From Today's [Byzantine Rite] Gospel Reading...

It seems indicative of the greatness of the gospel over law that Abraham says to the rich man in torment who wants Lazarus to go back to warn his brothers: "If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead." (Luke 16:25-30)

Abraham seems to be saying, in effect, that the Old Covenant is enough to be saved, that Moses and prophets ought be sufficient. "Though someone should rise from the dead" is an allusion to Jesus, but fortunately Christ did not see his mission as hopeless or useless or unpersuasive. The Incarnation and Resurrection are illustrations of God going beyond what we, who often act like the rich man, deserve. If Jesus took Abraham's approach, he could've said to us that we have Moses and the prophets and we have no need for Him to die and rise.

Some might read that parable in a Pharisiac way: that if you don't do x,y,z then it's your own fault and you deserve whatever punishment you might receive. But thank God for the hope of mercy. Jesus came to earth even for the deaf and hard of heart, for me and Chris Hitchens, for the rich man and his brothers.

The Search for the "Experienced Innocent"

Adam and Eve were created innocent but longed for the knowledge of good and evil. They wanted it both ways, to be knowledgeable and innocent, and thus it ever has been. There is a great charisma in those who combine the two, such as many a saint, because it's so characteristic of God. It's interesting to see atheist Christopher Hitchens associate that with Marcel Proust: "To be so perceptive and yet so innocent — that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust." Hitchens ascribed that same ability to Shakespeare and George Eliot.

A bestseller a few years back was titled How Proust Can Save Your Life. Shelby Foote, another non-believer, treated Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as his scripture, having read the whole thing nine times during his lifetime. Is Proustphilia a subliminal search for God?

Update: That sounded a tad unfair to Marcel, so the obligatory disclaimers apply: what I know about Proust's work can be contained in a small handbag, and the number of things that can be used as subliminal substitutes for God are myriad.

Iraqaphobia   - or only taxes & troops are forever

On This Week today, George Will made the remark that it's cold comfort, but conservatives like and appreciate market forces, and market forces are in play in the upcoming election. He says that supply and demand suggests that there is a great demand for fresh thinking on Iraq and it's hard to see Will's comment as inaccurate.

I had the opportunity to hear pollster/pundit Charles Cook speak the other day about how the upcoming Republican debacle in the mid-terms appears to be of historic dimensions. He compared it to a force of nature, a tornado, and that seems an apt analogy since there is an element of irrationality about it: good people are being thrown overboard just because they are, in his words, "wearing the red jersey".

A lesson politicians (we the people?) never learn and it is that it is only with great difficulty that you can ever retire a tax or withdraw your troops. Just can't do it. Thus Bill Clinton promised a withdraw of troops from Bosnia within six months. We're still there. And we're still in Korea. And Afghanistan. The difference is we're not incurring as many casualties in those places, but the lesson remains: it is far easier to go to war or enact a tax then to end a war or halt a tax. It would be far more surprising if we didn't have troops in Iraq now than otherwise.

Zeit Journal

From the Atlantic:

Nabokov wrote in America, as he touches a stone on a bridge on the night his wife has died:

I had never touched this particular knob before and shall never find it again. This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late. In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments; paying perhaps terrific fines, but stopping the train. Say, why did you do it? the popeyed conductor might ask. Because I liked the view. Because I wanted to stop those speeding trees and the path twisting between them. By stepping on its receding tail. What happened to her would perhaps not have happened, had I been in the habit of stopping this or that bit of our common life, prophylactically, prophetically, letting this or that moment rest and breathe in peace. Taming time. Giving her pulse respite. Pampering life, life—our patient.

Of the summer past a memory lingers: my wife floating in a thirty-dollar blow-up pool under the gilt sun. She, normally active as a perpetual motion machine, made the whole day somnolent by her somnolence. The present moment was halted.

Flash forward to an aging October. A weakened but unbowed sun visited one afternoon and we all went on a hike, including darling Lilliputians with wits more sure than promissory notes. Oh but the joys of friendship are disproportionate! And like a salve was the back-and-forth, to-and-fro, the easyness of it, the finishings of each other sentences, the inside jokes. The lilliputians spoke of fantastical pippsiehorses, an evolution of the term "pixie horse" in a children film. "Now," she said, "I can at last understand your hillybilly talk," after he read from a park sign explaining the derivation of a forest obscurity. “Talk slowly” being the knee-jerk reaction to hearing a sudden reference of an erotic nature, I was glad he gave me the opening after he drawled ‘nymph’ in his recital.

