From the January 2, 1900 edition of The Bourbon News (Paris, Ky). Found here, where they are digitalizing the nation's newspapers.
And don't forget that bad indigestion has broken many an engagement...
From the January 2, 1900 edition of The Bourbon News (Paris, Ky). Found here, where they are digitalizing the nation's newspapers.
"High School Musical" star Ashley Tisdale reveals what keeps her motivated to maintain her fabulous figure. In an interview with Shape magazine, the 23-year-old...23-year old? You got to be kidding. This is like saying, "We interviewed an aardvark in order to give us the secret of developing a long snout...". Come back in twenty years kiddo.
Unmasking the Devil: Dramas of Sin and Grace in the World of Flannery O'Connor
Thurber Album a Collection of Pieces
After Asceticism: Sex, Prayer and Deviant Priests
The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence
A Packet of Letters A Selection from the Correspondence of John Henry Newman
Parched : a memoir
Newsflash! : my surprising journey from secular anchor to media evangelist
Acoustic Ladyland
Mount Calvary Cemetery (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing))
The Unmaking of a Mayor
Correspondence of Thomas Ebeneezer Thomas Concerning the Anti-Slavery Conflict in Ohio
Memoirs and Writings of the Very Reverend James F. Callaghan, D.D.
The Catholic journey through Ohio
History of Educational Legislation and Administration in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati
The Flesh of God
Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America
2006 Baseball Card Price Guide
Crosley Field (Images of Baseball: Ohio) (Images of Baseball)
1962 Roman Catholic Daily Missal
Marian Apparitions, the Bible and the Modern World
Percy Mackaye, Poet Of Old Worlds And New
Dipped in sky;: A study of Percy MacKaye's "Kentucky mountain cycle",
Padre Pio of Pietrelcina Letters Vol III Correspondence w His Spiritual Daughters 1915-1923 1st Edition in English
Tales of a Missionary in Zambia
Shalom 2000
Germany Confronts Modernization German Culture and S
Breaking the Chains: Understanding Religious Addiction and Religious Abuse
Mexico and the United States, 1821-1973 (America & the World S.)
Eastern Catholic Churches in America
And Justice for None - on no-fault divorce
Bridget's Rosary
My beloved for me and I for my beloved: Eucharistic Prayer Book
Stochastic Systems
Ohio History (pub 1978) - Vol 87 # 1, 2 and 4
The Robinsons' (1872)
Who's Who in baseball - 1989
Historic Front Pages of the 20th Century - from the Columbus Dispatch
The Divine Grace - The Coptic Orthodox Church and Dogmas
A Guide to the Passion: 100 Questions about "The Passion of the Christ"
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 4 Salvation
The Douay-Rheims New Testament of the Holy Bible
Henry Thoreau,: American rebel
Backwoods musings
New Budget Landscaping: Designing Your Outdoor Space for Use, Comfort, and Pleasure
Shorter Christian Prayer
Peace, love and joy
Artes de Mexico - El Tequilla
Artes de Mexico - Visones de Guadalupe
City of the Dead: New Orleans Cemetery No. 1
The Treasury of San Marco Venice
Corca Dhuibhne: Its Peoples and Their Buildings
Hippocrene U.S.A. Guide to Irish America (Hippocrene USA Guides)
Irish Blessings (Little Books)
The spirit is mercy;: The story the Sisters of Mercy in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, 1858-1958
Funk and Wagnall's Standard Reference Encyclopedia (1961) (23 vols)
Divine Mysteries of the Holy Rosary (excerpts from Ven. Mary of Agreda's "City of God"
Marian Apparitions Today: Why So Many?
Orthodoxy and Catholicism: the Differences
The People's Mass Book
The New Catholics
Mike Spino's Mind/Body Running Program
How to watch and control your blood pressure
American Literature of the 17th and 18th centuries
Sayings of Samuel Pepys (Sayings Series)
Ostia Antica: A Guide to the Excavations
As It Were: Stories of Old Columbus
Boyhood of Great Men Intended as an Example to Youth
Gerry Faust: The Golden Dream
Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a Week
History of the Great War
The Redemption of Corporal Nolan Giles
Appointment In Rome: The Church in America Awakening
The Circle Dancers
Healing journey : the odyssey of an uncommon athlete
The Medjugorje deception : Queen of Peace, ethnic cleansing, ruined lives
Out on a Limb
Christ is in our midst : letters from a Russian monk
Two towers : the de-christianization of America and a plan for renewal
It tain't pretty.
