A CHN Report

Many years ago, due to a job opportunity, I left the warm, Gemutlichkeit culture of southern Ohio for the colder, somewhat banal flatlands of central Ohio. Fortunately there have been compensations - chiefly that of meeting my bride. There have also been a number of "bank error in my favor" geographical positives, such as this being the locus of one of the nation's greatest Irish festivals (in Dublin, Ohio), the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes and, of more recent vintage, the site of the Coming Home Network Conferences.

My parents and a niece had planned to come up this weekend, so my opportunities to hit the conference were limited but it seems I'd chosen well. (Although you can't know the good you have missed.) Msgr. Lane on Friday, Scott Hahn on Saturday, and the panel discussion on Sunday all were interesting and inspirational. Goosebumps attended one sentence from Scott Hahn that seemed, at the risk of sounding solipsistic, meant directly for me via the Holy Spirit.

It was painful to miss Joseph Pearce's talk but I'll order the tape. He radiates the sort of charm that one can call charismatic, which combined with his orthodoxy helps those of Irish descent recall that the English are not naturally perfidious but there is some good in them. During the panel discussion he told a little anecdote about proposing to his wife while kneeling before the altar at the oldest Marian shrine in England, an anecdote improved by his saying that that spot was chosen in part because he would already be on his knees and thus saved the embarrassment an Englishman naturally would feel in drawing attention to himself. Ha!

The place was packed for the talks I attended and it turned out to be much harder than expected to spot Rich Leonardi, an admirable defender of the faith (and occasional voice in the Cincinnati Enquirer). I'd seen a picture or two of Rich on his blog or maybe in the Enquirer and since the age of Conference attendees is skewed toward the more advanced in years, it seemed no problem to find someone my age. Wrong. The crowd was large and sold-out; so they're moving to a larger venue way out on the other side of town.

Via Rich's site I found this from Joanne Bogle, who I'd caught on the panel discussion.

Bright Sadness

Steven Riddle calls the Greek language much more joyful-looking and beautiful than the Latin. Perhaps the Latin is more tinged with a "bright sadness". His post recalled for me a recent reading, from the introduction to In This House of Brede:



I experienced a bit of sadness, although not very bright, in reading NRO’s John Derbyshire’s rejection of Christ, and much more of the same with respect to his uncle who died faithless. Derbyshire linked his declaration, not surprisingly, to his study of biology, the same familiar Charbyllic shores upon which the good Professor at our local church has dashed his ship. Perhaps the science is ahead of our theology. Whenever that happens there are “issues”. These issues tend to be of little importance in the hindsight of history (who, for example, has a problem reconciling Scripture that referencing four corners of the earth with the fact that the earth has been discovered to be round? Or, for most, the problem of a literal seven-day creation?) But biology certainly seems to be making our free will a bit more narrowly circumspect than we’d heretofore thought.

More disturbing than Derbyshire - who is, of course, still alive - is his telling of his Uncle Fred, a Christian who got esophogal cancer and then renounced religion, calling it all folly on his death bed. This is sort of terrifying in much the same way soldiers see their buddy get blown up in the very same foxhole. Would it be better if Fred had more timorousness, since ‘fear of the Lord’ is the beginning of wisdom? One gets a glimmer of how the martyrs were happy because they realized they were going to Heaven – they knew they were going to die in the state of grace. Let's pray for the Derb.

That's What I'm Talkin' About

Ken Blackwell, a gubernatorial candidate who is a conservative's dream, is on the ropes-- but at least someone gets it (and the author didn't even have to bring in Blackwell's impeccable pro-life credentials, which is the first criteria.)

Kate O’Beirne...

...defends Jim Towey from David Kuo's accusations in Tempting Faith.

The Wonders of Modern Technology

    

Hi Turkin with Leo Durocher ...and with Satchell Paige

Years ago I'd written this post about Turkin and Thompson’s The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, one of my favorite early books. And through the miracle of the internet, Hi Turkin's grandson wrote me:

Hi-

I was "Googling" Hy Turkin, who wrote the first Baseball Encyclopedia, and came across your blog entry. I wanted to compliment you on this nice piece. It is clear from the outset that like me you love the game of baseball.

Hy Turkin was my grandfather. I never got to meet him, he died 8 years before I was born, but some of my earliest memories of reading as a small child were of thumbing through his books. I remember reading the line "It took an earthquake to start this book" for the first time like it was yesterday. Like you said....quite the attention grabber...Anyway, it was great to see someone that was as impacted by his work as a child as I was. I wanted to let you know your piece was great and brought a big smile to my face.

See, blogging isn't a waste is it?

