He didn't stop all day to eat a bite
And he finally got there around midnight
The doctor said, she's in a better place
She said to give this you this note just in case
And it said, I'll wait for you at Heaven's gate
Oh, I don't care how long it takes
And I'll tell Saint Pete I can't come in
Without my love and my best friend
Oh, this ain't nothin' new
Sweetheart, I'll wait for you
Now, the book's target audience is clearly educated lay readers such as myself. I know very little about evolutionary aspects on medicine. But when I approach an interesting new field, I don't want to learn the controversial ideas of a fringe maverick. I want to know the current consensus among respected scholars, just like I don't like to turn to maverick plumbers, maverick dentists or maverick auto mechanics for a professional opinion.
Moalem's maverick status means that reading the book feels like walking on thin ice: whenever he says something that surprises me, I wonder, "is this accepted knowledge or a controversial hypothesis? What do non-mavericks in the field think?"
I don't know to whom I might recommend this book. Certainly not to a layperson like myself: too much uncertainty and speculation. And a professional scholar in the field is likely to know most of what Moalem says already. The ideal reader would be someone between these groups as to their level of expertise: perhaps a student of medicine or biology, as optional sweetener for a reading-list otherwise dominated by the stolid views of non-mavericks.
St. Thomas, in the 'Supplement,' takes up the question "Whether the Aureole of Virgins Is the Greatest of All" (Q. 96, Art. 12), and concludes that it is not the greatest. John Calvin saw in this very question a perfect example of the sort of inquiry that manifests a hunger for "empty learning" (cf. Institutions, III, 25, 11); seminarians perennially have found in it a subject of much mirth; and contemporary critics of the scholastic method will use the title of this article as the quintessence of the demonstration of its irrelevancy. Do they really imagine that St. Thomas' principal interest lies in determining the material size of the aureoles of virgins in comparison with those of doctors and martyrs? His concern actually bears on identifying the different tests, which these three "classes" of saints must endure for the kingdom of God. One can be confident that St. Thomas is not attempting to downgrade virginity by attributing to it an inferior glory. In fact, St. Thomas's analysis is careful and nuanced: "The martyrs' aureole is only simply the greatest of all … Yet nothing hinders the other aureoles from being more excellent in some particular way." What discretion!I have to say I was on John Calvin's side on this one until dictionary.com came to the rescue. I had been searching the ol' Petersnet site for William Most's works when I came across the above.
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What made biblical cities, like other ancient cities, a city? Walls. You couldn’t have a town without them. Walls not only defined the city limits but protected the inhabitants from mauraders and invaders. Walls also made punishment of transgressors within possible, since if the watchers in the towers noted a crime they could command "close the gates!" and stop the person from fleeing, and therefore be able to find him within the city confines.
This is an analogy for Judiasm and Christianity with respect to the building of the New Jerusalem (Jerusalem literally means "City of Peace".) The walls define us, protect those within the walls, and allow for punishment of transgressors of those within the walls.
What are “the walls” of Judiasm & Christianity? In the Old Testament it was circumcision. In the New Testament it is baptism. In the Old, circumcision was a shedding of blood, a giving up of part of our member, and appropriately since that part is most notorious for our most unruly desires, a symbol of our concupiscence. In the New Testament St. Paul calls baptism “the circumcision of the heart”, which means that the New Testament addresses the source of our unruly desires – from what comes from within, from our hearts.
Joshua (in Greek 'Yeshua' meaning “Jesus”) was the first to cross into the land promised to Abraham’s descendents. He crossed the Jordan river and the first city he took was Jericho, the ten-thousand year old town that was often represented with Rome and Babylon and others as ‘the devil’s city’. Jericho is the city situated at the lowest point on earth, a way of saying something spiritually through topography.
Joshua didn’t conquer all the Holy Land at once, though he did take many cities. It was left to his descendents to continue to gain the Promised Land. And which was the last city to fall? Jerusalem, by King David. But when David wanted to build the first Temple in Jerusalem, God said no. It was God's plan that a man of peace would build the temple at the "City of Peace", not a man with blood on his hands. David’s son Solomon (name “Shalomo” or ‘peaceful man’) built the Temple, just as another man of peace, Jesus, would build the new Temple.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem the final time why did he go out of his way, choosing an inconvenient route by crossing the Jordan river and going into Jerusalem via the uphill, desert road of Jericho? Because it was the route Joshua took. Jesus was intentional in this in order to show himself as the new Joshua. Why did he cleanse the Temple at Jerusalem when he'd been there before and likely saw the same things (moneychangers) going on? To fulfill the prophecy that zeal for his Father’s house would consume the messiah. The road Jesus took into Jerusalem was straight uphill - a symbol of the spiritual life being compared to climbing a mountain. Jericho is 853 feet below sea level while Jerusalem stands on the crest of a chain of mountains that cross Palestine from north to south, and which is its highest point 2558 feet above sea level. But Jerusalem doesn't lie on any important trade routes, nor is it the highest point, nor is there any natural reason why this city should be one of the most important places in the world for over four thousand years. Why Jerusalem? Because it was God-chosen, not man-chosen.
