Various

On St. Thomas More. Today is the anniversary of his martrydom:

Ackroyd returns again and again to that famous Hans Holbein portrait of More as Lord Chancellor, beautifully reproduced in the book with a small selection of other fine illustrations. The personality it displays is composed, acute, and as enigmatic in its own way as the Mona Lisa.

Today is the feast of St. Maria Goretti, who converted her killer.

Was the American Revolution a just war?...via Against the Grain

Liveblogging the Continental Congress, via The Provincial Emails

Interesting Jonah Goldberg column...

...here:

A potential lesson for the World Bank may be that building roads, dams and factories in the Third World is a fool's errand until those nations have the intangible capital required to maintain such things. The Marshall Plan's success in rebuilding Europe after World War II stemmed not from the U.S. footing the bill for concrete and bulldozers but from the intangible capital locked in the hearts and minds of everyday Europeans.

In an odd way, I think this complements Weisman's depiction of a post-human future. The greatest symbols of our civilization - from skyscrapers to libraries - not only count for a mere fraction of our wealth, they would turn to dust and rubble if we disappeared. The hardware is nothing; the software, everything. All that civilization is and can become exists within us. If we forget that, we forget literally everything.

Reminds me of (the liberal) Paul Theroux's thoughts about the answer to Africa being not more aid or industrialization but a return to subsidence farming.

Theological Implications of Henry John Deutschendorf's Lyrics

Lecture notes from a talk given the morning of 7/5/07 to my cats and dog:

Today I'd like to talk about H. J. Deutschendorf's view of God. What are we to make of it? To the extent can we can discern it in the lyrics to his popular songs? Was he a Deist, a nature worshipper, a pantheist or some combination of the above? [Crowd stirs; cat meows, dog lays down.]

I can see the audience is restless. Let me begin by saying that you, Lazarus, are a strikingly beautiful cat. Is not your coat a splendid array of color and is it not soft as the dawn? That is what the subject of today's talk might've said of you.

I would argue that Deutschendorf, known to many under the stage name "John Denver", is of the school that includes another Henry - Thoreau - and whose ex-wife Annie reminds us of another Annie, Annie Dillard, the nature novelist whose book current is on the NY Times bestseller list. This school is related by virtue of their uncommon attention to the Creator's details. They are often dismissed as more interested in nature than people. It has the ring of truth.

Since you, Alex, are thought of as part of "nature", you are exempt from their lack of attention although as a house pet their interest is far smaller than if you were a wild buffalo. (You keep eating like that and you just might look like one!)

I don't know if you read the paper yesterday, since you were sitting on it while I was trying to read it, but they reviewed Dillard's latest novel saying, "This story might be enough to prop up a short novel if Dillard showed the slightest shred of interest in her characters as people, but she doesn't. She uses them as paper dolls, moving them about the scenery that is her real interest." Dillard may give us clues into the writings of Deutschendorf, and vice-versa, so we must look at both Henrys & Annies in order to detect the heresies of what we'll call "naturists" even though I believe that term is already used by people who walk around nude. I know you guys already do that and it's no big deal to you, butt it is to humans.

It seems the naturist tends to see the long view, the very long view, which has implications on the present. They tend to see their journey in geologic terms. It's not that they don't believe God can act, but that He prefers natural means and has great patience. This can cause a leaning towards Deism. Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, a book that only those with the patience of Job could finish, reviews Annie Dilliard's latest novel:

In the fullness of time she realizes that the world has been her meditation, that simplicity and stillness and the sea have somehow made her sufficient to her life. This is both a modest claim -- "The Maytrees performed no heroic deeds, neither Toby nor Lou, and both acted within any decent heart's scope" -- and a deep tribute to any decent heart. The novel proposes that there is an involuntary, even unconscious shaping of character, individual and social, that comes with weathering, and that, in yielding to a wisdom no one could earn or choose and for which they have no language, people conform themselves in ways something like the accommodations landscape makes to wear and time.

This "weathering" seems to deprecate human free will; while it is true nothing can be done apart from God is our cooperation "involuntary" and even "unconscious"? Sometimes, but always? This is, however, in keeping with the naturist view. [Dog closes his eyes.] I know you, Obi, think little of a human's free will since I cave so easily to your begging for table scraps. And indeed free will is a mystery. I am sympathetic to this weathering view, sounding as it is as a synonym of sorts for Purgatory, yet am uneasy about its tendency towards quietism or stoicism. It is doctrinally unsound first in its Calvinistic overtones but also in its denial of the personal. God sounds no different than, well, the impersonal sea which ceaselessly beats the sand that it might be smoother. A purely mechanical god, no sense of a caring god. There is also no apparent trust that the action of grace can cause leaps, not just tiny increments, of improvement. In other words, a denial of miracles.

