Somewhere Kathy the Carmelite is Cryin'



The former star of "Gospel Minefield" is a big Phillies fan...

Update: Well, the Phils won today so her tears are dry.

Excerpts from Basil Shereghy's Book

On the petition in the Eastern liturgy "That we be delivered from all affliction, wrath, and need, let us pray to the Lord":

The Church prays first of all for temporal and external peace. Such peace is desirable and necessary because without a minimum of political stability the development of Christian virtues, the preservation of Christian culture and especially the exercise of public Christian worship is scarcely possible. The Christian way of life demands at least a minimum of external well-being for the supernatural development of man...

It is true that affliction, pain of body or mind, grief, illness, calamity, and misery can serve as a springboard for heroic virtue. But, for an average Christian, they do not create a suitable atmosphere for well-being and spiritual balance. Wrath or violent anger, not to speak of rage, deprives man of proper vision and forces him to act unnaturally. Very often they cause false evaluations of self and others. To suffer need means to be always troubled and worried, to be without internal peace. Think of the millions of those who hardly have their daily bread, who do not have shelter over their heads, who are naked and deprived of the necessities of life. How many people suffer need in the intellectual and spiritual life! Think of the people who cannot read or who are limited as to the choice of reading material. Consider the problems of millions of people without priests, churches or religious freedom. Such a situation, naturally, cannot create peace of soul.

Regarding a later petition - for "a Christian, painless, unashamed and peaceful end of our life":

After "a peaceful and holy" life we ask for "a Christian, painless, unashamed and peaceful end of our life." These four adjectives amply characterize the requisites of a happy death. It must be Christian, which means that the dying person should depart from this valley of tears fully reconciled with God and in the state of grace. A happy death is "painless": we always pray and hope that God would spare us great suffering, unbearable mental torments and physical agony. A happy death includes dying with dignity, preserving, in the moment of the great departure, a human decorum and stateliness. This is why we pray for an "unashamed" death. And finally we pray for a "peaceful" death. To die after settling all our affairs and earthly interests to die "with a smile on our face," reconciled with God and men, to go to sleep peacefully in God.

Taken from "The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom" by Basil Shereghy

The Acceptable Sacrifice

Why then?
I pondered,
as they changed on a dime,
zero-to-60 in apostolic zeal
post-Pentecost.

It was so different
than I'd always imagined:
not the cozy twelve plus Mary
with the tongues of fire
consoling the elite in the Upper Room.
"Is there a flame above my head?"
they might ask their neighbor.

No, it wasn't like that.
There were 120 in that room,
a Spirit conflagration for the masses
and not just the few,
for this was the completed raising of Christ,
the confirmation that now when the Father sees us
he sees His Son,
the Acceptable Sacrifice.

Get Thee to a Byzantine Liturgy

One of the things I'm most grateful for is the providential discovery of a Byzantine Catholic Church, located not far from where I used to live. The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is a treasure, a gift from God.

I went to an out-of-town "regular" Mass Saturday night and there was a jazzy piano and a flute player and you could tell they were pulling out all stops. There was effort, certainly. But it's as if all the seams were showing. The Byzantine Liturgy, by contrast, seems almost effortless; like watching Joe Dimaggio bat. Things seem to flow naturally.

The Byzantine Liturgy is almost magical in the sense that it's childlike but not childish; it is suffused with the message of love while managing not to cloy.

Minor changes recently came to our Byzantine liturgy. The happy refrain that we sing during Easter season used to be:

Christ is risen from the dead!
By death he conquered death,
And to those in the graves,
he granted life.

This has been changed to:

Christ is risen from the dead!
By death he trampeled death,
And to those in the tombs,
he granted life.

Subtle change - just 'trampeled' for conquered and 'tombs' for 'graves'. I personally liked "conquered" more than "trampeled". Trample is more easily survived. Conquered suggests the truth that death has been defeated and not just wounded.

Tombs and graves make little difference on the page. But singing or saying "graves" makes more sense. Your mouth makes a smile while singing "graves" and frowns in order to say "tombs". The Byzantines normally understand that what we do with our bodies is important, and during Easter liturgies it's more in keeping to smile.

