Joseph Molnar

A weekly thread of all Catholic Churches in South Bend: First up, St. Patrick's. Parish founded by Irish immigrants in 1858. The current church was consecrated in 1887. St. Patt's was the first of many Catholic parishes on the West Side and has the tallest steeple in the city!

@chacaranda Imagine the amazing book club conversations that could happen under that roof.

Facing near insurmountable temptation to make the worst financial decision of my life zillow.com/homedetails/12…

@chacaranda If its real people interacting with puppets (muppets) then the chance of AI being involved drops. That alone is a plus.

I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel strongly that this is part of the larger desire for a re-enchantment of the world. The Muppets are central to a healthy American psyche.

South Bend housing boom: According to South Bend-St. Joseph County Building Department data, the City issued 187 new house permits in 2025; this is the highest total ever recorded in the 34-year history of the consolidated department.

@aaron_renn Jason was the first one who connected population decline in Rust Belt cities with declining households. Or at least the first I ran into.

What It Actually Costs to Maintain An Older House - A great article from a while back by Jason Segedy theamericanconservative.com/what-it-actual…

AI is genuinely bad at basic info. This book was indeed published in 1959 - I confirmed with physical edition - as the people edited Wikipedia gets right and Google's AI gets wrong.

Kids are graduating four year colleges - supposedly top colleges! - and do not know how to put together basic memos.

A few years ago, having one or two large multifamily residential projects underway in South Bend would have been a big deal. Right now in the city, at least 18 are somewhere in the development process, from concept to construction nearing completion.

@bf_crane There is an odd sense throughout the film that the congregation does not feel like a "parish". Small things like you say...such as I don't think anyone genuflects when entering/leaving the pews. Still...I enjoyed it.

I wrote about how Wake Up Dead Man feels like a certain kind of Catholic convert: papist aesthetics with an underlying Protestant sensibility angelusnews.com/arts-culture/k…

What's the point anymore of CFB man if this rivalry can die.

This is your sign to log off and touch grass

On top of that...when people still do have hobbies they need to record themselves doing them to post them.

@chacaranda @bf_crane While no @bf_crane, I certainly thought it treated faith seriously.

Need the @bf_crane review of “Wake Up Dead Man” to find out if they treat faith as a serious subject. Then I can decide if I need to get mad before I watch it to get it out of my system.

Come home, Rust Belt.

@jacob__titus working on it, friend.

It's still standing. Run the trains.

South Bend received 3 tax credit awards this round, tied with Indy for the most in Indiana. In total, the three projects will bring $75 million in new investment and 272 new affordable housing units to South Bend.

The first time I bought gas it was $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, then the Great Recession got going full speed and by Christmas I think I managed one time to pay 99 cents. All in 6 months. Its pretty insane gas is still under $4 gallon 17 years later.

@Empty_America @snowset 33 and holding it off best I can x.com/JosephRMolnar/…

@snowset Yes, the decay doesn't actually start until at least 37 for active people with good genes.

I read somewhere long ago that a man peaks and begins inexorably to decay at age 25, so (also long ago) for my 25th birthday as some sort of elegy to my youth I spent 16 days backpacking alone and without resupply in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Turns out that the age of inexorable decay is more like 37, but in any case it was a good way to spend a fragment of that summer. And some parts of you, indeed, do not ever return from the Church.

@jacob__titus @lavitalenta All roads lead through SB

Started Leisure: The Basis of Culture this week (via @lavitalenta) and was surprised to find the translation was published in South Bend in 1998.

rebuilding south bend, house by house

@shagbark_hick @Cooperdavis x.com/chacaranda/sta…

Many people say this but it just... isn't true. And I hate saying that, because I don't want to offend those who've graciously invited me to many such events in my travels, but usually, the discourse at such events is not great. Exceptions seem to be in major cities... but again, they're unaffordable so the gritty dropout element is basically absent.

The reason it feels nearly impossible to quit Twitter is because of the almost complete and total absence of intellectual life in the offline world. There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo. I've been practically everywhere in the US -- the last scraps of that culture were already basically finished in the mid-2010's. After Covid, it's all dead. Everywhere. Even where people swear up and down it isn't dead. Formerly, there were always cheap havens for library layabouts, slacker autodidacts, artists, writers, whatever. Now, basically none exist -- and whatever made the formation of yesteryear's "scenes" possible seems to have come unglued. In fact, the types of people who ever built them seem to be going rapidly extinct. In lieu of robust offline discourse (which is to say discussions that exceed the daily gibbering about who-got-what new UTV, who won what game, and so forth), Twitter discourse comes to the intellectually-starved man like smartphone pornography comes to the randy young "incel." It's almost too tantalizing to stay away from. Hence the jokes made towards anyone who swears they're "quitting X." Yet the more we use it, the more we distract ourselves and shy away from actually BUILDING real-life, IRL iterations of the very thing we seek here. It's a complete trap, and without question, I have fallen into it. Sure -- many will rise to defend the very limited daily chatter that takes place in so many bars and diners, etc. They're right to defend it, but for some people, it is simply not enough. It cannot sustain them. They need to talk about ideas with "ideas men" sometimes. There is nothing wrong with this need -- it has always existed. I'd say we desperately need some kind of a low-rent, cheap "mecca" for academic bums and creative dropouts, but I fear that the formation of one may no longer be possible. Where once the intellectually starved young man struck out for old New York, or for Milan, or for Paris, or whatever -- now, he sates his hunger with paltry surrogates on the internet, and is consequently never moved to action. This has the effect of neutering him; his archetype may well fade into history because of that little piece of glass in his pocket. Very likely, I need to try to build such a haven offline anyway, even if such an effort only constitutes a kind of tragic "last stand." Though I'm re-assessing how exactly I've been approaching this, I'm just not gonna give up. I can't really afford to -- the alternative simply seems to be too bleak.