NRO's Jonah Goldberg says...

Iraq Was a Worthy Mistake

Balm of the Psalms

Happened across Psalm 73 the other day:

“Though I tried to understand all this, it was too difficult for me, Till I entered the sanctuary of God and came to understand their end.”

…and how true that so often the things that are completely un-understandable become understandable during Eucharistic Adoration or Mass.

“Since my heart was embittered and my soul deeply wounded, I was stupid and could not understand; I was like a brute beast in your presence. Yet I am always with you; you take hold of my right hand.”

Oh the Psalmist is a gift to us because he is not so holy that we cannot relate to him! How wonderful that God set down before us someone likewise confused and groping. A great comfort indeed.

Mid-Fall The air has the wistful quality of foreshortened time variable as a kite and prone to morning sickness; Quisp’d of quickened draft, pregnant with Old Man Winter. For S.A.D's, the light alley narrows to the size of European streets; For OCDs the leaf clutter mars clean-shaven forest floors. Meantime every seventy-degree day holds the promise of being the last, prompting impromptu celebrations of the narrowing of winter’s girth.

Whereupon I Torture Myself By Reading the Dispatch

Here's a great way to have it both ways if you're a newspaper that wants to appeal to liberal and conservative readers.

You endorse the Republican candidate but support him for all the wrong reasons. You support him by saying he brings a ton of pork to the district. In other words, if you bring home more benefits than your constituents give to Washington then you're a hero.

And that's precisely the problem with politics today. Everyone wants something for nothing. Fifty U.S. senators trying to rob from the treasury or at least get a better deal than their neighboring state. No wonder we run deficits.

One of the paper's columnists mentions that Ohio has an unemployment rate a full point above the national average. We're supposed to be horrified. But southeast Ohio is part of Appalachia and has chronically sky-high unemployment rates. After adjusting for southeast Ohio we might even be lower than the national average which is pretty darn good considering we're in the "rust belt".

That's not to minimize the pain felt in southeastern Ohio but I've yet to see anyone find a way to do anything about it. LBJ tried in the '60s. Lord knows Sen. Byrd has brought home more pork to West Virgina than twenty senators. And it's had little effect. The tools politicians can bring don't work. Linking a politician's effectiveness with the unemployment rate in southeast Ohio is like linking Jeb Bush's performance in office to the orange yield in central Florida. You can measure a politician by how much aid they give to southeast Ohio, but not the unemployment rate there.

Best you can do is provide a climate favorable to business because jobs are a very, very good thing and jobs come from businesses. So let's see where Ohio was, unemployment-wise, before Republican governors took over in '92 compared to now (both in relation to the national average). I'd be willing to bet it's better now. In fact, if it isn't I'll vote for the Democratic candidate.

Walker Percy, the Cards, the Tigers

Someone once said that they always checked the sports pages first because there you can read of success, at least for some. Everywhere else is failure and bad news. It's a habit I should get back into.

An interesting thing about the Cardinals and Tigers is that during the regular season both had gotten off to tremendous division leads and then seemingly relaxed in their prosperity. They were in a sense victims of the Percy doldrums -- their games became one ordinary "Wednesday afternoon" after another. Percy said that bad news takes us out of the ordinariness of a Wednesday afternoon and the Tigers and Cardinals both managed to manufacture their own bad news by losing a slew of games in August and September. Both played under .500 ball in September and nearly died in terms of making the playoffs. Percy says that near-death experiences are galvanizing; afterwards you not only appreciate life but in an odd way can throw it away. Everything afterwards is, in a sense, gravy.

So it seems not so surprising after all that the two worst playoff-bound teams in September, two teams who almost lost their (mid-season) playoff birthrights, ended up triumphing.