Bible history begins with Abraham; the first eleven chapters of Genesis are like "algebra" rather than a straight history. The only place in the bible where God asked for an animal sacrifice was when Abraham was told in Genesis 22 to sacrifice a ram caught in the thicket in lieu of his son Isaac on Mount Moria, the future site of the Temple of Jersualem. Abraham never owned any land in the Holy Land other than his grave plot in Hebron, south of Jerusalem. Abraham was basically nomadic. Shem, one of Noah's sons, might have been the mysterious Melchizedek, the "King of Salem" (Jerusalem) who offered Abraham bread and wine. (The word Semite comes from the name 'Shem'.)
The Mount of Olives, just east of the Temple, is where prophecy said the messiah was to arrive (and the sight of the Second Coming) and so the Jews' graves just outside the city all faced that mountain. Christ rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to great praise and fanfair from that mountain only to be killed soon after. The Garden of Gethsemani is also there.
Another example of God using geology as a prop was when Jesus took Peter up to Ceasari-Phillipi. The most prominent rock in the Holy Land is the one around which the Temple in Jerusalem was built. The second is the massive wall of rock at Caesarea Philippi, where there were pagan altars above and below it. That was the rock upon which Jesus would build his church against which the gates of hell would not prevail.
The Holy of Holies contained the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the commandments given to Moses and some of the manna given by God in the desert. The new Ark of the Covenant became the Blessed Mother, with Jesus's new Law of love and himself as manna in the Eucharist. Faced with the ark, David said, "Who am I that the ark of the Lord should come to me?" (2 Sam 6:9) Elizabeth tells Mary in almost the same words, "Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Lk 1:43) Why is Mary referred to as a "Queen"? Psalm 45 depicts a royal wedding with the line "The queen stands at your right hand, at your right hand arrayed in gold". And yet the queen isn't the person the king is marrying! Polygamy is and was a rich man’s game since the one ironclad rule that makes it work is that every wife gets her own house. So it is the Queen mother who lives with the King, who "stands at his right hand".
But it was precisely one of Tocqueville’s greatest insights that although human beings are not determined creatures, we are conditioned ones. The astonishing intellectual-moral achievement of Tocqueville, as Jacques Barzun has pointed out, was to understand the human person as having not only a conditioned free will but a conditional one. (Dostoevsky’s depiction of this moral-epistemological fact in fiction puts him in a class of genius far beyond any 19th-century French novelist.) Tocqueville’s love of liberty, like that of Burke, the Federalists, and Lincoln, asserts the existence of human liberty in a moral universe, within a providential, theistic framework. Tocqueville avoids the extremes of both determinism/fatalism (Islam, Spinoza, Cabanis, Gobineau, and their many modern successors, especially Marxist and Darwinian) and a radical, post-moral libertinism or self-will that was growing in his age and was promoted intellectually by such post-Christian thinkers as Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman, and Nietzsche, as well as by the gross, unregenerate class and individual selfishness for which the French use the phrase “l’homme moyen sensuel.” His profound insight on these issues makes him a permanent treasure of civic wisdom and self-knowledge, one of the great orthodox writers of the modern era.
As André Jardin correctly and luminously says in his biography, Tocqueville’s conception of liberty “was something more sacred than Benjamin Constant’s individualism and much closer to the Pauline freedom of the children of God.” As Tocqueville’s mentor Burke put it in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils.” In Tocqueville’s own words, “Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one thing else that better deserves the name: That is virtue. But what is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?” (Emphases in the original.)
If this long-time reader of Tocqueville has any quarrel with Brogan’s painstakingly detailed depiction of Tocqueville’s life and thought, it is with his condescending dismissal of Tocqueville’s discussion of the tendency for democracy to breed pantheism in Part II of Democracy in America: “What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean Toward Pantheism.” Scholars of Romanticism and popular culture from Irving Babbitt to Jacques Barzun, Quentin Anderson, E. D. Hirsch, Daniel Bell, and Allan Bloom have remarked upon the promiscuous, pantheistic spirituality whose forefathers were Rousseau and Whitman and whose progeny is our ubiquitous “rock culture.” Very much in Tocqueville’s manner, Anderson saw Whitman’s demotic cultural campaign as “a rejection of Christianity on behalf of an emotional egalitarianism” that was rooted in Whitman’s “rejection of the idea that the self is internally structured by conscience.” In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom discerned the key pantheistic-spiritual role that rock music pervasively plays in the sensibility of our young. Bell sees an anarchic aesthetic paganism undermining the otherwise successful operation of the American polity and economy. Barzun has noted the increasing vulgarity of our culture, and quoted Tocqueville’s comments on the dark side of egalitarianism: “Low emotions and ignoble instincts . . . are the products of equality.” Writing in 1986, Barzun argued that “leveling down” may take us far below “comfortable mediocrity” and reduce our “social surface to the plane of the deliberately sordid.”
That Burke and Tocqueville were profoundly concerned with manners and mores is a sign of their wisdom, and Tocqueville’s worries about egalitarianism, democratic culture, and pantheism are far from misplaced or irrelevant to our condition and that of our current cultural effluvia. The pantheistic, democratic sensibility from Rousseau and Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Madonna is a lethal toxin, a form of cultural bacteria that may rot from within a prosperous civilization that has defeated its most dangerous external foes.
