Contra Amnesia

Infant baptism, besides being efficacious in its own right (or rite, tee hee) is a powerful instrument against self-righteousness. What purer way is there to say that it is not we who chose God but God who chose us, through the flawed instrument of our parents? One of my favorite images from the Byzantine Catholic liturgy is when the priest prays,

"We thank You also for this ministry, which You have willed to accept from our hands, even though there stand before You thousands of archangels, myriads of angels, Cherubim and Seraphim, six winged, many-eyed, soaring aloft on their wings."

And so God desires to use human instruments in the sacraments, including Baptism.

But it seems as though we forget that. John Meehan in Two Towers: The De-Christianization of America and a Plan for Renewal plainly states those who think they are better than de-Christianized cafeteria Catholics are missing something:

Too many Catholics...fail to understand that the gift of Faith is a permanent, indelible mark imprinted on the soul; it cannot be taken away from them. That gift comes from God. They also do not comprehend that growth in knowledge and love of the Deposit of Faith requires systematic instruction, including disciplined training that culminates in a knowledge and love of Christian liturgy.

As a supernatural gift, baptismal Fatih cannot be lost. But growth in, and development of, that gift can be misdirected or undernourished. In fact, reinforced by the rational choices of one's free will, the kind of catechical instruction that one receives usually determines how he or she lives in particular historical circumstances and cultural conditions.

So there's a bit of amnesia going both ways: the de-Christianized who have forgotten who they are and what they've been given, and the orthodox believers who have forgotten who the de-Christianized are and what they've been given.

This is directed at me of course: I still recoil when I hear John Kerry's name.

Man Bites Dog Story?

Rev. Richard Neuhaus recommends an Andrew Greeley book.

Greeley throws down the gauntlet in challenging the secularization theories that have dominated the last hundred years and more, especially in the social sciences. “I find no persuasive evidence that either modern or postmodern humankind exists outside of faculty office buildings. Everyone tends to be premodern.” This is the argument that Greeley made at greater length in his 1972 book Unsecular Man, and it is an argument that now appears to have been ahead of its time.
__

Being a Catholic, says Greeley, is a matter of what one believes, in the sense of doctrines affirmed. But it is more importantly a matter of the sacred stories told in community. “None of the doctrines is less true than the stories. Indeed, they have the merit of being more precise, more carefully thought out, more ready for defense and explanation. But they are not where religion or religious faith starts, nor in truth where it ends.” The experienced Catholic reality is communal stories, rituals, and cultivated sensibilities that engage ultimate truths.

'I Would Walk 500 Miles'

The Byzantine Catholic liturgy I attend is about twenty five minutes away. But the next time I am wont to complain about that I might think of the father of this man:


Thomas Cogan Jr.   

His father, my great-great-grandfather, emigrated from Ireland but had no nearby church. The following obituary was obtained from the local historical society:

"The Rev. James P. Ward, who preached the funeral sermon, said: 'Mr. Cogan was known to walk from Glynwood to Piqua to be present at the divine Sacrifice of the Mass. It was his earnest zeal that prompted him to have a church close at hand, and he with others of the same sturdy faith united their efforts and established a pastorate at Glynwood.'"

That's at least thirty miles as the crow flies! Hard to imagine and a bit surreal. It would surely take a minimum of six to eight hours on foot?
____

But I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door     --the Proclaimers

Offline Generations

Suppose you’ve reached your peak earning power. Suppose you own technological devices your parents don't know exist. Suppose you’re web fluent and are proficient at googling for information or finding & buying old books. Then think how odd it is to imagine that your parents have a knowledge that all the money, books, and internet sites can’t buy: They have time-traveled.

Of course they haven’t time-traveled relative to their existence but they have relative to yours. They have experienced an age we can only read about and they know ancestors we have never met. How odd! In our self-centeredness we might imagine that their lives began when we became aware of ours. They were born at 37, right?

The young are not used to limits, physical or otherwise. But our elders have experienced another world, one that is neither transferrable nor inheritable. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s and my parents were born in the '30s and grew up in the '40s. There is no way for me to fully understand what the '40s were like no matter how much I might think I do. Even should I understand what the '40s were like I wouldn't know it, having no frame of reference. Books and photographs help but there is something irreplaceable in actually being there.

That my father was once a child is something I know from a photograph but it is still an abstract thought. I see him, he is smiling shyly, but that is not my father in any material way. Perhaps I'll grant that it is what my father might've looked like when he was young. That he had a mother is another abstract notion since she died before I was born. That he knew her as well as I know my own mother is completely foreign. I don’t have access to him interacting with her and on this earth there’s no password to gain it. There is no way I can imagine what my relationship would've been with her, or how my father's history would've been altered had she lived longer. If minute differences - such as words of praise or criticism that linger - alter us in profound ways, then something as large as an early death can also alter us in profound, if unknowable, ways.

Found Poetry

Below is the verbatim verbiage printed on a can of Guinness, in reverse order, and without punctuation:

Guinness Can Poetry  

yourself for Draught
Guinness of magic
the discover now body
black, deep and head creamy thick
uniquely the forming
settle to pint
your for moments
few a for wait glass
a into gently
beer the pour immediately
and it open.

___

What especially interests me in this bit o' advertising is how it seems to confirm what my pastor says is modernity's greatest fault: that of looking at everything in the short term. Notice the short term words: "now", "moments", "immediately"...

The Thrill Is Gone, Baby

Last night was bingo volunteer session number four if you're scoring at home, which of course you're not. And now this vibrant, fascinating subculture is beginning to look the way all vibrant, fascinating subcultures eventually look - like average Uhmericuns spending their time holding daubers. Well they say even nudists forget they're at a nudist colony eventually.

My co-workers are dears. I'd forgotten that I'd used my "you sunk my battleship!" line (best said immediately after hearing the caller say something like B-21) on a different co-worker. Having many co-workers means you can say the same joke multiple times, as long as you don't tell them when they're in a group. So I strive for maximum joke dispersal by telling them separately. There's a tip you can use! Who says this blog isn't useful?

Oh don't get me wrong - I didn't get into the bingo racket for the thrills, chills or the joke-telling. That's all bonus. No, I fully expected the business to be as dry and necessary as tax accounting. The trick is to keep it new, keep it fresh. Like holding your instant winnner tickets in new positions. Or inserting the word "proverbial" into the instant winner ticket name, ala: "King of the Proverbial Mountain".

That's not to say bingo is now completely bereft of surprises. One lady was smoking a cigarette while at the same time breathing through a air purifier. Or so a co-worker told me. Sounds apocryphal I know. Another lady had a large placard that stated what should be done in the case of a health emergency. Either she's not well or has a problem with hypochondria; I would error on the side of the former. Another grandma had her five grandchildren's pictures, nicely framed, standing athwart her bingo sheets.

I like the non-smoking room best because there's less smoke in there. I recall back when Bone smoked that I would bring a cigar when we got together so that my good smoke would cancel out his disagreeable smoke. It was like manufacturing my own little force field. But you just can't do that here, so I walk slow when I go by the pipe smoker. You see, my uncle Ed was a pipe smoker and a priest and the fragrance of the pipe is like nothing else. (That was for Jeff.)

The non-smoking room is also good because the grandmothers are so platonically grandmotherly. They look upon me with cherubic faces and make me feel like the platonic ideal of a grandson.

There is something peaceful about bingo. Everyone is marvelously industrious, including me. There are squares to daub, numbers to call and tickets to sell before we go. And it goes for a good cause. Sounds like a win-win. Unless you lose a lot of money of course.

Who knew...

...that 19th Century Anti-Catholicism could be so darn entertaining? Great find from Dom.

Of this pic, Tom of Disputations writes: "Now, I ask you: Viewed today, does this strike you as better suited for anti-Catholic propaganda, or for diocesan vocation literature?"

Is There Virtue in the Obscure?

How much of reading or writing poetry is a desire towards mindlessness? That last post prompted a revisit of Walker Percy's nonfiction work The Message in the Bottle. Percy, who could probably fairly be called a Thomist, writes that "likeness and difference are canons of discursive thought, but analogy, the mode of poetic knowing, is also cognitive" (uh, what he said):

One is aware of skirting the abyss as soon as one begins to repose virtue in the obscure.

Once we eliminate the logical approximation, the univocal figure, as unpoetic and uncreative of meaning - is it not then simply an affair of trotting out words and images more or less at random in the hope of arriving at an obscure, hence efficacious, analogy? and the more haphazard the better, since mindfulness, we seem to be saying, is of its very nature self-defeating? Such in fact is the credo
of the surrealists...If, as so many modern poets appear to do, one simply shuffles words together, words plucked form as diversified contexts as possible, one will get some splendid effects. Words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly. But it is a losing game. For there is missing that essential element of the meaning situation, the authority and intention of the Namer....Once the good faith of the Namer is so much as called into question, the jig is up. There is no celebration or hope of celebration of a thing beheld in common. One is only trafficking in the stored-up energies of words, hard won by meaningful usage.

It is a pastime, this rolling out of pretty marbles of word-things to see one catch and reflect the fire of another, a pleasant enough game but one which must eventually go stale.

I've written on my blog how the mundane can become fascinating if it's read by someone generations hence. I read gape-jawed of accounts of farm life in the 1800s which, to farmers of the 1800s, would presumably be jaw-gapingly banal. Percy says with respect to the power of words:

A word, by the very fact of its having been lost to common usage or by its having undergone a change in meaning, is apt to acquire thereby an unmerited potency.

Drunk on Poetry & Endorphins: WWAS?*

* -...what would Aquinas say?

When I was young I was drunk a lot.

Not on drugs or alcohol but endorphins. Which is what your body produces during exercise, sometimes called "runner's high". (Nowadays I run but not long enough for runner's high to kick in, which is an experience somewhere between going to a bar for one beer and getting a cavity filled sans novocaine.)

I was thinking about runner's high after reading Tom's comment with regard to drunkenness, "And how like St. Thomas to regard the loss of reason as a penalty, even if it's the end sought."

It occurred to me that the deliberate loss of reason* is far more common than commonly supposed and is certainly not limited to drunkenness. James Fixx, in his Complete Book of Running said that some runners find a trance so deep that they go through stop signs or stop lights and are killed by cars. If that doesn't represent a lack of reason I don't know what does.

Sleep, of course, is another reason defier. But also day dreaming, including the sort of day dreaming prompted by reading poetry. (Is that why Plato wanted to ban poetry?) Art in general, having no utility, might be a candidate. When you go to experience something that takes you outside the body, to "erase the map" as it were, aren't you experiencing a kind of drunkenness? If so, then I'm guessing there are a lot of drunks out there.

But St. Thomas recognized that value of play, saying that "playful actions themselves considered in their species are not directed to an end: but the pleasure derived from such actions is directed to the recreation and rest of the soul, and accordingly if this be done with moderation, it is lawful to make use of fun." He goes on to say that "reason itself demands that the use of reason be interrupted at times".

Perhaps it is reasonable to assume that the amount of reason interruptus required by an individual varies, well, by individual.
___

* - dictionary definition is "the capacity for logical, rational, and analytic thought; intelligence."

Wrestling with the Concrete
--by Heidi Lynn Staples
_______________________________________

Somethings he forgets what is a Fish;
The others joke that he is hard of Herring.
It is on the table. He isn’t used to it.

He crosses and uncrosses, fidgets
In the lull, in his favorite color;
Somethings he forgets what is a Fish

And which it from widget from midget from midgets
And wanders Every melodies singing—
It is on the table. He isn’t used to it.

In prescription frames with nonprescription lenses,
Canting into the wind of his own undoing,
Somethings he forgets what is a Fish.

In need of an oar or an ore, he offers Clarinet?
He whispers and shimmers about sum thing—
It is on the table, he isn’t used to it.

Hot scolds over shadows, shipness not ships
At all: Is is only he was thinking.
Somethings he forgets what is a Fish;
It is on the table. He isn’t used to it.


From Guess Can Gallop by Heidi Lynn Staples

Via Steven Riddle...

You scored as Sacrament model. Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church. Mystical Communion Model 83% Sacrament model 83% Servant Model 50% Herald Model 50% Institutional Model 34% What is your model of the church? [Dulles] created with QuizFarm.com

Knowledge Is Bliss

Intense religious discussion last night at my sister-in-law's birthday party. To paraphrase Andy Rooney: ever notice how "intense" and "religious discussion" often go together? Might as well be redundant.

I was listening as interlocuter number 1 defended Muslims, saying that some of his best friends were Muslims and that a religion can't be held responsible for the negative actions of their followers. Interlocuter number 2 disagreed, saying that Islam was the root cause of their terrorist pathologies. (And interlocuter number 2, being the member of a new, young dynamic church with no history or baggage, made the claim with equanimity.)

I had no choice who to side with if only because the priestly scandal was still fresh on everyone's minds (and was in fact alluded to in the discussion). I sided with interlocuter number 1, saying that the fact that Judas betrayed Christ was evidence that you can be a member of the greatest religion and still badly misrepresent the faith.

But this isn't an either/or. It's like nature/nuture debate. Part of it is that bad faiths ruin people and part is bad people ruin faiths. Of course I didn't say that; I think through my fingertips and I didn't have a keypad handy (and even with the keypad bat my weight).

The other obligatory target was the Catholic church, said to be still preaching the Old Testament. An ex-Catholic said that his Catholic education consisted of "the Old Testament and Mary." I said I didn't learn too much OT in my classes but I did agree that Catholic education was poor during the '70s. I admitted that I've learned an awful lot post-college that I should've learned at my Catholic high school. Someone else said that the Catholic Church didn't teach the bible - they didn't have a bible study class until they were out of college. I said that that is why Scott Hahn is popular now; he's filling a need.

Ellis on Adams on CSPAN's BookTV

Our second president, John Adams, said that success for a person or a nation carries within it the seeds of demise. One of his biographers, Joseph Ellis, said that Adams thought once the focus moves from producing to consuming the jig is up and that the key is to find a president who will "manage American decline" effectively. Ellis laughed and said you won't hear that on the presidential campaign trail: "hire me and I'll manage American decline effectively!". Ellis said that the fact that GNP growth has slowed over the past few decades shows that the American economy is already not what it used to be during the post-World War II days of hegemony. He also said that just because a nation is declining doesn't mean that decline can't be very gradual.

Charities Dancing With Politics

I've long thought that Israel, at least since becoming a state in 1948, has been far more "sinned against than sinning". To either confirm or contradict this I began reading a book on the history of the Middle East conflict but read to about page sixty. I'm still looking for the Cliff's Notes version. The fact that I'm not that well-informed should disqualify me from commenting but... (here's where you say 'that never stopped you before!').

Thanks, you are right. So from my perspective the Wall was long overdue given that Israel has a right to exist and Israelis have a right not to have their limbs removed by a bomb while shopping at a supermarket or riding on a bus. And if a wall helps, then go for it.

What prompts this post was this, which reminded me of this article in a magazine of a charity giving aid to the Middle East, which points out the negatives of said wall. It seems rather one-sided given the lack of explanation why Israel would go to the great length of building it. One may quibble where it was built, but the relentless provocation of Israel by the Palestinians has been this side of surreal. And Israel won the West Bank in the Six Day War in 1967, after Egypt prompted a pre-emptive strike by (from here): "ordering the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Forces stationed on the Egyptian-Israeli border, thus removing the international buffer between Egypt and Israel which had existed since 1957...[then] Egypt announced a blockade of all goods bound to and from Israel through the Straits of Tiran."

It seems to me there are far greater grounds for the United States to give Texas & part of California back to Mexico than for Israel to give back the West Bank.

So in a perfect world, the article might've included these paragraphs:

Palestinians inconvenienced by the wall say that they understand the need for Israel to protect itself and know that a wall, in possibly helping to prevent terrorist attacks, will also prevent retalitory bombings by Israel.

"I think the wall is a necessary evil," said one Palestinian woman, "I might not have to worry as much about Palestinian homes being hit by Israeli bombs now. And think of all Israeli children and civilians saved by this wall! No one wants the suicide bombers and if this wall is going to stop one suicide bomber, why then the inconveniences and hassles are worth it!"

I gotta hand it to Dubya. He came through. May God help him get this guy on the Court! And may he pick somebody just as good when Rehnquist retires! O Lord, hear our prayer for an end to abortion!

