Taking care of business That is, taking out the (white) trash
Not only did work get in the way of libertarian anarcho-Catholic blogging today but I had something to settle.
Very recently as I was backing my modest car out of a space at work the bumper scraped somebody else’s as you can see here (the other car). Not a big deal. So I tried to do the right thing and left a note.
The other owner turned out to be an old blowhard I’ve worked with for 12 years; in the merger/downsizing he was demoted from one of the bosses to one of the staff. Ex-soldier who shouts four-letter words.
A lovely upper-class bohemian in our old office who was let go in the big change, a pretty good friend, thought he was one of the lowest class people she’d met and I always told her she was wrong, that that’s just his act and he was really nice, good at heart.
Class wins out. She’s right.
This creature (he’s not a man) socked me with a bill closer to four digits than three to replace the bumper.
Today he approached me in our office for the money and I told him to his face exactly what I think of him, very carefully: it sounded threatening but literally wasn’t. (It didn’t sound Christian but that doesn’t work on big bruisers from the veterans’-hall bar. As they say in cosa nostra it’s just business. E-mail me and I’ll tell you what I said.) Worked as if I’d directed it. He stomped out and yelled ‘You’re DEAD!’ An editor heard it.
TV cop heroes and martial-arts fighters know: use your enemy’s strength against him and play him.
Yes, I kept my money, now insurance is taking care of it and he’s not allowed near me on company property.
Exciting collects.Fr Hunwicke explains a way that Advent is different: it doesn’t use one of the standard scripts. Excita, quæsumus, Dómine, poténtiam tuam, et veni : ut ab imminéntibus peccatórum nostrórum perículis, te mereámur protegénte éripi, te liberánte salvári : Qui vivis et regnas in unitate Spiritu Sancti, Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
St Peter the Aleut beloved of convert propaganda. If he was real then according to Rome he was right and his murderers wrong (universal in Christendom: thou shalt do no murder).
The Ratzinger proposal and the Zoghby initiative. In his outreach to other apostolic traditionalists the Holy Father is willing to listen and negotiate but of course defined doctrine is a non-negotiable. I wouldn’t say manyGreek Catholics are OicwRs like thankfully few ethnic Orthodox are rabid anti-Westerners; both factions consist of converts online, cyber-churches. As much as I like the OicwRs versus the latter (like I prefer hanging out online with Anglicans to the convert blogs and boards of either) I’m sorry but Zoghby didn’t make sense; it was the branch theory minus the Anglicans. Tout somme schismatiques sounds charitable like the Anglicans but means no church. Un-Catholic.
I love Christmas. How uncool. Now that Holiday (remotely related to and roughly contiguous with Advent) is upon us I’ll be looking for a Hallmark TV special, ‘The Armadillo That Saved Festivus’. No, seriously, I love Christmas including in its current form. (But I know that this, right now, isn’t Christmas.) So to those who grandstand about commercialism, neener. It’s when mainstream society forgets its anti-Catholicism for a while; even hard-shell Protestants put up statues of Jesus and Mary. The Incarnation wins out. God became man (actually at the Annunciation but anyway... we need a winter festival to cheer up), life’s long celebration’s here and you and I are in the way of eternal life. Deo gratias.
On being libertarian and pro-life. Political compromises/exceptions (except medical necessity, legal in the good old days) amount to ‘I have the right to kill you because of what your father did’.
The conservative as victim. Retreating into ignorant tribal identity politics or the reason besides sexual attraction people pay attention to Sarah Palin. I like her but she shouldn’t hold office.
Canada’s Gitmo or it’s not evil when white hockey-playing socialists do it, eh? It seems the Tories are their GOP. Also: Colin Powell’s rise to the heights of US politics was due to his burying the initial reports of the My Lai massacre in 1968.
Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro. Dignum et justum est. Nice to have a bank holiday on the important Russian feast of St John Chrysostom (Roman Rite: St Sylvester, abbot) this year.
LRC and Mises have more on all that: the Puritans began to prosper when they abandoned the well-meant socialism their descendants want to impose on us.
Photo: A prince among men, Bob Sorrentino, cuts last year’s pie. Molte grazie per tutto.
