Quotables

Rule number one: never read anything theological before bedtime.

I wanted to read Bleak House last night but I simply (cliche ahead!) could not put Cardinal Ratzinger's books down and ended up reading them all night. Technically speaking that is; i.e. past midnight. The way he puts things is so disarmingly honest and explicatory that it's extremely difficult to disengage.

Here are excerpts from Milestones and The Ratzinger Report:

Revelation is not a meteor fallen to earth that now lies around somewhere as a rock mass from which rock samples can be taken and submitted to laboratory analysis. Revelation has instruments; but it is not separable from the living God, and it always requires a living person to whom it is communicated. Its goal is always to gather and unite men, and this is why the Church is necessary aspect of revelation. If, however, revelation is more than Scripture, if it transcends Scripture, then the "rock analysis" - which is to say, the historical-critical method - cannot be the last word concerning revelation; rather, the living organism of the faith of all ages is then an intrinsic part of revelation. And what we call "tradition" is precisely that part of revelation that goes above and beyond Scripture and cannot be comprehended within a code of formulas.
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The Catholicism of my native Bavaria knew how to provide room for all that was human, both prayer and festivities, penance and joy. A joyful, colorful, human Christianity...While Protestantism certainly could give the impression of superiority and greater learning, I was more convinced by the great tradition of the Fathers and medieval masters...Protestantism arose at the beginning of modern times, and thus it is much more closely related to the inner energies which produced the modern age than Catholicism is. It has acquired the form it has today largely in the confrontation with the great philosophical currents of the nineteenth century. It is wide open to modern thought, and, as well as constituting a threat to it, that constitutes both its opportunity and its danger.
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Ratzinger considers that where Protestants and Catholics live side by side, the latter are more in danger of adopting the positions of the former. "Genuine Catholicism", he says, "is a highly sensitive balance, an attempt to unite aspects in life which seem to contradict one another and yet which guarantee the completeness of the Credo."

Perfect. That's it, isn't it? Holding the tension of seemingly contradictory notions makes Catholicism less accessible. "Both/and" is faithful to Scripture, but difficult for the human mind period (let alone in theology, where it is exacerbated by our desire to put God in a box).

Good Fit For Pope Benedict

From Lives of Saints, concerning St. Benedict:

The order which Benedict founded has spread over the earth. It was mainly responsible for the conversion of the Teutonic races...

Book O'licious

Memed by Julie of the winsomely named blog and arguably the most likeable person in St. Blogland. (Speaking of memes, regarding that earlier one about things I "just don't get" I forgot one: the voluminous bedrooms of the 3000+ square foot McMansions that are popular now. You could fit an Olympic-sized pool in some of the master bedrooms. I mean, I can understand a big living room. But bedroom? I don't even want to know what people do in rooms that size.)

Total Number of Books I’ve Owned: Somewhere north of 3,000. Not many by Steven Riddle standards, but enough to encourage rootedness since the thought of moving them leaves me underwhelmed.

Last Book I Bought: Dom Cuthbert Butler's history of the first Vatican Council. (Couldn't find "Thomists Are From Mars, Augustinians from Venus" else I'd probably gotten that.)

Last Book I Read: Mr. Blue – Myles Connolly

5 Books that mean a lot to me: An impossible question. I'll expand it a bit. Since the bible & the catechism are everyone's list I'll assume they transcend the category.

The Correspondence of Walker Percy & Shelby Foote - Tolsen, ed.

Old Thunder – A Life of Hilaire Belloc - Joseph Pearce

Lost in the Cosmos - W. Percy

Sun Dancing - Geoffrey Moorhouse

The Circle Dancers - Diana Der-Hovanessian

Rome Sweet Home - Hahn

The Secret of the Rosary - St. Louis De Monfort

Stonewall Jackson - James Robertson

Movie Review

Saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time over the weekend, which continued my string of not really liking criticially-acclaimed movies. Roger Ebert called it "transcendent". Man I am so jaded.

