All of this leads, and not all that circuitously, to the question of snark, the spirit of negativity, the personal animus pushing ahead of the intellectual or critical agenda. Snark is, I believe, prompted by the terrible vacuum feeling of not mattering, not connecting, not being heard; it is fueled by rage at the same. If writers and critics felt similar aggressive urges in the past—and of course they did, for personal, if not cultural, reasons—they were held back from venting, if not by an inner sense of decency, then by a more externalized awareness of prohibition. Cheap shots were not to be taken—not in the public arena.
During Brood X's 1970 emergence, Bob Dylan...added to the immortality of cicadas with a song he wrote about the occasion, "Day of the Locusts" [catching] the eerie appeal of the cicadas' sound:
And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill,
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.
And the locusts sang with a high whinin' trill,
Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me . . .
Dylan is one of a long line of artists smitten with cicadas. J.G. Myers, whose 1929 book "Insect Singers" records much of cicada lore, preserves these lines from an ode to the insect attributed to the Greek poet Anacreon: "You are worthy of the homage of mortals, you, the charming prophet of summer. The Muses love you." Out of the East comes this haiku from the Japanese poet Saren, as translated by Japanologist and cicada-lover Lafcadio Hearn:
Fathomless deepens the heat;
The ceaseless shrilling of cicadas mounts, like hissing fire,
Up to the motionless clouds.
Once the eggs are laid, the adults begin to die, and they will all be gone by early July. The eggs will mature, and provided they have not been eaten, young cicada nymphs will hatch out of their nests in August. Each one smaller than a grain of rice, they will drop to the ground and work their way into the soil, not to be seen above ground again until 2021.
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Loved it..loved it. I love Catholics and Catholicism even though I disagree on a few things - but what an amazing story potential brought out in TPOTC and the Catholic aspect of the story -- which I was able to get outside myself and forget about the Mariology and just dig the story and what they did with Mary. The closing scene - the Pieta - what a stroke of genius.
Perhaps Bud McFarlane has overdosed on religion. Orthodox Catholics have to lighten up a bit and put the religious stuff aside once in awhile. We all need to relax and realize that orthodoxy is only worthwhile when it proceeds from knowing the love of Christ.Then I read Rev. P.J. Michel's book responding to those who feel a dryness in prayer:
You are all day occupied in natural gratifications and frivolous amusements, intent on seeing and hearing all that is said and done, losing no opportunity for useless conversations, listening to any evil report against your neighbor; always distracted, occupied with the actions and interests of others without a thought for yourself, your eternal interests, and your salvation; prolonging this dissipation of mind and heart to the very beginning of your prayers, to which you hurry at the last moment, and without stopping to reflect for an instant on what you are going to do; and you imagine that all this distraction and dissipation will suddenly disappeear, and that recollection and devotion will as suddenly replace them, clam the tumult of your passions, reawaken at once in your heart sentiments of faith, piety, and love. In good sooth now, do you really expect such a miracle? You have scarcely once thought of God during the day, you have not had toward Him those sentiments which are his due...
Among her rival print columnists, there are few left who believe anything but that the prescription for society's ills is voting for the Good Guys, whoever they may be, next time around. King's own treatment would probably involve great quantities of benzene and a Zippo. Anyway, the very job of freewheeling "culture commentator" is dying out: as she never quite gets around to asking in Stet, Damnit!, how can you have a culture commentator without a culture?
Ten years is an awful long time to urge logic and clarity on a country that issues hunting licenses to the blind, devises lightweight hand grenades for female combat soldiers, and puts warning labels on balls of string.
What are big girls made of?
--Marge Piercy (1936-)
Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th century:
century of the ultimate lady
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting.
Paniers bring her hips out three feet
each way, while the waist is pinched
and the belly flattened under wood.
The breasts are stuffed up and out
offered like apples in a bowl.
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper
never meant for walking.
On top is a grandiose headache:
hair like a museum piece, daily
ornamented with ribbons, vases,
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy
of a hairdresser turned loose.
The hats were rococo wedding cakes
that would dim the Las Vegas strip.
Here is a woman forced into shape
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:
a woman made of pain.
How superior we are now: see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors.
She runs on a treadmill every morning,
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt,
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles,
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food
hungry, always hungry:
a woman made of pain.
If only we could like each other raw.
If only we could love ourselves
like healthy babies burbling in our arms.
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed
to need what is sold us.
Why should we want to live inside ads?
Why should we want to scourge our softness
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting?
Why should we punish each other with scorn
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?
When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?
"What's up with Jehovah Witnesses? They believe only a fixed number are saved. So they're evangelizing someone who might be taking their place?"
Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives.
--Isak Dineson, "Out of Africa"
Worlds
For Alexander there was no Far East,
Because he thought the Asian continent
India ended. Free Cathay at least
Did not contribute to his discontent.
But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more
Serene. To him it seemed that he'd but played
With several shells and pebbles on the shore
Of that profundity he had not made.
Swiss Einstein with his relativity -
Most secure of all. God does not play dice
With the cosmos and its activity.
Religionless equations won't suffice.
--Richard Wilbur
Parable
I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide
Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory lay wherever turned the fable.
