From an NR Article...

...As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous “information.” In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.
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Throughout the 20th century and on into the 21st, many scientists and politicians have followed Darwin in missing the significance of the “Central Dogma.” They have assumed that life is dominated by local chemistry rather than by abstract informative codes. Upholding the inheritability of acquired characteristics, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Trofim Lysenko, Aleksandr Oparin, Friedrich Engels, and Josef Stalin all espoused the primacy of proteins and thus of the environment over the genetic endowment. By controlling the existing material of human beings through their environment, the Lamarckians believed that Communism could blend and breed a new Soviet man through chemistry. Dissenters were murdered or exiled...

For some 45 years, Barry Commoner, the American Marxist biologist, refused to relinquish the Soviet mistake. He repeated it in an article in Harper’s in 2002, declaring that proteins must have come first because DNA cannot be created without protein-based enzymes. In fact, protein-based enzymes cannot be created without a DNA (or RNA) program; proteins have no structure without the information that defines them. As Yockey explains, “It is mathematically impossible, not just unlikely, for information to be transferred from the protein alphabet to the [DNA] alphabet. That is because no codes exist to transfer information from the 20-letter protein alphabet to the 64-letter [codon] alphabet of [DNA].” Twenty letters simply cannot directly specify the content of patterns of 64 codons.

But the beat goes on. By defrocking Lawrence Summers for implying the possible primacy of the genetic word over environmental conditions in the emergence of scientific aptitudes, the esteemed professoriat at Harvard expressed its continued faith in Lamarckian and Marxian biology.

Over at NASA, U.S. government scientists make an analogous mistake in constantly searching for traces of protein as evidence of life on distant planets. Without a hierarchy of informative programming, proteins are mere matter, impotent to produce life. The Central Dogma dooms the NASA pursuit of proteins on the planets to be what we might call a “wild goo chase.” As St. John implies, life is defined by the presence and precedence of the word: informative codes.

I began my 1989 book on microchips, Microcosm: The Quantum Era in Economics and Technology, by quoting physicist Max Planck, the discoverer of the quantum, on the resistance to his theory among the scientific establishment — the public scientists of any period whom I have dubbed the Panel of Peers. By any name they define the “consensus” of respectable science. At the beginning of the 20th century, said Planck, they balked at taking the “enormous step from the visible and directly controllable to the invisible sphere, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.” ...

After 100 years or so of attempted philosophical leveling, however, it turns out that the universe is stubbornly hierarchical. It is a top-down “nested hierarchy,” in which the higher levels command more degrees of freedom than the levels below them, which they use and constrain. Thus, the higher levels can neither eclipse the lower levels nor be reduced to them. Resisted at every step across the range of reductive sciences, this realization is now inexorable. We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth. As the famed chemist Michael Polanyi pointed out in 1961, all these fields depend on chemical and physical processes, but are not defined by them. Operating farther up the hierarchy, biological macro-systems such as brains, minds, human beings, businesses, societies, and economies consist of intelligent agents that harness chemical and physical laws to higher purposes but are not reducible to lower entities or explicable by them. - George Gilder

Richard Neuhaus...

...makes a good point:

So has the Episcopal Church in the United States strayed so far from Anglican principle (putting aside procedure) in the whole Gene Robinson business? Anglicans have suffered agnostics and Unitarians as bishops—John Shelby Spong has spent his entire career mocking and denying every single tenet of historic Christianity—now suddenly the election of an openly gay bishop in Gene Robinson or a woman presiding bishop in Katharine Jefferts Schori breaks the back of the Anglican Communion? I think the question is less one of whether a denomination can agree on what “born of the virgin Mary” means, as opposed to, once this is accepted as an article of faith, what to do with those in ministry who do not believe it and openly teach against it. That then becomes a matter of church discipline.
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There is some hope, though. In a letter to the faithful dated June 27, Rowan Williams lists as a summary item the following: “Commitment to the Communion’s teaching, on the basis of Scriptural and historic teaching reached in common council.” A council, did he say? Would this mean the production of another, modern confession—a more complete statement of faith? Perhaps even a catechism, which is what the Anglicans really need? Until Bishop Rowan and all Anglicans of goodwill reposition Anglicanism on a confessional foundation, even appeals to scripture and tradition will not be enough to keep their house from crumbling.

Ham o' Bone...

...reviews Bill Luse's novel The Last Good Woman.

Running Hangover

Yesterday
I felt like Rodgers at Boston
Shorter at Munich
a Kenyan running
into the East African sun
towards a horizon easily consumed.

Today?
I feel like Otis after a bender.

Know Jesus?

Thank an Apostle!

More here.

A Poet On Baseball

From an Atlantic review of a poem in Gail Mazur's book, Zeppo's First Wife:

...the concluding poem, "Baseball," is a three-page ode to the game's

"firm structure with the mystery / of accidents always contained."

And from an interview with the poet:

You write, in the final poem in the collection, "The game of baseball is not a metaphor." Why do you go to such lengths to insist that you're not using baseball as a symbol for something else?

Saying that baseball "is not a metaphor" was actually a strategy to get around the fact that baseball in fact is such a perfect metaphor for life, or for creative work. To have said it is a metaphor would have left me embarrassed by the cliché. The strategy, I'm sure, came out of my feeling of being stuck with the truism. When I uncovered the missing "not" in the declaration, I could go on to deny everything in the poem, an ironic denial, a trick to say what I wholeheartedly felt in the writing—that the world of baseball, the players, the park, the fans, is a world and a microcosm of the greater world. Sometimes I think that the longer a thing that is "not a metaphor" lives in a poem, the more of a metaphor it becomes.

Have to Laugh...

...because I can so relate to Eric Scheske. A fellow beer-drinker extraordinaire with a pessimistic streak, he writes of drinking on a summer afternoon on a deck overlooking a lake:

[I] thought, “Life isn’t so bad after all” and “I probably have at least forty more years to enjoy such moments.” Unfortunately, such thoughts are often followed with mental disruptions, like “I probably have cancer,” but I was able to banish them this time. I think the key to such moments is the existentialist approach: just enjoy. Don’t look at the enjoyment, just look. Just enjoy.

So true.

Twice Blessed

The pastor at the Dominican parish downtown was a delegate to some sort of official Dominican gathering in Rhode Island. For three weeks he sat on commissions and was held captive at endless meetings. He didn't quite put it this way but it sounded like hell. He said that arriving back home reminded him of how blessed he is to pastor here. But in the same sentence he also described himself as blessed to be a delegate. I suppose that is in keeping with St. Paul's admonition to rejoice at all times. Given that there's the phrase "damned if we do, damned if we don't", a double-cursing, it's appropriate there's a double blessing: "blessed if you have endless meetings, blessed if you don't".

Russell Kirk & Marty Haugen?

Good post from Pink Logician via Terrence Berres:

I think that he would do well to take a page (well, yet another page) from the Kirks of Mecosta.

The Kirk family attends mass at the local Catholic parish, St. Michael the Archangel in Remus, Michigan. Now, when I lived in Mecosta, I too attended St. Michael's and it was, hands down, the worst worst WORST parish I have ever attended. Ever. Really. We're talking hand motions with worship songs (songs undeserving of the term "hymn"), an ancient keyboardist whose "instrument" seemed constantly stuck on the Whitesnake-album setting, the ubiquitous smiley risen Jesus replacing the crucifix behind the altar, and the processing of a cross (it wasn't a crucifix, by any means) with a figure on it that my husband and I not-so-affectionately referred to as "tiki-head Jesus" and "Easter Island Jesus" by turns.

When I asked Mrs. Kirk why she stayed there at St. Michael's, why she didn't go down to Grand Rapids for a Latin mass or a visit to one of the nicer ethnic churches, she would usually say "It's gotten much better."

Humbling.

Habemus Blogemus

Less than three weeks ago I wrote, "One site that still doesn't have a blog yet is New Advent...".

Didn't take long!

Kinda/Sorta Schism?

From an outsider's perspective it would seem to Rowan Williams' credit if he "demotes" the American Episcopal church to a lesser status. From a financial point of view, it seems the Anglicans have more need of the Episcopalians than the other way around and it's always inspiring to see money take a back seat to principle. By my reading, most of the liberal Episcopalian bloggers could give a flying fig about being in the Anglican Communion and that was certainly the message they tried to send at the General Convention. It was hard to watch - like an errant husband french-kissing his mistress in front of his wife in an effort to try to entice her to declare a divorce, as if it would be a bit unseemly to declare it himself because no one wants to be labeled the Protestant these days, not even Protestants.

Meanwhile, Bishop Gene Robinson is certainly comfortable in his skin: "Let's not forget that we have been given a foretaste of the heavenly banquet where the marginalized are given an honored seat at the table," he preaches to fellow gay and lesbians, and I don't doubt they will have the best seats at the banquet - that is, those gays who've chosen the harsh and narrow path by remaining chaste. Seeing the audacity of Robinson and the liberal bloggers has been fascinating if only for their self-certainty. No mealy-mouthing around; they exude confidence, their consciences clear as pure grain alcohol. There is about them the spirit of Martin Luther, who I can admire for his own astonishing bravery. Liberal Episcopalians are as sure their homosexual acts are not sins as Martin Luther was of his doctrines.

And what else do Martin Luther and gays have in common? Perhaps their childhoods. It's a cliche to say that children are cruel but children are infinitely crueler to children who are different, a group to which homosexuals belong. And of Martin Luther it was said, "Extreme simplicity and inflexible severity characterized their home life, so that the joys of childhood were virtually unknown to him. His father once beat him so mercilessly that he ran away from home and was so 'embittered against him that he had to win me to himself again.' His mother, 'on account of an insignificant nut, beat me till the blood flowed, and it was this harshness and severity of the life I led with them that forced me subsequently to run away to a monastery and become a monk.'"

Maybe a tough childhood leads one to that toughness born of victimhood, a toughness so pronounced that one can't even imagine oneself as being wrong. Having been wronged, you think the "Emperor has no clothes" and thus have confidence in your own rightness if only by comparison. (Of course, that's not limited to those with tough childhoods but...).

Update: One commenter on Ruth's blog is underwhelmed by the statement of Rowan Williams:

Further, it is NOT in any way an intense theological teaching as Ruth suggests - just the reverse - a continuing refusal to come to grips with Biblical and Christian sexual morality. As usual, the Archbishop cannot find it within himself to say what the Bible and Christ clearly do. An intense theological teaching would teach WHY chastity is required of Christians, outside the union between man and wife. Archbishop Williams is a million miles away from that. Other Christian churches are able to do that; the Church of England is not. One truthful statement from the Archbishop in his letter? - the Church of England is unsure about sexual morality. How useful that must be to a teenager in this world. How unimportant the Church of England must believe that is to the teenager's soul.

Finally, the Archbishop further revealed his weakness, and his fundamental inability to say no - by suggesting the creation of different levels of Anglicanism - as if there are different levels of God's truth. That is a disaster waiting to bloom - and it will.

The future? Intense arguments and rhetoric about what is needed to leave or be in 'associate' status.

If the C of E is unsure about sexual morality I would invite those seeking it to "swim that Tiber" (sing to tune "Catch that Tiger").

Karen Hall...

She shoots, she scores!

I Came, I Saw, I Contemplated - title of a new blog

I post with some trepidation, since I've noticed that whenever I slip into inactivity I start picking up subscribers (mostly people who sign up for any and all library blogs whatsoever), but when I make an effort to post more frequently I lose them. Extrapolating from this trend, if I never posted I would attain the popularity of an Instapundit, but probably the strategy has diminishing returns. So here's a post for form's sake. - blogger at biblioblog.blogspot.com

Posting something even in not-even-trying-not-to-be-fake Latin is like telling your fellow Knights of Columbus you have too much beer in your refrigerator. People will lend you a hand without being asked twice. - Tom of Disputations

The real problem isn't that the Herald's light is under a basket. The Herald is the basket. For example, when a local pastor, Fr. David Cooper, permitted a prayer service for women's ordination at St. Matthias Church, Archbishop Dolan demanded he apologize. Yet our Catholic Herald recently ran this column by Fr. Richard McBrien taking the same problematic position. - Terrence Berres of "The Provincial Emails"

As we wandered the arena, we fell into conversation with Art, a representative of the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario. He was taken aback, to say the least, that (1) we were not pig farmers, (2) not from Ontario, and (3) we had wandered over from the Shakespeare Festival where we were spending our honeymoon. Since an industry gathering isn't the best place to find Christian fellowship walking by, he was probably genuinely glad to chat with us for a while about his organization, his family's roots in farming, and his hopes (however remote) that one of his children might take over the farm someday. One of his daughters gave us a small New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs. I haven't had one of those since my college days. They're very handy to keep in a purse, so I accepted with thanks. As we strolled away, Henry began paging through it and found a favorite passage. He began to read it aloud, as he does so well. It was delightful, but one of the more improbable romantic moments one might hope to encounter during one's honeymoon. And that's how to came about, boys and girls, that Roz's dear husband ardently declaimed to her Proverbs 31's praise of the excellent wife in the middle of the Ontario Pork Congress. - newlywed Roz of "Exultet" speaking of Henry of "A Plumbline in the Wind"

This was the spirit of the time--an awakening, some might say, from the torpor and sleep of Victorian prudery and oppression. Others might describe it as a long slide into the slough of sin. The truth probably lay somewhere between the two. The excesses of Victorian prudery and were well laid to rest, but they were only replaced by the excesses of the decadents from whom too much was never enough. - Steven Riddle on the opera Salome derived from Oscar Wilde's play

I honestly have my doubts as to whether, as a whole, Protestant preaching is any better than Catholic homiletics...Most of the evangelicals of every stripe are repetitive, and if they're not repetitive, they're disjointed, and they more often than not lapse into self-helpfulness. The mainstream Protestants I hear on television or on the radio don't strike me as particularly engaging, either. They are earnest, and that is about it. I am tough on priests and homilies...But I do think that there is also no agreement out there (and I mean among people who write and teach about this) as to what Catholic homiletics should be all about, anyway, and some of that even goes back to the disarray in Catholic Scripture scholarship over the past few decades. The fundamental question is: if the bottom line of Scripture scholarship has been the skeptical line (and it has)...from where can the power of preaching come? - Amy Welborn

A wise judge will not give the wrong decision in the face of a hard case. He will allow himself to appear to have hardened his heart, because he knows that truest mercy lies in not making a bad law. - Ghandi

Honestly, it breaks your heart to see the traditional Episcopalian wonder what is going to happen to their church.  As my wife said to me, imagine how you would feel if some group or social movement tried to take over the Catholic Church?  Well it almost happened.  I distinctly remember being in grade school (1970’s) and hearing a liberal priest telling a friend’s parents, “Just wait by the end of this decade all of the barriers of this Church will come crashing down.”  I distinctly recall trying to figure out what that meant as this friend’s parents grew angry.  I was reminded of this conversation a few years ago. This man is no longer in the priesthood and I don’t think he even attends a church anymore.  It was all about an agenda for him. - David Hartline of "Catholic Report"

The Episcopal Church: doing its part to make the USCCB look good. - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"

"[Henry Kissinger] is fascinated with how national characteristics translate into [soccer] playing styles: Brazil’s unbridled joy, England’s noble purpose, Germany’s grim determination.” Wow! You can interpret the psyche of a nation through soccer? Perhaps that is the reason why, although an anti-globalist, I prefer international sporting events to national ones. American Football would be much more interesting if the Buffalo Bills' and the Miami Dolphins' playing styles were influenced by climate and local cuisine, not which club had more money. - Josue of "Katholik Shinja"

What saying "And With Your Spirit" can teach us...The Liturgy is the work of the Holy Spirit, not the individual presider. In fact there is no "individuals" in the liturgy save the Body of Christ. Our response acknowledges the one Holy Spirit poured upon the presider and reminds us that the work we witness in this Eucharist is the Opus Dei...the work of God. - Michael Dubruiel of "Annunciations"

Future Shock Revisted

You probably recall Alvin Toffler's early 1970s book Future Shock. I was hoping to find some sort of list of predictions contained within and see how many came true. But there is no neat summary; much of the book contains anecdotes about the fast rate of change, something we're all quite familiar with now.

But a few excerpts caught my eye. Such as the addictive nature of the fast pace of life and how some actually choose it. (Looking at my own high school graduating class, the top 20% academic achievers are mostly in far-flung places like California or New York. The bottom third still live in our (relatively) quiet hometown):

Some people are deeply attracted to this highly accelerated pace of life - going far out of their way to bring it about and feeling anxious, tense or uncomfortable when the pace slows. They want desperately to be "where the action is."...James A. Wilson has found, for example, that the attraction for a fast pace of life is one of the hidden motivating forces behind the much publicized "brain-drain" - the mass migration of European scientists to the U.S. and Canada. After studying 517 English scientists and engineers who migrated, Wilson concluded that it was not higher salaries or better research facilities alone, but also the quicker tempo that lured them.

But what is really fascinating about the book is how Toffler completely missed the "baby bust". There seemed to be no recognition that in technologically-advanced societies the birth rate would fall. This is in tune with the times since one of the reasons the birth control pill was so lauded was that it would supposedly prevent a huge overpopulation problem. He predicted earlier marriages and having children at a younger age when the trend has been the opposite. He also seems to have predicted that men would want to have lots of children and raise them alone which strikes a completely false note. In fact, the opposite mostly happens in this age when deadbeat dads are hardly rare:

In London, photographer Michael Cooper, married at twenty and divorced soon after, won the right to raise his infant son, and expressed an interest in adopting other children. Observing that he did not particularly wish to remarry, but that he liked children, Cooper mused aloud: "I wish I could just ask beautiful women to have babies for you. Or any woman you liked, or who had something you admired. Ideally, I'd like a big house full of children - all different colors, shapes and sizes." Romantic? Unmanly? Perhaps. Yet attitudes like these will be widely held by men in the future.
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Today the family cycle is accelerating. We grow up sooner, leave home sooner, marry sooner, have children sooner. We space them more closely together and complete the period of parenthood more quickly...'The trend is toward a more rapid rhythm of events through most of the family cycle'.

