Excerpt...

...from the Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church by then Cardinal Ratzinger:

How can the objective truth of the Church's doctrines and the intensely personal character of the believer's possession of them be combined? "For many years...anglophone catechists and faith-educators have been obliged to work out of a cluster of theoretical attitudes that plumbed heavily for the personal, subjective aspect, to the serious detriment of their students' confident recognition of the Church's doctrines as objective truths." [Eric d'Arcy, "The New Catechism and Cardinal Newman"]. So, we are badly in need of an up-to-date account of doctrine's place in a complete education in faith. This would require overcoming a still very strong emotional antipathy to doctrinal catechesis.
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...The propositions of faith form a body of doctrines called, in Christian language, the depositum fidei. "Guard the deposit" (1 Tim 6:20), "guard the noble deposit" (2 Tim 1:14), St. Paul says to his disciple. "Guarding the deposit of faith is the mission which the Lord entrusted to his Church and which she fulfills in every age." These are the first words of John Paul II's apostolic constitution for the publication of the CCC.

What is "the deposit"? [Newman asks]. That which hath been intrusted to you, not which thou hast discovered; what thou has received, not what thou hast thought out; a matter, not of cleverness, but of teaching; not of private handling, but of public tradition.

Various & Sundry

Rich Leonardi's amazon.com review was pulled for reasons unclear. I smell a rat.

This, from Henry Dieterich, reminds me of the time a co-worker said to me: "You're too smart to believe in God." I think Henry is smart enough to break the stereotype.

Protected from liberal scorn by his role as a pretend rightwing ideologue, one would think Stephen Colbert would've given Dan Rather a bit of guff over RatherGate or mention the time Dan stormed off the set because tennis ran long. But he was a pushover when the old CBS warhorse came on the show to plug his HDNet gig. That's not to say Colbert isn't a leftwinger; he is, but his roleplaying usually allows him a bit more leash in putting liberals on the spot.

The normally irenic Christopher of Ratzinger Fan Club Blog is understandably tired and not gonna take it anymore. His post is here:

In what has become the characteristic approach of Catholic and Enjoying It, Mark dismisses a post by Tom McKenna by saying that he was "orgasmic at the idea of hanging Saddam," that his "blog is more or less devoted to obsessing over how to execute as many people as humanly possible," and that he had an "insatiable hunger and thirst for death, death, death, and more death."

Responding with what has likewise become my characteristic rejection of Mark's approach (played out over the course of a three-part series on Mark's treatment of the 'neocons' in August 2006 and a four-part series on "the torture debate" in October 2006), Mark expresses his frustration with my "fair and balanced act."

When I listen to [Pope Benedict], I hear a wise old man who has just about seen and heard it all - who, especially in his years at CDF, saw the best and the worst, and who, most importantly, also saw how people find their way out of the worst. Force-feeding and slamming down the books - any kind of sudden action out of the blue - will immediately put Newton's Third Law into motion...Forcing or manipulating is not the way to go. Infallibility doesn't extend to papal management style or decision-making. But still. When a 79-year old man who is brilliant, apparently very kind, also apparently an excellent listener who really values the process of dialogue and intellectual exchange, and who has been continually immersed in the worst of what this Church gives to the world (the CDF is responsible for overseeing clerical sexual abuse cases and other problems) - when this man is put in charge by the people who know him quite well - I'm going to listen and learn, even, I admit, as I yearn for a few hammers to come down, here and there. Hope. A virtue. I think Pope Benedict has a lot of it. Enough to share, in fact. - Amy Welborn

Suppose all candidates support "abortion rights"? In good conscience one could refrain from voting altogether. In some instances this might be best, even though voting is normally a moral obligation. Or one could try to determine whether the position of one candidate is less supportive of abortion than that of another. Other things being equal, one might then morally vote for a less supportive position. If all candidates support 'abortion rights' equally one might vote for the candidate who seems best in regard to other issues, hoping that one day he or she could be persuaded to become pro-life. - the late Cardinal O'Connor

I think Catholic bloggers are sort of like Hamlet’s players (II,ii):

they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the
time: after your death you were better have a bad
epitaph than their ill report while you live.