- Mark Shea on Amy's blog concerning the nomination of John Roberts

What made [Sen.] Biden's concern re [Clarence] Thomas's belief in natural law [Biden wanted to make sure that Thomas didn't have any belief in something called 'natural law'] so amusing is that fact that Roe itself is grounded in natural law theory, albeit a seriously misguided varient. An application of pure positive Constitutional law cannot be reconciled with Roe.

- commenter on Amy's blog

Augustine is easily more heart-felt than Aquinas. Which I appreciate. On the other hand, Aquinas' detachment and even-handedness make Mr. Spock look like a raving hysteric.

- John Farrell on Amy Welborn's blog

I believe what the Catholic Church teaches not solely--not even, when I'm at my best, primarily--because the alternatives are ugly. Quite often the alternatives are attractive, insofar as they partake in a partial share of the goodness, love, and grace that God offers. I believe what the Catholic Church teaches because, when I'm at my best, I love Jesus Christ, I love God, and I can faintly discern the beauty, hope, and peace He wants for me.

- Eve Tushnet

Lady at the rock who waited for Bernadette,
asthmatic child sleeping in a stone jail.
She met her at Massabielle, this rock
I touch while icy water seeps
in rivulets down the blackened crevices.
She waits to meet me now--
will my daughter have Mass said over me?--
now and at a time soon.
Ashes to ashes

- Excerpt of poem by Sharon Mollerus, via blogger at "Clairity's Place"

In his talk, Cardinal George raised some interesting questions he felt the Church faced about the compatibility of democracy with the Gospel...He emphasized that in the past, under other governmental structures, laws were imposed on the people and that was a basis for explanation of why they varied so much from the natural law. But with democracy, the people freely choose the laws, yet we still choose laws as immoral as other governmental structures. And that, albeit in a different way, authentic religious liberty is no better protected under democracy than other regimes. Well, that's my loose summary of the comment. And in fairness to Cardinal George, I think he would expand upon the nuances and complexities if time was alotted and wasn't at all suggesting that he didn't have explanations for why democracy produces immmoral laws (i.e., I'm sure the Cardinal is well aware of sin ;-) ). But I thought the topic worthy of reflection. Thoughts?

- post at "Cahiers Peguy"

Decided to Google Onan some more this morning! (Don't go there!)

- Elena of "My Domestic Church"; too late!

So, was my first kiss a Lutheran one, because of the simple *faith* the girl had that I wouldn't turn out to be a total jerk. Or was it more "Catholic", due to all the *works* I had to perform to get her alone and in the dark?

- Protestant commenter Rob on Disputations

Should a blogger get off a good word-lick, he thinks, hopes and prays he might get into Spanning the Globe. When he does, it's often not for the utterance he thought would do the trick, but for one least expected.

- William Luse, though it's never least expected when STG is mentioned. *grin*

The man who brought American democracy to the Church’s attention was Jacques Maritain, the French convert and philosopher. Maritain, having accepted a teaching position at Princeton before France fell to the Nazis, lived for over a decade in America and published a long essay, "Reflections on America", in which he expresses his deep admiration of the American experiment, and his hope that it could lead to a New Christendom—not the Christendom of the Middle Ages, which cannot be reinstituted, but a different, new, pluralistic order, which upholds human dignity and liberty as its foundational principles.... Thanks to the influence of Maritain, Pope Pius XII became the first pope to speak favorably of democracy, in 1944—eighteen years before the opening of Vatican II, nineteen years before "Pacem in Terris"...I am not going to answer Jack’s question too emphatically—“Is democracy compatible with the Gospel?” I will let the American Bishops do it for me. Aware of the uniqueness of the American experiment, and aware that it could provide a model for re-establishing the social order, the Bishops decreed the following in the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884: "We believe that our country’s heroes were the instruments of the God of Nations in establishing this home of freedom."

- blogger at "Cahiers Peguy"

[She] made me think about this adorable 85 year-old woman I used to sit next to at church, back when I lived in Pasadena and had a real parish.  One day there was an earthquake in the middle of Mass.  My first thought was that the 85 year-old might be so scared, she'd have a heart attack and keeel over on me, and what would I do.  Her first thought?  She squeezed my hand and said, "Just hold on to me.  I'm strong." When I get old (presuming the world is around that long), I hope I'm that kind of old lady.

- Karen of "Some Have Hats"

A Sap For Happy Endings

Sleep comes in fits and starts for the read-deprived. My dreams feel contrived compared to the ocean that awaits in the bookroom. And some of the stories contained therein nag for their lack of ending.

I spent part of my reading life this weekend caught up in the drama of Isak Dinesen's real life. Hers was an undeniable but often misdirected courage. A natural contrarian, she flailed at whoever was in authority causing her values and beliefs to fluctuate accordingly. Her allergy to the bourgeois in religion would seem to make her good ground for the gospel message if unfit for the Victorian obsession with appearances. But she saw the sexual norms of the bible and church not in terms of heroism but joyless puritanism.

I follow the ups & downs of her story:

She has syphilis!

Oh -- she got it from her philandering husband.

She divorces him?

No - he divorces her! She'd forgiven him. Wow.

She loves God!

No - she sold her soul to the devil.

Say what!? Well there are three references in the biography mentioning her vowing herself to Lucifer. Surely she jests? There's little accompanying detail, other than to say that she did it in exchange for receiving her stories. Which makes reading her stories seem like an ill-gotten gain.

Is there not a symmetry to pacts with Satan compared to our relationship with God?

With Satan:
you choose him, he doesn't choose you

With God:
He chooses you, you don't choose Him

With Satan:
You give him nothing, with the assurance of receiving something (in this life)

With God:
We give him everything, with no assurance of receiving something (in this life)

With God:
eternal life

With Satan:
eternal death

There is the natural - and naturally impossible - desire to discern the state of her soul at the end of her life. One can have no tragedies in life, not if one hopes Hell is empty, though I recognize the futility of that particular bit of cognitive dissonance. Still there's nothing more alarming to a sheep than seeing another one cliff-diving, though admittedly most don't know what they're doing. It is consoling to know we have a Savior who will search for the one sheep amid the hundred.

Could It Happen Today?

The blogger at Annals of Desire asks with regard to this monument:

"Would today's men have done the same? If they did, would today's women condemn them or praise them?"

They say the past is a foreign country and that picture affirms it. There is something achingly anachronistic about it, not only in men acting like gentlemen under great stress, but in the expression of gratitude by the women. To be grateful, even if it is for something expected, is as beautiful as it is rare. More here.

Evolution...

I've been off and on fascinated by the evolution/creationism debate. Here's an interesting excerpt from John Allen's latest:

Even processes that appear random, he said, can have an underlying logic.

“The idea that calling something ‘random’ means that it’s without direction is a mistake,” [Nobel laureate Charles] Townes said. “In a gas, for example, random interaction among particles ensures uniform distribution and temperature. In other words, an unplanned process produces an orderly outcome.”

“Evolution,” Townes said, “is like that. It’s a random process that produces spectacular things.”

And an excerpt from the Vatican’s International Theological Commission document, “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God.”

In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided.

I can see why it's such a debate. Moderns crave the personal and evolution seems too impersonal for some tastes. Not to mention the long-running debate over scriptural inerrancy, another hot-button issue. Combine the two and voila! From Catholic Answers' Karl Keating:

Q: I was under the impression that death in the world (all death- plants, animals, and humans) was a fruit of original sin, ie. God did not create death. If this is the case, then how could the Church accept the idea of biological evolution? Since death would have to occur over the course of generations to provide for "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest." Thanks for your time.

A: by Karl Keating: You have brought up one of the difficulties in squaring evolution with the biblical account of the Fall. There have been various attempts to do so. Whether any of them is adequate is for the individual to determine for himself. All the Church teaches is that theistic evolution is not necessarily incompatible with the faith. It doesn't teach that it really happened--or that it didn't.

Putting the Me in Meme

Karen tapped me and so I thought I'd do it from a vacation perspective.

What I was doing 10 years ago...I was experiencing the post-vacational glow, this time after a trip to Texas. We hit Austin, San Antonio, Bandera, & LBJ's ranch.

Five years ago... Smack dab in the middle of a trip to Richmond, Virgina.

One year ago... a vacational re-run of this year. A 25-mile bike trip day in July.

Yesterday...I walk the dog and there's nothing to pick up his poop with. So I grab something out of the garbage, a small piece of plastic. He goes twice. We shorten the road trip because I'm holding uncovered poop at arm's length. TMI, I know.

Of Pictures

Steven Riddle understands the need to preserve mystery, hence he provides a picture of himself only in shadow. Of course I do not approve. I think every blogger ought to post a clear picture of themselves because my curiosity deserves to be sated.

And so you ask where is mine? Well that begs a story.

I was at a country & western bar about ten years ago when a comely lass happened by and pinched me on the ass! "Cute butt" she said, smiling as she passed. I was struck dumb for I'd never been told that before. I consider myself average-looking, but(t) it occurs to me now that my backside might be my best side. And I refuse to post that. This blog has standards you know.

Fun With Scanners


 

This scanner is addicting. Here is the frontispiece to the 1958 edition of the forthrightly titled "I Love Books" (click to enlarge) 

Thank You St. Joseph!

...And to all who said a prayer for my stepson, who has decided against joining the Navy and instead got another job much more suited to his personality.

What Kind of World?   - new fiction

Back in the days of winos & roses I was following the Alaskan Pipeline for the same reason people climb mountains: because it was there. And I happened across more than my fair share of colorful characters including one chinless man going to Ketchikan who seemed a cynical soul. Spying the rosary in my hand he said, "Ah priests! If they had a real job they wouldn't be so nice. Put them in a business suit and they wouldn't be so peaceful!"

I wasn't a priest and he seemed a long way from the business world but I assumed from the scars he'd been there and from it he was running.

I told him about a pain from my past. "I once had a crush a girl who liked another fellow, a guy who was drunk all the time. Real light-hearted. He'd give you the shirt off his back too. But he had a buzz 24-7, the kind of light buzz Larry Hagman had during the '70s and '80s. He was such a friendly guy you didn't know if it was him or the alcohol. And I remember wanting to tell her, 'hey I'd be fun too if I was half-drunk all the time!' But I was wrong."

"Hell right you were wrong. I've been drinking heavy for three years now and it ain't done my attitude any good."

"Not just that. It's this thinking that everything can be explained by chemicals or the environment. Deep down we want something in reserve. We want to know that we can protect ourselves like you think priests do, or that I can fix myself a drink in case of anxiety. But the only true reserve is the one you can't see and maybe not even feel."

"Can't feel? A reserve you can't feel? What the hell good is that?"

"More trust really. Trust in God. I'm still working it out, though it's probably a sign of desire for control that I'm even thinking about it, as if I'm trying to build up a reserve in advance for my own damn sake."

He fiddled with his shirt.

"I had a friend who always said it's a 'doggy-dog' world instead of 'dog eat dog' world. I mean I actually saw him write it out that way so it's not like I was just hearing him wrong. Which do you think it is?"

Jumping the Shark

Come on, you know you want to see pictures of my great-grandparents don't you? Don't you? Surely it beats putting a picture of my cat on the blog, right?

Here is one pair. And another. And another.

My mom is sending a picture of the two missing great-grandparents and I'll have pictures of all eight, which I'm naturally very pleased about.

The "Surprise" That Was Not Surprising

David Brooks thought the suspenseful thing in the Roberts nomination would be how Sen. Clinton would vote - but come on, was there really any doubt? She wants to be President and it's metaphysically impossible for her to offend her base (and thus be denied the nomination) because the base knows that she's a true believer.

In fact, the more obvious Hillary becomes in moving to the center the more obvious it becomes to her base that it's all a ruse. Liberal primary voters weren't born yesterday - they know it's "wink, wink - I've got to do these silly things so I can win the general election. You know how crazy those Ohio voters are."

In fairness to Sen. Clinton, having been so close to the presidency she is far more sympathetic to rights the president exercises than most congressmen. She understands the President should be able to nominate his or her preferred judges. And pardon criminals in return for funding presidential libraries. (Ok, so how fair did you think I was going to be?)

Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. in First Things...

...has interesting things to say about C.S. Lewis:

In Surprised by Joy [C.S.] Lewis mentions that in the first years after his conversion he started attending Sunday services at his parish church, but adds: “The idea of churchmanship was to me wholly unattractive....I was deeply antiecclesiastical....I had as little relish to be in the Church as in the zoo. It was, to begin with, a kind of collective; a wearisome ‘get-together’ affair....To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk about spiritual matters....Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least. I have, too, a sort of spiritual gaucherie which makes me unapt to participate in any rite.”

These words, I believe, point to an individualistic and academic quality that affected Lewis’ religion almost to the end of his life. His “mere Christianity” is a set of beliefs and a moral code, but scarcely a society. In joining the Church he made a genuine and honest profession of faith—but he did not experience it as entry into a true community of faith. He found it possible to write extensively about Christianity while saying almost nothing about the People of God, the structures of authority, and the sacraments.
_

Apologetics, in Lewis’ view, provides a road map, but the map is no substitute for the journey. The relation between faith and reason becomes radically different once a person has made the act of faith. The believer enters into a personal relationship with God that involves far more than assent to propositions. He places total trust in God to such a point that he would continue to believe even if he ceased to see the reasons. Those who have experienced this interpersonal relationship know enough about God to trust Him even when He seems absent. On this ground Lewis defends what he calls “obstinacy in belief.”

Lewis proposes a very interesting definition. “Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Arguments do not secure us against the fluctuations of our moods.

Another Reason to Love Amazon.com

Manishevitz do I like this "search inside" feature they have on so many books. It's perfect for bloggodocia too because although you can't cut & paste from the actual page it brings up, you can from the index listing the pages where your search item appears since it gives you the context around the search item in plain text.

So I found the following quote from Catholic author Ron Hansen in his book "A Stay Against Confusion : Essays on Faith and Fiction"

"Babette's Feast" merges incongruities, reconciles the irreconcilable. With Soren Kierkegaard, Karen Blixen argues against the either/or proposition that there is only one correct way to live one's life, that we are faced with a series of critical choices and if we choose wrongly we are lost. In her story the hedonistic general finds in the miracle of Babette's feast both ecstatic pleasure and a joyful, magnanimous God whom he otherwise could not imagined.

One thing that interests me about Isak Dinesen is how her writing, especially in Out of Africa, is so damn lyrical. It's evocative and beautiful, like Updike's only without the sex. And while she tells good stories one could enjoy them strictly for the words & phrasings.

I think the rationalist likes stories, the romantic likes the poetry or melody. Flannery O'Connor, whose fiction I've never liked that much (though I love her letters, The Habit of Being), seems not all that lyrical but straight-ahead-always-going-forward-no-wasted-motion. The story is what is important for the holy (I don't mean that facetiously) O'Connor. Is the lushness of Updike or a Dinesen a form of debauchery? Is "good romantic" an oxymoron?

Excerpts from Judith Thurman's Biography of Isak Dinesen

But as much as Tanne [Karen Blixon, aka Isak Dinesen] loved her brother and missed him when he was gone, his vagueness and solemnity got on her nerves. They often quarreled...and Tanne thought that Darwin for one, ought to have been burned at the stake for his "depressing" view of life. He called her a reactionary, and she countered that he was a Bolshevik. They disagreed about sexual morality - his point of view was wholesome and romantic; hers enlightened, in the eighteenth century sense of the word - and about birth control, which Tanne thought was radically practical but not esthetic. Thomas told her that considering her general outlook she ought to become a Catholic, and she responded that without subscribing to any dogma she was a sort of Catholic..."I think so often about those words in the Bible: 'I will not let thee go before thou blessest me.' I think there is such deep meaning, something so glorious in them. I almost take it to be my 'motto' in this life."
_

If the feudal world of "Out of Africa" works so well, is so harmonious and beautiful, it is precisely because of its fixity. Love of fate is its central principle or, as Dinesen puts it, "pride..in the idea God had, when he made us." Its inhabitants take their places in the hierarchy according to the degree of pride they manifest, with the Africans - mystically forbearing and amused - at the top. The European aristocrats - the great atavisms like Denys, Berkeley and the narrator - defer to them, but just slightly and in the same spirit a gentleman feels himself to be morally inferior to a lady. Their fatalism is assertive; it is expressed as honor, and through it they have the privilege to understand tragedy. "If a man has a steadfast idea of honor," Dinesen told Curtis Cate, "he is absolutely safe as to what can happen to him."