He was more on target with respect to homosexuality (if he were writing today, I suspect the word marriage would probably lose the quotation marks):

As homosexuality becomes more socially acceptable, we may even begin to find families based on homosexual "marriages" with the partners adopting children. Whether these children would be of the same or opposite sex remains to be seen...In the United States a meeting of Episcopal clergymen concluded publically that homosexuality might, under certain circumstances, be adjudged "good"...We might also see the gradual relaxation of bars against polygamy.

The Delta Factor

Walker Percy always believed that what separates man from animals is language. Korretiv links a video of a Helen Keller moment.

Be Veddy, Veddy Quiet

I always wondered why the lack of Muslim voices against terrorism. Kathy Shaidle links to an article that helps explain why.

CEO Salaries

I had the bright idea to live-blog Saturday's Columbus Dispatch, giving my opinion on many of the articles contained therein. This exercise in hubris wasn't accomplished not on account of my realizing it was an exercise in hubris but because of the hard work involved. I laid down until the desire to blog went away.

But one article caught my eye. CEO pay is up to something like 242 times the average worker's pay. And I find it hard to have a problem with it. I look at the modern corporation as a glorified lottery scheme. There can only be one chief, but many of the Indians want to be that chief and so fueled by that ambition they play the corporate lottery. I say pay the guy well and there'll be hard-working individuals wanting that job (or jobs close to it) and that will only help the company and therefore the economy. Certainly even if the corporation isn't a meritocracy (i.e. see The Peter Principle) it's more so than a straight lottery.

Execs play an increasingly dominant role in the business world. A few generations ago you could basically rest on your laurels if you were a big company. Now you have to constantly innovate, diversify your portfolio, make quarterly earnings numbers, etc. A CEO can make one bad decision - say, hypothetically, you acquire a company and that company becomes a sort of East Germany to the rest of the company's West Germany. The result is that that decision swamps in importance all the individual decisions the indians made over the course of the year. Ten thousand indians can make good decisions but the helmsman can still crash them on the rocks.

So you say "why can't the CEO be paid 141 times the average person's pay instead of 242 times?". Good point, except I've always been fascinated by what happens with the Ohio lottery. When the jackpot falls to say $4 or $6 or $8 million, there are less players. When it's up around $15 or $20 million, there are many more. Why? The difference between four million dollars and twenty million dollars is miniscule to the average person. Four million dollars is plenty, isn't it? But no, people are making decisions based on it. So maybe 141 times the average pay really isn't as attractive as 242 to the high performers.

Various

You can’t listen to Hank Williams Sr’s I Saw the Light and not feel the thrill. And yet he was a troubled soul. Is it merely the addiction? Or was the addiction a sign of a deeper illness? Chicken or the egg? He reminds me of Jack Kerouac. At the end of his life, the beat poet was throwing up vodka while reading the Bible and National Review. It’s a banal observation, but tragic ends are so depressing and scream “why?”. A friend of my brother committed suicide last week. Why? 36 years old, married, with two foster children. He didn’t want to go to Vegas with the group back in May, the first sign (in hindsight) my brother noted.
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Went to the annual Communist Fest Friday. I didn’t enjoy it but went out of a sense of duty. Communist Fest (actually called Comfest) is the annual weekend at a large park in downtown Columbus where progressive types celebrate. It’s a chance for me to experience the Other, where the other is the anti-bourgeouis. The music is rock, the politics frightening. Come to think of it, it functions well as one of those Halloween horror parks. I really wasn’t sure why I was there since I don’t listen to much rock anymore and if I want political horror shows I can just bring up the Daily Kos website.
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I recall it was the late ‘90s and Ham o’ Bone was calling a radio station pretending to be a Vietnam veteran.

“When I was in ‘Nam,” he said, and a chill ran through my bones because the authenticity of his voice was undeniable. I couldn’t do it in a hundred years. If I did, I’d probably say “When I was in ‘nam” and then start to giggle. But Bone knew how to keep a straight voice.

“Got gut-shot by Charlie and…”. Turned out he knew the talk show host and all was well, but it never lessened the amount of creativity it took to come up with his war stories. Ham was always the plot man. When we co-wrote our novella, a science fiction romp titled “Steinberg!”, it was always Bone who soberly wanted me to move the plot along. We’d take turns. He wrote his couple pages and then I’d email it back to him with my pages appended. But I had a hard time advancing the plot in a serious way. Updike was my model and I wanted only to describe, in excrutiating detail, the flora and fauna and physical characteristics of amatory couples. In fact there was an element of sabotage as I’d tired of it early and often. Bone would leave the characters in a situation of grave danger and I would somehow manage to find them swapping saliva.

I’ve decided in the interim that God is contrarian, on the basis that everything I said I would not do I ended up doing. Taken to the extreme, this means that I should take write plot and Bone should write detail...
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My lust for travel increases exponentially during the summer months. During the fall and winter I’m as hibernatory as a bear. But in the summer even the smallest bike ride can trigger travelin' pangs. Even in the suburbs there is much to see. The variations of houses, the flowers and gardens and half-seen arbors in the backyard, the doors, the cornices, the statuary and the trees. Little things…like a house with her all her windows flung wide open – one can imagine the scent of the outdoors in that house.

Today was the “Haus & Garten” tour in beautiful German Village. And I missed it, due in part for the good reason of my father-in-law’s situation, but it’s funny that I’ve never been to a Haus & Garten. I’ve missed a premiere travel opportunity not fifteen miles from my house. Such is life. We live on an oasis of art and literature and watch American Idol and read The DaVinci Code.

(Mostly) Fictional Friday (on a Monday)

His writing life began by virtue of being an inveterate collector. At age eight, hiking in the woods, he'd pick up rocks and lift up bark and whatnot in a hopes of taking something home in order to extend the experience into the morrow. He wasn't yet conscious that collectors don’t have experiences for experiences’ sake but for the re-experiential purposes: a photo, baseball card, a book.

A natural outcome of the collecting mentality was to preserve travel memories in the amber of a journal despite the fact that he rarely went back and to re-read what he’d written. But he had great need to preserve the experience in writing as a hedge against a "travel famine".

Only permanency was charismatic. He liked the experience of things but didn’t take them too seriously due to their short shelf life. They vaporized upon contact, so ‘twas better to collect some artifact that could be referred to repeatedly in the future. Later he would begin to believe the rather obvious fact that life on earth was itself extremely impermanent.

Maybe there were three kinds of people, he thought. Those who live for the moment. Those who collect for an earthly future. And those who collect for eternity.

Remarkable Story

My father-in-law is in the hospital. Fortunately he is doing well and is out of immediate danger. The subject of prayer came up and the nurse overhead and told of a recent fiery car crash.

He was injured to the point of near death and was rescued and lifeflighted.

He reported to the nurse that he had felt himself leave his body for a time. He had floated above the cars behind him and in the first two he heard people complaining about having to wait. In the third car he heard the woman praying for him and so he remained with her.

He remembered the license plate number and told the nurse. Police cooperated in finding the owner of that third car because the doctor asked them to. She was asked to come to the hospital for a reason they couldn't share. The injured patient introduced himself and his family and thanked her for her prayers.

Wow!

They say people in the medical profession believe in God more many other professions (doctors are far more likely to be believers than scientists) and one can see why.

"How Shall I Know This?" vs "How Will This Happen?"

The gospel reading for today's remembrance of the birth of John the Baptist is from Luke. And in the first chapter there is the sharp - if initially subtle - difference between the response of Zechariah and Mary to good news from the angel Gabriel.

Zechariah doubts and asks, "How shall I know this?" which is the same language Abram asked God in Genesis 15:8 when Abram responds to the promise of numerous descendents with, "How can I know that shall I possess it?". In other words, both are asking of GOd how can I know you'll deliver? But at this point Abraham is Abram; he hasn't been called yet and lacks the covenant and his doubt isn't held against him. Zechariah, on the other hand, was a high priest, one of the few who could visit the Holy of Holies.

God's response is different in each case. With Abram, He responded by making a covenant with him and by working a great sign, bringing down fire from Heaven. Zechariah, on the other hand, already had the covenant and its promise. He was expected to have faith and did not and was struck mute for three days (a comfortingly mild punishment although more difficult for some than for others: today not blogging for three days might constitute a worse punishment).

Mary, on the other hand, inquires how the plan will enfold. The phrasing is different: It's not "how will I know what you are saying will happen?" but "how will this happen?". A big difference.

What is particularly interesting in this is how it relates to the as yet upbaptized Camassia, who seems half-way between the religious Zechariah (who was given the advantage of growing up in the Covenant) and the unchurched Abram (to the extent one can use "church" in that pre-Covenant age). So she's stuck between whether she should know better like Zechariah or whether she should receive a sign like Abram, although all of this is probably presumptuous for me to speculate on as I don't know her and I may be mis-reading her anyway.

Pope Benedict...

...on devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Quality Blogging

...over at The Inn at the End of the World. See especially the art, pictures, and text of a post about St. Thomas More's remains.

An Authority Unto Herself

In the quote below, a liberal female Episcopalian blogger experiences the cognitive dissonance of being led where she does not want to go by someone of her own gender. For perhaps the first time she has to choose between the message and the messenger and between two ideas she holds. One is that it doesn't matter what the message is as long as it's a woman she can identify with (in this case Bishop Jefferts Schori) doing the "messengering". The other is that only the message matters. Fascinating:

I was shocked and annoyed by the resolution we got. I was feeling like the Presiding Bishops were shoving it down our throats. When Bishop Jefferts Schori was speaking I also had this bizarre experience. For the very first time in my life I was really feeling invested in authority. Here was this woman in a very high office and I felt compelled to listen to her and her office. I've never in my life had that experience. It was weird and confusing because I was totally not in line with what she was asking of us.

She didn't say how she ended up voting concerning the resolution B-033.

Ham o' Bone...

...seems to be getting a bit big for his britches (metaphorically speaking only). So place tongue in cheek for this rejoinder! :-)

*

Food Song

I weigh two twenty two
a number hard to chew
but do not feel dismay
I'm just big-boned they say.

Of veggies I'll have none
I'd 'druther a Hahn pun
Or a cold and drizzly run
For of pizza I say 'yum'!

Call me quite a sinner
don't call me late to dinner
I'd rather not be thinner
if the food tastes like paint thinner.

Hitler ate no meat
and barely filled his seat
While Aquinas was rotund
His holiness fecund.

I'd rather be the latter
even though I would be fatter
guess I still can't be a satyr
when it comes to chocolate batter.

Where I Come From

I tried this meme, via Studeo, but kind of went back and forth between humor and seriousity and so gave it up.

I am from rotary dial telephones, Guinness Stout and Quisp.

I am from the Great Ohio River valley, where from under every streambed rock there's a crawdad.

I am from the poplar, rose, clementine...oh, nevermind.

Standing Firm

Sarah Hey writes movingly, comparing the Episcopalian cause to a "little stone bridge":

For some very strange reason, a number of us -- a small unit -- are being told to fight for or over this bridge. It is a pitched battle, full of hurled insults and cyber bloodshed, tactical actions, retreats by some [or perhaps calls back to their camp to await further orders], logistics and communications challenges, going awol, unexpected heroism, despair, and much more. We keep waiting for further orders, but so far the same command keeps reaching us -- to hold the bridge...
__

There's a reason why I love the excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt's Speech at the Sorbonne which I posted so many days ago. I struggle with practical action and love more the world of ideas and creativity. And as a person who has tended to avoid conflict at all costs, I am certainly similar to that young lord in my favorite line of that speech's excerpt, who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.".

So we ask the question. Why on earth are we out here fighting over this little stone bridge?

I will leave the theologizing and the philosophizing and the issues of Truth and the gospel to other minds, for now, although I have some arguments along those lines. Instead I'll address the question with some very practical responses.

First, we must take note that our Worthy Opponents are in the thick of the battle too. They seem to want this little stone bridge with a great deal of fervor, and all of us must ponder that fact and speculate as to why. I won't speculate, other than to say that we are fighting over this little stone bridge because it is greatly desired by others. That in itself is noteworthy.

I suspect that this particular little bridge is of interest for a number of reasons -- it is little, for one, and thus easily captured. It is crumbling, so that is attractively weak, yet still carries the troops from one bank of the river to the other and so is a useful vehicle. And for a number of decades its bridgekeepers and watchers were somewhat . . . slumberous, shall we say.

Second, once ground is taken, and territory conquered, battle-hardened units don't generally set up fine, plush camps, smoke pipes, and cook gourmet food. They don't establish themselves there . . . they rest a little, tend their wounds, and move on.

In other words, they advance their flag, and seek other territory to conquer. The little stone bridge over which they had fought so vigorously the day before, they now use as a launching pad, as a base of operations, from which to field more forces. The leader may establish a base camp, a field operation camp, but he only does so in order to send more troops into battle farther out into the woods, and the fields beyond.

There is a reason, for instance, why the national secular media presents two sides to the Episcopal church issue, rather than *one side* and that is because full rulership of the Episcopal church has not at all been fully established. The church is not able to "speak its prophetic voice" to the culture, without another voice piping up from within saying "that's not true and here's why" -- or, to say it another way, "we're not dead yet". If you think this is not a source of endless frustration to the powers-that-be -- that they are unable to make pronouncements without having that very annoying voice *from within* clogging up their news articles -- then I urge you to ponder just how vexed *you* would be if in your organization, your corporation, the same thing were happening. Most such "annoying voices" are your outside competitors, not your internal employees! ; > )
___

What about those who have left this particular little stone bridge or are thinking about leaving?

First, I say go with God, brother or sister in Christ, if you receive other orders. You are a worthy ally, and no doubt we shall meet again on some other field or plain. And second, I hope that you learned whatever it was you were supposed to learn while fighting this battle -- that is, as long as you were fighting it. Because if you were sitting under a shady oak tree and sipping dry martinis when you suddenly heard the sound of warfare a few yards downstream, and having just recently noted the battle, have now suddenly discovered new orders to other more comfortable climes . . . I somehow suspect that those orders have been forged and that you have not at all learned what you were meant to learn.

I am reminded of an early blog comment some time back in 2004, I believe, when a man posted on some site the happy news that he was "outta here" and on to a much better place. He could finally cease all of this silly, and useless fighting over an unworthy trivial corrupt Episcopal church, because he had crossed the Tiber and joined the Roman Catholic church.

He had not learned a crucial lesson, one that I suspect that God wants us all to learn.

I considered a response -- it would have been somewhat cruel, I am sorry to say -- but before I could do so, someone else had piped up with a comment along these lines:

"Welcome, brother. We hope you find rest and refreshment here on the shores of the Tiber. It is a beautiful place. Cast yourself down on its grassy banks and rest a while. . . . . But after you've rested -- and please don't do so for very long -- get up, strap back on your armor, and get back into the battle. We have a whole lot of fighting to do in this church and it is under assault as well."

Sweet! ; > )

But that leads me to what I think is a lesson I've been learning and that is . . . you're not going to leave the battle for long. Wherever you go -- there you are. And there'll be something fierce, something hideous, something demoralizing, something that seems doomed all over again, to fight your heart out for.

***

A commenter named Ramon follows up:

I watched this battle from across the Tiber as I am an orthodox Roman Catholic but let me tell you, as you so aptly pointed out in your analogy above, this is a battle and indeed whether one is a orthodox Anglican or an orthodox Roman Catholic, we indeed are fighting much the same battle. From my perspective, you and many other folks are truly fighting a valiant rear-guard action and I am cheering you on.

At West Point we studied many battles in which “a little stone bridge” was at stake. The 300 Spartans at Thermopyle died to a man, including their King Leonidas, not because they thought they could defeat 20,000 Persians, but because they had committed themselves to slow the Persian advance, their own little stone bridge. They did die but what they showed the world was that an “irresistable” force was not so irresistable in the face of resolute courage and determination and that lesson was well learned by the rest of the Greeks. Darius, the Persian King, didn’t last very long in the Greek peninsula and while the battle was “lost” (I would argue that strategically it won the war by breaking the Persian myth of invincibility).

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 

   

Inspired by this, this, and this...

Two Out Rally

Hurling bullet-fire he,
Billy Wagner came to see
if he could get the Redlegs out
and two he did, that dirty lout.

Ninety-eight his speed was clocked,
surely 5-4 was locked
in the ninth the Reds last chance
bases empty I watch askance.

But the Mighty Wagner threw
the count went full, a walk was drew
another pass, a small dink hit
and hope arrived, the bases lit.

Shootout at the green corral
oh-and-two on a strike and foul,
a single stroke to separate
the sheeps from goats at this late date.

Ninety-nine came a speeding train
but Phillips swung his fragile cane
and crack! the ball went in the field
and vict'ry for the Reds was sealed.

______________________________

And while we're on the subject...

Fine Art Friday   (via Summa Mamas)



This mosaic shows the great "Big Red Machine" of the 1970s. If that ain't fine art then I don't know what is!

Slate piece...

...on Garrison Keillor.

Patrick...

...has a moving post on the poison of too much irony and cynicism. (Me: "Lord, take away my irony and cynicism, but just not yet.")

Randomized Thoughts

courtesy Knights of Columbus	Let's raise a figurative glass (though it is noon somewhere) to St. Thomas More! If he's not the only lawyer in Heaven, it would definitely have to be an exclusive group. One would think the temptation to perform jesuitical jujitsu in order to avoid a beheading would be nearly overwhelming but the saint did not succumb.