His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes
Were heavy, and he headed for the stable.
--Richard Wilbur
Apologists for Senator Kerry's inanimate disapproval of abortion contend with the problem, for instance Mr. Ono Ekeh. He has the unenviable role of administrator of "Catholics for Kerry."
Its pitch on this issue is that Senator Kerry's war on abortion is most subtly conceived. You see, most abortions are had by the very poor. "John Kerry's vision for America is a pro-life vision that will ultimately reduce the frequency of and need for abortions" — after Mr. Kerry has eliminated poverty. Perhaps the candidate should be asked: Would it be reasonable to prohibit abortion for women who are millionaires?
My Thoughts: First off, I don't judge Bud Macfarlane; Nathan aptly quoted St. Josemaria Escriva concerning someone else: "It's true that he was a sinner. But don't pass so final a judgment on him. Have pity in your heart, and don't forget that he may yet be an Augustine, while you remain just another mediocrity." As Fr. Groeschel says, "we're all poor sinners".
Obviously one wonders what went awry. And perhaps I'm wrong, and it's pure supposition, but maybe it comes down to prayer. Bud once said, and I can relate: "I doubt anybody in the Vatican will be considering canonizing me as an example of mystical contemplative prayer." I have a sense that this article was a recognition, in the midst of his marital woes, that something needed changing in that department. He says that, "My goal here is not to berate you if you do not have a prayer life. I have fallen short myself until recently, so I am the last one who can possibly criticize you." I think it emphasizes how true it is that you are only as good as your prayer life. How crucial the quality - and not quantity - of prayer! Love is only derivative - from God - we can't ex nihilo it.
I asked a priest on a retreat last year why it is that so many of our priests failed in their chastity vows and so many of our bishops failed to protect young people. He said that I was "only" asking him to explain the mystery of iniquity! Well, they call it a mystery for a reason. Some mysteries are too deep. Would that God make our wills a little less free since it's the freedom that can lead us away from God?
Her thoughts: It often happens that people with a specific temptation they're fighting work hardest and loudest at it. Perhaps just as Jimmy Swaggart lashed out publicly at pornographers in an effort to preach hard truth to himself; Bud McFarlane may have started E5 men to help himself sanctify his own marriage. It's probably not so much that he was "Mr. Marriage" all along, then suddenly snapped--the "wonderful marriage extension" of his CatholiCity ministry was probably an act of public desperation, trying to stave off what he believed to be inevitable.
There are always two sides to every story. Satan loves to take down leaders. He must be pretty desperate to divorce her. I haven't heard a peep from his side; I wonder if he is perhaps too gentlemanly to give details. Nor, on the other hand, have I heard about any co-respondant.
THE PASSION COMES TO BRITAIN [John Derbyshire]
Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is about to open in Britain. Damien Thompson, editor of The Catholic Herald over there, got a pre-screening. He thought the movie, taken as a movie, was a bit cheesy, but welcomes it as a cultural phenomenon anyway: "This curiosity [i.e. about the movie] has been stimulated, ironically, by the very lobbyists who have declared premature victory in the culture wars: secularists and multi-culturalists. Nominal Christians say to themselves: if these ghastly people hate our inherited faith so much, there must be something going for it. And so they ring up the Odeon to book tickets for Saturday night. The wild success of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST has forced us to revise our assumptions about the inevitability of secularisation. If such a bad film can do this, what might a good one achieve?" Read the whole piece here.
I must say that at low points I wonder if my own faith is not as much negative as positive -- I mean, inspired not so much by the message of the Gospels as by revulsion at the sneering triumphalist arrogance of the Christ-haters. Hey, maybe I will go to see THE PASSION... Posted at 09:28 AM
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How frequently, fearing the labor we encounter in fighting against our evil inclinations, we ask God to free us from them, but it would seem that the conditions are that He is to do all and it is to cost us nothing. We aspire to the miracle performed for a St. Paul. It sems as though we said: 'If this inclination be displeasing to God, why does He not deliver me from it? Why does He not change the feelings of my heart? He has changed others in a moment." Waiting for this miracle to be performed in our favor, we, meanwhile, do nothing ourselves, and do not heed the voice of God whispering to our soul. Such dispositions, as you must see, are not apt to draw down upon us the mercy of God. Whosoever expects to serve God without doing violence to himself, contradicts the words of Jesus Christ.
Others, again, are free from such foolish presumption, and are kept back in the path of virtue fromtheir over-anxiety about their difficulties, and from their deep conviction that they can in nothing obtain merit; their whole mind is absorbed by this, and their only petition to God is to change their state. They hesitate to follow the lights and pious inclinations which God gives them, because not finding in themselves the particular graces which they are bent upon obtaining, and which they persist in asking for, they fear they are deceive...Did they only profit by those graces, although not such as they asked for, they would soon obtain what they desire, but which they cannot expect so long as they resist God.
It is always from want of instruction, or from inattention to that which we have received, that we are led to form unreasonable expectations...There is no doubt that the Almighty can perform miracles, but He has promised them to no one. Therefore have we no reasonable right to expect them, either to help us in our wants or to guide us in our actions.