Also found this link on Dinesen's "Babette's Feast", which includes this snippet:

Like great moral deeds, artistic creation absorbs our entire energies. Preparing a great feast or singing an aria by Mozart removes us from the range of the ordinary and makes reentry, in the words of Walker Percy, an urgent human problem. Percy renames "reentry" what Kierkegaard calls the second movement, the return to the finite. After the great discharge of the all-consuming deed, how do we resume the ordinary tasks of life without scorn for the smallness at hand? In Lost in the Cosmos, Percy seems to assume that faith’s trek back to the finite is no longer much of an option. His account of the modern alternatives to faith is bleak indeed.

And in a stroke of luck, you can now Amazon search inside Flannery O'Connor's "The Habit of Being". And I found these references to Dinesen. Unfortunately there's not much. In a letter in 1957: "All I have read of Isak Dinesen are the twelve Gothic Tales and some of them I like right much-the one where the old woman and the money change places - but I can't take much of her at one time." Later in 1964: "I'm still reading 'Out of Africa' by Isak Dinesen too."

Excerpt from Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa":

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...

From Our Diocesan Newspaper

VATICAN CITY --Eucharistic adoration may seem like a waste of time to beginners, but experience demonstrates that it yields great spiritual gifts, said the preacher of the papal household.

"To engagine in eucharistic contemplation means, in concrete terms, establishing a heart-to-heart contact with Jesus, who is truly present in the host," Caupchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa said.

Just as standing in the sun for an extended period changes the lines of the face, eucharistic adoration works its changes, too, he said.

"To stand before the Blessed Sacrament for a long time and with faith, not necessarily with a lot of passion, we assimilate the thoughts and sentiments of Christ, in an intuitive way," he said.

The Gospel for the Competitive

At our Byzantine parish the gospel today was from Matthew where Jesus says that he has come not to abolish the Law but to fulfil it, and thus anyone who encourages the smallest sin will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven. This reminded me of where elsewhere Jesus says that if you want to be greatest in Heaven you must serve the least.

It's interesting to me that Christ so desires that we imitate him that he offers motivations that sound almost base. In order to aggrandize ourselves - to be great in Heaven - he suggests we perform acts of charity and not lead others to sin. Shouldn't we want to do good out of love for Him and not out of love for ourselves and our position in Heaven? It as if Jesus is not afraid of intermediate stages in the spiritual life. One could say that he shrewdly understands human nature and that in condescending to become human he also condescended to appeal to our natural desire for hierarchy and competition. The desire to avoid Hell or shorten Purgatory are also motivations which seemingly fall short of perfection but have been/are powerful motivators in their effect.

Christ's desire that we exercise faith is also something that must be purely for our benefit. Faith offers God the trust and glory he deserves but in no way requires. Seeing how there is nothing in it for Him, it must be for us that we suffer here below in what Fr. Groeschel once said was proof of the doctrine of Purgatory (he said something along the lines of: "for those who don't believe in Purgatory, this earth isn't Club Med.").

The Sower Who Read   ...a cautionary tale

He was a farmer who tilled soil by day but at night tilled a different sort of soil, a soil rich with the scent of paper and ink and dense with the thoughts of the long dead. Every night he would retire to the lamplit bookroom, the century old lighting an affectation that had caused three fires and no fatalities (unless one counted books, and he certainly did).

The room was quite ordinary. Twelve by seventeen, a bit narrow feeling, and after wiping the dust away he wallpapered it with dead presidents both literally and figuratively. He hung portraits of Washington & Monroe & purchased four of what would be many bookcases. He carefully applied two coats of rosewood finish to the cases, proudly noting each swirl against the grain as if he were Michelangelo admiring his Giuliano de' Medici.

The room narrowed, exponentially it seemed, as he fed it new books. The gyre was not widening yet the center could not hold; everywhere he looked there were books, books, more books! They enveloped him as if in a womb or cocoon and it was as if they had come to life and had begun spinning a web slowly around him, ‘round and ‘round, and if his limbs were no longer free to move about, what was that to him? "Come, my pretties, come!" he said. And they gathered in waves, torrents now, and his books had books until the dead presidents were obscured and he could no longer leave the room, could no longer move, and so the farm began to waste but the books gleamed, gleamed in supernova fashion, gleamed with an exponential shine. And one fine April morning it happened: his books had tilled him.

Balthasar & Prayer

Edward T. Oakes, in America (via Amy Welborn):

Because I have spent much of my life trying to convey Balthasar’s massive achievement through translations, essays and monographs, I am often asked what first drew me to his theology. Actually, it was rather accidental. I had entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1966 and came across a book by him titled simply Prayer. The first paragraph showed me that here was a writer who got down to business right away. The opening lines struck me as so relevant to my own experiences in prayer (or rather lack of them) that their author captivated me from the start. Here is how the passage begins:
Prayer is something more than an exterior act performed out of a sense of duty, an act in which we tell God various things he already knows; a kind of daily attendance in the presence of the Sovereign who awaits, morning and evening, the submission of his subjects. Even though Christians find, to their pain and sorrow, that their prayer never rises above this level, they know well enough that it should be something more. Somewhere, here, there, is a hidden treasure, if only I could find it and dig it up—a seed that has the power to grow into a mighty tree bearing abundant flowers and fruits, if only I had the will to plant and cultivate it.

Ah yes, I said, that’s me! Rote prayer I knew well enough from my Catholic upbringing, but when I entered the novitiate I thought there should be something more. Yet here I was, trying to pray one hour in the morning and a half-hour in the afternoon, but I was apparently still the same religious automaton I had always been. Balthasar seemed to know just what I was feeling: Christians, he said, often feel like a foreigner forced to speak in a language whose rules they have never learned, or a stuttering child who wants to say something but cannot.

Still, how was Balthasar going to solve the problem he had so accurately diagnosed? Imagine my surprise, then, when I found the problem resolved not just over the course of the whole book but in the very next paragraph! The point of prayer, Balthasar said, is not to learn some new way of speaking, a task as arduous as memorizing French irregular verbs. No, prayer is first an act in which we learn, in his words, that “our halting utterance to God is but an answer to God’s speech to us.”

This might sound all well and good, but how is one to pray in a language God has spoken, when one’s very aridity in prayer makes God seem so silent? Again, the answer was not slow in coming: “Just consider a moment: is not the Our Father, by which we address him each day, his own word? Was it not given to us by the Son of God, himself God and the Word of God? Could any man by himself have discovered such language? Did not the Hail Mary come from the mouth of the angel, spoken, then, in the speech of heaven; and what Elizabeth, ‘filled with the Spirit,’ added, was that not a response to the first meeting with the incarnate God?”

Among other things, this passage explained to me why the Rosary is so popular. For it is almost entirely composed of these God-given prayers to help us in our need. Why worry about aridity or “experience” when we can resort to the Rosary when contemplative prayer seems to fail? Of course, Balthasar did bluntly assert in the first paragraph that prayer is something more than stereotyped formulas, and the Rosary is often considered to fall into just that formulaic rut. But as the book progressed, Balthasar explained that by interiorizing the Our Father and Hail Mary, one gradually learns to make use of the key privilege of prayer, what the New Testament calls parresia.

FFL

There's been some discussion/recussion concerning the group "Feminists for Life", sometimes with a whiff that it is somehow less orthodox than your typical right to life group. Judge Roberts' wife served in an official capacity for FFL and David Brooks of the NY Times tries to use that to suggest Roberts is more moderate for it: "he's not a holy warrior, and his wife is active in the culturally heterdox Feminists for Life".

I support FFL but I hope it doesn't make me less a holy warrior (a tag I'm unworthy of but to which I aspire). I see FFL as the more loving way of framing the argument. Being pro-life is truly win/win - both mother and baby win if an abortion is avoided - and FFL emphasizes that point instead of buying into the false premise of pitting mother against baby. I see FFL not as a repudiation of groups like the American Life League but the culmination or the fruition, or at the least complementary. Of course, Sister Christer supports FFL so I might be wrong. :-)

Writing

I was thinking about something I wrote not too long ago, a story about a woman who celebrates her birthday daily (a metaphor for what Christians must do – celebrate their baptisms daily) when it occurred to me that one of the more explicable reasons to write poetry or short stories is to invent something that someone hasn’t invented before. That’s not to say that what we write will be unique, since there is nothing new under the sun, but it will seem unique to us in the way a tribe in New Guinea might re-invent something we take for granted. Maybe it would take a mountain of reading to find that particular paragraph or story for which we hunger. What we say may leave 99.99% of humanity cold but if it warms our hearts it somehow seems an invention were inventing. Perhaps it's as simple as the creative juxtaposition of two words... Unfortunately, writers as a group are an extremely unimpressive lot. The Venn diagram of saints and writers wouldn't have much overlap. The inventions of the most inventive writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Greene, Joyce - aren't worth a bucket of warm spit if it didn't bring them closer to Christ.

H & H


Paysage Irlandais - oil; Guy Chevallier

Well yesterday was the annual 25-mile bike ride through the hills and vales of southwestern Ohio, traveling along bike paths to towns so far from the madding interstates they approach invisibility (without ever quite reaching it).

Did I bury the lead? Have I not yet mentioned it was hot outside? They say it's not the heat, it's the humidity, but is this really either/or? Can I get an "and"? It felt like the sun was superglued to my hat, so inescapable was she. And the humidity! Oy vey! The combination was Dante-ian.

But we were glad to have the sun because Ohio has been under the remnants of Hurricane Dennis for lo these many days. Worse than having rain or clouds is not being able to complain about it, but I have Florida readers and they would rightly find such complaints scandalous. It's almost as obscene as an American complaining to a Russian about a lack of economic opportunity. So into a each life a little rain must fall but spare me the remnants of 'canes.

One of the great delights of the annual bike ride is to find these small little towns. I would rather see a small Ohio town for the first time than most large cities, for large cities come with crowds and noise and sensation overload. The trail led to a new, good-sized library and we wondered if it was a mirage. The tiny town of Cedarville (reminiscent of Hooterville) has a nice new library? Population 3,828? Looked to be about ten books per resident.

Cedarville, like all small towns, has a main street called "Main Street" and, like all small towns, can be found almost immediately. And we stopped at various places along it, like the historic Opera house, built in 1886. The Opera house is registered as a national historic landmark (some verbiage like that, you can't expect me to read those signs), and so I was stunned when I found the door unlocked. Got to love small towns where even their treasures are unfettered. We walked in and wandered up the staircase to...to...a room the size of the modern McMansion's bedroom! Okay I exaggerate. Still, they shouldn't call this the Cedarville Opera House but rather the Cedarville Opera Family Room. And I thought how odd it would be to go to a play or movie here and know most of the people there. I go to a play or movie in Columbus and will, of course, know no one there. Of course, it doesn't reflect well on me that I usually consider that a good thing. Small towns are certainly a different world.

We continued up (down?) Main Street to the top of the hill, where all churches ought to be, and where stood a gigantic Baptist church, a Methodist church and a very old Presbyterian church. (Hearing Cedarville was dry, we safely assumed there were no Catholic churches in the area. Ha.)

The Baptist church promised more on the outside than delivered in the inside. The church proper was an auditorium. But they do do air conditioning well. I moved to the more interesting Presbyterian church, built in the 1800s, with the first pastor installed in 1829. This church looked like a church on the inside, with vaulting ceiling and lots of dark wood. But oddly, the "altar" was filled with life-size (and larger) Disney character cut-outs from The Lion King. There was something oddly humorous about the disjoint between the old and the new, sacred and secular. Despite my self-pledge to avoid metaphors ('I am Bill W. and I am a metaphorholic') one could see it as a symbol of where some churches have gone wrong - as a desperate "please love us! We're cute & cuddly!".

I walked back to the entrance where there was a mini-museum. Glass cases held beautiful old books with quiet, restful bindings. There was an aging bible and an old notebook with parishioner contributions. And there was a framed picture of a 19th century national woman's guild thanking this church's women for contributing the princely sum of twenty dollars. Similarly parsimonious will today's thousand dollar contribution eventually look. The large certificate of gratitude contained the photos of about a dozen women and I was struck by how uniformly homely Victorian women look. At first I think surely it's just their hair style and clothes but it seemed they just don't look that good facially either. And yet I'm sure they were a fine-looking bunch to the men of their time. Just another of life's little mysteries.

We stopped at the "Beans 'n Creams" coffee shop for a beer lemonade and a sandwich. I got a chocolate shake too. It was surreally good. Just other-worldly.

Then it was back on the bike trail, that long black roadway breasted by beeches and birches, thistles and Queen Anne's lace. Every once in a while we'd view paradisiacal homes nestled on hillocks with long porches aching for rocking chairs. *sigh*. I console myself that living there can't be nearly as good as imagining living there.

Since I'm no Lance Armstrong, biking twenty-five miles under an azure sky makes me sleepy. On the drive home I find myself falling asleep. But thankfully I discover anew that beginning to drive off the road is a powerful stimulative. After that there are no problems.

Oddly, energy usage begets energy usage, so once at home I take the dog a walk and tidy up the house a bit. Later that evening, I slept the sleep of the dead.



Cedarville Opera House; object is smaller than it appears

Poetry Friday

Oh To Be Shootin' The Breeze With Barney Fife

The weight of issues
the sturm & drang
the manipulations and gesticulations
i'll move you, you'll move me ---

I hope we can get to the small talk.

High Naturale

'Eye hath not seen nor ear heard'
is the language of the psychedelic
but this drug won't corrupt
its ecstasy is Physician-directed.

pre-Vatican I*

How perfect,
I think,
that the Church could act infallibly
without yet knowing it
like an infant with powers
she could not yet conceive,
like the Baptized still struggling
in the land of bereaved,
showing in growth
their dependence on Him.

* - Inspired by Pontifications' Swimming the Tiber, or How I Came To Love Infallibility

Potter...Rove....Rove...Potter

Never has so much been made about so little concerning these two characters. Given current evidence, they both seem harmless to me.

Gratitude is Elusive

Tom has been studying the Great Flood and it occurred to me that it seems as if God is constantly trying to cultivate gratefulness in human beings.

To greater appreciate the covenant given to Noah (i.e. the blessing of fruitfulness despite man's sin) there had to be a cursing of unfruitfulness due to man's sin (the Flood).

To better appreciate the NT there is the OT.

To appreciate Grace, there is Law.

To better appreciate Heaven, we have earth.

While earth, the Law, the Old Testament (I won't say the Flood) are good things, we don't seem to be able to appreciate gifts except through their denial, or at least through a kind of "relational assignation".

My father came home from work and whenever our mother would talk about how stressful his job was he would remind her and us of the poverty in China. I came to find that that was not just a platitude with him. He kept that in mind. He reminded himself that his job was not stressful comparatively speaking. (I'm not sure who the Chinamen coming home from a slave labor camp could compare his situation to.)

Understanding Styles

Interesting link via Amy's blog on the difference between "winter" and "summer" Christians.

Watching the Boob Tube

On Imus this morning non-Catholic NY Times editorialist David Brooks made an interesting observation:

"You look at the chief Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, you've got Biden, you've got Leahy, you've got Kennedy, you've got Durbin - all Catholics - and you look at the attention-grabbers on the court - Scalia, Thomas are Catholics, Roberts is a Catholic, and so sometimes I think that this whole thing is an argument between different types of Catholics. So I think it'll be interesting little dispute about what sort of Catholic Church we should have."

Meanwhile over on O'Reilly, Bill says that the reason pro-aborts are so rabidly pro-abort because "deep down they know the destruction of a fetus is problematic", so they need "affirmation".

Stuck in the '90s

Fox News analyst William Crystal called Bush's pick "bold" because Roberts wasn't a woman or Hispanic. And I thought: gosh how touchingly anachronistic.

Identity politics is so '90s. Nobody much cares about race or gender anymore. White conservatives love Justice Thomas and black liberals hate him. If Condi Rice was a liberal Democrat, Hillary Clinton would look like a red-headed stepchild by comparison, so fawning would be the mainstream press.