Faces of the SS

A New Yorker piece on recent find of an old photo album of SS officers at Auschwitz:

Over the Auschwitz album, like a gloss, clings a sense of a prideful observance of manners and customs, a tranquil and purified world, a shared purpose, a satisfaction in uniforms, boots, and accordions. Lives so exalted required trips to the hills, shot-guns and game hunting, companionable dogs, wine, and the presence of young women. "That the S.S. officers went on vacation didn't take us by surprise," Judith Cohen says. "What surprised us was that Auschwitz wasn't only a place to imprison men and women and kill European Jews; it was also a place to have fun."

The album's effect is discordant...What they have done is not written on their faces, but, even so, their faces are not especially sympathetic. They are the faces of hard men, who give the impression of being restricted in their capacities, their range of feeling. Hoecker's is the stray face among them which seems now and then to reflect charm, courtesy, and fellow-feeling.

* * *
Several people at the museum told me that the strangest thing about the album for them is that a person can look again and again at the images and never find an answer to the question "How could you have done what you did?" One thing that is particularly troubling is the presence of so many doctors and the pseudoscientific legitimacy that their participation lent to the selection process.

A couple things come to mind: one, a belief in Original Sin and in the presence of evil in the world makes us realize we are all capable of horrific evil, although I too would certainly look for the answer "How could you..." in the phots. But I think where the author betrays his naivety is his surprise that doctors - and by extension science - could be involved in a heinous deed, as if science can save us, and is if doctors aren't presently engaged in a mass killing involving a million babies each year.

Repetitive Prayer

The problem with repetitive prayer might just be that we don't repeat it enough.

Week in Review

It seemed so promising at the time. That’s the problem with writerly inspiration: you never know whether it’s legitimate or not until later. Will it stand the test of a couple days? Unfortunately it turned out to be overlong, over edited, with too many I-can-force-this-in's. But the jump-the-shark moment, in hindsight, was the mention of Cotton Mather. It’s just not gonna be good fiction since you can’t mention Cotton without jarring the reader. If you’re writing historical fiction it’s okay, otherwise exnay on dead Puritans.

I j'accuse Thursday's fiction as being written without benefit of beer. In the wake of that harrowing experience I've officially downsized my hunger to write the Great American Novel to writing the Great American Post. Writing is not too dissimilar to 10K road races in that you always want to test yourself. You fight against the tide of middle age not so much out of ambition so much as to just to stay where you are. You at least want to please yourself, to create a souvenir.

* * *
And so I found myself in a cartoon world this week. The new cube location makes everything feel just a bit off, like looking at the work world through a fun house mirror. The new news is that our garbage will be collected only twice a week. As someone who faithfully eats at his desk, this results in overflow garbage cans relatively quickly. But it'll save one million dollars a year (say like Austin Powers) so how can I be agin it?

I’m sort of surprised I never went to the old floor out of habit. Maybe that’s a hopeful sign contra Alzheimer’s. But I feel a bit discombobulated mostly by the gimlet eye of my bosses’ boss who is not gay (he’s married with kids) but who feels the same sort of compulsion to look at me that I feel towards a buxom girl. He travels by my cube at least five times a day and has clever and self-aware eyes that he holds in a perpetual half-squint as if out of vanity. I can see him out of the corner of my eye looking at me as he passes by. Don't think I don't know you're looking, I think, aware that my awareness suggests buxom girls are similarly aware. Darn. Fortunately when he passes I’m typically in a very thoughtful pose. At least I’m not picking my nose or surfing the 'net or something when he passes by. Yet.

Speaking of vanity, and we were a few sentences ago I believe (what's the statute of limitations as far as segues go? Can you say, 'speaking of...' when you mentioned something three lines ago? Six? Nine?) I think it’s crucial in blogging is to establish your unseriousness early and reinforce it at regular intervals because that leads one to take chances, to post bad poetry or self-indulgent posts or what have you. There’s a joy in being at the bottom. While I care little about SiteMeter, being so steady in its mediocrity, I've fallen into the bad habit of monitoring the number of Bloglines subscribers as a score-keeping device, and I lost two this week. Subscribers, after all, are committed. They're not one-night stands, like searchers who land here on the back of "video" + "sex".

It’s funny how we can feel a need to “maintain” numbers so low, but it seems symbolic of something larger – how we don’t take enough chances lest we lose our current members. It's like I mentioned in that previous post about Rev. Wright and how most Christian leaders are not brave enough to espouse something unpopular (i.e. the Cross) such that we lose adherents. We all care too much of the opinions of others instead of the one opinion that does matter - God's.