But I promised you a lecture on Deutschendorf! I have digressed. Let us first examine a song he wrote called Windsong. Wind seems to be, in this song, a metaphor for God. JHD writes:

The wind is the whisper of our mother the earth
The wind is the hand of our father the sky
The wind watches over our struggles and pleasures
The wind is the goddess who first learned to fly

The wind is the bearer of bad and good tidings
The weaver of darkness, bringer of dawn
The wind gives the rain, builds us a rainbow
The wind is the singer who sang the first song.

The wind is a twister of anger and warning,
The wind brings the fragrance of freshly mown hay
The wind is a racer and a wild stallion running
and the sweet taste of love on a slow summer's day...

The first two verses set the tone for song. The remaining lines will emphasize the traditionally "feminine" characteristic of home and hearth, "of freshly mown hay" and "the sweet taste of love on a slow summer's day." The traditionally masculine side is the "twister of anger and warning", the "racer and wild stallion running." Deutschendorf does not see God as Father or as Mother but as both. Bue he does, like so many naturists, sees the omnipotence of God. He writes, "The wind is the taker and giver of mornings." Being close to nature implies a recognition of God's power because one sees the helplessness of man in that environment clearly, but that also lends itself towards a denial of free will or the need for cooperation with God.

JHD finishes the song curiously with: "So welcome the wind and the wisdom she offers...Follow her summons when she calls again." The "wisdom" of the wind was not made clear in the song; there was no sense that the gifts this wind brings (i.e. fragrances and twisters) are not randomly offered, sans reason or meaning. And to say "follow her summons" seems to assume a free will that was tacitly denied in the previous lyrics. One assumes that following the summons of a tornado is to get the heck out of the way and to follow the summons of a sweet fragrance is to sniff it. This seems rather at odds with Christianity in which prudence means sometimes acting imprudentally. But I could be missing something, my dear animals. Maybe you could help me out?

Beauties of deeper glance

Was latently affected by a blog post at For Keats' Sake!; you could say it snuck up on me.

First the pictures draw. The visual is the gateway drug to a different sort of vision and yet so often we stand in the gateway lingering, even malingering.

We make the effort to read. The prose rather than the poetry, because prose is more easily accessible and even good poets, like good batsmen, fail at least seventy percent of the time.

But this prose is poetic enough ("crumpled-up sonnets") to trigger the yearning for something more, in this case a yearning for Keats' yearning and to see with new eyes what we already have.

A Revolutionary Connection on the 4th



Visited the grave today of my wife's ancestor, a soldier in the Revolutionary War. It's been said that John Davis was the one holding the flag when Washington crossed the Delaware. My father-in-law never tires of telling me that. *grin*

High Percentages

Deep Furrows says "I confess that I find justification the most boring theological topic. It reminds me of life insurance whereas I need help figuring out what to do with myself in the next few hours or days." He has a high density of interesting posts, such as:

Flannery O'Connor's reading list.

A serious reading of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos.

Sex and statues

Hope (not Bob)

Proclamations, including "the sweetest expression of ecumenism is the one formulated by Soloviev: 'You give us everything, except what interests us, Jesus Christ.'"

Photographs

(Click to enlarge)


Leaves (July, 2007)

Prairie Dog (July 2007)


Modern Office Ceiling (late 20th century)


Packed House (early 21st century)


Church (timeless)

"Merry Thomasmas!"



Title from Disputations... Mike Aquilla of "The Way of the Fathers" has a full report here.



(Tomb claimed to be that of St. Thomas, in Madras (Chennai)
Source: http://www.galenfrysinger.com/madras.htm, via here)

Every so often a book comes along that deeply moves and inspires me as a person, and as a Christian. I can never know when this will happen. Many books disappoint, and many surprise. I am right in the middle of one of those amazing books. It is Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger, otherwise known as Pope Benedict XVI. OK, I am an evangelical Protestant pastor. How can I speak such of a book by the Roman Catholic Pope of all people? I remember hearing Johnny Cash commenting on the Nine Inch Nails’ song “Hurt.” His words: “Well, a good song is a good song.” And a good book is a good book...Whatever your image may be of Joseph Ratzinger, this book will change it. In it you see deeply into his own heart, and what is there is a humble and gentle spirit, and a deep godliness...Pope Benedict is a very good writer. He is clear, and he is gentle. He also writes in a way that speaks to the heart. For me personally as a Christian, the manner in which he speaks and makes his points really speaks to me in a personal manner. He draws me into the kind of relationship with God that I desire to have. - from blog of North Carolina pastor Joel Gillespie

