Predictably, American RC bishops go for Obamacare
Well-meant charity etc. LRC’s Christopher Manion explains.

Labels: history, politics, the Catholic faith

From Joshua

• Libertarianism: it’s the real thing.
• A Republican is someone who thinks that...

Labels: history, libertarianism, politics

Owen White on the irony of those who criticise book theology

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith

LRC picks

• Lew Rockwell: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what your country is doing to you.
• Conservatives are running on empty.
• Murray Rothbard on the Oscars. Steve Sailer was on the right track: Dances with Giant Smurfs (which I didn’t bother seeing) was too popular so it seems that something more pretentious won.
• You’re not free. Having had a night encounter last summer with law enforcement (headlight and taillight out, unknown to me: $56) I understand. Unlicensed beer? Please.

Labels: film, libertarianism, politics

Mysticism debased
From Rod Dreher

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith

Government health care is not about health care; it’s about government

Labels: politics

The mainline denominations are only interesting to the media as foils for conservative religion
Obama can take you for granted just like the Republicans do conservative Protestants and pro-lifers. More.

He can take Bad Catholics (like his veep) for granted too.

Labels: Palestine, politics

Five creepy ways video games are trying to get you addicted

Sensible people see through Keynesian economics
From LRC

Labels: libertarianism, politics

Obsolete occupations

Labels: history

Clarity on ecumenism or more obnoxiousness doing business as orthodoxy?
An Orthodox blogger likes the way an in-your-face trad blog denounced the way Pope Benedict wished the Patriarch of Constantinople a happy birthday.

A one-true-church claim is part of what defines a Catholic church; it’s not a denomination. Which is why the Orthodox understood and respected Dominus Iesus while the mainline complained; the Pope was speaking their common language!

The matter at hand: Rome while in no way compromising its claim seems to acknowledge never-RC Orthodox bishops as having not only holy orders but jurisdiction over their never-RC people. (What it means when it says the Orthodox are churches; Protestants are non-churches, ‘ecclesial communities’ being the polite term for church-like collections of Christians.) The same benefit of the doubt that makes venerating post-schism Orthodox saints possible, even liturgically among the highest-church of the Greek Catholics (the Melkites and St Gregory Palamas; the tiny Russian Catholic Church and all the Russian Orthodox saints). Which sounds fine to me and in their usual unwritten customary way is mirrored by the Orthodox, who venerate pre-schism Popes as Popes and have never appointed an Orthodox replacement Pope. Even with the difference over his scope as the one real division between the two sides, it’s understood that the reigning Pope is who he says he is.

This benefit of the doubt given to people born on the other side is how I interpret the old-school condemnations, as applying not to them but to people who switch.

Of course I do hope that generosity doesn’t mean I’m one jump removed from the old relativists of Call to Action (wannabe mainliners who don’t like high church).

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith

Aggressive secularism
Damian Thompson reports:

“An assault on natural law”, which imposed “unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.”

As clergymen are warned they could be sued if they refuse to carry out homosexual “marriages” in church, what will the Equality Bill mean for religious doctrine?

The unique feature of Gordon Brown’s government is not its economic incompetence. Rather, it is doctrinaire secularism. For the first time in British history, no one sitting around the Cabinet table holds traditional Christian views that defy the liberal consensus.

Labels: England, politics

What life have you if you have not life together?

There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of GOD,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.

Labels: history, the Catholic faith

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Patrimony: Bishop Barnes on differing British and American Anglo-Catholic attitudes to the Prayer Book. More here and here.
• An e-mail conversation about the Telegraph’s coverage of the ACA saying yes to the Holy Father’s offer. We also talk about the underreported story of most of an American diocese (including the bishop, who was behind the move) of the Nestorian Church (the native church of Iraq) converting to Rome a few years ago.
• Talking to Fr Robert Hart and company. I don’t reflexively bash them but their long-standing position (Grafton’s) is an earlier version of Episcopalianism — so what’s to stop history repeating itself? — not Catholicism.
• Fr Laurence Wells on American RCs. 1. Real social justice (not the modern left) + the legit liturgical movement + orthodoxy = Catholic. 2. The old immigrant-labour-Democrat tie is hard to break (why many American churchmen think the party line is doctrine) but you’re right that the party line is not doctrine. 3. As I say, Pope Benedict had better have the ex-ACs’ back; they’ll need it!
• Scratch a libprot and find a nativist. But I appreciate the point about the inconsistency of hiring and giving benefits to the divorced and remarried. A counter-argument from my libertarianism: the divorced and remarried are consenting adults. Not so an orphaned or abandoned child the state tries to order the church to put into a homosexual couple’s home, against the church’s teachings.