The human condition of Haiti grows ever more frantically desperate. It is not so much that the country is actually poorer in absolute terms than it was — for it was always very poor — or that (for example) the life expectancy of Haitians is much lower than before. The historically new quality of Haiti's desperation is the population's awareness of wealth and abundance elsewhere, thanks to the media of mass communication to which even the poorest people in the world now have access. If you read Haitian literature of the 20th century, it grows ever more angry and despairing as the century progresses, as the awareness that things could be different increases, although it is unlikely that poverty in the absolute actually worsened as the century progressed. If you look at the pictures of Haitians in our newspapers, they are better or more expensively dressed than they would have been years ago, but the human quality of their lives has declined catastrophically. Modernization without prosperity has transformed poverty into absolute misery. --ANTHONY DANIELS
Time travel is the pornography of eggheads. What reasonably well-read person wouldn't jump in the Wayback Machine if he could? You don't have to be a science-fiction geek to wonder what the day before yesterday looked and smelled and tasted like. Small wonder, then, that filmmakers love to turn back the clock, though they tend not to do it especially well, getting the surface spectacularly right (the best thing about Hollywood is its art directors) and the substance hopelessly wrong.
--TERRY TEACHOUT
From a review of "A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People:
Germans have contributed much more than their fair share to civilization but also to human misery. Gifted as so many individual Germans may have been, collectively they have provided a cautionary tale of how not to organize a society, a nation, and a state. Time and again, they have destroyed their lands and negated their achievements; time and again, some strong man has come to rescue them, only to leave worse carnage and numberless dead...
Much of what Ozment says is thoughtful, though his style sometimes makes for ambiguity or, worse, academic cuteness. But is this apologia true? Are Germans really victims rather than victimizers, and would they all have been Beethovens and Kants if only others had let them? To make his case, he omits evidence that doesn't suit. No mention of the Teutonic orders of knights whose attempts at colonizing eastern Europe survived as factors in the two world wars. No mention of the persecutions that drove Jews to flee to Poland. No mention of the burning of witches. One 15th-century paranoiac by the name of Jacob Sprenger was alone responsible for burning 500 witches in just one year. No mention of the genocide that pre-1914 Germany was practicing in its African colonies. --DAVID PRYCE-JONES
One may surmise, therefore, that John Hittinger is an unusual kind of scholar who blends together Catholic, Straussian, and American concerns and who is driven by the intellectual challenge of finding a Thomistic justification for modern liberal democracy while possessing a keen awareness of the difficulties he faces.
The difficulties are evident in part one of his volume which begins with several chapters on the achievements of Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon. Hittinger clearly reveres these 20th-century Thomists, as well as the college professors from Notre Dame who introduced them to him as a young student. But Hittinger's reverence does not blind him to their shortcomings, as can be seen especially in chapter three, "Jacques Maritain's and Yves R. Simon's Use of Thomas Aquinas in Their Defense of Liberal Democracy."
In point of fact, Hittinger says, Thomas argued that the best regime is not a democracy but a mixed constitution which looks "something like constitutional monarchy." Hittinger concludes therefore that Simon's and Maritain's justification for liberal democracy is "not fully warranted by the texts of St. Thomas" and that their "advocacy of the democratic spirit and the sense of historical progress take Simon and Maritain well beyond the political philosophy of St. Thomas."
But the more interesting phenomenon limned in Chappell's book is this: [Martin Luther] King had a more accurate view of political realities than his more secular liberal allies because he could draw on biblical wisdom about human nature. Religion didn't just make civil rights leaders stronger — it made them smarter.From a Laura Miller column:
Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class.
Whether the topic is welfare, education, the regulation of biotechnology or even the war on terrorism, biblical wisdom may offer something that secular thinking does not — not pat answers, but a way to think about things.
For example, it's been painful to watch thoroughly secularized Europeans try to grapple with Al Qaeda. The bombers declare, "You want life, and we want death"— a (fanatical) religious statement par excellence. But thoroughly secularized listeners lack the mental equipment to even begin to understand that statement. They struggle desperately to convert Al Qaeda into a political phenomenon: the bombers must be expressing some grievance. This is the path to permanent bewilderment.
Classicism comes in two flavors, and while supporters of American foreign policy like to compare America to Athens, those with reservations turn to Rome....The leaders of the American Revolution courted the Roman comparison. George Washington staged a performance of Joseph Addison's play ''Cato'' for his officers at Valley Forge, presumably to inspire them with the austere tragedy of a statesman willing to sacrifice all for the republic. The 18th century was the Augustan age, in which the Stoic virtues of discipline and self-control -- qualities the Romans, in turn, admired in the Spartans -- were prized above the raucous squabbling of democracy in the Greek mode. By 1863, as Garry Wills writes in ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' Romanticism had replaced the Stoic ideal with the Greek Revival, and Athens was no longer disdained for being ''ruled by mobs'' and ''anarchical.'' The transformation has lasted and affected more than politics, as a reading of ''Cato'' shows. In the play, Cato's two sons compete for the hand of a young woman. She prefers the ''graceful tenderness'' of one over the ardent, fiery ''vehemence'' of the other, which she regards with ''a secret kind of horror''; her choice seems bizarre now, in a time when overpowering passion is prized above all in matters of the heart.Thomas Hibbs on Schindler's List (perhaps a weakness of TPOTC was the depiction of the Roman soliders, who are also at "too great a remove" from the typical viewer.)