My attempts to be dependable have made me erractic. - blogger profile of "papa herman"

It is worth noting, by the way, that the most sentimental people, who are loudest against the right to wage a just war, to execute a criminal, are just the people who are most likely to be in favour of ‘putting incurables out of their pain,’ which the commandment against murder most emphatically forbids.--Hilaire Belloc, via "The Daily Eudemon"

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.-- from film "The Third Man" via "Right as Usual" via "In Dwelling"

Get your motu running
Head down to your parish
Pick up thirty friends now
And you’ll have a happy day
Looks like it’s really gonna happen
Hear the Mass in a justice place
Say Kyries three times three, and
Explode into grace
Like God’s only begotten child,
We were born, born to be mild.
We eat of Him to live;
We’re never gonna die.
Born to be mild…
Born to be mild, yeah. --Maureen of "Aliens in this World" regarding the liturgical "motu proprio"

Having questions about Romney's faith become occasions for attacks on the Mormon Church which will then become wider attacks on the idea of people of faith being in the public square.  The assault on people of faith being full participants in the politics of this country has been underway for decades, and the secular left celebrates every attack on Romney's faith as part of the effort to turn the weak flank of the coalition of people of faith that has operated on so many issues, including most recently and visibly, the defense of marriage...It isn't bigoted to note the vast gulf between what Mormons believe and what evangelicals and Catholics believe.  It is bigoted to say that Mormon beliefs disqualify Mormons from politics or office. - Hugh Hewitt

The question is not whether, as president, Mr. Romney would take orders from Salt Lake City. I doubt whether many people think he would. The questions are: Would a Mormon as president of the United States give greater credibility and prestige to Mormonism? The answer is almost certainly yes. Would it therefore help advance the missionary goals of what many view as a false religion? The answer is almost certainly yes. Is it legitimate for those Americans to take these questions into account in voting for a presidential nominee or candidate? The answer is certainly yes.. I am sure Mr. Romney is aware of that, and I hope he finds a way of addressing it that does not suggest that his religion does not matter—or that those who think it does matter are guilty of unreasonable prejudice. --Fr. Richard Neuhaus of First Things

President Bush's humane and generous instincts combined with his moralistic and arrogant ones produced a political fiasco that could have been a policy fiasco as well. --the Corner's Ramesh Ponnuru on the defeat of the immigration bill

The radio talk-show hosts know more about the bill than most of the senators, if you want to know the truth. - Alabama senator Jeff Sessions on immigration bill

Your written voice is the unique way you put together words into coherent streams of thought. A strong written voice is as distinctive as DNA. A reader can glance at words you've thrown together on a page and have a good idea who wrote them without glancing at the byline. For a demonstration of written voice, cruise the blogs and note the different styles of writing. Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, Kathy Shaidle, Jeff Miller, and Tom Kreitzberg are all hugely successful Catholic bloggers with instantly recognizable "voices." I submit that one reason for their success is that they have developed powerful "voices" that set them apart from the rest of the congregation in St. Blog's Parish. When you visit their blogs, you're not just there for the links but for their "take" on the day's events. That's the power of "voice."...Blogging will [help] overcome the "stage fright" that can hinder your writing. The last is one of the steepest hurdles in voice development because if you are timid about how your thoughts sound to others then you are going to be timid about experimenting with your word choice and with how you construct sentences, paragraphs, articles, chapters, and so on. Regular public writing, even for a very small audience, is one means to overcome that. --Michelle Arnold on Jimmy Akin's blog

To knowingly and willingly put yourself in an excommunicant state is even worse when you realize what it is that you are rejecting. --Erik of "Erik's Rants", on a scandal involving a prominent blogger

This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing. --Wolfgang Pauli, caption for a blank square, via Zippy Catholic

God does not ask much of you: a little remembrance from time to time, a little adoration. --Brother Lawrence in "The Word Among Us"

What can I say? I was a literalist. My mother said not to lay a hand on the pan... --Ellyn of Obhouse explaining why she licked a sizzling frying pan as a kid

Things Hard to Believe - Two Quotes from Weekend Reads

As [Samuel] Coleridge says elsewhere in Aids to Reflection, 'Christianity and REDEMPTION are equivalent terms.' The very truth that is most essential to the Christian faith, our redemption in Christ and our dependence on grace for all that is good in us, is also the truth that is hardest to believe; it is now, therefore, that which is most likely to be left out, smoothed away, risen above in a world in which man's confidence in reason and in his own powers is constantly increasing.