Wars tend to concentrate the mind. No one cared that Lincoln was homely or that FDR was disabled. And we're involved in not only the hot war in Iraq but the culture war. And in a foxhole you don't care what the race, gender or ethnicity of your fellow soldier is, but only whether they can do the job.

~
Update: Today's chuckle is provided by Jeff Miller:

Thank you President Bush for selecting Judge Roberts, someone who actually believes in the Constitution as it was written. I know for myself if I ever saw a living Constitution I would get out my Holy Water and dowse it generously.

Now them's good comedy. First (to use an odious phrase) he's thinking outside the box. I've heard the phrase "living Constitution" so long that it no longer registers, I could on longer see the words-as-image the way Jeff did. I also like the word 'generously' at the end. "I would get out my Holy Water and dowse it" would work but "generously" gives the joke its proper inflection of exaggeration. The joke is also effective by its placement. He begins with "More evidence that George W. Bush is different than his father..." and we think that this will be serious post, but then the joke appears and lands all the more humorously for its unexpectedness.

Valley of Tears

"I weep for you, as Jazer weeps, O vines of Sibmah." - Jer 48:32

I wonder why
so many Marian statues
are said to be weeping.

I want to say:
‘cheer up Mary,
you’re in Heaven!'

It's not like the commercials
where the sportsman smiles,
says 'I'm going to Disney World!'

She cries the tears
her son had asked
‘Do not weep for me,
weep for your children’

We are her children.


*

Religious sentiment, they say,
is the partner of pornography--
"sensation for sensation’s sake"
to quote the late Flannery O'.

But oh it's not so with Mary
where sentiment isn't sentimental
emotions aren't chimeras
and love is real.

I am giving up blogging pretty much. Still, I think people ought to read my stuff even if I don't write it.

- Bill Luse of Apologia; my sentiments exactly

I frequently recommend The Habit of Being as rather essential spiritual reading. I gave a copy to my mother a couple of years before she died, and a few months before she passed away, she told me how tremendously helpful and meaningful the book had been.

- Amy Welborn

I'd binked and bonked around the Summa [Theologica] for years, and then by reading Fr. Farrell's Companion [to the Summa] realized . . . that God actually wants me to be happy. Now why, exactly, God allows people like me, who go about living as though He doesn't want them to be happy, to exist is (somewhat) another subject. The point is that if you're one of us, if you admire the Summa -- either in an abstract "will-have-to-go-there-someday" manner as one might admire the Taj Mahal or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or in a confused "gee-I-know-the-Summa-but-don't-think-God-wants-me-to-be-happy" way -- you ought to read Fr. Farrell's Commentary. You can find it online here. Or, if you want an even shorter version, pick up My Way of Life, which is a kind of prose-poem Fr. Farrell helped write about the Thomist view of the universe.

- Secret Agent Man

Look at nudies on the memorial of St. Maria Goretti? Never! Not that I look at nudies on any of the other 364 days of the year, of course. (To this day, I don't know what those images of Graham Faulkner look like.) This story just happens to be a great introduction to the point I want to make about Sta. Maria Goretti: she shames me into choosing the good.

-Enbrethiel of Sancta Sanctis

The Kolbe medal that I'd taken to wearing around my neck suddenly made me feel a little embarrassed. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but it struck me that, if I were to meet Kolbe, he'd find it sadly amusing that I was wearing his image rather than Mary's. Kolbe pointed to Mary—it seemed awkward that I should merely point to him....Last Sunday, I made the trip up to the Church of Notre Dame at Columbia University, a beautiful church with a lovely service. Afterwards, over refreshments, I noticed a parishioner was wearing the Miraculous Medal, and I asked her where I could get one. A young man who was standing nearby with his wife immediately proffered me a Miraculous Medal he'd apparently been carrying for just such an opportunity. It took me a moment to process that he was actually giving me the medal. Then I thanked him and took it happily. It was one of those magical moments of serendipity.

- Dawn Eden of "The Dawn Patrol"

Dawn Eden earlier this week posted a story about NARAL picketing outside of a crisis-pregnancy center with signs such as "FAKE CLINIC."...Their carrying signs that said "FAKE CLINIC" is especially ironic. Aborturaries don't offer medical services that perform healing. They don't heal what is broken, rather they kill both the life of the child and as a consequence do serious damage to the psychological health of the mother and can cause other possible medical side effect. A clinic where you are worse off when you came out then when you went in is by definition a "FAKE CLINIC."

- Jeff of Curt Jester

I have always hated domestic work, especially cooking and cleaning the kitchen. The kitchen is where I most felt like an unappreciated martyr. I started by bringing it to the confessional, and that helped some. But the greatest graces came when I offered up cooking more often and focussing on the kitchen for my lenten offerings. I began by placing a Crucifix on the window above the sink, so that whenever I felt like a martyr, I would remember what Jesus did for me. My husband tells me my kitchen is turning into a church, but he doesn't complain about the meals and cleanliness there now. As for me, I really enjoy cooking and cleaning for my family now--I offer a lot of it up for them and feel joyfully buoyant doing it! As for the idea of acting our way into feelings, I think that this is why we talk about love being an act of the will. Too many people divorce when the feeling of love first deserts us. They never make it to the stage where you have to think about why you first loved your spouse, and then take the initiative to treat him with the same joyful, loving spirit you did in the beginning, even if the feeling isn't yet there. Nagging and complaining will never bring the love back, but loving him usually will. The fact that the love is greater and stronger than ever is something too few couples realize anymore.

- commenter on Sr. Lorraine's site

Welcome to the reader who reached this site searching for "Catholic Church prostitute 15 century florence monday". Sorry, but I've only dealt with that topic as it pertains to Tuesdays, not Mondays.

- Greg the Obscure

This Harry Potter jazz makes me conclude that it's a race between the libs and the cons as to who wants the Index of Forbidden Books back in action.The libs can have something either to ignore or to insult. The cons can have extra ammo to act like know-it-all goon squad cops (whose help was never asked). God bless the "Caelum et Terra" crew. That was a welcome journal. It was like a good chill pill after a hard swallow of something in either "Crisis" or "The National Catholic Reporter".

- Fr. Shawn O'Neal on Amy's blog

I still sometimes think of poverty in [a] positivist way: I assume that it will breed crime and often blame it for many of society's other problems. Such a view implies that money can solve everything--which anyone can tell you it has no power to do...What I'm saying is that I wouldn't fault anyone who let desperate economic realities sway their moral choices. This is precisely why I'm in such awe of those who don't let desperate economic realities sway their moral choices.Sta. Maria Goretti puts me to shame not just because she said no to a particular grave sin, but because it is obvious that she had a habit of saying no to sin on principle.

- Enbrethiel of Sancta Sanctis

Bait 'n Switch

I jumped the gun on that last post. As a strategy to distract extremists it was pretty effective. (I wish the Prez & his staff were as good at planning for the aftermath of war as they are at winning elections and announcing Supreme Court nominees.)

John Roberts appears to be no Scalia or Thomas, but the bench folks seem to think he's a good choice. His wife has served as executive vice president for Feminists for Life, which can't be a bad sign.

Judge Clement to Get the Nod?

Red State.org seems to think so.

The fact that we don't know much about her speaks volumes. It represents a remarkable capitulation on the part of the President if she's nominated because it illustrates a spectacular double-standard.

Democrat presidents can nominate judges with paper trails who support abortion and who are not particularly attractive (see Ruth Bader Ginsberg). Republican Presidents have to slink around and find someone without a paper trail who is photogenic and by one report called Roe v. Wade settled law.

Certainly Bush would be hewing to the letter, if not the spirit, of what he promised - she's said to be a strict constructionist. But when you have a Republican Senate and a two-term Republican president, you just have to shake your head to see the President out skulking about in the bushes looking for a woman who won't offend Arlen Spector and Teddy Kennedy. It's really pathetic.

Need Some Good News?

Go here!

On The Glories of Nature & Why Southerners Make Good Writers

Letter from Reid Buckley to his brother William F. Buckley, as printed in National Review:

Walking a country lane and simply looking about one can be among the most rewarding experiences available to us in this vale of tears. Have you noticed the lyre-shaped sparkleberry tree at the head of the Pasillo, the tall, handsome hickory by the Plazuela de la Lealtad that looks as though it was at one time circled in chains, the trailing arbutus on the path entering the Peninsula, the birdsfoot violets and wild iris across the Big Pond? I can always tell a farmer when I receive his visit. His eyes take in everything, and he will say, "I notice you’ve put out milo where you had browntop millet last year. Any reason?"

I remember Icky Guy remarking to me how it is that southerners, who may not visit a book other than the Bible twice in their lives, yet turn out a disproportionate number of our country’s finest novelists, or used to. He explained the phenomenon by saying that southerners prefer to live their lives directly and intensely, as a personal experience, rather than derivatively — wasting their time buried in a book. But when they are called on, or feel the impulse, to write, they pour into their writing all that passionate and closely observed devotion to the land.

...The profound pleasure of nature is cost-free but jealous. It will not brook competition; requires total concentration. The trick is this: Keep the ego from intruding. Let the glory and balm of nature flood into your soul, in silence. Harken to nature. Sieve it through your eyes, suck it in through your nose and mouth (and pray that you do not suck in a deer fly at this season). Let your whole being float in what surrounds you, and shut up. Shut up! Do not talk, even if it kills you to keep silence. Do not even think, if you can avoid that. Nothing you may think or say is of the least importance to the cosmos. You will not be here for long; nature is here forever.

Funny

A Paul Harvey joke:

There are three types of people. Those who can count and those who can't.

Recognizing Muslims Are Different

Jonah Goldberg, as usual, gets it:

The scandal wasn’t that there was a "backlash" against the Muslim community. It is that there wasn’t more of a backlash within the Muslim community. We now know that the attackers were British born and raised Muslims. Yet there’s precious little evidence that the Muslim community is eager to turn on the enemy within with any admirable enthusiasm.

This is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. Obviously, it makes terrorism more likely. And it also makes precisely the sort of climate the press and moderate Muslims fear most. If normal Muslims can’t be counted on to turn on terrorists in their midst, how can a nation avoid taking measures that will seem unfair to normal Muslims? Already nine out of ten Brits support sweeping new powers for the police. If jihadis can hide among the larger Muslim population, it’s obvious that the larger Muslim population will come under greater scrutiny. The logic of the cancer cell kicks in, and even more young Muslims feel “oppressed” and the number of jihadis will grow.

Our mutual dependence is shown by the fact that we must wait for Muslims to get their act together in order for there to be fewer terrorist acts. And the mainstream media isn't doing us any favors -- rather than shaming Muslims they encourage the further production of imaginary chips on their shoulders. I suppose even if the Western media woke up and started calling a spade a spade (i.e. if the BBC & NY Times headquarters were hit) the Middle East would cling even tighter to Al Jazeera. The plain fact is that Western culture is skeptical of itself while Muslim culture is extremely self-confident. We do have a lot in common in that regard: we blame the West first and they blame the West first. Looks like we're in for a long wait.

Speaking of differences, came across an article on Christian-Muslim relations on the website of a humanitarian papal agency titled The Vocabulary of Dialogue. It's a good look at how we lose something in translation and how sometimes semantics can make a big difference:

One of the more interesting areas for the study of semantic fields is in words for color. Every language I know of has words for color. The healthy human eye sees the colors of the spectrum and names them. Nothing seems more natural or self-evident – the sky is blue and the grass is green. So there. What is interesting is that it is not so self-evident, especially at the “boundaries” of colors, where the semantic field of the word for a color in one language is broader or more constricted than the corresponding word in another language.

Two examples: When asked the color of dried, dead grass most English speakers will say that it is brown. Germans will say that it is gelb, yellow. When asked the color of a frost-covered field, most Germans will say that it is grau, grey, while most English speakers will say the field is white. It is clear that both the German and English speaker are looking at the same phenomenon. It is not that one sees one thing and the other sees something else. It is the case, however, that the semantic field of the English word yellow does not usually cover dead grass and the English word grey has a semantic field that does not cover the color of a frost covered field. The semantic fields of the German gelb and grau, however, do not cover this phenomenon, despite the fact that we often translate them as “yellow” and “grey” respectively.

This may seem like an interesting, but basically useless, piece of information, scarcely relevant, if at all, for the Catholic-Muslim Dialogue. However, I do not think that is the case at all. Roman Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity and a good part of Orthodox Christianity developed their vocabulary over centuries in Greek...

Simply put, if at the beginning of the Catholic-Muslim dialogue a great deal of energy was spent– and rightly so – on "how you are like me," the mature dialogue must eventually spend a great deal of energy on understanding "how you are not like me."

UPDATE: More from Lofted Nest...and from Daniel Pipes: Is Allah God?

Memes Happen

Summer meme makes me feel fine,
blowin' through the jasmine in my mind...

Elena has tagged me with what looks to be the world's longest meme:

What I was doing 10 years ago: eating pizza?

5 years ago: probably watching that I Dream of Jeannie episode where Tony yells "Jeannie!!...Jeannie!!" multiple times

1 year ago: I'll take Blogging for $500 Alex

Yesterday: Mass, read McCullough's account and analysis of Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs (fascinating read), grilled out shish-ke-bobs (actually my stepson did the cooking), drank two beers, mediated a family quarrel, hiked four miles.

5 Snacks I enjoy:
Ding Dongs
King Dons
Life cereal
Oreo's with new chocolate center
grapes

5 songs I know all the words to:
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
Billy, Don't Be a Hero
Star Spangled Banner
Take Our Bread
The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha

5 things I would do with $100 million dollars:
Unstrap our financially-strapped Byzantine Church
Buy a kayak for Darby Creek wanderings
Donate to my Catholic high school
Ditto Elena, back to school for theology/history and/or literature
Acquire ten acres out in the country

5 locations which I would like to visit:
Jerusalem
Germany
Rome
Medjugorje
Mexico

5 bad habits I have:
too much internet
trouble on the greens & off the tee (chip well)
too much dependence on self
laziness
answering memes

5 things I like doing
reading
writing
listening to music
beer drinking
biking

5 things I would never wear:
a lampshade
Speedos
an earring
a man bro
Bill Clinton-length running shorts

5 TV shows I like:
24
The Apprentice
The Munsters
BookTV's "In Depth"
Franciscan University Presents

5 biggest joys of the moment:
beauty of summer
the Mass
a plethora of great books to read
seeing my previously liberal stepson donating to the Cato Institute
the Sox are in town when I go to visit Boston o'er Labor day! Yea!

5 favorite toys:
Tivo
my 'puter
lawn tractor
my dvd player
cell phone

And these from Bill of Summa Minutiae (for once, living up to his blog name):

What are the last three things that made you sweat?
Reading in backyard sun on Sunday
Hike in woods Sunday
Cleaning house on Saturday

As far as tagging people, consider this an open invitation. I wouldn't want to be responsible for furthering a possible internet addiction. :-)

Bumper Stickers

Jeff Culbreath is looking for a few good bumper stickers. Which reminds me of a SUV I saw recently with a Marine Corps sticker beside another that said, "Martyrs or Marines? Who do you think is going to get the virgins?"

It's Intended to be Win-Win

I often forget that we're to thank God both in good times and in bad. This is a "win/win" situation: when times are going well we thank God for it and when times are not going well suffering offers us an opportunity to become closer to Him & so we thank Him. A saint once wrote "what's it to you whether you come to Heaven by way of the fields or the desert?".

But our lives are not all desert nor all field. And the difficulty is quickly accepting the desert after enjoying the field. To use a trivial example, if I'm involved in doing something and my wife asks me to help her do some cleaning or some other task. To switch gears, as it were. Similarly a weekend that looks free and then suddenly I'm told there's a third straight gathering with the in-laws. To smile and thank God seems a foreign concept while I'm out playing in the field (both literally and figuratively).

Some try to avoid re-entry difficulties by attempting to make life all field or all desert. The former is much more common of course, but there are remnants of the latter such as the stripping of physical beauty from churches, or such as shown by the way some denominations forbid drinking, gambling and dancing.

A Shocker

The conversation had the same quality we'd been having for years but this time with a shocking twist for an ending. (Though perhaps she's just more honest than most?)