Fr. Anthony Cogan (1826-1872)

From Faith, Famine and Fatherland - Perceptions of a Priest and Historian - Anthony Cogan 1826-1872

In his political views on the evolution of Irish society, Cogan's thinking reflected the spiritual concept of the Communion of Saints, where living believers share in a Christian fellowship with those who have already died in Christ. In Cogan's Diocese of Meath the reader is struck by the fact that there is scarcely no accommodation made for the division between the living and the dead. Cogan reminded his readers in 1862, that 'the old grave-yards where their fathers sleep, and where many of themselves expect to repose' also contain the remains of heroic priests whose records must 'be rescued from oblivion and neglect'. And in all this, the writing of history played a key role in shaping the consciousness of the local community and the nation.
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Little of Cogan's achievement or of his short life was remembered within his own diocese or by his clerical successors. His friend and fellow historian of Dublin, Fr. John O'Hanlon, believed that because of his labours and his personal sanctity 'in aftertime his grave shall be sought by many a pilgrim and from many of distant land.' But twentieth-century Ireland, languishing in the petty politics of the post Civil War era, and blinkered by an exclusive sense of remembrance of the heroes of 1916, allowed the memory of men such as Anthony Cogan to fade and die. A housing estate in Navan was named after him but few could explain the significance of the name By 1990, in spite of the presence of the monument on the wall of Slane church, all memory even of Cogan's grave had vanished...The very thing which Anthony Cogan had laboured so hard to prevent had now happened. Ireland was losing its collective memory--ironically not under a foreign oppressor, but under its own complacent independent regime.

On bible translations

I don't like the Catholic Study Bible recommendation, but the comment thread is interesting. I didn't realize you could get a Jerusalem bible with study notes for $8 (plus shipping).

The fort over against the oak-wood, Once it was Bruidge’s, it was Cathal’s, It was Aed’s, it was Ailill’s, It was Conaing’s, it was Cuiline’s And it was Maelduin’s; The fort remains after each in his turn- And the kings asleep in the ground. – Kuno Meyer, The Fort of Rathangan

Thomas of ER...

Provides interesting inside look as an employee of a car dealership, the inner workings of which are as shrouded in mystery to me as the local undertaker's:

Next time you're at the local corner car stop-n-go, ask if the Dr Feelgood selling you that well-seasoned cherry cream puff has a current certificate. If not, flee to the hills. Now, any salesman in the business for longer than a couple of years will most likely have at least one complaint on file. Someone will get mad at himself for buying the Hummer Comanchero Model 15x with stowable turret and 15mm canon with Powerglide Recoil (R), and run to the BMV to complain. Still, a consistent history of complaints is a problem. Then there's me - it's as though I fell from the sky and landed across from you, proposal in hand, urging you to 'sign on the line that is dotted'.

Call Me Motivated    ...but not Ishmael

Call me a motivated voter now.

With recent polls suggesting the Democrats are poised to take over the House and Senate, it don't get no more motivating than that.

My complaints about the Republicans suddenly seems an absurd luxury; nothing galvanizes one's attention quite as effectively the cold water of a worse option.

Most of the Democrat candidates remind me of the way we used to act at bars just before closing time. The girls were drunk and wounded and we were venal opportunists. Principled Democrats would've ran for office when Republicans were strong and sober, not now while they're weak. The almost pluperfect lack of ideas generated by the progressive party only adds to the perception that they want power merely because they like power, i.e. for its own sake. By contrast, in '94 when the Republicans took office they were full of ideas. The Contract with America wasn't just lip service either. They soon enacted most of the ideas contained therein.
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Sometimes I wonder if democracy, like Christianity, has ever been tried. At least democracy in the form of a meritocracy rather than simply an elaborate name identification test. Because the two Democratic candidates for office in PA & OH are awful, just truly awful. Profoundly bad. I'm speaking of Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey. They are so inferior to Mike Dewine and Rick Santorum that it beggars the imagination. They are running on their names. The Browns have a history in Ohio politics and the Caseys in PA politics. George W. Bush won because of his father. Hillary is a front-runner because her husband was a president who had an affair and made her a martyr. What's in a name? Nothing. If anything it's a contrary indicator given how different George W. Bush is from his father.
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Except in the case of St. Thomas More, it takes an uncynical person to use the word "virtuous" in the same sentence as "politician" but the pastor at a Dominican parish downtown shows his great faith by praying for such. Here are his thoughts in the most recent bulletin:

I remind all of you to register to vote, to be properly informed as to the issues and candidates running for office, and finally to vote on Election Day. The Catholic Church's strong stand against abortion and for Pro-Life issues and candidates should be paramount on your mind when you step into the voting booth. Please join me in praying for good virtuous politicians who will defend the life of our precious unborn children.

FYI: the "News you can hardly use" blog has been updated with a solution to the North Korea crisis.