Videat Dominus et Requirat

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., R.I.P.

2007-03-01T01:42:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: We find little to celebrate in the historical works, and less in the political contributions and editorials of Schlesinger. However, two of his causes we can admire. First, his strong anti-communism in an age when liberalism embraced communism without nary a pause. Second, his continued opposition to politically correct history and multiculturalism.

from the New York Times obit:

"However liberal, he was not a slave to what came to be called political correctness. He spiritedly defended the old-fashioned American melting pot against proponents of multiculturalism, the idea that ethnicities should retain separate identities and even celebrate them. He elicited tides of criticism by comparing Afrocentrism to the Ku Klux Klan."

“What the hell,” he answered when questioned by The Washington Post about his attack on multiculturalism. “You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.”

and from the Washington Post:

"Political correctness -- 'the attempt to teach history in the schools in order to please a variety of ethnic history groups.' The result, he argued, 'disunites the American past.'"

"Schlesinger also was a longtime contributor to The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page. The Journal's editorial page editor Robert Bartley told the Boston Globe in 1997 that while the liberal Schlesinger wrote from 'the other side of the great chasm of opinion we have,' he did so with 'grace and rare reasonableness.' And, Bartley added, 'I can't think of anyone I'd rather have had writing for us over the past 25 years.'"

Nota Bene: The Literary Tenor of the Times

2007-02-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Literary Tenor of the Times

by Mark Helprin

Unable as usual to resist the absurd, the New York Times recently attempted to find and certify the best work of American fiction that appeared in the last quarter-century, and perhaps to dilute their unconscious embarrassment published a list of the runners-up. Asked to serve on the enormous panel of solons they had assembled for the purpose, I declined on the grounds that neither I nor just about anyone else has a sufficiently wide or deep knowledge of all that has been written in the period, and that even if we had, such a determination is impossible, especially at the hands of literary people who have intellectual debtors and creditors, protégés, and favorites (including, not least, themselves).

But suppose for a moment that reality is suspended and the perfectly disinterested judges, after considering various worthies, were left to decide which of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would fill the last slot in their list. Though they might make the choice, it would be meaningless. A meaningless decision, however, would be easy in the literary tenor of these times, which makes itself known not so much in works of fiction but in the vast apparatus that contains and to an alarming extent directs them.

One would have to have spent the last 40 years in a bathyscaphe to be unaware of the conventions, requirements, strictures, and demands that aggressively have (almost) monopolized the field. To anyone who reads, writes, or publishes, they are inescapable, the senseless, destructive, and cruel companions to a suicidal slide of culture, remarkable for the degree to which they are taken as palliatives and correctives rather than the acid that eats away the bone. After all, the addict views narcotics, the criminal his next score, and the lemming the open air beyond the cliff edge—as salvation.

And thus the literary tenor of the times is saturated above all with nihilism and its outrider, contempt; followed by politicization and its outrider, conformity. The first pair of abominations serves to dissolve the supple, living flesh of civilization—whether in blunt Leninist political combat hidden in the folds of academic relativism, or in the unbridled Satanic ravings of popular culture that society has lost the courage to dismiss outright. And the second pair of abominations serves to cast what remains after the dissolution into a slipshod orthodoxy as gray, hard, and dead as concrete.

Strangely enough, the enforcers and beneficiaries of this orthodoxy, which in spirit goes far beyond even the standard obeisances to race, sex, class, economics, and selected dogma in international relations and meteorology, think they are beleaguered revolutionaries. For example, in affirming his courage, Norman Mailer—everything he has done has been to affirm his courage, which perhaps one should not condemn in a man who bears such a strong physical resemblance to Mamie Eisenhower—pronounces that he has been a leftist all his life, something that in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights may not be quite as dangerous as he hallucinates.

And yet politics themselves, of whatever coloration, are less damaging an intrusion upon the literary enterprise than the now deeply engraved notion that literature cannot escape them. Political discourse can be literature, as Pericles, Lincoln, and Churchill prove, but literature that is political discourse destroys itself, as history proves (pace the febrile tracts of tenured lunatics: Disguised Vaginal Narratives of the French & Indian War: The Hidden Meanings of Bernard de Con's Account of the Assault on Fort Ticonderoga—A Novel). Whereas great political writing, always primarily literary, is equipped to transcend the causes and contentions of the day, a literary work that rests upon a political cause will follow it into oblivion. Lincoln and Churchill infused politics with the higher truths to which literature is the handmaiden, but the modern convention excludes these truths by subordinating literature to politics.

One seldom encounters pure nihilism, for just as anarchists are usually very well-organized, most of what passes for nihilism is a compromise with advocacy. Present literary forms may spurn the individual, emotion, beauty, sacrifice, love, and truth, but they energetically embrace the collective, coldness of feeling, ugliness, self-assertion, contempt, and disbelief. And why? Simply because the acolytes of modernism are terribly and justly afraid. They fear that if they do not display their cynicism they will be taken for fools. They fear that if they commit to and uphold something outside the puppet channels of orthodoxy they will be mocked, that if they are open they will be attacked, that if they appreciate that which is simple and good they will foolishly have overlooked its occult corruptions, that if they stand they will be struck down, that if they love they will lose, and that if they live they will die.

As surely they will. And others of their fears are legitimate as well, so they withdraw from engagement and risk into what they believe is the safety of cynicism and mockery. The sum of their engagement is to show that they are disengaged, and they have built an elaborate edifice, which now casts a shadow over every facet of civilization, for the purpose of representing their cowardice as wisdom. Mainly to protect themselves, they write coldly, cruelly, and as if nothing matters.

But life is short, and things do matter, often more than the human heart can bear. This is an elemental truth that neither temporarily victorious nihilism, nor fashion, nor cowardice can long suppress, which is why the literary tenor of the times cannot and will not last. And which is one reason among many why one must not accept its dictates or write according to its conventions. These must and will fall, for they are subject to constant pressure as generation after generation rises in unprompted affirmation of human nature. And though perhaps none living may see the change, it is an honor to predict and await it.

Quote for the Day

2007-01-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
-- Ronald Reagan

Quote for the Day

2007-01-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

"Suppose that a great commotion arises in the streets about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential people desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, 'Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good-' At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted electric lights; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there was war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we must now discuss in the dark."

-- G.K. Chesterton --

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

2006-09-15T20:04:00.000-06:00

Oriana Fallaci, Journalist and Author

29 July 1929 - 15 September 2006

Rest in Peace

Remember...

2006-09-11T00:01:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: We remember with sadness those slain on September 11th. We honor with deep gratitude those fallen for duty and country.

The price of victory

2006-09-10T23:28:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: Mark Helprin wrote this article five years ago. We think that it is worth rereading.

We Beat Hitler, We Can Vanquish This Foe Too
By Mark Helprin
Posted September 12, 2001
Wall Street Journal, editorial page

America, it is said, is slow to awaken, and indeed it is, but once America stirs, its resolution can be matchless and its ferocity a stunning surprise.

The enemy we face today, though barbaric and ingenious, is hardly comparable to the masters of the Third Reich, whose doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Berlin that we had reduced to rubble. Nor is he comparable to the commanders of the Japanese Empire, whose doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Tokyo we had reduced to rubble. Nor to the Soviet Empire that we faced down patiently over half a century, nor to the great British Empire from which we broke free in a long and taxing struggle that affords a better picture of our kith and kin than any the world may have today of who we are and of what we are capable.

And today's enemy, though he is not morally developed enough to comprehend the difference between civilians and combatants, is neither faceless nor without a place in which we can address him. If he is Osama bin Laden, he lives in Afghanistan, and his hosts, the Taliban, bear responsibility for sheltering him; if he is Saddam Hussein, he lives in Baghdad; if he is Yasser Arafat, he lives in Gaza; and so on. Our problem is not his anonymity but that we have refused the precise warnings, delivered over more than a decade, of those who understood the nature of what was coming — and of what is yet to come, which will undoubtedly be worse.

The first salvos of any war are seldom the most destructive. Consider that in this recent outrage the damage was done by the combined explosive power of three crashed civilian airliners. As the initial shock wears off it will be obvious that this was a demonstration shot intended to extract political concessions and surrender, a call to fix our attention on the prospect of a nuclear detonation or a chemical or biological attack, both of which would exceed what happened yesterday by several orders of magnitude.

It will get worse, but appeasement will make it no better. That we have promised retaliation for decades and then always drawn back, hoping that we could get through if we simply did not provoke the enemy, is appeasement, and it must be quite clear by now even to those who perpetually appease that appeasement simply does not work. Therefore, what must be done? Above all, we must make no promise of retaliation that is not honored; in this we have erred too many times. It is a bipartisan failing and it should never be repeated.

Let this spectacular act of terrorism be the decisive repudiation of the mistaken assumptions that conventional warfare is a thing of the past, that there is a safe window in which we can cut force structure while investing in the revolution in military affairs, that bases and infrastructure abroad have become unnecessary, that the day of the infantryman is dead, and, most importantly, that slighting military expenditure and preparedness is anything but an invitation to death and defeat.

Short of a major rebuilding, we cannot now inflict upon Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden the great and instantaneous shock with which they should be afflicted. That requires not surgical strikes by aircraft based in the United States, but expeditionary forces with extravagant basing and equipment. It requires not 10 aircraft carrier battle groups but, to do it right and when and where needed, 20. It requires not only all the infantry divisions, transport, and air wings that we have needlessly given up in the last decade, but many more. It requires special operations forces not of 35,000, but of 100,000.

For the challenge is asymmetrical. Terrorist camps must be raided and destroyed, and their reconstitution continually repressed. Intelligence gathering of all types must be greatly augmented, for by its nature it can never be sufficient to the task, so we must build it and spend upon it until it hurts. The nuclear weapons programs, depots, and infrastructure of what Madeleine Albright so delicately used to call "states of concern" must, in a most un-Albrightian phrase, be destroyed. As they are scattered around the globe, it cannot be easy. Security and civil defense at home and at American facilities overseas must be strengthened to the point where we are able to fight with due diligence in this war that has been brought to us now so vividly by an alien civilization that seeks our destruction.

The course of such a war will bring us greater suffering than it has brought to date, and if we are to fight it as we must we will have less in material things. But if, as we have so many times before, we rise to the occasion, we will not enjoy merely the illusions of safety, victory, and honor, but those things themselves. In our history it is clear that never have they come cheap and often they have come late, but always, in the end, they come in flood, and always in the end, the decision is ours.

Nota Bene: I will not doubt

2006-08-13T20:48:00.000-06:00

I will not doubt, though all my ships at sea
Come drifting home with broken masts and sails;
I shall believe the Hand which never fails,
From seeming evil worketh good to me;
And, though I weep because those sails are battered,
Still will I cry, while all my best hopes lie shattered,
"I trust in Thee."

I will not doubt, though all my prayers return
Unanswered from the still, white realm above;
I shall believe it is an all-wise Love
Which has refused those things for which I yearn;
And though at times, I cannot keep from grieving,
Yet the pure ardor of my fixed believing
Undimmed shall burn.

I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain,
And though troubles swarm like bees above a hive;
I shall believe the heights, for which I strive,
Are only reached by anguish and by pain;
And though I groan and tremble with my crosses,
I yet shall see, through all my severest losses,
The greater gain.

I will not doubt, well anchored in the faith,
Like some staunch ship, my soul braves every gale,
So strong its courage that it will not fail
To breast the mighty, unknown, sea of death.
Oh, may I cry when body parts with spirit,
"I do not doubt," so listening worlds may hear,
With my last breath.

-Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Quote for the Day, part 3 (the friendship trilogy)

2006-08-13T19:58:00.000-06:00

"Think where man's glory most begins and ends and say -- my glory was that I had such friends."

- William Butler Yeats

Editor's note: Fare thee well, Lawrence of Rome, and Happy Trails.

Quote for the Day, part 2 (the friendship trilogy)

2006-08-13T19:34:00.000-06:00

"We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Quote for the Day, part 1 (the friendship trilogy)

2006-08-13T19:17:00.000-06:00

"Don't walk in front of me,
I may not follow;
don't walk behind me,
I may not lead;
Walk beside me, and
just be my friend."

-Albert Camus

Editor's Note: We present today's "Quotes" in honour of friendship. One of our writers, Lawrence of Rome, leaves Videat Dominus et Requirat tomorrow for an extended sabbatical. Though seperated by many miles, we rejoice in the journey that stretches before him and hope to convene, one evening long from now, at a tavern not unlike those described by Tolkien and Lewis, where, beneath a heavy cloud of smoke, with a cheery fire, and many a hearty drink upon the rough-hewn table, we will speak of great things.

Quote for the Day

2006-08-07T00:47:00.000-06:00

"To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child. What is human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one's ancestors and set in a historical context?"

—Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Quote for the Day, part two

2006-08-06T14:50:00.000-06:00

"The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy."

Robert Burns

Nota Bene: Ben Stein puts it bluntly

2006-08-06T13:27:00.000-06:00

How to Lose to Terrorists
by Ben Stein

Published 7/31/2006

We are in real serious trouble, and I'll tell you how and why I know it:

* Because the Hezbollah -- as has been well reported -- launches missiles at purely civilian targets in Israel as a matter of course, and no one in Europe or in the American left says "boo" about it. It's considered the Hezbollah's "right" to kill Israelis and when they do, they boast about it and promise to do more;

* Because it's been also well documented that the Hezbollah hides behind civilian targets and adjacent to civilian dwellings in Lebanon to fire its rockets at Israel, and when Israel fires back and mistakenly hits a home with civilians, the world of "intellectuals" and "thinkers" blames Israel and calls Israel bloodthirsty;

* Because when the Israelis kill civilians, they apologize, but when the terrorists kill civilians, they brag -- and the beautiful people scream at Eretz Israel and excuse the terrorists;

* Because if you substitute "America" for "Israel" and the "terrorists in Iraq" for the Hezbollah, you get what's happening in Iraq;

* Because it is impossible to beat a terrorist movement without using terror tactics, and we as a people of compassion and restraint, both in Israel and the U.S., will not use terror tactics even when survival is at stake, and this means we will not survive.It is very much as if, after Pearl Harbor, after the bombing of London, we said, "We will fight the Japanese and the Nazis, but we will only use humane means, and we will show total restraint and will never kill civilians. And we will search our souls and agonize about every move.

"It is this attitude that kept the United States from winning in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in Iraq. If we had followed that code of suicide, we would have lost World War II and the world would have been plunged into eternal darkness. You cannot fight inhumane people with humane means. You cannot fight savages with one hand -- no, two hands -- tied behind your back. No wars were ever won using restraint and only civilized means. That's a formula for complete defeat and for the end of civilized life. If we allow our media and French intellectuals to prevent us and the Israelis from using the means necessary to win, we'll lose...in Lebanon, in Iraq, and everywhere and this civilization is very well worth preserving. Yes, as sad as it would be to use terror tactics to win a war, it would be incomparably worse to lose. At the end of the war we win, there is light. At the end of the war we lose, there is the end.

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He also writes "Ben Stein's Diary" in every issue of The American Spectator.

Nota Bene: G.K. Chesterton's prophetic tale

2006-08-06T13:17:00.000-06:00

From The American Spectator

The Flying Inn Reconsidered
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
Published 8/3/2006 12:07:46 AM

When I was a child going through my late father's library my maternal grandfather pointed out an old copy of G.K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn, published in 1914, and said: "That's a good story!" I wish now that Grandfather had lived long enough for me to talk to him about many things. I am not sure why he, Mayor, Member of Parliament, Knight, and general pillar of the community, with no sign I could detect of even my father's bohemian streak, thought this tale of rum-disbursing rapscallions in flight from the law was a good story, but I took him at his word and when I read it found he was right. It is also curiously prophetic.

It was condemned to many years of neglect, presumably because of what was then seen as the quaintness and irrelevance of its subject matter -- an Islamic attack on and infiltration of England. It has, however, recently been reissued in the U.S. by Dover publications.

It is, as one of its excellences, a swinging hit at political correctness, penned a couple of generations before the term political correctness was dreamed up. The British politician, Lord Ivywood, by a piece of legal trickery, bans the drinking of alcohol in England. That is, alcohol is not banned outright, but can only be sold by an inn displaying a sign, and the signs are banned.

The good people, like irresponsible vagabonds, travel the country just ahead of the law, first with a donkey and then a motor car, with a keg of rum and a cheese, as well as an inn-sign rescued from the destroyed inn "The Old Ship," dispersing cheer to the workmen who have been denied a drink, singing merry songs on the way (naturally most of the establishment figures who support prohibition still manage to evade it for themselves in other ways).

But there is more sinister parallel development. Targeting the traditional English pub is only part of the politically correct targeting of all English institutions, traditions and identity, enforced by a British establishment enthralled by Islamicism. We also hear little asides about the cross being gradually banned, or rather, replaced by a combined cross-and-crescent symbol ("The Crescent, the growing thing...the religion of progress"). Smart art circles adopt Islamicist art. Then there are growing hints of political preparations for polygamy, the institution of the harem and the suppression of women.

Anticipating what would be one of the characteristics of 20th century totalitarianism and 21st century relativism, history is rewritten to show that England was originally an Islamic country. The old pub name "The Saracen's Head," probably dating from some memory of the Crusades, is, so the people are told, really a corruption of "The Saracen Is Ahead." "The Green Man" (another traditional English pub name which is in fact probably a fossil reference to very ancient fertility beliefs) was actually, according to the new revisionists, a corruption of "The Agreeing Dragoman."

One might think this pseudo-history a flight of fantasy too far. But in 2004 the Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, Taj Al-Din Hamad Abdallah Al-Hilali, who has described the holocaust as a Zionist lie, also claimed that Australia was originally Islamic land, settled by Afghans. The Australian Aborigines were their descendants. (In fact Aborigines reached Australia several tens of thousands of years ago. Some so-called "Afghans" -- actually mostly Iranians - arrived in the 19th century to work as camel-drivers in the outback.)

This real-world Mufti claimed as evidence of the Aborigines' Muslim origins the facts that they "have customs such as circumcision, marriage ceremonies, respect for tribal elders, and burial of the dead -- all customs that show that they were connected to ancient Islamic culture before the Europeans set foot it Australia." This real-world rubbish actually surpasses the tortured rationalizations and historical revisionisms of the fictional Islamicists in The Flying Inn. Apparently no one told the Mufti that circumcision (actually many Aborigines practiced subincision, a very different thing) far predates Islam and is characteristically Jewish, and marriage ceremonies, respect for elders, and burial of the dead are features of practically every society.

The same claim has been advanced by some modern Islamic writers for America, including statements that Columbus found mosques there. (The point here is that Islamic law states Muslims possess by right any land that once formed part of the House of Islam. This is a key element in Islamic claims against the existence of Israel.)

As The Flying Inn goes on it gradually becomes apparent that Ivywood is working towards destroying the entire Christian and Western identity of England. As Catholic priest Addison H. Hart pointed out in a recent essay, while Ivywood is using Islamicism as a tool, he is also a creature of pseudo-Nietzscheanism. "I see the breaking of barriers," he says. "Beyond that I see nothing." They are words that could be straight from modern deconstructionism and they encapsulate its ultimately Hellish nature. Ivywood is, ultimately, the voice of Antichrist. His associates and tools, his "false prophets," are a strange little Turk, Misysra Ammon, and a miserable crawling journalist, Hibbs However.

Against Ivywood is an at first tiny resistance movement: a giant, red-haired, hard-drinking Irishman named Patrick Dalroy, a thoroughly English pub-owner named Humphrey Pump, dispossessed landlord of "The Old Ship," who loves Pickwick and has the history of the country in his bones, and Lord Ivywood's poet cousin, an aesthete who is, as a later generation would put it, mugged by reality. After many adventures the story concludes with England roused, a decisive battle against the Islamicist Army which Lord Ivywood has been secretly shipping in, and Dalroy getting the girl. Like Nietzsche, Lord Ivywood goes mad, babbling of the Superman in an asylum.

As with other books by Chesterton, when I first read it I was puzzled but liked it. Perhaps part of what appealed to me was its obviously fantastical nature. When Chesterton wrote it, on the eve of the First World War, the great perceived threat to England and to the "Western and Christian heritage" was not Islamicism, which had been out of such questions for centuries, but German militarism. When I read it, the Cold War had been on for all my life, and showed no signs of ending -- or at least not of ending in victory. The Flying Inn had nothing to do with such "present discontents." But it is in my mind yet, when those other things are gone.

Hal G.P. Colebatch is a lawyer and author and lectures part-time in legal studies at Notre Dame University in Western Australia. His book Blair's Britain was selected as a Book of the Year in the London Spectator.

Quote for the Day

2006-08-06T12:29:00.000-06:00

A poem, in honour of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born this day in 1809. He requested this poem be placed as a requiem, at the end of any collection of his poetry.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Nota bene: Bishop Vasa tells a modern-day parable

2006-08-03T13:03:00.000-06:00

True obedience, whether convenient of not, is not easy

7/28/06

by Bishop Robert Vasa

The operative word of the week has been heat. The 100-degree-plus temperatures have made any afternoon activities nearly impossible and have been conducive to naps in the shade. Clearly, this is the situation not only in southern Malheur County, but nationwide as well. In many ways, southern Malheur County is a good place to be when it is this hot, since the July heat seems to fit perfectly well with the desert terrain. In other words, the heat is not unexpected. The situation would be a lot different if one expected moderate temperatures and then encountered these furnace-like conditions.

I have found over the years that the expectations we bring to a situation determine, to a very large extent, the ease or difficulty we experience in coping with that situation. Expecting brutal heat and encountering it makes the bearing of that heat much easier than expecting moderate temperatures and smacking into the wall that is the reality. Expectations, whether about weather or what others ought to do or about how life ought to be or what people will do or how a particular situation will be resolved, determine to a very large extent our immediate emotional reactions.

I believe the same holds true for expectations about Church teachings. When there is an expectation, as held by many people, that some stable and traditional teachings of the Church will change or even that they can change, then there is a lot of room for disillusionment, frustration, anger and distress when those unrealistic expectations are not met. In many ways, the difficulty is not what the Church teaches but the expectation that those teachings should be done away with or that they will change in the future.

I had the opportunity on Saturday to watch some 4-H equestrian events. These were very simple. The youngsters simply had their horses walk, trot or gallop in the circle of the arena both clockwise and counterclockwise.

I discovered that there were a lot of subtle, and some not so subtle, rules that these youngsters needed to learn. First, they needed to stay on the horse if they expected to receive some kind of award. Seems pretty obvious, but how many adults seem to think that they are still in the ecclesial running even if they do not go to church. How the young people held their free hand, whether their legs were too straight or their heels too far in or too far out and how they sat in the saddle were all taken into account in the “judging.”

They were also evaluated on how well they were able to regulate their horses. This meant that the horse, which often has a mind of its own, had a major impact on whether the youngster received an award or not.

One of the things that I clearly do not understand, and I have yet to encounter someone to give me a satisfactory explanation, is the concept of having a horse in the right or left lead. As I understand this, when a horse gallops or runs, it leads with either its right or left front leg. Even though both front legs stretch out at the same time, one leg “leads” the other, and apparently there is a way to instruct the horse which lead to use. In the arena, as I understand it, it is proper for the horse to have one lead while going clockwise and the other lead while going counterclockwise. I honestly do not know what difference it makes to either the horse or the rider — or the judge for that matter — but it is apparently important.

In watching the horses, I thought that some of them understood quite well and almost automatically which lead was proper for the given direction. Others clearly had a preference for one lead or the other and tended to use that lead regardless of the arena direction.

