I find the grisly spectacle of an imploding GOP fairly entertaining
From GetReligion. The headline is a Daniel Larison quotation.

Labels: politics

Catching up with Mere Comments

• Fun with grammar. Part of my job is making sure embarrassingly ambiguous writing doesn’t show up in print.
• The tragic death of Bunny-Wunny. True and false views of nature working, or God made raptors for a reason.
• Is Belarus turning Communist again? That’s horrible but none of my business if it is but I smell a rat. Is there any confirmation of this story? Didn’t the Norwegians at Forum 18 and others claim, and recently, that the country (Russian to the core — like most of the Ukraine — it probably will reunite with Russia) was favouring the Orthodox and persecuting others? Seems like another case of ‘demonise those backward, chauvinistic Russkies’ (and people sort of like them): when they’re not being embarrassingly Catholic they’re Commies. (USA! USA! Let’s bomb Serbia again!) Perhaps they’re not the only ones engaging in ridiculous Cold War nostalgia. Stuart Koehl in the com-box has a believable explanation (a state-controlled church like the Soviets). Just this weekend somebody told me Lukashenko’s rule is the impediment to Belarus’s reunion with Russia.

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, Russia

Saving the 1962 Missal from 1962
The leading edge of RC traditionalism is not nostalgia for the things Thomas Day rightly criticised but a resumption of the legitimate liturgical movement (real liturgical renewal) the 1960s killed off. As Damian Thompson and others have noted trads are usually about 30 years younger than Modernists.

An old Mass, even one wretchedly done in 20 minutes or junked up with 1890s ballads as hymns, has Catholic orthodoxy built into it:

... offered according to sound, organic liturgical books.

Labels: the Catholic faith

Myths about the Middle Ages
James Franklin takes on common knowledge. From Joshua Snyder.

Update: Mere Comments has more on this sort of thing.

It’s one of the characteristics of the “progressive” strain in the West, the slander of one’s ancestors.

Labels: history

Hidely ho, slaverinos!
GPS-tracking high-schoolers. From the LRC blog.

Labels: libertarianism

From Taki

• A world without Roe. John Zmirak gets it. We’d be better off if people would stop trying to use us with that issue.
• Bill Kauffman reviews The Revolution: A Manifesto.
• The great education bubble. Like me Christopher Roach has read Paul Fussell.
• Why are some atheists so angry?
• Some predictions. Iran’s a big winner in the Middle East but thanks to its Shi’ite religion will never be the No. 1 power there. The US is essentially owned by China. How long until the Chinese have an aircraft carrier?

Labels: politics

Yawm al-Nakba

Labels: history, Palestine

From Huw

• Power to the people police.
• Dems to Clinton: don’t hurt us.
• American Reich. Or ‘religious freedom is only for people we like’ says the political establishment. This comes in a leftist version.

Labels: politics

LRC picks

• Race cards and speech codes. Hillary Clinton is Old Left politics as usual, sincere but wrong on the issues, but spot-on here. And Geraldine Ferraro was right.
• True American conservatism. Forget war movies. It’s like Chesterton’s Little Englandism.
  

  ...a Republic, not an empire, a nation of families and towns, not barracks and bases. Kauffman writes to restore conservatives to their senses. No more war, please. Remember your ancestors. Remember Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. What has passed for the Right since the Cold War isn’t right in any sense.

Labels: history, politics

LP candidates
Or Bob Barr may not be the answer (BTW marriage doesn’t need defending by the state). At least on his site he says he’s non-interventionist in principle. (Obama isn’t.) If the LP is on Pennsylvania’s ballot this year of course I’ll vote LP again as in years past (only now as a paid-up member).

Ron Paul’s cultural conservatism is just right. The kind that can see decency in and common ground with parts of the left for example. Yet libertarianism is not libertinism.

Why I don’t go with the Constitution Party: sometime Moral Majoritarian Chuck Baldwin has good things to say about non-intervention (like a ’90s conservative)...

But:

Chuck Baldwin may think gays are clandestine operatives trying to take over the two major parties on the way to world domination.

Labels: libertarianism, politics

Humanæ Vitæ 40 years on
The ancient and unchanged Catholic teaching against contraception, until the 20th century shared by all Christians

The Catholic approach to politics
The right kind of picking and choosing (like Archduke Otto’s legitimism)

[St Pius X] ... taking from the liberal states of the time the structures that he believed were compatible with the theological nature of the Church.

Two unnecessary wars launched by a small cabal of morons.

Mighty Britain emerged from World War II as an American dependency.

The Bush Regime... is replicating the British folly of self-destruction.

Labels: England, history, the Catholic faith

Talking to Jorge about church infallibility

Labels: the Catholic faith

News from the Eastern churches

• New first hierarch of Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia: Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral), the first one not from Eastern Europe and the first one born in North America (he’s Canadian). Church site.
• Ex-Assyrian bishop and many people of his former diocese in California go under Rome, joining the Chaldæan Catholic Church. About 3,000 people are about to convert. Explanation.