* * *
A low profile is never helped by having "art" in one's cube. The standard cube is positively tundric in terms of decoration. People in Cube-Land are simultaneously starved for novelty while not providing it, and to the extent I provide it I will reasonably draw attention. Earlier this week the big guy’s right-hand man was suddenly staring over my shoulder. He said he was looking at my large tiger painting, the one chock-full of sentimental value (Mom bought it for me in the mid 80s - it’s like a Linus blanket now).

I’m hardly without sin – I look inside cubicles when I’m walking by them. But I have the decency to avert my eyes if I’m caught, which is also the proper response if you pass gas in a formal setting. It’s amazing you have to teach people these things!

* * *
Due to the pseudo-stress of work I signed up for my first “chair massage” at the office. Forgot to spring my obligatory joke about saying what right has my chair to get a massage when I don’t get them.

She was reading a book, something with the word “glass” in it I think, perhaps The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells. It looked like something Oprah would recommend and I felt naturally wary. Based on her book and her age and her occupation I figured she was likely a vegan Obama voter who wanted to ban guns and fuel-inefficient vehicles. In short, ban me.

I was surprised to see that the “chair” was actually a padded contraption, a sort of comfortable iron maiden, in which you ended up in a half-kneel with your butt hanging out rather vulnerably (although maybe I was doing it wrong). She indicated I should put my face down in a circular pad with a mouth opening. My Adam’s apple was pinched against the iron part of this “iron maiden” such that I was struggling for breath nearly from the get-go. Luckily I would have little need for breath, as this gig wasn’t exactly an exercise in heavy lifting, though when she was massaging my neck I figured she was only a half-centimeter from strangling me.

She worked the shoulders painfully. Likely she determined I was a Republican and taking out her frustrations. Any possibility of nodding off was abrogated by the sharp pinches in that area. The back, hands and arms were truly relaxing but she spent most of her time on my shoulders. I asked her where I was tight and she said in the lower back and shoulders, just like most office workers ("typical office worker" I was). Unfortunately she spent more time on the shoulders than the lower back.

I could tell it was a job for her, like mine is for me, and not a "calling”. It reminded me of when I get my haircut: the yawning chasm between my relaxation and the doer’s activism is disquieting because it’s too zero-sum: what is building me up is tearing them down. Work wearies the spirit and the flesh and I feel too much sympathy for them such that I can't truly enjoy it. Why would I add to her workload? I determined I likely wouldn't do this again.

After the massage it was back to my work and then a few hours later quitting time. (Cue Flintstone's whistle). I headed down to the workout room for a bit of Ian Ker’s biography (the current topic justification, which gives me a headache, especially on a Friday) while doing a 25-minute workout on the Stairmaster. Then I walked out of work and headed to the parking garage when who do I see walking dead straight-ahead of me? The massage therapist. The timing was such that just as she pressed the elevator button and turned towards me, I passed; we made eye contact but it didn’t register that a few hours earlier she’d given me a massage. I was in shorts and a windbreaker instead of dockers and a dress shirt, and I look like everyman anyway. Her demeanour and eyes and body language spoke of flatness and deadness and it occurred to me that despite myself, I might have more to give to her than she had to give me. I said a quick prayer.

Cabin Fever

I miss the scent of Hilton Head,
the 'lectric mix of dead palm needles
and salt-sea air
of Randy White mass paperbacks
and aloe vera…

There it’s eternally summer
(because I’ve only been there in summer)
where we duck the palm fronds
on the twisting bike paths
and pedal aside the semi-obscuring planks
of residential pools
and later watch old 24s….

We ride to the Academy
look for gators in the dark lagoons
and for turtles big as canned hams
there where it's eternally summer
and the smell is of dead pine needles
and air spiked with salt-water...

Divine Mercy Quote

Once the Lord said to me, Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy. Oh, how much I am hurt by a soul's distrust! Such a soul professes that I am Holy and Just, but does not believe that I am Mercy and does not trust My Goodness. Even the devils glorify My Justice but do not believe in My Goodness. My Heart rejoices in this title of Mercy.

[#300, The Diary of St. Faustina]

Botros Speaks the Truth in Love

Bill Luse recently linked to an inspiring post about someone I didn't know existed: a forthright Coptic priest in the Middle East taking Islam head-on and winning loads of converts.