Thus a given horse that tended always to use a left lead appeared to be wonderfully obedient and well trained when he was going in one direction, but his persistence in using that same lead when he was going the opposite direction indicated that he was obedient only when “asked” to do what he was going to do anyway. Then the young rider had to be vigilant about repeatedly instructing the horse about which lead to use.

Again, I thought of Church teaching and how easy it is for each of us to accept some teachings of the Church, not because the Church teaches them, but solely because it happens to be what we personally hold anyway. I would call this convenient obedience. In that instance, we are like the horse with the left lead which undoubtedly felt pretty obedient and “good” when what it was going to do anyway was consistent, at that moment, with what its master was asking.

On the other hand, in those instances when the Church asks us to do or accept something which we may not automatically or emotionally easily embrace, then we need to change or convert or alter our mindset in order to bring ourselves into compliance with those teachings. This is inconvenient obedience; it challenges us.

Unfortunately, if there is an expectation that the Church must, should or will change, then the tendency is to hold on to the erroneous belief or practice and even to do so with a certain degree of self-righteousness. The persistence of some horses in returning to their preferred lead was matched by the persistence of young riders in “asking” their mounts to use the correct lead. I do not expect that the horses’ tendency to choose their own lead will incline the judges to change this evaluative criteria.

It seems to me, and I acknowledge that I clearly lack “horse sense,” that using a right or left lead is rather arbitrary, and yet I do not expect the criteria to change. The Church is relentlessly persistent and consistent in Her teachings, and those teachings, contrary to modern relativistic tendencies, are not arbitrary. Despite the lack of arbitrariness, many are just as relentlessly and consistently recalcitrant in their perception that the Church, and not they, needs to or will change.

Obedience is not an easy thing, but a recognition that it is a loving Lord, a Good Shepherd, who asks and instructs us to abandon our own ways and more fully adopt and accept His ways does make true obedience possible — not only convenient obedience but the “inconvenient” type as well.

Vasa is the bishop of the Diocese of Baker, Oregon. This article appeared originally in the Catholic Sentinel of Oregon.

Of her ass she made a trumpet: Claire Shipman

2006-08-02T09:29:00.000-06:00

"Mikhail Gorbachev is generally regarded as the man who broke down the ‘iron curtain’ that separated the communist world from the West and thawed the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union."

-ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman, July 12, 2006

Spucatum tauri: John Kerry leading the way

2006-08-01T16:54:00.000-06:00

Ordinarily we try to avoid purely political issues, but this was too tempting to resist. As the photo below shows, John Kerry sure knows how to pack 'em in and lead the way.

At this rate, I'd say his prospects for 2008 look great. He's well on the way to winning the popular vote of Shady Acres retirement home in Des Moines, Iowa.

Could Kerry be practicing for his role in the afterlife? We'll leave that one to Dante.

Nota Bene

2006-08-01T15:26:00.000-06:00

Today is the birthday of Herman Melville, one of America's greatest literary voices, born 1819 in New York City. Melville wrote these lines in Moby Dick:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

And this after reading Shakespeare for the first time at age 29: "Dolt ... that I am, I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. ... I now exult over it, page after page."

Of his ass he made a trumpet: Fr. Jan Larson

2006-08-01T11:26:00.000-06:00

Liturgy Reflections: Mysterious liturgy
by Father Jan Larson

(From the July 6, 2006 edition of the Inland Register)

I was recently watching a part of the daily televised liturgy on EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network). The liturgy there is an odd mix of English and Latin, while following the texts of the current Roman Missal. The priest and ministers of the liturgy look way too somber and serious. The ritual is performed with all the exaggerated exactness of the pre-Vatican II Latin liturgy. The Mass is overly formal and mechanical. Needless to say, there are no women allowed in the sanctuary area, there is no procession with the gifts, no Sign of Peace, and, of course, no Communion from the cup for the lay people who are present. The liturgy, in effect, is unlike anything that Catholics experience in the vast majority of Catholic parish churches.

I am certain that the planners of these liturgies would explain their differences from parish liturgies with the familiar refrain that the post Vatican II liturgical reforms have taken too much of the mystery away from the Holy Mass. Certainly, they say, allowing the congregation full, active and conscious participation in the ritual is what empties the rites of their mystery, so the further we keep the secular congregation away from the clerical activity and space, the better to preserve the liturgy’s mystery. Thus the need to eliminate any personal touch with the lay folks, and, by all means, do not allow them to communicate with each other, even to wish one’s neighbor the peace of the risen Christ. (One wonders what these people think of the pope as he hugs and kisses the children who present him with the gifts to be offered, giving each of them a small gift as a remembrance of the liturgy. Perhaps it is all right for the pope to be warm and personable during the liturgy, but inappropriate for lesser souls.)

I think the folks responsible for these stuffy liturgies are confusing mystery with mystification. Rites that express mystery will invite people into the unknown, into what lies beyond the action of the ritual. Liturgy done well this way will cause people to ask, “How does this ritual which I can see, and in which I am participating, lead me more deeply into the beyond, into life of the God of mystery whom I cannot see?” Mystification, on the other hand, leads one to ask, “What on earth does that mean, and why in God’s name is he doing that?”

Luke Timothy Johnson, author of The Creed and other works, wrote recently in Commonweal magazine about the concerns of many conservative Catholics that paying attention to one another during the liturgy (what he calls “horizontal” values) have distracted us too much from the “vertical” values – our relationship with God and Christ. He writes:

“Critics who complain that these ‘horizontal’ values have been realized at the cost of ‘vertical’ ones, that mystery and a sense of the transcendent have disappeared among all the folksiness, need gently to be reminded of the difference between mystery and mystification. We who grew up in a Tridentine liturgy and who witnessed the travails of reform can bear an important witness to those of a younger generation who hanker after the ‘good old days.’ Some fear they have missed the solemn richness of Catholic piety, believing that the reformed liturgy comes dangerously close to Protestant worship, and that the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is the essential expression of authentic Eucharistic theology. But we are in a position to state that for every example of splendid monastic liturgy in the old days there were countless examples of parish worship that appeared meaninglessly mechanical.

“We know that birettas and fiddle-back chasubles, mumbled (and often mangled) Latin, and truly execrable renditions of Gregorian chant were no more aesthetically than theologically impressive. Having lived through ‘speed-typing’ Masses guaranteed to last no more than twenty minutes, we can point to the greater seriousness, even greater solemnity, of parish worship today. Those who call contemporary worship insufficiently sacred literally do not know what they are talking about.

“As for the growing similarity among the Eucharistic celebrations of Catholics and Protestants, we should rejoice that Catholics now feel at home at Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopalian worship, and that our Protestant neighbors have gained much through our process of renewal and reform. The Catholic form of worship remains a strong motivation for conversion among adults. As we have known all along, God works powerfully through the words and gestures of the liturgy; the hard work of renewal has served to make God’s work plain and public each Sunday when we gather as ‘church.’”

(Father Larson is a liturgical consultant for the Archdiocese of Seattle. This ought not come as a surprise.)

Spucatum tauri: Taking the Episcopal church's stance on homosexuality to its logical conclusions

2006-07-30T22:21:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: In his letter below, Dr. Harding is extrapolating the arguments the Episcopal Church is making in defense of its stance on homosexuality. Absurdities abound, and we suspect that is by design. Dr. Harding wants readers to see the foolishness, blasphemy, and arrogance the EC USA's leadership shamelessly perpetuates. They are guilty of leading their flock astray, and we all know what Sacred Scripture has to say about folks who do that. They best be visiting the mason soon to be fitted for their millstones.

"Whosoever shall lead astray these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea." Mark 9:42

Regardless of their temporal or earthly ending, their eternal destination is assured--where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
__________________________________________

"Do I Understand What You Are Saying?" An Open Letter to Bishops and Deputies who Participated in General Convention 2006

By Dr. Leander S. Harding, Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry

Dr. Leander S. Harding of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry summarizes the theological arguments that he has heard from Episcopal Church leaders in support of their revisionist position on human sexuality. He offers this summary not to endorse the revisionist arguments, but rather to help orthodox church members understand and rebut those arguments more effectively. The IRD has received Dr. Harding’s permission to publish this piece, for the interest of its readers in various denominations.

I was able to observe the House of Bishops and House of Deputies briefly first hand during the convention and I have followed closely the proceedings on the internet and through the media. Below are some conclusions I have developed as a result of my observation both by following the official deliberations and through more informal conversations. I wonder if I have heard correctly, and I welcome remarks from bishops and deputies about whether I have an accurate take on the center of opinion in the national leadership of the Episcopal Church. What follows are statements that I believe reflect the consensus of opinion in the national leadership of the Episcopal Church, particularly as reflected in the General Convention that just met in Columbus, Ohio. Do I understand correctly?

As I hear it, you are saying that:

1. God is the author of same-sex attraction by an act of special providence that includes biological and social-psychological secondary causes. Because we know through reports of the spiritual experience of same-sex attracted people that God is the primary author of these experiences, inquiry into the relative contributions of nature and nurture to same-sex attraction is of no significance for the church’s moral teaching or pastoral care.

2. This recognition of the source of same-sex attraction in the direct intention of God means that the categories of “Gay” and “Lesbian” are part of God’s order of creation in the same way as male and female.

3. Bisexuality is also created by God as an act of special providence through a combination of biological and social-psychological secondary causes.

4. It is likewise irrelevant to the church’s moral and pastoral response to this phenomenon to inquire into the relative contributions of nature and nurture in the development of this sexual orientation.

5. The recognition of the source of same-sex desire in the original intention of God for the creation and humanity is a revelation of the Holy Spirit in our time.

6. The General Conventions of 2003 and 2006 are witnesses to this new revelation of the Holy Spirit.

7. The Holy Spirit has not yet revealed what amendments in the church’s received sexual ethic will be necessary to accommodate bisexual and transgendered people, but we can expect further leading by the Holy Spirit in this regard. In the meantime such persons should be considered fit candidates for Holy Orders.

8. Certainty in moral or theological judgments which is based on an authoritative reading of a text, whether that is the text of the Bible or any other part of the dogmatic tradition of the church, is inherently an example of over-reaching.

9. Contemporary reports of personal spiritual experience by same-sex attracted people and their supporters affirming the spiritual blessedness of same-sex relationships provide a basis for moral and theological certainty on this question which the scriptures and the traditional teaching of the church cannot by virtue of the nature of the documents provide.

10. Christians who feel bound by the scriptures should understand that the fact that there are different interpretations of the scriptures which touch on same-sex attraction means that no single interpretation can possibly be authoritative.

11. Since the scriptures cannot possibly be authoritative on this issue and since self-reported spiritual experience provides the only reliable certainty on the subject, any objections to same-sex blessings on the basis of scripture are irrelevant a priori.

12. Exegetical discussion of specific texts which seem to forbid blessing same-sex erotic behavior can only be for the benefit of quieting the consciences of people who take the bible literally. At the end of the day the inherent uncertainty of the scriptures must give way before the certainty of the personal spiritual experience of the same-sex attracted and their supporters and the felt experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit in two succeeding General Conventions.

13. The most meaningful dialogue in which the church can engage is dialogue that allows same-sex attracted people and their supporters to share their perceptions of the ways in which God has blessed individuals and specific Christian communities through covenanted same-sex relationships. Actual argument about scripture or the teaching tradition of the church or the state of the scientific question could never produce any legitimate objections to the new thing the Holy Spirit is doing.

14. The experience of people who describe themselves as having been cured or freed from same-sex attraction is irrelevant and the church should not give such people a serious hearing. They either were never really same-sex attracted to begin with or are deluded about their claim to be freed or cured. The personal religious experiences of such people are not of the same quality and reliability as the experiences of the same-sex attracted in the church. These experiences are not to be seen as legitimate experiences of the power of the Holy Spirit in spite of all claims to the contrary. Likewise, scientific reporting of the overcoming of same-sex attraction is deeply suspect as ideologically tainted and can with confidence be dismissed without a serious reading.

15. Same-sex attraction and same-sex relationships should be recommended to our children as entirely equal to and as preferable as marriage between a man and woman. If any young person feels any same-sex attraction, it is by God’s express intention and not to act upon it is to dishonor God. To discourage young people from acting upon same-sex attraction is to dishonor God’s intention in the creation. The question is not whether young people should act on their same-sex attractions but when and under what circumstances. Young people who are experiencing same-sex attraction can be helped by being mentored by older same-sex attracted adults, and the church should be proactive in facilitating these relationships.

16. It is wrong for the Episcopal Church to dictate to any other province of the Anglican Communion what its policy on same-sex relationships should be.

17. It is wrong for any other province of the Anglican Communion to interfere with the leading of the Holy Spirit in this province. What the Holy Spirit demands at any particular time must be determined locally.

18. What the Holy Spirit is demanding must be determined provincially. Those dioceses which are members of the Episcopal Church and which resist the new teaching cannot legitimately be thought to be led by the Holy Spirit and must be resisted with all the canonical and legal means available.

19. A variety of interpretations of scripture can be tolerated in the church. But the canons of the church, especially with regard to the territorial integrity of Episcopal jurisdiction, allow for no variation in interpretation.

20. The proposal of the Archbishop of Canterbury for a new Anglican covenant, and for churches to choose constituent or associate status in the communion, represents a dire threat to the capacity of the church to respond to the leading of the Holy Spirit. It represents the prospect of a quenching of the Spirit.

21. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church has been uniquely privileged to hear from the Holy Spirit in a way that has been denied to the rest of worldwide Anglicanism, the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches and Protestant Evangelicalism. The Episcopal Church must at all costs maintain its witness to the unique agency of the Holy Spirit in its midst. Those who oppose the new teaching are enemies of the Holy Spirit who are making an idol of the past at the expense of the future to which God is calling us.

These numbered observations above are my take on what the dominant party in the leadership of the Episcopal Church is saying. If I have not got it right, I would like to know.

Spucatum tauri: Job opportunities that reflect society's decay

2006-07-30T15:52:00.000-06:00

The Organization of American Historians, long known for its steadfast defense of Western civilization, has this job opportunity posted on its website:

Hunter College
U.S. History: Gay and Lesbian/History of Sexuality. The Department of History at Hunter College invites applications for a tenure-track appointment in United States history with a specialty in Gay and Lesbian/History of Sexuality. Requirements for appointment are a Ph.D. in history, and evidence of successful teaching and scholarship. In addition to courses in the field of specialty, appointee must demonstrate a commitment to regularly teaching the U.S. history survey course. Rank and salary are commensurate with teaching and publishing record. Review of applications will begin August 2006 and continue until position is filled. Send letter of application, C.V., and three letters of reference to Barbara Welter, Chair, Department of History, Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021. Letter of application and C.V may also be sent by email to history@hunter.cuny.edu. Hunter College is an EEO/AA/ADA/IRCA employer.
I suspect that anyone who is not disturbed by such an opportunity is the perfect ~~man or woman~~ person for it.

Spucatum tauri: The so-called "religion of peace"

2006-07-25T16:09:00.000-06:00

These photos were taken in London during a recent "Religion of Peace" demonstration. I think they speak for themselves.

The choice before our civilization is clear; we can fight for its preservation or we can watch it die.

Nota bene: Maestro Monsignor Domenico Bartolucci

2006-07-24T21:57:00.000-06:00

"Today the fashion in the churches is for pop-inspired songs and the strumming of guitars, but the fault lies above all with the pseudo-intellectuals who have engineered this degeneration of the liturgy, and thus of music, overthrowing and despising the heritage of the past with the idea of obtaining who knows what advantage for the people. If the art of music does not return to its greatness, rather than representing an accommodation or a byproduct, there is no sense in asking about its function in the Church. I am against guitars, but I am also against the superficiality of the Cecilian movement in music – it’s more or less the same thing. Our motto must be: let us return to Gregorian chant and to polyphony in the tradition of Palestrina, and let us continue down this road!"

-Monsignor Domenico Bartolucci, who was appointed director (maestro) of the Sistine Chapel by Pope Pius XII in 1959.

Read an interview with Monsignor Bartolucci here.

Even curmudgeons need a vacation

2006-07-24T21:16:00.000-06:00

Pardon the long pause in posts. We reactionary grumblers took a brief respite from the world to contemplate the finer things in life--i.e., fishing, beer, cigars, and the rural West.

Nota bene: Charlotte Allen's take on liberal Christianity

2006-07-10T13:19:00.000-06:00

Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins

Out-of-the-mainstream beliefs about gay marriage and supposedly sexist doctrines are gutting old-line faiths.

By Charlotte Allen - July 9, 2006

The accelerating fragmentation of the strife-torn Episcopal Church USA, in which several parishes and even a few dioceses are opting out of the church, isn't simply about gay bishops, the blessing of same-sex unions or the election of a woman as presiding bishop. It also is about the meltdown of liberal Christianity.

Embraced by the leadership of all the mainline Protestant denominations, as well as large segments of American Catholicism, liberal Christianity has been hailed by its boosters for 40 years as the future of the Christian church.

Instead, as all but a few die-hards now admit, all the mainline churches and movements within churches that have blurred doctrine and softened moral precepts are demographically declining and, in the case of the Episcopal Church, disintegrating.

It is not entirely coincidental that at about the same time that Episcopalians, at their general convention in Columbus, Ohio, were thumbing their noses at a directive from the worldwide Anglican Communion that they "repent" of confirming the openly gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire three years ago, the Presbyterian Church USA, at its general assembly in Birmingham, Ala., was turning itself into the laughingstock of the blogosphere by tacitly approving alternative designations for the supposedly sexist Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Among the suggested names were "Mother, Child and Womb" and "Rock, Redeemer and Friend." Moved by the spirit of the Presbyterian revisionists, Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher held a "Name That Trinity" contest. Entries included "Rock, Scissors and Paper" and "Larry, Curly and Moe."

Following the Episcopalian lead, the Presbyterians also voted to give local congregations the freedom to ordain openly cohabiting gay and lesbian ministers and endorsed the legalization of medical marijuana. (The latter may be a good idea, but it is hard to see how it falls under the theological purview of a Christian denomination.)

The Presbyterian Church USA is famous for its 1993 conference, cosponsored with the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other mainline churches, in which participants "reimagined" God as "Our Maker Sophia" and held a feminist-inspired "milk and honey" ritual designed to replace traditional bread-and-wine Communion.

As if to one-up the Presbyterians in jettisoning age-old elements of Christian belief, the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord. When a Christian church cannot bring itself to endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New Testament, it is not a serious Christian church. It's a Church of What's Happening Now, conferring a feel-good imprimatur on whatever the liberal elements of secular society deem permissible or politically correct.

You want to have gay sex? Be a female bishop? Change God's name to Sophia? Go ahead. The just-elected Episcopal presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is a one-woman combination of all these things, having voted for Robinson, blessed same-sex couples in her Nevada diocese, prayed to a female Jesus at the Columbus convention and invited former Newark, N.J., bishop John Shelby Spong, famous for denying Christ's divinity, to address her priests.

When a church doesn't take itself seriously, neither do its members. It is hard to believe that as recently as 1960, members of mainline churches — Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and the like — accounted for 40% of all American Protestants. Today, it's more like 12% (17 million out of 135 million). Some of the precipitous decline is due to lower birthrates among the generally blue-state mainliners, but it also is clear that millions of mainline adherents (and especially their children) have simply walked out of the pews never to return. According to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, in 1965, there were 3.4 million Episcopalians; now, there are 2.3 million. The number of Presbyterians fell from 4.3 million in 1965 to 2.5 million today. Compare that with 16 million members reported by the Southern Baptists.

When your religion says "whatever" on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it's a short step to deciding that one of the things you don't want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.

It doesn't help matters that the mainline churches were pioneers in ordaining women to the clergy, to the point that 25% of all Episcopal priests these days are female, as are 29% of all Presbyterian pastors, according to the two churches. A causal connection between a critical mass of female clergy and a mass exodus from the churches, especially among men, would be difficult to establish, but is it entirely a coincidence? Sociologist Rodney Stark ("The Rise of Christianity") and historian Philip Jenkins ("The Next Christendom") contend that the more demands, ethical and doctrinal, that a faith places upon its adherents, the deeper the adherents' commitment to that faith. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which preach biblical morality, have no trouble saying that Jesus is Lord, and they generally eschew women's ordination. The churches are growing robustly, both in the United States and around the world.

Despite the fact that median Sunday attendance at Episcopal churches is 80 worshipers, the Episcopal Church, as a whole, is financially equipped to carry on for some time, thanks to its inventory of vintage real estate and huge endowments left over from the days (no more!) when it was the Republican Party at prayer. Furthermore, it has offset some of its demographic losses by attracting disaffected liberal Catholics and gays and lesbians. The less endowed Presbyterian Church USA is in deeper trouble. Just before its general assembly in Birmingham, it announced that it would eliminate 75 jobs to meet a $9.15-million budget cut at its headquarters, the third such round of job cuts in four years.

The Episcopalians have smells, bells, needlework cushions and colorfully garbed, Catholic-looking bishops as draws, but who, under the present circumstances, wants to become a Presbyterian?

Still, it must be galling to Episcopal liberals that many of the parishes and dioceses (including that of San Joaquin, Calif.) that want to pull out of the Episcopal Church USA are growing instead of shrinking, have live people in the pews who pay for the upkeep of their churches and don't have to rely on dead rich people. The 21-year-old Christ Church Episcopal in Plano, Texas, for example, is one of the largest Episcopal churches in the country. Its 2,200 worshipers on any given Sunday are about equal to the number of active Episcopalians in Jefferts Schori's entire Nevada diocese.

It's no surprise that Christ Church, like the other dissident parishes, preaches a very conservative theology. Its break from the national church came after Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion, proposed a two-tier membership in which the Episcopal Church USA and other churches that decline to adhere to traditional biblical standards would have "associate" status in the communion. The dissidents hope to retain full communication with Canterbury by establishing oversight by non-U.S. Anglican bishops.

As for the rest of the Episcopalians, the phrase "deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind. A number of liberal Episcopal websites are devoted these days to dissing Peter Akinola, outspoken primate of the Anglican diocese of Nigeria, who, like the vast majority of the world's 77 million Anglicans reported by the Anglican Communion, believes that "homosexual practice" is "incompatible with Scripture" (those words are from the communion's 1998 resolution at the Lambeth conference of bishops). Akinola might have the numbers on his side, but he is now the Voldemort — no, make that the Karl Rove — of the U.S. Episcopal world. Other liberals fume over a feeble last-minute resolution in Columbus calling for "restraint" in consecrating bishops whose lifestyle might offend "the wider church" — a resolution immediately ignored when a second openly cohabitating gay man was nominated for bishop of Newark.

So this is the liberal Christianity that was supposed to be the Christianity of the future: disarray, schism, rapidly falling numbers of adherents, a collapse of Christology and national meetings that rival those of the Modern Language Assn. for their potential for cheap laughs. And they keep telling the Catholic Church that it had better get with the liberal program — ordain women, bless gay unions and so forth — or die. Sure.

CHARLOTTE ALLEN is Catholicism editor for Beliefnet and the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus." This op-ed appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times.

Quote for the Day, part 2

2006-07-09T11:50:00.000-06:00

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
by William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship if feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:

Most friendship if feigning, most loving mere folly:

Then heigh-ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.

Quote for the Day

2006-07-09T11:48:00.000-06:00

For of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

John Greenleaf Whittier

Quote for the Day

2006-07-07T21:16:00.000-06:00

"To live within a just order is to live within a pattern that has beauty. The individual finds purpose within an order, and security - whether it is the order of the soul or the order of the community. Without order, indeed the life of man is poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Russell Kirk (1918-1994)

Spucatum tauri: The Rev. Philip Chester

2006-07-06T12:05:00.000-06:00

Anglican Rev. Philip Chester, vicar of St. Matthew's in Westminster, UK, has a modest proposal. He wants to change England's patron saint from St. George to St. Alban. The purported reason? Lack of clear evidence St. George existed. Umm, right. The real reason? St. George is associated with the Crusades and this could offend Muslims.