The ability of science to explain and illuminate the webs of interconnection does not dislodge our deeper intuition that our deeply embedded, highly influenced, and profoundly physical mental lives are somehow genuinely our own—and somehow our responsibility to discipline and cultivate.But doesn't that fly in the face of the assumption of most of us (not Reno necessarily) that in a post-Christian world things will be terrible because "everything is permissible"? Perhaps I'm missing something but Reno's post implies things won't get too bad because "real-world consequences focus the mind," as Reno wrote, and even without an awareness that God exists people will be constrained from much evil simply because of earthly consequences.
Roskies and Nichols think that we are more sophisticated philosophically than philosophers (and scientists) give us credit. It’s quite reasonable for us to reason about the actual world differently than an imagined world—and their experiment shows that we do. This is especially true when we are asked to reflect on the moral significance of abstractions—and the proposition “all our choices are determined and not free” is nothing if not an abstraction.
As Hillary Putnam has observed in a related context, “The impossibility of a metaphysical grounding for ethics shows that there is something wrong with metaphysics, and not with ethics.” The undergrads at University of Utah don’t know Hillary Putnam from Sir Edmund Hillary, but they seem to agree. “In the world taken as actual,” Roskies and Nichols conclude, we assume that “people are morally responsible regardless of the truth of determinism.”
"The Santa Claus idea has its advocates and disparagers, and there is force to what both urge for and against the children's belief in their patron saint. The only caution which I think is necessary to observe is with regard to the manner of giving the idea and explaining it as a fanciful story when the child is older. The mother must not make Santa Claus too seriously real, and must not break with rude abruptness the spell which she has woven in earlier days."From 1890 to 1915 there are a spate of articles on the existence of Santa:
Serge Larivee, a professor of psycho-education from Universite de Montreal, together with fellow researcher Carole Senechal from the Univerity of Ottawa, both in Canada, performed a comparison on the way 1,500 children (7 to 13 years of age) related to the myth of Santa back in 1896, and in 1979 (obviously, not the same children), and studied the implications of the changes.
As a general rule, Larivee notes that "When they learn the truth, children accept the rules of the game and even go along with their parents in having younger children believe in Santa. It becomes a rite of passage in that they know they are no longer babies," shows the official site of the University of Montreal. Among the findings of the study was the fact that some 22% of the children in 1896 were disappointed to find that Santa did not exist, compared to 29% in the study performed in 1979.
"The constant outcome of the two studies was that children generally discovered through their own observations and experiences that Santa doesn't exist," shared Larivee. "And their parents confirmed their discovery. Children ask their parents, for example, how Santa gets in the house if there's no chimney. And even if the parents say they leave the door unlocked, the child will figure out that Santa can't be everywhere at the same time and that reindeer can't be that fast."
History shows an increase in the tendency to perpetuate the myth even after kids' discovering it as such, as it maintains a good mood and joyfulness: 54% of the parents did so in 1896, 73% in 1979 and 80% in 2000.
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition.Postman argues not that truth is relative, but that the media affects the way we view truth. He goes on to say that every medium of expression has benefits and drawbacks and that typography obviously has many benefits and is preferable to what we have now (television & electronics).
Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that 'the truth' is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant...We have enough [prejudices] of our own, as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables..?...To the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathmatics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual.Truth thousands of years ago was conveyed through myth. By Christ's time it was parable and proverb. In our time it is through numbers. But truth is not limited by the "adornment" it carries, even though every age thinks it has a monopoly on truth.
