In which I excoriate Pope Francis as stupid and Pope Benedict as weak, and call for a wholesale purge within the Roman Catholic Church. (The written version of this review was first published March 30, 2018.) Written versions, in web and PDF formats, are available here: ttps://theworthyhouse.com/2018/03/30/book-review-change-church-pope-francis-future-catholicism-ross-douthat/) We strongly encourage, in these days of censorship and deplatforming, all readers to bookmark our main site: https://www.theworthyhouse.com and to subscribe for email notifications of new posts. The Worthy House does not solicit donations or other support, or have ads. You can subscribe for email notifications here: https://theworthyhouse.com/subscribe-by-email Other than at the main site, you can follow Charles here: https://twitter.com/TheWorthyHouse https://gab.com/TheWorthyHouse This and all Worthy House narrations are offered with accurate closed captions (not auto-generated). "Ross Douthat has a job that is, I would guess, either enviable or unpleasant, depending on the day—that of being the only regular conservative contributor to the New York Times. A frequent focus of Douthat’s is that most counter-cultural of doctrines, orthodox Roman Catholicism. If you want to suffer, you need only visit the comments section in the Times for any Douthat column, especially one on Catholicism. Exposing yourself to the firehose of bile and stupidity there will show you what Purgatory will be like, although perhaps Purgatory will be an improvement. Undaunted, Douthat now offers a full-length book on the changes being brought about by Pope Francis." . . .

The third book in Jünger's (unrecognized) trilogy about tyranny—not in the abstract, but how to live in relation to, and what to do about, tyranny. Any relationship to current events in the West is pure coincidence, of course. The written version of this review can be found here: https://theworthyhouse.com/2022/02/28/on-the-marble-cliffs-ernst-junger/ We strongly encourage, in these days of censorship and deplatforming, all readers to bookmark our main site: https://www.theworthyhouse.com and to subscribe for email notifications of new posts. The Worthy House does not solicit donations or other support, or have ads. You can subscribe for email notifications here: https://theworthyhouse.com/subscribe-by-email This and all Worthy House narrations are offered with accurate closed captions (not auto-generated). "As the twenty-first century grinds on, with history returning in spades, Ernst Jünger, German warrior and philosopher, grows more relevant every day. This book, On the Marble Cliffs, I view as his third book in an unrecognized trilogy advising us how we should conduct ourselves under different types of tyranny. It fits with two other books, more famous, The Forest Passage (1951) and Eumeswil (1977), which also parse freedom and oppression, each with a different focus and tone. This book, fiction both dreamlike and phantasmagoric, is lesser known and even harder to grasp than the other two. Yet it serves the same purpose: to instruct us how an individual in society should act when threatened by, or subsumed by, tyranny." . . . .