It is fascinating to watch Coleridge in this book confronting the old, apparent paradox - we are free, yet we are totally dependent on the grace of God- which can be resolved only in faith, and to see his long-learned love of God, together with his capacity to think, taking him, as similar qualities had taken Pascal, to fully Augustinian conclusions.

-- Lucy Beckett, In the Light of Christ

* * *

The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord 'has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,' that 'he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities,' and that 'with his wounds we are healed' (Is 53:4-6) no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing.

-Pope Benedict, Jesus of Nazareth

Style v. Substance

John Henry Newman said that men go by their sympathies, not by argument. I used to think this off-putting and unfortunate because it often leads to deception and pain, but it is how God made us. Emotions are part of being human and so to be influenced by style - by externals such as voice or hair or looks - is what separates us from robots if not animals.

In the past I naively thought a president's role was primarily one of being a good decision-maker and of leading us down the right path, ethically and in terms of effectiveness. But now I'm beginning to see how few voters really believe this. Many people look to leaders for inspiration and maybe even love. Did George Washington's height and majesty play nearly as big a role as his abilities as a general?

FDR, patron saint of liberals, was probably a mediocre president at best but he had a voice made for radio (Amity Shlaes writes, "In the darkness, Roosevelt’s voice seemed to shine...his calls for courage, his Fireside Chats, all were intensely important"). From this New Yorker book review:

He had the good fortune to be “a great radio speaker born into the era of radio.” As an experimenter with the economy, however, he was capricious and vacillating. In his manipulations of gold and the gold standard, according to Shlaes, “FDR’s playfulness was at its most destructive.” This was no time for playfulness: “Focusing on the fun of experiments neglected the question of whether unceasing experimentation might frighten business into terrified inaction.” The plethora of ambitious programs and agencies perpetrated in the first hundred days of the New Deal seemed aimed more at creating a sensation of activity than at achieving feasible objectives: “Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter.”...More ominous was Roosevelt’s totalitarian tendency: “His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.”

So apparently part of FDR's genius was to look busy and sound good. He rallied people through hard times simply by caring, whether genuine or not. That he arguably extended the hard times seems not to be the point.

I was amazed by how much credit George W. Bush got for his famous "bullhorn moment" just after 9/11. To me it was just style, a nice gesture, but it turns out that people demand style. They'll put up with incompetence if somebody has charisma, and so part of the reason for Bush's low poll numbers is that he neither looks nor sounds good. Like it or not, Clinton's "I feel your pain" combined with his articulateness works.

John Updike, author of the New Yorker piece, relays how this worked personally, how his father lashed out against business and embraced perceptions over reality (dashed with a pinch of desire for revenge):

My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt and never switched back. His memory of being abandoned by society and big business never left him and, for all his paternal kindness and humorousness, communicated itself to me, along with his preference for the political party that offered “the forgotten man” the better break. Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world.

Mother Teresa was once criticized for not getting the dying to hospitals or not providing better medical care - for a lack of competence in earthly things even though she offered the dying something ultimately more valuable: love.

But with business v. government, isn't it more complicated? Can either "love" you? Doesn't it come down to individuals? Business is hardly merciless; I've seen examples of people being "carried" for reasons good or bad and there are plenty of small businesses and family businesses that don't fixate on profit. On the flip side, there's nothing more inhumane than going to the DMV...

Now, For Some Good News

Former denizens of the Catholic convert site will remember the lively Mary Herboth, who facilitated conversations there in the BB days (BB= 'before blogs').

Her son Jordan is doing quite well! - click to enlarge:

Various

Would Russell Kirk be a 'crunchy con'?

* * *
My cursed dedication to duty along with the desire to "strike while the iron's hot" led me out of the brilliant sun to the computer where I composed 4.5 letters (one still pending) correcting newspaper errors of varying egregiosity. Really it's a full time job correcting local newspaper errors and I'm glad to only receive the paper on weekends. Call me arrogant; I suppose it's especially ironic when I call Sen. Voinovich the same. I do not seek errors, but when confronted feel the obligation to dash off an epistle even when the sun is out and the back patio beckons, full as the latter is with consolatory pleasures such as books of high word densities and cushions that absorb heat and act upon impact with skin as a massage. A goldfinch feeds, chasing away a hummingbird...