A short synopsis:

Ape-like humans protect watering hole by performing early rendition of Jane Fonda aerobic routine, complete with whimpy rebel yells that wouldn't even have scared McClellan. One ape discovers the destructive capabilities of a bone and aerobics routine is no longer effective. Moral: ignorance is bliss.

Something buried on Moon. Four million years ago. Very suspicious. Astronauts go to Jupiter.

HAL 9000, a super computer, can read lips. Who knew? Hal discovers that the crew is going to take him out so he takes out the crew first. And you thought the blue screen of death was bad.

Space pod ends up in somebody's living room. That can happen. Astronaut interrupts a man eating. Man looks over his shoulder. Continues eating. Then gets up. It's the astronaut! Then same astronaut is in bed, looking much older. Turns out Kubrick could imagine a lot of stuff in 1968 for 2001 but not the invention of Botox.

At the end, the '60s montage drags a bit. Psychedelic colors - L.S.D. reference? Fortunately, the greatest proof that mankind is progressing - Tivo - allows me to quickly fastforward. A baby in the womb is shown and show's over. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. And stay away from the brown acid kids.

On Pentecost

By Augustine's day Pentecost was a separate liturgical festival, and Augustine understood it as a celebration of an event no less historical than the birth of Christ. In a sermon preached on the day of Pentecost, he says, we are celebrating "the solemnity of a day so holy, that today the Holy Spirit himself came."

- Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought
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The Straight Dope on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.
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Gifts versus fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Good Reads

Reading tames the savage beast - or more likely I need to read if only in order not to feel deprived. Call it a placebo.

Tonight I caught a glimpse of Sen. Bradley’s wife’s memoir and it was greedily consumed. She was born and lived her formative life in Germany (close to the Czech border but at least it’s southern Germany), a country pleasingly foreign and yet not-so-foreign, impregnated as it is with ancestral resonances. It promises to be chockful of Germanic things, a plump memoir meaty with literary allusions (she’s quite the reader).

My ancestors came from "good" places to come from, if I can say that without bias. If living in the Midwest is an impediment to a strong sense of place (New England and the South have much more history and "placeness") then my ancestors are rich in what I lack. Southern Germany is the stuff of novels: the land of the Schwarzvald, castles, and Bavarian solicitude. The other side of the family came from Ireland, home of kings and saints, warriors and poets. I could read about either for quite a while.

TAN Books Update

Evolutionary Exchange

Normally I try to receive permission before posting emails but one takes liberties with blog friends. Steven Riddle is an expert on things paleo, so I asked him about reconciling this quote I happened across a while ago (didn't save the author's name):

"Augustine seems to be the first observer, at least in writing, to have noticed the greed, jealousy, and rage of which the human infant is capable. By pointing out the survival advantages of the infant's relentless self-interest, Mr. Miceli raises a central dilemma that has yet to be addressed by contemporary theology in dealing with original sin: how do we reconcile evolution with Genesis? If these behaviors are not only advantageous but evolutionarily essential, how can they be regarded as products of sin, which entered history only at the moment of our First Parents and which in any event must be eschewed? This question, in essence, constitutes Nietzche's central objection to Christian ethics..."

To which he offered a helpful answer, excerpted partially here:

My answer is that Augustine placed adult interpretations on infant behaviors--he saw rage--was it hunger? He saw jealousy--what was it really? Having a child really changed my perspective on what children are feeling with respect to adults. My little boy spent much of the years from 1-4 in a world with which I had remarkably little contact or understanding. The state of being simply isn't the same. Rage isn't anger at this age it is pain inside, etc. In other words, this is one of those places that I think Augustine was just plain wrong...[But] if I grant that Augustine is right, it still poses no problem for me because somewhere along the line God did intervene and made human beings of an entirely different order of creation than all the rest [since] human beings are the only animals that can choose consistently to act contrary to their own natures.

Ham o' Bone Responds to an Earlier Post

"I now think that the antichrist will be riding a 2054 Hover KX4."