Plato expressed such suspicions long ago. Tocqueville had over 2,000 more years of historical experience on which to draw to make his case against the pantheistic perversions of democracy and equality, and in favor of their noble and positive features. As Hugh Brogan’s fine biography shows, Tocqueville was a rare thing: an aristocrat who was really noble, in thought, word, and deed, and whose liberality was never libertine.
They talk of serious things like death and taxes
"Cold Fort Worth beer just ain't no good for jealous,I also recall a Merle Haggard song:
I try it night after night."
"Down through the ages men have died for their women"Big City" was one of my favorite Haggard songs when I was twenty years old, a fact that is downright hilarious given the lyrics:
And they've done so, so many times
But each time I loved one I always lost one
And I guess the right one is so hard to find.
So I'm shoppin' for dresses with no one to wear them
One in each color and one in each style
Maybe some day I'll find me a lady to wear them
Then my shoppin' will be done for a while
I bet somewhere a lady is shoppin' for britches
Comparing the values and apprasing each pair
Maybe someday the good Lord will get us together
And we'll both have a new wardrobe to wear."
I'm tired of this dirty old city.A Randy Travis number:
Entirely too much work and never enough play.
And I'm tired of these dirty old sidewalks.
Think I'll walk off my steady job today.
Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montanna.
And gimme all I got comin' to me,
And keep your retirement and your so called Social Security.
Big City turn me loose and set me free.
Been working everyday since I was twenty.
Haven't got a thing to show for anything I've done.
There's folks who never work and they've got plenty.
Think it's time some guys like me had some fun.
Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montanna.
And gimme all I got comin' to me,
And keep your retirement and your so called social security.
Big City turn me loose and set me free.
On one hand I count the reasons I could stay with youI also like this Randy Travis duet with oldtimer George Jones, in which Jones compares the young Travis to a train:
And hold you close to me, all night long.
So many lover's games I could play with you
And on that hand I see no reason why it's wrong
But on the other hand, there's a golden band
To remind of someone who would not understand
On one hand I could stay and be your loving man
But the reason I must go is on the other hand.
From the smoke it's hard to tellFeel free to google for complete lyrics to any o' these songs.
What's coming down the line
We heard you were a fast train
Coming out of Caroline
We wondered what you were haulin'
When you rolled on into town
Say it's good to know there's still
A few ol' country boys around.
Didion might seem to be wasting her considerable talents writing about an already oft-explored figure like Howard Hughes. But her sharply discerning essay, with shades of James, not only hints at what the Master might have made of Hughes. It explains the American mind, even today:That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.In the age of blogs, cellphone cameras, and reality TV, Didion’s last sentence is hauntingly prescient: “He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”
They're only happy when they're complaining. When they stop complaining I know something's wrong.It’s Thursday night bingo and I have Rednecks. Let me ‘splain. Rednecks is an instant winning lotto game which is very popular and they’ve just become available in the back room, the ‘sacristy’ of the bingo hall if you will. For the next twenty minutes I’ll be the most popular guy in the joint and, knowing this, I walk softly while carrying this big stick.
-- administrator at West Point on the cadets
Talk shows began to fascinate me when I was a teenager, many years ago...Over the years I also began to listen to Meet the Press, and to watch David Susskind’s television roundtable program, Open End, and many others.I used to listen to a lot of talk shows. Crossfire, Meet the Press, This Week with David Brinkley. Maybe I'm in a post-political phase of life, in the way women become post-menopausal, or maybe they've changed.
In more recent years, I can’t bear to watch most of the talk shows on television, and on radio I listen only to Rush Limbaugh and a couple of others. What has happened? Is it just my becoming ornery in my old age or have the programs themselves changed?
Larry: "I can’t say I often feel the power of the Holy Spirit during times of temptation, even those few times when I invoke the Spirit in the midst of it. Often I am angry or prideful or lustful and there is no immediate relief from those feelings. So I white-knuckle it. To what extent is our freedom is limited by our native psychology, say a tendency towards depression or "Fightin' Irish" anger? I suppose that's a moot point since because we don't know how much our freedom is impaired, it can't be of any objective use."
Moe: "Oh but we already have power, we already have the Spirit by virtue of our baptism and faith in Christ. A power unfelt at times but---"
Larry: "At Pentecost the power was felt - isn't that the model?"
Moe: "No, the Spirit prefers to work modestly, invisibly, humbly, without a big show, seeking the lowest ground, that is humble ground. Besides, the bigger the show, the bigger the cross. Pentecost was a preparation for their martyrdom."
Larry: "Yeah I can see that. I guess prayer for me is a great perspective-builder. Going to Mass or saying the rosary or reading Scripture will slowly turn things around such that I see the bigger picture. That, for example, no anger is worth holding on to in the light of Christ. He makes me feel good again, lucky sometimes, or at least lucky to have another chance to please Him. Or else I'll recognize that I simply have no choice - that I can't hold a grudge against my neighbor and receive at the Eucharistic banquet and I am at peace in that choicelessness."
Curly: "My notion of the spiritual life is that it's like a lotto game. People play the lottery in order to get a chance to win the big jackpot and prayer is the spiritual equivalent. Every day you pray and every day you fail – you scratch off a ticket that says you lost. And you ask for forgiveness and the next day you get up and you pray and then scratch off that day’s ticket with new hopefulness. To win the spiritual lottery is to win that sudden influx of love into your heart. That you become on fire for love of God and feel a great zeal and, to switch analogies, to become a champion, a saint, a Babe Ruth in love of God and neighbor. And, then the ultimate sense the spiritual lottery is, of course, Heaven, literally the heavenly jackpot."