One great advantage of God having come to earth is that it helps us discount whatever negativity we feel. If we look at the problem of evil, or natural disasters for instance, we know that Christ knew of them and it didn’t alter his love for the Father. We know that even personal suffering didn’t alter that equation either (i.e. the Cross). We know that he read and inhaled the Old Testament and there was nothing in it that shook his faith. He had no problem reconciling the difficult passages therein. There was no Marcion disconnect between the Old & his own teachings that would form the basis of the New. There is great comfort in all of that.
__

It’s a time of madness. The summer equinox. The heat has come and it is so humid that walking outside is like walking into a wall. I am full of deep yearnings and not just for sex. No I have a yearning to write, "write like the wind". There are moments of beauty in unexpected moments. Driving to work today I was floored by the undulating hills of clover next to Neil Avenue. There was the grace note of a tall dark blue flower against the background of this happy flowering pink/purple clover. And it feels like being indoors is a crime against nature. Ol' Jim Curley & Jeff Culbreath are saying their told-ya-so's. It seems a crime not to notice, but summer will go along without us whether the lightning bugs are appreciated and the hammock is bowed and the hummingbirds are spotted. The days already begin to shorten. Early summer is shot through with wistfulness. What part does nostalgia play in the Christian’s life? The bible is not friendly towards it (look at Lot’s wife). What part does sentiment play?
__

An odd thing about blogging is the disproportionality it tends to encourage. I pray much for an ex-Catholic blogger who has become a Mormon. Why? I don’t even know her. How odd is that? How odd that I pray for her more than I do some of my own in-laws and family members?
__

The great challenge is to bravely note other people’s blind spots and not feel a crisis of confidence concerning how gaping your own might be. You can't know your blind spot else it wouldn't be called 'blind'. You must go forward in a Pickett’s Charge, unafraid of being wrong. Reading of fallen evangelists like Jim Bakker discombobulates me because it shows how short-lasting the Scriptural imperatives adhere to us. James writes in his epistle that we forget who we are, and that is so. The spiritual evaporates quickly without prayer and the gospel.
__

I go to an ultra-orthodox parish downtown a lot. There are long lines for Confession and more devotions that you can shake a stick at. And the sermon is often one concerning the besetting sin of the orthodox: self-righteousness. And I had to laugh because - get this - during one of those sermons I'm thinking, "it's good that at an orthodox parish we hear about self-righteousness. I wonder whether at the liberal parish down the street they're hearing about sin and heterdoxy." and I imagined not, that that's the difference between the orthodox and the heterodox. You simply can't make it up. I felt self-righteous during a sermon about self-righteousness!
__

I saw one of the Episcopalian ministers identify herself on her blog profile as an ENFS or whatever those Myers-Briggs initials are. I sometimes think about what would happen if Jesus say about Myers-Briggs. Would he give a pass to introverts? Would “feeler” types be given a doctrinal pass since logic might not be their forte? Would “judgers” be less judged on judging? Maybe, but that's also what grace is for.
__

Regarding the Episcopalian madness, I do feel sorry that St. Paul's passage about marrying if you would otherwise be given over to lust can't apply to homosexuals. Which is why they are called to be saints. But the amazing way in which the liberals in that church have demanded their own way reminds one of what Josef Pieper wrote decades ago:

There seems nowadays some strong imperative to conduct ourselves as though eros really were a kind of absolute authority. There are those who feel that they are right, are carrying out a kind of religious duty "in the service of eros" - even though they may be deceiving a spouse, betraying a friend, abusing hospitality, destroying the happiness of others, or abandoning their own children. Then everything appears as a "sacrifice" painfully offered upon the altar of love.

__

So what else is in the hopper? Let me look in the discontinued items bin. (Please make shuffling noise.) Oh yes. Don't tell Steven Riddle, because he could change this in a heartbeat by adding thousands of books to his librarything collection, but the current standings as far as books we share in common with Amy Welborn goes: TSO (40), sriddle (34), TLSouthard (31), scipio (29) where TLSouthard is MamaT of "Summa Mamas" fame and Scipio is he who blogs here. Of course, it's not a competition so please no wagering.

What else from the bargain bin? Here's something from Right Angle blog Ohioans may be interested in concerning gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland's view of religion.

Matthew Lickona...

...pens a haiku about the movie A Prairie Home Companion:

Death comes for us all
Keillor sings as she draws near
A jowly stoic.

I saw it and was somewhat disappointed. I'd had high hopes which is always the wrong way to approach a movie. It was full of eye candy, in the sense of being well-photographed and getting a backstage glimpse at the set. Some of the music was good. But that's about it.

Lickona reviews it here, and in another post points us to a Godspy article titled Porn and the Sacred Heart.

Novak on the Trinity.

Beatin' a Dead Horse...

...but manishevitz, what a soap opera. And the 'Piskie bloggers, not unexpectedly, are articulate and witty and full of gallows humor. I'll miss 'em when they're gone. Ruth Geldhill writes from England:

So there will be a desperate, last-minute attempt in the US today to get something past the bishops and deputies that allows Bishop Schori to take her seat on the world Anglican state. Thus, in an extraordinary way, the election of a woman might have actually saved the Anglican Communion from schism. Had it been a man, they might not have cared so much. They really, really want to see Bishop Katharine up there, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury. And actually, I have to admit, so do I. The thought of real schism happening now is utterly heartbreaking.

Funny if it wasn't also sad. One deputy, a female pastor in New Jersey, wrote that she was ashamed that while there were starving people in the world they were wasting time on resolutions about gay bishops. But if sexuality is minutiae, gender isn't. She writes breathlessly:

The Episcopal Women's Caucus and Integrity held a party last night in honor of Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori, our new Presiding Bishop and Primate. The EWC had buttons made in pink which declare: "It's a girl!"...I woke up yesterday morning, the first day of life in the Anglican Communion with a Primate who is a woman, and noted that the sky had not fallen. Neither had the world changed the rotation of its axis nor was the sun hidden by cloud or eclipse. I do confess that my next thought was this: The Primate of The Episcopal Church is probably just waking up and was, no doubt, beginning to get dressed.

And, she's putting on her bra.

It's a brave new world.

It sounds almost fetishistic. Almost a "divine feminine", a cult of raising up of woman to the divine (and that the author quoted above is a lesbian isn't surprising. Men have been doing the same for years.). Another conventioneer posts a sermon from that new Presiding (bra-wearing) Bishop Elect:

Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation and we are his children. We are going to have to give up fear.

Our mother Jesus? There's a new one on me. I knew Geldhill would have a field day with that.

The female pastor from New Jersey is hoping for schism. She complains of Canterbury and certainly gets to the heart of the issue:

Ahem . . . . Can you say, ‘magisterium’? It is becoming reality – The Episcopal Church is becoming more and more dominated by the same ‘foreign rule’ that provided the impulse for the first Reformation. Except, of course, that the purple sacristy slipper is on the other foot, as it were. Now it is England that is the “foreign rule” to America, instead of the Britons objecting to Roman rule.

Update: "The Pontificator" comments about "Mother Jesus" on another blog: "I do not see anything objectionable to metaphorically describing Jesus as our mother. It is precisely the fact that the masculine pronoun is retained that makes this kind of metaphorical usage permissible (see Julian of Norwich)."

Faith & Reason & Sex

Regarding the Episcopalian situation, part of the reason I find it so interesting is that it pits those whose belief rests on Scripture in a sort of faith-alone position against those who exercise reason alone and give Revelation short shrift.

God knows that obedience is hard enough for us even when reason alone is invoked (i.e. don't do drugs since they'll wreck your life) or faith alone (i.e. Christ is God). But Catholicism tries to rest on both the faith & reason wings and this is never more clear than in her teachings on sexuality. Once you disconnect sex from procreation it seems contrary to reason to say that masturbation and gay sex are wrong. Is God arbitrary? What principle(s) underlay human sexuality? The Church doesn't scorn God's gift of reason while holding firm to the constant interpretation of Scripture regarding the sinfulness of homosexual acts.

I'm listening to a course on WWI and the instructor says that new technologies changed moralities. The newly invented machine gun was looked upon as a barbarous weapon, something never to be used on so-called "civilized" peoples. And yet we know the rest of the story. It seems the invention of the ever-so-convenient birth control pill has likewise changed moralities.

Another lesson of the Episcopalian Convention is how if the guiding principle of Anglicanism is lex orandi, lex credendi (or "what we pray is what we believe") then it doesn't seem to be working. (An off-the-cuff thought: does this mean the Latin Mass isn't the panacea Traditionalists think it is?) To the extent that Anglicanism's reason for existence is to ignore doctrinal differences (i.e. as a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism) then are the liberals in that church ironically more in keeping with what Anglicanism is about after all?

Interesting National Review Jonah Goldberg Article:

Ever since the dawn of the Progressive Era, conservatives have been fighting progressive assumptions about the role of the state, the nature of justice, and the relevance, if any, of the transcendent to public life. With few exceptions, this argument has been almost entirely on the opposition’s terms.

Consider, for example, the debate about same-sex marriage. Among those already convinced that same-sex marriage should be illegal, invocations of the Bible and natural law are common. But these arguments are useless when it comes to persuading the secular-minded. That’s why Maggie Gallagher, Stanley Kurtz, and others consistently invoke not God’s law but the laws of regression analysis and standard deviation (“deviation” in a strictly statistical sense, of course). These are useful arguments, and it’s good that someone is making them. But the implied assumption seems to be that if numbers and charts demonstrated that same-sex marriages were better for kids than “traditional” ones, conservatives — or at least many of them — would throw in the towel.

Indeed, so steeped are we in progressive assumptions that “traditional” has become a category to be tested and prodded like any other. One can imagine some study with towers of numbers falling in neat columns. One of these appears under the heading “traditional” and stands alongside a dozen others. Whichever category scores the highest, wins.
___

Why has this happened? The answer is that we live in a progressive world. If you live in Japan, you’ll be hard-pressed to persuade people of anything if you don’t speak Japanese or understand the culture. Similarly, conservatives must speak the language of progressivism in order to persuade progressives that they are wrong. The danger in this is that you can go native. John Blackthorne in James Clavell’s Shogun becomes more Japanese than many Japanese people. So, too, conservatives can end up more progressive than the progressives.

But what, exactly, do I mean by “progressivism”? Certainly not — or not merely — the tinfoil-hattery that gets called “progressive” on the web and elsewhere. Progressivism has overlapping meanings. It refers both to the generic leftism we associate with the word “progressive” and to the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But both of these senses rely on a more metaphysical meaning. Progressivism was perhaps best summarized by Condorcet’s declaration that there is “a science that can foresee the progress of humankind, direct it, and accelerate it.” Progressivism takes it as a given that mankind, not God, is the pilot of Spaceship Earth. The good is measured in material terms — greater health, greater prosperity, greater comfort — and the social sciences are the disciplines that allow us to engineer society in ways that will maximize the good. Recall that the phrase “social engineering” didn’t start out as an epithet; people once bragged that they were social engineers. Even if the term has fallen into disrepute, the practice is alive and well.

Progressivism was an entirely rational response to the scientific method’s success at what Francis Bacon called “the relief of man’s estate.” Rather than beseeching God for bounty and good fortune and giving thanks when these were received, mankind learned to do for himself. Irrigation replaced rain. Animal husbandry and domestication brought more happiness and prosperity than praying for a good hunting season. Medicine substituted for crossing your fingers that the smallest cut wouldn’t lead to deadly infection. While one occasionally hears sophomoric voices — on the left and the right — opining about the superiority of medieval life or the rapture of living in a “state of nature” with one’s fellow noble savages, few of us are eager to defenestrate dentistry, cable TV, and air conditioning in exchange for such joy. And rightly so.

But there was a considerable downside to the displacement of the Almighty by the trinity of the slide rule, the microchip, and the test tube. Eric Voegelin was among the most alarmed critics of the rising progressive tide. According to Voegelin, you cannot eliminate the religious instinct. “When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.” Translation: When you rely on science and technology to do God’s job, it won’t be long before you worship science as a god. Marxism, the apotheosis of progressivism, purged the divine and replaced it with materialism. For the Marxist, proclaimed Voegelin, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come.” For many people today, the steam engine has been replaced by the embryonic stem cell as the promise of the realm to come.

Conservatives, or at least a majority of them, retain an admirable opposition to crossing bright lines on “life” issues. The passionate denunciations that this “dogmatism” elicits from liberals are a sign of how fundamental is the progressive faith that we are our own gods. The Left’s rancor also reflects the fact that protection of the unborn is one of the last redoubts of conservative adherence to immutable moral law. Pro-lifers often concede that having an unwanted baby is “bad” for both the baby and the mother in material terms (though it is of course not as bad for the baby as death). They simply say that a higher law applies.

But very few conservatives would dream of making such an argument when it comes to, say, economics. They note that eliminating the “death tax” would be good for “growth,” or for minorities, or for entrepreneurialism. The cuts would pay for themselves, we are assured. But even when conservatives believe that the death tax is not only unwise but unjust (as indeed it is), they recognize that this position simply won’t fly. Indeed, the supply-side school of economics was born of the progressive desire to prove that cutting taxes for the rich would be good for the poor. Why? Because conservatives either accepted or surrendered to the prevailing view that high taxes on the wealthy would be justified if they advanced the common good. As a matter of logic, this view offers no principled reason for the state not to confiscate all wealth if doing so would be beneficial to society (though there are of course pragmatic reasons to think it would not). As a matter of justice, it is no more legitimate to rob a man of nine of his apples for the “public interest” than to take all ten.

Many supply-siders tout John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts — meant to counteract the worst stock-market crash since the Great Depression — as their model. But they were not implemented in the spirit of supply-side economics at all. They were rather a form of Keynesianism, justified in the language of Cold War competition. As H. W. Brands notes, Kennedy was the first president to claim that the government had an obligation to ensure economic growth. It is a sign of how thoroughly conservatism has absorbed progressivism that most of us take JFK’s view for granted. Believing it is the government’s job to ensure growth is tantamount to saying that the government should superintend the economy. A captain need not keep his hand on the tiller every second to remain a captain, and today’s “laissez faire” means “Let it be — until things take a bad turn.” In short, conservatives, too, have accepted that there is a science of human progress.

I offer no solutions here, in part because it is difficult to see exactly where the problems lie. The West may need a new metaphysics to deal with the challenges of modernity. I am not up to the task of crafting one. But conservatives could help that project along by asking themselves more regularly whether they favor something because it is right in itself, or simply because they like its outcome.

I left the Episcopal Convention so grateful to be Catholic. I have a profound sense of sadness as I reflect on the day. I am still digesting all I saw and heard. Make no mistake about it. The folks at the Episcopal Convention, are on the whole, very liberal. As a matter of fact, a part of the convention is even more liberal than Bishop Robinson. The majority of those at the convention would make the National Catholic Reporter’s views seem like that of Spirit Daily in comparison...I only wish those Catholics who disagree with our church could spend some at the Episcopal Convention. I think they would appreciate our Catholic faith, history, diversity, tradition and orthodoxy so much more. I will be praying for our Episcopal friends. They will certainly need many prayers. - David Hartline of "Catholic Report"

We can’t get anywhere with unity unless we figure out the Eucharist. When we come to an agreement on the Eucharist, we will have unity. - Anglican Father Victor King of Liberia, interviewed by David Harline

I feel like one sleepwalking, lost in the cosmos (to steal from my most interesting of recent reads, Walker Percy's book of that title), beset by demons of epistemology in the garden of ontology, wondering whether I really have the will to be a saint, sullen and withdrawn like the child I once was (who preferred the company of his own imagination to that of any other people, and ran around the deserted parts of the playground by himself playing the dinosaur hero). So I haven't exactly been up to writing anything of substance. Trust me, though, I'll be back. All it takes is my next epiphany. - Patrick of Orthonormal Basis

I think one thing that bothers me about ex-gay theology is that it doesn't just say "God CAN do this," but "God WILL do this"--God WILL change your life in this very specific way, removing a temptation, if you want it badly enough. And there's so little help on how to live before that change occurs, too. It just seems like such a setup for failure. - Eve Tushnet

The philosophy department at Notre Dame has about 60 faculty members. In 90 percent of the courses, friends at Notre Dame say, eminently pertinent documents such as the encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio are not read and, probably, not even referred to. In the world of academic certification, the philosophy department ranks 13th in the nation. The question persistently asked is not, “How do we create an authentically Catholic philosophy department?” but, “How do we get to a single digit?” - Fr. Neuhaus of "First Things"

Michael told me the other night of a news story he'd read indicating that the more plugged in a young person is, the more anxious and depressed they are. Now, there could be an inverse relationship as well - that the more depressed a kid is, the more they plug in. But as we were talking about it, we decided that the reason might be this - because of computers, text-messaging, cel-phones and God knows what else, young people are never, ever disconnected from their peers. Peers are the center of most kids' lives - they give them the most joy and fitting into that group is the cause of the most anxiety. Before the day of constant communication, there was space to be free of that. Oh, it might still be in your head as you worried about it, but you couldn't constantly be IM'ing or texting about who went where with who and who wasn't included, or worrying about the image that you're presenting. For a lot of young people, that space - the space to really be free and consider yourself apart from anyone else's eyes or ears - has disappeared. No wonder they're tense. - Amy Welborn

We shouldn't be too quick to separate this life from eternal life, since through Baptism our eternal life has already begun. Jesus does promise us comfort and security, not as a reward after we die, but as a gift right now, right here. It's not the material comfort and security we might want, but it is no less real, no less present in our fallen world, for being spiritual. In fact, to the extent comfort and security are subjective measurements of how we perceive ourselves, it doesn't make much difference whether they are based on material or spiritual reasons.The question, then, is to what extent material comfort and security can be sought without interfering with spiritual comfort and security. And the answer, I suppose, was given by Jesus: "Seek first the kingdom of God...." - Tom of Disputations

In 28 years of priesthood, I've been able to celebrate Mass in several other European languages. German has rhythm, Italian has poetry and Spanish is very strong when it's used in the liturgy. Catalan is intimate and French is elegant, but the English we use is impoverished and often trite. Sometimes, the translation is inaccurate and occasionally it's bewildering, such as the Arianism that was slipped unawares into the fixed Preface for the Fourth Eucharist Prayer: "You alone are God, living and true" addressed to the Father. I've been told that there's also quite a bit of Pelagianism in the translations, with the presumption that we get there by our own efforts. We need to sort out this mess and should express our regrets to the Protestant churches which have followed us too closely in altering their own words of worship. - Fr. Ferguson commenting on "Open Book"

If I had grown up heterosexual, I don't know if I would be Catholic today....Throughout my childhood I had a strong sense that something had gone wrong--that I was not only different but broken. I connected this feeling to my sexual orientation, and developed intense shame. This despite being raised in an extraordinarily gay-positive household--I could be misremembering, but I'm not sure I even encountered stigma against homosexuality until I was in junior high. The doctrine of original sin offered a startling and hopeful possibility: Suddenly the thing that made me different, my sexual orientation, was not the focus; my alienation was a distilled version of what every person experiences after the Fall. My orientation was a source of insight, not solely a burden or a political cause. - Eve Tushnet

The Increasingly Joyful Mysteries

Joy knew not man
until the Annunciation
and from Mary Joy found
Elizabeth and John and then
a score of shepherds keeping watch
till Simeon prophesized a wider dispersal
to be fulfilled in the Heavenly Temple.