- Fr. John Zuhlsdorf of "What Does the Prayer Really Say?"

If 60 Minutes is great journalism, then bring on supression of the press!
EDITED TO ADD: Note to Keilholtz (writer): "supression" would be what word, exactly? I am having trouble figuring out even what word was begun before it changed horses midstream. -Keilhotlz (editor)
PS I am leaving this abomination in the entry to humiliate you into doing a better job of reading what you post
PPS I am also leaving my own mispelling of my name, for similar reasons
- Erik of "Erik's Rants & Recipes". I can relate.

H...

...omer: No TV and no beer make Homer ... something something.
Marge: Go crazy?
Homer: Don't mind if I do!

It isn't quite as bad as that around here (for one thing, it'd be a dark, dark day when our household runs out of beer!) but we are a week behind on tv ... and I'm running out of tapes! - Julie of "Happy Catholic". I can relate.

Let’s return to the sagacious Dr. Johnson. In a Rambler essay he once opined that the worst sort of impertinence was that of the man who “keeps the exuberance of his faculties under visible restraint.” Dear old Dr. Johnson! He would have been appalled at the strangulated discourse and stifling constriction of poetry in our time. But then again, he lived in a saner age....Whatever feeble connection existed between their thought and their speech is made even weaker by their fear of saying the wrong thing. -- Joseph S. Salemi via Korrektiv

From a review by Steven Pinker of Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea by George Lakoff

The left, by contrast, is more likely to embrace George Bernard Shaw's (and later Robert Kennedy's) credo, "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?', I dream things that never were and ask 'why not?'"

In Act I of Shaw's Back to Methuselah, in which he retells the story of Adam and Eve, you'll see that what [Sen. Kennedy] quoted is said by The Serpent. I'm willing to concede the left is more likely to embrace his credo.

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins--or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom--Lucifer. --Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (1971) p. ix

- Terrence Berres of "The Provincial Emails"

I invite you to try a test with friends and family.  I've done this with about 15 people in the last couple of weeks.  Ask them to put the following three names in history, in the order in which they appeared:  Jesus, Mohammad, Moses.  I have been shocked at how many put Mohammad before Jesus, and even before Moses.  I think the reason this happens is because Muslim countries look so much older on television!  Now how could Americans understand Jihad, the Crusades, the relationship between the Bible and the Quran, or any thing they might hear that the Quran directs, without even understanding the historical sequence of the prophets? - via NRO's "The Corner"

I supported the war at the time, and it was a popular war, backed by liberals as well as conservatives; the invasion had a thousand fathers, and they weren’t all in the halls of the Department of Defense or the pages of the conservative media. But it was a war that we entered into, I think, without adequate deliberation and debate. It was critiqued, of course, but mainly by left-wing shouters like the “poets against the war,” and, what seem in hindsight like the best arguments against the invasion—the conservative arguments against it—were often conspicuous in their absence. One of the great virtues of the conservative movement has been its willingness to encourage debate within its own ranks, and on the question of invading Iraq—the most momentous question, so far, of the post–September 11 era—I think the movement didn’t live up to those standards, and we’re all the worse for it. - Ross Douthat

At a conference such as this, one barely puts one's nose out of doors, and I have only manged one walk - in the grounds of a nearby College, where russet and golden leaves were cascading on to wide spacious lawns and echoing the colours of a beautiful building in red sandstone....it turns out to be a Pontifical College, the only College in the USA owned by the Vatican, and Marcus Grodi's son is among those studying there......This Autumn weather links one immediately to childhood.....Autumn mists and the smell of cordite with fireworks exploding in suburban gardens, and the joy of standing around a great bonfire, sparks shooting up into the cold dark sky, family faces illuminated in the glow, and hot sausages and potatoes to enjoy as the flames died down. - Englishwoman Joanna Bogle of "auntie joanna writes", of her trip to Columbus.