"We are sure St Alban is a real figure," barked Chester. Well, in that case go right ahead. What defense could we possibly muster against such compelling logic?

St. Alban was martyred in England in the early 4th century. He is a martyr because he refused to compromise his faith in the face of adversity. Apparently his faith offended someone. In dumping St. George because his presence might offend Musilms, Rev. Chester is proposing the Anglican Church do precisely what St. Alban died to avoid. How ironic, and sad.

Quote for the Day, part 2

2006-07-05T22:16:00.000-06:00

This post is dedicated to the man who sent me this same poem a while back, when I was facing the same difficulty he's facing now. Just remember, dear friend, it is in fire that gold is tested.

Solitude
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all,—
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Quote for the Day

2006-07-05T21:17:00.000-06:00

If you have it [love],
you don't need to have anything else.
If you don't have it,
it doesn't matter much what else you do have.

- Sir James Matthew Barrie, author of Peter Pan -

Chronicle of the Damned, part 12

2006-07-02T00:00:00.000-06:00

My first reaction when stumbling upon this website was to wonder why the girl at the right side of their logo (see above) would ever need to worry about reproductive freedom. My hunch is that the barriers between her and the copulatory act (with a man, anyway) are many. But I digress.

"Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom (SYRF) educates, organizes and empowers youth and young adults (ages 16-30) to put their faith into action and advocate for pro-choice social justice."

Ok, I see, it's about 'pro-choice social justice.' And here I was thinking this had something to do with abortion. What a fool I am.

"[SYRF] lifts up pro-faith youth and young adult perspectives on reproductive choice issues and provides young people with tools and opportunities to advocate for choice on their campuses, high schools, congregations and communities."

I'm trying to think back to my Catechism classes and remember my faith's 'perspective' on reproductive choice issues. Ok, now I remember--we can choose to have sex, or not. Seems pretty clear to me, but according to SYRF this line of thought is lacking somehow. I must need more 'tools and opportunities.'

Let's take a look at some testimonials and feedback about the group's sundry activities, posted on SYRF's website (peppered with my comments, of course):

"This experience was awesome, totally inspiring. I don't know if we made a difference today but it made me want to try again tomorrow." (This comment refers to the summit's lobby day on Capitol Hill.)

Well, I have to say that if you feel the need to try again tomorrow, it means you failed today. Thank God for small favors.

"I met other young men and women who think like me, agree with what I have to say, and are struggling just as much."

Wow! Sounds like all the makins' for a great dialogue. Just think how far Socrates could have gone if he only talked to people with whom he agreed.

"I was glad to learn more about pro-choice Christians because where I live it feels like an anomaly. But now I know!"

Newsflash: (and may God forgive your pastor for not telling you this) there's a pretty good reason most Christians aren't pro-choice. Yes, you are an anomaly.

Everyone gets to throw in their $0.02 worth.

Catholics:

"The pro-life position is really a pro-fetus position, and the pro-choice position is really pro-woman. Those who take the pro-fetus position define the woman in relation to the fetus. They assert the rights of the fetus over the right of the woman to be a moral agent or decision maker with respect to her life, health, and family security." (Dr. John M. Swomley)

Thanks for clearing that up, John. Silly me, all these years I've been 'pro-fetus.' Now I see the light.

Jews:

These, then, become the guiding principles on abortion in Jewish tradition: a woman's life, her pain, and her concerns take precedence over those of the fetus; existing life is always sacred and takes precedence over a potential life; and a woman has the personal freedom to apply the principles of her tradition unfettered by the legal imposition of moral standards other than her own. (by Rabbi Raymond A. Zwerin & Rabbi Richard J. Shapiro)

That's great, Raymond & Richard. I didn't know that self-centeredness and moral relativism lay at the heart of Jewish moral thinking. So that's how your faith has survived for thousands of years.

Unitarian Universalists:

Unitarian Universalists have a deep and abiding reverence for life. But we recognize, also, that life is always lived in relationship. Thus, we maintain that moral decisions can never be made in a vacuum but are, instead, always made in the context of competing claims for attention to the quality of life. Women's choices in reproductive matters are morally complex. Such choices can be very difficult, even the occasion for grieving and a profound sense of loss. Nonetheless, the difficulty of such choices does not mean that they cannot also be a faithful and morally affirmative response to what a woman perceives to be holy and just. Women are, inherently, moral agents, as are all people, and they are capable of subtle and sensitive moral discernment. (by Reverend Dr. Rebecca Edmiston-Lange)

Wow Rebecca. That statement is just as vague, mushy, and pointless as Unitarian Universalism itself. Rarely have I seen so many words used to say so little. Have you thought about spearheading the church's evangelization campaign?

One can only wonder at the extent of Satan's joy in capturing these young folks. The depth of his joy will be matched only by the severity of their torment in the afterlife. The minions of Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom will be scattered throughout the Inferno, to caverns far and wide. The most vile among them will dwell in Circle Eight, home of Seducers and peddlers of Fraudulent Rhetoric. The least culpable among them will suffer in Circle Six, home of Heretics.

Their suffering will be profound. So much so, in fact, they will come to wish they had never been born--or, to use their own parlance, that their mothers had made a different reproductive choice.

Quote for the Day

2006-07-01T00:50:00.000-06:00

It's the birthday of editor and writer William Strunk Jr., born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1869). His book The Elements of Style has become the standard style manual for writers all across America. Strunk wrote, "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

Quote for the Day

2006-06-28T17:55:00.000-06:00

It's the birthday of Mark Helprin, born this day in 1947. He writes about characters who go on adventures, have crises, and come to appreciate the beauty of life. He said, "I have no agony or resentments. Boredom and alienation don't mean a thing to me."

Editor's note: Postmodernist writers or would be writers, take note and mend your prosaic ways.

Spucatum tauri Bovine excrement: The National Catholic Reporter

2006-06-28T11:03:00.000-06:00

Editor's Note: The NCR editorial to which we're referring here is, in the purest sense of the term, spucatum tauri--bullshit. But we know they prefer neutered English, so in deference to their sensitivities we'll call it bovine excrement today. Let it never be said we're overly harsh or unfair.

As if we needed more reasons to doubt the Catholicity of this publication (note the intentional refrain from using "newspaper"), their 6/30/06 editorial on the US Bishops' vote approving liturgical translations more faithful to the original Latin gives us yet another.

The tactics used to reverse the reforms that had resulted from the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and more than three decades of subsequent work were secretive and engineered by people incompetent in the discipline and accountable only to a small group who had achieved power. That power was used to accomplish what they could not by persuasion or through the mainstream of liturgical scholarship.

Ah yes, more secret Vatican conspiracies. When did Dan Brown join the NCR's editorial board? Their logic seems to be "Church authorities co-opted our agenda and produced an outcome we and our ilk didn't like, so there must have been trouble afoot." And let's not even talk about "mainstream" scholarship. Religious education in parishes and schools is still recovering from the devastation wreaked by "mainstream" scholarship. Do you like emptying pews, an ill-informed flock, and the vocations crisis? Well, you can thank, among other culprits, "mainstream" scholarship for that.

If wars ever have winners, then the winners in this one comprised a small crowd of powerful actors in the Vatican, in league with others passionately opposed to the direction that translation of documents had taken in the 35 years since Vatican II, who managed to overthrow that process and put in place one of their own. In 1997, as John L. Allen Jr. reported nearly eight years ago, 11 men met in secret in the Vatican "to overhaul the American lectionary, the collection of scripture readings authorized for use in the Mass. Short-circuiting a six-year debate over 'inclusive language' by retaining many of the most controversial uses of masculine vocabulary, and revamping texts approved by the U.S. bishops, this group decided how the Bible will sound in the American church."

More conspiracies. It's starting to sound like a John Birch Society leaflet. If we have to thank a conspiracy for killing the utterly absurd move towards "inclusive" language, that's fine by me. By the way, if you say 'he/she/it' fast enough it sounds like 'horseshit', ironically. But I digress. Or do I? How better to describe the attempt to erase a disinction found in both Tradition and Scripture? God chose to reveal himself in the masculine form. Jesus was not a hermaphrodite. Moreover, when Scripture refers to "man" it's in reference to all of mankind. But that's just plain unacceptable to those who would dumb down the language of worship to makeaccommodatedate a political agenda, I guess.

That was the beginning of the final phase of a coup that upended all of the processes that had been in place since Vatican II, translation principles that had been approved by a previous pope and decades of work by a number of bishops and a host of liturgists and Bible scholars.

Yes, the stars aligned and the right-wing cabal prepared to strike its final blow. Like Pinotchet toppling the Allende government, a select few at the Vatican conspired to overthrow the unsuspecting, innocent, and harmless vox populi. Why not just change Pentecost to the closing day of Vatican II?

Of the group that met in secret, only one man (no women were included) held a graduate degree in scripture studies; two members were not native English speakers; another was from the United Kingdom and had spent no significant time in the United States; and the group included several members who came in with reputations for opposing inclusive language. "Powers in Rome handpicked a small group of men who in two weeks undid work that had taken dozens of years," the NCR report continued.

The junta is revealed. What cretins be they, meeting in secret? Too few Americans, not enough native English speakers, no women, and...this is most terrifying, folks, it's not for children or the squeamish...several were known to oppose inclusive language! They cut a swath far and wide, undoing work that had taken dozens of years. What a bunch of malarkey. The NCR is ticked because Rome stopped people from turning us into Episcopalians.

Life goes on and so will the community, even if we have to wrap our tongues around awkward constructions that treat Latin as if it were the language Jesus himself spoke and even if we have to wait longer for our own official language to acknowledge that more than half the human race is female.

Resting on self-congragulatory smugness, the NCR asserts they know better than the corpus of US Bishops (who, by the way, voted 173-29 to accept the more authentic translation...hardly a nail-biter). The revolution failed and the Church is to blame. They speak as if "community" doesn't have anything to do with "communion," forgetting that the latter is requisite for the former. By the way, here's some translation-- "Life goes on...even if we have to wait longer for our own official language to acknowledge that more than half the human race is female," really means: "Life goes on...even if the Church fails to alter Scripture and the liturgy to appease the radical feminist agenda." No need to check that translation, as it's been approved by our own staff of registered curmudgeons.

Finally, we suspect that the way forward will also include accommodating those who simply refuse to go along and will stand in place and continue to use the same language they've been using for decades. Our suspicion is that God will not be terribly upset by a little show of resistance.

I wonder if the NCR shows such magnanimity towards those who came to Mass one day a few decades ago and noticed the priest facing them, the high altar gone, and the Latin absent from the liturgy. Their world changed suddenly, yet they're browbeaten by the "progressives" and told they need to get with the program.

Finally, the NCR's suspicion that God won't mind a little resistance from them is probably true, but only because He's grown accustomed to it by now.

Off the Record, a feature of Catholic World News, also took a humorously satirical shot at NCR's editorial.

Spucatum tauri: Modern Art

2006-06-27T19:40:00.000-06:00

'Thought to Have Merit'
An English sculptor loses his head.

from the Wall Street Journal

BY LIONEL SHRIVER
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
12:01 a.m.

LONDON--Once in a while a news story so speaks for itself that it threatens to put commentators out of a job.

In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator, David Hensel, must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibit of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the Royal Academy had rejected his artwork proper--a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite--and selected the plinth. "It says something about the state of visual arts today," said Mr. Hensel. He didn't say what. He didn't need to.

Moreover, the Royal Academy denies having made an error, for the plinth and hastily carved wooden support were, according to an official statement, "thought to have merit."

For those who despair that artists these days seem to have lost the skill of fashioning meticulously crafted objects, don't blame Mr. Hensel. While the slate base took only four hours to hack from a mortuary slab, and the little boxwood prop less than an hour, he had painstakingly carved and polished that laughing head for two months. But alas, the sculpture itself has--shudder--emotional content. It was originally christened "One Day Closer to Paradise," a far too expressive title; Mr. Hensel would have been better off with the portentously enigmatic "Exhibit 1201." His laughing head is not only fatally well rendered, but exudes a sense of joy and hilarity, and the overtly evocative is declassé. How much more sophisticated, a stoic square of slate that speaks of--well, ask the viewers.

"The sculpture is a mixture of heavy stone with a light piece of wood on top," the Daily Telegraph quoted a Dane as explicating last week while admiring the plinth. "I like the total effect. It is a really nice contrast." A Londoner rejoined, "If it was in more of a minimalist show, it would definitely seem more beautiful." Presumably these folks would find an emperor clad in a "minimalist" manner equally stunning.

Me, I just put a brick on my desk. I gaze in wonderment at the contrast in textures--the smooth, unyielding sides of the brick, the rough, almost sexual crumble on its chipped corner, the humbler, more submissive sensuality of the scarred plywood desktop. I marvel at the fierce, affirmative perpendicular of the brick, in firm opposition to the languid, taciturn serenity of the lateral . . . But that's not even funny, is it? Joseph Beuys has piled bricks on a floor of the Guggenheim and called it art. How exasperating, a field so far out in la-la-land that it is impervious to parody. You see what I mean about being out of a job.

Of course, the Royal Academy's exaltation of that plinth recalls many a misapprehension in galleries, where visitors are wont to coo over the fire hydrants, ventilation grates and trash cans, all of which are more durably and fastidiously crafted than the works on display. For that matter, one gift that contemporary art seems to have given us viewers is a way of seeing every object in our surround--as I look about my study now, the powerful yet precarious piles of paperbacks, the airy, ephemeral flutter of bank statements--as art. But in that event, we not only don't need commentators; we don't need artists, do we?

Or the Royal Academy.

Spucatum tauri: The myth of moral equivalence

2006-06-27T14:33:00.000-06:00

Gulags on Ellis Island
A dissonant note of moral equivalence at an exhibit on communist horrors.

BY BRIAN M. CARNEY

ELLIS ISLAND, N.Y.--Tucked out of the way on the top floor of the main building here is a curious little traveling exhibit about the Soviet Gulag. On the day that I visited, no signs in the lobby of the Ellis Island Museum announced the presence of the exhibit; one happened upon it through determination or by chance, stepping with little warning from display cases devoted to the hopes of immigrants seeking freedom or opportunity in America into the hopeless deprivation and cruelty of Siberian death camps.

The Gulag exhibition is on display at the museum through July 4, after which it will travel around the country over the next two years--to Boston; Independence, Calif.; Atlanta; and Washington. The show's title, "GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom," offers some hint as to why the exhibit is being housed here during its New York stop; Ellis Island is, in its own way, about the struggle for freedom. And it sits, of course, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

In this setting, the exhibit's collection of artifacts from Gulag camps--supplemented by a brief history, Soviet propaganda newsreels and short biographies of notable dissidents who were exiled to the Gulag at one time or another--takes on an affecting, mesmerizing quality. The space it occupies could be tramped through in the blink of an eye. But one is invited to linger, not least by the secluded feeling up in the attic, away from the bustling main reception hall, and the sense of discovery that comes from having found the exhibit at all. Moreover, the small artifacts with which the story of the Soviet Union's system of forced-labor camps is told are strikingly effective. One display explains that spoons, cups and bowls were in such short supply that the crude and makeshift examples here on display --made from castoff tin cans and bits of scrap metal--were highly prized.

Another explains that the Belomorkanal--a slave-labor-intensive project that was hailed as a great early success of Stalinism--was not only built by terrorized prisoners but proved useless in practice. It is only after this that one is shown the silent newsreels of the allegedly happy socialist workers building the canal, intended to connect the White Sea with the Baltic, while Stalin looks on approvingly. Experienced in this way, the cheerful-seeming newsreel shot takes on a captivating, horrifying double meaning. From the explanatory panels elsewhere in the exhibit, a visitor now knows, watching the grainy footage, that prisoners who grew too weak to move their quota of dirt in this and other projects were routinely killed or left to die; the socialist system had no resources to waste on those who could not contribute their share.

There are also full-scale mockups of a Gulag prison cell and prisoners' firsthand accounts of their degrading treatment at the hands of both guards and fellow prisoners--common criminals were sent to the Gulag along with political dissidents, and the former were often employed by the prison guards as oppressors and tormentors of the latter. As for what constitutes a political crime, we learn of a man sent into exile for scrawling an ironic remark on an allegedly secret ballot (which had, in any case, only one candidate listed). Others, we are told, might receive three years of forced labor for being thrice late to work; indolence was a crime against the people.

But then, abruptly, the spell is broken, and in a dispiriting if not alarming way. "Brutal systems have played a prominent role in many countries, including the United States," one of the exhibit's last panels tells visitors. By itself, that one clause--"including the United States"--would be bad enough. But the panel continues. "Although slavery ended after the American Civil War, its consequences persist. The repercussions of the Holocaust in Europe and apartheid in South Africa reverberate even today. Similarly, Russians face the legacy of the gulag. How can citizens in these countries face up to the horrors of the past?"

Just as it is the small details of the Gulag exhibit that lead one to consider the depth of the deprivation its captives endured, it is the word "similarly" that so effectively undermines what has just been shown. After all, if the Gulag is "similar" to anything in American life or history, does it teach us anything about the Soviet Union--or about anything at all? "If you cannot distinguish between levels of evil, you are a cause of evil." Such was the astute reaction of a man whose father spent a decade in the Gulag, when confronted with this moral equivalence in the paragraph above.

It is certainly true that learning about evils perpetrated in other times in other countries can too easily lead to a comfortable sense of moral superiority. That can, in its own way, undo what might otherwise be a teaching moment. All the same, however, things are not all the same. If the Gulag is interesting only as a means of turning a mirror on the injustices of our own penal system, it is arguably not interesting at all. The Gulag was, and is, a reductio ad absurdum of sorts of the Soviet system itself. It was where "counterrevolutionary" elements were sent to learn the virtues of work and of collectivism, but the lesson was predominantly that of man's inhumanity to man. All prisoners were slowly starved to death, and those too weak to work were starved faster than the strongest. Thus the weak grew weaker and the strong stronger. The overwhelming impression at the heart of the Gulag exhibit is just this--that cruel and arbitrary power lay at the heart of a system that purported to redress inequalities but instead etched them in stone.

The Soviet Union tried throughout most of its existence to forcibly prevent its citizens from seeking freedom in the West. The rest of Ellis Island tells a very different story about a quite different country and system. It's the story of a country that, for centuries, people have risked their lives to reach. No moral equivalence there.

Mr. Carney is a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The article can be read here.

Quote for the Day

2006-06-25T16:28:00.000-06:00

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities.

- William Butler Yeats
from "Under Ben Bulben"

Quote for the Day

2006-06-25T16:21:00.000-06:00

"You can't go back home to your family--
to a young man's dream of fame and glory
to the country cottage away from strife and conflict
to the father you have lost
to the old forms and systems of things which seems
everlasting but are changing all the time."

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Spucatum tauri: Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words...

2006-06-22T09:42:00.000-06:00

...even when that picture renders you speechless.

Nota bene: Ted Harvey, Colorado legislator

2006-06-21T10:23:00.000-06:00

Planned Parenthood Celebration Jolted by Abortion Survivor by Ted Harvey, assistant minority leader, Colorado House

She sings the anthem to applause, then her secret is revealed to stunned silence.

I want to share with you an awesome experience I had in the Colorado House of Representatives on May 8. It is a humbling experience to look back and realize that God used me to play a role in His divine orchestration.

I was leaving the House chambers for the weekend when our Democrat speaker of the House announced that the coming Monday would be the final day of this year's General Assembly. He went on to state that there were still numerous resolutions on the calendar which we would need to be addressed prior to the summer adjournment. Interestingly, he specifically mentioned that one of the resolutions we would be hearing was being carried by the House Majority Leader Alice Madden, honoring the 90th anniversary of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

As a strong pro-life legislator I was disgusted by the idea that we would pass a resolution honoring this 90-year legacy of genocide. I drove home that night wondering what I could say that might pierce the darkness during the debate on this heinous resolution.

On Saturday morning, I took my 8-year-old son up to the mountains to go white-water rafting. The trip lasted all day. As we were driving home, exhausted and hungry, I remembered that I had accepted an invitation to attend a fundraising dinner that night for a local pro-life organization. One of my most respected mentors had personally called me several weeks earlier and asked me to attend, so I knew I'd have to clean up and head over.

After our meal, the executive director of the organization introduced the keynote speaker. I looked up and saw walking to the stage a handicapped young lady being assisted to the microphone by a young man holding a guitar.

Her name was Gianna Jessen.

Gianna said "Hello," welcomed everyone, and then sang three of the most beautiful Christian songs I have ever heard.

She then began to give her testimony. When her biological mother was 17 years old and seven and a half months pregnant, she went to a Planned Parenthood clinic to have an abortion. As God would have it, the abortion failed and a beautiful 2-pound baby girl was brought into the world. Unfortunately, she was born with cerebral palsy and the doctors thought that she would never survive. The doctors were wrong.

Imagine the timing! A survivor of a Planned Parenthood abortion arrived in town just days before the Colorado House of Representatives was to celebrate Planned Parenthood's "wonderful" work.

As I listened to Gianna's amazing testimony, the Lord inspired me to ask her if she could stay in Denver until Monday morning so that I could introduce her on the floor of the House and tell her story. Perhaps she could even begin the final day's session by singing our country's national anthem!

To my surprise she said she would seriously consider it. If she were to agree, she wanted her accompanying guitarist to stay as well. A lady standing in line behind me waiting to meet Gianna overheard our conversation and said that she would be willing to pay for the guitarist's room. Gianna then said that she would think about it.

As I was driving home from the banquet, my cell phone rang. It was Gianna, and she immediately said, "I'm in, let's ruin this celebration." Praise God!

When Monday morning came, I awoke at 6 a.m. to write my speech before heading to the Capitol. As I wrote down the words, I could sense God's help and I knew that this was going to be a powerful moment for the pro-life movement.

Following a committee hearing, I rushed into the House chambers just as the opening morning prayer was about to be given. Between the prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, I wrote a quick note to the speaker of the House explaining that Gianna is an advocate for cerebral palsy. I took the note to the speaker and asked if I could have my friend open the last day of session by singing the national anthem. Without any hesitation the speaker took the microphone and said, "Before we begin, Representative Harvey has made available for us Gianna Jessen to sing the national anthem."

Gianna sang the most amazing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner that you could possibly imagine. Every person in the entire chamber was completely still, quiet and in awe of this frail young lady's voice.

Due to her cerebral palsy, Gianna often loses her balance, and shortly after starting to sing she grabbed my arm to stabilize herself, and I could tell that she was shaking. Suddenly, midway through the song, she forgot the words and began to hum and then said, "Please forgive me; I am so nervous." She then immediately began singing again and every House member and every guest throughout the chambers began to sing along with her to give her encouragement and to lift her up.

As I looked around the huge hall I listened to the unbelievable melody of Gianna's voice being accompanied by a choir of over 100 voices. I had chills running all over my body, and I knew that I had just witnessed an act of God.

As the song concluded the speaker of the House explained that Gianna has cerebral palsy and is an activist to bring awareness to the disease. "Let us give her a hand not only for her performance today, but also for her advocacy work," he said. The chamber immediately exploded into applause -- she had them all in the palm of her hand.

The speaker then called the House to order, and we proceeded as usual to allow members to make any announcements or introductions of guests. For dramatic effect, I waited until I was the last person remaining before I introduced Gianna.

As I waited for my turn, I nervously paced back and forth praying to God that he would give me the peace, confidence and the courage necessary to pull off what I knew would be one of the most dramatic and controversial moments of my political career.