Bliar: of course he knew there were no WMDs when he sent a token British force as part of the Coalition of the Bullied (by Real President Cheney, a Class A bully). Historical-irony note: the same pol who invented Iraq, by drawing lines on a map cutting up the Ottoman Empire, in his drive to wipe out a rival European power (yes, a nasty one but not the worst) ended up making Bliar’s poodleness possible by, in his lifetime, turning the country into a dependency of the US (and BTW handing half of Catholic Europe to the worse of the rival European powers at the time... and as the man had a way with words named the resulting empire). BTW more American forces are stationed abroad than British at the height of the old empire. Via RR.
Historically women were attracted to strapping, virile men who would pass on their bulging, hairy-chested, muscular genes to their children. Obviously the point was to ensure that the resulting offspring would be strong enough to survive all the horrifying claptrap that goes on in the forest at night.
Thanks to some hormone magic, this tends to change after the woman is pregnant.
But when on the pill, a woman’s body thinks she is pregnant all the time.
Big Brother Facebook. As has been mentioned before: At 18 years of age you are responsible enough to handle a rifle in order to murder someone for the U.S. military, but at 19 years of age you are not responsible enough to handle your liquor in order to have a little fun.
Another part of Pope Benedict’s revival? I understand there was no communicatio in sacris but the new rule allowing this always bothered me. I can’t imagine a Church Father lending his cathedral and altar to the local second-generation Montanists. The Orthodox would never do it (exception: the Antiochians have rented their Ligonier retreat centre to Greek Catholics).
Every time the mainliners whinge about these stories saying how mean-spirited the Pope is I see this (unmasked schism and heresy aren’t pretty).
Cum iter ad mare cepísset, * pópulus voce magna clamábat : Dómine Jesu Christe, salva illum ; et Clemens cum lácrimis dicébat : Súscipe, Pater, spíritum meum.
The [US 1979] BCP and ESPN both turned 30 this year. And yet, why is it that ESPN is no longer “that new sports network,” while some people continue to insist on referring to the BCP as “that new prayer book”?
If you like me were formed by, among other things, eastward-facing Communion and Cranmer’s sonorous prose (but not necessarily, one hopes, his Protestant theology) it’s a ‘new book’. US 1928’s far from adequate for Catholics (the theoretical ‘floor’ of my churchmanship using the high-low scale is the American Missal, jumped-up US 1928, the mode of the former biretta belt and now Antiochian WRO) but as Chesterton wrote, the beauty of the old Prayer Book is not the extent that it was the English Church’s first Protestant book but its last Catholic one. Cranmer went into schism and heresy but retained the 16th-century Godward worldview of our holy mother the church.
Good traditional Roman Riters will say the 1960 and 1962 (which I’m fine with) or maybe 1965 revisions are respectively the new breviary and missal and of course the Eastern Orthodox call the Gregorian calendar new.
I’d be saying the same thing then as now only I’d have been called a liberal: in the Roman Rite how about more well-done High Masses with chant, some nice Protestant hymns vetted for orthodoxy at Low Mass and sometimes having dialogue Masses (including congregationally sung High Masses) and doing at least some of it in the vernacular? (IOW Fr Hallahan could have looked over the fence at what Fr Smith probably was doing: now that’s my kind of ecumenism.)
I’m off to read Vespers from one of the old books.
Iraq’s Christians seek return; sense extinction. Hussein’s (why were the media on a first-name basis with him?) rule, which was better for them than now, was none of our business. AFAIK Iraq’s apostolic Christians break down thus: the Eastern Catholic church, the Chaldæans, is bigger than its parent the Nestorian Church (properly called Assyrian; the full name is the Holy Catholic Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East... similar misunderstanding as with the Copts), which has two versions, the larger, somewhat liberalised (but not really by Western standards; relations with the Chaldæans are friendly, common among Middle Eastern apostolic Christians) one whose patriarch has lived in Illinois for some time (much of its diocese in California including the bishop converted to the Chaldæans about a year and a half ago, leaving the properties behind) and a small, Old Calendar, anti-ecumenical True Assyrian Church of the East started about 40 years ago. The Nestorians’ anaphora of SS. Addai and Mari is the oldest one still used (the Roman Canon comes close) and the only one in Christendom with no institution narrative. Website: Christians of Iraq.