Merton's Last Journal

Found a $2 roughed-up copy of The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, something I probably wouldn't have have bought but for the price. But it's funny how there's more depth in it than in 99% of the glossy, new bestsellers for which they ask high prices with little substantial delivery.

It seems that Merton's last words, public words anyway, were "So I will disappear." This was at the end of a talk he gave just before his death on December 10, 1968. The context of the remark is more banal: "I will conclude on that note. I believe the plan is to have all the questions for this morning's lectures this evening at the panel. So I will disappear."

A few excerpts...Merton quotes "The Mandala in the Human Body" in his journal:

Spiritual sterility can be due to the fact that fertilization by the union of (wisdom and discipline) has not taken place. Wisdom as sperm, discipline as ovum give us the 'new creature,' the living reintegrated and growing 'personality'.

He quotes a translation of 16th century Bengali poetry:

I would set fire to my house
for him. I would bear
The scorn of the world.

He thinks his sorrow is joy
When I weep, he weeps.

When the sound of your flute reaches my ears
it compels me to leave my home, my friends,
it draws me into the dark towards you.

Elsewhere he sounds almost like he's affirming "spam poetry", a genre in which snippets of spam are spun into...well snippets of spam that are supposed to read like poetry:

Marcuse has shown how mass culture tends to be anti-culture - to stifle creative work by the sheer volume of what is "produced," or reproduced. In which case, poetry, for example, must start with an awareness of this contradiction and use it - as ant-poetry - which freely draws on the material of superabundant nonsense at its disposal.

Found in a Church Bulletin

Spirited Discussions

The family gatherings include a brother-in-law who is a self-described political moderate but who also describes himself as a socialist. The two conservative brother-in-laws (myself and Chris) debate him early & often.

A recent one was a bit humorous. Our socialist interlocuter thought he had us when ESPNU, an obscure ESPN spin-off channel, played hardball and outraged Ohio State Buckeye fans by buying the rights to the game such that it would not be shown on network or regular cable. He said this was an outrage, and "an example of everything that's wrong with the capitalistic system....Big guys screw over the little man."

Chris said that we wouldn't have most of what we have today without capitalism, all the fantastic technologies that allow games to be broadcast. I said that ESPNU's little gambit backfired. They may've won the war but now they are associated with all that is evil in the world (at least in Columbus's eyes). ESPNU is dead to us. I think I made my point that sure ESPNU screwed us, but in a capitalistic system the consumers usually won't allow repeated screwings. Discuss & recuss amongst yourselves.

On the Pope's Latest

Benedict VI stressed the educational value of praying and thanking God before meals. “This custom should be preserved or rediscovered, because it teaches one not to take the ‘daily bread’ for granted, but to recognise it as a gift of Providence,” he said. “We should get used to blessing the Creator for everything: for air and water, precious elements that are the basis of life on our planet, as well as for the food that God offers us for our sustenance through the fecundity of the earth.”

When I was a kid, thanking God for meals seemed somehow disingenuous since it seemed like Dad worked awful hard for the money to pay for those meals. Now I've somewhat woken up to the fact that our whole life is a gift and that the earth belongs to God. I also see more clearly how fragile the whole economic system is and how we, in America, are very fortunate to live where food shortages are not a problem. As Amy Welborn, in The Words We Pray wrote:

There are countless ways to thank God for our food, and by extension our lives...The Torah reveals that the whole earth belongs to God. So before a meal, God is blessed. These prayers are called benedictions; they are prayers of praise and, as one writer puts it, "a way of asking for and receiving God's permission to take and enjoy that which belongs to Him."...Gratitude for a meal is really just an extension of the gratitude we're called to live in all day long.

Uh, umm....

I was online re-ordering checks and saw many different categories: sports, wildlife, collegiate, religious, etc... The religious category contained one style of check. Jesus? Angels? A cross? No, Martin Luther King.

Healing Doc

Friend of mine from the local Byzantine church went to one of these healing services. He seems enthused (he had no physical ailments to be healed). I'd never heard of Dr. Nemeh, but thanks to a google search on "Open Book" I found the above link. A funny thing is one proponent of Dr. Nemeh's said "there's no 'me' in Dr. Nemeh". Well, literally there's a "me" just after "Ne" and before "eh".