I occasionally donate to SAT-7, but suspect it is extremely "soft"when it comes to apologetics. Fr. Botros is bravery in action, and bravery normally comes from individuals, not institutions (EWTN's boldness comes only because of one remarkable person with total control over it in the beginning - Mother Angelica). The Venerable John Henry Newman said as much, that bravery comes from individuals, and he argued against the impulse of others to make the Tractarians an organization rather than a group of disparate individuals (like bloggers!? *grin*) because he knew there are things they could say as individuals that a committee could not.

I recall reading a page at random in "Testimony of Hope: The Spiritual Exercises of Pope John Paul II" and opening to a sentence that said love is more powerful than even the media. It's tempting to think of the media as the great power; to use one example, it's been said that money is an incredible advantage in political campaigns and that's because money buys media.

Prayer Request

Please pray for the ten victims of a tragic Pennsylvania fire and the surviving family members:

Police say the fire in Brockway took the lives of a 40-year-old woman and nine victims younger than 20 on Thursday.

Two other people escaped. One of them is a woman who jumped from the second floor.

Brockway is a rural town of about 2,000 people 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh....

The three generations of Petersons lived together in the home, said family friend Carol Paruso.

She didn't know any of the victims, but my bingo co-worker Kim was born and raised in that very small town.

On Steinbeck's "East of Eden"...

Link here:

It's a perplexing book—melodramatic, self-indulgent, even trashy; yet at last you feel you're reading a real novel rather than fictionalized reportage—a novel with strong characters, large-scale story development, a central idea holding it together. And in the first-person passages, which lovingly reimagine his mother's family, the Hamiltons, he was able to move beyond the impersonality of his earlier work.

The fulcrum of the book is the tragic story of the fictional Trasks: Adam, the good man; Cathy (Eve), his evil wife; Adam's brother, Charles; and a second pair of brothers, Adam's sons, Cal and Aron (Cain and Abel, in case you missed the connection). To an impressive degree Steinbeck succeeds in turning this ambitious metaphor into a moving human drama, and it can be gripping when it isn't maddening. Alas, it's disfigured by the most intrusive of all his guru figures, who stains the narrative with his relentless wisdom. This is Lee, Adam's Chinese "houseboy," who discards his faux pidgin in order to say profound things in impeccable English (he's been to college and, as a hobby, translates classic Chinese poetry into English). It's Lee who introduces to Adam (and to us) the ultimate message of East of Eden and the heart of Steinbeck's philosophy: the Hebrew concept of timshel, which Lee happens to have picked up from a learned old rabbi. Timshel, we're told, means "Thou mayest"; in other words, thou hast a choice. "I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because 'Thou mayest.'" And he can cook, too!

On the positive side, Steinbeck's descriptive style is by now highly fluent and convincing. How surely, for instance, he evokes the town's brothels:

They seemed very small, and they tried to efface themselves in outside neglect, and the wild overgrown front yards tried to hide them from the street. Remember how the shades were always drawn with little lines of yellow light around their edges? You could hear only a murmur from within. Then the front door would open to admit a country boy, and you'd hear laughter and perhaps the soft sentimental tone of an open-face piano with a piece of toilet chain across the strings, and then the door would close it off again.

Understanding Obama & the Black Churches

Gleanings from National Review and The New Yorker are starting to put the puzzle together for me: Rev. Wright is to black churches what Marty Haugen music is to Catholicism and what megachurches are to Protestantism: in all cases it is Christianity desperately (and unnecessarily) trying to hold on to people. A large part of this desperation is likely due to we Christians not exhibiting the faith, hope and charity we ought, but Christianity can only be held together by Christ and certainly not by the duct tape of dumbed-down Masses or megachurches preaching the prosperity gospel or by disdaining whitey. What good is it to gain the whole world (in terms of adherents) but lose our soul?

From NR:

Personally, culturally, and politically, Obama is an academic. That is his ethos and appeal...My point of late has been that the whole Reverend Wright fiasco has its roots in the nexus between the radicalism of elite university divinity schools and the lives of urban African Americans. Wright’s infamous remarks are not a fluke or "out of context," but part of the consistently hard-left political worldview nurtured by Wright’s elite divinity-school mentors. Wright’s ability to give a popular and hard-edged spin to the sophisticated academic theology of black liberation is what drew Obama to Wright — who was the perfect bridge between Obama’s radical intellectual world and the ethnic authenticity he lacked.

In the same way a good college lecturer makes political radicalism unthreatening and appealing to freshmen, Obama sees his task as smoothly introducing the sometimes radical or off-putting vision of the Democratic left to Americans. And in just the same way, Obama means to "bring us together" with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Asad, and the rest of the world’s rogue gang.

