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Some jottings about the news

.يا رب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ


Friday, May 16, 2008  

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

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Thursday, May 15, 2008  

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.

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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.
‘Organic’ here meaning ‘following immemorial custom’ (which Pius IX didn’t think he had the right to change on a whim, even a pious one: ‘I’m only the Pope’).



Part of that liturgical movement is:

Chant’s comeback
Remember about 10 years ago when there was a best-selling CD of it?

The liturgy as cosmic praise
Quoting Pseudo-Dionysius, Pope Benedict sounds Eastern Orthodox

Photo: Sung Mass in Lublin, Poland. It’s interesting to compare that culture’s natural baroque style to liturgical-movement chic at High Mass in a French abbey. The traditional church is not monolithic.

From TNLM.

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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.

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

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From Taki

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Yawm al-Nakba

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Wednesday, May 14, 2008  

From Huw

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LRC picks

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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.
As Joshua Snyder writes ‘of course, none of us are under the illusion that a third-party candidate could win’ but no.

I’m just marking time before this happens.

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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.
The Old Right’s appreciation of the New Left
The New Right = the Old Left

World Wars I and II or how the British destroyed themselves
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.
From Joshua Snyder.

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008  

Talking to Jorge about church infallibility

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News from the Eastern churches

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Monday, May 12, 2008  

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.”
From Tea at Trianon.

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‘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.
From the com-box:
... a traditional Catholicism that’s not allrah rah, isn’t the pope great?” andthe 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.
My priest is that way (he’s ethnic Polish); I’ve got the benefit of that for 12 years.

Anglo-Catholics can add our own cultural ephemera: a Gothic tower with its bells ringing amid a nearly equally grey sky, trees and green fields*; an organ diapason; a choir trilling; a Tudor turn of phrase; a hymn tune; reserve and discretion about other people’s vices mixed with ironic and camp humour showing everybody knows what’s happening behind the scenes, over drinks after a service; a 39-button cassocked and mozetta’d priest giving a Lenten quiet day saying ‘God is dying to forgive you if only you will let him’ in an old-fashioned London-meets-Oxbridge voice...

Of course it’s not exclusive to the Western forms of Catholicism: for example Slav Orthodox from Russia and Deer Hunter country (Greek Catholics too) ‘get it’. Natural traditionalism. Revelation working through natural religion.

*One thing I love about the town where I live is it has all that, a fine background to pray at home! Even if the tower and bells are Presbyterian. ;)

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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.
— Kathryn Muratore at the LRC blog

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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.
‘Break free of the phoney choices our political system gives us’
Not a dime’s worth of difference, like Pepsi (Obama) or Coke (Clinton in the Old Left rôle and McCain), both nothing but caramel-coloured sugar water
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.”
Also:

The militarist media
Glenn Greenwald on those analysts paid by the Pentagon. I think it’s much simpler: coverage of the war, spun or not, doesn’t matter much because the ruling and middle classes don’t care. They know Iraq’s not a fight for America’s survival (so why not bring the soldiers home then?) and, selfishly, they know they and their kids won’t be conscripted and sent over there.

Veterans’ suicides

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Three from Bishop Williamson

Television like the Internet is a tool neither good nor bad in itself and the bishop would consider my libertarianism, Burkean conservatism and classical liberalism simply parts of the right wing of modernism (unlike him I’m not about the divine right of kings, I don’t think the Middle Ages were perfect — people are not perfect — and I believe in ecumenism and religious liberty rightly understood which is not indifferentism) but otherwise yes.

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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.

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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.
I can see enough of these people staying home if Obama gets the nomination to give McCain the presidency.

Might mad-bomber McCain go nativist/anti-immigrant (sidling up to racism) to try and win these votes? Ugh.

People who talk about real things instead of pandering to prejudices get frozen out of the process.
[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.
Which was decent of him.
People forget. In 1976, Carter... in Philadelphia, talked about preserving the “ethnic purity” of the neighborhoods.
I didn’t know that.
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...”
He was right about the pledge (get rid of it), almost right about the second matter (the almost seamless garment or some crimes forfeit your right to live but very few) and libertarianism has the answer on civil liberties and it’s not in the culture wars (mostly a sideshow in what is supposed to be an impartial constitutional system and free market).

From Chronicles.

More from me and Deacon Jim.

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