Everyone wants to be the Greeks -- democratic if disorderly, cultured if impulsive. Nobody wants to be the Romans, with their well-oiled war machine, their vaunted sobriety and their frank imperial ambitions. But even in books intent on characterizing contemporary America as either one, it's possible to find as many differences as similarities.
Some have objected that Oskar Schindler represents the banality of goodness, an ordinary businessman with little apparent interior life who manages to do the right thing and save many Polish Jews from the gas chambers...Yet the film succeeds at doing what historical art aims to do: educate our minds, inform our memories, and foster appropriate sympathy, revulsion, sorrow, and admiration. What is most instructive about Schindler is not just his ordinariness, but the way his entrepreneurial opportunism, his mundane desire for profit, and his willingness to use bribes and other illegal means of persuasion kept him from being swept up into the camp of German true believers and provided him with the skills and habits to engage in systematic deception of German officials.Jonah Goldberg on the CORNER:
The real weakness of Schindler's List is not in the character of Schindler but in that of Goeth, an unhinged psychopath whose intoxicated sadism puts him at too great a remove from the viewer, who is apt to come away identifying the evil of the Nazis with simple madness. In an illuminating suggestion, the philosopher Gillian Rose proposed that a certain conception of an "ethic of service," captured effectively in the film The Remains of the Day (1993), could implicate ordinary human beings in the Nazi system.
The fact that Al Qaeda is calling for revenge for Yassin's killing demonstrates how wars cause everyone to choose sides. That's how wars work. Much like Qaeda's interest in American failure in Iraq, it was in evitable that the terrorist group most dedicated to destroying one democracy would would become a natural ally for the terrorist group dedicated to destroying us. This doesn't mean that there's active cooperation between the two organizations. But it does mean that al Qaeda understands that Hamas sympathizers are natural recruits to be al Qaeda sympathizers. Opponents of America's friendship to Israel will no doubt claim that this opportunistic joining of forces -- at least rhetorically -- could have been avoided if we took the position that Israel's fate is of no concern to us whatsoever. But if that doesn't fit Churchill's definition of appeasement -- i.e. feeding your friends to the alligator in the hope he'll feed you last -- I don't what does.
"The series grew out of a catalog I was editing of books in print," [Edwin] Frank said. "It was broken down into categories such as ‘Italian Literature,’ and I noticed there wasn’t a single book in print by Alberto Moravia.
"That gave me a sense that there was a hole (in publishing) that could be filled."
And fill it his series has, with two titles by Moravia (Boredom and Contempt) as well as with little-known books by under-appreciated writers such as J.R. Ackerley, Joyce Cary, Richard Hughes, Mavis Gallant and J.F. Powers.
Universities concentrate, understandably, on teaching canonical works, tested by time and deemed the greatest achievements in literature. But that sort of vetting can crush lighter, more delicate pieces.
"In college today you’ll read a lot of Virginia Woolf. Of course Virginia Woolf was a remarkable writer, but she was also a remarkable modernist writer, and that is how she’s taught, as a modernist," Frank said.
"There are a lot of books on our list that are modern, but not modernist, and for that reason they tend to get passed over. Richard Hughes’ "A High Wind in Jamaica" is electrifying in its own right. It could only be a 20th-century book, but it doesn’t fit into any of the categories."
Many of the books in the series have had, at one time or another, cult followings. Dog lovers, for instance, have long pointed to Ackerley’s "My Dog Tulip" as one of the very best books ever written on the relationship between man and canine.
Other books, such as Hughes’ "A High Wind in Jamaica", were vastly popular when published, but then almost entirely forgotten — for decades — until Frank or one of his army of suggesters unearthed it and made it a part of the series.
"The picking process is still headed by me," he said. "I’m a committee of one. But I solicit suggestions from our contributors and readers. Probably my biggest resource is the used-book store."
The used-book store is a place, Frank said, where decade-by-decade fashions in literature "overlap and rub shoulders."
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Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother’s milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow
Not reckoning that all could melt and go. — To the Etruscan Poets, Richard Wilbur
--Bill Eichenberger
As George and Amy point out, something went seriously wrong in that generation before the Council, else we wouldn't have had such a rapid and complete collapse. I think what George means by "rule-based formation" is the old model of being told what to believe without it being explained to one. The first priest to do my personal instruction (I bailed on RCIA because it had zero content, and was all about feeling good about Jesus) was an elderly Irishman formed in that system. I appreciated him at first because he cared about doctrine. But I quickly saw that he was unable to explain in any depth why the Church taught what it did. He thought it was sufficient to say, "Look, here's what the Church teaches, accept it if you want to, or reject it, but here's the deal." You can imagine how frustrating that was for somebody like me, who had great sympathy for the Church, but really wanted to know where this doctrine comes from. Yet I don't feel harshly toward this good priest. That was how he was raised.
I'm thinking that a lot of folks in that Conciliar generation were never taught the deeper reason why the Church teaches what it teaches, and when confronted with a culture, but within the Church and outside it, that forcefully challenged the Church ... found that they couldn't withstand the blast.