Half-@ssed Opinions Sale

Today VMPDS is having a sale on pent-up ill-advised, under-informed comments. Caveat emptor! (I learned that phrase from an old Brady Bunch show.)
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First off, heard a smidge of pundit Robert Novak on Fox yesterday. And he said for all the difficulties of the Iraq project who could've done better? It makes the other Novak's comment, Michael Novak on NRO, at least a little more sensible. The latter said that he thought Rumsfeld was a fine Defense secretary. That seems insane on the face of it but it's hard to see how with a country the size of Iraq -- in the Middle East where tensions and tempers run hot (we're not talking the more phlegmish Flemish after all) and where there are three separate ethnic/religious groups angling for power --- well, you can see any Defense secretary was going to have a helluva time with it.
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You sometimes hear Christians say that God might withhold His grace from America due to an evil, such as abortion or war. This seems an implicit recognition that there is mortal and venial sin and that "not every sin is mortal". While countries are obviously different from than individuals, it is interesting that there's an underlying feeling that nations can almost be in a state of mortal sin.
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In those halycon days of early blogdom, we were blazing new trails and finding fresh, previously unimagined forms of comedy. One of those forms was the ol' search-strings-that-brought-someone-to-your-site gag. It might have jumped the shark, but here are a few of recent vintage:

drunk kid knifes own hand video
aquinas point of hilarity
What are the 5 points of Dr. Phillip Crosby?
"do you have feelings of inadequacy" tequila movie
How long can a woman smoker over 300lbs expect to live in the US

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There's a review in The Other Paper for the new film "The Queen", which I understand is a look at the actions of British leaders in the wake of Princess Diana's death. The writer made an interesting point about what the movie did not explore:

It also would have served up a haunting ambiguity: Is Blair correct in believing that all good governments, even symbolic ones, must show their emotional receptiveness at all times? Or does the queen's stoicism, however out-of-touch, represent the last vestiges of a system in which both leaders and constituents are allowed their dignity?

This sort of reminds me of how New Orleans resident and historian Douglas Brinkley said on one of the talk shows that President Bush's greatest sin during hurricane Katrina was that he never had a "bullhorn moment" as he did in NY after 9/11. That interested me because most guys at least see things in terms of performance - what did they do that achieved help for those people? There seems to be also be a need for emotional displays on the part of leaders.
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Couldn't stop watching VH1's top 100 hits of the '80s last night. They'd play a snippet of the song then talk about what the artist is doing now. Some are dead (i.e. the INXS guy), but most of them fall into a familiar pattern which can be summarized thusly: "Band X's fame quickly evaporated in the late 80s/ early '90s. They split up and went their separate ways. They reunited in 2002 and are now playing to nostalgic crowds". One band that has stood the test of time is obviously U2 and "With or Without You" was up there around number 3 or 4. Here is an interesting link of people trying to divine the meaning of the lyrics.
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I'm trying to half-close my eyes and avoid the funk of seeing the wholesale slaughter of a decent Ohio politicians in the coming election. I can scarcely believe Ohioans are apparently going to give the nod to Sherrod Brown over Mike Dewine. Mike Poterma makes a touching appeal to Buckeye voters:

Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown is a doctrinaire lefty who has voted for huge tax increases and partial-birth abortion. (The liberal group Americans for Democratic Action gives him a rating of 100 percent—same as Dennis Kucinich. NARAL, too, rates him 100 percent.) Mike DeWine, on the other hand, is a 100-percent pro-lifer who is strong on national defense and wants to extend the Bush tax cuts.

All of these issue positions would be enough to convince me to vote for DeWine—but I have the added advantage of knowing him personally. Years before becoming literary editor of National Review, I served on his staff in Washington, D.C.—and I know that he’s a genuinely good man, principled and public-spirited. Please, Ohio, vote for a man who is a credit to our state.

Even grizzled, cynical lefty Joe Hallet of the Columbus Dispatch likes the incumbent senator, and told of an anecdote where years ago Dewine campaigned for three days while trying to pass a kidney stone. Dewine would lay in the back seat of the car while they traveled from town to town, practically writhing in pain. But then he would get up and shake hands and make a short speech at each stop. He's a gamer.

A kind of exhaustion has settled over Ohio; perhaps being on the frontlines of the '04 election has led to some sort of collective guilt, and the recoil is fierce. It's hard to watch your state implode and willingly become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. That DeWine should be twelve points down to Brown the weekend before the vote is symptom of a sort of collective madness. Like my father always said, it's a pendulum swinging. (See above comments on '80s rockers). Cultures swing from good to bad, to and fro. I suppose it's our turn to make things worse.
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Many pundits are asking how it can be that with such an excellent economy the President's numbers even on how he's handling the economy are bad. Unemployment has been surreally low during his tenure. Well it turns out that people aren't getting raises like they used to and we want to improve our material quality of life, not just "survive". What's interesting is how new houses are getting bigger and bigger and bigger in terms of square foot and amenities. Is there a disconnect?