Her goal is temporal happiness and to avoid suffering, and so there's always a wrestling between her and God.

"Look at the way he treats his friends- the Jews, the Irish, His Son!"

I had no answer. This didn't seem to be an opportune time to mention Pascal's line that "every conversion is a sentence" or quote the writer Paul Claudel: "No one can foretell where the demands of God, which the Scriptures tell us are harsher than Hell, will stop. Small wonder that your flesh shudders where so many of the greatest saints have trembled before you."

I'd certainly tried St. Paul, who said that God never gives us more than we can bear.

She asked me to pray for something concerning a mutual loved one.

"I'll pray that God's will be done."

"No! Don't pray for that!"

"What? You're kidding right."

"No, I never pray for that."

I should've asked her how she makes it through the Our Father. But I also realized anew the natural end of apologetics, that point at which only Love can take somebody. There's a gospel account of Our Lord saying that it's better to do something after saying you won't do it, than saying you will and not doing it. I hope and pray she's in the former category.

Negative Aspects of Blogging

Inspired by the news that Hilary of Fiat is leaving the blogosphere...

1) Dysutopian responses common

Being called a jackass in print, without the ameliorating gestures of tone and body language, often triggers negative emotions in the receiver.

2) Inoculative effects of tiny doses of fame are, in fact, not inoculative.

It is been shown that the negative impacts of fame on the human psyche are not only not avoided by tiny doses of fame but instead these trigger only the desire for greater fame. Site statistics are to bloggers what the Coke bottle was to the Aborigines in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

3) Words as plumage

Inappropriate mating rituals can occur. The male blogger engages in preening activities such as aggressive behavior in comment boxes in order to secure admiring glance of female readers.

4) Taboo Breaking

Saying that which cannot be said can be hellaciously appealing. This most often takes the form of profligate usage of cuss words.

5) Disproportionate Time Spent Polishing Posts of Utter Insignificance

Here the blogger revises and extends his remarks as if they're appearing in the Congressional Record. (Note: since most blogs have more readers than the Congressional Record, this is not necessarily irrational behavior.)

6) Rise of "blog coaches" a sure sign of the Apocalypse

Lavishly paid consultants known colloquially as "blog coaches" provide ideas for posts, analyze content for audience appeal, counsel on when to use "that" versus "which". (Ok, I made this one up.)

St. Thomas Aquinas on "Whether prayer should last a long time?"

Now the quantity of a thing should be commensurate with its end, for instance the quantity of the dose should be commensurate with health. And so it is becoming that prayer should last long enough to arouse the fervor of the interior desire: and when it exceeds this measure, so that it cannot be continued any longer without causing weariness, it should be discontinued. Wherefore Augustine says (ad Probam. Ep. cxxx): "It is said that the brethren in Egypt make frequent but very short prayers, rapid ejaculations, as it were, lest that vigilant and erect attention which is so necessary in prayer slacken and languish, through the strain being prolonged. By so doing they make it sufficiently clear not only that this attention must not be forced if we are unable to keep it up, but also that if we are able to continue, it should not be broken off too soon." And just as we must judge of this in private prayers by considering the attention of the person praying, so too, in public prayers we must judge of it by considering the devotion of the people.

Wow

Lefty Richard Cohen takes on lefties (talk about a man bites dog story):

Whatever it is that explains how thugs on the left remain heroes long after their thuggery has been exposed has now attached itself in a way to Saddam Hussein. I don't think he is quite ready for T-shirts or coffee mugs, but when the war in Iraq is denounced, Hussein is often not mentioned at all. Michael Moore managed to leave him on the cutting room floor in his cartoon of a documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," and he gets similar (non)treatment in the upcoming documentary "Why We Fight." From these and other sources you would think that the nature of Hussein and his regime had nothing to do with the decision to go to war. But Hussein figured prominently, even paramountly, in why some of us originally supported the war and why some people still do. The man is a beast.

It's hard, in a mere column, to account for why parts of the left have such a selective concern for human rights -- in one place but not another.

via Two Sleepy Mommies

Let's Play...

..."what's on my lampstand" - a new meme as tagged by Steven Riddle. First, a lamp -imagine that! I bet precious few lampstands are without one. Also a clock radio, Lit of the Hours, 3 remotes, "Lamentations & Exaggerations", a Pieta statue and "Letters & Diaries of John Henry Newman Vol. XXVII".

Update: I'm supposed to tag people. Bill of Apologia fame because he can make a boring subject interesting. MamaT. Smock Mama. And two others (decide amongst yourselves) are free to join in the fun.

Pipe Me A Tune

It's so odd how one day the Makem Brothers can sound lachrymose, gluttonously sweet, and Mr. Rogers simple. And the next I can’t get enough of them. I’ve played the cd twice and it strikes some primeval nerve. I can feel again the magic in the strumming of the bodhran - somebody call the Cheiftains!

I'm homesick for Ireland so play me nothing but songs of Eire. I miss the old sod and old poems and the hint of sea dust in the air. I miss the medieval maps with the crypto-familiar names; Connaught, Mayo, Donnegal, Slivo. I hunger for a bit of the west wind's spray against my face, the froth of salt sea against my neck, the rush of white sail flying over the rhythmic blue.

Cén t-ainm atá ort

Oh sean behean-bhoct!
lined with your ancient names
sing, you creasing Shannon,
you weather-beaten land
flood me with your Inis’s
hide me in your Croagh’s
your Ard Mor’s
and your Eochaill’s,
find me in your Loch’s.

Flee back to thee,
Tongue, sound the ancient chord!
Tá mé i mo chónaí i
Bíonn gach duine go lách
go dtéann bó ina gharraí
An dtuigeann tú?
Is dóigh liom
Buíochas le Dia!

His hair is like a mop
drawing swirls of blood
footholds for Heaven seekers
each smear a saving torrent
containing a thousand Floods.

His feet are bound and tied
split by the hard iron
of human stubbornness,
while from His ribs
issue the water & blood
of Adam’s new bride.

Sea Songs, Shanties, & Poetry

Excellent sea shanty resource:

Cape Cod girls ain't got no combs
     Haul away, haul away
They brush their hair with codfish bones
     And we're bound away for Australia

Also came across this retrospective of sea bard George Mackay Brown, including poems of tribute here, here and here.

Whereas, when it blows from the West — which is after all, the airt it loves best — it brings music and magic to us, seal songs and the breath of mermaids and the merry splurge and dance of whales. And more, it brings aromas of the magic isle in the west, that people have known was there for thousands of years. The Gaelic-speakers called it Tir-nan-Og (which means ‘the land of the young’). Once we’re there, believe me, Gypsy, we'll never be old and sick and weary — for pussies there’ll be a silver fish on a plate every day, and a nice stone – emerald or lapis lazuli — to sit on always in the sun, and no dogs and no bad-tempered householders who ‘shoo’ pussies off their doorsteps. There, in Tir-nan-Og, even the East wind is gentle and full of scents and sweet sounds. ---George Mackay Brown

Excerpt from "A Cairn for George Mackay Brown" by A.G. Boobier

5,000 years ago
a stone
HURLED
from Vestafiold

§

it BROKE the upsurge
of the Atlantic breakers

held aloof the raw salt wind
at Skara Brae

dug into black earth
held limpets kelp
became sepulchre and home
to fishermen and farmers...

§

it FELL among brothers sisters
who danced in the round
with the Beltane sun
and the two waters
at Brodgar

Pottergate 2005

Mark Felt: "Follow the Quidditch ball"

Media: "What did the Pope know, and when did he know it?"

JK Rowling as Dick Nixon: "You won't have Harry Potter to kick around anymore!"

My Talking Points    - prompted by a post on Amy's blog

My take has always been that if the Iraq War was unjust, then the Gulf War was unjust because the Iraq war was a continuation caused by ceasefire violations. If the Iraq War began two months instead of ten years after Hussein began violations fewer would've a problem with it. The time lag bothered most even though, ironically, that time (coupled with economic sanctions) was given to Hussein in order to help avoid war.

Ignoring the ceasefire agreement was certainly a viable option, at the risk of rendering future ceasefires meaningless and thus encouraging other rogue states. Not to mention encouraging Hussein himself. One has to measure that price against the dear price of engagement.

So, is it worse to be unpredictable (in the sense of sometimes enforcing or hewing to agreements and sometimes not) or to be predictable (i.e. having the world know where we stand and how we'll react)? A Ryne Duren or a Greg Maddox?

I should read more on how World War I started. Was it that the major powers were too predictable or not predictable enough? My impression is that key countries had 'set points' which if triggered automatically sent them to war. Was it that the set points were far too trivial for what was to become an unimaginably brutal war? Or was it that their triggers for war weren't communicated or taken seriously?

I see I've asked too many questions to call this my "talking points".

Das Hoot

    A new form of blogger comedy has been discovered over at the Corner. Basically you pick out Broadway shows and tweak the names and stories for comedic effect.

~

Sound of Moo Sick - a fish-out-of-water comedy about a city slicker in the country dealing with an ill bovine (based on a story by Jeff Culbreath)

Breast Side Story - Young mom sues city for failure to allow her to public breastfeed

My Fair Katie - musical in which William F. Buckley takes a bet that he can turn Katie Couric into a conservative and pass her off at the Heritage Foundation's annual ball

A Soros Line - millionaire George Soros tries singing and dancing rather than throwing money at those mischievous American voters

Hello Folly - tragic docudrama starring young actress marrying a famous actor/Scientologist

Beat Me in St. Louis - comedy starring the Reds playing those unbeatable St. Louis Cardinals

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Sorghum - city uses eminent domain to take small farmer's land in order to build strip mall

Rant 'em at the Opera - counter-tribalist blogger sings rants against everything and everyone

Glen Married Glen's Boss - woman leads forty-year old bachelor down the aisle - or he's fired!

The Lyin' King - the epic saga of filmmaker Michael Moore

Beauty and the Least - story of how in serving those who have the least Mother Teresa became the world's beauty

Summer Guide to Resisting Lust

It's summertime and that means a young, middle-aged, and an old man's thoughts turn to... the fact that women are wearing less clothes. Here are a few suggestions you may or may not find useful:

1) Re-direct your attention from the body to the face and hair.

Sometimes you can't look away. (This is especially true when you're driving a car - for best results, look straight ahead.) But you can look at hair and face. Not only is that not felt on a glandular level (aesthetic only) but it also reminds you of her personhood and that she's not to be reduced to an object of pleasure.

2) Remember the words of the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want". Alternative readings: "I shall not lack" or "I shall not lack for any good thing". Feelings of desire and want can be discarded since how can we want if God promises we shall be satisfied?

3) Praise God for his marvelous handiwork. Tell Him what an impressive job he did with her (sometimes this goes along the lines, 'perhaps too good'). This helps not only in helping us to step back and become outsiders rather than participants but also by invoking God we are given help.

4) Ask Mary to pray that we be given the grace to want to be chaste.

The Latin Mass

I received a book catalog with a quote (not my ellipsis) from Cardinal Ratzinger: "By incessantly inventing new Eucharistic prayers...we have sunk farther and farther into banality." And it occurred to me that there has been a rather large hole in my hit-and-miss education. I have little idea what a pre-Vatican II Mass consisted of. I've been to two Tridentine liturgies but in the distracting newness of it I didn't get a complete sense of what was actually being prayed.

If we are what we pray, then the Liturgy to some extent forms us. (Of course, you have to pray it to be formed by it and I've heard it said that few back in the '50s paid much attention to it and instead said their own prayers & private devotions.) But here the Church was formed for hundreds of years by a liturgy I was completely unfamiliar with! For history's sake alone I should have read the text of the Latin mass before. But fortunately, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I was able to here.

The Mass seemed more expressive of our mutual dependence; there are more mentions of and prayers to the saints (and our dependence on God was expressed visually by the priest facing the same direction as the people). There was more focus on sinfulness of course. But oddly, given how clerical the pre-Vatican II church was and how the priest is seen as an altus Christus, there was an equality in the confessions of priest and people. The priest alone expresses sorrow for his sins, before God and the laity, offers an act of contrition and the parishioners respond, "May almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins, and bring you to everlasting life.". The laity then identically express their contrition and the priest responds with the same prayer asking God's forgiveness.

Update: I found this interesting post.

Rich

Scott Hahn's latest arrived in the mail yesterday and it is rich. Flipping at random, I read a sidebar on the historicity of the Flood, a common enough question in a scientific-minded age. There are also copious quotations from Church Fathers and the Catechism, including a long quote from Augustine's "City of God" concerning David & King Saul and how David's tremendous respect and solicitude for the unsavory Saul was due to Saul's annointing (Saul as 'The Lord's Christ'), which is inspiring example of seeing God where others don't.

I wish we'd had resources like this when I was young. At our Catholic high school we suffered through the heretical "Christ Among Us" (one that Amy Welborn especially loathes). We were also heavy into John Powell S.J.'s stuff, which is better that "Christ Among Us" but not nearly as rich as Hahn's. Newly reverted and feeling the zeal, a few years back I wrote our high school and chastized them for their mediocre Religion program. I received a very defensive reply. And I have more sympathy for them now. It's hard to know what you don't know, and I think they just didn't know any better. They thought they were doing the right thing and giving us the proper tools to evangelize ourselves and the world.

Just An Old-Fashioned Love Song?

I was at a place of great financial temptation leafing through the impressive Spiritual Formation Bible, a Protestant version but with Catholic-friendly Dallas Willard among its editors. I read the introduction to "The Song of Songs" and was a bit disappointed with Dallas.

The editors wrote that this book celebrates the physical love between a man and a woman only, end of story. They said it shows how this shows that the Church was wrong to hate the body and hate sex and wrong to allegorize this book for a thousand or more years. Either/or, not and/both. Compare and contrast to Ronald Witherup in The Bible Companion:

The origin of some of the text might well be in secular love poetry from the ancient Near East, but its preservation in the Bible assures us that there is also a deeper meaning to appreciate...Interpreters through history have always appreciated deeper levels of the text. Rabbinic interpreers saw in this love relationship the symbol of God's covenantal love for Israel as his bride. Christian interpreters picked up on this deeper symbolism, seeing in the book the allegory of the relationship of Christ to his church.

Where I've Visited



create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out our California travel guide

And the hat tip goes to...(envelope please)...Some Have Hats

What If They Had Met?   - new fiction

He was jowly from a long history of fast food washed down with cheap beer, but he still had his hair. The man across the table looked a mirror image but for being older and having less to offer a barber.

“So, how’s the karaoke circuit been treating ya?” asked the older man.

“That ain’t fair. I’ve got some record deals brewing. And speakin' of brew, I ain't seen see yours at our QuikMart!”

“Well, that’s what you’re drinking partner. My fifteen minutes is over and it’s affecting sales.”

They sipped the beer and complained bitterly about the National Enquirer.

“I don’t care what they say, it’s not what the rags think of us that matters, or the country or even the world. I've been given the promise dude. I remember it morning and night, every time I f—k up I remember the promise.”

The older man shrugged and offered the younger a bowl of peanuts. They returned to a topic they had in common, their famous brothers.

“They’re both smart as hell. If my brother had your brother’s discipline—“

“And if my brother had your brother’s charm —“

“They’d have ruled the world wouldn’t they of?”

"Like if chocolate met peanut butter."

A stranger walked up. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

“Prolly. I’m Roger Clinton, and this is Billy Carter.”

           ~

They parted company. On the jukebox a Patty Loveless song played...

After all my lonely nights
Without an end in sight
A morning shining bright for me awaits
Where the sweetest times will last
All's forgiven from the past

Someday I will
One day I know I will
Someday I will lead the parade

Though they've scattered through the years
Old friends will gather near
With nothing but the kindest words to say
And the sweetest times will last
All's forgiven from the past

Someday I will
One day I know I will
Someday I will lead the parade

And the sweetest times will last
All's forgiven from the past
Someday I will lead the parade

Stating the Obvious

Yogi Berra said that "baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical." Similarly, in many ways war is ninety percent mental, or psychological. So Bush can't say that things are going poorly or moderately poorly in Iraq, if in fact they are. Nor can he, or should he, say anything negative about the sorry state of Islam & Muslim culture because that worsen the situation; it's often best for leaders to not state publicly the root of a problem.