Let me find a political analogy, and see if that helps. I wrote a cover story for Natl Review that examined in part why the Netherlands went from being one of the most religious and conservative countries in Europe to being the most secular and liberal in a single generation. In a nutshell, it's like this: the Dutch are a strongly consensus-oriented people, very averse to conflict. In the 19th-c., leaders of the three blocs in the country -- the Protestants, the Catholics and the Socialists/secularists -- got together and worked out a power-sharing system, called "pillarization." The idea was that the country rested on three pillars, and that maintaining social and political unity depended on everyone trusting the leadership and falling into line. Disputes were worked out at the top, and everybody stayed in their own little pillar. They even had Catholic grocery stores, Catholic soccer teams, etc. Everybody stayed in his own pillar, and got along fine.
The Second World War broke all that up, and by the time the 1960s came, people began to question why they were still living according to pillarization, and all that entailed (esp. religious devotion). The leaders had no answer for them. And lacking the ability to articulate why it was impt to live this way, the old order collapsed. People had ceased to believe in it, because at some point they had grown comfortable in their belief that the world would always be the way they arranged it.
Holland has never recovered. And because the Dutch are strongly consensus-oriented, when the leadership stopped being able or willing to articulate its raison d'etre, the people crumbled too.
I think that dynamic may explain a lot of why the Church collapsed as it did post-Vatican II, even though in America, the 1950s were a golden age.
"Keep this faith ever by your side to help you on your way and close your ears and have nothing to do with any other, even if I myself should change my allegiance and preach another faith to you or an angel of darkness be transformed into an angel of light to lead you into error...
With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover, there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus. But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in Rome.
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 | According, therefore, to the measure of one's faith in the Trinity, one should proceed without holding back from danger to make known the gift of God and everlasting consolation, to spread God's name everywhere with confidence and without fear, in order to leave behind, after my death, foundations for my brethren and sons whom I baptized in the Lord in so many thousands. |
The danger is that we will try to force the OT into a preconceived Christian mold that does an injustice to it. It is unacceptable, for example, to think of the God of the OT as a vengeful God whereas the God of the NT is all loving. God is often portrayed in the OT as incredibly patient and understanding despite Israel's stubbornness and failings, and the NT contains many references to judgment and eternal punishment that must be placed into the total picture of its message...There is a back-forth flow between them that will remain somewhat mysterious, yet we will be able to appreciate both testaments uniquely for what they say about God and God's relationship with humanity.I've struggled with this concept of differences between different eras, but, of course, God can do anything he wants. To be born in this era of grace, I'm sure Martha would say, is a good thing, and ought to lead to a greater spirit of thankfulness and praise. Everything I've learned from God I've had to re-learn. Many times.
*
Because God's message applies to all times, and not simply to our own, the interpretation of any passage in a given era might be different from previous or later interpretations.
*
The Bible basically provides a means measure the quality and direction of our lives....The canon provides a moral measure of how we stack up against God's expectations.
*
In each instance [of the OT], the covenant [creation, Noah's, Abraham's, Moses', David's] is violated by people. They sin, and God threatens and punishes. But a few good souls always remain with whom God can begin again. And so the pattern continues...until the NT era.
With the coming of Jesus Christ, Christians believe that God has changed the pattern. The NT perspective on salvation history is that in Jesus Christ God has acted definitively with a "new covenant" that can never end. Now, because Jesus' obedience to God's will was perfect, there can be no other covenants. There is no longer need for the pattern to continue in exactly the same fashion. Instead, salvation has been assured in the person of Jesus Christ. But those who believe in him are expected to live out salvation by lives that reflect it. The NT thus does not envision a lad back view of salvation history as if God has done it all, with the result that we human beings need do nothing else.
I once heard the great philosopher Alistair MacIntyre say of one of JP II's encyclicals on moral thought, "Veritatis Splendor," that it was the deepest and most subtle philosophical meditation on truth since Kierkegaard. "Centesimus Annus" is the greatest work among all papal letters on the free society, cultural, economic, and political; add his companion encyclicals, "Laborem Exercens" and "Sollicitudo Rei Socialis," and you have the most distinguished body of reflections on the social and economic order produced by any religious body in any time. His path-breaking discourses on the theology of the human body may be the so far least noted of the bombshells he has left for future generations to unpack.
A priest friend of mine who is no admirer of Pope John Paul II at all, ...told me some years ago that he prayed every day that the pope will go soon to the heavenly destination he has devoutly longed for. My priest friend describes himself as a progressive Catholic, and the church of his romantic dreams he describes as the "Vatican II church." Every day that John Paul II's clear memory of Vatican II, at which as a young bishop (then archbishop) he was a leader, replaces those romantic illusions with a more accurate and rigorous reading, my priest friend dies a little.
"Father Dick," I want to tell him, "It's okay. You're not losing an illusion, you're gaining a more vigorous reality. Buck up! Look at what the world has gained these last 25-plus years! Promise you, he's not likely to live more than 17 more years, when he reaches 100."
Then I imagine 100,000 Poles singing in unison: "Stolat! Stolat! May you live 100 years!"