Tom & George

He calls it justice, which it certainly is, though it could be considered a show of mercy on some of his readers. Others might think it an exercise in prudence, for irritation makes intellectuals irrational, or so Ramesh Ponnuru posits in an artice in National Review concerning George Will's sudden distaste for social conservatives, with Ponnuru pointing out a string of illogicisms in Will's columns:

Will got in another Schiavo shot, describing social conservatives (no sneer quotes this time) as “unchastened by public disgust about their attempt 10 months ago to drag the federal government into the Terri Schiavo tragedy.” But social conservatives didn’t drag the federal government into this tragedy; it was there from the start. The Supreme Court had ruled, in 1990, that all states had to make it possible for a surrogate to direct that a feeding tube be removed from an incapacitated patient. Florida, Schiavo’s home state, never had a choice about whether to comply. Social conservatives were merely trying to contain the damage from that federal intervention.
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Social conservatives often deserve criticism, even sharp criticism, and some of Will’s hits the mark. What fair-minded observer would deny that they can be intolerant, or self-righteous? Will is right to say that too often they play the victim card. They do, sometimes, overreach. Will is probably right to consider both intelligent design and the marriage amendment instances of such overreaching. (I would also point to the insistence, by many social conservatives, that America is in some constitutional sense a “Christian nation.”) Social conservatives, whatever they should be called, can learn from his rebukes. By any sensible reckoning, Will is, even today, a moderate social conservative himself. But lately, when social conservatives are the topic, Will’s reasoning loses its customary intricacy.

How to explain it? I will venture a guess. George Will is the most coolly analytical of commentators. (He is cool even — especially — when he is scorching.) Look closely, however, and it is just possible to see that his thought is being distorted by an emotion. It is a powerful yet underrated emotion: irritation.

Song

In the Byzantine Rite's cycle of readings yesterday's gospel was the calling of Andrew & Simon Peter. And this morning I heard the delightful Sara Evans tune Suds in the Bucket. So I combined them for you (as always, remember what you paid):

They were out fishin', say it was a little past nine
When the Lord pulled up, a white pickup truck
The scribes shoulda seen it comin' - it was only just a matter of time
Plenty old enough, and you can't stop God.
Andrew stuck a note on the screen door "sorry but I got to go"
That was all he wrote, his mamma's heart was broke
That was all he wrote, so the story goes

(Chorus) Now his wife's in the kitchen starin' out the window, scratchin' and a rackin' her brains
How could 38 years just up and walk away?
He left the boat in the water and the bait hangin' out on the line

Now don't you wonder what the preacher's gonna preach about Sunday mornin'
Nothing quite like this has happened here before
Well God must've been a smooth talkin' son of gun
For such a grounded dude to just up and run
Course you can't fence time, and you can't stop God

YEEEHAW!

(3rd chorus) Got his sandals on they're headed to Jerusalem tonight
How could 38 years just up and walk away?
Trouble is a comin' and they say that the night is near
The fisherman is gonna be a saint
'Cuz he left the boat in the water and the bait hangin' on the line...

Various and/or Sundry

So this is how a schism happens. We weren't there in the 11th century when East and West officially went separate ways. We weren't there during the Reformation. We weren't around to watch the Anabaptists get out of Dodge or watch the Mennonites split from the Old Order Amish. But we are watching a train wreck now as the American Episcopalians begin divorce proceedings from the Anglican communion (although admittedly the former comprise a tiny fraction of the latter).

From the Columbus Dispatch:

At least 1,000 people pushed into Trinity Episcopal Church to celebrate the Eucharist and show their support for New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man. His supporters filled the pews, balconies and basement and spilled out onto the S. 3 rd Street sidewalk. They laughed and cried and stood clapping as a teary-eyed Robinson urged them to love those gathered about a mile away in a modest, windowless room at Nationwide Arena.

There, Bishop Peter Beckwith of Springfield, Ill., presided over an intimate service. Although their numbers were small by comparison, roughly 80 people, they sang loudly and held tightly to their convictions.

Re: the phrase "tightly-held convictions" with respect to conservative Episcopalians. "Tight" seems often used in conjunction with conservatives in the media but seems here an adjective very applicable to the progressive Episcopalians, who not only have tightly-held convictions but are not shy about imposing them.
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From a progressive Episcopalian blogger at the Convention here in Columbus:

Yesterday a really cool resolution came before the House of Deputies it called on dioceses and congregations to do education about debt and debt reduction for families and called for February to be designated 'Debt Awareness Month'...We had amendments and amendments to amendments and people were debating the month that should be debt awareness month and someone suggested April instead of February and someone else said we shouldn't pick a month and it was taking a long time. Someone got up and said we should really have September be debt awareness month because that prepares people for Christmas buying and doesn't overlap with Easter. I strongly agree with him and right after he spoke they called for a vote. I ended up voting for the resolution because I think in essence its a good resolution while at the same time thinking February is the wrong month...All in all, I'm excited about debt awareness month and think any month is really a good month to talk about it and every month is essentially debt awareness month.

I think that pretty much speaks for itself. Later she expresses qualms about using her child as prop:

I've been struggling with the idea that Naomi is someone or something that helps me make political points. Many times before and during convention people have told me that Naomi's presence really makes a point (her being here in general, me having her on the floor with me, me bringing her to a committee meeting, me bringing her to a hearing). I decided during morning worship that although I often feel uncomfortable with politicians 'posing' with their kids I could find a balance between using her as a prop and finding a way to be truly me, protect her, and have her presence here with me be the natural thing I think it is and if all that happens to be a political statement then so be it.

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A thought: the Beatitudes begin "Blessed are the poor in spirit" and continue in that sort of third person vein. "Blessed are those who mourn...Blessed are the peacemakers". We may or may not be able to identify ourselves in those categories (which is the source of consternation - Bob Deffinbaugh writes, "I was thinking of the statement Nikita Krushchev made a number of years ago while in the United States, when he said, “I’ll tell you what the difference between Christians and me is, and that is if you slap me on the face, I’ll hit you back so hard your head will fall off.” He was impacted by the Sermon on the Mount. He knew what it said, and he didn’t like it at all. The truth is that the natural man does not like its message. This is not the message one would take to write a best selling book—even a Christian book. The message of the Sermon on the Mount is not one that sells.")

But then the Beatitudes suddenly switch to the first person: "Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake." (emphasis mine). I wonder if this suggests that not all are called to be martyrs in the sense of the verse before ("Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness' sake") but that all Christians will be persecuted in the sense of falsely accused and reproached.
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As Roman Catholics, there is a tendency to think the events at the Episcopalian Convention have nothing to do with us but they are momentous in the sense that we are all affected by each other and by the climate of the culture. Artificial birth control was universally prohibited before the Anglicans, in 1930, okay'd their use. Some thirty years Rome visited the issue and the papal commission apparently approved the Pill, while Pope Paul VI (suprisingly given his generally diffident management style) condemned the practice. I know of Catholics who date their disobedience to the pope to the promulgation of Humane Vitae. So, at the risk of great oversimplication, the actions of the Anglicans in 1930 eventually led to a great deal of our current division in the American church.

Excerpts from Scott Hahn's Scripture Matters:

I propose that St. Thomas [Aquinas] is best understood not simply by looking at his metaphysics, or by studying his appreciation of Aristotle, or by updating him with modern science. Rather, I suggest that St. Thomas is fundamentally a biblical theologian. In fact, many of his biographers tell us that Thomas would have described himself primarily as a teacher of Scripture...Many scholars now are rediscovering the biblical depth of his teachings, and the importance of appropriating the scriptural categories that formed the framework of much of his thought.
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...Because of sin's blinding effects, the "book" of nature must be translated by the inspired Word of Scripture. Nature, since the fall, cannot be truly understood apart from Scriptures...Apart [from them], not even a genuis as St. Thomas could have made much sense of God's purpose for salvation history...

I'm convinced that many well-meaning people have fastened onto the natural law for the purpose of helping Catholics enter the American public square and discuss morality in a religiously neutral way...[but] fallen human nature is incapable of knowing the natural law with certainty. As St. Thomas teachers, it is only possible with much effort, after a very long time. Only a few will come to know it, and even then with an admixture of error. If we are going to adopt the natural law tradition that our Church teachers, we should not do it with an apologetic strategy of selectivism or minimalism, because the natural law is not something that is non-religious. In drawing from the natural law tradition, we cannot escape religion...St. Thomas, as I understand him, is a consistent and committed theocrat.

Another tidbit from the same book:

But what about the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8)? Notice that Jesus did not condemn her, but neither did He apologize for her public shame. He does not refrain from judgment. Judgment, after all, is a precondition of mercy. Jesus sets her free, but He makes clear that mercy has its price, and that price is the fulfillment of the Law: "Go, and do not sin again." (Jn. 8:11).

More Episcopalian Talk


Fr. Manning's an openly celibate priest

Still hyp-mo-tized by the Episcopalians in town. Heard some of the protagonists and antagonists on Larry King’s show. Three were pro-homosexual sex (including Andrew Sullivan and Bishop Gene Robinson) and three anti-. The anti- folks seemed to track well with their respective religious groups. The Baptist emphasized Scripture (though surprisingly he said that we look to tradition for help in interpreting Scripture). He insinuated gays need not be gay; they can be transformed by the power of grace. Which seemed a Cross-less Christianity though at the same time is indicative of an adamnant faith that refuses to sell God’s power short. The Catholic priest emphasized the positive side: you can be gay and have deep friendships and love – but it just can’t be physical. No sex; a definite cross. He argued from a natural law perspective, how we have to track as closely as we can to the true purpose of sex. Men are made for women and vice-versa. And the third fellow, an Episcopalian priest, basically argued that 2,000 years of Christian tradition can’t be wrong and that Scripture should be the standard against which we measure ourselves rather than the other way around. Sullivan kept insisting that he can’t bear false witness and to deny that he’s gay would be to bear false witness. Absurd, because the priest had that covered. You can be gay, you just can’t make it about sex. And the fact that that is never taken seriously means that despite protestations to the contrary, being gay is about sex. Duh. But that doesn't make their situation less pitiable; they are called to be saints and that many are resisting is not exactly an unfamiliar situation, gay or straight.

A commenter on a blog thread about the King show said that the big elephant in the room that went unmentioned was the Fall and how things aren’t the way they should be after that. It’s interesting that the priest (Fr. Manning) argued from nearly the opposite perspective. That nature is good and that nature intends men be with women for the positive purpose of children.

Sullivan's attitude is symptomatic of modern Christianity in the West, which is the attitude that we’ve already seemingly errored on the side of too much rigor so why not error on the side of too little rigor for awhile? From "masturbation will cause insanity" and "the death penalty for sodomites" to "gay sex is God's will" in one easy ...er...stroke. Reading about Presybterians of the 18th and 19th centuries is illuminating as they are the anti-Sullivans. Back then God took all “ties” – in other words, any doubt about something was settled in favor of the more rigorous fashion. Now not only does man take all ties but more often than not man is taking even what is clearly God’s. The head of the Episcopalian church – the one who promoted Gene Robinson to bishop - argued that we’ve learned so much in the past centuries in the fields of medicine and physics then why not sexuality? But is it really that we have learned so much about sexuality or that we have made it our god because it’s tough enough getting through life without forgoeing pleasures that modern man has come to expect?

The Episcopalian prelate was asked by Larry King to sympathize with Sullivan but surprisingly he tried to one-up Sullivan's victimhood and play one too. He said that he wishes he and other orthodox folk weren’t being marginalized and isolated in the present Episcopalian church. Can we buy that Episcopalianism is as important to the prelate as sex is to Andrew? Maybe we could if we lived in a different age?

CNN kept showing the graphic beneath Gene Robinson referring to him as an “openly gay bishop”. I thought a possible parody be to have a graphic under Fr. Manning that said “openly celibate priest”. It seems in today’s world celibacy is rejected out of hand and is now more courageous than being openly gay.

Judgment Day

White-hot the black-wrought
iron bench off High Street
where I read a Bill Luse novel
to the beat of the sun’s beatlessness.

She splits the sky and renders judgment
strong and hot, visible to all
inescapable astride the 'sphere
plain as the nose on your face.

At home the tomato plants slump
and I look at them sideways and debate
between the tough love of asking their roots to go deeper
and the pity of watering them now.

5K College Reunion Race

I could hear her struggling for breath
“’86” she said,
as in class of ’86,
a year after me.

Life was repeated
for I was a step ahead
though just as breathless.

'08 Prez Campaign

What'll be interesting to watch in the next election is which of the Forces-Which-Determine-Who-Will-Be-Elected will dominate. I think the three forces are:

1) Whiplash Syndrome
2) The Smiler Gets the Worm
3) Authenticity: If you can fake it you can make it

The Three Forces

Generally there is a natural tendency to vote for the person who is least like the last president. Call it a pendulum or "previous occupant fatigue" but this is how we got squeaky-clean outsider like Carter after Nixon and straight-talking Bush after smooth but forked-tongue talking Clinton. This would suggest that Hilary is in a good position because people might be ready for nuance and talking-out-of--both-sides-of-your-mouth again. (As well as someone who can pronounce "nuclear".) This force also favors Hilary in the sense that she's a woman. On the Republican side one could argue that Newt Gingrich could woo voters with his smartness and fluid command of the English language.

The nicest person wins. This theory is that most of the time the more genuinely likeable person wins. (Someone said that if Bill Clinton could've met every voter individually he would've won his elections unaminously.) This would seem to favor John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, John McCain. Test the candidate by forming a mental image of them bonding with Oprah. If you can't really imagine it then they don't have much of a chance of winning.

In post-modernity the hunger for authenticity is so great that it might trump everything else including competency or ideology. Gore in '00 was perceived as non-authentic (recall his dumping his environmental agenda, his consultations with Naomi Wolf about how to dress like an alpha male (if you have to ask...) and the "I invented the internet" attitude). Kerry in '04 was as fake as the day is long. It's difficult to see his "I voted for it before I voted against it" as anything other than subjugating the war to his political ambition. If the Democrats had nominated someone capable of authenticity we might well have had a Democratic president. For '08, John Edwards or Russ Feingold seem well-positioned here since this is Hillary's Achilles' Heel.

Fine Art Friday

Via MamaT     

Why? For the symbolism in it... For the fact that the glorifying rays surrounding Mary have not changed her attitude of supplication to God (downward cast of head, hands folded in prayer)...For the miraculous fact that an image made on a tilma - a "poor quality catcus-cloth" - has survived five centuries...

Columbus Pics

Okay, so if whoever had taken that picture of the Convention Center had merely changed their camera angle, they would've had this glorious eye feast:



Perspective is everything, 'eh? Well, seriously there is at least this park (five minute walk from Convention Center):

   

More pics:



 

Ohio: Not As Bad As You Think

I'm hyp-mo-tized at seeing familiar landmarks on the blog of a UK Times blogger, way o'er there in the England. It just doesn't happen too often.

For example, that depicted is the Convention Center, in which I've eaten many times and have walked by countless times. You can imagine the doubletake I did when I found it in this context.(Cue "It's a Small World After All" music.)

Of course all this comes not without snark. You don't post a picture like that for its sex appeal.

There are some beautiful blogs coming out of GenCon...I am going to post from time to time some extracts from the ones that amuse or inform. But you can see why Americans blog so much. This picture shows the Columbus Convention Centre where it is all happening. It's not much like Church House in Westminster, surrounded by Starbucks, bookshops, churches and even an Abbey to tempt one into realtime gossip, literature and spirituality. I suddenly have a new compassion for The Episcopal Church and its delegates. What suffering, nine days in a building like that. No wonder they're all surfing off into cyberspace.

It looks a lot better from the inside. Maybe if I'm supremely motivated I'll bring my camera tomorrow and prove it. Certainly Ham o' Bone can vouch for it. Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think Ohio's sacred honor has been impugned! This shall not stand! I shall bring my camera tomorrow!
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Update: Re-reading her, I do have to concur that the neighborhood can't compete with Westminster, but there are microbreweries nearby that help make up for the bad view!

The Convention

I have been remarkably remiss in my bloggerly duty. There's this Episcopalian convention just two minutes from my place of work and I've not spent one lunch hour there for porpoises of live-blogging. (And no I did not pay Gregg for the Welbornian Haloscan link. Nice of him though.)

I meant to rectify that matter today and so I wandered o'er there about 11:30am. I felt the excitement that conventions naturally confer, representative as they are of fascinating little subcultures with their own tics and language and rituals. This one is interesting on its own merits because the issue is of a titanic kind: the clash between those for whom Scripture is relevant and for those whom it is not. (If you think I'm kidding, read this.) What makes it so fascinating is that this is not a debate between atheists and believers, but between self-professed believers within the same communion.