Larry: "Interesting Curly I've never looked at it that way before. [gives a noogie.] I tend to look down lottery participation, thinking it a tax on people who are bad at math. Money doesn’t make people happy, and besides they should save that money in a bank since the odds are so poor."
Curly: "But why do the poor play the lottery so much more than the middle class let alone the rich? Because living hand-to-mouth, with a constant worry about debt makes the dream of winning so much sweeter than someone with fewer debts. Is it like that in the spiritual realm? If I were virtuous and holy and devout, instead of constantly incurring debt (with a host of demon creditors thinking they own me), then would I be less concerned about the spiritual realm? Would I pray as often? Would I scatch those spiritual tickets? What about you Moe?"
Moe: "Hmm...well I think of the spiritual life as "family life." That is, under normal conditions, you don't "feel" love all the time. Yes, you love your mom and dad and brothers and sisters, but you don't really run an emotional or feeling "high." It simply is. Then in crisis, suddenly, you understand the bond that holds you. Like when mom died. Yes, I missed my mother and knew I loved her, but suddenly, I understood my deep connection with God. I prayed incessantly, in Love with God and feeling it for a short time. I was more certain than ever of His existence, even though these are exactly the times when many begin to doubt--a loved one taken away far too young and all."
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I for one would not bet the mortgage money that Europe's low birth rates of today will continue for very much longer. Nor would I place much confidence in the continuance of high birth rates among European immigrant populations. Human reproduction is very influenced by economic incentives, and in Europe today those incentives discourage child-bearing among the educated and encourage it among the least skilled. (For the unskilled immigrant an extra child means extra money from the government; for the middle class family, an extra child means extra expense in a society where the breadwinners must struggle to earn an additional $2 for every $1 they are allowed to keep.)
But what if those incentives change? I think we'd all be surprised at how rapidly behavior changed in response. Think of welfare reform in the United States. Welfare rolls began to shrink even before the welfare laws were changed, as welfare recipients realized: "Oh, they're serious this time. I guess I'd better get a job." Europeans are no less amenable to new realities than the American underclass.
Whenever I see the kinds of expressions on the faces of people in high-fashion ads, I feel lucky that I never met them.Meanwhile, I wasn't aware of how steadily McCain has been growing less conservative over time. (Run Fred, run?)
Where are all the beautiful movie actresses? There are some better looking women on television news programs.
Will those who are dismantling this society from within or those who seek to destroy us from without be the first to achieve their goal? It is too close to call.
Benito had a secret room ironically called the "anti-Gnostic" room, or AG for short. "Secret" for him was a nonsense word, like supercalifraglisticespaladocias. Secrets were merely revelations, future or past, that had been forgotten.
Inside were rows of bookshelves that concealed a trapdoor to bliss, an entrance to the laboratory where he created fabulous things by combining combustible words he called "his chemicals". He was constantly mixing them, scribbling away as if for medicinal purposes. In that room he had the perfect privacy of Ed Abbey in his desert, Catullus in his scriptorium, Persius in the arboretum, Euripides at the Atheneum, Drysdale at his bank, Rapunzel in her hair, a cloistered nun in during the third Joyful, Archie in his chair, Virgil at Mantua, Norm at the bar, Sulpicia at his villa, Aeschylus in a dithyramb, a Natufian in the Fertile Crescent, O'Reilly in the no-spin zone, Carson as Carnac, or Paul Lynde in the secret square.
His cousin Juan visited him from Zihuatanejo one June day and Benito led him to the AG. They went through the trapdoor and immediately were transported back to Mexico, where generations of family were celebrating Toraidio's eighth birthday. There was a large pinata front and center and the crowd was chanting as anticipation grew.
"Cuál está adentro!" the crowd yelled, "What's inside?"..."What's he made of?"
His uncles gravely told the boy that the mule was made of coal and switches, and a form of vinegar that was so combustible it might explode and do him harm. His aunts scoffed and told him there was honey and candy and trampolines that would catapult him to the sky!
The blindfolded Toraidio swung and swung and swung, and out of the violence the mule's side split open at last. Everyone was surprised by what came out, even the aunts who'd predicted giant trampolines. (They knew good would come but later said "how could we explain what we only dimly understood ourselves?") The surprise was a sort of magic, since only magic could explain it. Out poured neither honey nor vinegar; each person was touched in the way most needed. Antidote and affliction were married and integrated in a way that left all astonished.
