Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 14

‘The Dadly Virtues’ Finally Charts in ‘Fatherhood’

After asserting the patriarchy by dominating Amazon’s “Motherhood New Releases” last week, The Dadly Virtues finally charted in the Fatherhood category. The patriarchy will not be denied.

‘The Francis Effect’–Now on Twitter!

This story by Matthew Gambino is a classic:

A journalist who has been covering the Vatican for more than 20 years has never seen anything like the effect Pope Francis is having on the world.

John Allen, a veteran Vatican watcher formerly with the National Catholic Reporter newspaper and now with Crux, a Catholic news website of the Boston Globe newspaper, points to two facts about the pope’s huge popularity.

At 19 million followers on the social media site Twitter, the pope is “the most popular spiritual leader on the planet,” Allen said. That’s more followers on Twitter than the next highest such leader, the Dalai Lama (10 million), but in the middle of the pack with basketball star LeBron James and pop singer Miley Cyrus, also at 19 million.

A more solid measure of popularity is a Pew Foundation study cited by Allen that showed an astronomical 80 percent approval rating among all United States citizens, and 90 percent among American Catholics.

Nowhere in the piece–nowhere–does Gambino mention the fact that the attrition rate among American Catholics has dramatically increased under Francis for the first time in years. And it’s not like Gambino didn’t try to look at actual numbers:

The much-touted “Francis effect” has at this point led more to a greater curiosity in the Catholic Church, more so than in actual church attendance, although half of the pastors in the Diocese of Rome have reported an increase in attendance, Allen said.

Again: We don’t need anecdotes! We have actual numbers! And the numbers tell us that “Catholicism is losing members faster than any denomination.”

But you know, Pope Francis has totes got the Twitter working. So who needs people in the Church and receiving the Eucharist? That’s so 2005.

More ‘Dadly Virtues’

Over at the Free Beacon there’s an adaptation of Matt Continetti’s chapter up–it’s great. And the Standard has an excerpt from my introduction to the book. Which, by the by, will be “officially” on sale next week.

There Is No ‘Francis Effect’

Or at least, not the kind that people say there is.

The next time someone pushes “the Francis Effect” around by way of explaining how super-duper awesome and popular Pope Tambourine the Holy Father is, please send them to this piece about how, just within the last couple years, the net attrition rate for American Catholics has increased.

This doesn’t prove that Francis is responsible for these losses, but at the very least it puts the lie to the idea that Francis has been the source of a resurgence for the Church as New York Times editors and anti-fracking environmentalists across our fruited plains suddenly lifted their hearts to Rome.

How to Run the GOP Debates

Jonathan Martin has a piece on the logistical problems with running a series of GOP presidential debates where there are 12 (or even 17) candidates.

My (only) half joking idea is to run them like the English Premier League: Start by having two tiers of debates for candidates, based on their national poll numbers. Say, Tier A for candidates over 5 percent and Tier B for candidates below that.

Run the A and B debates in the same venue on consecutive days.

And after each series, you relegate the worst two performers from Tier A to the B pool, and elevate the top two performers from Tier B to the A pool.

I know what you’re thinking. How do we decide who these top-two/bottom-two finishers are? Easy: Twitter.

Schism Watch

BREAKING: Vatican officially recognizes `state of Palestine’ in new treaty.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 13, 2015

It would be pretty funny if someone would go and photoshop David Souter onto the throne of Peter.

Instant Classic

Last night was the AEI launch for Dadly Virtues and it was pretty great: a nice crowd, lots of laughs, no hugging or learning. And then Tucker happened.

Here’s my gift to you: Below is the full event (which will air on C-SPAN eventually) but if you cut to the 52:00 mark, you get to Tucker Carlson’s unbelievably awesome performance piece.

If this doesn’t make you want to buy the book, then I’m all out of ammo.

Amazon

I’m gratified that The Dadly Virtues seems to be doing okay. Better than okay, even, because as of just now it’s a “#1 New Release” on Amazon! In the category of . . . Wait for it . . .

 

WaPo on ‘Dadly Virtues’

Carlos Lozada has a very nice review of Dadly Virtues in the Washington Post. You can read it here.

Quick Amazon note: The Kindle version is up and running now, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Police and Transgenderism

Hoover’s Richard Epstein seems to be (less or more) with me on police reform. But that’s not what really caught my eye in his essay. It was this sentence:

No one knows the exact figure, but a decent estimate tells us that there are about 900,000 police officers in the United States.

The reason this jumped out at me is that in writing about the transgender debacle at Smith College I took a brief detour to look at the estimates activists give us for transgender numbers in the United States. The line they push is 0.3 percent of the population. That may seem small, but keep in mind that gay-rights activists spent a generation insisting that 10 percent of the population is gay, but the real number turns out to be 1.6 percent.

So in order for us to believe that 0.3 percent of America is transgender we’d have to believe that there’s one transgendered American for every five gay Americans. Or, to put it in another context, we’d have to believe that there are as many transgendered Americans as there are police officers.