During my fifteen minute sojourn I saw many Episcopalian priestly types. I also saw two who looked exactly like Franciscan monks. One of them turned left and stood in a line for internet access. Would've made a good picture.

A sign notes that former U.S. Senator J. Danforth is speaking here tonight. His journey has been an interesting one. My understanding is that he was one of the most influential senators in seeing that Judge Clarence Thomas, a proponent of natural law, made it to the Supreme Court. But Danforth has gone all NY Times on us, denouncing religious conservatives in that paper. Which reminds me of something. I noticed a university parking lot the other day with a tremendous number of handicapped spaces. And I experienced a cognitive dissonance in seeing a culture (ours) that thoughtfully provides handicapped people with mandated spaces close to buildings but which also allows the killing of unborn life in the womb. What's going on?

What's going on is that we are in favor of doing good as long as it costs us nothing or little. For the ambulatory, it costs nothing to walk a few extra steps. But to save a child's life, it costs a woman nine months of labor. And while a handicapped person didn't choose to be handicapped, a pregant woman chose to get pregant by having sex. But this is our culture in a nutshell - one that will do the right thing if it's costless. One that will go to war if it costs few American lives or doesn't drag on too long. One that will be pro-life as long as there are no ramifications to - i.e. if cloning could save a life than cloning is okay. One that will produce an Episcopalian church that might fracture over the issue of the biblical injunction against gay sex because that costs. (Gosh that was preachy. And certainly a self-indictment besides given that often I take the easy way out.)

I ultimately found little I could report, being that I did not have credentials, media or otherwise. There was a guard posted outside the door of one large gathering and I felt the sting of discrimination as I didn't have one of those convention badges around my neck. I saw people in groups of two or three or four and had a sudden urge to eavesdrop.

There was one venue without a guard posted. It was a woman's conference and the speaker was deriding the lack of presence of 'women at the table' in our country. She said, "My first question with respect to the war would've been: 'How many will die?'". (I hope Condie Rice counted as a woman at the table.) I listened for about five minutes and it was all a call for more earthly power for women and I was not the least bothered by it because this is truth in advertising. If you're an Episcopalian woman this is likely what you believe. (What's interesting is how the whole thing has changed over the years. From an interest in the outcome in the issues to an an interest in who is making the call on issues. It's become more a naked interest in power than merely to do good. Power acquired not as a means to an end but an end itself. Of course, they would say that they can't accomplish the ends without themselves because women see the world differently (well, isn't that gender discrimination?).)

But I expected that. This where disaffected Catholics can and probably should go. As one commenter said on Amy Welborn's blog: "The 'liberal' wing of the Catholic Church will often claim they have no home in the Church. Well, they do have a home and it is called the Episcopal Church." In the end, people who are interested in power for power's sake will not be interested in Catholicism because the Church is not for that purpose. As then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

There is an ideology that fundamentally traces all existing institutions back to power politics. And this ideology corrupts humanity and also destroys the Church. Here is a concrete example: If I see the Church only under the aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is oppressed. And then the question of, for example, women's ordination, as an issue of power, becomes imperative. I think this ideology produces a totally false point of view, as if power were the only category for explaining the world and the communion present in it. If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life. We are not in the Church in order to exercise power as if in some kind of association.

O'Rama's Recipes

  <-- Satisfied customers!

Every few months or so I try to share one of my mouth-watering recipes and today is no exception. What follows is something I call Toast with a Twist or sometimes Toast with a Kick. Feel free to use either term. You'll need two pieces of bread, either white or the funny-looking brown kind. You'll also need JIF chunky peanut butter and milk.

Acquire loaf of bread from refrigerator. Examine individual slices for mold; if moldy, give to dog. Experience has shown that it won't hurt him.

Place two slices into what I call a toaster. Snooty types may refer to this useful appliance as a "toaster oven" but be not fooled as I think it's the same thing. Press down on button using thumb or index finger until it locks into place. This begins the toasting process.

If you own a mixer, now's a good time to throw stuff in it and watch it mix! This is an entertaining sideshow while waiting for the bread to heat. You can throw fruit, milk and whatever in it but I recommend milk and Hershey's chocolate syrup. Hmmmm hmmm good!

Remove bread from toaster after two minutes or until they pop up, whichever comes first.

Remove pieces carefully (they will be hot - no lawsuits please!) and then take Jif^TM peanut butter and apply liberally to the toast.

Serve with apertif of chilled chocolate milk. Bon Appetit!

Still not convinced? Not sure if you want to incur the cost or time for this recipe? Take not my word for it. Here is what one erudite soul wrote of Toast with a Kick or a variant thereof:

"I introduced Auberon Waugh to [it] ten years ago when he first visited America..It quite changed his writing style: for about ten months he was at peace with the world. I think that was the time he said something pleasant about Harold Wilson. In the eleventh month, it was easy to tell that he had run out. It quite changes your disposition and your view of the world if you cannot have peanut butter every day." - William F. Buckley

Stay tuned for next month's recipe when I'll be featuring something I call La' Chef Boye Ardee served with Al fresco!

You've Probably Already Seen It...

...since Julie has a large audience, but there's a good discussion
going on there about the term "charismatic Catholic".

Excerpt from Havighurst's The Miami Years

On the 1920s poet-in-residence Percy MacKaye:

...it was natural that [university] President Hughes should think of establishing an artist's fellowship at Miami. When he asked where he might find the right artist, the Stillman-Kelleys had the answer. Soon Percy MacKaye and his family arrived in Oxford.

A house was ready for them, on the site of present Hamilton Hall, but MacKaye looked doubtfully at an airless work room on the balcony of the Library, with a row of windows just under the high ceiling. What he wanted was a low roof and a fireplace. Three months later he moved into a studio cabin--the students called it "the poet's shack"--in the deep woods of the lower campus. That winter at a plank table beside the broad fireplace he began writing a long narrative poem.

Inland among the lonely cedar dells
Of old Cape Ann, near Gloucester by the sea,
Still live the dead in homes that used to be.

When Dogtown Common was finished in March 1921, MacKaye read it to a group in the Stillman-Kelley studio. He had a cold that evening. Coming in out of the raw night he looked both drawn and swollen. When he took off his coat there was a hot water bottle, slung around his neck. But in the swing of his reading--

There lie the lonely commons of the dead--
The houseless homes of Dogtown. Still their souls
Tenant the black doorsteps and the cellar holes. . . .

...he forgot his distress. Warmed by his own voice he threw off the hot water bottle and gave himself to the spectral tale of witchcraft in colonial New England. A few nights later he read the poem to an audience of students and faculty in Benton Hall. He was a slender, intense and lonely figure on the wide platform, a hand darting up to push back his loose shock of hair, his voice rising and falling like the sea-surge of Cape Ann.


"the poet's shack"
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Occasionally MacKaye left the campus for a lecture trip or a visit to his publishers. During this first Ohio winter he met Robert Frost in New York. Frost: "Percy, where are you living now?" MacKaye: "I'm at a college. In Ohio." Frost: "What are you doing there?" MacKaye: "Just living, writing. Robert, you ought to get a college to support you." Frost: "How can I get one?" MacKaye: "I'll talk to President Hughes. He'll have an idea." A few months later Robert Frost became poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan.

Meanwhile Frost had written to MacKaye in Oxford: "The arts seem to have to depend on favor more or less. In the old days it was the favor of kings and courts. In our day far better your solution, that it should be colleges, if the colleges could be brought to see their responsibility in the matter. We are sure to be great in the world for power and wealth. . . . But someone who has time will have to take thought that we shall be remembered five thousand years from now for more than success in war and trade. Someone will have to feel that it would be the ultimate shame if we were to pass like Carthage (great in war and trade) and leave no trace of spirit."

Saw a bumpersticker the other day that said, "Don't Believe Everything You Think". I believe I'll have to think about that one.
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I liked this photo via Barbara Nicolosi of her trip to Spain of this guy taking a cigarette break. He hangs out in the square of Santiago Del Compostello dressed like St. James the Apostle and poses for pictures with the tourists for tips.
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The temptation to snark is always with me, especially where the Kos-a-nostras are concerned. For example, I recently tried to imagine how it would be if one of the conventioneers live-blogged the Yearlykos convention:

4:35pm: Arrive at the Las Vegas hotel and the room isn't ready. Front desk apologizes, says the maid will be there shortly. So the front desk is in on this too? An obvious Bush attempt to ruin the experience of Kos-goers. Sickening. The right wing conspiracy is powerful but will not triumph.

5:15pm: Finally able to get in the room. I tell the maid I'm for raising the minimum wage.

5:42pm: After donning my "Buck Fush!" shirt I head out to the lobby in hopes of seeing my hero. He served our country you know unlike those chickens--t hawks...

But I really don't want to turn into an anti-anti-Bush person to the extent that's possible. There's a tissue-thin difference between merely savoring their foilbles and being mean-spirited and patronizing and I constantly aerate that border. So how does one appreciate and honor the loony left? Perhaps by calling them artists, medieval craftsmen? So writes Joseph Bottum here.
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The Drudge Report seems a bit lame compared to say five or ten years ago. Here are some recent headlines that seem remarkably news-free: "Redford Joins Climate Fight..." / "Progressives Gather in DC" / "DNC Chairman Dean: Rove Has Real Sin...". All of these are dog-bites-man stories.
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Thought I'd take this opportunity to include a little story my wife experienced many years ago. (Originally posted as a comment on Jeff Culbreath's blog.) She (hereafter referred to as "S.") lived on a farm and one of the cows had a bull calf which was raised around the milk cows & around people and so didn't have a fear of people. Started getting bigger and became real protective of the herd. So S. goes out and the cow had had a calf and didn't want to come in to the barn to get milked, so she took a hollow pipe with her, about 18inches long, 2 1/2 inches in diameter just to be on the safe side since sometimes mothers are a little protective of the calf. The pipe probably saved her life as a Mennonite farmer only two weeks later and less than five miles away got gored in the spine and died.

The 3,000 lb bull was in the barn. The cow and calf were in a 5 or 10 acre field, surrounded by an electric fence, and about 2/3rds of the way in. She checks the bull and he is totally unconcerned with her as she walks out of the barn. Doesn't even look at her. Walks half-way out and happens to look at the barn and sees the bull in the doorway who is beginning to bellow and move his head from side to side. He's got a bead on her and starts coming towards her. She had about as much acreage to cover to get back to safety as he had to get to her.

The bull charged her and she did a smart thing in hindsight. She started charging him, waving her arms and screaming. He stopped dead in his tracks. Then he starts up again, though more slowly. When he gets there she clubs him on the nose with the pipe and he backs away and shakes his head. She takes a step to the side, toward the fence. She does this over and over, each time making her way closer to the fence. Then it started raining and she dropped the pipe! She retrieved it, which was almost beneath the brute's legs. She continued smacking him on the snout until she got under the electric fence, receiving a jolt herself. He followed and bellowed at her the whole way as she walked around the fence...
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And finally, my sis-in-law offers this visual joke:

Library Things Review

Here:

With due diligence and an open mind, I gave it a whirl. And wouldn’t you know, I was converted. LibraryThing is one of those tools you never know you need until you use it. Knowing which book is where is useful enough to justify it, but there are subtler joys too..."Tag" each book with your own searchable keywords. This is great for locating books you’ve lent out, moved into a box in the basement, or taken to work. If there’s a fire or a flood, you’ll know which books to replace. You can tag books you should return to friends. You can catalogue books you don’t own, but want to remember to buy or borrow.

You can also rate and review your own books. That doesn’t appeal to me. I know which books of mine are good. I was tempted to assign a nasty tag word to a bad airport novel, but I removed it when I recognized my own vanity at work. I suppose I hadn’t wanted some other user seeing it in my collection without comment....But what I’ve found most interesting is seeing the patterns in my own shelves: the archaeology of my life so far. This could be called navel-gazing, or a waste of time. I’m starting to think of it as an effort to understand my own soul.

Truly American

Do you remember that theme song "Truly American" from the old Letterman skits? That should be the background music for this post which is prompted by the meeting of ECUSA in my town and by something Neuhaus wrote at First Things :

Schoenborn observes: “The Church can never identify herself with any one nation. She is not a national Church. And yet the unmistakable features of the Church can be discerned within the different nations. This is never more luminously expressed than in the saints. Who could be more French than Therese, more English than Thomas More, more Spanish than Ignatius, more Italian than Catherine and Francis? And yet none of them is just a national saint, and any attempt to misuse the saints in the cause of nationalism (as has happened, for example, in the case of Saint Joan of Arc) totally misses the point of their lives.” Which prompts the question: Who could be more American than . . . ?

What would a truly American saint look like? What are American characteristics? Though some of these are a bit trivial, we are seen by Europe as more laid back and enterpreneurial, more violent, more emotional and into self-help (re: Oprah), more hardworking, and more puritanical when it comes to smoking and drinking.

Looking at those characteristics it seems the Evangelicals got 'em covered but for the violent part. Who is more laid back and hardworking than evangelicals, where even their small groups have small groups and the weekly activities of the typical megachurch require a directory the size of a small telephone book? Self-help? America's best-selling religious book is a self-help-by-helping-others book. (As an experiment I put "Christian self-help" in the subject box of the Amazon.com search engine. The number one result was "The Purpose Driven Life" audio book. How American is that?)

As far as enterpreneurial & puritanical, I think the LDS win hands down. Joe Smith started his own religion and now even coffee is banned. It's an export, not an import and has very spicy doctrine, like hot wings.

But for sheer unselfconscious Americanism it's hard to beat the ECUSA. They want to canonize Thurgood Marshall. I'm not making this up. Marshall wasn't big on going to church and liked his booze and women but he did serve at the Holy and August U.S. Supreme Court...

Founding father Alexander Hamilton...

...opines on the responsibility of the executive:

Having won re-election, the Mayor of New Orleans (so happily acquired by Mr. Jefferson) is planning for his new administration. His first term was defined, of course, by Hurricane Katrina...It is always needful...to fill the job with competent men--men who, like the Danish governor general, will take charge and do what is needful. This applies equally to executives at lower levels of government, when the problem to be dealt with is a matter concentrated in one locality. President Bush and Gov. Landrieu of Lousiana were not up for re-election last week, and so could not be judged for their omissions. If the people of New Orleans are satisfied with Mayor Nagin, then we may conclude that they deserve what they get.

(Hamilton as imagined by Richard Brookhiser.)

The Kos-inator

Funny. (Bad language alert.)

I keep coming back to my experiences standing in front of classrooms full of adolescents, all day, every day, for nine years. What did they need? What were they hungry and thirsty for? A strong dose of doctrine? "Catholic identity?" No - that is the fruit, the next stop along the road, or even simply a more formal articulation of the fundamental need. It all comes back to Christ. Some would like to pose a disconnect - for example, during the past forty years, the suggested disconnect has been that if you have "love" you don't need "Church" and all of its articulations and ritual. Benedict makes clear that the love of God is embodied in the Church, because the Church is the Body of Christ and Christ is the Way, is God's love enfleshed. Every step of the way he reminds us that we can't separate ourselves and our faith from the Church. - Amy Welborn

There is not a single nation or culture on the face of planet earth that voluntarily converted to Islam. Is it possible that the heritage of forced conversions has infected Islamic culture not with the zeal of true faith but with a psychological coping mechanism of self-justifying fanaticism? Not that this is conscious, but that there is a subconscious structure of distorted fanaticism based on a cultural remembrance of the initial forced conversion. If an entire culture is conquered and forced to adopt a religion it in no way believes, could the new believers create a mindset conducive to the kind of murderous fanaticism we see today? If the individual forced convert reacts in the ways [Eric] Hoffer describes, what would an entire culture do in the same situation? Quite frankly, this does make the Muslim world a lot more understandable than a strictly logical analyses does. - Lee Ann Morawski

The issue of theodicy comes up again and again: Where was God when the Jews were being murdered at Auschwitz? I am reminded of an evening many years ago, when I went to see the film of Sophie's Choice. As I walked home, I pondered this question and asked myself, "How could God permit such a thing as Auschwitz?" I felt the reply, "In the same way He permits the little Auschwitz in your heart." If men can turn their backs on God, and little sins are possible, then great sins are possible. And the answer to all of them is the same Cross of Christ. - Henry Dieterich of "A Plumbline in the Wind"

For years I thought art class and music classes were a waste of time. Maybe this was because they were regulated to once a week, Friday afternoon, and only were required in elementary school. How I now lament this folly, both in my own thought and in the school system I attended. God is most visible to us (or at least to some of us) in nature and in the arts. The true purpose of art is to help reveal God to man. - Jim Curley of "Bethune Catholic"

Some people are never happy unless they're causing trouble. The sort my wife calls "a disturber". I read the most wonderful description of "disturbers" the other day: "she rolls like a pinless grenade through the rooms of other people's lives". Isn't that wonderful? - John of "The Inn at the End of the World"

The gender gap is not a distinctly American one but it is a Christian one, according to Murrow. The theology and practices of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam offer "uniquely masculine" experiences for men, he said. "Every Muslim man knows that he is locked in a great battle between good and evil, and although that was a prevalent teaching in Christianity until about 100 years ago, today it's primarily about having a relationship with a man who loves you unconditionally," Murrow said. "And if that's the punch line of the Gospel, then you're going to have a lot more women than men taking you up on your offer because women are interested in a personal relationship with a man who loves you unconditionally. Men, generally, are not." - WaPo story asking where the men are in churches

It seems to me that illegal immigration is a form of trespass. Trespassing can be minor, temporary, and incidental; or it can be ongoing, significant, and grave. Trespassing is something we may do licitly (even if not legally) when we are in immediate grave need. It is not something we may ever do licitly for the rest of our lives though. It is not something we may ever do merely to improve our station in life, even if our station in life is extremely modest. As soon as our grave need - that is, our literal starvation, etc - has been met, we must stop trespassing, and if possible make amends for it, or at least go back to the proper legal process. Whatever the merits (or detriments) of amnesty as a practical matter, it seems to me that it represents a basic distortion of the moral law....[It] doesn't represent mercy to the lawbreaker, it represents a dispensation to break the law. Granting an amnesty would do violence to the common good. Those who have made sacrifices to keep the law should be granted at least no lower a priority than those who have not done so. Any other path is a basic violation of justice. - Zippy of Zippy Catholic

The agrarian experience, even if only experienced short term can teach you something of salvation-that you work out your salvation with God one day at a time just as you live your life one day at a time. The long term vision of Heaven is worked on a daily basis, not quarterly etc. It is hard to put in words exactly what I mean: I will try again before this topic is over. Let's put it this way, simple traditional lifestyles are not very forgiving. If you don't work one day, you may just not eat. Yet at the same time, the rhythms of the seasons regulate your work, leisure, waking, sleeping.....Am reminded once again of the saying (paraphrasing) of Belloc: "It takes six months to turn a farmer into a city-boy; it takes 3 generations to turn a city boy into a farmer." - Jim of "Bethune Catholic"

If you have the misfortune to listen to NPR or read the New York Times, you'll hear wide-eyed self-important catechesis in the liberal's religion: politics. They report on the things that matter to them most - the travels of the president, political wrangling in congress, long analyses of legislation, all directed these past years at removing this heretic (Bush) who has assumed their papacy (White House). - Bill of "Summa Minutiae"

This guy became a Catholic because of Rosemary's Baby and Hammer Horror Films (you have to read it), and although he still seems to be in the familiar "I approve of Catholicism because of its pretty decorations & earthy acceptance of human frailty which implies I can still do whatever" phase, there's always hope for someone like that. At least he's in the door. - Kathy Shaidle of "Relapsed Catholic"

Who do you pray to if you have lost your St. Anthony of Padua statue? - Curt Jester

The First President Bush & Cardinal Law

Interesting letter from George Herbert Walker Bush to Cardinal Law. Bush here is responding to a letter Law wrote in which he tried to persuade the president to not force Hussein out of Kuwait.