Always so prescient, that Bone. Except for the global depression. :-)

Fictional Friday

"I just got in this to write about it, to experience it. I don't care about being Trump's apprentice," I told my brother at a family gathering. "I'm thinking of just walking off the set. I'm going to get killed in the boardroom. We're down to six and I can't hide anymore. I can't just do a decent job on the tasks and survive by being small. He's going to say, 'you've never been project leader for ten tasks! You've never volunteered for anything! Why are you here?'."

"Just go in there and schmooze and be political. That's what he's looking for."

"You know I can't smooze. A decent handshake is as good as I can manage - after that it's inevitably downhill."

"Look you made it this far-"

"I don't want to trash the family name."

"It'll be more embarrassing to the family if you walk off the set! You don't think they won't spend a lot of air time on that?"

"You may be right but the more I fight in the boardroom the more obvious it will be that I have no case to make and the more ridiculous I'll look."

"You wanted to to experience, to observe, to write. Why would you pass up the boardroom!? Why would you pass on the experience of hearing Donald Trump say, 'You're fired!'? For that reason alone you should go."

"Well, okay. I guess. But it's not going to be pretty... and you're going to be infamous by association!"

"That's what family's for. At least since Adam & Eve.

WFB Review

William F. Buckley reviews Ross Duthat's book "Privilege" about Harvard:

His fine coda tells of the author’s sensitivity and the range of his concern.

“I hope, in the end, that I love Harvard as we should love the world: not because it is good (it is not) but because there is good in it, and things worth fighting for. Perhaps the rest will pass away, until in my memory and the memory of my classmates only the best remains, the beauty of the place and the promise of greatness, a promise that went unfulfilled in my four years but endures nonetheless — as if around another corner, through another ivied gate, there waits the university of our imagination, the Harvard of our unrequited dreams."

Quotable

There are no longer any deep loves or passionate devotions to great causes; expediency and self-interest are too general. Politics and economics are our major interests, and neither can warm the souls of men. Our fires of patriotism, evangelization, and zeal are being reduced to embers. We are cold, dull, and apathetic. One tiny effect of that want of fire is the fact that in our Western world there are but few orators. Most men in public life are readers.

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen

From the latest National Review

Michael Potemra on Pope Benedict's false reputation:

He shows a sensitive appreciation of developments in other denominations, applauding what he sees as “a new vitality” in Protestantism: “The Evangelicals and fundamentalists always used to be typical leaders of the opposition to the papacy. But there have been astonishing changes there, because they can see that the Pope is actually the Rock who asserts before all the world exactly what they confess in opposition to modern versions of watered-down Christianity. So, from a certain point of view, they see the Pope as their strong ally, even though their old reservations have not been cleared away. . . . What we dare to hope for we should await confidently, but with great patience.” Lest this be misinterpreted as a belief that Protestants will be simply absorbed into Roman Catholicism, Ratzinger says, “The formula that the great ecumenists have invented is that we go forward together. It’s not a matter of our wanting to achieve certain processes of integration. . . . [The Catholic Church] will allow herself to be educated and led by the Lord.”...

He shows the same basic generosity of spirit in miniature, when he discusses Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin leader who condemned Jesus and has been presented as a pure villain throughout much of history: “As high priest, Caiaphas is responsible for the faith of Israel. Naturally it doesn’t occur to him that he might really be condemning the living Son of God to death. He sees in Jesus someone who has done injury to the very heart of the Jewish creed, the belief in one God, by the presumptuous claim to be himself God’s Son. And, certainly, he does this in a state of blindness, unable to perceive the mystery; his faith is encapsulated in a formula. We ought not to be too ready to condemn him, since in some way he believes, of course, that he is acting responsibly on behalf of religion.”...

After making his way through these books, the reader may be hungry for graduate-level Ratzinger — for example, his 1968 book Introduction to Christianity, a meditation on the Apostles’ Creed. Here he writes of an adult faith in which doubt and belief coexist:

Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. . . . [Man exists] in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction.