The Paradox of Brotherhood

Excerpt from The Thought of Benedict XVI, by Adam Nichols OP:

The great problem of brotherhood, [Ratzinger] points out, is that all unions entail the separating off of those who are united from the rest whom they leave behind. This is a paradox which can be proved by everyday experience. Ratzinger confronts it, in the hope of resolving it, by considering the witness of the biblical revelation. For the Old Testament, a brother was someone who belonged with you in the unity of the common people of God. Here what was crucial was the fatherhood of God, which provided Isrealite brotherhood with its essential basis. There is, however, something strange here. For prophetic Yahwism, Israel's national God is the universal God. This position is in itself inherently unstable. It might lead to the conclusion that the formation of a unified brotherhood within the Israelite nation is unthinkable; or again, it might lead to the opposite conclusion that any form of wider, international brotherhood is undesirable. Everything turns on just how people make the connection between the non-national, universal God and the fact that there is only one people who worship him as their God. For Old Testament faith, this connection is made not by Israel but by Israel's Lord. He chooses Israel for no merits of its own but by a free decision of his grace. On the same basis, he is free to reject Israel, something for which the subsequent transgressions of the Israelites would provide more than sufficient justification.

The upshot of Old Testament faith in God's covenant with Israel, notably in its Deuteronomic form, is that God is said to have a special, though not exclusive, relationship with the Hebrew nation...The effect of this is to introduce an element of uncertainty into any tendency to set apart the brotherly community of Israel too rigorously. The prophets often tried to stimulate a sense of the potential openness of the Hebrew religion, both in prophecies of woe directed to Israel and in prophecies of weal which embraced other nations or in some way opened on to a more universal mise-en-scene.

But another, darker side of the coin is shown in the emergence of Judaism as a faith in certain respects dissimilar to Old Testament religion, something which happened in the Hellenistic period. Ratzinger sees a certain process of rationalisation at work in this period, making people uneasy with the idea of gratuitous - and in that sense uncaused - divine election. So the thought arose that God had offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world, but only Israel had accepted it,thus becoming the one and only people of God. Superficially a more reasonable concept of the God-Israel relationship, it carried with it an unfortunate consquence: in the last analysis, it implied that it was not so much God who chose Israel, but Israel who chose God. Moreover, it appears to have led in practice to an ever stricter sealing-off of the Jews from the goyim who, after all, must voluntarily have renounced their special fatherhood of God and thus were justly deprived of the brotherly comradeship of his true children. We are at this point, Ratzinger somberly remarks, at the dividing-line which separates the Old Testament as preparatio evangelica from Judaism as the 'synagogue'.
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And so Ratzinger comes at last to the New Testament in which...he hopes with some confidence to find the resolution of the paradox of brotherhood. At first, however, the sayings of Jesus only seem to perpetuate the problem. For, on first hearing, those sayings seem to present the same ambivalence which as dogged the issue throughout history:

On the one hand, it is clear that all those who need help are, irrespective of any barriers, through their very plight the brothers of Jesus. On the other hand, it is also apparent that the coming community of the faithful will form a new fraternal community which will be distinct from those who do not believe.

A universal idea of brotherhood, in other words, stands cheek by jowl with a particular or limited one. The inspired commentary of the New Testament writers is of some assistance here. In Paul, while the idea of fatherhood is rendered more profound by incipient Trinitarianism, of evern greater significance is the doctrine of Christ as the Second Adam. For this teaches that though men are not yet brothers in Christ they can and must become so. The philadelphia owed to one's fellow Christian does not exclude, but rather implies, the appropriateness of the agape offered to every man. Meanwhile, in John, the idea of Christian brotherhood reaches a supreme intensity, but at the risk, for the unwary, of endangering the universal outreach implicit in Christ's message.

Ratzinger finds the patristic development of these motifs somewhat ambivalent...The need is for a new synthesis. Ratzinger offers one of his own in four stages.

To be continued...

The Poetry of Babelfish

Read an Italian review of the 1968 film Romeo & Juliet and look how handsomely (if cryptically) it emerges from Babelfish: In the arc of these two days I have regarded with my sister, after infinity of time, Romeo and Giulietta di Zeffirelli. The film in himself is po' heavy... a po' from Zeffirelli says, po' a more teatrale that cinematographic. However all it can be said to Zeffirelli, but that it is not meticulously precise and fililogico in whichever thing do not make. Therefore the customs are practically perfect, and the acclimatizations, to times a po' pompate (insomma, are in the ' 68, but they are looked at very gets worse now obrobri!), they are decidedly credible....Here... therefore I, that I am usual to ramble backwards with the head in the time, have loved it from child and every time that I see it continuous to innamorarmene as of a icona lives to which I can grab hold of when open dream to eyes of my Late Middle Ages.