More here and then here.

My 8-Hour Ohio Vacation

Never underestimate the aesthetic value of a quote at the beginning of piece of writing. --Anonymous

I’m stopped at a traffic light and got a lot on my mind. Like who would I choose if I had to choose between Gore and Kerry. It bothers me for some reason that I can’t form an opinion. Another thing that bothered me was the huge difference between hummus and humus. Lose an "m" and hurt someone's feelings. And finally I wondered why the lady with the Kerry/Edwards sticker in front of me chose to go 35 in 45mph zone thus assuring Mutually Assured Delay at this light.

But oh the pleasures of an olde-fashioned road trip! You can take your cruises and your flights to Florida or California just give me the wheel, some music and a ribbon o’ highway. On the way to my destination I alternate between some fine German ooom-pah music and Mike McConnell, a Cincinnati talk show host who makes Rush Limbaugh look like a amateur. McConnell made me sigh at the creativity of the young; it is only they (and maybe Lilek) who could come up with such colorful terms for those tattoos girls get on their lower backs: “Ass antlers” and “tramp stamps”. I could not have come up with those had I had all day. But people have different talents.

My first stop in this all inclusive, eight-hour vacation via Interstate 70 enroute to southwestern Ohio was the little town time forgot: Trenton, Ohio. (I think that was the name.) I stopped there on a whim because it looked interesting but sometimes looks are deceiving. From the roadway I saw enough similarities to my home town to provoke nostalgia and enough differences to provoke curiosity. In hindsight, my half hour was a bit long in the tooth.

But oh those old churches! Looked in the window of an old Mennonite chuch (the doors were locked of course – not having the Blessed Sacrament means Protestant churches are closed outside Sunday and/or Wednesday hours). There was a barrister-style bookcase with old books behind the glass. 'Bout gave me a woody. Later, in Oxford, Ohio I found an ancient looking Presbyterian church from the 1830s and to my surprise found the door unlocked. It soon became apparent why as this church was gutted. It was now apparently a parish center and as bland as a conference room. Only the deep dark wood banister remained. I went upstairs and found a basketball hoop, cheap carpet and a few old couches. Next door, it turned out, was where the new church was. I stopped by. It was locked.

Girls, Churches & Books

At Miami University I take a little bike trip before I run. And I see the different nicknames the boys and girls give their rented houses. One group of coeds named their house “Bikinis and Martinis”. This seemed to me rather blatant advertising to the op sex. At least the bikini part. What group of guys would name their house “Speedos and Beer”? Or, if salesmanship is the aim, even “Fat Wallets & Whiskey”? I don’t see it. I also sense some false advertising since weather during the Miami academic year (late Aug-May) affords surprisingly few opportunities for bikinis.

On to a less salacious topic. (Segue alert!). At the old Presbyterian-church-turned-gymnasium, I noted one fragment from yesteryear: a collage of photographs of past pastors (say that five times fast) from the founding to the 1960s. It reminded me of the old pictures of early fraternity classes except the pastors were older. How distinguished and sober they look! Hard-souled men from an age when men weren’t womanly. And the smell in the room was that of old books. Sort of musty and redolent of “old library”. It’s too bad men aren’t shoppers. If they were instead of having to choose from fresh lily scents and vanilla or apricot for your bathroom spray, there would be “Oil de Books”. I’d buy that. Beats lighting a match.
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The new dorms I see have large windows. We had small windows and we liked it, because it gave us something to look forward to when we were seniors.
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The “oil de books” lingers in my mind. I recall books I’ve been wanting for going on ten years now. Like the Miami poet Percy MacKaye’s work. And Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare and Chesterton on Shakespeare. One of the mysteries in life is why Chesterton’s book on the Bard is not only out-of-print but is like $175 for a copy. What are there, like three copies in the world of that book extant?

There are books every home library should have – a dictionary, the bible, Shakespeare’s works, etc..There are books every Catholic library should have: the Catechism, some Chesterton, Butler’s Lives of Saints. And there are books everyone named “TSO” should have: Johnson on Shakespeare, Chesterton on Shakespeare and MacKaye’s poems. Plus I’d like to get a book about the obscure French priest our high school was named after.

My church tour continued with the Catholic church in town which, predictably, was open. I’ve been in there hundreds of times, mostly as an undergrad of course, but the stained glass windows opened up for me today in a way they never had before. So odd! As much as I love and am partial to words it seems that art captures things in a way words can’t. There is no way to describe, for instance, the look on the face of the angel who was delivering the cup to Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane. Saddness, yes, but more. Jesus appears to receive it with the attitude that “this is good only because of He who gives it says it is”. He drank what looked to be poison except the Father said it was not, another case of the substance changed but the accidents not. A transubstantion.

In another window, Joseph as a carpenter has an axe in his left hand for wood-chopping purposes and is holding his right hand out for Jesus to supply more wood. He is looking at Mary and Mary has a look difficult to describe again but it is both sad and knowing but also curious? She is looking intently at Jesus who is carrying the wood as he would later the Cross, over his shoulder. Jesus looks like Isaac and Joseph like Abraham.
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If It Ain’t Baroque, Don’t Fix It
      or Don't Anticipate Calvary

King Library is the king of periodicals; one could die happily in this full and eclectic collection. I happen across something called Paris Review and open at random to a letter written by Tennessee Williams counseling a would-be play writer, saying the writer should avoid all pain, suffering and doubt while producing that first draft. “Then comes Calvary – but not before.” It seemed a message that this life is a first draft and Purgatory will be our editing.

Perusing the periodical New Letters: A Magazine of Writing & Art I came upon the phrase “had to pee like a racehorse”. Gee whiz maybe I have a future in writing.

New Oxford Review and Commonweal represented Catholic interests, which is sort of like representing American liberalism and conservatism with Michael Moore's and Ann Coulter's books.

I headed to another building, the hall containing the Classics Department. There is an aura there that just isn’t present at say the Accounting Dep’t. Here in the Classics there are posted ads for overseas study but what really caught my eye were the free books. I now own Harold Segel’s “A Comparable Study of the Baroque Poem” which will grace my shelves unread until I die. But my slogan is, “if it’s free, it’s for me!”.

I made it my business to read the profferings posted outside the professor’s offices. And the first I came to had an anti-Bush cartoon complemented by a long, whiney quote from Thomas Jefferson written shortly after the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 was passed. Not exactly a motivator to become a classicist since the message seems to be "study the Classics and hate Bush" but you don’t have to do so to be anti-Bush. It seems to bespeak a poverty just as the Clinton haters displayed.

Blinded By the Light

Emerging from the library I felt my own sort of poverty as the day was sunny and beautiful and I’d just wasted a portion of it indoors. I had a sudden urge to read something scholarly under the shade of a papyrus tree. I briefly pondered going on a run but that would be borrowing tomorrow’s energy. So I found a spot next to a wall to sit and drink, beneath windows and across from a parking lot. But I can see an olde brick dorm (“dorm” sounds too coarse and ugly to describe what is a stately mansion gracefully accompanied by her maids of honor, her trees, growing ever bigger with every passing year…). Almost like Monticello, so fine are the columns and the tough of green of the porch awning, the color of rusted coins and old sea wrecks. Clover salts the mid-distance though the sky is cloudiferous though there is full sun.

I underestimate sweet Ohio. I sometimes think there is more to do here than anywhere in the U.S. That might sound provincial except for the fact that I’d rather visit Europe or Russia or South America or anywhere else in the world than Ohio. (And certainly Bill Luse’s snake-swallowing birds sound interesting.) But within the continental United States? Ohio has charms to soothe the savage beast. She is small towns, large towns, tranquil campuses (campii?), deep woods, flatlands, Appalachian hills, Great Lakes, great rivers…But there is also the sweet smell of asphalt and the intoxicating scent of new wood in construction sites and that reminds me of my youth…

There is more peace among the birds on a sunny, summer afternoon than in the softest bed at night. The press of so many clouds above while bathing in full sun only magnifies the grace. It comes to mind unbidden: we are eating dinner at that restaurant near the place we stay in Hilton Head. It’s late in the week and we are well-rested but for the adrenalin hangover caused by the two-hour nightly viewings of “24” on dvd. Oh how good a time that was! My favorite vacations are inevitably not cruises or trips to cities but those sweet weeks. It’s as deeply ingrained as the brief moments in the cabin in the Appalachian foothills where in the morning I’m reading in a rocking chair and the woods surround us and we're living the Little House on the Prairie dream except the chores are done and there are no phone calls, interruptions... just bliss.

CNEWA

In the words of Maggie Thatcher, is the charitable organization Catholic Near East Welfare Association getting wobbly on us? (Or, shall I say, going Maryknoll on us?) It's understandable that an organization that aids Palestinians - mostly Christians but also Muslims - would not be a big fan of Israel. I suppose you take on the scent of those near you. But the articles seem to be needlessly provocative unless I'm just uncommonly sensitive and looking for bias. One line says, "And in Palestine, the Israeli occupation, with its bombing raids, targeted assassinations and everyday humiliations..." Another line: "[One child] had two brothers in an Israeli jail." Not good, but perhaps justified?

In fairness, there is one line that went "Israeli children fear riding on public buses, a frequent target of Muslim extremists' suicide attacks.". (Though, come to think it, interesting that the word terrorist is avoided. Has that become passe'? In this article there is Israeli violence but only a "Muslim extremist" counterpart.) No doubt there is bad behavior on both sides and if you're writing from the Palestinian side you're only going to see what impacts you. But still...

Far more provocative is how in the same issue the Secretary General of CNEWA is getting iffy and wobbly on the issue of conversion:

Suppose I’m a Jew looking at the teaching of Jesus and attracted to it. Is there any way for me to integrate it into my life, remaining a Jew by identity and a member of a Jewish community? Privately, it may be possible. But, publicly it would be a kind of consorting with a historical enemy. Some try it, for example, Jews for Jesus. But, how do you embrace Jesus without replacing all the customs and practices of Judaism with the foreign customs and practices of one of the Christian churches?

Shocking, because isn't he saying in effect that customs and practices are more important than embracing Jesus? Whoa Nellie. The scandal of particularity still obtains: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life".

I Wish I Was a Hummingbird

Alas. My wife cooks for hummingbirds but not for moi. She cooks about as often as Michael Moore praises President Bush, so you can imagine my surprise when, after bringing home Chinese food, I see the stovetop activated. I ask why. She said she is cooking a sugar/water mixture in order to entice hummingbirds to the feeder.

In fairness to my wife, she has many other skills. She's know as "Villa" around the office after Bob Villa for her landscaping and handywork skills.

The Parody Blog...

...co-hosted by my brother-in-law and me has been updated with a post about a baby wishing he was an illegal alien.

Deja Vu

Been reading a bit of history on the Gulf War and Senator Byrd writes President George H.W. Bush asking him to give Saddam more time and to give sanctions longer to work.

Sigh. Familiar, 'eh? The same tune would be played later on. While there might've been a tinge of doubt about Saddam's capacity for change in 1990 our allies were still asking that we give Saddam more time over a decade later. One could wish that anti-war folks would simply honestly make their case rather than bide for time. The President has been widely criticized for mistakenly believing WMDs existed but there's no outrage for the numbnucks who thought giving Saddam more time would work. They should've just said, "we believe there is no cause for war with Saddam". While continuing to make money off him.

Sunday Thoughts

Is this “season of the Spirit” less personally believable than Lent? The indwelling of the invisible Spirt, whose effect in my life can feel muted, seems harder to believe than that someone would come down from Heaven two thousand years ago in order to save me.

And indeed it is beyond me. Psalm 139 says, “Behind and before you encircle me and rest your hand upon me. Such knowledge is beyond me, far too lofty for me to reach.”

That the Spirit is a free gift is apparent in Hebrews 11:39-40 where martyrs of old who were “too good for the world…did not receive what was promised, since God had made provision for us to have something better, and they were not to reach perfection except with us.” With us? They who were “pilloried and flogged”, “stoned or sawed in half or killed by sword” (Heb 11:37). Who are we that the Lord should come to us? But just as Moses didn’t see the Promised Land though he was far more deserving that those he led, so we have gotten to taste the streams of life-giving water in this Last Age. The Promised Land was as nothing compared to the Eucharist, which is His pledge that He will be with us until the end.

“And so the Lord in his pity for mankind, who had fallen in the hands of brigands, having himself bound up his wounds and left for his care coins bearing the royal image, entrusted him to the Holy Spirit. Now, through the Spirit, the image and inscription of the Father and the Son have been given to us, and it is our duty to use the coin committed to our charge and make it yield a rich profit for the Lord.“

– St. Irenaeus

From the Word Among Us:

And in the face of this great mystery, we might be tempted to ask why God would even care to reveal himself and his love to a people whom he created but who have turned away from him in sin. It’s only when we connect with the Holy Spirit that we come to appreciate the one word that most clearly describes our Triune God: love. Love is the reason why God creates. Love is the reason why Jesus saved us. Love is the reason why the Holy Spirit has chosen to live in our hearts and mold us into the image of Christ. And love is the reason why God will never give up on us.

God is in charge and suffering by itself (at best) makes nothing but a good Stoic rather than a good Christian. One can ask how one can enjoy a summer afternoon when at 4pm you have a root canal, but it is the summer afternoon that was made by God as much as the root canal. The doctor is in the beer and sun and trees as much as he’s in the purgation – else he wouldn’t have created it all. It’s not that the earth is going away; merely a New earth.

The Byzantine homilist complained of his Irish Catholic upbringing today, saying his mother saw his priesthood as one of mutual loss and thus of mutual benefit. He said that is wrong and that suffering is seen as too much a good as if both are earning Heaven in a neat double-sidedness. But love is the reason for it and the saints loved the earth. He said St. Teresa of Avila didn’t play a musical instrument in her monastery choir in order to inflict suffering. The saints don’t look forward to death as the end of suffering. They love life. And they love.

Welcome Back Kidman

Eric Scheske reports. (Adorned with obligatory photo).

Schoenborn's Book

Richard Neuhaus talks about Cardinal Schoenborn's book here, with excerpts on prayer, nationalism and original sin.

John Updike's Faith

Cynthia Ozick review:

His is not a social faith. Though ''Lifeguard'' closes with an exhortation to ''be joyful,'' the Kierkegaardian singleness of the God-possessed, quivering among the darker stars, predominates. This singleness, this historyless aloneness, turns up in the essayistic apercus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the daily vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts...Updike owns the omnivorous faculty of seeing the telltale flame in every mundane gesture. Despite this busy Bruegelian amplitude, the concluding soliloquy of the unsettled young husband in ''The Astronomer,'' who is befuddled by an atheistic sophist, carries a recognizable Updikean signature: ''What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?''

But the past, so defined, is not the same as history. By a lively coincidence, the current publishing season brings us also the early fiction of Saul Bellow, where history infiltrates nearly every thought or movement -- which is perhaps why Bellow has been called our most ''European'' novelist. Among contemporary fiction writers, Updike is the most rootedly American (though of German, not WASP, stock), and the most self-consciously Protestant: the individual in singular engagement with God. The Protestant idea of God, which nurtured and shaped America (at least until Sept. 11, 2001), is the narrowed Lord of persons, not of hosts; he is not conspicuously the Lord of history.

Random Thoughts

Praise the Lord is always to be remembered. Too much “looking ahead” is so damaging. At the workplace, managers wisely don’t tell you the full scope of a project lest you despair, they merely give you the workable morsel on which to dine this day or week.

Interesting Anecdotal

Was listening to an interview ask Richard Brookhiser what the founding fathers would've thought about Bill Clinton's White House dalliance.

