Quote of the Week

Whether I understand women or not, however, is beside the point of these columns.

The point is I like them, on the whole more than I like men.

I am an incurable male chauvinist by the standards of the radical feminist. I admire women's bodies greatly.

I also enjoy their minds.

And their attention and their affection and their concern.

I like them strong, I like them smart, I like them pretty (and that need have little to do with age).

And, God help me, I like them Irish.

I like them a lot.

So that's why I write about them.
--Andrew M. Greeley, A Piece of My Mind... on Just About Everything

My comment:

Well, I don't necessarily like my women Irish but apart from that, I'm more like Mr. Greeley than I care to admit sometimes. It must be a Catholic thing...

R.I.P. Andrew M. Greeley

American Catholic priest, writer and sociologist Andrew Moran Greeley -- most famous for his numerous fiction and nonfiction books about Catholicism -- finished his last prayer on May 29 at age 85.

He will be missed.

Quote of the Week

I am obviously not arguing that discrimination against the Irish or the Italians or the Poles is or was anything like that which our black brothers have had to endure, but I am suggesting that bigotry is by no means a lower-class phenomenon and that compassion among the elites is by no means universal. And yet, an attitude of compassion towards one group mixed with bigotry towards another group is, in the final analysis, intolerable -- intolerable on moral grounds because it is hypocritical and intolerable on political grounds because it is self-defeating. The intellectual who “loves” the blacks and the “poor” but has contempt for the Irish or the Italians or the “middle class” is in the final analysis every bit as much a bigot as the blue-collar worker who “hates niggers,” for both are asking, “Why Can’t They Be Like Us?” And to this titular question in this book there can be but one satisfactory answer: “Because they don’t want to be and in the United States of America, they don’t have to be.”
--Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can’t They Be Like Us?: America’s White Ethnic Groups

Movie Song of the Week: “Bye Bye Life”

I have no idea whether or not the Angel of Death would look anything like Jessica Lange. In fact, the one woman in my life who looks anything like Jessica Lange actually saved me from a premature death back in 2004. But it says something about Bob Fosse's vision that Lange's performance as the Angel of Death in 1979's All That Jazz received an endorsement from priest/author Andrew M. Greeley of all people. And I kinda like it too -- though I would probably envisage my angel as looking more like Salma Hayek or Dolores del Río.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this week's number. Even if you disagree with Ms. Lange's performance, the song is still good.