That substantial numbers of conservative evangelical voters are even considering these candidates as presidential prospects is a sign of their political maturation and of their more pragmatic view of what can be expected from politics and politicians. It is also evidence that many of them are awakening to at least two other realities -- (1) they are not electing a church deacon; and (2) government has limited power to rebuild a crumbling social construct.Voting-wise, I exercise either political maturity or I stand for principle; I never act cravenly or like a utopian. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :-)
BALTIMORE, MD--Post-lenten depression can happen anytime within the first eight weeks after Easter. A person may have a number of symptoms such as sadness, lack of energy, trouble concentrating, anxiety, and spiritual hypochondriasis. Post-lenten depression can be treated by "hair of the dog", i.e. prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
If one says 'theism DOES have scientific support', at the same time as the other side says that it does not, then this is an admission that Darwinism as well is not strictly science but depends for some of its credibility on philosophical assumptions, assumptions that he must consider mistaken....[There] ought to be agitating that these mistakes be made known to the students in science classes in public schools where they are being indoctrinated in pure materialism.I wrote my bro-in-law yesterday of the difficulties of surpressing surprise in the workplace: "I could be more patient with a computer-illiterate co-worker if I wasn't constantly being surprised by her computer illiteracy. If someone would've told me what to expect I think I'd have been less exasperated. I was having her copy a pgm and she's in 'My Computer' and she copies the pgm. Then waits. 'What are you waiting for?' I ask. 'Waiting for it to copy! [pause] Oh, that's right, I have to paste it.' (I think I got a glimpse of Tom of Disputations's daily life, at least when he reads blogs.) My bro-in-law replied: "Support is one of the hardest jobs. I've noticed that folks that are really good at support are the ones that need it as much as the people they're helping." Which maybe isn't a bad analogy for saints and bishops, who need God just as much as the ones they instruct.
Remember the late Joe Strummer, singer, writer, rhythm guitarist and heart and soul of The Clash? I read an interview with him once in which he said he hoped he was on the side of the good, and how he didn't understand rock and rollers "jokingly" or otherwise seeming to use approvingly or glamorizingly imagery of or allusions to the evil or demonic...(I remember he gave an example of being on the side of good that when he was hungry he used to steal so he could eat, but that he wasn't hungry anymore, so he didn't steal.)...I hoped that this was an illustration of someone who'd never really been taught convincingly responding to the conscience written on his heart, and without necessarily being sure that there are evil spirits, not wanting to align himself with such things with even the risk of implying that evil is cool.Interesting thing about comparing hell to cancer, as I did in my previous post, is that such an analogy implicitly assumes both are completely beyond our control. There are risk factors for cancer and risk factors for hell, but ultimately the teaching of John Paul II is that hell - unlike cancer - is chosen. But I don't even want to get near the grace/free will thing today, concerning which I've already admitted defeat anyway. It's a drinkin' Friday and thorny theological questions disturb the equinamity needed to quaff healthy quantities of Guinness.
I read this interesting thing a while back that I think then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, along the lines of how in the modern West people don't fear evil spirits like more "primitive" people did, or do, but it's because of Christianity that we don't have to fear, and without Christianity we're just not acknowledging how we really get to a place that the devil can't hurt us. The people in pagan societies recognized the existence of evil and didn't have the same protection against it, but so many of us here don't recognize the evil and reject the means to protect ourselves from it. something like that...
WORCESTER, MASS - November 16, 1863: Merchants and bankers throughout New England are breathing more easily today as a period has been put to the lawless career of notorious bandits “Ralphie and Lou.”
The outlawed couple, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 60, and Louisa May Alcott, 31, both of Concord in this State, met their deaths in a hail of lead from the firearms of the Worcester constabulary, assisted by elements of the erstwhile 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, home after service in the North Carolina theatre.
"Immediately after his brutal assault on young Maria Goretti, Alessandro was imprisoned temporarily in Nettuno and then transferred to Regina Coeli prison in Rometo stand trial. After vehemently denying his guilt, he finally broke down in the face of overwhelming testimony. Since he was a minor, he was sentenced to only thirty years hard labor.
A priest came to see him soon afterward, and he turned on the cleric in rage, howling like a maniac and lunging at him.
In the days which followed, Alessandro lost his appetite and grew nervous. After six years of prison, he was near the brink of despair. Then one night, Maria appeared to him in his cell. She smiled at Alessandro and was surrounded by lilies, the flower symbolic of purity.
From that moment, peace invaded Alessandro's heart, and he began to live a constructive life. After serving his sentence, Alessandro took up residence at a Capuchin monastery, working in the garden as a tertiary. He asked pardon of Maria's mother and accompanied her to Christmas Mass in the parish church where he spoke before the hushed congregation, acknowledging his sin and asking God's forgiveness and the pardon of the community."
I wander from church to church along with the crowd. I listen to its muffled, multilingual murmur, like the rush of the sea; a slow human whirlpool spins me around, and tired, empty faces flash by—as empty as my own; eyeglasses glint; the pages of guidebooks rustle. I squeeze through the narrow doors of churches, push past my neighbors, trying, like everyone else, to get a better view, trying not to become irritated. After all, I think, if Heaven does exist it’s likely that I’ll enter it with just such a flock of sheep, of people—old, not all that smart, a bit greedy. Because if Heaven isn’t for people like us, then who is it for, I’d like to know? Are there really so many others—special people, people who are noticeably better than us ordinary, statistically average souls? No, there aren’t, so in all likelihood I will have to plod across those green meadows with a herd of American tourists, disgruntled that everything is so ancient and small. And, if that is the case, then Heaven must be awful and boring—which, by definition, seems wrong. Everything in Heaven should be utterly sublime.
“I have never seen anything so sublime (see the other side) in my life!” my father wrote. See the other side. An ordinary paradise. What did he see that I don’t see?
