Out o' the Loop

I think it was the late '90s when William F. Buckley admitted he'd never heard of the television show Friends. My admiration of him grew.

I bring this up because my screenwriting friend Ham of Bone called and said the deterioration of popular culture has been swifter than we'd imagined, probably because we are increasingly disconnected from it. Bone and I are getting to play that "old fogey" role we'd admired from afar -- elitists not through effort but by standing still while the culture collapses around us. A sort of accidental competence. Competence by walking around.

Bone submitted three plays for an annual contest that Matt Damon sponsors and part of the entry requirement is a "peer review". Which means that for every one he submits he has to read three.

He says they stink. Woefully. One was a period piece set in 1928 and it's "f--k this" and "f--k that", a six year old child uses the Lord's name in vain, another uses the term no-brainer (which sounds anachronistic to me but I may be wrong). Another screenplay sounds like a beer commercial: "...and three hotties open an ice cold beer and they get splashed by a wave which glistened against their chests..." The screenplays are supposed to be PG13, so how does a menage à trois fit?

I told him that if the culture declines much more we'll look pretty good by comparison. "But who will read?" he said. Good point. A decent blacksmith isn't too useful these days.

Cardinal Ratzinger on the Modern Mind

Link via Bill of Random Notes

One of the standard questions hovering about the intellectual world since the crisis of Marxism has been, "where does the intellectual left go next, especially if it refuses to consider orthodoxy?" The obvious, most likely answer, I think, is that it goes in the direction of ecology and environmentalism insofar as these all-embracing systems provide an apparently plausible, natural justification to reduce the relative importance of man's individual dignity in the name of a planetary or worldly, if not cosmic, "good". This postulated inner-worldly transcendent good is proposed in the name of the on-going cycles of nature and of the good of the living "species" within it. This higher "good" becomes the criterion by which we judge how many people we can have in each country or on the earth, how long they can live and under what conditions, what they can or cannot consume, what is their relation to the state. Indeed, it is not the state but the world state, which, since it is said to have the exclusive responsibility to look out for the distant future, can control the present in its name. "Progress" is replaced as an ideal by "stability". This simultaneous relativizing of the dignity of the human person and of the consequent justification for the vast expansion of the state has provided a handy way to replace or rather incorporate the Marxist ideology that formerly justified these inner-worldly goals...

*
In the light of the appeal to Christians and non-Christians alike of Marxism, relativism, and New Age movements, Ratzinger asks, now addressing himself to the intellectuals in the Church, "Why has classical theology appeared to be so defenseless in the face of these happenings? Where is its weak point, and why has it lost credibility?"..... Their [historical critical] method reduces the reality they study to its (the method's) proportions. Ratzinger puts this position into words: "If I know a priori (to speak like Kant) that Jesus cannot be God,. and that miracles, mysteries and sacraments are three forms of superstition, then I (the exegete with this philosophy) cannot discover what cannot in fact be in the sacred books." My philosophical theory has prevented me from seeing what might be there. What I see is my theory, not the reality. Ratzinger does not deny that there is value in the "historical-critical" method. Generally, if it is used to study the history of the Roman emperors, say, it works fine. When the method is used of the Bible, two problems arise. The method wants to find out about the "past as something past." History further is said to be "uniform." This means that all instances of a given type will be judged to be the same on the basis not of fact but of theory. The method brings us to the past, not to the present.

Secondly, the world in theory must be held to be always the same. The method requires this. The crisis of exegesis is a crisis of the philosophical presuppositions that guide its method by which it reaches conclusions such as that Jesus did not affirm His own divinity. "The problem of exegesis is connected ... with the problem of philosophy. The indigence of philosophy ... has turned into the indigence of our faith. The faith cannot be liberated if reason itself does not open up again." Reason, in other words, knowing itself, must see that it is grounded in what is, over which it has no control. What is controls what we know and not vice versa. The exclusion any reality, however, is contrary to the object of reason itself . "Human reason is not an autonomous absolute." Ratzinger thinks that scholastic philosophy in the Twentieth Century in a sense failed because it tried to do the impossible, that is, provide a totally rational ground of the faith that a priori excluded the possibility of faith's openness to reason.

