the rules of litigation in any case.

Dylan’s attorneys told the judge that the evidence “strongly suggests Plaintiff has destroyed evidence directly relevant to the central factual allegations in this litigation, and that the evidence may be lost forever. This would mean Plaintiff will never be able to comply with her discovery obligations and the integrity of these proceedings and Defendant’s ability to mount a fair defense have been compromised irretrievably.”

The letter asked for “case-ending sanctions and monetary sanctions,” and said the issue would be addressed at a hearing on Thursday.

 

1. JESUS THE CARPENTER

   by Kari Jenson Gold1 . 18 . 22
   

My husband and I recently left the city after a lifetime on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Following in the footsteps of Chip and Joanna Gaines, or better yet, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (that sublime precursor to the inferior The Money Pit), we had dreams and visions along with considerable trepidation. We were more than aware of the potential pitfalls of old homes, and friends warned us of both financial and marital ruin. Indeed, we could recite every line of dialogue from the scenes where the Blandings reel from structural mishaps.

But in the event, working closely with our contractor and carpenters has been one of the most surprising and rewarding revelations of our lives. Expensive, yes. But profoundly fulfilling. The crew members were skilled, imaginative, and hardworking. They were also kind, thoughtful, and funny. They took enormous pride in their work, and finished each day with the tangible results of their labors. I talked with one of the younger men (a former Marine) who is apprenticed to the master carpenter, and he spoke of the joys of his job. Every day, they literally build a home for someone. They change people’s lives for the better in immediate, obvious ways. They don’t think or write about beauty. They make it.  

Yet they have a hard time finding young people who are willing to sign up for this sort of work.  Programmed to attend college and find a job doing something with computers, most are unwilling to contemplate another sort of life. The Ivy League makes a lot of noise about changing the world for the better, but produces mostly hedge fund bankers and consultants. It’s way past time that we upend our priorities, rethink our assumptions, and imagine entirely new ways of educating our youth. The young man restoring an old home is or should be worth more than a McKinsey employee. The farmer producing food in a sustainable and compassionate manner is of greater value to the community than another DEI administrator for Facebook. We need to return to the notion of vocations and guilds, and move away from the obsessive focus on college.

Even as I was pondering these ideas, Pano Kanelos, former president of St. John’s College (my alma mater), announced the founding of a new educational institution, the University of Austin. Dedicated to the “fearless pursuit of truth,” the university seeks to counteract the indoctrination, groupthink, and censorship that now plague academia. Many of the advisers are prominent academics and journalists who have been unjustly “cancelled” by woke mobs and their supine institutions (full disclosure: I know some of those who are involved). 

I had assumed there would be some pushback to UATX, but I was astonished by the vitriol—and how much of it came from learned academics and graduates of our country's most elite universities. Those involved with UATX were denounced as “right-wing grifters,” “white supremacists,” “transphobes,” and “bigots.” The orgiastic frenzy was breathtaking. The reaction was so extreme, and so ugly, one had to wonder what exactly everyone was afraid of. Established academia, in particular, had a field day for weeks.

The contrast between these recent ugly displays and our time with the carpenters was so stark, so arresting, that I could not stop thinking about it. The daughter of a professor, I had always venerated the life of the mind, the idea of the ivory tower, a place set above and apart—even while recognizing the day-to-day flawed reality. But I have started lately to wonder if there is something inherently pernicious in a life devoted exclusively to the mind. In Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, the protagonist Harriet Vane ponders this very question after a particularly disturbing murder is committed in one of the Oxford colleges. Absent a grounding in the physical, in the stuff of daily life, does one necessarily “lose touch” with reality? Does some sort of distortion occur that permits, indeed encourages, the incubation of perverse and destructive ideas?

After all, we have the academy to thank for a world that can no longer admit the difference between a man and a woman, and for a world no longer permitted to say the word “mother”—unless it’s helpful when defending abortion. Of course, this disconnect from reality has a great deal to do with the rejection of God; danger arose when the post-Enlightenment university began to question God’s presence, leading inevitably to the current state of affairs in which God need not apply at all. Recall that Harvard erased God from its motto years before Princeton got rid of Woodrow Wilson. An ivory tower that explicitly excludes God is a dangerous place.

Grounded neither by the daily labors of the body, nor by a relationship with the Father, today’s academy has rejected both our embodied nature and our creaturely nature. We do so at our peril.

Human beings need to read and they need to plant vegetables in the ground. They need to write and they need to clean. The life of the mind can be a precious, beautiful thing, but divorced from the physical, and isolated in an ivory tower that has cancelled God, it leads inexorably to corruption. Jesus, after all, was a carpenter before becoming a rabbi. The disciples were fishermen. Paul, the one academic among them, was happily torturing Christians until he fell off the horse.

So while UATX is a welcome alternative to the current academy—a bold, defiant project in a terrified, woke world—we also need to rethink on a larger scale, envisioning all sorts of new physically and theologically grounded ventures. And perhaps my alma mater’s motto, Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque—“I make free adults from children by means of books and a balance”—might be retooled for a new college of the future to read: “I make free adults from children by means of books and a balance and a handsaw.”