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, Iraq

Beyond left and right

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

Labels: politics

‘If I think our world needs anything, it is a strange and colourful orthodoxy’
As Chesterton found when as a young man he tried to invent the most outrageous religion he could imagine orthodoxy is the strangest and most colourful thing of all. Like several of my readers right and left Arturo’s much better read and probably more intelligent than me but I think I understand.

I have concluded from a very young age, however, that beauty and truth are things that are incapable of being grasped totally by the mind of man. If absolute truth exists (and I believe it does), I don’t necessarily believe that it is totally consubstantial with the human brain. At best, the mind can invoke it, but it cannot grasp it. And it will change you in ways that you least expect. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, the Truth is inherently strange, and It will transform you into its own image and likeness when you are exposed to It.

... a traditional Catholicism that’s not all “rah rah, isn’t the pope great?” and “the 1962 missal is the most holy thing on earth” (emphasis mine).

I was a little kid before Vatican II, and the Church of my childhood was all about incense and candle wax and Benediction and May processions and holy cards and sun slanting through stained glass and statues of the Little Flower and nuns floating down school corridors (I was convinced that nuns didn’t have feet). And none of that has Thing One to do with beng able to argue against Sola Scriptura. Not that I undervalue the latter. Scott Hahn’s arguments come in handy, I must confess, now that I live down here in the Bible Belt. But I am not a Catholic because of Scott Hahn. I am a Catholic, at least in part, because it’s in my blood. Holy cards and statues are in my blood, and saints are in my blood, and Three-Way Medals are in my blood, and novenas and rosaries are in my blood. The Catholicism of inner-city Irish-Italian Dorchester, Mass., circa 1958, is in my blood.

Labels: the Catholic faith

Space cadets

It amazes me that people actually think that the federal government is, and should be, responsible for maintaining a given workforce. If there is demand for a certain product that requires space exploration, the market will provide the jobs. If no such demand exists, it’s better for everyone if would-be astronauts are employed in some other occupation.

Labels: politics

Take the red pill
LRC’s theme today. Understandably I liked The Matrix. (Saw it on a wide 1920s cinema screen!) I still think ‘most people are indifferent about freedom as long as they’re kept entertained and well fed’ and the revolution won’t happen; a few freedom-loving, aware people probably will keep being shut out and thus won’t make a difference. But having a few more such is of course a good thing. A little education can do the trick. But I’m counting on this to happen instead (go, gridlock!) and in the meantime keeping my head down and trying to stay in the state of grace.

This nurse had accidentally left her copy of The Revolution: A Manifesto at her nurses’ station overnight. When she arrived the next morning, fearing the book might be lost, she found to her amazement that the overnight nurse had actually read the entire thing. Not only that, but she had become an instant convert, wanting to spread Ron Paul’s message to her friends and family, and get extra copies of his book.

This is a person who, just a day earlier, had supported Hillary Clinton on the grounds that she wanted to see a woman in the White House.

Another person in the same discussion thread says that his own father, once a staunch McCain supporter, is now firmly for Ron Paul and withdrawal from Iraq. Having had a chance to read Dr. Paul’s positions for himself, he is now convinced that if all Americans could do so, Ron Paul would be president.

Republican politicians pull the wool over conservatives’ eyes. While campaigning, they’ll pick on isolated instances of government waste and promise to abolish them, leading voters to believe they’re supporting the small-government candidate. But once in office, the politicians invariably support greatly increased spending in other areas. “And,” Paul writes, “nothing changes.”

Democrats fool their voters, too. They oppose Republicans’ wars, at least at election time, but they have a list of other wars they’d like to wage in different parts of the world. “And nothing changes.”

Labels: politics

Three from Bishop Williamson

• Surviving financially.
• Most conservatives are fake conservatives.
• Documenting distress or even Dada had a point.

Labels: history, politics

I’ll take ‘family, friends, and a quiet life’ over ‘a chain of garages’ any day of the week and twice on Sundays
Of course there’s nothing wrong with opening a chain and getting rich but yes, I’ll take an honest old German mechanic in an unpretentious little shop you wouldn’t look at twice, discovered by word of mouth from another decent small businessman in your town, over ‘the Cottman shuffle’ (in which they say they have to take your transmission apart to find out what’s wrong, charging you for it, and then try to sell you a new transmission for thousands no matter what the truth is).

From Joshua Snyder.

The Hillary Democrats
These people are the key to the 2008 US presidential election

What Hillary and Begala are saying is politically incorrect, but it is also patently true.

[McCain] berated Tarheel Republicans for linking Barack, the Rev. Wright and local Democrats, and denounced a conservative talk show host who introduced him for mocking Barack’s middle name.

People forget. In 1976, Carter... in Philadelphia, talked about preserving the “ethnic purity” of the neighborhoods.

Dukakis’ veto of a Pledge-of-Allegiance-to-the-Flag bill, his opposition to capital punishment, his pride in being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU...”

Labels: politics