While I waited, a prominent reporter from one of the major Denver newspapers walked over to Gianna and told her that her rendition captured the spirit of the national anthem more powerfully than any she had ever heard before.

Finally, I was the last person remaining. So, I proceeded to the microphone and began my speech.

Members, I would like to introduce you to a new friend and hero of mine -- her name is Gianna Jessen. She is visiting us today from Nashville, Tennessee, where she is an accomplished recording artist.

She has cerebral palsy and was raised in foster homes before being adopted at the age of four.

She was born prematurely and weighed only 2 pounds at birth. She remained in the hospital for almost three months. A doctor once said she had a great will to live and that she fought for her life. Eventually she was able to leave the hospital and be placed in foster care.

Because of her cerebral palsy, her foster mother was told that it was doubtful that she would ever crawl or walk. She could not sit up independently. Through the prayers and dedication of her foster mother, she eventually learned to sit up, crawl, then stand. Shortly before her fourth birthday, she began to walk with leg braces and a walker.

She continued in physical therapy and after a total of four surgeries, she was able to walk without assistance.

She still falls sometimes, but she says she has learned how to fall gracefully after falling for 29 years.

Two years ago, she walked into a local health club and said she wanted a private trainer. At the time her legs could not lift 30 pounds. Today she can leg press 200 pounds.

She became so physically fit that she began running marathons to raise money and awareness for cerebral palsy. She just returned last week from England where she ran in the London Marathon. It took her more than eight-and-a-half hours to complete. They were taking down the course by the time she made it to the finish line. But she made it, nonetheless. With bloody feet and aching joints, she finished the race.

Members would you help me recognize a modern-day hero -- Gianna Jessen?

At this point the chamber exploded into applause which lasted for 15-to-20 seconds. Gianna had touched their souls.

Ironically, Alice Madden, the majority leader and sponsor of the Planned Parenthood resolution, walked over to Gianna and congratulated her.

As the applause began to die down, I raised my hand to be recognized one more time.

Mr. Speaker, members, if you would allow me just a few more moments I would appreciate your time.

My name is Ted Harvey, not Paul Harvey, but, please, let me tell you the rest of the story.

The cause of Gianna's cerebral palsy is not because of some biological freak of nature, but rather the choice of her mother.

You see when her biological mother was 17-years-old and 7-and-a-half months pregnant, she went to a Planned Parenthood clinic to seek a late-term abortion. The abortionist performed a saline abortion on this 17-year-old girl. This procedure requires the injection of a high concentration of saline into the mother's womb, which the fetus is then bathed in and swallows, which results in the fetus being burned to death, inside and out. Within 24 hours the results are normally an induced, still-born abortion.

As Gianna can testify, the procedure is not always 100 percent effective. Gianna is an aborted late-term fetus who was born alive. The high concentration of saline in the womb for 24 hours resulted in a lack of oxygen to her brain and is the cause of her cerebral palsy.

Members, today, we are going to recognize the 90th anniversary of Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood…"

BANG! The gavel came down.

Just as I was finishing the last sentence of my speech -- the climax of the morning -- the speaker of the House gaveled me down and said, "Representative Harvey, I will allow you to continue your introduction, but not for the purposes of debating a measure now pending before the House."

At which point I said, "Mr. Speaker, I understand. I just wanted to put a face to what we are celebrating today."

Silence.

Deafening silence.

I then walked back to my chair shaking like a leaf. The Democrats wouldn't look at me. They were fuming. It was beautiful. I have been in the Legislature for five tough years, and this made it all worthwhile.

The House majority leader wouldn't talk to me the rest of the day.

Was it because I introduced an abortion survivor, or was it because we touched her soul? She could congratulate an inspirational cerebral palsy victim and advocate, but was outraged when she discovered that the person she congratulated was also an abortion survivor.

The headline in The Denver Post the next day read "Abortion Jab Earns Rebuke." The majority leader is quoted as saying, "I think it was amazingly rude to use a human being as an example of his personal politics."

Yes, Representative Madden, Gianna Jessen is a human being. She was when she was in her mother's womb, and she was when she sang the national anthem on the floor of the Colorado House of Representatives.

The paper went on to quote Gianna, stating she was glad I told her story.

"We need to discuss the humanity of it. I'm glad to be able to speak up for children in the womb," she said. "If abortion is about women's rights, where were my rights?"

All I can say is, "Glory to God!" He orchestrated it all, every minute of it, and I was so honored to have been chosen to play a part. May we all continue to be filled with and to fight for the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ!

God bless Rep. Harvey for his courage in defending the culture of life. You can read the article at the same place I found it here. You can also visit his own website.

Of his her ass he she made a trumpet: Katharine Jefferts Schori

2006-06-20T11:22:00.000-06:00

When asked during a CNN interview if homosexual activity is sinful:

"I don't believe so. I believe that God creates us with different gifts. Each one of us comes into this world with a different collection of things that challenge us and things that give us joy and allow us to bless the world around us. Some people come into this world with affections ordered toward other people of the same gender and some people come into this world with affections directed at people of the other gender."

Schori was recently elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church USA.

The Episcopal Church, awash in the "blessings" of sodomy and sundry heresies, has a membership roster shrinking swiftly enough to make it the fastest dying church in America. Perhaps that's the true blessing.

Chronicle of the Damned, part nine (revisited)

2006-06-14T14:38:00.000-06:00

We usually reserve this fate for groups and organizations. We think this a worthy exception to the rule.

Janice Sevre-Duszynska wants to be a Catholic priest. The 56-year old troublemaker, whose exploits include being arrested for trespassing at Ft. Benning (GA) and disrupting several ordination services demanding the bishops ordain her, prefers that her work be termed "prophetic obedience" rather than protesting. That's great. I would prefer that human excrement consist of gold bullion instead of feces; alas it isn't so.

"I used to make believe I was a priest, celebrating the Mass, blessing the people and giving the homily," Sevre-Duszynska says. "I knew the altar boy's prayers. I had learned them in Latin." As a kid I used to make believe I was playing drums in a band with Paul McCartney. Does that mean I should now make a public spectacle of myself because it didn't happen?

Idiocy is not her only crime. She also slouches towards blasphemy. "I am all of the oppressed women of the Bible. I am Sarah, I am Hannah, I am Elizabeth, I am the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment, I am the woman who anointed his head with oil." I won't even bother with a response here.

"To me, to be a priest means to live your life on the edge," she said. "To me, that's where the Holy Spirit is doing her dance." Again, enough said.

In July a dissident Catholic group will ordain Janice to the diaconate, and then, perhaps after further theological study (not that it will matter), to the priesthood. Interesting, but also irrelevant. Holy Orders in the Roman Catholic Church are not valid when an attempt is made to confer them upon women. Her "ordination" will exist only in her mind. Given its paucity, I'm sure that will be sufficient.

Recently Janice began a trek in Arizona with other activists through the Sonora desert. The goal was to walk 75 miles from Sasabe, Mexico, to Tucson. The desert is a hot place, Janice. You'd better get used to that.

In the world to come, Janice will serve in the diocese Lucifer gives to Roman Catholic Womenpriests. This diocese will occupy Circle Six, where heretics dwell. Under the guidance of Bishop Margaret Renewal, this group will also sink lower to occupy Circle Eight, where the purveyors of fraudulent rhetoric and the falsifiers roam. May the Lord, in His infinite mercy and kindness, take pity on those who are deceived by these miscreants.

Christian Reflections, Twenty-one

2006-06-13T20:21:00.000-06:00

"Ah, but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! - Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament no longer illumined by the beacon fires of the ancient hope."
from A Rebours, by J.K. Huysmans

"Baudelaire, the satanic Baudelaire, who died a Christian, must surely be one of M. Huysmans' favourite authors, for one can feel his presence, like a glowing fire, behind the finest pages M. Huysmans has written. Well, one day, I defied Baudelaire to begin Les Fleurs du mal over again, or to go any farther in his blasphemies. I might as well offer the same challenge to the author of A Rebours. 'After Les Fleurs du mal,' I told Baudelaire, 'it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the Cross.' Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross. But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice."
- Jules Barbey d' Aurevilly

Quote for the Day

2006-06-13T20:17:00.000-06:00

"The troubles of our proud and angry dust

Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

Bear them we can, and if we can we must.

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

- A.E. Housman

from Last Poems

What Colleges Forget to Teach

2006-06-12T21:51:00.000-06:00

City Journal
What Colleges Forget to Teach
Higher education could heal itself by teaching civics—not race, class, and gender.

Robert P. George
Winter 2006

The university is worth fighting for. No other institution can carry the burden of educating our young people. That’s why we must redouble our efforts to restore integrity, civility, and rigorous standards in American higher education—particularly in the area of civic education.

I’ll be the first to admit that the situation is dire. I sympathize when critics throw up their hands in despair. I sometimes feel that way myself. Darkness often prevails in places where the light of learning should shine. I often trade horror stories with my friend Hadley Arkes, a distinguished scholar of jurisprudence and political theory at Amherst. On one occasion, I explained that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton was sponsoring a viciously anti-Catholic art exhibit—one that it would never even permit were some favored faith or cause, such as Islam or gay rights, its target. Every year, some outrage along these lines seems to prove that anti-Catholicism really is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals, though anyone familiar with academic life today knows that anti-Semitism itself is making a run at being the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.

Professor Arkes listened sympathetically and said, “Things have gotten pretty bad here at Amherst, too: we’ve granted tenure in political science to a guy promoting a theory explaining the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush by reference to his alleged homoerotic attraction to Ronald Reagan.” “Well,” I replied, “Princeton has topped that. We’ve given a distinguished chair in bioethics to a fellow who insists that eating animals is morally wrong, but that killing newborn human infants can be a perfectly moral choice.” (This professor has since gone on to say that there would be nothing wrong with a society in which large numbers of children were conceived, born, and then killed in infancy to obtain transplantable organs.)

And so we go back and forth with each other, in a macabre game of one-upmanship.

Still, teaching at Princeton is in many ways a joy. I have the privilege of instructing students who actually know when the Civil War took place. Even before arriving at Princeton, they know that Lee surrendered to Grant, not to Eisenhower, at Appomattox Court House. Most know that Philadelphia, not Washington, D.C., played host to the constitutional convention. Few would list Alexander Hamilton among the most important presidents, because they know that he was never president. Some can identify the cabinet office that he held and even give a decent account of his differences with Thomas Jefferson. Speaking of whom, all my students know that Jefferson owned slaves—but then, everybody seems to know that, even those who know nothing else about him. My students, though, also know that it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, not his cousin Teddy, or Harry Truman, or JFK, who promised Americans a New Deal. Some can even tell you that the Supreme Court invalidated some early New Deal legislation and that FDR responded with a plan to pack the Court. Yes, my students and students at elite universities around the country come to campus knowing American history pretty well—and wanting to know it a lot better.

Many of these young men and women value historical knowledge not merely for its own sake but because they want to be good citizens. More, they seek to be of genuine service to fellow citizens. Many hope to be legislators, judges, even president. They know that knowledge of American history is vital to effective citizenship and service.

But they also need an understanding of American civics—particularly the principles of the Constitution. For all their academic achievement, students at Princeton and Yale and Stanford and Harvard and other schools that attract America’s most talented young people rarely come to campus with a sound grasp of the philosophy of America’s constitutional government. How did the Founding Fathers seek, via the institutions that the Constitution created, to build and maintain a regime of ordered liberty? Even some of our best-informed students think something along these lines: the Framers set down a list of basic freedoms in a Bill of Rights, which an independent judiciary, protected from the vicissitudes of politics, would then enforce.

It’s the rare student indeed who enters the classroom already aware that the Framers believed that the true bulwark of liberty was limited government. Few students comprehend the crucial distinction between (on the one hand) the national government as one of delegated and enumerated powers, and (on the other) the states as governments of general jurisdiction, exercising police powers to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare. If anything, they imagine that it’s the other way around. Thus they have no comprehension as to why leading supporters of the Constitution objected to a Bill of Rights, worried that it could compromise the delegated-powers doctrine and thus undermine the true liberty-securing principle of limited government.

Good students these days have heard of federalism, yet they have little appreciation of how it works or why the Founders thought it so vital. They’ve heard of the separation of powers and often can sketch how the system of checks and balances should work. But if one asks, for example, “Who checks the courts?” they cannot give a satisfactory answer.

The students’ lack of awareness flows partly from the conception of the American civic order that they have drunk in, which treats courts as if they aren’t really part of the government. Judges, on this view, are “non-political” actors whose job is to keep politicians in line with what elite circles regard as enlightened opinions. Judicial supremacy, of the kind that Jefferson and Lincoln stingingly condemned, thus winds up uncritically assumed to be sound constitutional law. The idea that the courts themselves could violate the Constitution by, for example, usurping authority that the Constitution vests in other branches of government, is off the radar screen.

Lacking basic knowledge of the American Founders’ political philosophy and of the principles that they enshrined in the Constitution, students often fall prey to the notion that ours is a “Living Constitution,” whose actual words matter little. On the Living Constitution theory, judges—especially Supreme Court justices—serve as members of a kind of standing constitutional convention whose role is to invalidate legislation that progressive circles regard as antiquated or retrograde, all in the name of adapting the Constitution to keep up with the times.
It doesn’t take much to expose the absurdity of this theory. The purpose of enshrining principles in a constitution is to ensure that the nation’s fundamental values remain honored even if they fall out of fashion. As for adapting the nation’s laws to keep up with the times, legislators can—and should—take care of that task. The proper role of courts when they exercise the power of judicial review is essentially a conserving (you could even say “conservative”) one. It is not to change anything but rather to place limits on what one can change.

Does this mean that our Constitution is “dead”? No: the Constitution’s principles are “living” in the sense that they can apply validly even to matters that the Founders themselves could not have anticipated. The original understanding of Fourth Amendment principles governing searches and seizures, for example, can reliably extend to cover today’s controversies about computer files, cyber-storage, and electronic surveillance. So to reject, as we should, the Living Constitution and its anticonstitutional doctrine of virtually unlimited judicial power is by no means to treat our Constitution as a dead letter. Rather, it is to treat the Constitution as law—supreme law—binding on, and limiting the power of, every branch of government and agency of the state, including the courts.

What is the source of this educational breakdown? The trouble isn’t the students—they’re bright and eager to learn. It’s that too few teachers are presenting students with the Founders’ philosophy, much less introducing them to the great issues, some still with us today, that divided the Founders.

And if teachers aren’t teaching the Founding’s principles, where will students learn them? They’re not likely to get any sense of the distinction between the delegated powers of the national government and the general jurisdiction of the states from any newspapers, national magazines, or television news networks, that’s for sure. Have the editors of the New York Times and the folks at CBS News even heard of that distinction yet? News travels slowly, true; but it shouldn’t take 218 years.

The solution to this educational breakdown is straightforward: we need to make a commitment at every level of schooling and within the public media to promote a deep awareness of the principles of the American Founding. Why educate students into archaism? some will doubtless object. Surely governing principles set forth in the eighteenth century have little relevance to us in the twenty-first. But American ideals, as embodied preeminently in the Declaration of Independence, are universal and timeless. They have force wherever there are human beings, fallible (indeed, as the Founders recognized, fallen) creatures, yet images of God in their possession of reason and freedom—beings, as the Declaration says, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

The constitutional scheme that the Founders devised for the lawful governance of human beings and for the preservation of their sacred rights is the world’s greatest triumph of practical political science. Of course, we shouldn’t treat our institutions as if they’re perfect—the Founders provided, after all, for their possible revision by constitutional amendment. True civic education isn’t indoctrination. The Founders themselves weren’t of one mind as to the proper interpretation of their handiwork in every respect. And reasonable people of goodwill, of course, disagree about key matters of constitutional interpretation. We do our students a wonderful service when we invite them into the great historical and contemporary debates about the meaning of our fundamental law in controversial cases. To do that, though, we must equip them with the historical knowledge and the philosophical understanding necessary if they’re to evaluate intelligently the competing arguments.

We needn’t teach that our institutions are uniquely just—that any polity that seeks to respect people’s rights and preserve liberties must copy them precisely. But anyone who sincerely seeks the truth will see that ours are indeed worthy institutions that have served Americans well whenever our people and leaders have shown the wisdom and mustered the fortitude to honor and live by them. The fact is, freedom-loving people throughout the world—even in an age darkened by widespread anti-Americanism—draw inspiration from American ideals and look to American institutions as the gold standard of republican government. Even critics of American policy feel that they must pay lip service to our ideals of democracy, limited government, equality before the law, civil liberty, private property, the free economy, and the rule of law.

Madison did not doubt that it would be so: “The free system of government we have established,” he wrote, “is so congenial with reason, with common sense, and with a universal feeling that it must produce approbation and a desire of imitation, as avenues may be found for truth to the knowledge of nations.” In Eastern Europe, much of Latin America, and parts of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, “avenues have been found for truth to the knowledge of nations.” Yet, at the same time, in the U.S. itself, public comprehension of “the free system of government” that Madison and his “founding brothers” bequeathed to us has eroded. We must reverse that trend. Otherwise, the quality of citizenship and statesmanship will inevitably suffer.

Madison famously observed that “only a well-educated people can be permanently a free people.” Yet some today seem to think otherwise. They don’t necessarily doubt that the impoverishment of civic understanding erodes citizenship and statesmanship, but they wonder why we can’t get along perfectly well anyway. We are, after all, the richest, most powerful nation in world history. We’re on top, and despite emerging economic challenges from China, maybe India, we’re likely to stay there. Isn’t that enough?

To this, a double reply. First, history shows us that basic freedoms are hard-won and easily lost. The institutions that preserve freedom can be crumbling even as they appear strong. Severe economic strains and other fundamental challenges can tempt people to compromise or sacrifice even basic freedoms. As Madison knew, it is conviction born of knowledge—civic understanding—that is our bulwark, our only true security, in the face of such temptations.

Second, as Plato (though no admirer of democracy) observes, the goal of the polis—the political order—isn’t merely to establish security but also to provide the conditions for citizens to live good and decent lives, worthy of human beings as rational and moral creatures. Our founders saw this crucial philosophical point. The purpose of the Declaration of Independence and its principles of civic life, Jefferson wrote shortly before he died, were “not to find out new principles or new arguments never before thought of, nor merely to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject. . . . All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sydney, etc.”

These “elementary books” inform us that statesmanship and, especially, citizenship, though key means to other ends, possess a value greater than merely instrumental. When we carry out our civic responsibilities in an informed way, we find ourselves ennobled as individuals and as a community. Even if a nation could remain on top in the global competition for military and economic superiority, and even if its basic political structure could last more or less indefinitely, the people of that nation, if they remain ignorant of the moral foundations of that structure, would be impoverished.

Whatever one thinks of the decision to invade Iraq, one cannot fail to find deeply moving the desire of the vast majority of Iraqis to be democratic citizens—a desire that cannot be accounted for merely by noting the tendency of democracies over time to be prosperous and stable. Rather, Iraqis proudly displaying ink-stained fingers are saying something that we Americans, at some level, still appreciate: that democratic citizenship fulfills an important aspect of our humanity. It is so inherently desirable that Iraqi men and women have risked their lives to exercise the franchise, just as it caused those eighteenth-century Americans who pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to risk the king’s hangman’s noose.

Our posture cannot be—must not be—complacent. We must firmly resolve to make reform and renewal—whatever the obstacles, whatever the costs—our constant endeavor. We must not let the resistance of entrenched interests or recalcitrant ideological forces in the academic establishment, the funding bureaucracies, or anywhere else intimidate us. Let us seize every opportunity, marshaling our resources and deploying our wits to advance the cause of reform wherever we detect an opening, however much the weeds may obscure it. The reform and renewal of civic education in our nation is a noble cause. We must make it an urgent priority.

Christian Reflections, Twenty

2006-06-12T21:27:00.000-06:00

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
by Robert Robinson, 1758

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

Quote for the Day

2006-06-12T20:21:00.000-06:00

"Actions speak louder than words, let your words teach and your actions speak."

June 13th is the memorial day for St. Anthony of Padua.

Nota bene: Cardinal Francis George

2006-06-12T12:22:00.000-06:00

Will the real Vatican II please stand up?

In the time after Pentecost, the Church considers the impact of the Holy Spirit in her life. Individuals often speak of an inspiration, of feeling led by the Spirit. Works of mercy and compassion get organized against all odds. In the midst of serious disputes, unity of faith and life is preserved. In the Church’s common life, an Ecumenical Council is one of the events that is guided by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit guards the Church in every age from abandoning the apostolic faith, and a Council is an instrument for strengthening that faith from generation to generation.

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1966), 40 years after its conclusion, remains for many Catholics a source of both joy and tension. What was the Holy Spirit calling us to think and to do? For some, the Council itself was the work of the Spirit, but its implementation has been hijacked by left-wing or right-wing ideologues, depending upon one’s choice of enemies. For others, the Council itself was flawed because its documents are ambiguous or even inconsistent with apostolic tradition. The extremists in this line made tradition another word for museum and lose the sense of a living Body of Christ. Some even believe that Pope John XXIII and all his successors are anti-Popes and that the Church has been without a Bishop of Rome since the death of Pius XII in 1958.

A few months ago, the current Bishop of Rome and successor of St. Peter, Pope Benedict XVI, offered an interpretation of the Second Vatican Council that merits close attention. The Council was called in order to give genuinely new impetus to the Church’s mission in the world. In order to overcome within the Church anything that might impede or obscure the Church’s mission, the Council called for an updating or renewal in the Church’s life. “Aggiornamento,” which is Italian for updating, was not, however, intended to mean that the Church should simply accommodate herself to the world. Ecclesiastical renewal is not a form of self-secularization. Pope Benedict says of those who took this path: “They have underestimated the inner tensions as well as the contradictions of the modern epoch.”

Pope Benedict contrasted two interpretations of the Council. One is a story of discontinuity and rupture with the Church’s past. It is as if the Church after the Council was a new, a different Church from all that had gone before. Where the texts of the Council did not support this interpretation, they were put aside in the name of the “spirit” of the Council. This is not to deny that a “spirit” of a meeting is always more than the texts it produces; it is to say that the Church’s development from one age to the next cannot be in contradiction with her apostolic origins. Among those arguing for rupture, some Americans found attractive the idea that a Council can reconstitute the Church with a mandate from the “people,” understood as separate from their pastors. But the essential structures of the Church come from Christ, and the bishops of Vatican II had no mandate from Christ to make a new Church or destroy the nature of their own apostolic office.

The more authentic interpretation of Vatican II, according to our Holy Father, sees the renewal or reform rooted in the tradition that links the Church to her apostolic origins. The Council did set out to give “a new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought,” as Pope Benedict puts it, but in a way that “preserved and deepened the Church’s inmost nature and identity.” The Council’s emphasis on ecclesial communion means that everything and everyone in the Church is related. Nothing can be understood apart from our relationships among ourselves and with all those who have gone before us in faith. This communion or network of relationships across space and time is made vital through the action of the Holy Spirit. Synthesizing fidelity and the dynamics of renewal, the Pope states that: “The Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time; she continues her pilgrimage amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God, proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes.”

Forty years after the end of the Council, its major documents are being taken up and studied again here and around the Catholic world. It is the Pope’s desire that these documents will give life to the Church a generation after they were first written in the hope of a new springtime for the Church’s mission in the world. That hope shaped the “spirit” of the Council and must remain with us now. To abandon hope is to sin against the Holy Spirit.

As the Council’s documents are re-read today, the question inevitably arises about the experience of the last 40 years of their implementation. Much that is positive and helpful in the Church today comes from the instructions of the Council. Much that is negative and destructive in the Church today comes, it seems to me, from fratricidal arguments about elements of the Church’s life and teachings, conflicts that distract Catholics from attending to the reason the Council was called: the conversion of the world.