Mexico City & Environs

I've been going through "Ghosts of Vacations Past" for the purpose of creating a travelogue blog and thought the one below from September 2000 might be of interest to readers of this particular blog. I have a homemade rosary bought at the Shrine at Los Remedios and I sometimes think of the hands who made it, where they are now, what they are doing..._______________________________________________

Down where peyote dreams meet prickly pear catci…where pollution hangs like a cloud over the bowl of Mexico City….where the mustached, cool-visage’d bus driver shares a smoke with a paid-off policeman….where rich reds and bright yellows emanate from indigenous plants…where flower-laden groups walk the long corridor to the Gaudalupe area….where old women walk the length of a football field on their knees to Our Lady's image..where bus drivers make the sign of the cross when passing a church....where where under the strong Mexican sun children stream in dark blue school uniforms through dire neighborhoods of corrugated shacks….all these are impressions of Mexico.

Unlike Cortes, who came to Mexico City in the early 16th century by long and tortuous route, we arrived by plane (while complaining, of course, on how long it took). You could see the dense city of 25 million souls hemmed in by the mountains, mountains that appeared from on high like a big green skirt. Our foray into the foreign met us with foreign signs like Que y Sabarro and swarms of green VW bug taxis. Dense canyons of buildings covered the land till the reach of the mountains, at which point shacks and shanties sidled halfway up the hills, their inhabitant's laundry hanging out on rooftops suggesting a kind of exhibitionism or vulnerability. We saw an old priest hearing a confession out in the open as if it were a common thing and saw paintings of Jesus and Mary that exuded an inexpressible warmth.


Shrine church at Los Remedios

We visited the Shrine at Los Remedios ("the Remedy") on the Saturday after 10,000 pilgrims had come for a celebration of Masses and devotionals and food and fireworks and high-wire acts. There was a little courtyard with various rooms containing religious articles and walls papered with petitions, prayers and pictures. I bought a rosary at the shrine and asked the local padre to bless it. He looked like a tall Sancho Pancho and wore a white Dominican-like robe. He took a pine bough and dipped it in holy water and proceeded to brusquely bless the rosary and then me. Earlier, at Mass at Los Remedios I witnessed Mexicans with tears in their eyes. They appreciated the Faith.

We'd visited just before the September 6th feast of Virgin of the Remedies (Fiesta of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios):

September is the time of Cholula’s large fair celebrating the Virgin of the Remedies, the statue of the Virgin now housed in the church on top of the pyramid. The statue itself, an 8-inch-tall figure left behind by a Spanish soldier in the 16th century, is taken down from the pyramid in September to begin a cycle of visits to Cholula neighborhoods.

Cortés and his men had...placed the doll-sized wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary on the altar. On the night of July 1, 1520 the Aztecs, drove Cortés and his men from the town, and this night was henceforth called by the conquistadores ‘La Noche Triste’, The Sad Night. The conquistadors attributed their good fortune in escaping to this little Vergin de los remedios.
...
Later, during the colonial period, the Shrine of Our Lady of Los Remedios was built when a spanish officer found that religious figure under a maguey plant. It is said that the small virgin had been brought by Gonzalo Rodríguez de Villafuerte. The shrine, which divides the Satélite area from the popular zones of Naucalpan municipality, was built in the sixteenth century, and in the architectural compound we can find the well-known caracoles or Los Remedios Aqueduct.

From another source:

While Guadalupe served as the uniting symbol of Mexico's poor, the rich (criollos, born in Mexico of "pure" Spanish blood; and peninsulares, born in Spain) had their own icon, La Virgen de los Remedios...She was carried to the New World by one of Cortes's men, and survived the noche triste . While still an important religious symbol in Mexico, La Virgen de los Remedios isn't in the same league with Guadalupe.