Ultimately terrorists won't be defeated from without, but from within. That is, it won't end until Muslims finally begin to shame their bloodthirsty co-religionists. The biggest Muslim scandal today isn't Osama Bin Laden, but his enablers - the Muslim community. Where are the Muslim protest marches against Osama? Why haven't contributions to mosques fallen precipitously? And, as Tom Friedman of the Times mentioned, there was a fatwa calling for the death of a novelist, Salman Rushdie, but no fatwa issued by any prominent cleric against a mass murderer like Osama bin Laden or Al-Zawahiri. Sigh.

    

'Makes up stories! Great, horrible enemy! Must be killed!'

'Bombs embassies, kills civilians, a bit overzealous at times but all-around good guy. Tips his barber well.'

UPDATE: a more definitive piece here, via Julie.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

It's particularly easy to be snarky when blogging, because it feels like you're not really talking to anybody. Which is weird, given the fact that you're talking to everybody. - Karen Hall of "Some Have Hats"

In human affairs there is nothing from which he does not extract enjoyment, even from things that are most serious. If he converses with the learned and judicious, he delights in their talent, if with the ignorant and foolish, he enjoys their stupidity. He is not even offended by professional jesters. With a wonderful dexterity he accommodates himself to every disposition. As a rule, in talking with women, even with his own wife, he is full of jokes and banter. No one is less led by the opinions of the crowd, yet no one departs less from common sense. - Desiderius Erasmus on St. Thomas More, via Meredith of "Basia Me, Catholica Sum"

I can easily see how the nuclear family in and of itself tends to reduce family size. Having only one set of hands to care for baby is a massive job. Two sets of hands, is livable but hard. How having a grandparent, aunt, cousin, etc. around to help out makes a big boost in terms of restoring sanity to new parents. I'm certain this logic carries forward when adding further children to the mix, although after 2 I'm told economies of scale begin to kick in. I know there are many other factors influencing small family size -- including the expense of raising children in this culture and the death of the family wage for the married man. But that's my two cents for the night. - Olde Oligarch

I read somewhere that the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs was nearing its apex in America, but that outsourcing of service jobs was just beginning and would soon be having a huge impact. That rings true...Tonight, as I was out buying a pizza for dinner and fighting the long line at the carry-out at Pizza Hut, it occurred to me that outsourcing begins at home. I don't fix my own car anymore, don't even change my own oil anymore. I don't fix my own furnace, I don't even try. Someone came and replaced our doors and windows, we had our roof done by a firm -- my own father, at my age, would have spent his evenings doing all those things and my own mother would have spent the evening making dinner instead of us having carry-out. It's a changing world. - Rock of "Lofted Nest"

Here's a tip I learned long ago...and it works. First, remember: the commandment is to love your neighbors (including your enemies). It doesn't demand that you like them! So. About that SOB who is constantly telling you exactly what you're doing wrong with your life...or that total idiot who just cut you off in traffic...or that in-law who insists on telling you the proper way to raise your own children...or that [fill in the blank #*@(@*#&@ person]? Here's what you want to do: (I didn't make this up. A friend -- a holy person, actually -- clued me in on this one long ago.) Pray for the creep. (N.B. It's probably not a hot idea to use the word "creep" in your prayer.) Here's a prayer I often use: "Dear God, please put that so-and-so in a higher place than me in Your Heavenly Kingdom. Amen." That's it! - the inimitable Pewlady

Any discussions about the "practical" aspects of [early reception of the sacrament of Confirmation] must take a backseat to theology, and the mis-placement of confirmation oh, lo these many decades in many parts of the world has really been a travesty, and done great damage to a proper theological understanding of confirmation itself and the sacraments of initiation as a whole. And, turning to pragmatic considerations, anyway, as we've discussed here before, adolescent confirmation, shorn from its baptismal associations and proximity to Eucharist, by 10-15 years in the life of the one celebrating, has become, in practice, less a sacrament (in perception) than a ritualized sociological marker of, not Christian initiation, but initiation into adulthood (sort of), and, more practically, a tool for blackmail...go through this, and you won't have to go to religious ed any more. More common than you think. - Amy Welborn of "Open Book"

For more than a day after intercourse with a woman, a man will experience a moderate psychological aversion to women other than the one he slept with. - Patrick of Orthonormal Basis, on a study that lends support to the exclusivity factor in relationships

As a side note, Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian, has a line in his book "Hidden Gospels" suggesting early Church fathers would have thought it absurd that Christians should have Scripture in their homes. They couldn't envision Scripture outside the Sacraments.- Rich Leonardi of "Ten Reasons"

The theory of evolution is far more than adaptation and survival of the fittest, or however the popular mind seeks to characterize it. The materialism and randomness at the heart of the theory must be dealt with by theists, who do their faith no credit by simply saying, "Oh, God could have started it all." At heart, the Darwinian theory of evolution and traditional Judeo-Christian theism are a much harder fit than many people think. That said, I'm not for teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. What I am for is a more honest instruction in the theory of evolution - acknoweldging the problems, the gaps and the intelligent, scientifically-based challenges to it. One could do this, I'd think, without espousing Creationism. - Amy Welborn

In Germany, he was asked about survival of the fittest. He told them it was not a strange thing at all -- the fit will survive of themselves. "But in my experience," he said, "what I have seen is the survival of the unfit. And that is where God's glory comes in." - Sundar Singh via "Happy Catholic"

For Whiter Teeth Buy Crest

One of the things least appealing about modern life is how easy it is to drown in all the trivialities and superficialities. Perhaps I've getting curmudgeonly, but it's the little things that annoy. Such as the ubiquity of advertising.

For example, I'm watching the All Star game and the camera lingers on someone vaguely familiar. And it's Billy Bob Thorton. Big whoop, I think. And so you'd think that would be it, right? No. The announcers do a commercial for his next movie! This was planned; there was nothing inadvertent about it. So now I'm wondering: did Thorton go to the game for love of the game or pimp his movie? And since when did we sign up for commercials outside the alloted 2, er, 3, er, 4 minutes between innings?

In the past ten years corporations have gotten really good at simply not leaving any profit on the table. Bleeding you the way the gov't does. Like having both an income tax and a sales tax, movie houses have discovered the profit in both having a fixed price at the gate and an extra tax within by making you sit through twenty minutes of commercials. The correct consumer response is to avoid going to movie houses. So you buy DVDs and soon they'll have commercials you can't skip through.

My friend Ham o' Bone begins filming his movie, or at least two "shorts" of seven minutes long, next week. Which is probably what prompted a dream last night in which I was looking for stuff to film at a local grocery mart. I was looking for something meaningful to say amidst a tide of Tide - but everything seemed washed of meaning. I wonder if decreasing patience with trivialities is the definition of a religious fanatic? Or is it the definition of the spoiled & impatient?

I was under the impression that Bone was going to show these film "shorts" to various & sundry movie people with short attention spans (i.e. those would rather watch film than read scripts). But he's going to try to get it independently funded by doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs (to the tune of at least a million) and get the movie made on his own. But there's the problem of distribution. And how will he advertise---

Man Behind the Curtain

Amy Welborn made some provocative comments concerning the Wizard of Oz:

"I've always (well, not always...for the past couple of decades, anyway) wondered about this, and Michael brought it up the other night when we were in Knoxville, and we all sat around watching The Wizard of Oz on TCM. Is The Wizard of Oz responsible for the massive loss of faith and the embrace of subjectivism in the West? Could it be? I'm sure you've thought about this too - no all-powerful Wizard, just a little man behind the curtain, tricking everyone. No need to really have anything real within - just believe that you have a brain, a heart and courage, and take on the external signs, and you're there, baby."

It's certainly a very Pelagian story. I recall as a child being let down by the ending - that the wizard (the God figure) was so powerless. It's a very naturalistic story in keeping with those who think Christ didn't multiply the loaves and fishes but simply inspired people to express their latent generosity by sharing what they had on them.

Many progressive Catholics appear to see the sacraments in a similar light, not powerful as conduits of grace in their own right due to the promises of Christ, but only psychologically valuable. Ronald Rollheiser in "Holy Longing" says daily Massgoers don't go to be sustained by God or seek his blessing but to keep themselves from falling apart, comparing them to alcoholics going to AA meetings. For them any old ritual will do and God is ancillary. Sad.

Terror & Torture

I'm not an expert on torture techniques, except with respect to the infliction of my poetry on unsuspecting readers. But I do watch the television show 24, which gives me some credibility. And the technique seems to be to occasionally let off. Let the guy think about it. Give him some room to come to the conclusion that he needs to see things your way.

So when I read something by Victor David Hanson the other day I wondered at the similarity between torture and terrorism:

Terror is the signature of the Islamist: hit, back off; hit, back off — hoping in a few years to erode the will and nerve of affluent and leisured Western countries.

Bin Laden has so far only made one mistake: He took down the entire World Trade Center rather than the top floors, and had the misfortune of having George Bush as president. Thus he lost Afghanistan and ended up with democratic reform from Iraq and Lebanon to the Gulf and Egypt. Train bombings in Madrid and bus explosions in London, like the carnage in Iraq, are preferable, since they are enough to terrify and demoralize the Westerner but not quite enough to knock sense into him that only military resistance and victory will save his civilization.

So the attacks will never quite be of such a stature to convince Western voters that one more such explosion will destroy their societies. The trick is instead to wage war insidiously, incrementally, and stealthily to avoid an overwhelming response. A cooling-off period in between 9/11 and 7/7 in which Western apologists, pacifists, and Islamist sympathizers go to work is essential for the terror to continue.

Perhaps. But it seems that the West is even more threatened, if less dramatically, by low population replacement rates. Europe, like an old soldier, won't die but will likely fade away.

Finally, ABC's This Week constantly reminds us of soldier's deaths. Here's the story of one soldier's heroism.

Crayons to Oils

This blogger's visit to The Cloisters brought back vivid memories. I'd visited there seven years ago this month and recall enjoying the tranquility and the sense of history.

I went back to my trip log and found it didn't stand up well. The writing was trite and unremarkable even though at the time it sung. But that doesn't negate the "joie of words" experienced at that time and nor does it negate the current joy of words as blogged here, even if they not age well.

Writing doesn't much matter but it reminded me how we as a church have progressed doctrinally, developing into a great oak from a small acorn. The joy Israel took in her books of Moses was no less joyful for its "looking through the glass darkly" and incompleteness.

Deja vu

Re: Journalism

I think the root cause of American's disillusionment with the press is not Jayson Blair and his ilk. Those who have brought true shame to the profession in recent years don't bother me that much. Every institution has their Jayson Blairs; the fact that there are corrupt police or lying journalists or child-abusing priests does not mean that the police, newspapers and the Catholic Church should be abolished or looked down upon. It only means that when a crime is made known the institution has a responsibility to correct and admit it. (And blogs certainly help journalists with that - St. Blog's own Christopher Blosser recently shed light with an excellent post on Pope Benedict's history that resulted in an admission of error from the writer for the The American Spectator.)

What does bother me is the seemingly intentional bias one encounters in newspapers like the Dispatch. Like not having a home-grown conservative on the Dispatch editorial page. Like having a regular guest political columnist who is odious on the life issues (Professor Oldenquist of OSU) without a contra voice. And like a recent Sunday front page article on gay marriage that was unintentionally hilarious for the way it framed the issue.

No doubt a certain amount of bias is unavoidable because we all come with all our viewpoints. But it's the lack of effort to overcome bias that makes people think less of journalists. "Coloring the News" by William McGowan and Bernard Goldberg's books are very persuasive on this point.

Journalists have a remarkably difficult job because fairness requires enormous discipline, and many writers seem to be long on passion but short on discipline.

My Fair Brother-in-Law

Went to a musical Saturday night, "My Fair Lady" put on by the arts council of one of the suburbs of Columbus. My brother-in-law played Professor Higgins and did a marvelous job. I love expressions of joy in movies which is why I'd always liked Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain" and why I particularly liked the moment that Eliza "got it" - the "Rain in Spain" scene - in this production.

My father-in-law mentioned during intermission how his son had lived this for the past six months or more. Spent hours and hours at play practice, memorizing lines and missing family gatherings and all for what? Three performances. Poof, and it's over, he said. (I thought of it as akin to blogging - a lot of time spent doing something that has that similar Poof! quality.) I'd never looked at it like that before. Hadn't thought about all that went behind this two or three hour performance. When we congratulated the actors afterwards we were thanking them not just for the performance but for that iceberg of time & energy submerged beneath this evening's tip.

Credits

Lately fellow bloggers have done a yeoman's job in directing me to instructive and/or pleasurable books. I'll have to take any future suggestions more seriously *grin*. In no particular order:

Steven Riddle recommended the engaging Randy Wayne White novel "Sanibel Flats". It's the pluperfect backyard hammock read.

Jeff Culbreath recommended John Meehan's Two Towers, which I started Friday and has been surgically attached to me ever since. (I even brought it to Saturday night's "My Fair Lady"; my mother-in-law became briefly interested in it thinking it was about the New York tragedy.)

Recently finished Frank Deford's marvelous biography of Christy Matthewson and John J. McGraw. Mark of "Irish Elk" recommended it after I'd already started reading it but still receives post-credit for his good taste. The book is so well-written that I looked in vain for another Deford offering, finally settling on Michael Sokolove's "Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose" which looks to be a more depressing read than Deford's "Old Ball Game".

Other recommendations that I have followed up on, in the sense of buying the book though shamefully not in having started yet:

Kathy the Recusant Carmelite: "The Persecutor" by Sergei Kourdakov
William 'The Quiet Man' Luse: "Joan of Arc" by John Beevers
Mama 'a book a day keeps the doc at bay' T: "A Green Journey" by Jon Hassler
Tom of Disputations: "A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist" by Abbot Vonier
Steven '20,000 Books Under the Bed' Riddle: "Nourished by the Word: Reading the Bible Contemplatively"
Bill 'Rock Star' White: "Modern Times" by Paul Johnson

Kreitzberg's Baby Photo!



Via Old Oligarch.

Pedigrees

Just finished a biography of Robert Hamilton Bishop, the first president of Miami University of Ohio (founded 1809). Bishop lived an interesting life in interesting times and it's fun to construct the "intellectual family trees" of great men - noting who influenced who and how ideas were handed down. (I recently read that there was a straight line from Luther to Hitler but that seems to be taking it a bridge too far.) Bishop was primarily influenced by Adam Ferguson:

Ferguson, Adam , 1723–1816, Scottish philosopher and historian. He was professor of philosophy at the Univ. of Edinburgh (1759–85). His Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) criticized earlier theories of a state of nature; it was an important contribution to intellectual history and influenced Hegel. In his Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), Ferguson advanced the principle of perfection and attempted to reconcile self-interest and universal benevolence...In his ethical system Ferguson treats man as a social being, illustrating his doctrines by political examples. As a believer in the progression of the human race, he placed the principle of moral approbation in the attainment of perfection..."We find in his method the wisdom and circumspection of the Scottish school, with something more masculine and decisive in the results. The principle of perfection is a new one, at once more rational and comprehensive than benevolence and sympathy, which in our view places Ferguson as a moralist above all his predecessors."

One of Ferguson's influences was French political philosopher Montesquieu, especially his Esprit des Lois (1748):

By far, [Montesquieu's] most influential work is The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Two main ideas are presented in this analysis concerning the nature and workings of government. His first assertion is that forms of government will invariably differ according to the political and social climate and circumstances which they have to deal with. He concluded from analysis that despotic rule is best in large empires as to maintain control and order, especially those in the "hot climates." As for democracy, he concluded that small city-states would be the best situation for it, because it would be Senk simpler to maintain and govern, with general agreement of the populace being easier to achieve. His second assertion, the most important of the treatise, is the fact that a balance and separation of powers is needed for an efficient and successful government.

The Bloggification of Newspapers

It had to happen sooner or later. The self-indulgent post has appeared in the newspaper.

The editor of the Columbus Dispatch now regularly serves up a column that attempts a spiritual work of mercy: enlightening the ignorant, that is, we the readers. Disturbed by the low regard journalists are held by the public he uses the column as an apologia for the profession and ends up sounding like Officer Krumpke's West Side Story delinquents: "we're just misunderstood / deep down inside there is good". (One could say that he's just following Kinky Friedman's father's sage advice: "treat adults like children and children like adults". I find that I've become more childish as I age if only because in the cutthroat world of childhood and adolescence survival trumped self-indulgence.)