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth, the personal expression of the love between the loving Father and the beloved Son. The Holy Spirit desires that the entire world know the truth about God, about ourselves and about the world itself. That divine desire is thwarted when the Church is not an eager and effective instrument of evangelization. The Holy Spirit works to make us an evangelizing Church. Let us pray to cooperate with the Spirit and to implement the Second Vatican Council more fully. God bless you.

Cardinal Francis George is the Archbishop of Chicago and is also vice president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Quote(s) for the day

2006-06-11T15:02:00.000-06:00

"No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny."

-Paul Johnson, historian

"Moses said to the people: "Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live? Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors, all of which the LORD, your God, did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? This is why you must now know, and fix in your heart, the the LORD is God in the heavens above and on earth below, and that there is no other. You must keep his statutes and commandments that I enjoin on you today, that you and your children after you may prosper, and that you may have long life on the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you forever."

-Deuteronomy 4:32-43, 39-40

First reading of the Mass, on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (Order of Mass, Roman Rite)

Well Done: Remembering the Men of D-Day

2006-06-06T10:13:00.000-06:00

"You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely....The free men of the world are marching together to victory. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."
~General Dwight D. Eisenhower giving the D-Day order on June 6, 1944.

Quote for the Day

2006-06-04T21:07:00.000-06:00

"Make yourself an honest man, an then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world."

Thomas Carlyle

Spucatum tauri: The "Reverend" Wendy Saunders

2006-06-04T19:33:00.000-06:00

Wendy Saunders is an Anglican "priest" in London. How does she witness for Christ? According to the Church Times, she dyed her hair pink and purchased a pink Nissan car. Most priests wear clerical garb as a witness to Christian simplicity, while members of religious orders wear habits as a witness to poverty. But Saunders has chosen pink hair and a pink car. How special.

Who says modernity hasn't made positive contributions to religion?

Quote for the Day

2006-06-01T22:58:00.000-06:00

"Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor. "

Mark Helprin

Of his ass he made a trumpet: Alan Hevesi

2006-06-01T20:26:00.000-06:00

"The man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president's eyes if he could get away with it. The toughest senator, the best representative. A great, great member of the Congress of the United States."

State comptroller Alan Hevesi, complimenting Senator Charles Schumer.

Hevesi is a former professor of government and politics at Queens College.

Read more, including his "apology."

Christian Reflection, nineteen

2006-06-01T17:25:00.000-06:00

St. Josemaria Escriva
(1902-1975)

"The apostle calls a Christian miles--a soldier. Thus it is that in this holy and Christian war of love and peace for the happiness of all souls, there are, in God's ranks, tired, hungry soldiers, covered in wounds...but happy. For they bear in their hearts the sure light of victory."

Of his ass he made a trumpet: Marcos Aguilar

2006-06-01T15:33:00.000-06:00

"Ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction. And so it isn’t about an argument of joining neo liberalism, it’s about us being able, as human beings, to surpass the barrier."

-Marcos Aguilar, founder and principal, La Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a charter school in El Sereno, CA (yes, he's allowed to teach children).

Source

Of his ass he made a trumpet: Ted Turner

2006-05-31T15:10:00.000-06:00

Because their stupidity knows no bounds, neither must our efforts to ridicule them. That's why we're launching a new category of assault: "Of his ass he made a trumpet" (Dante's Inferno, 21.139). Fans of Chronicle of the Damned and Spucatum Tauri will surely relish this addition as we use miscreants' own words to illustrate their monumental foolishness.
____________________________________________

"I am absolutely convinced that the North Koreans are absolutely sincere. There’s really no reason for them to cheat [on nukes]....I looked them right in the eyes. And they looked like they meant the truth. I mean, you know, just because somebody’s done something wrong in the past doesn’t mean they can’t do right in the future or the present. That happens all the, all the time. I didn’t get to meet him [Kim Jong-Il], but he didn’t look — in the pictures that I’ve seen of him on CNN, he didn’t look too much different than most other people I’ve met. I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars. I didn’t see any brutality"

-Ted Turner, from an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, 9/19/05

Nota Bene: Constitution or Tyranny

2006-05-30T22:15:00.000-06:00

Constitution or Tyranny

By Mark Helprin

In fear of a Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito originalist coup de main, and with extraordinary brilliance—for her—Senator Dianne Feinstein recently expressed this view of strict constructionism: "Women would not be provided equal protection under the Constitution, interracial marriages could be outlawed, schools could still be segregated and the principle of one man, one vote would not govern the way we elect our representatives."

Leaving aside the bizarre notion that originalists fail to recognize that Constitutional amendments govern—which, of course, by the Constitution's original command they do—her plaint is only the blunt tip of a long and freighted spear. Quite simply, the Left openly disdains the Constitution when it frustrates even the most transient of their preferences.

For them, it is a benighted 18th-century document that can be interpreted to mean the opposite of what it states, and is best elasticized into meaninglessness, the void of which they cover with a thatch of legislative decrees as thin as needles but as thick as fish in a crowded sea—a forest of forty, fifty, or sixty thousand closely leaded pages in which the fundamental powers of the people are lost and subsumed. This view comports with a Darwinian notion of the evolution of law, as in the English model that we did not choose; with a visceral distrust of tradition; with an interpretation of history that seeks even destructive progression and rejects even benevolent repetition; with hostility to certain principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, such as the recognition of rights pre-eminently in the individual; and with a frequently bitter disfavor of impediments to the bureaucratic drive or the immediate expression of popular will.

A case in point is the Left's conviction that the 2000 presidential election was illegitimized by a constitutionally mandated electoral college that weighs votes unequally and thereby begs for abolition. By this logic, so does the Senate. So do the three branches of government, where a party with 51% of the vote may make 100% of the decisions. And so do the states. Is it fair, for example, that the people of Wyoming can make their own law, whereas the people of the Upper West Side must combine their aspirations with those of the primitive inhabitants of the Adirondacks?

In the 19th century, oil was transported in ships with hulls caulked to form a single chamber, and as their cargoes shifted with irresistible momentum these ships readily capsized. Naval architects then compartmentalized them so that their massive loads could not rush unchecked in reaction to the momentary condition of the sea. This is what the founders did in restraining the power of even self-government, and this is what those who recoil from the Constitution as it is actually written find most distressing.

In the name of efficiency, speed, and process, they chafe at those of its elements that frustrate the impulse of the moment, force compromise, or sidetrack action. But without these frustrations, which yet allow an energetic executive to act in time of emergency, we would find ourselves in the presence of the kind of immediate, singular, untrammeled power of, for example, the king that George III might have become had he not been frustrated by the Magna Carta, the Common Law, Parliament, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Though they call it progressive, their vision of governance predates the Constitution and favors the jealous power not of kings but, in their place, a kingly state in which the implicit ownership of all the realm is established not through vassalage but by an unlimited power of taxation, and in which corporate rights are vested not in feudal classes, guilds, aristocracy, and sects, but in race, ethnicity, and sex.

What stands in the way of this retrograde vision that would catapult Western civilization back to the autocracy, corporate rights, and cults of obedience from which it has gradually emerged over several thousand years? The Constitution, as it stands, a document that is by nature clarifying. Metaphorically, whereas the strict constructionist removes the accumulated scale so that original intent can be seen in depth and detail, advocates of a "living" Constitution bury it so deeply in layer upon layer that only the topmost gloss will govern according to the whims of the governors. And lest some jurist incapable of ordering principle over decree be forced to the embarrassment of ruling contrary to his prejudices, and thereby affirming the essence of law, they simply imagine a new Constitution every time they find it standing in the way.

Nor is strict construction, as it is often portrayed, inflexible or passionless, not that these need be disqualifying. Because the Constitution can be amended, it is perfectly flexible, though not hurriedly so. The telling difference between the liberally elastic document and the conservatively amendable one is that the latter demands the consent of the governed rather than that of a small juridical elite. And if the life of the "living" Constitution emanates from the regulatory song of the bureaucratic state, the life of the real Constitution arises in the passion of the Declaration, the First Organic Law of the United States, the minder and conscience of a Constitution ratified in compromise and forced to delay but not to deny the implementation of the Declaration's self-evident truths. The unparalleled language of the Declaration, forged in war, draws its force from its postulates and intent, and its postulates and intent are unequivocal, the guide stars of the nation and its Constitution, as Lincoln, if not Dianne Feinstein, would attest.

And contrary to the senator's thoughtless accusation, it is the originalist view—Lincoln's view, the view of the Union dead—that, in fact, guarantees equal treatment under the laws, the preservation of individual rights, and the continuance of the republican form of government. For with the Constitution as it is actually written, many political outcomes are possible, but with a Constitution that is imagined day by day and hour by hour, all politics are tyrannical.

This article can be found in the Spring 2006 edition of Claremont Review of Books

Mark Helprin, whose books include A Soldier of the Great War and Winter's Tale, is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute.

Quote for the Day

2006-05-30T19:20:00.000-06:00

"That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of the atoms I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet should fall into a most ingenious treatise on philosophy."

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Spucatum tauri: Elton John

2006-05-26T10:34:00.000-06:00

Elton John (pictured at left in what is undoubtedly one of his favorite recreational gestures) blasted the Catholic Church recently for it stance on condom use. This according to the Irish Examiner.

Speaking at a business awards ceremony in London, the pop star and avowedly bisexual/homosexual (it matters not which one, because let's face it, there's no real moral difference there) mentioned his numerous friends who have died of AIDS.

Apparently Elton believes that condoms, rather than virtue and self control, would have saved his 60 (that's right, sixty) friends.

As egregious and utterly absurd as his assault on the Catholic Church is, still more worrisome are his associations. The picture at right says it all.

Nota bene: Ben Kessler

2006-05-25T10:02:00.000-06:00

Ben Kessler set of a firestorm of controversy when he lambasted the selfishness of modern culture in his speech during commencement at Minnesota's University of St. Thomas.

Kessler is a Roman Catholic seminarian and student at the university. You can see part of his speech here, in which he criticized the culture of selfishness. Specifically he targeted the issues of contraception, cohabitation, and some sort of mischievous food fight that took place at the university.

Having spent several years eating in college cafeterias, I can say with verity that such food often makes for better projectiles and amusement than nourishment. I see little harm in a good ol' fashioned food fight once in a while.

The real issue is Kessler's attacking a culture of selfishness, and where better to start than in academia? College students too often spend more time exploring and indulging vices than they do learning. Heaven forbid one of their own point out that fact.

The most amusing critique of Kessler's speech came from a faculty member:

"Jill Manske, a professor of biology and former director of women's studies at St. Thomas, said that she worried that non-Catholics would 'perceive a shift to the right' at the university and might not feel welcome teaching or studying there."
-"A Commencement Turns Ugly," Inside Higher Ed, 5/24/06

Translation: she's afraid some would perceive the Catholic university is making a shift towards actual Catholicism. Forgive me, but I've no sympathy for folks who attend or teach at a Catholic university yet are confounded by the Catholic values it's supposed to espouse.

Some who are inclined to agree with the substance of Kessler's speech criticize its prudence. We're not among them. Prudence is overrated, and too often is the excuse that milquetoast bishops, priests, and lay leaders use to cover their cowardice. The time for half-measures and softspeak is over.

Kessler is studying for the CATHOLIC priesthood at a CATHOLIC university, and he stood up and spoke for CATHOLIC values (notice a theme here?). Facing criticism from a sackless clergy and university leadership, Kessler apologized for offending people. The real tragedy here is his apology, not his speech. Nonetheless, Ben Kessler earns a nota bene for his commendable stand for virtue and selflessness.

Various news sources ran stories on the event.

Chronicle of the Damned, part 11

2006-05-24T11:25:00.000-06:00

The Rainbow Sash Movement

Their Mission:

"The Rainbow Sash Movement is an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender Catholics, with their families and friends, who are publicly calling the Catholic Church to conversion of heart around issues of human sexuality."

Translation:

It is an organization of very confused people who are publicly defying the teachings of the Church to which they claim allegiance. They are calling on that Church to reverse teachings and beliefs on homosexuality that pre-date Christianity itself.

Their Mission:

"Members of the movement are committed to bringing the gifts, the witness and the challenge of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people into the heart of the church. Through our public, prayerful, visible presence at the Eucharist and in the ongoing life of God's People, through our work for justice, through speaking the truth of our lives and our loving, we call the whole church to build with us a future of liberation, reconciliation and joy for all people."

Translation:

They are committed to flaunting their deviant behavior and lifestyle choice to the Church's flock by insisting that their grave sin is no sin at all. They are committed to using sacred worship as a setting to advance their own cultural agenda. Through their public defiance of Church teaching, presence at the Eucharist made visibly scandalous by wearing "rainbow sashes" as symbols of that defiance, their public encouragement of others to join their activities, and through their public dissent and advancement of moral relativism, they are calling on the Church to defy the teachings of Christ and build a "future of liberation" from Truth and the Gospel.

Their webpage contains links to other shameful groups such as Dignity USA and the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries, and even comes with a listing of "Lesbian and Gay-Friendly Parishes."

The "Rainbow Sash Movement" is one of sundry dissent groups that openly challenges the Church's authority on matters of faith and morals, yet bizarrely insists on calling themselves Catholic. Chock another batch of souls lost to poor or nonexistent catechesis (way to go "Spirit of Vatican II"!).

Tradition, Scripture, and natural law are unequivocally clear on the immorality of homosexual acts. Yet this group of miscreants would ask us to overturn all that and embrace their twisted notion of tolerance and charity. It is a tired song, sung in every age. In the good ol' days we called it heresy, but now so many milquetoast bishops and priests refuse to confront this group and call it for what it is.

It should come as no surprise that the Rainbow Sash Movement has another spectacle in store for Pentecost. They plan to present themselves for Holy Communion at cathedrals across the nation, and by the way they'll be wearing their rainbow sashes to make sure everyone knows what they're doing. That's rather amusing, considering they oppose bishops denying Holy Communion to various dissenters on the grounds that doing so constitutes using the sacrament to make a political/cultural statement.

Let's take a look at some quotes from Joe Murray, "U.S. Convener" (whatever the hell that is) of the Rainbow Sash Movement.

"It is our hope that you will welcome the gifts and insights we offer to the Church. If you don't accept these gifts and insights, than [sic] the Church will suffer; the Church will lack something that is very important."
-From a 2004 letter to Bishop Wilton Gregory, then president of the USCCB

"Gifts"...You mean a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and the Christian vocation? Yeah, that's something the Church should promote. "Insights"...You mean different ways to sodomize and defile? The Church will suffer if we don't accept these gifts and insights? That's like saying a garden isn't thriving unless there are weeds growing in it.

"We wish to belong to Church, and you have to open the doors, not only physically, but in every other way so that we will have a tremendous sense of belonging. It's our Church as much as yours."
-Ibid.

It's not 'your' Church, and it's not 'my' Church, IT'S JESUS CHRISTS'S CHURCH. It's not about following my beliefs and my ways of doing things. The same applies to you. If you want play-doh religion, try the Episcopalians. If you want to belong to the Catholic Church, then obey her teachings and act in communion with her.

"January 17 through the 25 of 2005, is the week when various Catholic and Christian denominations pray for Christian Unity nationally and internationally. We are puzzled why Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender (GLBT) Catholics and Christians GLBT Churches and organizations are being excluded?"
-From a 2005 Rainbow Sash Movement press release

You're puzzled? What !#$%& planet do you live on? This isn't exactly rocket science. You were excluded because you are an organization in open defiance of the Church, in open defiance of teachings that virtually every Christian church holds. Unity isn't about pretending that we're all in the same boat. It's about actually being united in core beliefs. Christ taught a lot of things, but he did not say that it's ok to bat for the other team.

"The Church has been well served by gay priests for centuries. Who can cast the first stone when it comes to gay priests?"
-From a 2005 Rainbow Sash Movement press release

Umm, let me see, an independent group found that 80% of clergy sex abuse cases were situations where a priest had a sexual encounter with an adolescent/early teen boy. They're not pederasts, they're homosexual predators. Need someone to cast the first stone? Where do we sign up? I'm sure there have been some priests who served the flock well while they struggled with homosexual sickness. But the point is they struggled with it, knowing it's a grave disorder. The foul ones embraced it and led lives of scandal. That's why there's a clergy abuse crisis in the Church.

Like many of the Damned, those donning rainbow sashes will be spread throughout the Inferno. Their primary and obvious place of repose will be Circle Seven, home of sodomites. Their odious acts also merit a lower place in Circle Eight, where their fraudulent rhetoric, divisiveness, and falsification will surely be rewarded in the fire that dieth not. Rainbow Sashers will also be splattered across Circle Six, home of heretics, and Circle Two, dwelling place of those ensnared by lust. Their final resting places are far and wide, as befits their crimes against God, nature, and man.

In somma sappi che tutti fur cherci e litterati grandi e di gran fama, d'un peccato medesmo al mondo lerci. Know, in a word, that they were scholars all, great men of letters, clerks of wide renown, made filthy in the world by the same fall (Inferno, Canto 15, 106-108).

Quote for the Day

2006-05-19T11:23:00.000-06:00

George Orwell

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

-From 1984

Those who would revise our past, trash our culture, deconstruct our literature, and insist that Western civilization is the scourge of human history know Orwell's words all too well. For Orwell it was a work of fiction. For them it is a modus operandi. Their actions give credence to his work of fiction by making it a reality in our lives.

Only by remembering will we preserve our patrimony. Only by living life to the fullest will we assure the continuation of our culture. Only by recapturing our language will we continue our literary tradition. Only by a willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of our civilization will we guarantee its continued existence as a beacon of hope and light in a world gone mad.

Christian Reflection, eighteen

2006-05-10T14:18:00.000-06:00

"Unless you recognize the presence of Mystery, night advances, confusion abounds and -- when it touches your freedom -- rebellion erupts, or disappointment is so overwhelming that you'll wait for nothing more and live desiring nothing more. From the mystery of Christ's resurrection a new light floods the world, fighting for territory, inch by inch, pushing back the night."

-Monsignor Luigi Giussani (1922-2005). Founder, Communion and Liberation

Requiescat in pacem: George C. Roche III

2006-05-08T12:45:00.000-06:00

George Charles Roche III
(1935-2006)

George Roche III accomplished many things throughout his life, but he will be remembered most for what he did at a tiny college in the middle of nowhere in southern Michigan.

As the president of Hillsdale College from 1971-1999, he took the school from a modest endowment to one larger than $200 million. Not bad for a school of 1,200 students in a region filled with colleges and universities. This endowment and the impressive fundraising machine Roche built is what allowed Hillsdale to exist fully independent of funding from the federal government. For students that meant--and still does--that aid for the ~$20,000-per-year education has to come from private sources.

In 1977 the US Department of Health Education and Welfare tried to force Hillsdale to submit to various federal regulations. The college lost a 1984 Supreme Court case, and under Roche's leadership, it did what was necessary to insure its students could receive an education without federal student aid.

Many a student owe a debt of gratitude to Roche because of this. Were it not for his leadership, we of limited means wouldn't have been able to attend Hillsdale and receive the blessings of a classical liberal arts education.

His presidency of Hillsdale ended in scandal and intrigue, and men of good faith will disagree about Roche's culpability in what happened. That is a discussion for another time and place. Regardless of the accusations and complaints leveled against him, the indisputable fact is that George Roche fought the battles of the past and built the school into what it is today. Now Hillsdale sails under another captain, but moves forward under the same flag to fight the battles of today and tomorrow. George Charles Roche III made that possible. May he rest in peace.

Quote for the day

2006-05-06T23:57:00.000-06:00

"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."

Edmund Burke

Reminding Europe....

2006-05-06T19:07:00.000-06:00

Many have forgotten, remind them!

Nota bene: Cardinal George Pell on Islam

2006-05-05T10:10:00.000-06:00

Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Syndey (Australia), takes a lengthy but frank and sobering look at Islam

4/2/2006

September 11 was a wake-up call for me personally. I recognised that I had to know more about Islam.

In the aftermath of the attack one thing was perplexing. Many commentators and apparently the governments of the “Coalition of the Willing” were claiming that Islam was essentially peaceful, and that the terrorist attacks were an aberration. On the other hand one or two people I met, who had lived in Pakistan and suffered there, claimed to me that the Koran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims.

Although I had possessed a copy of the Koran for 30 years, I decided then to read this book for myself as a first step to adjudicating conflicting claims. And I recommend that you too read this sacred text of the Muslims, because the challenge of Islam will be with us for the remainder of our lives – at least.

Can Islam and the Western democracies live together peacefully? What of Islamic minorities in Western countries? Views on this question range from näive optimism to bleakest pessimism. Those tending to the optimistic side of the scale seize upon the assurance of specialists that jihad is primarily a matter of spiritual striving, and that the extension of this concept to terrorism is a distortion of koranic teaching[1]. They emphasise Islam’s self-understanding as a “religion of peace”. They point to the roots Islam has in common with Judaism and Christianity and the worship the three great monotheistic religions offer to the one true God. There is also the common commitment that Muslims and Christians have to the family and to the defence of life, and the record of co-operation in recent decades between Muslim countries, the Holy See, and countries such as the United States in defending life and the family at the international level, particularly at the United Nations.

Many commentators draw attention to the diversity of Muslim life—sunni, shi’ite, sufi, and their myriad variations—and the different forms that Muslim devotion can take in places such as Indonesia and the Balkans on the one hand, and Iran and Nigeria on the other. Stress is laid, quite rightly, on the widely divergent interpretations of the Koran and the shari’a, and the capacity Islam has shown throughout its history for developing new interpretations. Given the contemporary situation, the wahhabist interpretation at the heart of Saudi Islamism offers probably the most important example of this, but Muslim history also offers more hopeful examples, such as the re-interpretation of the shari’a after the fall of the Ottoman empire, and particularly after the end of the Second World War, which permitted Muslims to emigrate to non-Muslim countries[2].

Optimists also take heart from the cultural achievements of Islam in the Middle Ages, and the accounts of toleration extended to Jewish and Christian subjects of Muslim rule as “people of the Book”. Some deny or minimise the importance of Islam as a source of terrorism, or of the problems that more generally afflict Muslim countries, blaming factors such as tribalism and inter-ethnic enmity; the long-term legacy of colonialism and Western domination; the way that oil revenues distort economic development in the rich Muslim states and sustain oligarchic rule; the poverty and political oppression in Muslim countries in Africa; the situation of the Palestinians, and the alleged “problem” of the state of Israel; and the way that globalisation has undermined or destroyed traditional life and imposed alien values on Muslims and others.

Indonesia and Turkey are pointed to as examples of successful democratisation in Muslim societies, and the success of countries such as Australia and the United States as “melting pots”, creating stable and successful societies while absorbing people from very different cultures and religions, is often invoked as a reason for trust and confidence in the growing Muslim populations in the West. The phenomenal capacity of modernity to weaken gradually the attachment of individuals to family, religion and traditional ways of life, and to commodify and assimilate developments that originate in hostility to it (think of the way the anti-capitalist counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s was absorbed into the economic and political mainstream—and into consumerism), is also relied upon to “normalise” Muslims in Western countries, or at least to normalise them in the minds of the non-Muslim majority.

Reasons for optimism are also sometimes drawn from the totalitarian nature of Islamist ideology, and the brutality and rigidity of Islamist rule, exemplified in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Just as the secular totalitarian-isms of the twentieth century (Nazism and Communism) ultimately proved unsustainable because of the enormous toll they exacted on human life and creativity, so too will the religious totalitarianism of radical Islam. This assessment draws on a more general underlying cause for optimism, or at least hope, for all of us, namely our common humanity, and the fruitfulness of dialogue when it is entered with good will on all sides. Most ordinary people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, share the desire for peace, stability and prosperity for themselves and their families.