Clouds sometimes obscure but then the sun sirens back. I love the atmosphere of Sunday afternoons. It's quieter than Saturdays and even my wife, perpetual motion machine that she is, tends to slow down. By Sunday the yard tasks done, the grass mowed, the laundry finished & a Reds baseball game plays. Saturday is for prose, Sunday for poetry.

* * *
The Dispatch writes:

Voinovich called Sean Hannity's conservative radio show Wednesday and wound up hanging up in anger. That provoked a firestorm on a variety of conservative Web sites.

I'm not a fan of Hannity (though I liked his attention to the Schiavo case) and wouldn't see hanging up on him as particularly damning. Instead it was that Voinovich seemed so clueless in that interview, that he didn't know that a key amendment had been voted down, that he didn't know what the Fairness Doctrine was, and that he came off as arrogant in his anger at conservatives who "threaten" him with unemployment, as if he has a God-given right to be a senator. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama said that some talk show hosts know more about the issue than some senators. He must've been listening to that show.

* * *
Turns out Evelyn Waugh daily drank from noon to night while I live in fear that I error on the side of too little drinking. (Well, the word 'fear' is purely for hyperbolic effect.) Sure he was mostly miserable, or so the New Yorker sniffs, but given his horrific upbringing and loveless parents it feels semi-miraculous he died of natural causes (maybe on the wings of God & alcohol).

If the past was a braver and more manly time, as everybody instantly intuits, it was also a drinking time. No one seems to make a connection despite the reputation of “liquid courage’. (The New Yorker article said that brutal English writers of the era called each other everything but “drunks”, which was not then seen as perjorative.) As idiotic as Christopher Hitchens often is, he is as brave as they get - and he drinks like a fish.

* * *
Lively Bill Luse & Jeff Culbreath duel on on immigration at What's Wrong With the World?:

From Bill:

[Jeff wrote] I am predisposed to lenience because the illegals in question are - for the most part - Catholic.

I already knew that. It's the Peggy Noonan sentimentalist approach which, based on the voting records of legal Hispanic immigrants, will do this country no good, but only aggravate the downward spiral into liberalism.

From Jeff:

Sentimentalism is a weakness of mine, to be sure. But the Catholicism of the immigrants is unsentimentally a positive good. When push finally comes to shove in the culture wars, they're the kind of people I want as neighbors - even if, as John Henry Newman observed in the lives of many Catholics, they "live badly but die well".

...Their voting records really don't concern me either way...When the hierarchy of the Catholic Church gets serious about discipline and catechesis the votes will fall in line (assuming that votes will matter at that point).

It seems to me that betting the hierarchy will get serious about discipline and catechesis and then betting that Hispanics in America will obey is... well, a lot of betting.

Waugh's Rebellion

The New Yorker has a review of the new book about the Waugh family including Evelyn. The normal New Yorker caveat applies in that it was written by anti-Catholic Joan Acocella (only Peter Boyle there is fair to the Church), but it was interesting to see how the perceived seed of First World War, excessive sentiment, was reacted against by the succeeding generation:

...it should be added that Evelyn’s rebellion against Arthur is merely one instance of the most notorious generation gap of the twentieth century, the antagonism between the young people of the nineteen-twenties—known in England as the Bright Young Things—and their parents, whose values, the children felt, had led to the pointless slaughter that was the First World War. In an essay that Evelyn wrote while still in high school, he announced this generation’s coming: “They will be above all things clear sighted. The youngest generation are going to be very hard and analytical and unsympathetic. The young men of the nineties”—Arthur’s generation—“subsisted upon emotion. They poured out their souls like water and their tears with pride; middle-aged observers will find it hard to see the soul in the youngest generation. But they will have—and this is their justification—a very full sense of humor.” His prophecy was correct.
* * *
Waugh was loyal to the generation of the twenties—in English fiction, he was its leader—but he soon began worrying about its morals. Alec recalled that after receiving She-Evelyn’s fatal letter Evelyn said to him, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.”

Post from Dispatches from TJICistan on Shaidle's non-Annulment

This exchange interests me primarily because it reminds me of the Protestant Reformation and how the principle of indulgences was good but the corruption of the same during the Middle Ages helped spread Luther's rebellion.