Kari Jenson Gold’s most recent piece for First Things was “Give My Regards to New York.”

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1. WOMAN, HEAL THYSELF

   by Kari Jenson Gold7 . 26 . 22
   

The Church of England isn’t sure what a woman is. “There is no official definition, which reflects the fact that until fairly recently definitions of this kind were thought to be self-evident, as reflected in the marriage liturgy,” said Rev. Robert Innes. Our most recent Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, isn’t sure what a woman is either. “I’m not a biologist,” she said. Normal people, who know exactly what a woman is, are afraid to speak up. How did we get here? What happened?

Will it surprise anyone if I tell you we women are to blame? From Eve onward, we have possessed an extraordinary ability to make trouble for ourselves. And the past fifty years have been especially disastrous; our collective instincts have often been destructive rather than creative, self-defeating rather than empowering.

The feminist movement of recent history has held one sacrament supreme above all: abortion rights. But such feminism—that of abortion rights, and its attendant wage servitude and hook-up culture—has brought nothing but confusion, misery, and despair to all involved. Poll after poll, survey after survey, indicates that women are more unhappy now than they have ever been—at least since such studies were undertaken. And an ever-increasing number of young women and girls have now decided they are, or want to be, men, mutilating themselves in the process and filling their bodies with hormones that will make them forever infertile.

Meanwhile, abortion on demand has succeeded primarily in letting men off the hook. They got casual sex with zero accountability; we got a lot of ho-hum sex. Most women don’t actually enjoy sex without emotional attachment. How absurd to have to point this out: Men and women are different, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. We have more than two millennia of literature, art, and science exploring such differences. But today, we are supposed to forget all that.

The feminism that places abortion rights above all else rejects women’s raison d’être, namely, the procreation of the human species, and replaces it with what, exactly? Better a slave to the marketplace, apparently, than a slave to your own child. This sort of feminism views women merely as inferior versions of men, as people handicapped by a uterus. It posits that women will only ever be free if they deny their ability to give birth. In a just world, the logic of this feminism runs, women will be no more bound by biology than men. Both freed—to make money for the state.

But abortion is not justice for women. It is vengeance on the unborn. And, appallingly, women seem so desperate for power, they will grab it any way they can. If necessary, by murdering their own unborn children, any time, for any reason. Shout your abortion. Congratulations, ladies. You finally found something so powerless, it cannot fight back: your own baby.

The #MeToo movement of the past few years is, in part, a reaction to the confusion sown by abortion-above-all-else feminism. The natural consequence of a culture of sexual license and no accountability, #MeToo may have seemed like a movement for justice, but it became, in practice, an opportunity for women to settle old scores, take revenge on old boyfriends, and destroy lives with impunity. “Believe All Women” is a ridiculous slogan. Women lie all the time, just like men. 

In all too many cases, #MeToo is not justice. It is vengeance. And ultimately, the fallout, both professional and romantic, will harm women. Men will be reluctant to socialize at all with female colleagues, and entry to the “old boys’ club,” for which we once fought, will be barred again.

Romantically, of course, it’s a disaster. Only the brave, or very good-looking, will feel comfortable even approaching a woman. When every encounter, flirtation, or unhappy love affair can come back to haunt and ruin a man’s life, he will have to think long and hard before engaging in any sort of relationship at all. And increasingly, this is what seems to be happening. Marriage continues to decline, and birth rates have plummeted. Indeed, young men now report having less sex with women than ever before. It seems that most have settled for online pornography—much safer than a real woman.

Imprisoned by jargon and rigid rules, paralyzed by an imagined fragility, today’s young women must find happiness not in relationships, but in obsessive online activity. Might I suggest that flirting is far more enjoyable than tweeting? It is one of life’s greatest pleasures, but we have now produced a generation of women who regard compliments they didn’t ask for as abusive. 

In a world where all is understood through the lens of power, love is impossible. Women will always be destined for unhappiness if they choose power over love. A feminism that cares only about power and freedom from others, rather than love and freedom with and for others, is doomed to failure.

And, indeed, one need only look at the world we have helped bring about. Why are we now demeaned as “people with uteruses,” “bleeders,” “birthing people”? Don’t blame the trans activists. They’re only taking brilliant advantage of the ammunition we gave them.

We must bear much of the responsibility for this linguistic and existential confusion. When we understand ourselves as essentially inferior versions of men, handicapped rather than blessed by a uterus, eventually everyone else will too. Women are no longer regarded as extraordinary, complicated, mysterious humans blessed with the astonishing and supreme power of growing and giving life. No, they’re just weaker, non-men burdened with a uterus.

The Church of England does not know what a woman is—but we do. A woman is an adult, human female with two X chromosomes. And we might point, as an example, to Mary, a poor, unmarried, young Jewish woman from Nazareth, whose “yes” to God is history’s single most consequential choice since Eve chose the apple.

Change our thinking, and we can change the world. It’s time, ladies, that we heal ourselves.

Kari Jenson Gold’s most recent piece for First Things was “Jesus the Carpenter.”