Hillary didn't help herself with her over-the-top sermon at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala., two weeks ago. Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year. At times, it approached the Southern Gothic burlesque of Bette Davis chewing up the scenery in "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte."Sweet. She also seems very fair-minded for an admitted Democratic partisan:
This kind of outreach to expose and remedy injustice represents the finest spirit of leftism, a practical, compassionate activism -- not the pretentious postmodernist jargon and sanctimonious attitudinizing that still pass for leftism among too many college faculty. Capitalism, which spawned modern individualism as well as the emancipated woman who can support herself, is essentially Darwinian. It expands any society's sum total of wealth and radically raises the standard of living, but it leaves the poor and weak without a safety net. Capitalism needs the ethical counter-voice of leftism to keep it honest. But leftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism...I like that Paglia takes risks, even ones that can leave her looking ridiculous. She opines:
The relationship between Cheney and George W. Bush is also perplexing. Despite the nearness in their ages, Cheney acts like Bush's father (no coincidence since Cheney served in George H.W. Bush's administration). There's something creepy about how Cheney, after heading the candidate search, insinuated himself into the vice presidency. He locked onto Bush like a limpet, using the more extroverted and physically dynamic president as his proxy. Bush's independent judgment was paralyzed, as if by snakebite. It's an unsavory, toxic relationship, a vampiric pseudo-marriage like that of the shadowy, Machiavellian Roger Chillingworth and the impressionable, waffling Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."....Which is the sort of unintended hilarity we often expect from academics. Instead of Bush wanting someone with experience and gravitas and finding it in Cheney, Paglia sees a Gothic, parasitic dysfunctional relationship. Common sense is not so common, but then it's not always as entertaining as the alternative.
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Not that I have any control over this…but when I die, I want someone to remind me about the love of Jesus Christ. I want someone to ask me about repentance and offer reconciliation. I want someone to challenge me that the best is yet to come, that this suffering joins me with Christ, and like his suffering, it is not the last word. God is here and God will be there and has already broken my path for that journey. I want to receive the anointing of the sick, and be told that God will raise me up. I don’t want someone asking if I’m “in touch with my values.” And especially if I am weak and in pain, I hope the person helping me have a holy, joyful death will not expect me to “take the lead.”This stirs up a lot of thoughts and emotions for me. How in the past I may have had the opportunity to deliver this message to a dying friend and how I failed, how embarrassing death is and how tongue-tied it can make us, what a bastard death is but how radically and profoundly our faith in Christ confronts it. I'm reminded of how Walker Percy shined the light on this in his fiction -- recall Lonnie's death in The Moviegoer and how Binx responded to questions from Lonnie's siblings about the hope of the resurrection, and recall the deathbed baptism scene in The Last Gentleman, how matter-of-fact and therefore how good the priest was -- and of how Percy approached his own death. Percy himself often pointed to the witness of Flannery O'Connor and how she confronted death with courage and a clear vision of God's grace. - blogger at Korrektiv
"He looks like James," he said. "Same eyes and forehead."
Every new birth is greeted in the Rodgers family by a ritualistic weighing in on which side had won the genetic lottery. He'd thought that by confirming the obvious - that he looked like their side - he was giving her a small gift.
"Yes he sure does," she said wistfully. He could tell she considered this no victory for her; even her husband was still other. Outer Mongolia to him, he was still Mongolia to her and they suddenly became insiders, conspirators in their mutual outsiderness.
It would be a nice symmetry if I could find something similar for my nephew, who makes his First Communion in May. But alas I can't. At the risk of sounding like an ol' curmudgeon, they don't make Communion plaques like they used to.My plaque(The platelet at bottom that said "Remembrance of My First Holy Communion" fell off yrs ago.)
Wesson Oil eliminates ear mites. All it takes is a few drops of Wesson corn oil in your cat's ear...Massage it in, then clean with a cotton ball. Repeat daily for 3 days. The oil soothes the cat's skin, smothers the mites, and accelerates healing.
Dawn kills fleas instantly...Dawn dishwashing liquid does the trick. Add a few drops to your dog's bath and shampoo the animal thoroughly. Rinse well to avoid skin irritations. Good-bye fleas.
Bounce is a rainy day cure for dog odor ...Next time your dog comes in from the rain, simply wipe down the animal with Bounce or any dryer sheet, instantly making your dog smell springtime fresh.
An Imagined Word Association Game with Bill Mahrer
"Theocrat"
"George Bush!"
"Global warming"
"George Bush"
"War"
"George Bush"
"Stupidity"
"George Bush"
"BIll Mahrer"
"George B--, er, ?!"