“It's like another planet." That was the only way one diplomat could describe North Korea. Consider a visit from the Great Leader to a foreign dignitary living in Pyongyang: It would first be determined which particular salon in the forty-room guest palace the Great Leader would visit. Next, just before the appointed meeting, an army truck would arrive. A specially trained team of soldiers would then strip the salon of all furniture, rugs, and wall hangings — right down to the bare floor. A second truck would arrive with replacement furnishings. Among these would be the Great Leader's own desk as well as his personal items and baskets of flowers. In this salon, the Great Leader would exchange ten minutes of pleasantries with the foreign dignitary and then depart. Afterwards, the two trucks would come back in reverse order so that the salon would be returned to its original condition.--William C. Triplett
An ordinary man thinks it enough to do as is done to him; he will think it fair to resent insults, to repay injuries, to show a becoming pride, to insist on his rights, to be jealous for his honor, when in the wrong to refuse to confess it, to seek to be rich, to desire to do well with the world, to fear what his neighbors will say. He seldom thinks of the Day of Judgment, seldom thinks of sins past. Such is the ordinary Christian - and such is not among God's elect.
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This is the highest excellence to which we ordinarily attain: to understand our own hypocrisy, insincerity, and shallowness of mind - to own that, while we pray, we cannot pray aright, to repent of our repentings, and to submit ourselves wholly to his judgment, who could indeed be extreme with us, but has already shown his loving kindness in bidding us to pray.
There once were many millions for Haiti from the World Bank, but the bank says the money bought almost nothing, and it says it will exercise "extreme caution" before it resumes trying to help Haiti.
"Of course the World Bank and the international community gives, but who to?" said the Rev. Willy Romélus, the pro-Aristide bishop of Jérémie. "To the government and to groups that invest a lot of money in bureaucracy, cars and logistics, leaving nothing for the people."...
The United States Agency for International Development and the United Nations plan to spend millions more for Haiti — but there is a sense that it comes with the weariness attached to large-scale, long-running failure.
A smaller scale may work. The Agency for International Development provides roughly 30 percent of the Haitian Health Foundation's $1.2 million operating budget, covering the salaries of three managers and 80 workers like Mrs. Delille, who makes $100 a month.
Two agency officials met Tuesday with Sister Maryann Bérard, a Franciscan nun who runs the foundation, which also builds houses and latrines and runs the only home for expectant mothers in Haiti.
They may have absorbed a lesson Sister Maryann says she learned from her 15 years in Haiti: aid works when it flows from the ground up, not the top down.
God, who is the tender Father of all His creatures, has taken every means to remove that excessive fear which would draw them from Him. To prevent the soul that has become sensible of its ingratitude and terrified at the view of its repeated relapses into sin, after so often obtaining pardon for them --to prevent such a soul from losing all hope and daring no longer cry out to Him from the abyss into which it has again fallen, not only does He assure it, by the mouth of the Psalmist, "That those who hope in Him shall never be confounded," but He expressly declares the positive law of His mercy, and commands us to hope in Him.
Ah! we little know the boundless tenderness of that divine Heart, if we judge of it by our own, or if we imagine that it ever ceases to care for us. So long as we are in this life we are under the law of mercy, and of that mercy we can ever avail ourselves.
Let us then never fear to have recourse to the merits of Jesus Christ. We honor them when we make use of them to obtain that which helps which we need, since it was for this that Jesus Christ vouchsafed to acquire them and to give them over to us...It would be a singular way of honoring them, the not daring to make use of them; it would be going directly against the end which our divine Savior proposed to Himself. In turning from His gifts as useless, we should not be evincing our esteem for them, but only proving our indifference.
The Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men. To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls, who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saone and are vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.
Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from visions...
....though cold by race, [through] her politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world, and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue.
She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic?(she had a little tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so much love his own nation as hate his neighbours...
Nice detail from Bruce Feirstein's column in this week's New York Observer. Feirstein, who is a screenwriter, describes having lunch in a Santa Monica restaurant with ten Hollywood friends. None of them "had actually seen the film, despite offering vociferous opinions about it. Then the Hispanic waiter spoke up. 'I loved it. I usually don't go to movies, but I went to a matinee, on the second day.'"
The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow. ... Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches. Compared to him, the rest of us are only fitfully sentient; and intellectually, too, his sentences simply weigh more than anybody else's. John Updike and Philip Roth, the two writers in perhaps the strongest position to rival Bellow, or to succeed him, have both acknowledged that his seniority is not merely a question of Anno Domini.
...there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between the Jewish sensibility and the temptations - the inevitabilities - of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, "At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life." The archaic rule is sombre, blood-bound, guilt-torn, renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomised, unreflecting, and unclean.
Bellow has presided over an efflorescence that clearly owes much to historical circumstances, and we must now elegiacally conclude that the phase is coming to an end. No replacements stand in line. Did "assimilation" do it, or was the process something flabbier and more diffuse? "Your history, too, became one of your options," the narrator of The Bellarosa Connection (1989) notes dryly. "Whether or not having a history was a 'consideration' was entirely up to you."
Love is celebrated for, among other things, its transformative powers; and it is with love, in concert with his overpowering need to commemorate and preserve ("I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten"), that Bellow transforms the world...