Yet, it was reality, not reason, that decided that to which reason was open. And reality included the reality of God and His activity in time. Faith cares for and about reason. "It is not the lesser function of the faith to care for reason as such. It does not do violence to it; it is not external to it; rather, it makes it return to itself." Thus, faith can liberate reason from itself by asking it questions that it could not itself have anticipated, yet about which it can consider. "Reason will not be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will not be human."

Enjoyed This...

....a little too much. Driving all the St. Blog gals wild isn't enough for our man Bill, who now is extending his charismatic influence to a lady named Jennifer.

Kathy Shaidle's book...

..."God Rides a Yamaha" is excellent so far. She writes, "I am...increasingly convinced that living well requires fewer 'deep thoughts' and more simple acts." She also quotes Thomas Merton and although I'm not fit to carry his (what's the spiritual equivalent of jock strap?), I just never quite trust him after reading his last journals and seeing how his spiritual journey progressed, given the promise and beauty and hope as portrayed in "The Seven Storey Mountain". The tendency is to think his theology must've been askew.

Still the truth of his words ring out:

The mind finds itself entering uneasily into the shadows of a strange and silent night...It tries to force acts of thought and will. Sometimes it makes a mad effort to squeeze some feeling of fervor out of itself which is, incidentally, the worst thing it could possibly do.

If he is completely inexperienced he will get the idea that he is very holy because of all the holy feelings that are teeming in his heart. All these things mean very little or nothing at all...and there is only an accidental difference between them and the tears children sometimes shed when they go to the movies.

Yet I wonder about this cavalier attitude towards feelings. Crisis has a nice piece by Alice von Hildebrand, who argues that despite what some may say feelings play an important part in the life of a Christian. Even though feelings arise outside the will, the will is involved in disregarding inappropriate ones such as envious thoughts, and fully receiving healthy ones, like contrition and joy. She sees the will and feelings as a "marriage". There is much more in the article, very interesting and nuanced, but unfortunately it isn't online. It's one of those articles I wish wiser people than me would blog about.

Haiti

I was cruising, literally, on the fringe of the idyllic island of Hispaniola, the westward part owned by Haiti, on January 23. Two weeks later began a coup. A successful one as it turned out. Royal Caribbean has naturally cancelled all stops there.

It's difficult to accept mystery and to accept when there is no answer. And no answers seem forthcoming for Haiti and her helpless poverty, an Africa writ small. The coup probably gives the people some hope, a hope most of the world community surely thinks naive but will politely keep to itself. It seems if we could ever find a way to nation-build Haiti, the international community could do the same in Africa, if the will was there.

It apparently is so difficult for democracy to take root that it's easy to be pessimistic how successful it will be in Iraq.

   Spanning the Proverbial Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts
                -(the weekly feature where I become instantly unpopular with those not quoted herein)

I won't say that I'm going to stop blogging during lent. I tried that once, and ended up as SecretAgentMan. But that's my goal, and anyhow I'm going to blog a lot less than I have been until Easter. -Secret Agent Man

...a natural conversational pattern applies as much to God as to your spouse or co-worker....But of course stream-of-consciousness monologues are not conversations. A few seconds to center myself, two minutes of headline news, three minutes of listening to God's silent whispers. That sounds like a schedule I could stick to. - Tom of Disputations

Remember the admonition is not "Listen Lord, your servant is speaking," but rather, "Speak Lord, your servant is listening." -Steven Riddle