And he said they'd be concerned about whether the President lied under oath during the Paula Jones trial. Which, of course, was what the impeachment was all about. Then Brookhiser went on to say how George Washington felt it was important that Americans believe in God in order for the country to survive, but the reason was interesting. Washington asked how would the oaths taken everyday in America's courtrooms and by our government officials during inaugurations be effective? They would be swearing by something they didn't believe in.

Whatever you want to...

... say about Ann Coulter, at least Republican ex-prez's ain't sittin' with her at national conventions.



Just sayin'.

I Did Not Know That...

More of the uniqueness of Peter: he was the only one whose name was changed by Jesus. Paul apparently changed his own name. The 'net has it (and you can always trust the 'net):

Paul's missionary campaign began c.44 in Antioch. He journeyed to Cyprus, where he converted Sergius Paulus, the governor of the island. It was probably at this point that he changed his name from Saul to Paul, in honor of his distinguished convert.

Man Bites Dog Story

Fr. Dowd attempts to rescue us "black sheep" of the Catholic family:

As part of my philosophy as a writer I believe in being blunt, so let me begin this essay with as blunt a statement as I can: I believe we must concede the possibility that the war in Iraq was, in its origins, a just war. Do I have your attention now?

Yes. How nice that for once it's not the "usual suspects" of Weigel & Novak positing the Iraq war being just. (Of course it goes without saying that the majority of those against the war are likewise "usual suspects".) The rest of Fr. Dowd's post is here...Brave soul, he.

Interesting in all of this is how "toady" you want to get. Kevin Miller would rather be wrong than switch:

"At every moment, I assent to the authoritative (even when non-definitive, and hence changable) teaching of the living Magisterium at that moment."

Admirable, though that assent sounds close to fideism - but then I've always had a secret attraction to fideism (pacifism certainly appeals to my sense of Irish fatalism; my patron saint had a similar fatalistic streak). Ironically it's been Disputations that has lessened fideism's appeal over the years.

Tom responds to Kevin's comment:

"Which, of course, was also the position of Sts. Augustine and Thomas (though not Grotius), making it difficult to appeal to them as definitive authorities opposed to, or even alongside, the Pope."

Tom's post was worth it, I suppose, just to make the day of the anti-war folks. Funny how people are different though. If Tom says something controversial that I approve of, I'd silently gloat but would "get small" comment-wise, lest he take it back. But ol' Sullivan's having a field day, in there enjoying and gloating and full of carpe diem. And why not? I'm fond of endzone celebrations. Coach Paul Brown used to say, "act like you've done it before" after a wide receiver celebrates his first NFL touchdown but that seems a tad dry and gloomy.

(Over on the Corner, an emailer refutes victory dances:

Victory dances are for other cultures. Our culture does things differently, in some ways more like the ancient Romans did. Culture isn't separable. Adopt the ways of another culture, and you adopt part of that culture, abandoning your own.

The sobriety that makes victory dances & shooting in the air unthinkable for US troops is also that which makes it possible for a sniper to lie on a Fallujah roof without moving for hours, until a jihadi lingers out of cover too long — and then the only thing he moves is his trigger finger. Think deeper upon victory dances.)

I will, though I'd rather dance a jig.

I suppose I made a couple of mistakes which paved the way to support. One was (be careful what you read) reading a long pre-9/11 article by the respected Mark Bowden in The Atlantic, which demonstrated how horrible Saddam Hussein was and what a threat he was to the region. Delusions of grandeur led Saddam to believe he could take over the Middle East. It certainly disposed me to a certain attitude. But the real issue was the ceasefire agreement. I do have a strong law and order streak because or despite being a Midwesterner (Steve Sailer wrote that "Minnesotans like Garrison Keillor tend to be politically liberal because they are so personally conservative by nature and nurture that they can't imagine anybody else might need to be restrained by law or tradition.") It seemed outrageous and dangerous that Hussein was flouting the ceasefire treaty. Still, what we should've foreseen was our lack of ability to enforce the ceasefire in a prudent way.

Update: Didn't anything derogatory by "usual suspects": Weigel and Novak have done more for Christendom than 99% of us.

Half-baked 'taters...

...doesn't blog too often, but she recently put up a perfectly Waugh-ful post up, including this comment about the Catholic Church:

I was not at all attracted by the splendour of her great ceremonies, which...could well [be] counterfeited. Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do. That is the Mass I have grown to know and love. -Evelyn Waugh

The blogger at Taters begins her post with:

Wanton consumption of alcohol is often ensued by hangovers and indiscriminate retching. In the same way, the only result of an overdose of Waugh can only be regurgitation though in a complimentary sense, of course!

Natural Beauty

I took this picture while on a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains a few years back and it's my current desktop wallpaper. But Jeff Culbreath is apt to make a flatlander out of me with pictures like this. At least in the desktop wallpaper sense.

I go by farm fields on bike rides and the rows are so straight and the fields so weed-free that it seems as mechanical and artificial as what many city folk do for a living. Plus, in the farmer's case, your work place is your home and vice-versa and you begin to look at crops like dollar bills instead of as God's beauty, much as those who study Scripture for a living begin to treat it like a corpse instead of as a living thing. I like the idea of leaving work in the workplace and not bringing it home but that might be a non-holistic/non-integral approach to things, betraying a lack of appreciation for the dignity of human work.

The Boys Are Back in Town



Fairytales can come true
it could happen to you
if you're young at heart...

Seven straight road wins, including a sweep of the Cardinals. Why I'll be a monkey's uncle...

Brrr...It's Cold

I've seen the dark side, and it just got displayed here by John Derbyshire.

Of Derb, one sometimes doesn't take his prejudices seriously. "He's just funnin' us" I think. Or he lacks impulse control when it comes to his thoughts. I could never really take the animosities against the Irish (and against Catholicism) produced by a childhood in England seriously because I can't understand hatred against what I consider so benign. And yet it was said C.S. Lewis could never quite convert to Catholicism because of that extremely powerful early-life revulsion to all things Irish and papal. Two smart people who couldn't overcome early childhood learning. Reminds me of the line attributed to the Jesuits - "give me the child at the age of seven and I will give you the man". Fascinating.

One sees a bit of shunning by WFB and now I understand it better. I recall Bill Buckley having a shindig at his house and inviting all the "kids" (mostly Catholics) at NRO but Derbyshire. Derb complained about it on the Corner, but I guess in the end his views are too barbaric for polite company. I suppose one needs a reminder that even on the "good guy's side" - which I believe the conservative party mostly to be (those who say 'pox on both parties' are utopians although I'm moving swiftly in that very direction) - there are purveyors of evil.

Derb wastes little time offering the anti-Catholic barb "it is possible that RTL might break out from its natural habitat in student chapters of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception..." while ignoring the fact that the great majority of evangelical Christians support the right to life.

Ross Douthat, a helluva writer and blogger, writes a keen rejoinder to Derb.

In the latest NR...

...Roger Scruton writes of female beauty and it seems a bit hyperbolic does it not? But what do I know.

...[t]here is the problem posed by beauty. Female beauty is a powerful social force — more powerful than money, more powerful than physical strength or intellectual acumen. The Trojans were destroyed by the beauty of Helen, Dante redeemed by the beauty of Beatrice, post-war Britain restored by the beauty of the young Queen Elizabeth. Hence we are in awe of female beauty and reluctant to see it as a physical asset, or to allow it to be marketed for its financial worth. Beauty is a symbol of the ideal. It cannot be possessed or consumed, any more than a melody in music can be possessed or consumed by the listener. It is forever unassimilable, a mark of the inherent meaning and purposefulness of human life. In the presence of beauty, therefore, we are inclined to adore, to worship, to sacrifice. For this reason beauty is a powerful stimulus to marriage, and beautiful women who marry do a lasting service to their sex. They cease to be competitors, and at the same time set an example. All women can take hope from them, knowing that, in the light that shines from a face that is both beautiful and devoted, they too may exhibit some reflected glow.

But suppose a beautiful woman takes the other path. There is no limit to the amount of money that a Brigitte Bardot or a Marilyn Monroe could command as a whore, no limit to the havoc she could create on the rare occasions when she would be compelled by financial necessity to cash in her assets. And by behaving in this way she would also degrade the idea of beauty: No woman could easily be set on a pedestal in a world where the fiscal benefits of beauty are fully exploited. And it would be a world full of anger, a world as threatened as Troy was threatened, once Helen was brought within its walls.

Fresh Fiction...

...from Ham o' Bone here. Very creative that Ham. Very vivid piece.

Joseph Bottum of First Things writes,

"I’ve never much liked fiction. Writing it, I mean. Reading it is another matter, of course. How else is anyone supposed to get through life?"

But Ham o' Bone likes writing it and his enthusiasm is catching. I think I've exhausted The Vinny Code but for the three people who read my fiction (I include myself in that trinity) I may have to crank out some more.

"They Voted Against Their Own Bill"

Politics certainly provides ample opportunities for schadenfreude. Very amusing.

On Communication Skills

Malcolm Gladwell interviewed:

You write about political phrasing, and how a politician like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan is better at calming and inspiring an audience than a politician like George W. Bush is. How much difference does that make to voters watching speeches on television? How much does phrasing overlap with personal charisma?

That’s a good question, and not one I have a good answer to. Television has a strangely muting effect on a lot of this stuff. A former aide to Clinton once said to me that if Bill Clinton had been able to personally shake the hand of every American, he would have been elected unanimously. [Uh, no. - TSO] I think that’s right. In person, people like this are far more impressive than on television: we pick up so much more on nuance. I remember the first time I saw Jesse Jackson live. I’d seen him many times on TV, and was unimpressed. I thought he was kind of a clown. In person, I was floored. Cesar is the same way: it’s only when you meet him that you “get” why he has that kind of effect on dogs.

Cesar’s phrasing skill impresses not only dogs but dance teachers and movement analysts, and some of them use their own phrasing to work with children with developmental issues. What are the broader implications of good phrasing?

What we’re talking about, when it comes to phrasing, is simply the ability to communicate with clarity. We all think that those around us have the ability to read our minds—and we get frustrated when our intentions are misunderstood. But the truth is that accurate communication is really hard, and only a very small number of people can do it well. One of my favorite quotes in the article was from Karen Bradley, a prominent movement analyst, who said that when someone does manage to properly integrate posture and gesture with speech we tend to give them TV shows. Oprah is a great example. We also tend to elect them President—like Reagan and Clinton.

Not Always Either/Or

In today's gospel reading, the Pharisees attempt to trap Jesus by asking if it is permissible to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus could then be seen as either an accomodationist with the Romans or tagged as a revolutionary. The main groups of Jewish leaders in Christ's day were Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees wanted strict separation from Rome and all things worldly. The Sadducees were ready to make accommodations. Both were wrong.

St. Paul preached to the Athenians at Areopagus. The audience was Epicureans and Stoics, the latter holding that man was sufficient for himself and the former that God did not occupy himself with man. One might liken the Epicureans to present-day Deists or Unitarians, and Stoics to Pelgians or atheists. What they had in common was they saw no reason to turn to God and repent. Both were wrong.

That sort of reminds me of what Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger once said about Christian unity. That both Catholics and Protestants would have to change.

Every Blog Tells A Story

Ever'body got a blog these days. Even search engines like Pro Life Search. (Blog here.)

I went out to the excellent Universalis site and even there found a blog. You can tell a blog by its links. I was surprised to see they link to Busted Halo, which I seemed to recall being on St. Blog's liberal fringe. I smelled a rat. A progressive, heretical rat. And sure enough a cursory search revealed a warm-fuzzy interview with Jimmy Carter, a link on doctrine that used Richard McBrien's Catholicism as a source, and another column that expressed dismay over the Vatican instruction on homosexuals in the priesthood. Well, stop me before I heresy-hunt again. It's just so surprising to find Catholic "liberal" blogs even though undoubtedly they're out there enmasse.

Speaking of blogs/bloggers, did you know Amy Welborn's first name is actually Amélie?

One site that doesn't have a blog yet is New Advent and when you search for "blog" you receive The Abomination of Desolation. Somebody trying to tell us something? Sounds like an Easter egg...

I understand more fully why Uncle Gilbert [Chesterton] said that if the world were ever to return to paganism and perish, then the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die. The last words of everyone from Patroclos to Hector are fists shaken in defiance of the pagan gods . . . yet they somehow manage to be pious fists.

It is this ambivalence which marks the greatest theme of the Iliad, which is the relationship between man and the gods.

In most cases, men make the proper offerings to the gods and the gods favour them for it. Many times in the text does a god look down from Mount Olympus, see a devotee in danger, and go down to rescue him simply because that devotee never neglected that god's altars. Yet there are also times--tragic, unforeseen times--when the deepest pietas goes unrewarded, for the ancient gods are willful, fickle figures.

So they are often blamed for everything by their more or less justified devotees. Priam doesn't accuse Helen or any other human for bringing the war on Troy: he accuses the gods. Agamemnon refuses to accept responsibility for the great losses his side suffered after he took Briseis from Achilles, nor does he blame the disgruntled warrior: it is only the gods who are at fault.

As ridiculous as all that finger-pointing is, both Trojans and Greeks have a point. The gods meddle so much in men's affairs, even stooping to cheating and lying, that men can no longer be wholly responsible for anything. To the gods go all the blame, but also all the glory. It is a delicious moment, therefore, when Diomedes is able to wound both Aphrodite and Ares. Even though his supernatural strength is just another gift from Athena, the whole episode is steeped with more pious defiance of the deities.

*****

Christian tradition has retained the same concept, though it has changed the imagery: we no longer wage war with God; we wrestle with Him. (Never mind, as Antony points out, that Jacob actually wrestled an Angel sent by God . . .) I personally dislike the modification. To wage war, one needs an army; but one can wrestle with an Angel all by one's lonesome self: that makes the former image the more Catholic one.

Having said that, let me humbly modify Uncle Gilbert's other insight that the Iliad is great because all of life is a battle: life is not just any battle, but the battle we wage against God. The wound Diomedes' spear made in Aphrodite's hand is uncomfortably reminiscent of the wounds our nails have made in our Lord's hands.

Two thousand years of Christianity have not diluted any of the this theme's power. The questions Homer asked in the Iliad, we are still asking today.

What is there to life besides enduring until death? Why do good men die and bad men live? Why does God show favour to some and not to others? How can we say we have free will when all the good we do is the work of grace acting within us? How can we still not blame God for all the evil in the world, when all He has to do to dispel it is to will it gone?

The only advantage we have over Homer and the ancients is that there is one answer which we at least know; there is one secret which has been revealed to us, even if we barely understand it. To us has been disclosed the mystery of the motivation of God.

*****

The key to any character is his motivation, for what he does is based on what he wants. What Achilles is after is obvious--and it is the same story with Agamemnon, Hector, Patroclus, Priam and the other characters . . . save one. Of the epic's central movers and shakers, one figure is inscrutable and seemingly determined to stay that way.

Zeus, king of the gods, makes it very clear that he loves the Trojans, particularly Hector. From what the other Olympians say, we know that he also cares greatly for Aeneas. Yet he grants Thetis' petition that Achilles be granted immortal glory, though he knows fully well that it will mean the deaths of many Trojans, Hector foremost among them. Then why does he not just refuse, which he has every right to do? What outcomes does he know in advance which sway his decisions? Will there ever come a time when he, at long last, achieves his ends, and shall finally sit back and let men have some real freedom to steer their own courses?

We Christians may say that our God sat back after the Resurrection and Ascension, letting the Apostles take over from there. As soon as we do, however, we come face to face with the blinding light of St. Paul's conversion and the direct intervention of God. So He still does turn the tide of human affairs. That being the case, however, we return to the mystery of why He prevents some evil, but allows the rest. Why do some seem to have an inordinate amount of grace and a charmed life, while others are plagued by trouble after trouble? Pietas is still demanded of us, but to what end?

*****

Aside from their pettiness and plotting, what really bothers me about the gods in the Iliad is the shallowness of their affections. Whenever they give a hapless human a reprieve from death, it is always because he has been a faithful devotee; yet they have nothing else good to say about him other than that he made the sacrifices that he ought to have made. Our God is a little more interesting than that . . .

It is easy to imagine Jesus choosing St. Matthew because He was delighted by the neat, meticulous way the accountant kept track of his tax records. Perhaps He became especially fond of St. John and St. James because He heard the siblings lightly bickering about which one was the better fisherman. Maybe it was the way St. Philip and He both seemed to favour a particular fig tree that made the former seem like a good man to have around.

Given the way most of His disciples ran away after He was arrested (which He would naturally have foreseen), He obviously didn't select them based on strength of character alone. That means still have no idea what truly separates the called from the chosen.

All we can truly be sure of is that He is not a fickle deity who plays favourites, but a God Who loves equally, yet very differently. When was the last time one of the Olympians disguised himself as a mortal just to hang around with some cool people? When was the last time one of the Olympians thought that even people who didn't make regular offerings and weren't descended from gods were cool?

You can't really shake your fist at Jesus in rage, though you may shake your head in befuddlement.

*****

If the heroes of the classics were punished for their hubris, then our God was punished for His humility. Our cosmos is not one which pits helpless men against self-seeking gods, but one in which God let Himself become helpless in the hands of self-seeking men.

Life is still a raging battle, the outcome of which we do not know, much less the purpose. The only thing different for us is that this time we know that we are fighting with God, not against Him--and that He was willing to take a bullet--nay, worse than a bullet--for our side. For us, the big mystery is no longer why we have such strange, undeserved fates, but why God allotted Himself the strangest, most undeserved fate of all.

He has shifted our focus from the garden blocked by a sword-wielding cherubim to the garden in which He Himself rolled back the stone. Our Fall may have doomed us, but His Redemption has saved us anew.

Accordingly, we no longer strive like the heroes of the Iliad to defy death by achieving immortal glory while we yet live. That has already been done for us; the battle that we still wage, we have already won. As we keep our faith in the only One over Whom death has no more power, we hope through all our lives that He shall keep His promises. Yet the prize is now greater than glory: it is love.