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ALL BODY BUILDERS ARE GAY? DISCUSS.

 

C.S. Lewis on Pornography and Masturbation

·                                                                                                                                                 C.S. LEWIS

In "Mere Christianity" C.S. Lewis identified a factor in the astonishing growth of pornography.

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis
1898-1961

"There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips…. We grow up surrounded by propaganda in favor of unchastity.  There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us.  Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance.  God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome."

The Weight of Glory

In The Weight of Glory he summarizes a man's battle with pornography. 

"If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.

"Lying on that study sofa…I had sensations which you can imagine.  And at once I knew that the Enemy would take advantage of the vague longings and tendernesses to try and make me believe later on that he had the fulfillment that I really wanted.  So I balked him by letting the longings go even deeper and turning my mind to the One, the real object of all desire, which (you know my view) is what we are really wanting in all wants… "

In some letters, Lewis writes:

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.

"And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.

"For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival.

"Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.

"In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself…After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in.  Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process.  The danger is that of coming to love the prison.

"The evidence seems to be that God sometimes works such a complete metamorphosis and sometimes not.  We don’t know why: God forbid we should presume it went by merit.

"He never in my unmarried days did it for me.  He gave me –- at least and after many ups and down, the power to resist the temptation so far as the act was concerned.  Never did he stop the recurrent temptations, nor was I guarded from the sin of mental consent.  I don't mean I wasn't given sufficient grace.  I mean that I sometimes fell into it, grace or no…

"The great discovery for me was that the attack does not last forever.  It is the devil's lie that the only escape from the tension is through yielding."

 

 

        GOD BLESS THIS NUN!

 

We'll have nun of that! Italian nun splits up two female models as they kiss for a photoshoot - calling it 'the devil's work' before declaring 'Jesus, Joseph and Mary!'

·         Models Serena de Ferrai and Briton Kyshan Wilson were kissing in a Naples street

·         The elderly nun in her habit broke them apart and said it was the 'devil's work'

·         She made the sign of the cross while the two models giggled behind her 

 

This is the moment a furious nun split up two female models as they shared a kiss for a magazine photoshoot in Italy.

The unidentified nun – dressed in her all white habit – saw red as she walked past Serena de Ferrari and Briton Kyshan Wilson taking part in the shoot in a Naples backstreet.

Dragging the two women apart as they locked lips, the nun shouted:' What are you doing? This is the devil's work,' as the women giggled at her outburst.

The unidentified nun – dressed in her all white habit – saw red as she walked past Serena de Ferrari and Briton Kyshan Wilson

Both women – who also star in a popular Italian TV soap called Mare Fuori were taking part in the shoot for Not Yet magazine.

The nun reprimanded the camera crew and the two women before crossing herself and saying: 'Jesus, Joseph and Mary.'

Make up artist Roberta Mastalia, who was on the shoot, said: 'We were on location in the Spanish Quarter in Naples, in a little sidestreet with the two models when all of a sudden the nun walked past.

'She asked us if we had been to Mass that day and when we said 'No' she started blaming young people for Coronavirus and then she saw the two models posing up ready to kiss and that's when she ran forward to split them up.

·          

The women – who also star in a popular Italian TV soap called Mare Fuori were taking part in the shoot for Not Yet magazine

·          

Dragging the two women apart as they locked lips, the nun shouted:' What are you doing? This is the devil's work'

'Our first reaction was we were all stunned the new took it as a bit of a joke and in fact a you can see from the video the two girls are laughing.

'We then had to ask the nun to leave as we explained we had work to do and she slowly walked off.'

Serena posted a still from the video on her Instagram page with the comment: 'God doesn't love LGBT' while London born Kyshan, 19, also uploaded it onto her feed.

Antonello Sannino, of a local gay community group Arcigay, said:' It was homophobic behaviour from the nun but at least she wasn't aggressive. It seems as if the nun was quiet outraged by what she saw which would be understandable if it was another era.'

Local priest Father Salvatore Giuliano said: 'The Church has always been updating its views but in all walks of society, even in ours, some members, maybe of the older generation have not kept up with the latest changes.

·          

The nun reprimanded the camera crew and the two women before crossing herself and saying: 'Jesus, Joseph and Mary'

'I embrace this nun, who simply had the same reaction as any of our grandmothers would have. Within the Church a feeling of understanding has begun and this has started through Pope Francis who recently met for the first time with a transsexual in the Vatican.

'Yes, much work still has to be done but it's becoming increasingly clear that love between two people of the same sex is no longer taboo in any environment.'

The Catholic Church in recent years has changed its views on same sex relationships but it's teachings say sex between couples of the same sex as a 'mortal sin'.

It outlaws same sex marriages but has outlawed same sex unions.

In 2013, Pope Francis famously said: 'Who am I to judge gay people?' while two years ago the Argentine pontiff said in a documentary by Evgeny Afineevsky that 'homosexual people have a right to be in a family... they are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or made miserable over it'.

The Vatican later attempted to clarify the comments saying they were taken out of context and did not indicate support for same-sex marriage.