On the pessimistic side of the equation, concern begins with the Koran itself. In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages. I will return to the problems of Koranic interpretation later in this paper, but in coming to an appreciation of the true meaning of jihad, for example, it is important to bear in mind what the scholars tell us about the difference between the suras (or chapters) of the Koran written during Muhammad’s thirteen years in Mecca, and those that were written after he had based himself at Medina. Irenic interpretations of the Koran typically draw heavily on the suras written in Mecca, when Muhammad was without military power and still hoped to win people, including Christians and Jews, to his revelation through preaching and religious activity. After emigrating to Medina, Muhammad formed an alliance with two Yemeni tribes and the spread of Islam through conquest and coercion began[3]. One calculation is that Muhammad engaged in 78 battles, only one of which, the Battle of the Ditch, was defensive[4]. The suras from the Medina period reflect this decisive change and are often held to abrogate suras from the Meccan period[5].

The predominant grammatical form in which jihad is used in the Koran carries the sense of fighting or waging war. A different form of the verb in Arabic means “striving” or “struggling”, and English translations sometimes use this form as a way of euphemistically rendering the Koran’s incitements to war against unbelievers[6]. But in any case, the so-called “verses of the sword” (sura 95 and 936)[7], coming as they do in what scholars generally believe to be one of the last suras revealed to Muhammad[8], are taken to abrogate a large number of earlier verses on the subject (over 140, according to one radical website[9]). The suggestion that jihad is primarily a matter of spiritual striving is also contemptuously rejected by some Islamic writers on the subject. One writer warns that “the temptation to reinterpret both text and history to suit ‘politically correct’ requirements is the first trap to be avoided”, before going on to complain that “there are some Muslims today, for instance, who will convert jihad into a holy bath rather than a holy war, as if it is nothing more than an injunction to cleanse yourself from within”[10].

The abrogation of many of the Meccan suras by the later Medina suras affects Islam’s relations with those of other faiths, particularly Christians and Jews. The Christian and Jewish sources underlying much of the Koran[11] are an important basis for dialogue and mutual understanding, although there are difficulties. Perhaps foremost among them is the understanding of God. It is true that Christianity, Judaism and Islam claim Abraham as their Father and the God of Abraham as their God. I accept with reservations the claim that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship one god (Allah is simply the Arabic word for god) and there is only one true God available to be worshipped! That they worship the same god has been disputed[12], not only by Catholics stressing the triune nature of God, but also by some evangelical Christians and by some Muslims[13]. It is difficult to recognise the God of the New Testament in the God of the Koran, and two very different concepts of the human person have emerged from the Christian and Muslim understandings of God. Think, for example, of the Christian understanding of the person as a unity of reason, freedom and love, and the way these attributes characterise a Christian’s relationship with God. This has had significant consequences for the different cultures that Christianity and Islam have given rise to, and for the scope of what is possible within them. But these difficulties could be an impetus to dialogue, not a reason for giving up on it.

The history of relations between Muslims on the one hand and Christians and Jews on the other does not always offer reasons for optimism in the way that some people easily assume. The claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities are largely mythical, as the history of Islamic conquest and domination in the Middle East, the Iberian peninsula and the Balkans makes abundantly clear. In the territory of modern-day Spain and Portugal, which was ruled by Muslims from 716 and not finally cleared of Muslim rule until the surrender of Granada in 1491 (although over half the peninsula had been reclaimed by 1150, and all of the peninsula except the region surrounding Granada by 1300), Christians and Jews were tolerated only as dhimmis[14], subject to punitive taxation, legal discrimination, and a range of minor and major humiliations. If a dhimmi harmed a Muslim, his entire community would forfeit protection and be freely subject to pillage, enslavement and murder. Harsh reprisals, including mutilations, deportations and crucifixions, were imposed on Christians who appealed for help to the Christian kings or who were suspected of having converted to Islam opportunistically. Raiding parties were sent out several times every year against the Spanish kingdoms in the north, and also against France and Italy, for loot and slaves. The caliph in Andalusia maintained an army of tens of thousand of Christian slaves from all over Europe, and also kept a harem of captured Christian women. The Jewish community in the Iberian peninsula suffered similar sorts of discriminations and penalties, including restrictions on how they could dress. A pogrom in Granada in 1066 annihilated the Jewish population there and killed over 5000 people. Over the course of its history Muslim rule in the peninsula was characterised by outbreaks of violence and fanaticism as different factions assumed power, and as the Spanish gradually reclaimed territory[15].

Arab rule in Spain and Portugal was a disaster for Christians and Jews, as was Turkish rule in the Balkans. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans commenced in the mid-fifteenth century, and was completed over the following two hundred years. Churches were destroyed or converted into mosques, and the Jewish and Christians populations became subject to forcible relocation and slavery. The extension or withdrawal of protection depended entirely on the disposition of the Ottoman ruler of the time. Christians who refused to apostatize were taxed and subject to conscript labour. Where the practice of the faith was not strictly prohibited, it was frustrated—for example, by making the only legal market day Sunday. But violent persecution was also a constant shadow. One scholar estimates that up to the Greek War of Independence in 1828, the Ottomans executed eleven Patriarchs of Constantinople, nearly one hundred bishops and several thousand priests, deacons and monks. Lay people were prohibited from practising certain professions and trades, even sometimes from riding a horse with a saddle, and right up until the early eighteenth century their adolescent sons lived under the threat of the military enslavement and forced conversion which provided possibly one million janissary soldiers to the Ottomans during their rule. Under Byzantine rule the peninsula enjoyed a high level of economic productivity and cultural development. This was swept away by the Ottoman conquest and replaced with a general and protracted decline in productivity[16].

The history of Islam’s detrimental impact on economic and cultural development at certain times and in certain places returns us to the nature of Islam itself. For those of a pessimistic outlook this is probably the most intractable problem in considering Islam and democracy. What is the capacity for theological development within Islam?

In the Muslim understanding, the Koran comes directly from God, unmediated. Muhammad simply wrote down God’s eternal and immutable words as they were dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel. It cannot be changed, and to make the Koran the subject of critical analysis and reflection is either to assert human authority over divine revelation (a blasphemy), or question its divine character. The Bible, in contrast, is a product of human co-operation with divine inspiration. It arises from the encounter between God and man, an encounter characterised by reciprocity, which in Christianity is underscored by a Trinitarian understanding of God (an understanding Islam interprets as polytheism). This gives Christianity a logic or dynamic which not only favours the development of doctrine within strict limits, but also requires both critical analysis and the application of its principles to changed circumstances. It also requires a teaching authority.

Of course, none of this has prevented the Koran from being subjected to the sort of textual analysis that the Bible and the sacred texts of other religions have undergone for over a century, although by comparison the discipline is in its infancy. Errors of fact, inconsistencies, anachronisms and other defects in the Koran are not unknown to scholars, but it is difficult for Muslims to discuss these matters openly.

In 2004 a scholar who writes under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg published a book in German setting out detailed evidence that the original language of the Koran was a dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac. Syriac or Syro-Aramaic was the written language of the Near East during Muhammad’s time, and Arabic did not assume written form until 150 years after his death. Luxenberg argues that the Koran that has come down to us in Arabic is partially a mistranscription of the original Syriac. A bizarre example he offers which received some attention at the time his book was published is the Koran’s promise that those who enter heaven will be “espoused” to “maidens with eyes like gazelles”; eyes, that is, which are intensely white and black (suras 4454 and 5220). Luxenberg’s meticulous analysis suggests that the Arabic word for maidens is in fact a mistranscription of the Syriac word for grapes. This does strain common sense. Valiant strivings to be consoled by beautiful women is one thing, but to be heroic for a packet of raisins seems a bit much!

Even more explosively, Luxenberg suggests that the Koran has its basis in the texts of the Syriac Christian liturgy, and in particular in the Syriac lectionary, which provides the origin for the Arabic word “koran”. As one scholarly review observes, if Luxenberg is correct the writers who transcribed the Koran into Arabic from Syriac a century and a half after Muhammad’s death transformed it from a text that was “more or less harmonious with the New Testament and Syriac Christian liturgy and literature to one that [was] distinct, of independent origin”[17]. This too is a large claim.

It is not surprising that much textual analysis is carried out pseudonymously. Death threats and violence are frequently directed against Islamic scholars who question the divine origin of the Koran. The call for critical consideration of the Koran, even simply of its seventh-century legislative injunctions, is rejected out of hand by hard-line Muslim leaders. Rejecting calls for the revision of school textbooks while preaching recently to those making the hajj pilgrimage to Mount Arafat, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia told pilgrims that “there is a war against our creed, against our culture under the pretext of fighting terrorism. We should stand firm and united in protecting our religion. Islam’s enemies want to empty our religion [of] its content and meaning. But the soldiers of God will be victorious”[18].

All these factors I have outlined are problems, for non-Muslims certainly, but first and foremost for Muslims themselves. In grappling with these problems we have to resist the temptation to reduce a complex and fluid situation to black and white photos. Much of the future remains radically unknown to us. It is hard work to keep the complexity of a particular phenomenon steadily in view and to refuse to accept easy answers, whether of an optimistic or pessimistic kind. Above all else we have to remember that like Christianity, Islam is a living religion, not just a set of theological or legislative propositions. It animates the lives of an estimated one billion people in very different political, social and cultural settings, in a wide range of devotional styles and doctrinal approaches. Human beings have an invincible genius for variation and innovation.

Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited. To stop at this proposition, however, is to neglect the way these facts are mitigated or exacerbated by the human factor. History has more than its share of surprises. Australia lives next door to Indonesia, the country with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world[19]. Indonesia has been a successful democracy, with limitations, since independence after World War II. Islam in Indonesia has been tempered significantly both by indigenous animism and by earlier Hinduism and Buddhism, and also by the influence of sufism. As a consequence, in most of the country (except in particular Aceh) Islam is syncretistic, moderate and with a strong mystical leaning. The moderate Islam of Indonesia is sustained and fostered in particular by organisations like Nahdatul Ulama, once led by former president Abdurrahman Wahid, which runs schools across the country, and which with 30-40 million members is one of the largest Muslim organisations in the world.

The situation in Indonesia is quite different from that in Pakistan, the country with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. 75 per cent of Pakistani Muslims are Sunni, and most of these adhere to the relatively more-liberal Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence (for example, Hanafi jurisprudence does not consider blasphemy should be punishable by the state). But religious belief in Pakistan is being radicalised because organisations, very different from Indonesia’s Nahdatul Ulama, have stepped in to fill the void in education created by years of neglect by military rulers. Pakistan spends only 1.8 per cent of GDP on education. 71 per cent of government schools are without electricity, 40 per cent are without water, and 15 per cent are without a proper building. 42 per cent of the population is literate, and this proportion is falling. This sort of neglect makes it easy for radical Islamic groups with funding from foreign countries to gain ground. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of religious schools (or madrasas) opening in Pakistan, and it is estimated that they are now educating perhaps 800,000 students, still a small proportion of the total, but with a disproportionate impact[20].

These two examples show that there is a whole range of factors, some of them susceptible to influence or a change in direction, affecting the prospects for a successful Islamic engagement with democracy. Peace with respect for human rights are the most desirable end point, but the development of democracy will not necessarily achieve this or sustain it. This is an important question for the West as well as for the Muslim world. Adherence to what George Weigel has called “a thin, indeed anorexic, idea of procedural democracy”[21] can be fatal here. It is not enough to assume that giving people the vote will automatically favour moderation, in the short term at least[22]. Moderation and democracy have been regular partners in Western history, but have not entered permanent and exclusive matrimony and there is little reason for this to be better in the Muslim world, as the election results in Iran last June and the elections in Palestine in January reminded us. There are many ways in which President Bush’s ambition to export democracy to the Middle East is a risky business. In its influence on both religion and politics, the culture is crucial.

There are some who resist this conclusion vehemently. In 2002, the Nobel Prize Economist Amartya Sen took issue with the importance of culture in understanding the radical Islamic challenge, arguing that religion is no more important than any other part or aspect of human endeavour or interest. He also challenged the idea that within culture religious faith typically plays a decisive part in the development of individual self-understanding. Against this, Sen argued for a characteristically secular understanding of the human person, constituted above all else by sovereign choice. Each of us has many interests, convictions, connections and affiliations, “but none of them has a unique and pre-ordained role in defining [the] person”. Rather, “we must insist upon the liberty to see ourselves as we would choose to see ourselves, deciding on the relative importance that we would like to attach to our membership in the different groups to which we belong. The central issue, in sum, is freedom”.[23]

This does work for some, perhaps many, people in the rich, developed and highly urbanised Western world, particularly those without strong attachments to religion. Doubtless it has ideological appeal to many more among the elites. But as a basis for engagement with people of profound religious conviction, most of whom are not fanatics or fundamentalists, it is radically deficient. Sen’s words demonstrate that the high secularism of our elites is handicapped in comprehending the challenge that Islam poses.

I suspect one example of the secular incomprehension of religion is the blithe encouragement of large scale Islamic migration into Western nations, particularly in Europe. Of course they were invited to meet the need for labour and in some cases to assuage guilt for a colonial past.

If religion rarely influences personal behaviour in a significant way then the religious identity of migrants is irrelevant. I suspect that some anti-Christians, for example, the Spanish Socialists, might have seen Muslims as a useful counterweight to Catholicism, another factor to bring religion into public disrepute. Probably too they had been very confident that Western advertising forces would be too strong for such a primitive religious viewpoint, which would melt down like much of European Christianity. This could prove to be a spectacular misjudgement.

So the current situation is very different from what the West confronted in the twentieth century Cold War, when secularists, especially those who were repentant communists, were well equipped to generate and sustain resistance to an anti-religious and totalitarian enemy. In the present challenge it is religious people who are better equipped, at least initially, to understand the situation with Islam. Radicalism, whether of religious or non-religious inspiration, has always had a way of filling emptiness. But if we are going to help the moderate forces within Islam defeat the extreme variants it has thrown up, we need to take seriously the personal consequences of religious faith. We also need to understand the secular sources of emptiness and despair and how to meet them, so that people will choose life over death. This is another place where religious people have an edge. Western secularists regularly have trouble understanding religious faith in their own societies, and are often at sea when it comes to addressing the meaninglessness that secularism spawns. An anorexic vision of democracy and the human person is no match for Islam.

It is easy for us to tell Muslims that they must look to themselves and find ways of reinterpreting their beliefs and remaking their societies. Exactly the same thing can and needs to be said to us. If democracy is a belief in procedures alone then the West is in deep trouble. The most telling sign that Western democracy suffers a crisis of confidence lies in the disastrous fall in fertility rates, a fact remarked on by more and more commentators. In 2000, Europe from Iceland to Russia west of the Ural Mountains recorded a fertility rate of only 1.37. This means that fertility is only at 65 per cent of the level needed to keep the population stable. In 17 European nations that year deaths outnumbered births. Some regions in Germany, Italy and Spain already have fertility rates below 1.0.

Faith ensures a future. As an illustration of the literal truth of this, consider Russia and Yemen. Look also at the different birth rates in the red and blue states in the last presidential election in the U.S.A. In 1950 Russia, which suffered one of the most extreme forms of forced secularisation under the Communists, had about 103 million people. Despite the devastation of wars and revolution the population was still young and growing. Yemen, a Muslim country, had only 4.3 million people. By 2000 fertility was in radical decline in Russia, but because of past momentum the population stood at 145 million. Yemen had maintained a fertility rate of 7.6 over the previous 50 years and now had 18.3 million people. Median level United Nations forecasts suggest that even with fertility rates increasing by 50 per cent in Russia over the next fifty years, its population will be about 104 million in 2050—a loss of 40 million people. It will also be an elderly population. The same forecasts suggest that even if Yemen’s fertility rate falls 50 per cent to 3.35, by 2050 it will be about the same size as Russia — 102 million — and overwhelmingly young[24].

The situation of the United States and Australia is not as dire as this, although there is no cause for complacency. It is not just a question of having more children, but of rediscovering reasons to trust in the future. Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia, no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be benign. In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Most of this is a preliminary clearing of the ground for dialogue and interaction with our Muslim brothers and sisters based on the conviction that it is always useful to know accurately where you are before you start to decide what you should be doing.

The war against terrorism is only one aspect of the challenge. Perhaps more important is the struggle in the Islamic world between moderate forces and extremists, especially when we set this against the enormous demographic shifts likely to occur across the world, the relative changes in population-size of the West, the Islamic and Asian worlds and the growth of Islam in a childless Europe.

Every great nation and religion has shadows and indeed crimes in their histories. This is certainly true of Catholicism and all Christian denominations. We should not airbrush these out of history, but confront them and then explain our present attitude to them.

These are also legitimate requests for our Islamic partners in dialogue. Do they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated by the verses of the sword? Is the programme of military expansion (100 years after Muhammad’s death Muslim armies reached Spain and India) to be resumed when possible?

Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose Sharia law? Can we discuss Islamic history and even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran without threats of violence?

Obviously some of these questions about the future cannot be answered, but the issues should be discussed. Useful dialogue means that participants grapple with the truth and in this issue of Islam and the West the stakes are too high for fundamental misunderstandings.

Both Muslims and Christians are helped by accurately identifying what are core and enduring doctrines, by identifying what issues can be discussed together usefully, by identifying those who are genuine friends, seekers after truth and cooperation and separating them from those who only appear to be friends.

For the complete article, including footnotes, go here.

Quote for the Day

2006-05-04T00:24:00.000-06:00

"...And Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all dreadfully cracked about the head and desperately in need of mending."

Herman Melville

Well Done: Remembering the Men of the Titanic

2006-05-03T16:06:00.000-06:00

To The Brave Men

Who Perished

In The Wreck

of The Titanic,

April 15, 1912.

They Gave Their Lives That Women

and Children

Might Be Saved.

Erected By

The Women

Of America.

Editor's Note: So reads the inscription on the Titanic Memorial, thanking the men who lived and died, for a principle of honour and chivalry.

Titanic Chivalry

April 26, 2006

by Carey Roberts, on www.ifeminists.com

It was 94 years ago this month that the unsinkable Titanic collided with a North Atlantic iceberg. Of the 1,327 passengers on board, 73% of the women made it to the lifeboats, while only 7% of the men survived. That fateful night, the bodies of 702 men settled into their watery graves.

Within days of the tragedy, women set out to build a fitting memorial. First Lady Helen Taft donated the first dollar, explaining she was "glad to do this in gratitude to the chivalry of American manhood."

Of course not everyone was thrilled. Some argued that the fund-raising efforts were diverting attention away from the crusade to grant women the right to vote. One politically-correct person argued, "Why not, instead of having the memorial solely for the heroes of the wreck, have it also for the heroines!"

But the grateful ladies persisted. In May of 1931 Mrs. William Howard Taft unveiled the imposing 15-foot memorial, featuring a man in a Christ-like crucifix pose. The statue was located in a splendid venue on the banks of the Potomac River, just a little downstream from Rock Creek.

At the ceremony, congressman Robert Luce of Massachusetts pointed out that the survival of so many women was "the reason for this memorial and our presence here today." Other speeches hailed the chivalry and the men who protected their families by sacrificing their own lives.
Some would say that the chivalry that is commemorated by the Titanic Memorial is an anachronistic hold-over from a fading era of male privilege.

But the truth is, chivalry is one of the strongest impulses in the male psyche. And despite the feminist browbeating of men who hold open doors, chivalry is very much alive and well.
Chivalry is one of the most potent forces that has shaped the course of human history. Chivalry impelled medieval men to rise up and shield their womenfolk from the Mongol invaders. Chivalry rings throughout the Declaration of Independence, especially its stirring conclusion: "we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

One of the great icons of American culture is the southern gentleman who would freely duel to the death in defense of womanly virtue, or the Rhett Butler-types who spare nothing so their Scarlett O'Haras can save their splendid plantations.

Give chivalry its due for the fact that in the United Kingdom, women are allowed to retire at age 60, while men must sweat and toil another five years. It's chivalry, of course, that motivates legislators to pass laws that exempt women from the military draft.

Even in the heat of battle, chivalry rules the day. Remember Jessica Lynch, that G.I. Jane-wannabe who passed out after her truck took a wrong turn behind Iraqi enemy lines? Nine men in her company were shot in the head, execution-style.

But when word filtered back that Lynch was being held in a remote hospital, an elite assault unit of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Air Force Pararescue Jumpers volunteered to come to the aid of this 19-year-old damsel in distress.

Try to match that, Sir Galahad!

Chivalry plays out every day in our families and communities. That's why men's earnings shoot up as soon as they get married, so they can provide for their wives and children. These men accept risky or lonely jobs like asbestos removal or long-haul truck driving. And these men work overtime so their dearly-beloveds can live in their well-appointed dream houses.

And here's the amazing part - these men don't complain.

In December 1965 president Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to turn the first shovelful of dirt for the gleaming Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But the Titanic Memorial stood in the way of progress.

So the statute was removed to an obscure Potomac River backwater. It's not on many tourist maps. But if you ask around, someone can probably point you to it.

When you arrive, you won't find any faded flowers placed by grieving widows. But your efforts will be amply rewarded by the poignant words inscribed on the pedestal: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic April 15, 1912. They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."

An obituary for John Kenneth Galbraith

2006-05-02T22:36:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: We considered many approaches to the passing of famed economist Galbraith. He did of course, prove that bad ideas indeed lead to ill consequences. We decided that his old skiing partner of many decades and intellectual foe, William F. Buckley, most gracefully gave the appropriate eulogy.

John Kenneth Galbraith, R.I.P.

By William F. Buckley

May 2, 2006

The public Galbraith I knew and contended with for many years is captured in the opening paragraphs of my review of his last book, "The Culture of Contentment." I wrote then:

"It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions, and wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed, his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember having been developed by Ben-Hur, the model galley slave, whose only request of the quartermaster was that he be allowed every month to move to the other side of the boat, to ensure a parallel development in the musculature of his arms and legs.

"I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It's great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over 40 years."

So it is said, for the record; and yet we grieve, those of us who knew him. We looked to his writings for the work of a penetrating mind who turned his talent to the service of his ideals. This involved waging war against men and women who had, under capitalism, made strides in the practice of industry and in promoting the common good. Galbraith denied them the tribute to which they were entitled.

When they went further and offered their intellectual insights, Galbraith was unforgiving. His appraisal of intellectual dissenters from his ideas of the common good derived from the psaltery of his moral catechism, cataloguing the persistence of poverty, the awful taste of the successful classes, and the wastefulness of the corporate and military establishments.

Where Mr. Galbraith is not easily excusable is in his search for disingenuousness in such as Charles Murray, a meticulous scholar of liberal background, whose "Losing Ground" is among the social landmarks of the postwar era. "In the mid 1980s," Galbraith writes, "the requisite doctrine needed by the culture of contentment to justify their policies became available. Dr. Charles A. Murray provided the nearly perfect prescription. ... Its essence was that the poor are impoverished and are kept in poverty by the public measures, particularly the welfare payments, that are meant to rescue them from their plight." Whatever qualifications Murray made, "the basic purpose of his argument would be served. The poor would be off the conscience of the comfortable, and, a point of greater importance, off the federal budget and tax system."

One needs to brush this aside and dwell on the private life of John Kenneth Galbraith. I know something of that life, and of the lengths to which he went in utter privacy to help those in need. He was a truly generous friend. The mighty engine of his intelligence could be marshaled to serve the needs of individual students, students manque, people who had a problem.

