Good summary found in a tweet:
How God prepared the world for Christ:
Greek reason + Hebrew faith + Roman order
This is what Providence used to prepare the world to receive Jesus Christ.
These cultures, due to the Incarnation, have a unique, unrepeatable effect on humanity.
Greek reason and Hebrew faith began a dialogue hundreds of years prior to Christ.
In sum, Greek reason coupled with Hebrew faith under Roman order tilled the earth for the coming of Jesus Christ. As St. Paul teaches, our Lord came in the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4).
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Yep, from Christopher Caldwell:
"Both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were conservatives confident enough in the loyalty (or gullibility) of their conservative base to govern as liberals— domestically at least. Bill Clinton, similarly, held onto lunchpail Democrats while governing on behalf of investors. Barack Obama held onto blacks while governing for billionaires. It was at best a paradox, at worst a trick: why appeal to your own people by pursuing the policy they elected you to pursue if they'll vote for you anyway out of loyalty? Better to pursue the policies of your adversaries and win a few of them by persuasion. In America, it worked for individual politicians, who— except for the first President Bush —were out of power by the time the public caught on. But eventually it cost the entire political class the trust of the electorate. That happened to the United States in 2016. It is happening to Germany now."
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Provocative quote found elsewhere:
“The purpose of illegal immigration is to facilitate a transfer of wealth from labor to capital.By increasing the supply of labor, wages fall. The crucial part of this dynamic to understand is that all of the economic gains go to the top (ie, capital). They are NOT evenly distributed among the native population, and in fact, illegal immigration actually harms the native population, both economically and socially.”
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Interesting to read Jim Rickards, who teaches financial warfare at US Army College in Pennsylvania, give a short history of how England lost her empire (beginning with the worldwide general reserve currency, the pound sterling).
All was well until November 1914 when the sterling started going down. WWI had started in August. Britain had been selling stocks to acquire gold, since they knew they needed gold to fight the war.
Keynes said, “We’re not going to win the war with money, we’re not going to win the war with gold, we’re going to win the war with credit. Your ability to borrow will determine the ability to win the war. And by staying on the gold standard we can secure credit.”
But they needed lots of stuff - agricultural supplies, clothing, weapons, metals - so they bought them from United States, causing the gold to start flowing to US and while it took awhile - some 30 years - the sterling was no longer the reserve currency as of July 1944.
He said that the world cannot destroy the US dollar but the U.S. can, and that’s what we’re doing and Ukraine is a part of it thanks to our sanctions. If you keep hitting countries with economic sanctions and using your reserve currency as a weapon, eventually countries will leave the room rather than risk being punched.
He was prescient in Jan 2022: He said the U.S. will throw everything at Russia and the Russia economy will do just fine. “Any oil not sold to Europe will be sold to China and India. They’ll ramp up their industrial base and the sanctions will mean almost nothing to them. The ruble is strong, they have labor shortages from growth, don’t need to import weapons by building them themselves, and have expanded the BRICs.”
He says the good news is it’s not too late to reverse the move away from dollar as a reserve asset.
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Part of the difficulty of Christian churches highlighting injustice is it’s a large playing field. The easy cases are lethal attacks on humans (abortion) or what it means to be human (transsexual idiocy). The lawlessness of our “justice” system seems to get a pass.
I get that the Constitution is not a religious document but the shredding of it will lead to more direct attacks on civil liberties, freedom of speech and religion.
The church can’t fight every injustice and you can’t really highlight the J6rs and the weaponization of government against them when we didn’t highlight the injustices against Muslims involving human right abuses at Gitmo, the Patriot Act, and the no fly lists targeting innocent Muslims.
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I amuse myself. The chaos in the Church that Francis promised (he did, after all, say he wanted to “make a mess”) led me to borrow from Trump when after Muslim terrorists killed fourteen in California he said he was going to call for a shutdown of Muslims entering the country until they could figure out what’s going on. I commented, “God’s going to call for a total and complete shutdown of the Catholic Church until bishops can figure out what the hell is going on.” The great Zmirak, no less, “liked” it.
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I watched a video that makes our life in the West seem even more precarious: we literally ride along on God’s providence. Tucker Carlson and Dennis Quaid recently talked about the power grid and how a simple sun flare, as happened in 1859 (that wiped out telegraphs), would be lethal in a modern electrical environment.
There are plenty of reasons both manmade and of the "God chastisement” variety that augur not smooth sailing ahead. The combination of our elites actively working for our destruction along with the people abandoning God is not a good one. You wonder how long we can dance along the precipice without falling over into wars, depression, and chaos. It’s been a pretty miraculous run, from the end of WW2 till now, given the presence of nuclear weapons. But the big problem is faith has eroded since the 1970s and quickly since around 2004, which cannot go unanswered by either God or natural consequences. Congress members are swearing their oath of office not on a Bible but on comic strips or worse. How can there be an oath before God without God?
So we’re all hanging on a precipice, and so “to work or not to work” is far less important than listening to what work God has for us, not what work man has for us. And the challenge is to never slight the work of prayer and liturgy.
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To paraphrase a famous quote, ask not how the Roman Empire fell, it falls for thee today. The things that seemed puzzling to me as a kid - how could a fabulous wealthy and militarily successful nation like Rome fall to a bunch of half-naked barbarians? Well, we see an image of that in our own time when a bunch of cave-dwelling Taliban folks kicked us out of Afghanistan.
Or another small example: experts say that to strengthen our electrical grid would cost about $100 billion. Which is about what we sent to Ukraine. I suppose empires fall due to neglect and misplaced priorities.
Eric Metaxas linked to a study showing that serious Christians in Germany in 1930 voted against Hitler and shallow Christians voted for him. Which is another way of saying fix religious devotion and you’ll fix politics. Eric thinks we need to be involved in politics but that study shows, to some extent, that it probably won’t work. Were strong Christians going to be able to “persuade” weak Christians to vote against Hitler in 1930? Admittedly, they didn’t try very hard but still… And Eric would probably argue strong Christians could’ve made it infinitely harder for Nazis to accrue power had they acted in a more political manner, ala Bonhoeffer.
The problem with focusing on politics is it doesn’t feel too much in the early Christian tradition. Jesus, after all, seemed entirely uninterested in the goings on of the Romans and their empire. And he taught that very small things, like the widow’s mite, the mustard seed, and the five loaves and two fish have far greater impacts that world historical events.
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Today’s first reading trimmed some of the more interesting parts. The sin of Eli’s sons was disrespect concerning the sin offerings to God, i.e. proper worship. A verse from 1 Samuel goes, “sins can be mediated when committed against people, but if committed against God?”. Blasphemy as the unforgivable sin. A commentary:
“The Ark of the Covenant's disappearance happens in the context of wars against the Philistines. Here we see that the death of Eli and his sons, the capture of the ark, and the defeat of the people—all this is due to the sins of the sons of Eli. God just could not let their sin go unpunished, and he imposed a punishment so severe that Phinehas’ wife had good reason to exclaim, ‘The glory has departed from Israel’ .