More on Eastern Christian soul and brotherhood. This week I got to know the friendly older chap, also baptised John, who works at the pizzeria near work. Assumed all these months he was Greek but he’s Armenian (is John Hovaness in Armenian?), and Armenian Apostolic (in communion with the Copts), originally from Jerusalem whence his family fled from Armenia (Hayastan, the world’s oldest Christian country) after the 1915 Turkish genocide. He’s been in the States since the fine year of 1960 and like me is a fan of flea markets.
Did you know that Paul Anka and Jamie ‘Klinger’ Farr are Antiochian Orthodox?
‘Apocryphal’: the Pope on Anglican orders. Taking out later mediæval ceremonies with bad intent — officially no longer ‘thinking with the church’ — invalidated them. Reordination is the only way.
Reverend Ref: The [US 1979] BCP and ESPN both turned 30 this year. And yet, why is it that ESPN is no longer “that new sports network,” while some people continue to insist on referring to the BCP as “that new prayer book”?
Gay trads. I’m all for being openly gay: honest with yourself and whoever else’s business it might be (your confessor for example). ‘Tolerant conservatism’ named for me by the other Bishop Robinson is a holy MYOB. Remember, you are a Catholic child of God first and foremost. Not a homosexual, a kleptomaniac, a glutton, a bigmouth, a lazy bones or anything else. We don’t define ourselves by our temptations or sins. We could all hang signs from our necks standing in the confessional line, but it’s the sign of the Cross that defines us and saves us.
Was Genghis Khan a dandelion or an orchid? The ongoing trend toward the future Stolen Generation of African-American children. Notice how there are two movies out this month, Precious and The Blind Side, both about how 350-pound impoverished black teenagers’ lives can be fixed up by caring social workers and/or white adoptive parents.
Genes matter. But don’t base the law on them. They’re only a factor. People are complicated and yes, deserve equal opportunity not equal outcomes. I’m neither a collectivist nor a determinist so no white-power politics or eugenics, thanks.
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The most mythological feast-day? I’m no Modernist: St Pius V thought so too. What matters is, like the legend of St Philomena, it’s not heretical and there’s no proof it’s not true. The Gospel tells us nothing of the childhood of Mary; her title Mother of God eclipses all the rest.
Fr Hunwicke: Orate, fratres. It’s to the other ministers in the sanctuary; I knew that. The dialogue Mass gives the impression that it’s to the congregation, which is not theologically unsound but historically that’s not so.
Naming the bishop in the Canon. St Cyprian: Whence you ought to know that the bishop is in the Church, and the Church in the bishop; and if any one be not with the bishop, that he is not in the Church.
TNLM: Marketing Catholicism? As Arturo and Owen (criticising Ancient Faith Radio’s American evangelical makeover of Orthodoxy) might say, is the whole concept wrong? Of course so is the other extreme of not allowing converts (the Great Commission, the Book of Acts etc.). The other point is gimmicks from popular culture don’t have staying power bringing in the lapsed either (the parable of the seed not being able to grow roots).
T1:9: Time’s Protestant-biased coverage of the Pope’s offer to the last Anglo-Catholics. Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism: friends or rivals? How about neither? The essential difference of infallibility (‘I can’t change that; I’m only the Pope’) vs fungibility (by the state, the dominant class’s mores, etc.: absolute power really) means corporate reunion’s impossible. Shut down ARCIC. This announcement from Rome is incredibly messy. No, it’s not. The two don’t compete; each takes in the few from the other side who ask to come in. They serve different markets as much to do with liking or hating Englishness and high culture in church as theology. Doctrinally rigid umbrella: biased much? Try solid or something like that instead. More democratic church governance: what? If that means trusteeism for parish ownership, forget it (although like clerical celibacy it’s not doctrine). Anyway the Anglican spokesmen seem awfully afraid of the Pope. Like they’re worried the Queen might hand back the keys to Canterbury Cathedral when he comes round next year.
To quote the Bard (who pretty much kept his religious views to himself, sensible under Elizabeth I), sound and fury signifying nothing.
Damian Thompson: 20 minutes. That’s all the time the Pope needed with Dr Williams. It looks as if they devoted much of it to ARCIC, the official dialogue between the Communions which I thought had been wound down years ago. There’s going to be a “third phase” of this waffle? To discuss what? Tips on where to buy the tastiest organic biscuits to serve after Sunday-morning services? Pope Benedict has given up on the Church of England, in the nicest possible way.