Two or three weeks ago he sent me a copy of a poll taken among academic economists. He was voted the third most influential economist of the 20th century, after Keynes and Schumpeter. I think that ranking tells us more about the economics profession than we have any grounds to celebrate, but that isn't the point I made in acknowledging his letter. I had just received a book about the new prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, in which National Review and its founder are cited as the primary influences in his own development as a conservative leader. But I did not mention this to Galbraith either. He was ailing, and this old adversary kept from him loose combative data that would have vexed him.

I was one of the speakers at his huge 85th birthday party. My talk was interrupted halfway through by the master of ceremonies. "Is there a doctor in the house?" The next day I sent Galbraith the text of my talk. He wrote back: "Dear Bill: That was a very pleasant talk you gave about me. If I had known it would be so, I would not have instructed my friend to pretend, in the middle of your speech, to need the attention of a doctor."

Forget the whole thing, the getting and spending, and the Nobel Prize nominations, and the economists' tributes. What cannot be forgotten by those exposed to them are the amiable, generous, witty interventions of this man, with his singular wife and three remarkable sons, and that is why there are among his friends those who weep that he is now gone.

Spucatum tauri: Whenever Tim Robbins speaks

2006-05-02T16:06:00.000-06:00

Tim Robbins, literary scholar, presidential historian, and all around Renaissance man, speaks.

Again, Tim Robbins, half of Hollywood's darling political couple (the other is Susan Sarandon, his partner of many years, mother of his children, and whom he is avowedly against marrying), has opened his uninformed mouth and spouted nonsense.

"We have right now a media that is willfully ignoring the high crimes and misdemeanours of the president of the United States," Robbins intones, "Clinton lied about a blowjob, and got impeached by the media and Congress."

He forgets the great outrage from the media and persons of influence about Clinton's "personal" life being dragged into the public view. I seem to recall the trouble being that the media was too supportive of Clinton, that is, refusing to hold the President of the United States to a higher standard, especially as his affairs involved deceit, perjury, and public shame to the office and to the country.

"(Bush) got us into (the Iraq) war based on lies that he knew were lies. ... His war has recruited more Al-Qaeda members than Osama bin Laden could ever have dreamed for ... yet no one in the media is calling for impeachment," continues Robbins.

Again, Robbins flies from reality. Recruitment is not rising. In fact, very quietly, U.S. and British commandos have nearly eliminated all non-Iraqi Al-Qaeda leaders. Zarqawi is the last one and has barely avoided capture or death several times in the last three months.
Furthermore, Bush was given Congressional approval for war. What legitimate charges can stem from that? Why would the media call for impeachment, knowing it is an ill-founded hope? They would look foolish and see their diminished credibility disappear altogether. Better to just report and give a platform to fools in Hollywood who call for impeachment. Robbins expresses the silly notions that many would like to see occur, but he saves them from having to risk professional ridicule for it. Of course, Robbins risks no ridicule, since Hollywood has not met an anti-American it didn't like since the days of Stalin.

To round out his pretensions, Robbins displayed a remarkable lack of insight, and began drawing similarities between America and the pages of 1984, Orwell's work on totalitarianism.
"Unfortunately, the book and the play is more relevant now than it ever has been," he said. "(It) talks about continuous warfare as a means to control the Western economy, and as a way to control rebel elements within society through the use of fear, constant fear."

I guess an historical understanding of this book is beyond Robbins. But ok, let us bring it up to the present. Which civilization truly represses? The remains of Western civilization or Islamic fundamentalism? It bodes ill for a society that simply claims freedom, without any restraints. That is the uneducated mob, perhaps with Robbins in the front ranks, unwilling to see greater goods that personal libertinism. Sacrifice of certain liberties is the mark of a great society, not piddling dissent peddled as "liberty" to the harm of country and life.
My argument fails however, if Robbins (quite mistakenly, or just bloody wrong) sees history since the Enlightenment as a peaceful pursuit of passions and unrestrained liberty void of bloodshed, of which only now, we are digressing.

"In my country we seem to be sanctioning renditioning of innocent people without trial ... put them in jail without telling anyone ... and torture them out of suspicion of what we think they might do," Robbins said. "This is exactly what Orwell was talking about when he spoke of thought crimes," he added.

No need to point out the legal status of said "innocent people." Largely non-citizens, enemy combatants, those who fight w/out uniforms, terrorists, and insidious planners intent on bringing down the "Great Satan." Does Robbins ever wonder where he would fit in an Islamofacist regime? Perhaps he would be in a movie, his head and body both sharing camera space - but not together.

Robbins, so fond of communism (remember the movie The Cradle Will Rock?), indeed, totalitarianism, insults Orwell, who saw through the ideological facades and castigated their adherents. If only Orwell were alive to pen a sharp, ripping rebuke of Robbins.

Christian Reflection, Seventeen

2006-05-01T17:06:00.000-06:00

The Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D.

So, following the holy fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; of one essence with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same of one essence with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days, for us and for our salvation, the same born of Mary, the virgin God-bearer, as regards his humanity.

He is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no changes, no division, no separation. At no point was the difference between the natures taken through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being. He is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught us from the beginning about Him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ Himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed down to us.

Quote for the Day

2006-05-01T10:49:00.000-06:00

"The bones of Muhammad are in Medina, the bones of Confucius are in Shantung, the cremated bones of Buddha are in Nepal. Thousands pay pilgrimages to worship at their tombs which contain their bones. But in Jerusalem there is a cave cut into the rock. This is the tomb of Jesus. IT IS EMPTY! YES, EMPTY! BECAUSE HE IS RISEN! He died, physically and historically. He arose from the dead, and now sits at the right hand of God."
-Sir Lionel Luckhoo, ambassador of Barbados and Guyana,
world's most successful criminal attorney.
Accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior Nov. 7, 1978.

Spucatum tauri: The Star Spangled Banner...in Spanish

2006-04-27T16:10:00.000-06:00

A GRAVE INSULT

A scheduled release of America's national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," in Spanish, is raising the ire of many, including those who are sympathetic to some immigrant and illegal aliens plight.
This will serve one purpose, to further those with extreme sentiments and push moderates into an unfriendly position.
What a travesty, that this nation's anthem, a symbol in song of our patriotism and love of country, is sang in a foreign language.

And yes, did we mention the sliding in of new lyrics, complete with fashionable and p.c. lines offering political commentary on immigration.

As the above linked article wonders, can one imagine the response from the French should the "La Marseillaise" be recorded in English. Gallic pride would rise up in virulent cries for vitrolic revenge.
No nation should have such a cultural cornerstone effaced in this way.

Is this what immigrants in 1840, or 1900, or 1980 hoped for? That their children would one day sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Gaelic, Italian, Croatian, tribal dialects, or tonal variations?
Is this what soldiers for some two hundred years have died for? Is this what brings a tear to the patriotic eye before a baseball game?
I know it is not.

As a historian, I made sure that despite immigrants, regional differences, cultural divergences, and state loyalties, Key wrote the original in ENGLISH. Indeed he did.

The Star-Spangled Banner
by Francis Scott Key

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watch'd were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,
'Tis the star-spangled banner - O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation!
Blest with vict'ry and peace may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto - "In God is our trust,"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Nota Bene: Honouring Lech Walesa

2006-04-25T09:41:00.000-06:00

Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Salutes President Lech Walesa

Drawing his strength from devout Catholicism, Lech Walesa, a Polish shipyard worker, led the 10 million member "Solidarnosc" or "Solidarity" movement that helped crack communism in Eastern Europe. He ranks with Reagan, Thatcher, Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II as the key figures in defeating Soviet Russia and her satellites.

"I have often been asked in the United States to sign the poster that many Americans consider very significant. Prepared for the first almost-free parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989, the poster shows Gary Cooper as the lonely sheriff in the American Western, "High Noon." Under the headline "At High Noon" runs the red Solidarity banner and the date--June 4, 1989--of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the "Wild" West, especially the U.S.
But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together. "
Lech Walesa

Christian Reflections, Sixteen

2006-04-25T08:24:00.000-06:00

"The Inadequacy of Instant Christianity"

By A.W. Tozer

"Instant Christianity tends to make the faith act terminal and so smothers the desire for spiritual advance. It fails to understand the true nature of the Christian life, which is not static, but dynamic and expanding. It overlooks the fact that a new Christian is a living organism as certainly as a new baby is, and must have nourishment and exercise to assure normal growth. It does not consider that the act of faith in Christ sets up a personal relationship between two intelligent moral beings, God and the reconciled man, and no single encounter between God a creature made in his image could ever be sufficient to establish an intimate friendship between them.

By trying to pack all of salvation into one experience, or two, the advocates of instant Christianity flaunt the law of development which runs through all nature. They ignore the sanctifying effects of suffering, cross carrying, and practical obedience. They pass by the need for spiritual training, the necessity of forming right religious habits, and the need to wrestle against the world, the devil, and the flesh...

Instant Christianity is twentieth-century orthodoxy. I wonder whether the man who wrote Philippians 3:7-16 would recognise it as the faith for which he finally died. I am afraid he would not."

Quote for the Day

2006-04-24T20:22:00.000-06:00

"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster."
Gen. Douglas MacArthur

Christian Reflections, Fifteen

2006-04-24T13:15:00.000-06:00

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."

Tertullian

Quote for the Day

2006-04-23T00:52:00.000-06:00

"In the beginning was the Word, not the Fact; history is thought and spoken and written with words; and the historian must be master of his words as much as of his 'facts,' whatever those might mean."

"For words are not mere tools, neither are they mere symbols. They are representative realities; they remind us of the inevitable connection between imagination and reality... The corruption of speech involves the corruption of truth, and the corruption of words means the debasement of speech which is the debasement of our most human and historic gifts."

- John Lukacs -

Quote for the Day

2006-04-22T14:37:00.000-06:00

"Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Quote for the Day

2006-04-21T14:28:00.000-06:00

"Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing."

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Christian Reflections, Fourteen

2006-04-20T14:56:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: This is longer than our usual "reflections." However, the article points out very apt points that despite theological wranglings, Reformed Protestants and Orthodox Catholics will most certainly agree upon. As indeed, each has faced the same compromisers, then immoral celebrants, intent upon removing all tenents of the Christian faith that might require adherents to die to self, and live to Christ. Fortunately, both groups have stood firm, although upon the fringes, the liberals have induced many to join and try to chip away at the Rock. They are breaking against the cliffs. But vigilance must be maintained.

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The difference between “anything goes” and Christian inclusiveness

By Father Thomas Williams
in National Review Online

To celebrate Holy Week and Easter, the United Church of Christ (UCC) produced an attention-grabbing television ad highlighting its inclusive policies. Viewers watch an “intolerant” church rejecting — or rather, literally ejecting — a black mother, a gay couple, an Arab, and a person using a walker. As each tries to sit in a church pew, he or she is sent flying by an ejector seat.

The ad contrasts the inclusive UCC with the ejecting church: “The United Church of Christ: no matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”

This is, in many ways, a wonderful message. It strikes a chord with us Americans in our conviction that all should be welcome, none rejected. The inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, penned by American poet Emma Lazarus in 1883, sums up American open-heartedness:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

More to the point, wasn’t it Christ himself who welcomed the “wretched refuse” of his time, associating with publicans and adulterers, lepers, prostitutes, and the whole offal of Palestine? He and his disciples were from the wrong side of the tracks, the Palestinian outback of Galilee — a powerful message for the rich and famous of his time and ours. He was fiercely criticized for fraternizing with outcasts, and disparagingly dubbed a “friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Isn’t this absolute inclusiveness essential to the Christian message?

Yet I suspect the UCC ad had a more specific criticism in mind. I am unaware of any church in America that turns away blacks, or that has a policy against Arabs or handicapped persons. There are, however, a number of Christian churches that consider homosexual behavior to be sinful. By sneaking the gay couple in between the African-American woman and the Arab-American, the UCC disingenuously equates racial discrimination with moral principle.

There is a difference between a church saying “We welcome all persons” and “We welcome all behavior.” After all, two things distinguish Christian belief: a body of doctrine and a moral code. Following Jesus entails both. Jesus welcomed prostitutes, but he never welcomed prostitution.

He was soft on adulterers, but unyielding on adultery. After forgiving the adulterous woman, in fact, he adds: “Go and sin no more.” And the tax collector Zacchaeus, on encountering Jesus, promises to pay back all those he has cheated — fourfold. Jesus never welcomed cheating, but he did welcome reformed cheaters. This is not just a matter of semantic hair-splitting. Jesus came to call sinners but to condemn sin, much as a doctor heals sick people but eradicates sickness.

There is a problem with identifying people with their choices. Thieves are welcome in the church not as thieves, but as human persons. When Jesus tells the chief priests and elders that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31), he is not winking at thievery and prostitution. He is responding, rather, to their willingness to acknowledge their errors and to change.

The Church is absolutely inclusive toward persons (all are invited to enter) but not toward ideas or behavior. If our “inclusiveness” means that we are no longer able or willing to distinguish between good and bad behavior and to make universal moral judgments like “wife beating is bad,” then we have effectively abandoned morality.

The UCC might respond that homosexuality is genetically determined. Science is ambivalent on the subject, and studies contradict one another. Yet, regardless of the biological component to homosexuality, the UCC would be missing the point. The fact of the matter is, we all are teeming with inclinations and tendencies — some good, some bad. The whole idea of self-mastery and virtue is to sort through those tendencies and to harness them for good. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail, but it beats throwing in the towel.

People have always looked for scapegoats for their wrongdoing. Justifications and rationalizations are part and parcel of human conduct. The difference is, where people in the past often blamed others, or their upbringing, now they blame their genes. Few today would join comedian Flip Wilson in saying “the devil made me do it,” but plenty seem ready to say, “My DNA made me do it.” Such abdication of personal responsibility crushes the transcendence of the human person.

Christianity is essentially inclusive. Christians believe that Jesus came to call sinners — all sinners — and to die for us so that we might have life. All are invited, none excluded. Yet he also taught about right and wrong, and distinguished between good behavior and bad. No one is in a position to throw stones, but in good conscience we cannot turn the Gospel’s moral message on its head.

— Father Thomas D. Williams, LC, is dean of the theology school at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University where he teaches Catholic Social Doctrine, and is a Vatican Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Quote for the Day

2006-04-20T14:24:00.000-06:00

As the astronauts soar into the vast eternities of space, on earth the garbage piles higher; as the groves of academe extend their domain, their alumni’s arms reach lower; as the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence. In great wealth, great poverty, in health, sickness, in numbers, deception. Gorging, left hungry, sedated, left restless; telling all, hiding all; in flesh united, forever separate. So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy, seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely.

Malcom Muggeridge, “The Great Liberal Death Wish”

Spucatum tauri: Accesorize Your Wardrobe with Totalitarian Symbols

2006-04-20T11:38:00.000-06:00

From Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online:

"Yes, this is an old topic, but it’s still a point worth making: Via the Media Research Center: 'On Monday, for the second straight weekday, Access Hollywood's New York correspondent, Tim Vincent… sported a hammer and sickle T-shirt as he introduced a story.'
Now, this doesn’t make Tim Vincent Joe Stalin, and nor does it mean that NBC is run by Bolsheviks, but it’s yet another reminder of the way that the atrocities of Communism somehow seem to count for less than those of other mass-murderers.
Put it another way: would Tim Vincent have appeared on Access Hollywood sporting a swastika?"

Editor's note: Additional options include the Chinese flag, Che Guevara, Zapatista Revolution, and anything Pro-Palestine (pro terror) or anti-Zionist (Jew/Israel). In fact, your choices also include anything anti-American or the very fashionable, anti-Bush. This last choice has demonstrated amazing staying power, remaining in vogue for six years straight.

From our research though, a few symbolic icons are not appropriate. As mentioned above, avoid the swastika. (We heartily agree, by the way, we just don't understand how a regime that kills under 10 million is worse than those that kill close to 100 million)
Others to avoid (and we heartily dissent) - the Israeli flag, certainly the American flag, any non-cute, non-ironic, non-sarcastic shows of support for our fighting men and women. And anything with a real sensible message (pro-life, pro-gun, pro-intelligence).

Quote for the Day

2006-04-19T20:46:00.000-06:00

"Hollywood - A place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul."

-Marilyn Monroe

Chronicle of the Damned, part 10 (revisited)

2006-04-18T16:54:00.000-06:00

PETA Earns Its Thirty Pieces Of Silver

taken from the above linked article

April 17, 2006

While hundreds of millions of families prepared to celebrate Easter this weekend, the fanatics at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took advantage of the occasion to spread some disturbing holiday "cheer."

In Austria, PETA mock-crucified activists wearing masks of pigs and other animals on Good Friday -- right outside St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, where Catholics were celebrating the holiday. Apparently the pig-man died for our "sins of nourishment." (We're pretty sure that even plants die when we eat them.) The Archdiocese of Vienna called the protest "a completely unacceptable falsification of the religious dimension of Good Friday."

Meanwhile, in Australia, PETA was denied a similarly offensive and ridiculous display when billboard owners in Sydney refused to put up an Easter message featuring a bloody, crucified lamb.

Especially laughable was PETA's misappropriation of the Bible in its grotesque Austrian protest. Many of the activists carried signs reading "Du sollst nicht töten," German for "Thou shalt not kill." We're not Bible experts, but considering that the Ten Commandments appear in a book that explicitly condones the eating of meat, we're pretty confident that it's not exactly an animal-rights tract.

PETA has a long and tawdry history of distorting religious traditions to advance its own agenda. Download a copy of our report, "Holy Cows: How PETA twists religion to push animal 'rights'" and learn more about how far they'll go.

Editor's Note: see our earlier Chronicle of the Damned, part 10, for more details on PETA's destination (hint: it is deep in the bowels of the inferno)

Quote for the Day

2006-04-18T16:03:00.000-06:00

"What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue."

Edmund Burke

Easter Sunday: The Day of Resurrection!

2006-04-16T21:49:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: We celebrate, with thankful hearts, a debt that was paid twenty centuries ago.

The Day of Resurrection!

John Neale described how early Greek Christians sang this hymn:
As midnight approached, the archbishop, with his priests, accompanied by the king and queen, left the church and stationed themselves on the platform, which was raised considerably from the ground, so that they were distinctly seen by the people. Everyone now remained in breathless expectation, holding an unlighted taper in readiness when the glad moment should arrive, while the priests still continued murmuring their melancholy chant in a low half whisper. Suddenly a single report of a cannon announced that twelve o’clock had struck and that Easter Day had begun; then the old archbishop, elevating the cross, exclaimed in a loud, exulting tone, “Christos aneste!” “Christ is risen!” and instantly every single individual of all that host took up the cry…At that same moment the oppressive darkness was succeeded by a blaze of light from thousands of tapers which…seemed to send streams of fire in all directions.

The Day of Resurrection

by John of Damascus, Sixth Century

The day of resurrection! Earth, tell it out abroad;

The Passover of gladness, the Passover of God.

From death to life eternal, from earth unto the sky,

Our Christ hath brought us over, with hymns of victory.

Our hearts be pure from evil, that we may see aright

The Lord in rays eternal of resurrection light;

And listening to His accents, may hear, so calm and plain,

His own “All hail!” and, hearing, may raise the victor strain.

Now let the heavens be joyful! Let earth the song begin!

Let the round world keep triumph, and all that is therein!

Let all things seen and unseen their notes in gladness blend,

For Christ the Lord hath risen, our joy that hath no end.

Unto the place Golgotha

2006-04-14T13:03:00.000-06:00

Isaiah 53

1 Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?

2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

8 He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

9 And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.

11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Christian Reflections, Good Friday (continued)

2006-04-14T12:56:00.000-06:00

Man of Sorrows

Man of Sorrows! what a name
For the Son of God, Who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Guilty, vile, and helpless we;
Spotless Lamb of God was He;
“Full atonement!” can it be?
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Lifted up was He to die;
“It is finished!” was His cry;
Now in Heav’n exalted high.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

When He comes, our glorious King,
All His ransomed home to bring,
Then anew His song we’ll sing:
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

by Philip P. Bliss

Christian Reflections, Good Friday

2006-04-14T01:00:00.000-06:00

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er His body on the tree;
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

by Isaac Watts, 1707

Chronicle of the Damned, part 10

2006-04-13T21:14:00.000-06:00

PETA Attempts Ultimate Mockery

Holocaust insinuations and slavery comparisons apparently were not enough. This year, a PETA chapter in Vienna plans to stage a crucifixion of three animal mask wearing activists.

"We suffer and die for your sins of nourishment," is their slogan.

They will attempt this outside St. Stephan's Cathedral, on Good Friday.

The People's Party, which is quite conservative, denounced this as a "mockery of a religious community on one of the most important days of the Christians," and concluded that "the action would be more blasphemy than animal protection."

The Archdiocese of Vienna firmly declared,"It's a completely unacceptable falsification of the religious dimension of Good Friday." Furthermore he hinted that "The square outside the cathedral was a 'sensitive' place where not anything could be permitted to happen."

Plans for a crucified lamb billboard in Sydney were rejected.

Should those activists complete their plans, no animal mask will hide them from the sight of God. They mock the death of His Son. Woe unto them.
To equate scriptural passages with a political agenda equals blasphemy.
PETA no doubt has many good intentioned folk. Those who do well to remember the Bible's teachings on cruelty to animals.
Nevertheless, most members miss the mark. They place animal "rights" over human life (ask them to choose between medical testing on animals or human death), they forget that animals do not have a soul, and they would place animals above the economic well-being of humans. Humans are set apart from the rest of creation and are to be in dominion over it. Animals are in subjection to humans, to be used in labour, or for food. And this is a result of the fall, man sinned and all creation "groans" under the curse.

For those who will try this Good Friday stunt we say, beware.

Your actions place you in Circle Five, reserved for the wrathful and sullen. Theirs is righteous anger, but instead of concern over sin, murder (what if half the energy of saving animals from a variety of real and perceived cruelties was directed at an undeniable cruelty, namely, abortion), and other human injustices, PETA focuses on all the wrong aspects and gets quite worked up over it.
"Sotto 'l velame de li versi strani" or "under the veil of the strange verses" describe the denizens here.

Another respite will be endured in Circle Seven, among the blasphemers. No mockery of the Cross can, without repentance and faith in the very object (Christ) they mock, lead anywhere else.

Some may even fall into Circle Eight with the falsifiers and practicioners of fraudelent rhetoric.
"Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta" or "and of his ass he had made a trumpet" is a fitting description for many of PETA's protesting hordes.

The Veteran in a New Field, 1865

2006-04-13T19:18:00.000-06:00

"When I was in the army, many years ago, I was an infantryman, and in the course of what I saw, and did, and came to understand, I was broken. Sometime after I had returned to the United States and my life had resumed, I rounded a corner in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw a painting I had known all my life but which I had not until that moment been able to understand. This was Winslow Homer’s masterfully restrained portrait of a veteran returning to his fields. The generation touched by fire in the Civil War understood the great import of this painting, they knew why the veteran had his back turned to the painter, why he was alone, why he worked in utter quiet, why the light was so clear, the scene so tranquil. After years of war and destruction, they understood, and after having passed this painting for the first time as a man, so did I.

As if there had never been a Gettysburg, an Antietam, or a Chancellorsville, the light struck the soil and the wheat grew. The world was the same. The essential rules had not changed. Devastation had not triumphed. The veteran could return to his fields, and the answer to his tentativeness was that, as if by a miracle, they were now even richer than he had remembered them."
by Mark Helprin

(in an article for The New Criterion, 1994)

Nota Bene: Bradley Birzer -- Little Words and Mighty Swords

2006-04-13T14:44:00.000-06:00

Editor's note: we present another fine commencement address
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“Little Words and Mighty Swords”
Spring Convocation, 2004
Delivered at Hillsdale College
By Dr. Bradley Birzer

Before I begin I would like to thank several persons: the members of the Senior Class of 2003, the members of the Senior Class of 2004, my faculty colleagues, and the administration. I can’t imagine a better group of people to work with and for.