- Enbrethiliel of "Sancta Sanctis". In a word: wow.

And the Earliest Riser Award Goes To...

...St. Thomas More (from The Word Among Us):

Home life was disciplined and devout, with morning and evening prayers and Scripture reading during dinner.

Reflecting on his own experience, Thomas recommended that a busy person should find some quiet spot, “as far from noise and company as possible,” where he or she could be alone with God every day. More himself found that quiet time by rising at two in the morning for personal prayer. Then followed study, desk work, and daily Mass. (He did go to bed at nine in the evening and took a nap after lunch.) When possible, he would spend the whole of Friday praying alone before a crucifix.

Interesting NR Review of Brookhiser's "What Would the Founders Do?"

The modern free state was born in late-17th-century England, and the American Founders were close enough to the English example to preserve its most sensible features. Like a lawyer who prepares a new contract by marking up the last one, the Founders lifted words, phrases, arguments directly from the English precedents. At the same time, Brookhiser observes, the Americans designed their republic in blissful ignorance of the next great moral and spiritual upheaval: The “Romantic age came too late for the Founders. It was as remote from them as Marx, Freud, or post-modernism. By missing the Romantic revolution, they missed the urge to uncover an authentic inner core, which we, as Romanticism’s late children, still feel. The Founders were always either learning, via their senses, or learning to control themselves.”

The pre-Romantic mind of the 18th century was, T. S. Eliot said, a “mature mind: but it was a narrow one”; John Henry Newman complained of the “dryness and superficiality” of the neoclassical sages. The poetry of the 18th century means less to us today than that of the ages that preceded and followed it; but where constitutions are concerned, the qualities of maturity and self-control valued by the Augustan temperament were wholly a blessing. Their love of order and restraint enabled the chief political actors to resist the utopian impulses that Romanticism was subsequently to nourish. When, at length, an American statesman shaped by the Romantic tradition appeared, and obtained power in a revolutionary moment, he devoted his genius not to overthrowing but to protecting the Founders’ 18th-century achievement. At Gettysburg and in the Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln used Romantic techniques to strengthen the neoclassical Constitution. The Romantic mind gloried in the highly colored poetry of the past; Lincoln rallied the North with a quasi-religious rhetoric derived from the Bible and the country’s earliest spiritual inspirations.

By contrast, countries without an 18th-century political tradition — regimes founded solely on a Romantic inspiration — have fared less well. The difference between Lincoln and his contemporary Otto von Bismarck is instructive. Bismarck, like Lincoln, had been influenced in his youth by Byron and the poetry of Romanticism; his rhetoric, like Lincoln’s, was pregnant with the figurative language of the past. The philosophy of “blood and iron” was shot through with the spirit of the primitive Teutonic myths and romances — but Bismarck used this poetry, not to strengthen free institutions, but to destroy Prussia’s fledgling liberal tradition. No wonder Americans are grateful for their 18th-century revolutionaries, narrowness and all.

Now That's Somethin'

I'm hyp-mo-tized by anyone living in America who is so removed from popular culture that they don't know the movie Brokeback Mountain is about two gay cowboys. Yet my sister-in-laws husband's parents rented the movie because they "liked Westerns" and were none-too-pleased.

In the Last Days of Bill Clinton's...

...administration all we heard about was his legacy. He was said to have cared deeply about it despite his pardoning people at the end of his second term in exchange for contributions to his library, at least by appearances. Michael Burleigh writes in Earthly Powers:

Fame, the opinion of posterity, displaced the judgement of God. As Diderot wrote: 'Posterity is to the philosopher what the next world is to the religious man.'

Another neat observation from the book is:

There was not a great gulf between Jansenists who believed that God had turned away from a corrupt world and philosophical Deists who claimed that, in the absence of providential intervention after the initial act of creation, the natural world functioned like a clock according to the laws which science might uncover.

I’m always grateful for the bay of light that rips through the book room as the sun begins its descent. It’s a west window and I suppose I’m not much of a morning person so it’s well I have the opportunity to see late day sun turn the rosewood finish amber. June is a month loaded with nostalgia, carrying the cargo of the peak of early summer as well as my birthday. In July there are already back-to-school sales and premature dead leaf litter but in June there is nature's guarantee of freshness and perfection. The cottonwood trees have just finished their magical gauze-snow and the first lightning bugs are ready to take their place. The fireflies greet me as if in anticipation of my birthday, leaving shortly thereafter. This month of the strawberry moon contains the days for great saints of St. Anthony and St. Thomas More and seems redolent of the Pogue’s “Fairytale of New York”.
__

There’s something electric about those gilt-edge’d pages declaring the Faith, declaring God’s interventions. The sign of love is presence and God is always present - though for us carnal types the more palpable the better. We’re hungry for his consolations and interventions; on this day, Pentecost, we read of the Apostles receiving the wind and fire and Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now we baptize and confirm without fire or wind or speaking foreign languages and we are tempted to say that means less is expected of us. The apostles received much but incipient enviousness is checked by a shudder at the cost: i.e. the shipwrecks, imprisonment and martyrdom of Paul and the upside down Crucifixion of Peter to name two. And here I get upset over a dental visit.
__

Was at a large party over the weekend, 90+ there, and a family member wanted to use the prayer at dinner as an evangelistic opportunity. “Did I do well?” I was asked. I understand the impulse but prayer is intrinsically valuable, it’s end is not evangelism anymore than Mass should be so used. The by-products should not be confused with the main purpose which is to invoke God and be in unity with Him. The only Christian witness that "works" has an unconscious aspect to it because it has nothing to do with us but everything to do with God. Unconscious not only, in this case, as far as what words to use in prayer but even a kind of indifference as to whether God will use us or not. Perhaps that is too quietistic but there it is.

I think nothing has been more challenged by modernity than the doctrine of grace. William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” was all about using religion as a means to an end rather than it being an end in itself. Bill Moyers wrote a big bestseller “The Power of Myth” to the same effect. It’s affected us in ways we scarcely realize (Kathy Shaidle says that like it or not “we’re all Modernists now”) and it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. We are in the position of needing his grace more than most generations due but that is counterintuitively a good place to be since to stand in need is to be poor and to be poor is to be blessed.
__

The great thing about family is that you’re stuck with them. God as Father means he’s stuck with you, regardless of your lack of ability to please Him. And for that I praise the Lord! Because he has made us family and he’s stuck with us!
__

Oh I love the Psalmist. Who cannot relate? He sounds so modern - like a manic-depressive! One minute he’s complaining of God’s inattention and the next he’s “Praise the Lord!” sometimes in the very same psalm.

If you'll permit the indulgence, wrote about this photo.

Musings on My Wife's First Communion Picture

Why am I so entranced by
her early pictures?

She looks like the child I would design
had I the chance to design a child.

First, she would be a “she” because,
as the song goes,
Thank Heavens for Little Girls.

She would have blonde hair the color of the sun
and her forehead would tilt forward
in shyness or anticipation.

The white of her Communion dress
would contrast with pocked-grey siding
and the sun would cover half her face
like Moses’s at the Burning Bush.

There would be a fence in the background
symbolizing spiritual safety and her right
hand would clasp the Crucifix like a nun’s,
her index finger upon His breast.

You Don't See...

...that caption too often. Larger image here.



Found here, via Steven Riddle.

Bakker Excerpt

Televangelist Jim Bakker's I Was Wrong is surprisingly engaging. Who knew he bunked with Lyndon LaRouche in prison and read Solzhenitsyn? And it's so fruitful from the viewpoint of sobering oneself up. It is a tragedy that men seem to learn only from tragedy. So we must constantly read of other's nightmares in order to prevent our own --with God's help that is.

A particularly poignant moment is when, in prison, Christ's preacher realizes he'd forgotten who Christ is, or rather never knew Him in the first place. After a dream in which he imagined Jesus pulling out a slice of His own eye (as if a contact lens) handing it to Bakker saying, "I want you to see everything and everyone through My eyes" Bakker writes:

I began to ask, as much to myself as to God, "How can I see everything and everybody through the eyes of Jesus?"

The answer, whether from God or my conscience or my own mind, was crystal clear: I must read every word Jesus said, because if I know Him and His words, then I can see everything through His eyes.

Instead of reading my usual two motivational or inspirational books each day, I began reading the Gospels every day. I got a red-letter edition of the Bible from the chapel library, the words in red indicating the words of Jesus. I literally wrote down every word Christ spoke as recorded in Scriptures. Then I wrote a condensed version of the verses to help me remember them. For instance, "Love your neighbor." "Love God." "Do not sin." I began to see things in the Bible that I had never seen before. I made up my mind then that I was going to ask God all the difficult questions I'd skirted over in my busy years. The first question I asked God was, "Why are there so many dying people here, and why can't I help them? What can I do?"

I was surprised at the answer I heard from God: "You are arrogant. You think that you are the only person I have in this prison. I have many others here. I am God." And then God said to me, "I did not bring you to prison to minister. I brought you here to get to know Me."

Very Cool!



Just received my copy of Bill Luse's book. Bill did the cover art too. Gotta love the attribution "Bernebie Productions" (Bern being one daughter, "Ebie" the other.)

Mourning the Appearance of the Rajah but With Reason for Hope

News came yesterday that the Astros signed the great Roger ("Rajah") Clemens. Since my beloved Redlegs are but a hair's breadth ahead of said Astros in baseball's premiere division (the NL Central), one can safely say that no good can come of this. In recent years the Reds have forced me to give great attention to the early season since they're normally out of it by the advent of warm weather. The 1969 "miracle Mets" had a nice alliterative ring to it and it's getting more difficult to believe the "miracle Reds" of '06 will prove descriptive. In 1990 they led the division wire-to-wire. In 2006 they led from the 1st week of May to the third week of May. Meanwhile we face the insanely good St. Louis Cardinals - men among boys.

But it's not over till it's over! Was it ovah when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Did FDR raise the white flag at San Juan Hill? Did Johnny Appleseed quit planting seeds when he got to Arizona? No, no and no! Did Sergeant Carter give up on Gomer Pyle? Did Mr. Douglas of "Green Acres" quit his agarian dream? Did Herman Munster undergo plastic surgery? NO, no, and no! Did Gilligan give up joking despite a tough and very limited crowd? Has John Daly stopped drinking? Did Marsha Brady fold when she got bopped on the nose by a football? No, no & no! Did 'Liz Hurley give up men after Hugh Grant? Did Tom drop Disputations after Chris Sullivan found his blog? Did the Washington Generals give up after losing to the Globetrotters the millionth time?

What they all had in common is they were able to sing (for best results sing along with me now): "To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go. To right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar, to try when your arms are too weary, To reach the unreachable star. This is my quest, to follow that star -- no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To fight for the right, without question or pause, to be willing to march Into hell for a heavenly cause. And I know if I'll only be true, to this glorious quest. That my heart will be peaceful and calm, when I'm laid to my rest."

Can you picture those words on the lips of an Oliver Wendell Douglas or a Herman Munster or a Washington General? I can, and remember the word "can" is right inside the word "can't". And so, to the Reds I dedicate a familiar poem:

When things go wrong,
As they sometimes do,
When the road to the pennant seems all up hill,
When the wins are few and the payroll is high,
& you want to smile,
but you have to sigh.
When Clemens is pressing you down a bit,
rest if you must but.......

DON'T YOU QUIT!
OH NO! DON'T YOU QUIT!

Partial List of Traumatic Injuries in the Spiritual Life

victim of PPS Syndrome

I'm not holy enough to have experienced many of these symptoms but I'm sure many of you readers have:

1) Blood Sugar Fataltosis: This can occur as soon as two hours after beginning a fast, when the blood sugar falls so steeply as to induce paralysis and death.

2) Extraocular muscle tears: This can occur when the effort to gain custody of the eyes was too abrupt.

3) Lip & Tongue Lacerations: This happens when you bite your tongue or lips in an effort to avoid saying a mean-spirited remark.

4) Juvenile-induced insanity: This happens sometimes to parents of large families but contrary to the slogan "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" to lose one's mind in the service of having children is a badge of honor.

5) Knee Fallaoffitis: Knees have been known to fall off due to overuse in prayer.

6) Levitation Sprains: After levitating, some saints are said to have had rough landings although we have little documented evidence of this particular injury.

7) PPS (Premature Pruning of Skin) Syndrome: This can occur with too frequent application of Holy Water.

8) Ave Carpal Tunnel: Those saying over fifteen decades of the rosary daily are at risk.

Musings & Bemusings

I'm often surprised at the difficulty the Resurrection poses for many. But if one believes in God it is completely understandable that He can change the laws of the universe at his discretion. Miracles I don't have too much of a problem with. But what is always hard to get my head around is that God loves and cares about what to Him must seem like complete minutiae. As complex as we imagine we are, we are to God what a rock or stone is to us. And God loves created things that are even less complex than us, like sparrows as the Scripture passage goes. The amazing thing isn't miracles but that he isn't completely bored by us. I recall reading the blogger at Korretiv write,

"Why did I join the Catholic Church? Out of boredom, when it comes right down to it. Everything else bored me to death -- except God's love, God's majesty, God's infinite intimacy and yet infinite distance, His mystery. And only in the Catholic Church are those preserved. Everywhere else under the sun is a yawning chasm of yawns and boredom unto death."

I can quite understand the sentiment expressed but I'm also glad that God isn't bored by me even though I might not have a clue why he isn't.

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For those watching for signs of the Apocalypse, I just found another -- saw a bumpersticker yesterday that said "I My Granddog".
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For those who think all sin is equal, the predicted result is either high despair or high presumption, though the chance of self-righteousness is lowered. For those who see great differences in sin, the chance of self-righteousness increases but there is perhaps a better balance between despair and presumption.
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One of my favorite mysteries of the rosary is that of Christ's Baptism. I'm fascinated by it. Why did God the Father gave his imprimatur on such a seemingly small act? "You are my beloved Son" came not after the Sermon on the Mount, or after a spiritual or corporal work of mercy, or after a miracle or after prayer. Instead it came after an act of humility, by being baptized by a man (John) who was doing something that God could (and would, with the Holy Spirit) do better. The other supreme act of humility was the Cross, after which God the Father glorified Him far beyond what he did at the baptism of John. And just as Peter initially avoided having his feet washed John initially recognizes his unworthiness to (water) baptize the Lord. This mystery is particularly relevant because it shows how God wants to use human, flawed instruments (although admittedly John the Baptist was a great saint - greater than even all the OT saints).

A Two Sentence Recap on Third Parties

Peggy this this time is different. John asks why should it be when the two parties survived two wars and a depression.

Walker Percy

Mere Comments mentioned the birthday of Walker Percy on May 28th. He would've been 90. I hope WP's in Heaven; I squirmed while recently reading about him joking about it with Foote in one of his letters: Percy: "Yeah: Percy, O'Connor and Foote. A fine trio. Two at least will never get to heaven." Foote responded, of course, that he was sorry to learn that Walker and Flannery O. wouldn't be joining him there.

A commenter on Mere Comments wrote: "What I find strange is that even some liberals like Percy. Makes me wonder if they are reading the same books as I am." Not to equate liberals with agnostics, but that reminds me of (I've written of this before) how a co-worker emailed me saying, "the first time I read Love in the Ruins (early '80's) I was a devout agnostic. As a recent convert to Catholicism (less than a year ago) I can say, without giving anything away, that it struck me *completely* differently when I recently reread it."

WYSIWYG

Michael Novak on the braveness of George Bush.

The Vinny Code - Chapter 3. (Previous chapters here).

I dreamt I was eating breakfast at Mel's Diner in Paris, Tennessee and everything was rife with filmic associations. Big belly'd guy named Mel. A waitress named Flo. Another man looked the spitting image of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and I heard him tell Flo that someone was going to drop a plate of dishes seconds before they did. I looked out the window and there were baseball players coming out of the cornfield. Coincidence or conspiracy? I started to suspect the Vatican.

I finished my eggs and read the local news. The elderly curator of the local "Early Television History" museum had been murdered and investigators were asking the services of a symbologist from Aztech Community College. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, I thought. Take away reason and accountability. Perhaps my friend Dan Tan would write another book.

I woke up and remembered I was to meet Dan that afternoon. He knew his audience. He had surfed the Zeitgeist well. Three hundred zillion copies in print before the paperback and the obligatory movie version. Reputations were hurt by the book, which was surprising given that it was clearly labeled as fiction. Variety, the Hollywood paper of record, patiently explained that Costner wasn't divine, Elvis wasn't gay, and the Vatican hadn't arranged a conspiracy to keep the film industry down. But there were many who believed in Tan's vision and there was a growing sense among the non-believers that Tan's followers were proof that God gave man too much rope intellect-wise. It seemed a good education was too much a prerequisite, though hardly sufficient, for faith in Christ over Costner.

I met with Dan daily after he cashed his royalty checks since he was always in a good mood then. I mentioned how a poor education seems to affect one's view of the Divine and thus one's view of everything. He shrugged and told me I should ask Colonel Parker. So the next day I asked Colonel Parker.

"Well now the way I see it is everybody's in a state of dupery. It's just some are more duped than others. It takes humility to admit that son. That's not to say the facts ain't important, 'cause they are, but there are worse things than ignorance. Like pride. Like thinkin' you refuse to be duped and you have to know God's particulars in a way you hain't earned. Let me put it this way: ain't nobody on earth real clear on what their own glorified body will be like. Ignorance is part of the human condition of man and thank God for it since it's the only thing that keeps some people humble."

I was going to object and say that it didn't work that way since no one thought of themselves as ignorant even if they were.

"Well, What we need to know, we do know - although with a lack of instruction fewer are receiving what they need to know and that's what bothers me. Look at Tom Cruise--"

"Grace, my boy. Don't underestimate it," he said, offering me a fine handrolled cigar.