From the diary of a 19th century pilgrim:

We went lately to pay a visit to the celebrated Virgen de los Remedios, the Gachupina, the Spanish patroness, and rival of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This Virgin was brought over by Cortes, and when he displaced the Indian idols in the great Temple of Mexico, caused them to be broken in pieces, and the sanctuary to be purified, he solemnly placed there a crucifix and this image of the Virgin; then kneeling before it, gave solemn thanks to Heaven, which had permitted him thus to adore the Most High in a place so long profaned by the most cruel idolatries.

It is said that this image was brought to Mexico by a soldier of Cortes's army called Villefuerte, and that the day succeeding the terrible Noche Triste, it was concealed by him in a place where it was afterwards discovered. At all events, the image disappeared, and nothing further was known of it until, on the top of a barren and treeless mountain, in the heart of a large maguey, she was found by a fortunate Indian. Her restoration was joyfully hailed by the Spaniards. A church was erected on the spot. A priest was appointed to take charge of the miraculous image. Her fame spread abroad. Gifts of immense value were brought to her shrine. A treasurer was appointed to take care of her jewels; a camarista to superintend her rich wardrobe. No rich dowager died in peace until she had bequeathed to Our Lady of Los Remedios her largest diamond, or her richest pearl...

The mountain is barren and lonely, but the view from its summit is beautiful, commanding the whole plain. The church is old and not very remarkable, yet a picturesque object, as it stands in its gay solitariness, with one or two trees beside it, of which one without leaves was entirely covered with the most brilliant scarlet flowers. Señor — having been the Virgin's coachman, the Señora — having been the daughter of her camarista, and C—n the minister from the land of her predilection, we were not astonished at the distinguished reception which we met with from the reverend padre, the guardian of the mountain. The church within is handsome; and above the altar is a copy of the original Virgin. After we had remained there a little while, we were admitted into the Sanctum, where the identical Virgin of Cortes, with a large silver maguey, occupies her splendid shrine....The image is a wooden doll about a foot high, holding in its arms an infant Jesus, both faces evidently carved with a rude penknife; two holes for the eyes and another for the mouth. This doll was dressed in blue satin and pearls with a crown upon her head and a quantity of hair fastened on to the crown. No Indian idol could be much uglier. As she has been a good deal scratched and destroyed in the lapse of ages, C—n observed that he was astonished that they had not tried to restore her a little. To this the padre replied, that the attempt had been made by several artists, each one of whom had sickened and died.

During the trip we visited at least ten churches. All of them were beautiful though markedly different. The Cathedral at Zocala Square was a feast for the eyes. Ornate gold altars and side altars repeated like endless eaves of finely decorated libraries. The Cathedral was dark, magisterial and and not for impressionable young children given the skulls & such. It's immensity and brilliance represented the justice of God and the power of God. It illustrated the gospel account of Mary Magdalen pouring expensive oils on Christ's feet, or the story of the wise men and their gifts of gold and myrrh. Another church, Juan Diego's uncles', was the opposite. It was light, and airy and simple. There were no reliquaries but an easiness and it emphasized the accounts of Christ riding on a donkey and being born in a manger and God's gentleness and mercy. Concerning the Cathedral:

Having destroyed the Aztec temples here, Cortés ordered the construction of a church on the same spot. In 1573 the church was demolished and work began on the Cathedral itself, intended to resemble its equivalents in Toledo and Granada. It was consecrated, still incomplete, in 1667 and the final touches - the two bell towers and central dome designed by Manuel Tolsa - were finished in 1813. The adjoining Sagrario, parish church for the area, was built from the local red tezontle stone in the 1700s and is equally impressive with its Churrigueresque façade.

Outside the Cathedral

Inside the Cathedral

We went for a walk that night and had a pair of Corona's at a bar with live Mexican music. The next morning we visited the Aztec pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. We scrambled up to the top for a magnificent view of the valley where Indians sacrificed up to 20,000 of their best athletes and prettiest virgins. Now we make them homecoming kings and prom queens.