The column tends to be a bit whiney and defensive, which is not uncharacteristic of blogs (though not St. Blogger's, who are indefatiguable in their sheer outwardness). One can see his reasoning: "we buy ink by the gallon so why not spill some defending our grand profession?" And so the article begins with the customer's lack of gratitude: "you expect us to be there for you when you note an injustice..." and yet we readers don't give back the love. Apparently it's not enough that it's his job. Can you tell I've been reading the heartless Florence King today?

Anyway, his column inspires me to want to write an apologia for computer programmers. Let's see...

"Surveys show that computer programmers are not loved by the general public despite the constant problem-solving that we provide (ok, problems we introduced, hey let's not get technical). So your computer has a bug and who you gonna call?"

You getteth the idea.

I'm not against whiney, self-indulgent posts in blogs but I'd rather not see them in the newspaper. I like beer, but that doesn't mean there ought to be bars in chapels.

Zell, the Great Indoorsman - new fiction!

Zell Lawson was an inveterate reader and referred to himself as a fine indoorsman. If he’d coined the word then he thought that an outrage: what was it about the outdoors that suggested a man define himself by it without an equivalent for those who labor under General Electric’s finest?

He couldn’t understand it when he heard folks say that they could never work “behind a desk”. At least not until after he’d gotten a job and found out that the thrill of having his own desk and nameplate lasted thirty-six days. The thrill of toiling in God’s earth might last longer but he couldn’t know for sure.

But he did know he had a soul and he began to notice the effect of soul on body and body on soul. He knew they spent their lifetimes dancing together and how one never did nuthin’ without it affecting the other and that they were more closely bound than white on rice. What was the effect of all this concrete and artificial lighting on the body and soul? Grace builds on nature but what if we were killing nature by laying concrete and spending the best hours of every day under the influence of fluorescence?

He found a book about the ‘70s crop of homesteaders and back-to-the-landers. And he wasn’t sure if he was sad or relieved when he learned the great majority had long since come back to the desks and offices and artificial light. The odds were excellent that if he'd tried it the results would be identical and yet…and yet it felt like cheating. It was like looking at the back of the book for an answer to a high school mathematics problem. Or looking at a bible study guide for the meaning of a particular passage….

Catching up on Last Weekend

Busier than usual so many more images to assimilate. First a fond favorite – going to Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati. Was Clemens pitching? I didn’t notice. Did the Reds win? Okay, I did notice. But it barely affected my mood.

Oh but there’s a peacefulness felt there on the orderly diamond. Perhaps I've played just enough baseball to be able to feel every hit and shag every fly. My muscles have memories and I move with the fielders and strike with the hitters and they don’t even know it. The field is an effervescent green and the sun shines unfailingly. And the boats go by on the muddy river just outside the stadium. And all I can think is: I have to get here again. We move to the smoking section and smoke cigars behind an imaginary line that an usher enforces. And we drink Germanic beer in a Germanic town as the Germanic Reds, slow of foot but hefty of bat, strike out like so many Mighty Caseys (or at least the German equivalent).

The next day is the 4th and so there is the parade tour. First the local parade; we ride there on our bikes and catch some of it. My favorite was the barbershop singers singing “God Bless America”. Then we go to the alternative 4th of July parade, the DooDah Parade, because I wanted to see how the other half (progressives) live. We left Red State America and travel fifteen minutes to Blue State.

As we walk to the parade site we see them lining up and there's an old man sitting on a chair wearing nothing but a barrell, and we fear that he doesn’t have anything on underneath. We don’t verify.

The parade starts and I’m wondering when dressing like a priest or nun will get old. Apparently some schticks just ne’er get old. And they must hate the Church to endure 93 degree temperatures dressed in black. They go by carrying a banner that says “Separation of Church and Hate”.

Then there’s a float with a huge dinosaur straddled by the “Runaway Bride” dressed in a wedding dress. Later a float of full-figured ladies allied against breast reduction surgery. My favorite was the little group of five that held signs saying “People Against Signs” and “Signs Lie” and such. My type of humor. The DooDah parade makes me wishes Red America's parades were no less patriotic but with more wit & humor.


DooDah parade (photo credits: my wife)... another pic here & here

Writers Who Blog

"Blogs are a way to listen in and find out what people find funny and respond to," said Marion Maneker, editorial director at HarperCollins's HarperBusiness unit, who said it was too early to determine whether blogs would affect sales.

Quotable

I always thought there was no way Shakespeare could've labored in the sense of belaboring:

Mark Van Doren (who also wrote very well on all the plays in his 1939 book Shakespeare) once remarked that Shakespeare must have written his plays easily or he could not have written them at all. There is just too much in them: so much brilliance, so much meaning, all happening at once. This is all too much if a writer has to work it up. Shakespeare wrote plays the way Mozart wrote music.

-Jeffrey Hart

Latest in NR

Michael Potemra reviews "Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism" by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom in Nat'l Review:

In this well-written volume, Noll and Nystrom give a lucid — and often highly inspiring — account of the amazing distance Catholics and Protestants have traveled in the years since JFK’s statement. By 2004, evangelical politician Gary Bauer was able to say the following: “When John F. Kennedy made his famous speech that the Vatican would not tell him what to do, evangelicals and Southern Baptists breathed a sigh of relief. But today evangelicals and Southern Baptists are hoping that the Vatican will tell Catholic politicians what to do.” Bauer’s statement was hardly even controversial: In a poll that same year, evangelicals gave a higher approval rating to Pope John Paul II (59 percent) than to Jerry Falwell (44) or Pat Robertson (54).

The ice had melted on the Catholic side as well. In 1956, a commentator in the Catholic magazine Priest was still dismissing Martin Luther as “a lewd satyr whose glandular demands were the ultimate cause of his break with the Christian Church.” Less than a decade later, a writer in the same periodical admitted that “we’d feel quite silly today declaiming against Luther in the intemperate words of yesterday”; by 2004, a Catholic reviewer of a new Luther biography was declaring that Luther simply could not “have foreseen that the Church of Rome would some four centuries later, at Vatican Council II, adopt many of the reforms that he championed.”...

"What we see today may be described as an incarnation of Christ in Catholic form and an incarnation of Christ in evangelical form. Since there is only one Christ, these incarnations are pulled toward each other."

And Then There Were None?

What happens if Bush can't get a judge through the obstructionist Senate Democratic minority by October? Does the court operate on eight justices? And since it's unlikely either party will control sixty Senate seats this century, will each subsequent vacant seat go unfilled? Will it be...(drumroll)...Justice Thomas deciding everything by himself in 2030?

On The Demise of France's 35-Hour Work Week

NY Times article :

How could the futurologists be so wrong? George Jetson, we should recall -- the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday become -- worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that we wouldn't know how to spend it.

Economic globalization obviously has a great deal to do with the change. It has leveled the playing field all over the world, so that the have-nots can now compete more equally with the haves, especially if they are willing to work harder, longer and for lower wages, which so many of them are. And the haves, in turn, find that they have to pick up the pace just to stay even.

But there may be a more insidious force manifesting itself -- something along the lines of an evolutionary law that says, paradoxically, the more you try to simplify or eliminate work, the more of it there is to do. Scholars estimate that medieval peasants, for example, worked between 120 and 150 days a year....The Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert William Fogel has studied what he calls the "efficiency of the human engine" and found that the mechanical advances of the Industrial Revolution were paralleled by an equal increase in the human body's size, strength and endurance. In his view the great growth industry of the 19th and 20th centuries was the capacity for work itself.

The more work we do, apparently, the more we're able to do, and though Fogel himself takes a sort of Toffler-like view of the 21st century, predicting that leisure will become the next great growth industry, there's little evidence of that right now. Working hours in America -- the nation in the world with by far the most efficient human engines -- have risen steadily over the last three decades. And far from complaining, we have adopted a superior, moralizing attitude that sees work not as a necessary evil, a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Can't Keep Up...

...with either Scott Hahn or Cardinal Ratzinger's prodigious output of writings. I just learned that Hahn now has his definitive bible study out, which he considers to be his most important work. A back-to-school gift for high-school or college students?

Takes All Kinds

Jonah Goldberg cracks me up:

That my words do not carry weight with you is not evidence whatsoever that my words do not carry weight.

Let's hope someone starts the SADL (Skydiver's Anti-Defamation League). KTC? *grin*

Spinning Spam Into "Poetry"

Don't forget: the more you drink, the better this blog reads. Here's another poem made up of 100% biodegradable spam:

This site is straightforward
when it comes to finding what you need. buckshot

Hey, friend, I see
you are very upset! XANA
L0RAAZEPAM, AMBIEN surely jealous
meant shining.
You were Accepted.
Here is your Money.

Inspired by reception of email with the subject header:
This site is straightforward when it comes to finding what you need. buckshot

Quick Asides

Was listening to WLW, "the Nation's Station", 50,000 watts out of Cincinnati. And I learned that the game show host Wink Martindale has a "game show room" at his home. He asks guests play board games like Trivial Pursuit so he can moderate.

The mind reels, doesn't it? It's hard not to come to the conclusion that God wanted him to be a game show host. Do those who love their job do so because they're extremely good at it or are are they good at it because they love doing it?
*
Listening to David McCullough on Russert's show and he said that many of the key players of the Revolutionary War (such as Thomas Paine) were Quakers who had put aside their pacifism, recognizing that "some wars are worth fighting". Wow. That's not what I thought pacifism was about.

*
A progressive Catholic I know was surprised when I told her that Cardinal Ratzinger, back in the '60s, was on the "liberal" wing of the Church. It's almost as if that gave the Pope a bit more credibility in her eyes. Conservatives are given no credit if they've always been conservative because then they are seen as blindly & brainlessly following Church teaching. Of course, on the other side, if you change your mind someone could say "well, they were wrong once, they could be wrong again." It's all about faith.

*

I try not to get tangled in apologetics but when the topic comes up and I have a lengthy exchange with someone I think it's God's sneaky way of getting me to pray for that person because afterwards I almost always experience PASD (post-apologetic stress disorder), characterized by "I should've said this!" and "Gosh I sounded self-righteous there!". Also Bishop Sheen's "win an argument, lose a soul" resonates. So I end up praying that God undoes any damage I'd done.

*

Picked up some good ol' KFC ('a heart attack in a sack' to quote Tim McGraw) and there was an eager, enthusiastic worker at the window. She was probably a Somali (Columbus has the second largest population of Somalis in the country). Dark-skinned and pretty, she had one obvious flaw: a missing front tooth. She had braces on the rest of them, which suggested this was a work-in-progress and that soon she'd have teeth as good as any American. Is that what Purgatory is like? Getting our teeth fixed while being eager of mien because we're in the anteroom of Heaven?

Habit of Being

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post on Flannery O'Connor. And the hat tip goes to... Two Sleepy Mommies

Partly Cloudy

The forecast for the Supreme Court vacancy is already looking a bit gloomy. I heard on the radio Pres. Bush defending Alberto Gonzalez. It's sobering if Bush is even thinking of nominating him. Also the President made some seemingly contradictory statements as quoted in the Wash Times link above:

Bush said he would have no "litmus test" that disqualifies candidates because of their opinions on abortion and gay marriage.

"I'll pick people who, one, can do the job, and people who are honest, people who are bright and people who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not use the bench to legislate from," Bush said.

Hopefully this is on order of the single gal saying, "I have no litmus test that disqualifies a potential husband because of his opinions on religion. But I do want someone who will enthusiastically attend Mass every Sunday."

Because if you want someone to strictly interpret the Constitution, then they won't find the right to an abortion in there. Even honest liberals such as this author admit that the Roe v. Wade was pulled out of thin air since there's no right to privacy found in the Constitution. My question is: "do you consider 'settled law' settled if the law was originally legislated from the Court?"

 Spanning the Globe To Bring You The Constant Variety Of Posts

Is it a sin for a moron to call an imbecile an idiot? - tagline of the blog "Nehring the Edge"

Ignatius Insight presents lots of Catholic bloggers on "The Problem With Blogs". My basic thought on blogging is "Take what helps or amuses you and leave the rest." It reminds me of my sister's theory of throwing a party: "If they're going to complain about free food and free entertainment, they're jerks anyway." But I am at least mentally healthy enough that I can't dredge up any guilt about blogging. People who are bored or irritated are obviously the wrong audience... I don't see how someone could be annoyed by a blog any more than they could be annoyed by a sign in the neighbor's yard. - Karen Hall of "Some Have Hats"

I am troubled by Orthodoxy’s “Easternness.” The coherence and power of Orthodoxy is partially achieved by excluding the Western tradition from its spiritual and theological life. One is hard-pressed to find an Orthodox writer who speaks highly of the Western Church, of her saints, ascetics, and theologians, of her manifold contributions to Christian religion and Western civilization....If the catholicity of Orthodoxy can only be purchased by the practical expulsion of Augustine and Aquinas, then, at least in my own mind, Orthodoxy’s claim to be the one and true Church is seriously undermined...A truly catholic Church will keep these great theologians in conversation with each other, and their differences and disagreements will invite the Church to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the divine mysteries. - from "Pontifications", prior to his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism

The famous psychologist Carl Jung put his professional reputation on the line with his book "Synchronicity." A synchonicity is kind of like a coincidence only it's a coincidence with great meaning and purpose to the person who notices it. If you're a fan, or an idle wonderer, about Intelligent Design, Jung's book is the equivalent of Intelligent Design only with Psychology. In a famous example, Jung is working with a difficult patient whose totally rational view of the world prevents her from overcoming her psychological problems. She relates a dream she had about a golden scarab beetle. Jung knew that the scarab held great significance to ancient Egyptians as a symbol of rebirth. As the woman was talking, they heard a tapping on the window, Jung opened the window and in flew a golden scarab beetle. The total shock of the instant resulted in the woman's rational view of the world being dropped and Jung was able to help her by acknowledging that there was a deeper meaning in the universe. - Rock of "Lofted Nest"

We will NOT, however, be staying in Key West, where one cultivates weirdness until it is merely boring. - Steven Riddle

One of the more fashionable ways of talking about faith these days is to use the image of the "story." We're told that what faith is essentially all about is finding a "story" (or "narrative" or "myth") that is meaningful to you, that fits, that informs your life and gives you strength for your journey....it's a day [feast of Sts Peter & Paul] to confront the lie, that has indeed infected the way Catholics talk about spirituality, that this journey is all about finding that blasted story. What an insult to the martyrs. What a violation of their experience of Christ, which was no page-turner, but the encounter with the Living One, whose impact on them was such that they could not but say "yes" when he called them to follow. Not to just keep telling a story and inviting others to groove to it if they feel like it, either. But called to invite others to meet that same Living One and be saved, reconciled and redeemed by Him. - Amy Welborn

Why should you worry whether God wants you to reach the Heavenly home by way of the desert or by the fields, when by the one as well as by the another one arrives all the same at a Blessed Eternity? -- St. Pio of Pietrelcina via "Sancta Sanctis"

The notion that somebody in New Zealand was praying for me was more than I could imagine. I have never been an emotional worshipper of Christ; I have never felt the weight of His love and presence literally drive me to the floor prostrate. I can say that no longer, as I have felt just that in the last 24 hours, and have cried the cries of a child humbled at the love of my Heavenly Father and His providential workings in my life. - Lance Salyers, assistant prosecutor in Dayton, Oh. fired over a blog entry

What does it avail you to argue profoundly of the Trinity if you be wanting in humility, and consequently be displeasing to the Trinity? - St. Thomas a Kempis, "Imitation of Christ" quoted on a blog

I cannot ever hear "Cat's in the Cradle" without starting to cry a little. I really can't. "We'll get together then..."--the thing about fatherhood, I sometimes think, is that it is so thoroughly a metaphor for our relationship to God the Father that no real human father can suffice. That's part of why ordinary human fatherhood deserves so much honor. Because ordinary human fathers bear so much of the brunt of their children's aloneness. Mothers (sometimes) get the desperate confessions of fear and sickness; fathers often don't even get that solace, that trust. Every mother is Mary, Mother of God (Mother of Sorrows, Queen of Heaven, Mary at Cana and Mary at Calvary), but every father is (symbolically) Yahweh, not Joseph. And it's terribly hard. So I guess... there's nothing really to say except, Thank you. - Eve Tushnet on Father's Day

I volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center. A 16 year old girl came in for a pregnancy test. As we waited for the results she was visibly trembling and near to tears. When the result was negative, she began to cry and laugh and bounce up and down. I asked her why she was so happy. She looked at me like I was a total idiot and and with that "duh, you're so stupid" tone that teenagers do so well, she answered "I'm way too young to have a baby". I leaned toward her and said "Then you're also too young to be doing what makes babies." For a long moment she stared at me with her mouth open and not breathing, then in a very small voice she said "No one ever told me that before." - commenter on Fructus Ventris, replying to Alicia's post with the line "I don't understand why so many people are surprised that sex leads to pregnancy."