This sounds dramatic, but this is the first time in my life that I have smiled in the middle of a desire or a craving and said "I join my puny little suffering with Your enormous pain, done in love for me, my Lord!" And I don't even feel self-congratulatory about it (except maybe now, since I'm typing it out). This is a RADICAL change for me.... A new place, a new desert, has opened before me, a place for real change, real purification. And that darn movie did it for me, that is, God's Grace working through that movie. I'm pretty excited, because I know for sure that growing in virtue means growing in prayer, and I just plain can't wait. -Therese Z. of Santificarnos

When I was in the queue for ashes, I heard Fr. O'Brien saying two different things, depending on whom he was giving the ashes. To grown ups was he said, "Turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel." To the little ones he was saying, "Try to be good for Jesus." When my turn came, however, Fr. O'Brien said something different. He took one look at me, smiled in his understated Irish way, and said, "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." There is no way to say how much that meant to me...the theme of [Dietrich von Hildebrand's "The New Tower of Babel"] is that we must never forget that we are creatures--that is, we must never forget that we are dust and that we shall return to dust. When we forget our condition as creatures--and the necessity of the attitude of religion --we curse ourselves. - Enbrethiel of Sanctis

As I have always understood it, the practice of Lenten abstention is "the mortification of the flesh". That is, giving something--anything--up during Lent is good to the extent that it is difficult, because giving up something difficult helps kill the earthly desires for that thing, and those desires, even for dessert, are perilous to the extent that our appetites for them distract us from the One True Appetite. -Kairos Guy

I don't even look for the GIdeons anymore, since there is also often a Book of Mormon in the same place and position of honor. Maybe we need to have a campaign to place the CCC in every hotel room! - Alicia of Fructris Ventris

"An ounce of morning is worth a pound of afternoon."....the more I do around the house, the more I care. In homemaking, as in marriage, feelings follow actions. -Kathy of GospelMineField

Evangelicals know that there is "Power in the Blood". So do Catholics. After all, the blood, the selfsame blood that is splattered all over the scourgers at the Pillar, is the blood that we drink on the altar. We say in earnest, what the mob said in unconscious irony: "May his blood be on us and on our children." I pray that prayer will be granted me and my children all the days of our lives. So do Evangelicals.... [Gibson] has no trouble with that identification between the blood on the floor of the guardroom and the blood in the chalice. So we are shown the scene in which Mary blots up the blood of Christ with towels just as a Catholic would blot the spilled Precious Blood with a purificator...Don't feel too smug about the Sullivans of the world recoiling in horror from [the Cross]. If you don't recoil, you haven't thought about the implications of the gospel. I *hope* that, should it be necessary, I can someday be willing to endure what the gospel has cost some of our brothers and sisters--and supremely, our Lord. But I don't know if I could. I fervently pray I shall never have to find out. - Mark Shea

The violence inflicted on Jesus is horrendous, and I found it numbing. Why is that? Is it because the critics are right, and my conscience is reacting to the prurient sadism behind what Jim Cork's critic of choice, Michael Coren, calls a "pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic blood cult"? I thought Coren's line was silly on several levels, the most obvious one being that none of the documents of Vatican II preach that Jesus' crucifixion was a decorous, bloodless affair that could only be viewed from a distance and was all over in five minutes. I also had to shake my head because cult means "the service expressly offered to God through sacred signs and inward dispositions of adoration, praise, thanksgiving, and petition for forgiveness, salvation, and earthly well-being which acknowledge God's supreme power." (K. Rahner). So yeah, you could say we're a blood cult. I for one am proud of it. I'm sorry it scandalizes weak sisters like Michael Coren. I'm sorry it's too much for a lot of people. But we're a blood cult. We worship Holy Blood. We drink Holy Blood. We adore Holy Blood which is glorious, not only for its other mystical and magnificent divinity, but for the fact that it was shed in torture for our sins and our redemption. As far as I'm concerned anyone who -- like the Romans who crucified Jesus -- is shocked at the gruesome cannibalistic atmosphere they find in all that can go soak themselves in oh-so-spiritual readings of John Chapter 6 and imaginary depictions of Jesus as a cartoon character whose feet never touched the earth. Let them squirm at the idea of God's chest hair matted with sweat, dirt under His nails, rubbing gritty sleep from his eyes. Let them stop their ears at the thought of Him screaming in pain and gasping for breath. We love the God-Man entire. His divinity, His humanity, and everything they did and underwent. We even love His blood, especially His blood. - Secret Agent Man