Zocala Square is second in size only to Red Square in Moscow. The imposing square is surrounded by gargoyle'd buildings and one expected to see a bullfighter or matador at any moment. Zocala pulsated with foreignness. At one end loud opera music blared, at the other side there was a maniacal Indian drumming. The place felt like the setting of a lost empire or somewhere Indiana Jones would feel at home. The square was equal parts danger - full of rogue tour guides and pick-pocketing banditos - and glamour, with pistole-toting police guarding the Mexican treasures. I clambored up the stairs to a sumptuous room only to receive a curt, "no moleste!". I said, "Vamous?" and he said, "si". Later, at the bottom of the stairs, I offered a "Beunes Dios" at a stiff-necked policeman and received my first 'gracias'. It was then I knew I'd connected with the Mexican people and was now one of them.

The next day we loaded up the bus and headed for the reason we came - Guadalupe. We were so used to seeing copies of the image of Guadalupe that when we walked into the actual Basilica we had no idea we were looking at the real thing. Mass was far in back and because of the immense crowds we came back the next day for the real visit. By then I a greater sense of awe as I entered the church. After Mass we went to the back of the altar and looked at the image a few more times. The tilma and image has been closely studied:

Within six years of this apparition, six million Aztecs had converted to Catholicism. The tilma shows Mary as the God-bearer - she is pregnant with her Divine Son. Since the time the tilma was first impressed with a picture of the Mother of God, it has been subject to a variety of environmental hazards including smoke from fires and candles, water from floods and torrential downpours and, in 1921, a bomb which was planted by anti-clerical forces on an altar under it. There was also a cast-iron cross next to the tilma and when the bomb exploded, the cross was twisted out of shape, the marble altar rail was heavily damaged and the tilma was...untouched. Indeed, no one was injured in the Church despite the damage that occurred to a large part of the altar structure.

In 1977, the tilma was examined using infrared photography and digital enhancement techniques. Unlike any painting, the tilma shows no sketching or any sign of outline drawn to permit an artist to produce a painting. Further, the very method used to create the image is still unknown. The image is inexplicable in its longevity and method of production. It can be seen today in a large cathedral built to house up to ten thousand worshipers. It is, by far, the most popular religious pilgrimage site in the Western Hemisphere.

Roadside scenes & paintings in a church

Altar Over War

Scott Hahn, in his talk at the Coming Home Conference, said that the spiritual life is a war, a battlezone, but then added, “or rather an altar”. The latter seems a more uplifting positive image. War seems a pointless test of our manhood while an altar is a place where something productive rather than destructive is going on. On a altar the sacrifice is objectively useful. Every man who hasn’t been to war wonders how he would perform (and many who have been think they could’ve done more) – and yet that’s all indicative of the self-focus that is natural to testing. But an altar is intrinsically other-focused, a trade in which we can benefit others.

The Conservative Landscape

Ramesh Ponnuru has a great piece in the latest National Review:

The real crisis of conservatism...is neither political nor philosophical but a mixture of both. That crisis can be boiled down to two propositions. The first is that, at least as the American electorate is presently constituted, there is no imaginable political coalition in America capable of sustaining a majority that takes a reduction of the scope of the federal government as one of its central tasks. The second is that modern American conservatism is incapable of organizing itself without taking that as a central mission.

The Republican party is a coalition that includes some libertarian-minded members, some social conservatives, and some voters who have a foot in both camps. It is easy to imagine (as Sager does) that it can choose which kind of majority party to be: one oriented toward the libertarians, or one oriented toward the social conservatives. If that were the case, a voter could root for one definition or the other, depending on his own priorities. But only one of those coalitions would actually form a majority. If over the last generation the Republicans had not absorbed the statist social conservatives at the price of losing some libertarians, it would have remained a minority party. If it had instead tried to pick up libertarian Democrats while alienating social conservatives, it would have become a much smaller minority than it already was.
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But anti-statists can take heart, in a way, from the second horn of the dilemma. Conservatives don’t seem to be able to move forward in any other way than theirs. Every attempted makeover of the conservative movement and Republican party over the last 15 years has been driven by the political weakness of anti-statism. Patrick Buchanan tried to throw out the free traders to bring in socially conservative union members. George W. Bush offered a “compassionate” (read: more statist) conservatism. John McCain and his fans had a “national-greatness conservatism.” Conservatism has rejected each ideological novelty like a body rejecting a transplant.