A note from Dr Tighe: If the “original intent” of the framers of the 39 Articles in the context of the Elizabethan Church of England is normative, then the Evangelicals really do hold the “title deeds” of Anglicanism. But without church infallibility what’s to stop conservative Protestantism becoming liberal Protestantism as happened in 18th-century England?
Here I stand revisited. Conservative ELCA people take a page from recent ex-Episcopalians and mull over a move from liberal Protestantism to... slightly less liberal Protestantism. More.
... ignorantly believing the nonsense so many millions of American kids were taught at schools about how George III was like Hitler, only even worse?
Joseph Sobran, as you probably know, once wrote: “King George didn’t care a hoot whether you smoked or how much water your toilet tank held.”
Or the Queen and Prince Charles (almost met him once; if only he’d turned to his left not to his right) most likely don’t want to run your life; they only wish everybody would remain calm and do their duty. The kind of Canadian who wants a republic probably does want to.
Not that her good intentions and sex appeal make her immune to criticism: Palin and the decline of conservatism. Goldwater should have been president.
How high-profile CEOs could revive the Libertarian Party. Sarah Palin is rumored to be mulling the idea of starting a third party, pulling together social and fiscal conservatives alienated from the GOP. The Blue Dog Democrats, turned off by President Barack Obama’s spending, could reach across the aisle to moderate Republicans and try to attract independents. But the best third-party contender already exists. The Libertarians, like so many independents and disaffected Democrats and Republicans, are fiscal conservatives and social liberals — and no one has yet built a lasting coalition out of this growing force.
Justin Raimondo: Obama’s Wag the Dog: stage the Gitmo trial now to distract from possible attention to his war on Afghanistan not that we’re hearing any objections from the left.
Stealing is wrong but so is selfishness. Such narcissism reminds me of a story about a selfish, no-good rich man who died and tried to get into heaven. But you can’t just walk through the Pearly Gates. An angel reviews your life, then St. Peter decides if you can enter. To counter the angel’s negative review, the rich man argued that he had a history of charitable giving. He’d once tossed a nickel into a beggar’s cup, he pointed out. Plus, some years later, he had aided a poor woman by giving her a nickel. Then there was the time he put a nickel into the Salvation Army kettle. Hearing all this, the angel turned to St. Peter and asked, “What in the world should we do with this man?” And St. Peter said, “Give him back his 15 cents, and tell him to go to hell!” Now that’s a story that these big banksters need to hear — and ponder.
The best mistake ever. Getting the state out of the marriage business. Of course most of the human race throughout history including Catholics are not bigots. But minorities’ rights under the no-harm principle are our rights.
Something for cat people: I’ve heard of moggies so tame they’re afraid of their natural prey (I think my hefty outdoor friend gets all the recreational bird-hunting he wants on top of handouts from people and a home where he can be fed if he needs it) but never captive big cats being like that. Call me sceptical but don’t forget the stories of rogue animals attacking keepers et al.
The prosperity gospel and the crash. The utter insanity — coupled with the flat-out greed of bankers willing to make loans to gullible and greedy Jesus followers — did harm.
Facts, opinion and kids these days. “They can crack the alphabetic code,” he said. “But they can’t stay focused and comprehend what they’ve read.”
Palin’s not the answer but Dreher and Glenn Beck seem wrong as to why (she’s a likeable, sexy, clueless red-state fascist). With the best intentions in the world Dreher and his crunchy good upper-middle-class taste seems (if I’m reading him right) a sort of orthodox mirror of the religious left: all the world needs is someone like him telling us what to do and spending our money to do it.
Happy birthday, Archduke Otto Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church in South Philly has a portrait of the Emperor Franz Josef in the basement hall. He was well liked by the Slavs in the empire.
Vocation. This problem’s a tough one. On one hand are the liberal RCs who accuse all orthodox young men of this (‘pious and overly devotional’) to screen them out of seminary and on the other are the young men who actually have this problem. I know about the holier-than-thou personality who wants power over others. Had a pain-in-the-arse housemate like that briefly, almost 20 years ago, who unsurprisingly tried out the seminary and last I heard is a therapist working under some quack (I know — I met him). Their schtick is ‘being orthodox RCs people can trust’; I see a huge malpractice case on the horizon. (If this is the therapy some dioceses offered, no wonder they went bankrupt over molestation scandals — some of them deserved it.) Matthew 7:21-23.