Meme Me Up Scotty

The young & talented Enbrethiliel has tagged me. Five things about which I ask 'what's the big deal?'.

1) American Idol. Never seen it, but it appears to have a cult-like following. Perhaps it's unfair to have something on the list I haven't personally tried but...

2) Jazz music. Blues I can get into, but jazz gets under my skin. Bad jazz is worse - Kenny G music would get me to talk at Guantanamo.

3) Bingo. I wrote a post a couple weeks about it. One could also put in this category Las Vegas, which I know I'll have to visit some day if only to try to understand the fuss.

4) American Express credit card. Let's see...you have to pay for the right to carry their card? Am I missing something?

5) Longaberger Basketry - every year there's a convention that takes place downtown not far from where I work. I see thousands heading to convene on all things Longaberger. It's one of the most inexplicable things I've ever seen. To each his own as they say.

Evolution of a Blogger

Despite appearances to the contrary you just don't become a blogger over night. It takes years of practice and preparation. You have to earn your spot in the trenches of complete anonymity in order to earn a shot at near complete anonymity. Here was my path to blogging greatness:

Pre-1990:
I cut my teeth on poetry. A sample began:

Bad poetry,
Ain't kilt no one yet.

1990-1998:

Something called Profs Notes was the preferred corporate communication before Lotus Notes. In the days of Profs, fellow conscriptees would pass notes under the barrack walls, bonding over our shared juvenility. [Warning, rough language ahead.] Example:

"In one of the ironies of [this company] you might notice when next riding the 'vadors [elevators] that if you say only the first syllable of every other word in the phrase that appears therein, namely, "Press alarm button for assistance." you get 'Press butt ass', a bit redundant I know."

Reply by fellow conscript: "Hmmmmmmm, and if you say only the first syllable of every word, you get 'Press all butt for ass.' Seems kinda' blatenly obvious, eh?"

Reply by another conscript: "If you get on the elevators at [company name] and say out loud what I am usually thinking, you will get "f*ck. f*ck. F*CK.!!!"

1998-Present:

Began a private journal. Equal parts exaggeration and lamentation with a twist of self-pity. Shaken, not stirred. Example:

[On moving from the first home I'd owned]: My house is like a gunfighter, making his last stand. He’s there with his Colt rifle, standing in the aging sun, a bit sad that it has to come to this. I’m a bit sad, too, in that all the creature-comforts I’ve built up will be ripped suddenly and new ones will have to be stitched in the garment of life. The comforts I think of include the short drive to work, the cavernous book room downstairs, the 2-minutes to Kroger, the ancient and crusty (pun noted) Antolino’s pizza tradition...Yes, I can’t kid myself, it will be tough. I’m ready though, and now I freefall like Van Halen, singing ‘might as well jump’.
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We discussed the relative value of suffering for Christians, whether the Red Sox will ever win a World Series (speaking of suffering), whether the French film Ham rented was a ‘ship movie (short for relationship, i.e. chick flick), the best place to put one’s money during the coming global depression (metals vs cash), the best way to allocate one’s lunch money, whether the anti-Christ will drive an S.U.V. (me taking the con, Ham the pro), how to get rich by checking friend’s couch cushions, the best way to drink a Guinness (four opposing fingers to thumb), the healthiness of watching too many X-files, Mr Boo’s last vowell movement, and whether either of us could come up with an oxymoron using the word "oxymoron". (More journal excerpts here.)

One of the things I like about blogging is the low expectations. It's something we can be good at. Let's face it, we don't really have to worry about the Peter Principle in blogland.

And generally I like what I'm good at. I like playing basketball more than baseball because I'm much better at it. I chose a career for similar reasons (or at least my reviews are good). But the rub is that what I did not choose - to be a Christian - is also what I'm not particularly good at. For once I can't alter the playing field to my own advantage. That that bothers me goes to pride of course.