Buchananism repelled more voters than it attracted to the Republican standard. Buchanan ended up purging himself rather than anyone else — before having to slink back to a party that had moved even farther from his vision. Conservatives may not know how to fight the overspending that “compassion” dictates, but they do know that they hate it. Bush’s signature policies of “compassion” — the Medicare drug bill, the education bill, easy immigration, and the faith-based initiative — either failed from the start or have come into disrepute among conservatives. Some of that disrepute is excessive: Conservatives who think that congressional rejection of Bush’s Medicare bill would have yielded a free-market alternative are indulging in fantasy. But the disrepute is a sign that modern conservatism cannot easily be dragged away from anti-statism, and may not be able to be dragged away at all.

In my book, that’s a good thing. But it does make the future of conservatism that much harder to map. And it doesn’t help when my fellow anti-statists spread fog over the debate about that future.

Ross Douthat Review of Flags of Our Fathers

By now almost everyone knows the story. Once upon a time Clint Eastwood made brutal, violent, and implicitly right-wing movies like Dirty Harry. Now he makes brutal, violent, complicated movies like Unforgiven and Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby — movies that subvert America’s sunny ideas about itself; movies that demythologize our culture of violence; movies that win Academy Awards. He used to be Harry Callahan, doling out vigilante justice from the barrel of a gun; now he’s Saint Clint, teaching us about the costs of bloodshed.
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The war itself, as Eastwood portrays it, is the only commentary on war the movie needs. But instead Flags of Our Fathers shuttles back and forth between Iwo Jima and the bond drive, the better to contrast the horror of combat with the kitsch of the home front. The point of these scenes is at once obvious (war is hell, and nobody at home knows it) and obscure (should the government not have sold war bonds?), and the actors don’t give us any purchase: Phillippe glowers, Bradford mugs, and Beach sobs and drinks, drinks and sobs. And then, as if the studio — or maybe screenwriter Paul Haggis, he of bogus-uplift films like Crash — reminded Eastwood that this a Greatest Generation flick, dammit, the movie stops complicating the war effort and starts elegizing it, with sensitive boomers sobbing over their World War II vet dad.

The result is a film that’s at war with itself — part melodrama and part docu-drama, minimalist and bloated all at once. It’s an Eastwood effort, so the critics love it, but those seeking a movie that actually says “something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight,” as the Times’s inevitable rave puts it, are better off looking elsewhere.

The Strengths & Weaknesses of the Internet

I thought I'd shop amazon.com for cereal bowls for my wife. We're missing a couple of what was once a complete set. I searched for "bowls" and discovered a wide variety of styles and patterns. I vaguely remembered something....what was it...something like "Falzgraph".

So I typed in "falzgraph" and came up empty. But never fear, I googled falzgraph and it suggested an alternate spelling of pfaltzgraf, which got me closer. It asked: "Did you mean 'Pfaltzgraff'? I cut & pasted that into Amazon and got a variety of styles and patterns, none that look like ours.

Ah well, the 'net can't do everything for you.

Hope

Amy Welborn writes of the Holy Father's essential optimism, of how he sees...

...that eventually, when presented with the truth, people will eventually find their way to it. Don't you think that has marked almost every talk that has come from Benedict? A conviction that, first of all, God is real, human beings are made by God, in his image, and find their peace in Him. (yes, Augustinian, indeed.) All of the competing voices and temptations out there will eventually fail us, individually and collectively, and we'll eventually figure out that what God is offering us is not a prison sentence, but a key to unlock the prison in which we've locked ourselves.

This is persuasive, that love is first patient (1 Cor 13). There are young people I know making incredible, unbelievable mistakes, mistakes that will cost them dearly in body and in spirit, and there is a great desire to do something, anything, to head them off the track they've headed down. But I recall the parable of the prodigal son, and how the father did not try to stop his son but in fact he enabled him by giving him the inheritence early. The son eventually came back, came to his senses. Panic, negativity, force, manipulation all stink of hopelessness.