The larger point is that, as I've noted before, "We are all good Catholics now," good Catholics whose status as Good Catholics we wear as a badge and hold as a ticket no matter what we happen to believe. Which stands in opposition to the traditional stance of a Christian through a couple of thousand years, which has been the acknowledgment that we are all Bad Catholics in some sense, but uttered in the deep hope and trust that God is merciful and that filled with new life in Christ, we are redeemed, not by our own power or by our own wisdom, standing in judgment of what we think should be true, but by the love of God, the medicine in which we sinners stand in deep need.I very much doubt that Tom of Disputations, when he wrote what follows, was thinking of the Hannity & company - since they have the whiff of being way too spiritually full of themselves - but it bears repeating in this context, concerning "cultural Catholics":
They will be there because there is where they go on Easter. They will be variously smiled at, cursed at, and tolerated, but generally dismissed as "Christmas and Easter Catholics" who do little more than clog the parking lot and mess up poll results (remember, 70% of Catholics don't believe in the Real Presence).I try often, without success, to pinpoint the time during the '90s when I became convinced the Catholic Church offered not just good suggestions but was the Authority. I suspect it was around the time I became deeply convinced about the truth of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If the Church was right about the great gifts of the sacraments, it seemed she was right about everything since so few churches were right about sacraments. But I can't pinpoint it.
Here, though, I'm not talking about the C&E Catholics too spiritually full of themselves to go to Mass on lesser feasts. I'm talking about those people, maybe not even baptized, who are too spiritually empty to go to Mass, except when it will be crowded enough that no one will notice their emptiness.
And maybe this will be the year when a word or a gesture reveals to them that the Man they were looking for is here, in this church, on this altar, with these people. Maybe the prayer that makes it so will be yours.
Ironically, King said, her birthday is Jan. 22, the date that the Supreme Court justices approved legalized abortion.
"After I had my second abortion, I was Miss Pro-Choice Queen for years," she said, in spite of the King family's belief in the civil rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
"In 1983, I was born again and I had a confrontation with the living God," she said. "I repented and said, 'God, this was wrong and I'm so sorry.'"
She said she realized then that "God had forgiven me and so I became -- over those years from 1983 to today -- increasingly a pro-life speaker."
"I met Father Frank Pavone on the road," she said, "and he was quoting Rev. King's Christmas speech and his letter from the Birmingham jail about infanticide."
When the Holy Spirit "found her," King said, she felt called to direct African-American outreach as a pastoral associate for [Fr. Pavone's] Priests for Life.
...Bone & I will be celebrating St. Patrick's Day because that's the day AOH celebrates it.
The Ancient Order of Hiberians is old school but has fallen on hard times. Membership has shrunken and their lovely thatch home has been taken away from them. Will we stay faithful to them or celebrate the day at the big blarney bash on the 17th? (The answer is we'll stay faithful, kudos to Bone). The AOH'rs are now vagabonds, holding St. Pat's Day in a (nearly) undisclosed location a week early, the latter presumably because their musical beau, the Hooligans, won't sacrifice high-paying gigs on the 17th. (AOH without the Hooligans is like Johnnie without the Walker Red). By the end of the Hooligans's set, their litany of “God Bless Ireland” and “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” is nearly unbearable for its intensity and one can not sing loudly enough to disperse the adrenalin that accrues in your veins.
On Raglan Road
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.
- Patrick Kavanagh
Most holy Apostle, St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the Church honors and invokes you universally, as the patron of difficult cases, of things almost despaired of. With good reason many invoke you when illness is at a desperate stage. We now recommend her to your kindness. Amen.
Once upon a time, back in the days when disco reigned supreme, Hillary put up a measly $1000 bucks, money which was shepherded by some Clinton fundraisers in the commodity business. Remember? Ten months later, Hillary’s $1000 dollar cattle future "investment" magically morphed into a $100,000 profit. (Eat your heart out Boone Pickens.) 10,000 percent profit in less than a year—makes Obama’s $13,000 stock loss look like chicken feed doesn’t it? Of course, Queen Midas later told investigators there was no inside fix for her cattle futures investment (wink-wink). According to Hillary, she carefully read the Wall Street Journal commodities page every day.Sure it's an old story but the whole $1000-to-$100,000 overnight thing was something Ham of Bone & I tried mightily to accomplish during the late '80s & early '90's. So it has some personal resonance.
Later, while still a youth, he left the imperial court and struggled in asceticism on Mount Athos, and in the Skete at Beroea. He spent some time in Thessalonica being treated for an illness that came from his harsh manner of life. He was present in Constantinople at the Council that was convened in 1341 against Barlaam of Calabria, and at the Council of 1347 against Acindynus, who was of like mind with Barlaam; Barlaam and Acindynus claimed that the grace of God is created. At both of these Councils, the Saint contended courageously for the true dogmas of the Church of Christ, teaching in particular that divine grace is not created, but is the uncreated energies of God which are poured forth throughout creation: otherwise it would be impossible, if grace were created, for man to have genuine communion with the uncreated God.St. Gregory of Palamas also defended the Hesychasts:
Hesychasm, a movement dating back to the Fathers of the desert, believed that since the body itself received the grace of sacraments and the pledge of final resurrection it would propertly have a share in "pure prayer".Elsewhere, in a column titled Reflections:
If the philosophies of men were able to satisfy men, why did the philosophers Justin and Origen become Christians? Why did Basil, Chrysostom and Gregory, who, in Athens studying all the philosophy of the Greeks, receive baptism? And why did Blessed Augustine, who knew the wisdom of both the Greeks and the Romans, throw away all and seek salvation and illumination in the Faith of Christ?