There's book put out by Tan called, "Purgatory". The book should be condemned. It's a violation of the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent said that it is wrong to teach people that Purgatory is like Hell.* - tortured heading based on this
And that book quotes St. Catherine of Genoa, and it quotes her out of context. [Fr. Groeschel has written a book of St. Catherine of Genoa, whom he calls 'the Mother Teresa of her time'].
Let me quote St Catherine: "As they die the holy souls understand the reason for their Purgatory the moment they leave this life. After that moment that knowledge of that reason disappears. Immersed in charity, incapable of deviating from it, they can only will and desire pure love. There is no joy save that in Paradise to compare with the joy of the holy souls in Purgatory. This joy increases day by day because of the way in which the love of God corresponds to that of the soul."
They don't tell you that in that book. I wrote to Tan that they should not publish that book. It is true that there is suffering in Purgatory, but it's a lot better than this. I can't wait. Having been born in Jersey City, let me tell you Purgatory is upscale.
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Poetry of Witness
“It’s just horrible,” she said
“and I don’t understand why
people didn’t form a human chain
and stop the trains from entering the camps.
That’s what I’d do,” she said.
She wasn’t there, of course,
wasn’t even born,
but she felt strongly,
repeatedly nodded her head,
wrote a poem
and won an award
instead.
--Michael S. Glaser
What is prayer? It is commonly held to be a conversation. In a conversation there are always an "I" and a "thou" or "you." In this case the "Thou" is with a capital T. If at first the "I" seems to be the most important element in prayer, prayer teaches that the situation is actually different...
Conversion requires convincing of sin... in this "convincing concerning sin" we discover a double gift: the gift of the truth of conscience and the gift of the certainty of redemption. The Spirit of truth is the Consoler.
--John Paul II
Could you change the format to dark letters on light background? Believe me, it's much easier on the eyes. Keep up the good work.It wasn't my insights that provoked that email, it was screen resolution. Glad to have changed it, but I wonder if she's still reading because I've never heard from her since.
Midway though the first act of Frank McCourt's The Irish and how they got that way, a pair of players speak briefly of the Irish male in love: "An Englishman who wants to propose says 'Darling, I love you, will you marry me?'"observes one to another, who ripostes: "An Irishman asks: 'Mary, how would you like to be buried with my people?'"
The punch line usually gets a laugh, layered as it is with allusion to the quirkiness of gender relations among the Irish, the preoccupation with death, and the recognition that romance renders many among this poetic people laconic. -Maureen Dezell, "Irish America"
True faith is not shown here below in peace, but rather in conflict; and it is not proof that a man is not in a state of grace that he continually sincs, provided such sins do not remain on him as what I may call ultimate results, but are passing on into something beyond and unlike themselves, into truth and righteousness. As we gain happiness through suffering, so do we arrive at holiness through infirmity, because man's very condition is a fallen one, and in passing out of the country of sin he necessarily passes through it.
I clambered down the hill to Archettes and saw, almost the first house, a swinging board 'At the sign of the Trout of the Vosges', and as it was now evening I turned in there to dine.
Two things I noticed at once when I sat down to meat. First, that the people seated at that inn table were of the middle-class of society, and secondly, that I, though of their rank, was an impediment to their enjoyment. For to sleep in woods, to march some seventy miles, the latter part in a dazzling sun, and to end by sliding down an earthy steep into the road, stamps a man with all that this kind of people least desire to have thrust upon them. And those who blame the middle-class for their conventions in such matters, and who profess to be above the care for cleanliness and clothes and social ritual which marks the middle-class, are either anarchists by nature, or fools who take what is but an effect of their wealth for a natural virtue.
I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces. They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious living. Heaven keep us all from great riches—I mean from very great riches.
Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new clothes whenever they feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a great feast with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact what they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study cleanliness, order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence all this round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to wit, with conventions, and they are quite right.
I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of these my colleagues, but I recognize that they are on the just side in the quarrel; let none of them go about pretending that I have not defended them in this book.
Accountants' favourite authors are Jane Austen and Tolkien, and they spend more leisure hours reading than MPs, journalists, teachers, taxi drivers or politicians.Link via the Book Slut
At an average of five and a quarter hours a week, they read twice as much as the clergy, who manage only two hours 40 minutes. The clergy pine for humour, with a higher percentage than other professions citing it as preferred reading.
Just as we were all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worthwhile asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I'm certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight-three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, 'It's disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can't the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?' Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
One of the standard questions hovering about the intellectual world since the crisis of Marxism has been, "where does the intellectual left go next, especially if it refuses to consider orthodoxy?" The obvious, most likely answer, I think, is that it goes in the direction of ecology and environmentalism insofar as these all-embracing systems provide an apparently plausible, natural justification to reduce the relative importance of man's individual dignity in the name of a planetary or worldly, if not cosmic, "good". This postulated inner-worldly transcendent good is proposed in the name of the on-going cycles of nature and of the good of the living "species" within it. This higher "good" becomes the criterion by which we judge how many people we can have in each country or on the earth, how long they can live and under what conditions, what they can or cannot consume, what is their relation to the state. Indeed, it is not the state but the world state, which, since it is said to have the exclusive responsibility to look out for the distant future, can control the present in its name. "Progress" is replaced as an ideal by "stability". This simultaneous relativizing of the dignity of the human person and of the consequent justification for the vast expansion of the state has provided a handy way to replace or rather incorporate the Marxist ideology that formerly justified these inner-worldly goals...