Labels: Anglicanism, England, politics, the Catholic faith

Five reasons the Oscars matter even less than you thought
From Cracked

Labels: film, history

The Tenthers
Common knowledge says non-interventionist means Nazi (from WWII propaganda) and states’ rights means racist. (Racist really means believing race is determinative and wanting to base the law on that.) From Karen De Coster.

Labels: politics

Style and substance in film
From Taki

Labels: film, history

Shaping souls, national character and revolution
From LRC

Labels: libertarianism, politics

Labels: film, humour

From RR

• Missouri: House seeks to block Obamacare.
• Iceland: after the bank bust, a free-market turn.
• ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ pilot retires.
• ‘Defending terrorists.’
• Against ‘special’ relationships. Of course Justin Raimondo agrees the Falklands are none of America’s business.
• Palestine revisited.
• Anti-pot propaganda is as stupid as ever.
• Joe Stack.
• A left-libertarian explains why he’s not a leftist.
• Who are the real crazy people in American politics?

Labels: libertarianism, Palestine, politics

What America’s putative pro-life party did in Iraq

Yesterday there was another news item that, unlike Rove’s book, has received scant attention. It speaks directly to the legal culpability of Bush, Rove and the other criminals who should be arrested rather than doing book tours.

CBS News reports, “Doctors and parents in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are blaming a sharp increase in the number of birth defects on the highly sophisticated weapons U.S. troops have used in the city during the war.

“The BBC reported Thursday the staggering statistic from doctors in the city that the number of heart defects found in newborn babies is 13 times the number of similar birth defects in Europe.”

Bush ordered Fallujah to be essentially destroyed in 2004.

The CBS story states: “British-based Iraqi researcher Malik Hamdan told the news organization that one doctor compared the number of birth defects from before 2003 to today. Before the war began, she saw about one case every two months. Now she sees cases every day.

“Her research shows that as of January, the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births or 13 times Europe’s rate.” Bush is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Many tens of thousands of children have died directly as a consequence of Bush’s war that was based exclusively on lies and deceit. In addition to the spike in birth defects, a whole generation of Iraqi children will face a lifetime of physical and emotional wounds. Seventy percent of children are suffering from trauma-related symptoms reports the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists and the World Health Organization. That conclusion was based on a survey of 10,000 primary school students.

We owe it the people of Fallujah and all the still suffering people in Iraq to let them know that “We The People” in the United States, like they, recognize that a government that spoke in our name committed some of the worst atrocities in modern times.

Labels: Iraq, peace, politics

Ron Paul: ‘if I were president’
From LRC

Labels: libertarianism

The tea parties of no
From Thomas Knapp

Labels: politics

Notre Dame and Fordham have weekly Tridentine Masses
Pope Benedict’s revival is under way... getting a following among the kids

Labels: the Catholic faith

Cracked goes to the Oscars

Labels: film, humour

Arturo on lack of vocations
A trad who’s not a romanticiser nor judgemental (‘blame contraception’, a practice that’s wrong and self-defeating but that’s too pat an answer to this problem) like the protestantised neocons

Labels: history, the Catholic faith

30 error messages you don’t want to see
From Cracked

Labels: humour, the Internet

The decline of RC schools
From GetReligion

Labels: the Catholic faith

The Falklands are none of America’s business
It’s a little like Northern Ireland: geographically it should belong to one country but the majority want to belong to another only there’s no dispossessed Argentine minority. Either defend the locals or evacuate them.

Labels: England, politics

Right young things
Daniel McCarthy on Frank Chodorov and the young’s potential today. From Joshua.

Labels: history, libertarianism, politics