I think the other thing that has changed, though, is the willingness of Christians (evangelical? All of us? I don't know) to be publicly honest about failure and weakness. Christians have always sat in Church and listened to sermons about how sinful they are and how much they need to repent. Christians have always read books inspiring them to be better people. But in the public conversation, in the process of creating an image for what Christians were, there was a hard shell of propriety, a deep desire not to show any fractures to the world, despite the bumper sticker sentiment, "Christians aren't perfect; just forgiven." I do think that the public image, as crafted and presented by Christians, of what the ideal Christian is, has shifted, or is in the process of doing so, and that image is far more likely to include public acknoweldgement of sin, temptation and weakness than it was a few decades ago. That's intriguing. - Amy Welborn

You could go...

..a month of Sundays and not hear a decent country song on the radio, so I have to thank Tim McGraw for his latest. Now that's country! And a beautiful, sunny day like today also conjures up the ol' Merle Haggard song, "Big City".

Better Living Through Fiction

Cindy McCray had a favorite saying. It was “if you’ve got your health, then you’ve got everything.”

She learned it from her father and it became her mantra. She told it to the grocery store clerk and to the person who did her nails and to the local city bus driver. She shouted it from the rooftops and told everyone she met for it amazed her how few realized it. Every morning she checked that her limbs were working and that her breathing was sound and then she thanked God.

Her husband Sam was the superstitious sort and said that if you think too much about your health you'll jinx it. He also said that if you get too high over good health then you’ll get too low when you’re sick but Cindy always seemed to be in such excellent health that his theory went untested.

On her 28th birthday Cindy said that celebrating a birthday every year was too infrequent. "Our time on earth is too precious and brief to recognize it annually – why not measure it in days?" So every day at 10:38am (the time she was born) she’d sing Happy Birthday to herself and she'd sing it again at 5:19pm for Sam (the time he was born) and they'd eat a piece of birthday cake. (She didn’t put candles on it due to the city fire code.) Her husband, in putting up with it, wasn’t sure if he was edging closer to sanctity or insanity, or whether there was really any difference. He knew he loved her despite her eccentricities. He also knew when his real birthday came it didn’t feel like his real birthday. It felt like just another day.

When Cindy turned 12,723 she drove to the store as was her custom. (“Cake supplies don’t grow on trees!” she told Sam, when asked about her grocery receipts.) She was proceeding through an intersection when a huge green truck tried to make a left at the same intersection. She slammed on the brakes but it was too late – there was the shock of impact and she looked down amazed at the sheer wrongness of seeing bone jutting from skin. It nearly made her vomit for bone was meant to be used but never seen. She lost consciousness before she could check the extent of other injuries.

Her condition stabilized and Sam held her hand in the intensive care unit. He feared greatly, not so much for her life now but for how she would handle her ruined health.

“Honey…,” she said with great effort.

“Yes?”

“It’s almost 5:19…”

He cried.

Quotable

"Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors." - Abigail Adams

word and Word

Recently the eparchy (Eastern Catholic equivalent of 'diocese') of the local Byzantine Catholic Church decided to change the word "testament" to "covenant" in the words of consecration. I've been reading a lot recently about the difference between covenant and testament, which I won't go into in this post, but suffice it to say that despite covenant being more accurate I'll miss the words "this is the blood of the new testament" because the first time I heard it it unified the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist anew for me. It was a way of saying that Christ not only gave his word concerning the promises of the New Testament but signed them in Blood.

St. Augustine writes of the gift of Scripture: "God is faithful, for he has put himself under a debt to us, not as if he had received anything from us, but by promising us so much. The word of promise was too little for him: he wanted to bind himself in writing, by giving us, as it were, a handwritten version of his promises."

In Fairness to Lewis... (see previous post)

Here's his self-defense. You make the call. Via Jay Nordlinger of NRO, a CNBC interview with Maria Bartiromo:

BARTIROMO: . . . Do you think that you have misread [the Iraq situation] at all?

LEWIS: Yes, I think I was a little too optimistic, but what I misread, I think, was not so much what happens in Iraq as what happens here.

. . . BARTIROMO: What do you mean?

LEWIS: I mean, the response, the way that the media have reported what's happening in Iraq. I mean, I understand that one bridge destroyed makes a better story than ten bridges built. But nevertheless, the situation in Iraq, the standard of living, the improvement in general conditions to the Iraqi people, and the measure of support that we enjoy among the Iraqis — all these are far better than one would gather from simply following the media.

[Bartiromo asks Professor Lewis about Senator Kennedy's comparison of Iraq to Vietnam.]

LEWIS: I think that is a disastrous comparison. If you listen to the propaganda of the fundamentalists in Iraq and elsewhere, they have a litany that they keep repeating. They say, "The Americans have become degenerate. They are soft and pampered. They can't take it. Hit them and they'll run." And then they repeat: Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia, and all the other small episodes since which brought no effective response. Talking about Vietnam now will merely confirm them, tell them that they are right, because we all know how Vietnam ended, and that will assure them they have a good chance that this will end the same way. And they have just won a considerable success in Spain . . .

BARTIROMO: What has surprised you most about the events in post-war Iraq?

LEWIS: What has surprised me most is the indecision which is shown by us, not by them. You have to remember that we began with a rather unfavorable record. In '91, the time of the Gulf War, President Bush Sr. called on the Iraqi people to revolt against the tyrant. They did. They revolted against the tyrant. In the meantime, we made a cease-fire agreement with the tyrant and then sat and watched while he crushed the revolt . . . You can understand therefore that when we call on them again to revolt, they were rather more cautious. There is, shall we say, a well-grounded mistrust. They know also of the abrupt departures from Somalia, the departure from Vietnam. They don't want to become boat people . . .

BARTIROMO: . . . many have long believed that peace in the Middle East would first have to come between the Arabs and the Israelis. Do you believe that instead peace in Jerusalem will come through Baghdad?

LEWIS: I believe that the peace between the Arabs and the Israelis will come after, not before. At the moment, the conflict is an extremely useful safety valve. It is the licensed grievance all over the Arab world. When they're angry and resentful and embittered, which they all have very good reason to be, for the most part, against their own governments, this provides a means of expressing it, which does no harm to their own governments. Before the invasion of Iraq, people were saying, "We have to settle the Palestine question first and then deal with Iraq." That sent a clear message to Saddam Hussein: Make sure they don't settle the Palestine question.

What Went Wrong With Lewis?

I'm hypmotized by the semi-fall of a "wise man", or so was informally dubbed the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis. I know I shouldn't be surprised since it was learned, impressive men who gave us Marxism and Calvinism (not to in any way equate the two but still...).

From Michael Hirsh, an editor at Newsweek:

Perhaps in the long run, you can't Islamicize democracy, and so Islam is simply standing in the way.

Iran is the best real-world test of this hypothesis right now. A quarter century after the Khomeini revolution, Iran seems to be stuck in some indeterminate middle state. The forces of bottom-up secular democratic reform and top-down mullah control may be stalemated simply because there is no common ground whatsoever between their contending visions. That's one reason the Kemalist approach had its merits, Fouad Ajami argued in a recent appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think Ataturk understood that if you fall through Islam, you fall through a trap door. And in fact, I think the journey out of Islam that Ataturk did was brilliant. And to the extent that the Muslim world now has forgotten this. . .they will pay dearly for it.”

But there is no Ataturk in Iraq (though of course Chalabi, and perhaps Allawi, would still love to play that role). For now, Sistani remains the most prestigious figure in the country, the only true kingmaker. Suspicions remain in the Bush administration that Sistani's long-term goal is to get the Americans out and the Koran in—in other words, to create another mullah state as in Iran. But those who know Sistani well say he is much smarter than that. Born in Iran—he moved to Iraq in the early 1950s, around the time Lewis saw the light—Sistani has experienced up close the failures of the Shiite mullah state next door. He and the other Shiites have also suffered the pointy end of Sunni Arab nationalism, having been oppressed under Saddam for decades, and they will never sanction a return to that. So Sistani knows the last, best alternative may be some kind of hybrid, a moderately religious, Shiite-dominated democracy, brokered and blessed by him and conceived with a nuanced federalism that will give the Kurds, Sunnis and others their due. But also a regime that, somewhat like the Iranian mullahs, uses its distinctive Islamic character, and concomitant anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, as ideological glue. For the Americans who went hopefully to war in Iraq, that option is pretty much all that's left on the table—something even Bernard Lewis may someday have to acknowledge.

Full article here.

Fictional Monday

“Schedule my midlife crisis for March 21^st, 2007,” Bernard Scully told his secretary on September 3^rd, 2005. “No, I’m not kidding.”

Scully had long wanted a Mercedes both for the fine hood ornament and the thrill of German engineering, and thought that by fulfilling a desire and checking off one of the famous demands of a midlife crisis he could kill two birds with one stone. This was in character, for he had the reputation of exerting the sort of control over his life others dream of. His lists had lists, his plans had plans. It was a joke around the office that he’d scheduled his own circumcision.

Toward the goal of becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation he read business books voraciously. There were the animal books: “Swimming with the Sharks” and “Taming the Tigers”. There were the etiquette minders: “Using Your Voice to Communicate Authority” and “How to Use Golf to (Pitching) Wedge Your Way to the Corporate Green”.

His philosophy was that your main responsibility in life was to keep yourself happy because happy people don’t cause much trouble. They don’t throw red paint on people for wearing fur and don’t disrupt G-8 summits. They don't abuse their wives or take mind-altering drugs. They aren't extremists of any sort.

Months passed and Scully continued making lists and consuming things in order to make him want to get up in the morning. On the morning of September 3rd his secretary knocked on office door. "It’s time for your mid-life crisis now. What’s it gonna be? Beach bum on Maui?"

He smiled broadly. “Nope. Time for my first Mercedes-Benz.”

At the dealership he caressed the lines of the latest Cabriolet convertible and felt...nothing. He stared at the famous insignia, which looked like the ‘60s peace sign, but felt no peace, no happiness. It was just metal, he thought, morosely. Nothing but sheet metal and car parts that would rust and fill a landfill.

This wasn't in his business books.

“What kind of midlife crisis am I having?” he said to himself. Not even the thought of having an affair or becoming a beach bum lifted his funk. "Affair. Car. Dropping out. What else is there?"

A voice came: the crisis isn't what you haven't gotten, but what you haven't given.

Justice Not Served

It's always disheartening to listen to the female Cokie Roberts, who happens to be a political pundit & public Catholic. I identify her first by gender because it sometimes seems (am I being too male?) that anything that is good for women is good for society.

Her retrospective on Sandra Day O'Connor was, necessarily, a retrospective on the way she felt when Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female SCOTUS. And she positively beamed when another This Week panel member explained how O'Connor was the most powerful justice, as if "power" has now suddenly taken on the the same connotation as "good" or "wise". Oh sure, we all adore our ethnic groups and our gender identities more than things like ideas and principles. So whatever O'Connor espoused, the important thing is that she was a woman, nevermind that at least half of aborted children are females and that O'Connor helped foster its continuation.

Roberts and Gringrich then had a fascinating little exchange. Cokie said that women are more practical, they are good at helping others reach consensus. And Gringrich agreed, saying that O'Connor didn't interpret the American Constitution but interpreted the consensus of the American Zeitgeist. Gringrich said that most women want to figure out how they can meet their opponent half way, while most men want to know how they can beat their opponent. And he was pleased that we're now apparently free to recognize gender differences and Cokie was pleased that Gingrich agreed with her. As long as men are depicted as competitive ape-like figures, then sexual stereotyping is fine.

But I must've missed the news because I didn't know the job description of a SCOTUS changed. That it's now to determine the consensus of the American people instead of interpreting the Constitution. (Although I suppose it is progress that at least she attempted to judge by the opinion of the American people instead of judging by her personal opinion, the way most of the justices have over the past five decades.) The question in the end becomes when does the rule of law become rule-by-arbitrary-opinion? Bill Luse put it well: "It seems that the rule of men is now the rule of law".

Various

I'd like to do a study* of the Psalms and the use of the word "blood". It's often used in the sense a desire to wash in the blood of his enemies...in one Psalm it's rendered "wash my feet in the blood of the wicked". This is interesting in light of how Paul said Christ was "made sin" for us, and how now in the New Covenant we, who are wicked, are washed in the blood of the Holy One.
++

Our priest today had a sermon about how God is sovereign, in the sense of knowing & permitting, random events. Now that’s a real difficulty in a nutshell – moderns understand the randomness in a way ancients didn’t. The ancients didn't know of randomness and saw all events as a personal message from God. Moderns error on the other side by mistaking randomness as something apart from God, rather than something he sees and permits.
++

Abraham seemed to have his greatest test in the sacrifice of Isaac. And he lived years after, to a great old age. He was never tested again as severely. It occurred to me that it’s possible the time of our greatest testing is already behind us! At least we can hope. Just another reason not to borrow trouble.
++

St. Alphonsus tells us that we need to pray for our final perserverance daily not because God is checking off a daily prayer sheet in a desire to deny us final perserverance, but because He knows us so well, knows our single weakness which is to take Him for granted and forget His benefits. He knows well that we would grow complacent and that that which we do not seek with hunger is not appreciated.

* - I found twelve separate references to blood in the Psalms, subdivided into these categories:

Vengeance - 5
God desires Mercy, not Sacrifices - 2
Power of Innocent Blood - 4
Other - 1

I've Gotta Be You

I was reading NRO’s list of recommended summer reads and I learned there was a new biography of C.S. Lewis. I went out to read the comments on Amazon and the gist of the new material is that C.S. Lewis drank a lot. Borderline alcoholic. But I think that’s yet another example of the historian’s mistake of judging the past by the standards of the present. Everyone drank like fish back then. Everyone was “borderline alcoholic”, at least by our present-day MADD-inspired standards. Which is just another indication of just how influenced we are by our society. That’s not to say we don’t have free will, but our behavior lives in a very cramped living space.

Around Town

NR's annual recommendations on beach reads.
~
Sharp pictures from the Saint Rose Priory in Springfield, KY. The "Sacred Heart at Dawn" one is exceptional.


~
John Miller on Shelby Foote's Southernness. "...if the New York Times were reviewing his book afresh this Sunday, he would be portrayed as a crank". Undoubtedly true.

Idiotology

My brother-in-law has been giddy after discovering scientology because it confirms his long held theory that "people are idiots" and Scientology appears to be exhibit A. (I've been lately giddy about the news that Justice Souter's hometown might be thinking of eminent domainin' his property, but that's another post.) Jesus put it in a kindler and gentler way by saying that people are sheep, and there's no question we are severely retarded compared to angels. The key is to find the right teachers and follow them. More on the wrong teachers here, here, and here.

To tune of David Bowie's "Ground Control":

Ground control to Major Tom, Ground control to Major Tom:
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
Ground control to Major Tom: Commencing countdown engine's on
Check ig-nition and may L Ron be with you

This is ground control to Major Tom, you've really made the grade!
And soon you'll be a Thetan level VI,
Now it's time to leave the spaceship if you dare

This is Major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door
And I'm jumping on the couch in a most peculiar way
And Lauer looks very different today

For here am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can't do

BRIDGE

Though I've spent eight hundred thousand dollars, I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go,
tell my ex's I love them very much, they know

Ground control to Major Tom:
Your circuit's off, there's something wrong.
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?