And congratulations to Dr. Willson for his well-deserved award. He is the Cato the Elder of the history department, and I thank him for his many services to God, country, and Hillsdale College.

But, I especially want to thank my wife, Dedra, who turned 35 today. I thank God everyday that He saw fit to put us on this earth at the same time, to share our pilgrimage.

My talk today is about death, love, mystery, and myth.

G.K. Chesterton wrote some of most stirring words of the past century in his “Ballad of the White Horse.”

The Men of the East may search the scrolls,
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God Go Singing to their shame
The wise men know what wicked things are written on the sky,
They trim sad Lamps, they touch sad strings,
Heaving the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings Still plot how God shall die.

Out of the mouth of the Mother of God like a little word come I;
For I go gather Christian men from sunken paving and ford and fen,
To die in battle, God knows when, By God, but I know why.
And this is the word of Mary, The word of the world’s desire:“No more of comfort shall ye get,
Save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher.”
Then silence sank.

Though it was ostensibly a poem about an event in the ninth century, King Alfred’s valiant defense of the Christian Anglo-Saxons against a massive invasion by barbarian infidels, “The Ballad of the White Horse” really served as a thinly veiled, gallant call to arms for those who would have to suffer through the miseries and pains of the twentieth century, the deadliest century in the history of the world. Though Chesterton wrote the poem before the horrors began, he prophetically believed that a world that was embracing the materialism of Marx, Freud, and Spencer would only come to ruin.

Indeed, the twentieth century was one that witnessed the flourishing of the vast filth and blatant inhumanity of the killings fields, the holocaust camps, and the gulags. Whether in the camps of the European or Asian ideologues, some humans, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, viewed all other human persons as nothing more than a collection of parts, ready to be dismembered and reassembled in Picasso-esque fashion, or perhaps simply quartered and the quartered again. Armed with the ideological doctrines of fascism, National Socialism, and Communism, the twentieth-century became a century of the inverted vision of Ezekiel: wheels within wheels, endlessly spinning, the abyss ever expanding, ever within reach. The names of the ideologues may have varied, but they were all of the same stripe, and, in the end, they will most likely arrive in the same place, their names absent from the Book of Life. And to them, I say “good riddance, may justice be done.” Each denied the uniqueness and dignity of the human person, seeing him or her not as Imago Dei, in the image of God, but, instead, tragically, as only a means to an end; nothing but a cog in a vast machine, and the system—as all systems are wont to do—run amok. Indeed, with modernity and its many servants, the Logos wept, and in marched the new gods: Demos, Leviathan, and Mars. And, they quickly took possession of the field, claiming victory, and setting up their supposed utopias, based on race, class, or any other fanciful human notion. Once we have overturned history and superstition, the new prophets of the new gods argued, we should start at the year zero. Once this has been accomplished, man—or at least certain men—might attain godhood—and the apotheosis began.

And, then. . . the terror reigned. No bright and creative utopias of liberated individuals flourished. But, instead, the specter of cold, brutal, and endless death. Indeed, in the twentieth century, the vivid colors of the glorious reality of Creation became the dull grays of conformity, and, then, very quickly, with failure after failure to perfect the man or woman, the bright reds of blood became one with the browns and blacks of mud; an unholy, coagulating, turbid muck. Those four colors: gray, red, brown, and black define the previous century.

The new gods—Demos, Leviathan, and Mars—demanded many sacrifices, and their murderous appetites seemed insatiable. Their toll of deaths in the twentieth century overwhelm our imaginations and steal much of our innocence away from us: 200,000,000—by the latest count, but more are being unearthed—human beings, each created uniquely in a certain time, in a certain place, for a certain purpose. For, nature makes nothing in vain.

But, we have no room to breathe a sigh of relief that we have left the twentieth-century. For, the new gods have not departed; they have simply taken on new names. For certainly the killing has not ceased simply because we’ve entered a new century. The brave new worlds continue. The twentieth century witnessed the greatest slaughter in history, but the twentieth-first century has continued apace: with 160,000 Christians being murdered per year since 1991. Shockingly, over 65% of all Christian martyrdoms in the past 2,000 years have occurred in the last 86 years!

T.S. Eliot described it best in his dramatic homage to St. Thomas A Beckett, with the Chorus:

Now I fear disturbance of the quiet season:
Winter shall come bringing death from the sea,
Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors,
Root and shoot shall eat our eyes and our ears
Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams
And the poor shall wait for another decaying October.
Why should the summer bring consolation
For autumn fires and winter fogs?
What shall we do in the heat of summer
But wait in barren orchards for another October?
Some malady is coming upon us. We wait, we wait,
And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints.
Destiny waits in the had of God, shaping the still unshapen:
I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen
Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing,
Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.
Come, happy December, who shall observe you, who shall preserve you?

And, yet, despite the optimism of the end of Eliot’s chorus, many in the past century waited and waited for December to come, the blessed moment of the Incarnation to celebrate. For many citizens of the past, foul century, though, waiting, longing, and suffering under the reign of the new gods, Good Friday represented far more than Christmas.

The blood of the martyrs built the Church in the first several centuries AD. What will the blood of the twentieth and twenty-first century martyrs build? Absolutely nothing, if we forget their sacrifice. And, even worse, less than nothing if we mock their sacrifice.

As Americans, we too easily forget or ignore their sacrifices in our historical memory—after all, it happened “over there, somewhere in Europe and Asia, and they’ve always had problems.” Or, so we comfort ourselves even as our Mexican brethren, connected to us by a very long—if often permeable—border suffered some of the worst excesses of attempted genocide between 1917 and 1930.

But, Chesterton gave us words of hope.

Out of the mouth of the Mother of God like a little word come I;
For I go gather Christian men from sunken paving and ford and fen,
To die in battle, God knows when, By God, but I know why.

The little words. What are they? Who are they? The Word is obvious—that which and who Created the World, that Which and Who Entered the World; that which Redeemed it; that which conquered Death; that which will one day bring all things back to right order. The stoics and Christians know it as the Logos; the Jews as the
Memra who will come.

So, in our own ways, we may each understand “the Word.”

But, again, what about Chesterton’s Little Words?

Well, you are a little word, and I am a little word. Each person behind me is a little word. Each one of us is glorious in that we are Imago Dei. It is a terrible burden, and an awesome grace. For, as little words, we are called to sacrifice. Not others—as the ideologues of the twentieth and twenty-first century believe—but our very selves.

This is not mere theory, mere wishful thinking, or mere romanticism. This is reality. And, we can find evidence for it throughout history. Indeed, the West itself, is the product of sacrifice: the sacrifice of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. When the last Greek died at the Gates of Fire, the West was born.

We see it in Jesus Christ, as the greatest exemplar of sacrifice. Others, though, in the classical and Christian world followed his example, before and after the Incarnation: Leonidas, Socrates, Cicero, Sts. Peter and Paul, Stephen, Felicity, Perpetua, and Boniface; Sts. Thomas A Becket, Thomas More, and John Fisher; the many men of the Continental Army and Patriot movement of the 1770s and 1780s; the 620,000 men who gave their lives for a better republic in the American Civil War; and the many men who served their country and their faith in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the 2 Gulf Wars.

And, most recently, who can forget Tom Burnett—that 38-year old Wall Street Banker, father of three girls, husband to a beautiful wife, and a devout Christian. This man, a former college football player for St. John’s College in Minnesota, a lover of business as well as of ancient Greek philosophy, helped two other courageous western men drive a jet airliner into rural Pennsylvania soil on a clear September morning, 2001. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something about it. I love you honey.” These were the last words his wife heard over the cell phone.

What better words could serve us in a new century?

But, at heart, we must ask: what is sacrifice? Is it always blatant heroism? In the City of God, St. Augustine tells us that the early Church refused to use the word “hero,” for it was a pagan term involving will power. But, he conceded, if the Church were to appropriate the word, it would have to give it to the martyrs. For, what is sacrifice, but the highest form of love, nothing more and nothing less. And, Love is the force that created the universe, animates all things, and, in its own time, bring all things back to right order. We see it everyday and in every moment of history. We see it in the many western martyrs mentioned above. I see it in the vast dead of the twentieth-century, most of whom are forgotten, many of whom simply disappeared into the shadow worlds of the Gestapo and KGB.

In the words of Eliot’s chorus:

Even in us the voices of seasons, the snuffle of winter, the song of spring, the drone of summer, and voices of beasts and birds, praise Thee.
We Thank Thee for Thy mercies of blood, for Thy redemption by blood.
For the blood of Thy martyrs and saints shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places.
For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ,
There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it
Though armies trample over it, though sightseers come with guide-books looking over it. . .
From such ground springs that which forever renews the earth.

But, love is not dead, and it is certainly not about death. Immensely far from it; for love conquers death. And, I, right here and right now, see love in front of me, and I see it behind me. I see it to my right, and to my left. For love is ultimately quite simple, and it comes in a variety of different packages. In its highest form, it is the willingness to lay down one’s life for another. But, it is also the willingness to change the baby’s diaper at three in the morning, when one’s spouse would like to sleep. It is the willingness to follow the lead of a college professor of rhetoric and classics to fix bayonets and charge down a Pennsylvania hill on a hot, humid July afternoon in 1863. It is also the willingness to forgo a Friday evening party because the person in the dorm room next to yours needs someone to talk to, right then and right there.

For, each one of us is called to love. Nature makes nothing in vain. For, no one is made for this earth. . .

-To be an exemplar of pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, or sloth
-no one is made to live a quiet life of desperation
-no one is made to be a mere player on a stage
-no one is made to be a cog in a machine
-For, no one is made to be a means to some earthly end
-For, no one is made to be a consumer; merely choosing between Wal-Mart and Target; between Pepsi, Coke, and R.C.
-For, no one is made to spend his time in front of the TV

Instead, we are called to prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and love. We are called to be extraordinary in ordinary situations. We are called to greatness. We are, after all, Imago Dei, each a little word.

As I look back over the past two thousand years of civilization, I see three profound gifts, each a sword, ready to aid us.

The first is Romano-Celtic. A lady of supreme beauty rises from a lake, and she bequeaths—temporarily—to a young Celtic man with an unlikely, non-Celtic name of Arthur, the Sword of the Roman Duke of Britain, Excalibur. With it, he is to restore order to his kingdom, under siege from within and from without. He forms his company of warriors, marries the stunning Guineivere, and creates the kingdom he was meant to create.

But, fallen men behave in fallen ways, and Arthur’s men are offered the supreme choice: worldly, false beauty or otherworldly, true beauty; Guineivere or the Holy Grail, the cup of the Last Supper. Even the Sword of the Lady of the Lake can not attenuate such a choice. Lancelot chose poorly, Galahad chose wisely. Divided, the kingdom dies.

For my second sword, I choose a blade forged in the mythical fires of the first age of the world. A short blade, its purpose is to vanquish the world of incarnate demons. Toward the end of the third age of the world, two unlikely suffering servants, Frodo and Sam, journeyed into Hell itself, carrying the Ring of Power, the burden of the world, to its doom. The guardian at the gates of hell, Shelob, the unholy spawn of an evil of the ancient world, traps the two. Frodo unsheaths the sword, Sting, and says bravely to Sam, “Come, let us see what Sting can do. It is an elven-blade. There were webs of horror in the dark ravines of Beleriand where it was forged.” When Shelob gets the best of Frodo, Sam takes up the sword. As Tolkien wrote, “Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master’s sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen.” But, even with his small victory, all seemed lost, for Frodo was most likely mortally wounded.

And, yet, not all was lost. Deep within Mordor, “Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.” Sam saw Beauty; such Beauty demonstrated for him the permanence of the Good, and he fought for the truth of the One, the One who created all things and Who allows us the privilege of being little words, agents in His Grand Story.

Sam’s hope is the hope that springs forth from the Grace imparted by the Incarnation, the Death, and the Resurrection of Christ. It is the hope that reminds us that the baptized must sanctify the world and “redeem the time.” It is the hope that reminds us that God makes nothing in vain, and that Grace and Grace alone perfects fallen and sinful nature. It is the hope that each one of us is born in a certain time, and a certain place, for a certain purpose. It is the hope that reminds us that we mean something, that God loves us so much that He blessed us by making us a part of His Story: the story that began when He spoke the Universe into Existence; the story in which The Father sent His only Son to live with us for 33 years, fully God and fully man, to teach, and then to suffer, and then to die on a piece of Wood, betrayed by even his closest friends.

But St. John remained. And from the cross, Jesus turned to His Mother, and said, “Behold your son.” It is the hope that Mary and St. John held in their hearts. It is the hope that comes after three days of anxiety, gripping frustration, and utter despair, as the women at the tomb understand that the One they mourned conquered Death, ransoming us from our own follies for no other reason than. . . Love. Indeed, it is the hope that all things are created and animated by the Love of the Spirit. Love is, after all, the greatest force in the Universe. Even Samwise Gamgee, the mythical Hobbit living in a pre-Christian world—the land between heaven and hell, this Middle-earth—understood that. And, so should we.

Let not future generations say of us: we slept. Instead, may they remember us as those who fought the good fight for the Logos and for humanity. Let it be said that in the twenty-first century we took up either of our mythically-laden swords and wielded them with all the force imaginable. We would be blest indeed if a future historian wrote of us: “No onslaught more fierce was ever seen.” Just as the Enemy arrives in new packages and in a variety of different forms throughout time, so too does the Army of the Logos. As with Arthur and Sam, each little word—you and I—arises at the time he or she is most needed. And, we are each lent the weapon which we will best wield. Understood properly, we should come to realize that each sword is the embodiment of the same sword, and that the damage it inflicts upon the Enemy is vast and incalculable. When we understand that Excalibur and Sting are one and the same, we will hold in our hands the third sword: the Sword of the Spirit, the sword of love.

And, through Grace, we will conquer.

Thank you and God bless.

Nota Bene: Mark Helprin -- Defend Civilization Itself

2006-04-13T14:26:00.000-06:00

editor's note: we present this speech in the spirit of spring commencements
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Defend Civilization Itself
24 May 2002
Delivered at Hillsdale Academy
By Mark Helprin

I had wanted to speak to you tonight about defense, about the campaign in Afghanistan, and the war against terrorism — to shower you with facts and figures, which would support my contention that, in regard to the defense of this country, three administrations in a row have not done, and are not doing, enough. Three administrations in a row have not appreciated, and still do not appreciate, the gathering storm. I had wanted to do that, but the president of a surrounding college said, wisely, "Remember the occasion." And I shall, for it is a most worthy occasion, and he is right, it must take precedence over policy, which not only blows with the wind, but disappears with it.

The graduates tonight cannot know what is in their parents' hearts. You have been spared that, until you have children of your own, who are about to take the first step in leaving you . . . forever. Among those of false and mechanistic emotion, the expectation is that your parents will be overjoyed. But in a world where things matter, where love is understood in its relation to mortality, and where there is the courage of commitment — which is to say, in this world — they cannot be overjoyed. And this I know not only because I once left my own parents, and then they left, me, forever, but because I have two daughters of your age, and although they must, it breaks my heart to see them go.

My heart will have to wait, however, because by tradition in this the very last act of your extraordinary secondary education I am obliged to impart to you some sort of resolution for which, given the nature of that education, you are particularly suited. It is also my hope that, in regard to resolution, I can outdo the deservedly most famous high school commencement address in all of history, Clarence Darrow's command to a 1918 graduating class: Get out of here, and go swimming. That's admirable, but I would like to add just a little more, and to lengthen it by only a third. My charge to you, then, taking into account who you are and the nature of this institution, is: Get out of here, go swimming, and defend Western Civilization. Admittedly that is a bit more than Darrow asked, but then again he was a Progressive, and Progressives are notoriously permissive with their young. I know that such a charge is most ambitious, but it comes at the right time, both in history and in your lives.

There is a time to lay down arms, and there is a time to take them up, and that we are now in a time to take them up is self-evident. Those for whom it is not self-evident, who would challenge the right to defend against and preempt barbarous attacks upon our persons and our country, and who would instead substitute a distorted inquiry that would end in the condemnation not of the terrorists but of the terrorized, do not find the need to defend their civilization — Western Civilization — self-evident. Nor do they find the action of doing so congenial, in that it is something from which they habitually abstain. This is a serious charge, and I have drawn a clear line, but I mean to, so let me give you an example.

Several years ago, I was speaking in a university town in Massachusetts. By some quirk which I hope never to see reproduced, and before I knew what was happening, I found myself debating my entire audience on the subjects of human sacrifice and cannibalism. These well-educated and polite people — only a few of whom would actually have murdered or eaten one another — who had sons and daughters, Ph.D.s, and BMWs, were defending the Mayan and Aztec practice of human sacrifice — that is, in the main, of children — and the South Sea custom of cannibalism. It wasn't that they were for such things: they weren't. It wasn't that they were not against them: they were. It was that to take the position that human sacrifice and cannibalism are wrong is not only to reject relativism but to place oneself decisively in the ranks of Western Civilization, such a position being one of its characteristic distinctions, and this they would not do. They were ashamed to do so, and they were afraid to do so. My charge to you is that in this, you never be either ashamed or afraid.

Civilization is vulnerable not only to munitions; it is vulnerable to cowardice and betrayal. It is a great and massive thing of many dimensions that can be attacked from many angles. When professors of ethics at leading universities advocate infanticide, you know that civilization is under attack. When governments and churches advocate racial discrimination, you know that civilization is under attack. When a popular "art" exhibit consists of human cadavers in various states of mutilation, including a bisected pregnant woman and her unborn child, you know that civilization is under attack. The list is endless. The daily assault could fill an encyclopedia of decadence and degradation.

You must never fail to stand against such things, to use your education to break the sophistry that surrounds them, and to draw upon it to summon the memory of a thousand struggles, of ten thousand battles, and of the countless millions who fell to establish and defend those principles that not long ago were called self-evident, and that, now and forever, absent moral cowardice, are self-evident.

If civilization can be attacked on many fronts, it can also be defended on many fronts, and to do so you need not necessarily drop into Afghanistan by parachute or found a political party. Last summer, in Venice, I was walking from room to room in the Accademia, which, unlike timid American museums, throws its windows wide open to the light and air of day. As if to bring even further alive the greatness and truth of the Bellinis and the Giorgiones on the walls, the galleries were flooded with music. As is most everything in Italy, it was unofficial. It came from a guitarist and a soprano on a side street. He played while she sang — gloriously — Bach, Handel, Mozart, and anonymous folk songs of the 18th Century. Because it was music, I cannot properly convey to you how beautiful it was, but it was accomplished, precise, and infused with the ineffable quality that lifts great art above that which merely aspires to or pretends to be great art. I could not see them from the windows, but when, several hours later, I went outside, they had neither ceased, nor skipped a beat, nor produced a single false note.

They were impoverished Poles, who appeared to be in their late twenties. She was thin, sharp-featured, and hauntingly beautiful. Most people simply passed them by, some dropped a few coins in a basket at her feet, and the visitors to the Accademia had no idea who they were, but she sang as if she were bathed in the footlights of La Scala, where she should have been, and where someday she may be. It did not matter that they were unrecognized, that they sang on the street, or that they were desperately poor, because that day in Venice they rose above everyone else, except perhaps the saints. In this they shared a brotherhood with the American soldier who made the first parachute jump, in the dark, into Afghanistan. For they and he were defending the civilization of the West, and they and he are inextricably linked. Without the soldier, they could not exist except in subjugation, and without them, he would not have enough to fight for.

I ask you to join this brotherhood, and, in your own way, whatever that may be, to defend and champion the sanctity of the individual, free and objective inquiry, government by consent of the governed, freedom of conscience, and the pursuit — rather than the degradation and denial — of truth and of beauty. I ask you to defend a civilization so buoyant with the presence of God that it need never compel others in His name. I ask you to defend a civilization that rather than deliberately obscuring the difference between combatants and non-combatants, struggles to maintain and respect it. I ask you to defend a civilization of immeasurable achievement, brilliance, and freedom. I ask you to defend civilization itself.

It is not without risk, and to request this of you in the presence of your parents is something I can do only because I ask the same of my own children. Because of the temper of the times (and, some would say, the temper of all times), what may be exacted from you is sacrifice — of income, position, title, acceptance, respect, perhaps even of life. But what may be provided, or, rather, earned, is a kind of battlefield commission that will give you neither rank nor insignia nor anything but honor. And therein lies the justifying balance, for honor is usually worth at least what you must give up to obtain it. We have heard of late how we are at a disadvantage in the war that has just begun, because in the West we cling to life and comfort at the expense of honor. Our enemies tell us that, and in the telling they barely conceal their enjoyment. Do they really believe this? Because if they do, I have a message for them: The sense of honor in the West may be slow to awaken, but it exists in measures and quantities, when it does awaken, enough to fill the world, as it shall, as it must. How do they think we have come to where we are? How do they think we survived the battles that led to the great revisions in this civilization, its unprecedented turnings, redirections, and rededications — of which, being entirely unself-critical and subjective, they have not yet had the courage to make even one? They say we have no history. Did we spring from a leaf? How do they think we have come through our five thousand years? Honor. From long familiarity, we know what honor is.

It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street. It is God's valuation and resplendent touch, His gift of strength to those who need it most, when they need it most.

I ask you to defend and protect what is great and good, to choose your battles, to stand your ground. For little things cascade into big things, and even should the larger battle not go well, hold your position. Even if, in the end, you do not prevail — though you must — you will have done right, and the ghosts of those who came before you over many thousands of years, of those who fell unknown and unremembered while doing right, of those who upheld against all pressures and in the face of wounding opposition, will be justly honored, as you will be justly honored, by those who come after you.

Congratulations, and God bless.

Spucatum tauri: Our country is spending itself to death

2006-04-13T11:40:00.000-06:00

Normally we tend to avoid matters of pure politics, and more still matters of pure public policy. Today we're going to break that rule.

If you haven't seen it (and judging by the newspaper headlines, you haven't), check out the 2005 Financial Report of the United States Government.

It takes some time to wade through it all, but it's worth the effort. The report is chock full of frightening stuff. If a private company made financial projections like this, their stock would plummet. Alas, the U.S. government needn't worry about such repercussions and accountability, which is the biggest reason why there's a storm gathering on the horizon.

For those tempted to blame the current (and admittedly spendthrift) president and congress for this problem, hold your horses for a second. This is a problem with roots going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and every presidential administration and congress since then shares the blame for this. For those tempted to blame this decade's tax cuts and the war in Iraq for our nation's financial problems, once again you'd be wise to take pause and actually read the report. Adjustments to the government's balance sheet resulting from tax cuts and the Iraq war are a DROP IN THE BUCKET compared to "entitlement" and social spending (i.e., Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, etc). The numbers clearly show that even if President Bush hadn't cut taxes (a big reason, by the way, why the U.S. economy is doing pretty well now) or invaded Iraq, our fiscal future would still be dreadfully red.

Finally, for those tempted to think that the worst-case-scenario is simply "oh, well, social security and medicare just won't be there when I retire," think again. A likely outcome of this problem is the complete financial collapse of the United States. Think about that for a second. It's not a pretty thought. The bottom line is that our government is making promises to its own citizens it can't keep, and unless things change one day the chickens will come home to roost. It's only a matter of time.

Read through the report. Look at the graphs and charts. Complain to your elected officials. Tell your friends and family. Share this with the media. Burying our heads in the sand isn't going to solve this problem.