The squaws leave and the tribal council begins. "Runs with Elk" passes the pipe while the elders stare ahead with dark, impassive eyes. Mention is made of the white man and what to trade him for firearms.I continued to walk to the sweet spot, that place where it's fun to walk, where the rhythm is infectious and where you'd sooner stride than not. I feel relaxed in the sleety rain and unbidden, a song comes to mind only it turns out I mangled the lyrics. I thought Neil Diamond sings in "I've Been This Way Before": "And I've been renewed! I've been regained." But Google proves otherwise, smashing blissful ignorance:
The young semi-warrior named Bows with Glittens asks to speak. He is recognized by the wizened chief. He says that it's increasingly clear that the tribe needs more light boxes to treat an epidemic of seasonal affective disorder.
"When the light grows dim, I have a craving for sweets and feel sorta depressed," said Bows with Glittens. "I hear the white man has an invention called 'light boxes' which emit full-spectrum light that mimics the sun in the time before the deer mate."
Oh what a fascinating family! The Buckleys are to me what the Kennedys are to the public at large. I can hardly wait to read Christopher Buckley's memoir, due out next spring. I'd like to learn more about Pat. What a fighter! What a mixture of paradox! Earth mother, nurturer who was to the right of Bill politically. She who, even when she wasn't speaking to Bill, would pack lavish lunches for him. This Manhattan socialite, hobnobber with the rich and famous, believed foremost in taking care of her man. And a bit of him died with her - how copious were his tears at her passing.
Story here
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? could we?
--Photo from Spanish blogger at "Compostela", who finds a use for his blog beyond therapy: "Y este blog, aparte de medio para hacer amigos (y algún enemigo), para terapia, como sustitutivo de la creación literaria y como altavoz me ha servido para tener un disco. A partir de ahora lo podré contar: con mi blog he conseguido un disco (alguna cosa más, he de decir, en honor a la verdad)."![]()
"The stupid party": this is John Stuart Mill's description of conservatives. Like certain other summary dicta which nineteenth-century liberals thought to be forever triumphant, his judgment needs review in our age of disintegrating liberal and radical philosophies.If liberal and radical philosophies are disintegrating today (Kirk wrote in 1953), what do we call the growing spirit of Leviathan in Washington that claims competence in all areas, great and small, of every citizen's life?
Upon earth there is not his like,- Bill of Summa Minutiae
a creature without fear.
He beholds everything that is high;
he is king over all the sons of pride. —Job 41:33-34, on Leviathan
Dante. Pascal. St. Ignatius of Loyola. John Donne. Chaucer. Seneca. Coleridge. Kierkegaard. Baudelaire. Chekhov. Joyce. Albee. Joseph Brodsky. F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Berryman. Flannery O’Connor. Graham Greene. W. H. Auden. Kafka. Evelyn Waugh. Aldous Huxley. Karl Menninger. Thomas Merton. William Styron.Oy! That's sort of like a prosecuting attorney mentioning that Mother Teresa proclaimed the defendant's innocence.
Father John Dietzen: Dec. 12, 2008
QUESTION CORNER
Do believe in Santa
Q: My question isn’t very deep, but with Christmas coming I am concerned about the attitude of some friends who don’t want their children to “believe in Santa Claus.” From almost infancy, they tell their children there isn’t really a Santa and that it was all made up to sell more things at Christmastime. I think they’re missing something, but I’m not sure how to tell them. What do you think? (Florida)
A: I too think they are missing something — very big. It’s always risky to analyze fantasies, but maybe it’s worth trying for a moment.
Fantasies, perhaps especially for children, are critical ways of entering a world, a real world that is closed to us in ordinary human language and happenings. They are doors to wonder and awe, a way of touching something otherwise incomprehensible. Santa Claus, I believe, is like that.
No one has ever expressed this truth more movingly and accurately, in my opinion, than the great British Catholic author G.K. Chesterton in an essay years ago in the London Tablet. On Christmas morning, he remembered, his stockings were filled with things he had not worked for, or made, or even been good for.
The only explanation people had was that a being called Santa Claus was somehow kindly disposed toward him. “We believed,” he wrote, that a certain benevolent person “did give us those toys for nothing. And ... I believe it still. I have merely extended the idea.
“Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.
“Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking.
“Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic good will.”