Related, from a New Yorker article on Rev. Wright and his spiritual mentor James Cone:

There was, for [James] Cone, another motivating force in the rise of black liberation theology. In black neighborhoods across America, the spiritual marketplace was getting crowded, and churches seemed in danger of being edged out. Politically inclined young people who wanted no part of “the white man’s religion” could turn instead to Marxism, or to various strains of black-nationalist thought, or to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, the group that groomed Malcolm X. Cone found himself on the wrong side of a growing divide—as he puts it, “We were Martin Luther King, Jr., people”—and he realized that not just the sales pitch but the product had to be changed; the urgency in his prose reflected his anger but also his fear that the black Church was becoming obsolete. Preachers who had helped lead the civil-rights movement were being outflanked by black nationalists who mistrusted any belief system that claimed to be universal. The historian and theologian Gayraud Wilmore contends that the Nation of Islam “kept fire at the feet of the historic black churches.”

* * *
Wright seems to have a complicated relationship with Farrakhan, whose national headquarters are in the South Shore neighborhood, a few miles from Trinity. His remarks about Farrakhan veer from the fulsome (the minister’s analysis of America’s racial ills is “astounding and eye opening”) to the equivocal (he is “sincere about his faith and his purpose”), but for the most part Wright chooses his words with tactical care, the way Cone did when he wrote about Elijah Muhammad. It is the language of a respectful, and possibly anxious, rival. Like Cone in the nineteen-sixties, Wright may have worried that he would be judged, and found wanting, by purer and less forgiving forms of black nationalism. Farrakhan represented the threat; his followers—particularly the young black men whom churches sometimes had trouble reaching—represented the prize.

Various

Divine Mercy and Pro-Life:

* * *
While watching the excellent PBS documentary Triumph at Carville, the story of America's leper colony, I thought about how small really is beautiful. The institution was small enough - and humane enough - to offer the original patients a permanent refuge there should their adjustment to life "on the outside" after their cures become problematic (many had lived at Carville for 30 or more years). There's something about the red tape of today's large organizations that makes such largess seem almost quaint.

* * *

Pope to Give Homily in Latin

At the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium later this month, the Vatican says Pope Benedict will give the homily in Latin, without translation.

"It's a good idea for Catholics to learn the language of the Church," said a papal aide.

One man with a ticket to the papal event lamented, "the only Latin I know is pig Latin!"

(More parodies here....)

* * *
They were for the war, before they were against it: Sure it's fish in the barrell, but The Other Paper takes the Columbus Dispatch to task:

The paper’s March 20 piece...noted that “The Dispatch opposed the Iraq war from the start….”

That would be impressive if only it were true. While the paper has offered a number of editorials criticizing the war, the Dispatch was for it before it was against it.

On March 18, 2003, the day the first bombs fell on Baghdad, the Dispatch’s editorial board offered the following analysis of the president’s decision to invade Iraq: “Bush had just two choices: Back down or go it alone. He made the right choice.”

Six weeks before that, the paper had offered a more detailed case for invasion by basically rehashing every point Colin Powell made in his now-infamous presentation to the United Nations.

“The United Nations Security Council should authorize military action against Iraq for its failure to disclose and destroy its weapons of mass destruction,” a Feb. 6, 2003, editorial said.

* * *
I'm a tad jealous of Rich and Jim, although given the crowds and the lack of enthusiasm for the idea among my household and friends, I think the papal Mass is something I'd rather have attended than attend. (Not that I could've necessarily secured tickets, of course.) But it's well that Jim & Rich go, since they have children of the age for whom it will no doubt be a very memorable and edifying experience.

* * *
Very cool: It's nice to know my blog isn't a complete waste!

* * *
On the Darwin fish via Alicia.
* * *
"Empowerment" is such a nice way to say, "you do it" isn't it? I'm always impressed by someone with a felicity for euphemisms, mostly because I'm weak at it. Here we see my boss getting empowered, who in turn empowered me (by coming over and telling me to call Services):

_____

To [Name withheld]

I just wanted to let you know a piece of a tile from the ceiling apparently fell on Tom's desk last night. Someone apparently found it and put it back up but can we still get someone to come down and look at it? Thanks.