This issue has been misstated by the MSM where it is represented as an issue about sex rather than cost vs. benefit. This is a vaccine for 6 specific strains of HPV (over 50 exist) expected to prevent roughly 30 of the HPV infections in the U.S. It will cost 7.6B annually to protect the public against a disease that, in some cases causes genital leasions which, left untreated may in rare cases lead to cervical cancer. That 7.6B annually should be put to better use rather than lining the pockets of vaccine producers!A couple weeks earlier he'd written me:
It makes sense for schools to require vaccines for measels, mumps and rubella, but not for genital warts, [expletive]! What, are we allowing the kids to have unprotected sex at school between classes?!?!? WTF?! Next they'll be listing condoms on a grade-schoolers required supplies list between the No.2 pencils and the 3-ring binder.Chris decided not to waste his time and send his reply in. I wasted my time yesterday on a less worthy issue, refuting a Sunday Dispatch column which proclaimed that Americans voted for "civility" in '06.
I've read about two dozen studies of what Gardasil actually does and how it acts and it turns out that Gardasil actually protects against a very small family of the HPV virus--this virus seems to be kind of the like the rhino-viruses that cause colds. However, it protects against the particularly form that is associated with the onset of cervical cancer. Now the kicker--the easiest protection against this form of HPV is to avoid promiscuous sex. Yes, indeed, it is another of the sexually transmitted dangers of the modern world. And it has long been known by doctors that the best way to reduce about 90% of the cases of cervical cancer is for those who engaging in
frequent partner changes to avoid doing so.
I tried to hide out, holed up, still fighting the War Between the States in 1870, but at last they got to me. Blogger that is. The so-called "beta" is no more. You will be assimilated, er, I mean upgraded.Presented with sample posts ("Classes suck," "Is Prince gay?"), Stephen Greenblatt, a professor who is the general editor of "The Norton Anthology of English Literature," was more optimistic. "There could well emerge, taken together, a certain accidental prose-poetry out of these brief notes," he wrote. "But Shakespeare it ain't. The short lines remind me of certain Dada-like moments in early Harold Pinter - or, better still, Charles Mee."
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The great nineteenth-century Russian novels have qualities of freshness, immediacy and emotional intensity which make them, in my view, the best novels of all. It is a cliché, but nevertheless true, to say that Tolstoy was a writer of epic and Dostoyevsky of tragedy: I think Dostoyevsky the greater novelist because he engaged with deeper questions of good and evil, of temptation and suffering and innocence, and also because he really believed in redemption in Christ, which Tolstoy (who believed in the redemption of Tolstoy by Tolstoy) certainly did not.
Like painted kites, those days and nights - went flyin' byIf I was Dawn Eden, the former professional clever headline writer, I'd have thought of a snappy title for how I got busted at the Columbus airport. I was thinking of some riff off the song "Four Dead in O-hi-o", like "Four Meds in O-hi-O" except it was only one med that I'd brought in my carry-on that got me in trouble, a gel for eczema. I was taken aside and tortured by a Jack Bauer figure. Bauer said he was doing it because I shouldn't be on vacation during Lent since there is nothing penitential about sitting in the sun or swimming in the ocean. My wife was sure – would've bet money - that I'd tried to smuggle a Guinness on board.
The world was new, beneath a blue - umbrella sky
Then softer than, a piper man - one day it called to you
And I lost you, to the summer wind…
-- Frank Sinatra, "Summer Wind"
Back at the hotel, Playa Azul, I go for a 3-mile run and notice a gila monster. Or at least that's what I decided to tell my naturalist uncle who likes to correct my naturalist errors. Why deprive him? It was actually an iguana, silver with vertical black stripes and a ‘gobble' under the neck. The real excitement was seeing what seemed to be baby barracudas in the water, at least that's what my uncle said they could be. They could also be tube fish. Barracudas sound cooler. The multisyllablic name is fitting for a fish with such teeth, like John Wayne Gacy or John Wilkes Booth or Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Well I pulled out of Pittsburgh…" – "Six Days on the Road"Slept like a rockasuarous last night. Yesterday I'd driven a seemingly Caliphate-era bike, rickety but with wide radial tires, and experienced the dislocation up & down parched roads full of life, walkers, scooters, autos, push-carts, bikers, school children in uniforms. The bike ride and snorkeling have their soporific effect.
"Retirement isn't scary here…[In America] it is the vestibule of death. In France there is no equivalent anxiety and there are no great Florida-style gulags for the elderly. One of the striking things about Paris is that it is filled with old people who actually look old: bent, fitted out with canes, but dining and lunching and walking their dogs…The humiliations visited on old people in America – dressed up like six-year olds, in shorts and t-shirts and sneakers, imploding with rage – aren't common here…".
"God-haunted, mother-approved." - anonymousThere was no way I was going to go scuba diving. My hard and fast rule is to never operate heavy machinery on the ocean floor. Google "snorkeling accident" versus "scuba diving accident" and see the difference. I'm not sure I like that my wife is doing it either but I figure she won't take undue risks, like trying to go down 1000 feet. She's a safe driver car-wise and there's probably a carry-over. She's definitely a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. Didn't want to go in the water on Sunday because there were "creepy things" in there, i.e. it wasn't a sterile environ. But I insisted she snorkel with me and she was hooked. There are pretty creatures in that water! Beauty overcometh much and her love for animals overcometh more. She later said this was probably her favorite vacation ever, which is saying something seeing how she's been to Hawaii a couple of times.
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