Are not parents of faith blessed, countless times over, to have for their children (and for themselves) such a fantastic and playful bridge to infinite, unconditionally loving Goodness, the Goodness which dreamed up the Christmas event in the first place?
Call Santa Claus a myth or what you will, but in his name parents, and for that matter all of us who give gifts at this special time of the year, are putting each other in deeper touch with the “peculiarly fantastic good will” who is the ultimate Source of it all. Plus, it’s fun!
I hope your friends reconsider.
Readers of long standing will recall that for a few weeks each summer at the family cottage in Quebec, across the Ottawa River from Pembroke, Ontario, where I was born and reared, I attend to a particular project, usually a re-reading of familiar texts...
There is, of course, neither Internet nor television nor newspaper. The last factor is an annual reassurance that there is life after the New York Times. Not, to be sure, that anyone should need to be reassured about that. I would not exaggerate. Life on Allumette Island is not pristine wilderness. There is, for instance, a phone...It is a tradition of more than twenty years that for a couple of weeks George Weigel and his family, now extending to the third generation, are there, and the conspiracies extravagantly attributed to the two of us are plotted in leisurely evenings on the deck accompanied by Jack Daniels, cigars, and sunsets beyond description. This year Rabbi David Novak was not able to make his annual visit, so the further elucidations of the errors of Immanuel Kant will have to wait until next summer.
But back to Charles Dickens. Our daily “newspaper” at the cottage is the Encyclopedia Britannica and, as it happens, the extended article on Dickens is by the inimitable G.K. Chesterton. As you might expect, this is the old fourteenth edition of the Britannica. (I have the even more venerable eleventh edition at the house in New York.) Later, after Sears Roebuck bought the Britannica in 1920 and then gave it to the University of Chicago, it ended up falling into the hands of Mortimer J. Adler, whom I trust God has forgiven for turning it into something of a referential muddle, complete with a “synopticon” based on the 102 “greatest ideas” of history and a complicated compendium of subordinate ideas. The Britannica at the cottage is content to give one material to think about rather than a tutorial on how to think like Mortimer J. Adler. And Chesterton on Dickens gives one much to think about.
"It would have been tempting to really give the hard @ss a piece of your mind. Liturgy is paying off for you.""Liturgy is paying off for you." My guess is the Catholic might say, given that circumstance, "The praying you've been doing is really paying off." The Protestant might say, "That bible-reading or small group you are doing is paying off." Or "the Spirit is working on you."
Love for the poor and the divine liturgy go hand in hand, love for the poor is liturgy. The two horizons are present in every liturgy that is celebrated and experienced in the Church which, by her nature, is opposed to any separation between worship and life, between faith and works, between prayer and charity for the brethren.Defining the poor further, Benedict writes:
We know that other, non-material forms of poverty exist which are not the direct and automatic consequence of material deprivation. For example, in advanced wealthy societies, there is evidence of marginalization, as well as affective, moral and spiritual poverty, seen in people whose interior lives are disoriented and who experience various forms of malaise despite their economic prosperity.
Like Pope Benedict's first Encyclical, this book might too be entitled: God is Love. It is a good corrective to many popular and intellectual images of God that conceive of God as cold, distant, impersonal, and needlessly judgmental...The real task of evangelization today is very much that of trying to evangelize the imagination, of trying to put healthy, life-giving images of God into the popular imagination.Which, if you think about it, is rather amazing isn't it? That is, that we tend to have poor images of God? I don't get the sense that Muslims see God as distant, cold and impersonal despite their conception of God's love being, in my opinion, infinitely poorer than ours given that ours came down to earth and died for us. Assuming what Rolheiser says is true, I'll throw out a bunch of possible reasons and see what sticks:
Of course seeing God as distant and unloving is almost literally the original sin. It was Adam & Eve's seeing God as not having their best interests in mind that led to obeying the serpent instead of God.lingering Deism produced during West's Enlightenment lingering Jansenist heresy Islamic clannish societies produce less alienation and anomie. To some extent we take our image of God from our earthly fathers; fathers in West are devalued and/or distant from their children. The West is suffering-phobic and so God is seen as not a consistent reliever of pain. Lack of prayer Fr. Groeschel says that prosperity, paradoxically, breeds anxiety. (Presumably because once you have it, you could lose it.) Anxiety is an enemy to trust of God.