This feels timely...

...given John Derbyshire's recent profession of not believing in Christ: An Examined Life examines unbelief.

A Shout Out to Saints

Inspired by Bill & Steven:

Mary, Queen of Heaven and every man's heart

St. Alphonsus Ligouri, confessor & consoler

St. Pio, friend of mankind

St. Thomas More, patron and birthday saint

St. Perpetua, brave early martyr

St. Anthony Mary Claret, saint of the Council

St. Philip Neri, who said lest Jesus stop him he'd be another Judas

St. Anthony, great friend to the young

St. Therese of Lisieux, because it's about love baby

St. Joseph, helper of stepfathers

St. Paul, who brings news of hope

Dispatch Article ...

...on Ray Bradbury's latest book:

Farewell, Summer — the sequel to Dandelion Wine — was written and rewritten over a period of four decades. Bradbury fans will love the comic and wistful fable if as an affirmation that their beloved storyteller can still write powerfully and poetically.

What makes the modest work so appealing is the deft way Bradbury weaves together two divergent points: the innocence of youth and the experience of old age.

Name Identification Voting

Recently - perhaps always - voting has seemed to be less an evaluation of the merits of the individual and the positions they take than whether or not the voter has heard of them.

It also explains how Bob Taft was inflicted on Ohio as governor. "Taft" sounds like a good old Anglo-Saxon name, tinged with history and destiny. (A quick google turns this up: "The name Taft is a topographic name or habitational name from a dialect variant of Old and Middle English toft ‘curtilage’, ‘site’, ‘homestead’.")

But back to our story. Perhaps there's a less cynical view. Perhaps voters aren't mindlessly pulling for the familiar but are thinking that he comes by it honestly. He's a politician not because he likes wielding power and spending money but because it's the family business. A legacy running for office shows, in a way, a lack of ambition. And most of us appreciate a lack of ambition in our politicians because it means they'll be less motivated to screw things up worse than they already are. In the corporate world, we experience constant reorganizations which decentralize things followed by a centralizing, followed by decentralizing, ad nauseum, presumably because ambitious execs don't want to just sit on their hands and not be able to point to something they've done.

Another analogy is this: would you not be a bit creeped out if you learned that someone from childhood wanted to run a mortuary despite having no connections to the that business and merely wanted to work with dead bodies?

Scott Carson...

...talks about the pro multis "controversy".

Feast of All Saints

"As the believer leaps into God, he cannot thereby renounce solidarity with his neighbor and leave him to his fate. His leap of faith, rather, must snatch up his neighbor and bring him along; he ought to leap for his neighbor, representing him in an indissoluble fellowship of salvation...Christian joy in its totality wells up from this point of solidarity; a joy limited to considering one's own grace and salvation could not claim to be Christian." --Hans von Balthasar

Photo credit Elena.

Color me...

...unmoved by the recent joy that seems to have attached to the rumor that the Eucharistic prayer might be changed from "for all" to "for many". A blogging friend puts it passionately well:

The certainty is that if this is what the Church teaches, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that I am not among "many." In my entire life I have never been on the winning team, and the Calvinists have already devised the tests for those who will make it and those who won't--I am in the latter category.

If this change comes about, and it sounds certain that it will, I will be reminded at every Mass of my exclusion from those for whom Jesus came. I will accept this as the teaching of the Church because I know the Church is the guardian of the truth...

Also:

Many cheered the translation precision of "for many" for the phrase "pro multis" which in turn is a translation from the Greek for "the multitude," which, without any stretch of the imagination means, "all."

What is even more odd is that this translation is applauded without reference to its following restrictive clause--"that sins may be forgiven." This phrase restricts the meaning of the "for you and for all," it gives the purpose of this sacrifice--"That sins may be forgiven."...Now, perhaps if Jesus has said, "so that all might be saved," we'd have a good argument. But what He said is "so that all might be forgiven." The might be is not contingent upon the efficacy of the sacrifice but upon the resistance of the individual person.

It's difficult to see how anyone equated that last line with thinking "for all" means all our saved. The resistance of the individual person means that person can resist God's grace and be damned. Neither myself nor my correspondent are "liberals" or universalists but merely would like to see the correct translation in the Mass, one that derives from the literal sense of Scripture -- that is that all repetentant sinners can be forgiven.