Rowan, just shut up. Now. John of Ad Orientem: After I stopped laughing my first reaction was to wonder where Rowan is getting his drugs. But after a brief reflection I realized that this may be the first time Rowan has ever taken a firm stand on a controversial subject within his communion. Clarity is always a good thing. Either Bishop Farrell is being patronising, trying to be nice, or is a liberal too. Not to deny what Episcopalians like Derek and me have in common but official union talks are over. A dead end.
Good entry on ‘Crime Story’. Thanks, Rap Sheet, for linking to my page. That all-American show says something to men around the world. I get hits from the UK to Russia to Turkey to Chile.
It’s fun to compare the two: same country, same period but different cities and different jobs so different social classes. The upper-class or socially climbing young people in the first don’t listen to rock (at least so far in the episodes I’ve seen). People in both liked jazz. I wonder if Draper and Torello met in the Army in Korea.
The Obama most folks thought they voted for is clearly MIA. They just weren’t paying attention. All they saw was his colour and like a ‘magical’ movie character (as famously described by Spike Lee) they projected on him. Which is what he wanted. It got him elected.
Scoundrel-defenders, line up here. To whittle liberty down, the politicians must target some group that the majority of people are loath to defend. The perfect companion to the lovely Niemöller speech the left like so much. Cue the Ken Burns soundtrack violins: First they came for the pimps and drug-dealers...
Huw: practice, practice, practice. It is meet and right so to do (and here seems to agree with Arturo) but doctrine and a divinely instituted, infallible church backing it are still required as indeed Orthodoxy teaches. (So joining a faith where the content of the creeds is officially optional is not a valid choice. Sorry. I don’t make the rules.) The ad-hoc way of improvising, very slowly and case by case, is immemorial custom and far better than adopting wholesale change in principle (the ‘Reformation’ and the Epic Fail Council). Slavs in a parish in Pennsylvania not Cranmer’s or Bugnini’s approach nor the hyper convert stuff Huw mentions, thank you.
A libertarian who happens to be Catholic looks at the Episcopal row. Defending the freedom of religion and property rights of people you don’t agree with. That and when it finally settles I hope people caught in the middle like Charley (defending his freedom of religion) still have a place to worship on Sunday.
Fr Z on Cardinal Kasper and the Pope’s offer. 1) The invitation is mainly for English Anglo-Catholics (Americans aren’t interested) but that doesn’t mean TAC aren’t welcome. 2) Face it: union talks with the Anglican Communion are over. Drop them.
New blog: The Anglo-Catholic from a member (a cathedral senior warden and standing-committee member no less) of an ACA diocese (the biretta belt in miniature?), a rare example of an American Anglo-Papalist and another youngish man (a YF) who at least in style (not ironic hipster condescension) has more or less ‘gone home’ to around 1962 (with a waiver for the flavour-saver like my square goatee). Well done! (Tangent: a glimpse at what IT was like back then. It’s from Cracked. ’Nuff said.)
Fr Longenecker on Anglican snits: let our people go. Every time one of those people complains, the nuncio in Britain should ask for an old church back.
Fr Hunwicke: Why can’t these people just robustly say “We decided to terminate the last phase of the Ecumenical Movement — the phase in which organic union was the aim — because there are very important questions on which we are right and Rome, quite simply, is wrong. This was an impasse round which there is no way until Rome changes her mind”.
Joshua quotes St Edward the Confessor: The extreme corruption and wickedness of the English nation has provoked the just anger of God. When malice shall have reached the fullness of its measure, God will, in His wrath, send to the English people wicked spirits, who will punish and afflict them with great severity, by separating the green tree from its parent stem the length of three furlongs. But at last this same tree, through the compassionate mercy of God, and without any national (governmental) assistance, shall return to its original root, reflourish and bear abundant fruit.
Yearly festival at St Nicholas, Philadelphia This year I saw Brother Steven Haws and Michael Neuschl from Clem’s; Brother Steven has long lived in Mirfield and Michael is now a parishioner at St Nick’s. Caught up with several local people and of course had my Slav soul food of stuffed cabbage in red sauce and pierogi. The bearded figure is of Grandfather Frost, not exactly Santa but a whimsical personification of winter. This year in the church they played recorded Russian liturgical music showing off the building’s acoustics. It’s said that Stokowski used to pop in and listen to the choir; I have a 1950s recording of them and know many of the people on it.