I hope Sarah Palin is getting a chuckle out of this:When one reporter asked what she would tell New Yorkers who question whether she has the qualifications for the job, Ms. Kennedy, 51, started to respond. But then an aide stopped her from saying more, and led her to the waiting vehicle.“Hopefully I can come back and answer all those questions,” she called out as she got into the S.U.V.
Nice one, New York Times.
"This is such a sad story. Mugabe and his cronies have completely destroyed the entire country in six short years. Now they're culpable in killing off the remaining population -- and the world simply watches as it happens.
Mugabe reminds me of a Metallica song 'King Nothing'"Just want one thing
Just to play the king
But the castle's crumbled
And you're left with just a name
'Where's your crown, King Nothing?'"
For me, the psychology is often in reverse. I learn from seeing what I don’t want and avoiding it, rather than from seeing what I do want and aspiring to it. I have been to many wonderful Christmas parties in the last decade and seen many glorious women behave with dignity and grace. I don’t remember them. It’s the woman in the red dress I won’t forget.
There are stained-glassed windows that adorn an enclosed corner of the building that contains our workplace. Curious things, I thought, curious enough to research. (Though hardly curious enough to interest any readers; label this a self-indulgent post.)
The building was "demolished in November 1974. The stained glass windows were salvaged, put in storage for nearly 30 years, then restored and installed in Walter Hall."
Outside Ewing Hall, early 1900s
Stained glass windows inside hall
Professor Redfield said, “The laws reflect the culture, and the culture is shaped by the lack of laws.”
Reminds me of a country song by Joe Diffie that went:
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die_____________
Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don't wanna go tonight
Fill my boots up with sand, put a stiff drink in my hand
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die...
Just let my headstone be a neon sign
Let it burn in mem'ry of all of my good times
Fix me up with a manequin, just remember I like blondes
I'll be the life of the party even when I'm dead and gone
Prop me up inside the library if I die
Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don't wanna go tonight
Walker Percy and Thomas Mann, put a Kindle in my hand
Prop me up inside the library if I die...
Just let my headstone be a Borders sign
Let it burn in mem'ry of all of my good times
Fix me up with some Shakespeare or maybe "Kubla Kahn"
I'll be the hit of the library even when I'm dead and gone
Prop me up inside the library if I die
Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don't wanna go tonight
Walker Percy and Thomas Mann, put a Kindle in my hand
Prop me up inside the library if I die..
When she broke the news of her lupus to Robert Lowell, in March 1953, she swore that "I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing." Spinning her own life as a parable of a prodigal daughter, forced home against her wishes and finding a consoling gift, she later encouraged the young Southern novelist Cecil Dawkins: "I stayed away [in New York] from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depending on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here."Anecdotes abound, such as this tidbit of what captured her attention on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Cloisters in New York:
In the soft light of the Early Gothic Hall...she was drawn to a four-foot-high statue of Virgin and Child, with both parties "laughing; not smiling, laughing."...What chiefly pixilated her in the sculpture was its artistic sensibility. As she wrote to a friend, "Back then their religious sense was not cut off from their artistic sense.' Embodying a profound spirituality that could accommodate humor, even outright laughter - a recipe she was working toward in her own novel - the statue...was living proof of Maritain's writings on the breadth of expression possible in religious art."And on the issue of faith and mystery, Flannery writes in response to a friend who worried about the challenge of secular learning:
"At one time, the clash of different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith." Instead she suggested a respect for 'mystery,' a term she first applied to illness, but which was increasingly key to her theology. As for the conundrum of predestination and God's punishment, she offered a literary answer: "Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge."Two nitpicks: the author suggests that her final two stories display a development in O'Connor's vision, a development which doesn't appear to be explicitly defined other than a quote referring to a critic saying there was a "mellowing" in her fiction. More on that theme would've been helpful. Also O'Connor's reaction against Communism during the late '40s was labeled as "shrill" and apocalyptic though given the level of death, both spiritual and physical in Stalin's U.S.S.R., her response seems proportionate.
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