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In the light of the appeal to Christians and non-Christians alike of Marxism, relativism, and New Age movements, Ratzinger asks, now addressing himself to the intellectuals in the Church, "Why has classical theology appeared to be so defenseless in the face of these happenings? Where is its weak point, and why has it lost credibility?"..... Their [historical critical] method reduces the reality they study to its (the method's) proportions. Ratzinger puts this position into words: "If I know a priori (to speak like Kant) that Jesus cannot be God,. and that miracles, mysteries and sacraments are three forms of superstition, then I (the exegete with this philosophy) cannot discover what cannot in fact be in the sacred books." My philosophical theory has prevented me from seeing what might be there. What I see is my theory, not the reality. Ratzinger does not deny that there is value in the "historical-critical" method. Generally, if it is used to study the history of the Roman emperors, say, it works fine. When the method is used of the Bible, two problems arise. The method wants to find out about the "past as something past." History further is said to be "uniform." This means that all instances of a given type will be judged to be the same on the basis not of fact but of theory. The method brings us to the past, not to the present.
Secondly, the world in theory must be held to be always the same. The method requires this. The crisis of exegesis is a crisis of the philosophical presuppositions that guide its method by which it reaches conclusions such as that Jesus did not affirm His own divinity. "The problem of exegesis is connected ... with the problem of philosophy. The indigence of philosophy ... has turned into the indigence of our faith. The faith cannot be liberated if reason itself does not open up again." Reason, in other words, knowing itself, must see that it is grounded in what is, over which it has no control. What is controls what we know and not vice versa. The exclusion any reality, however, is contrary to the object of reason itself . "Human reason is not an autonomous absolute." Ratzinger thinks that scholastic philosophy in the Twentieth Century in a sense failed because it tried to do the impossible, that is, provide a totally rational ground of the faith that a priori excluded the possibility of faith's openness to reason.
Yet, it was reality, not reason, that decided that to which reason was open. And reality included the reality of God and His activity in time. Faith cares for and about reason. "It is not the lesser function of the faith to care for reason as such. It does not do violence to it; it is not external to it; rather, it makes it return to itself." Thus, faith can liberate reason from itself by asking it questions that it could not itself have anticipated, yet about which it can consider. "Reason will not be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will not be human."
The mind finds itself entering uneasily into the shadows of a strange and silent night...It tries to force acts of thought and will. Sometimes it makes a mad effort to squeeze some feeling of fervor out of itself which is, incidentally, the worst thing it could possibly do.Yet I wonder about this cavalier attitude towards feelings. Crisis has a nice piece by Alice von Hildebrand, who argues that despite what some may say feelings play an important part in the life of a Christian. Even though feelings arise outside the will, the will is involved in disregarding inappropriate ones such as envious thoughts, and fully receiving healthy ones, like contrition and joy. She sees the will and feelings as a "marriage". There is much more in the article, very interesting and nuanced, but unfortunately it isn't online. It's one of those articles I wish wiser people than me would blog about.
If he is completely inexperienced he will get the idea that he is very holy because of all the holy feelings that are teeming in his heart. All these things mean very little or nothing at all...and there is only an accidental difference between them and the tears children sometimes shed when they go to the movies.
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He made us all into Jews, in choosing us to take up his Cross. This is what Christians believe. The world will take it or leave it. God, according to Christian witness, could only have become Man as a Jew, in a most unexpected fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies to the Jews. And he entered into the heart of the old Temple sacrifice, becoming that sacrifice, Himself.So my tendency is to think that Christian anti-Semites are eejits. I understand that objects intended for a certain use will be misused. So for the same reason we have a warning label on the plastic bag our newspaper comes in ("Do not place over your head. Suffocation could result."), we have to have disclaimers on Gibson's movie. Where, pray tell, will it end though? Car accidents kill people. Shouldn't we eliminate all automobiles?
She was a kind old woman whose Yaghan, according to Aguilera, was authentic. Our conversation was brief and brittle. When I asked Emelinda what could be done to keep Yaghan alive, she said she was already doing it, as if a formal program were under way.
''I talk to myself in Yaghan,'' Emelinda explained in Spanish. ''When I hang up my clothes outside, I say the words in Yaghan. Inside the house, I talk in Yaghan all day long.'' I asked her if she ever had a conversation with the only other person in the world who could easily understand her, Cristina Calderón, the official ''last speaker'' of Yaghan.
''No,'' Emelinda said impatiently, as if I'd brought up a sore topic. ''The two of us don't talk.''
I was trying to get him to talk about why his characters tended to be so much older than he is and so cut off. ''You of all people,'' I said. ''You've got your family, your friends, you're close to your in-laws. . . . ''
''Well, like all writers, I feel like I have this other, inner life,'' he said. ''I've always felt like I should be somebody else -- I should be more brash or ambitious, or I don't know. I feel like I've got a lot of secrets. I don't, but I feel like I do.''
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