I'm excited by the immediacy and freshness and personal quality of blogs. I also like the bad words and knife fights, even if we don't do that kind of stuff around here. I don't own a shiv, and Our Girl is too sweet. (I don't even think she knows some of those words TMFTML uses.) Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here. "We" meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It’s not a private party. There’s no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do. - Terry Teachout of About Last Night

flesh covers/ the bone and the/ flesh searches/ for more than/ flesh. - Charles Bukowski, via Lee Ann of Spinisters

You can divide Christians by what aspect of Jesus they focus on: life/teachings, death, and resurrection. Those in the first group are nearly all liberal, those in the second nearly all conservative, the third can go either way. At least, that's my anecdotal, highly unproven observation... - Camassia

First, I’m glad [The Passion of the Christ] exists, for a lot of reasons. It reinvents and reinvigorates the genre of the Biblically-based film and gives new life to films that seek to take spirituality seriously. Why? First of all, because it’s fearless. That, of course, is what drains the life of any potential treatment of faith-related issues on film: fear. Fear of bad box office, fear of offending the wrong people. Drains the life out of any film, any work of art, as a matter of fact. - Amy Welborn

Is This Horse Glue Yet?

I'm not a Jew, although I play one in the Church, since I've been grafted on. As David Warren put it,

He made us all into Jews, in choosing us to take up his Cross. This is what Christians believe. The world will take it or leave it. God, according to Christian witness, could only have become Man as a Jew, in a most unexpected fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies to the Jews. And he entered into the heart of the old Temple sacrifice, becoming that sacrifice, Himself.

So my tendency is to think that Christian anti-Semites are eejits. I understand that objects intended for a certain use will be misused. So for the same reason we have a warning label on the plastic bag our newspaper comes in ("Do not place over your head. Suffocation could result."), we have to have disclaimers on Gibson's movie. Where, pray tell, will it end though? Car accidents kill people. Shouldn't we eliminate all automobiles?

We Don't Talk

From an article on the approaching extinction of half of the world's 6,000+ languages currently spoken: "In peril is not just knowledge but also the importance of diversity and the beauty of grammar. They will tell you that every language has its own unique theology and philosophy buried in its very sinews..." 'Yaghan' is a language spoken by only two speakers in southern Chile. The author spoke to one of them:

She was a kind old woman whose Yaghan, according to Aguilera, was authentic. Our conversation was brief and brittle. When I asked Emelinda what could be done to keep Yaghan alive, she said she was already doing it, as if a formal program were under way.

''I talk to myself in Yaghan,'' Emelinda explained in Spanish. ''When I hang up my clothes outside, I say the words in Yaghan. Inside the house, I talk in Yaghan all day long.'' I asked her if she ever had a conversation with the only other person in the world who could easily understand her, Cristina Calderón, the official ''last speaker'' of Yaghan.

''No,'' Emelinda said impatiently, as if I'd brought up a sore topic. ''The two of us don't talk.''

Passion of the Christ Thoughts

Two questions. First, is part of the hysteria by cultural critics of TPOTC due to their realization that in a post-modern, post-reason age rule by emotion is, in fact, the future? So is this part of why they posture against Gibson's emotional movie? Apparently fear of a theocracy among the Left is very strong, despite decades of secularization.

Second, what impact has TPOTC had on your ability to visualize and meditate on the Sorrow Mysteries of the rosary?