R.
_________

R.-
(I am going to empower you, so hang on!) For these type of requests, call Services at xxxx option 2 and they will send someone up. :-)
Thanks,
[Name withheld]

When the mob gathers against Horton, the argument that his cause must be ended and the speck destroyed is a familiar one: it must be done for the sake of the children! This is screamed by the marmish Kangaroo and echoed by every last animal in the forest. When all other political arguments fail in real life, of course, this is precisely what happens. The children are rhetorically nationalized by the demagogue and anyone who disagrees is painted as an enemy of virtuous childhood. - from "Horton Hears a Who" review on Lew Rockwell, via Eric Scheske

We do not doubt the good faith of their objections; we hope our critics are right and hope that it is we who have misread the situation...But the key sticking point is that these critics deny what we find undeniable: the bishops indulgently beaming at the little ones with Liquid Plumber in their sippy-cups. - - Diogenes at "Off the Record" on rarity of Catholic hierarchy to warn laity of spiritual dangers (via Mr. Beres)

Americans these days tend to either wallow in sentimentality, or to despise it entirely, which only proves that our society is losing its balance. - Jeff of Stoney Creek Digest

The Stanford Review discusses how Stanford University rejected a proposal to invite then-Cardinal Ratzinger to lecture at the university in the 2000-2001 school year. The newspaper alleges ideological concerns played a role...I am reminded of the passage in More's Utopia where he berates the English aristocracy for poorly educating their people and then punishing them for committing the crimes for which their lack of education has prepared them. If these Stanford professors and their like prattle on about the vulgarity and ignorance of American Christianity, they should acknowledge that acts like the refusal of a venue to a future pope ensure that American religious discussions remain at a crassly elementary level. - Kevin Jones of Philokalia

I think the question of length [of liturgy], so bluntly put, is the wrong question and actually sort of …embarrassing, maybe? Especially when you consider, say, the normal length of many Orthodox or Eastern Rite liturgies - every Sunday. And also because of course, historically, the Easter Vigil has always been long - as in all night long, if you go back far enough. In some monasteries, it is still all night long...No, the better question is, as Fr. Martin elaborates in his post, is what elements of the Vigil, as lived out in our parishes, are reflective of artistic and homiletic excesses rather than truly at the service of God through the liturgy? - Amy Welborn, on complaints about the length of Easter Vigil

[I] was slowed, however, by a particular paragraph in which we learn that "Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous — and authentic — hadith stating that women should 'breastfeed' strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time...the logic being that, by being 'breastfed,' the men become like 'sons' to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them." Finally, a Muslim tenet I might be able to embrace. With minimal enthusiasm, of course. - Bill of Apologia

The real issue is this: Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam? - Howard Dean in 2004, who is presumably supporting McCain this year (via Bill of Summa Minutiae)

During the Easter Vigil Mass, when entire liturgical year seemed to be crashing down around my ears, the only thing I noted from Father's homily was his point about St. Mary Magdalen's tears. She saw Our Lord in the garden, but did not recognise Him because all she could see was her own sorrow. In the same way, we have the chance to encounter Our Risen Lord every day, but we do not see Him because we, too, are blinded by our own sorrows... I was content to be bland, unremarkable and flat for the rest of my life; I really thought it was the best I could do. Then my godmother turned her shrewd gaze on me and became one person who didn't think I was disappointing, even with all the objectivity of distance. Something else I had been accustomed to believing was that self-esteem doesn't matter. Wasn't humility the real virtue? Now Antony points out that St. Peter had the same wrong ideas when he refused to let Our Lord wash his feet. God does not want us to esteem ourselves more than we're worth, His own life having been priced at thirty piece of silver; but then again, He suffered and died to redeem us from sin, so He shouldn't want us to esteem ourselves less than we're worth. - Sancta Sanctis

Because I have a degree in economics I have learned to distrust the entire field of economics, and to treat new economic theories with extreme caution. However, what these people call "binary economics" sounds remarkably similar to Catholic distributism. - Jeff of Stoney Creek Digest

Collectors often decried how money had ruined their hobby, making it hard for them to form meaningful friendships through their cards. Money, however, made the hobby not only profitable but also more serious, more instrumental, and therefore more manly. The same collectors who complained about greed often bragged in the same interview about the value of their cards. Yet money, in turn, made the hobby less akin to child's play and more like work: lonely, competitive, unfulfilling, and alienating. - - Author John Bloom in A House of Cards (1997)

Coptic priest Zakaria Botros's motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote 'Israeli interests,' or 'demonize' Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire. - NR article via Bill Luse