Update: The violence wasn't nearly as bad as I'd imagined it would be. I guess I'm desensitized even though I never watch horror movies. (Never seen any of the Friday the 13th or Hannibal movies for example.)

Just after the movie ended, two boys in their late teens walked out disappointed, grumbling that it wasn't nearly as violent as they'd hoped. So I guess this is one of those "eye-of-the-beholder" type movies. I thought Braveheart was more horrific, maybe because while I have grown up around the idea of crucifixion (i.e. the Stations of the Cross a yearly event), the idea of drawing and quartering was more foreign and so created a more visceral reaction.

What if there were an Onion-equivalent for college student newspapers.... hmmm.....

Local Man Misses Class
BOSTON—John "No" Qualms blew off his 8:30 Introduction to Stochastic Systems class.

"I didn't feel like going because that last beer didn't sit with me too well last night. I probably had one more than I should've, but I'd already opened the bottle and I didn't want it to go to waste."

When asked how many beers he'd had he said he hadn't counted, calling it a "gauche question".


Trustees Increase Tuition
LANSING—The Board of Trustees for AlmaMaw U. raised tuition by 8.5% citing fears that "the college down the road" will raise tuition by 8%.

"We want to get ahead of the curve here. Consumers rate the quality of a university by its price, and we want to be in the vanguard. Besides, textbook prices are increasing at an astronomical rate."

When reminded that textbooks are not included in the price of tuition, the Board President said, "oh, yeah, well lots of things are going up. You ought to see our landscaping bill."

Economics major Jan Deck sees no problem in the increase.

"It's the market reacting as it should. The value of a college education has been shown to be two million dollars in increased salary over a lifetime. This means the price of a college education wants to reach $50,000 a year, the discounted present value of two million dollars. Mom and Dad - if you're reading this remember you're getting a steal," she said, while sipping an Arabian Mocha Sanani.

From the Poem Silo...

The Creek Bed

wash out mess of stones reds yellows oblong and sheltering
quivering in the panned stream, panned wan with whip-strikes
sanded by years of water, cool, seasonal
wash mints glint-sunned made redder
greener, bluer by ever-flowing water
a surface of Sturm und Drang dragged
by passing trunks and prospecting kids.

Pass the Corn

The Irish backbroke on canals
from which sprang farmhouses
where nary a potato was grown.

Uprising

little upsidedown roots
green, stud the barren earth, last year’s
bulbs sprying even themselves.

KTC Alert

Kathy asks for prayers.

Can Anything Good Come Out of Suburbia?

Apparently this new literary star has. He writes of alienation without, on the surface, being alienated:

I was trying to get him to talk about why his characters tended to be so much older than he is and so cut off. ''You of all people,'' I said. ''You've got your family, your friends, you're close to your in-laws. . . . ''

''Well, like all writers, I feel like I have this other, inner life,'' he said. ''I've always felt like I should be somebody else -- I should be more brash or ambitious, or I don't know. I feel like I've got a lot of secrets. I don't, but I feel like I do.''

Riddle Me This....

Can someone tell me why there is this unholy alliance between Rad Trads and anti-Semitism, ala Gibson's father? What is the connection between a fealty to the Latin Mass and denying the Holocaust?

Urgent Pork Slicing Ahead

One of our corporate Values (capital "v") is that we have a "sense of urgency". This is no problem for me; I always have a sense of urgency, except when it comes to things I don't want to do.

But isn't a sense of urgency in some way part of the problem of our modern society, the inability not only to set aside contemplative time but to do things in a contemplative manner? Is our company Value really a value?

I say this because I was waiting in the lunch line, watching our friendly cafeteria worker painstakingly cut the pork roast. With great patience (not slowness...I think there is a difference), he cut each slice as if he were cutting it for Christ. Now as much as I appreciate a finely cut piece of pork, I was wishing that he do his contemplative thing on his own time.

I'm certainly not making fun of his job - my job is similar to his in import - I'm just musing. Contemplatively.