Beautiful instructional videos on the Tridentine Mass. Low Mass. The rest are now here (scroll down). The consecration is done this way in Latin at Clem’s. Commentary at Fr Hunwicke’s. Of course it’s a hotchpotch; that was standard thanks to longtime priestly habits, parishes having only an older copy of the Missal and immemorial custom. There’s a story of John XXIII doing things like that, the older forms of ceremonies that he was used to despite their recently being modified or stopped officially. Or as one man suggests, this simply could be a snapshot of official practice in much of 1962. Elsewhere somebody quoted Gamber that the second Confiteor was made optional not banned.
An FSSP priest talks on EWTN about chant (plays on Windows Media Player). Another non-surprise: compare the age of the audience of this to that of the average readership of The Tablet.
Вечная память (eternal memory, RIP): Patriarch Paul III of the Serbian Orthodox Church, aged 95 (pictured at right). Biography.Acclaimed by all that knew him as “the walking saint”, he will be sorely missed by all apostolic Christians as a true example of Christ-like humility and piety, and a light in an increasingly dark, Godless world.
The Russian Orthodox Church ends ecumenical relations with the German Evangelical Church, the old state merger of Lutheran and Reformed that’s the country’s Protestant church. Talking to each other is fine but of course official talks on union make no sense because of the very different Catholic vs Protestant beliefs on the church (infallible vs fallible and fungible). That became clear talking to the professors from Tübingen in the late 1500s (just like Protestants today they wanted both an Eastern church legitimising what they did and to start a ‘Reformation’ in the East). As with the conservative Anglicans over the gay bishop and gay weddings, why now? Coverage of this makes it sound like John Stott’s compromise of limited women’s ordination (in which the woman minister is always supervised by a man and there are no women bishops), an untenable position that understandably seems more offensive to liberal Protestants than the Catholic one. Official Orthodox talks with ACNA make sense because there’s still a remote chance of ACNA’s three AC dioceses converting.
Those churches that live by the surrounding culture, die by the surrounding culture. 1955 was better of course but it had its problems: since the ‘Enlightenment’ mainstream Western churches, including, in practice, RC, too often became mere vehicles of civic religion useful for making more productive or more obedient citizens (at least in ’55 they were more likely to give lip service to orthodoxy). As Dr Tighe recently wrote of the quintessential Anglicanism of the period, a deep freezer of latitudinarian moralism, the dutiful religion of the Queen and George H.W. Bush. To be fair, isn’t the modern mainline more about SWPL decorum than living faith or coherent doctrine? (Or it’s just as homogeneous and conformist as the ’50s but I like the ’50s better.) From Tripp.
Patrick Kennedy. A commentator: What he doesn’t get is that he doesn’t disagree with the hierarchy of the Church, he disagrees with the teaching of the Church. And ...yes, that makes him less of a Catholic. A lot of Catholic politicians (and Orthodox politicians for that matter) think they can be Protestant individualist pick ’n’ mix theologians Monday to Saturday and good Catholics or Orthodox on Sunday. The Kennedys seem to straddle the line between Bad Catholics and Modernists. They’ve always traded on the ‘Catholic = my grandmother was Irish’ identity not the ‘Catholic = I believe in all that stuff (even if I don’t live up to it)’ one. Patrick Kennedy’s guilt depends on whether he’s ignorant or malicious. There are lots more Bad Catholics than Modernists. Bad Catholics don’t agree with the church but don't think they can bend tihe church to their will; Modernists like Protestants think they can. Joe Biden is a Bad Catholic. The church doesn’t micro-manage, and there’s some truth to ‘Catholic’s not just what you believe; it’s what you are’ (so Bad Catholics arguably are still in the fold), but if you cause public scandal it’s time to excommunicate (part of Pope Benedict’s mop-up after the Epic Fail Council?).
Some buckshot at the Protestants from a friend of the blog: Reading “magisterial” Protestants discuss history is a lot like hearing whores talk about love. You know that they really don’t take it seriously, but only use historical data to justify their own pet theories. Never once does it occur to them to step into the actual world that the authors of the thirteenth century or the Patristic era actually lived in, oozing with scapulars, rosaries, saints’ bones, and other “superstitions” that don’t jive with their pet interpretation of the Gospel. Never will such a person admit that, “hey, maybe the way people did things a thousand years ago really is better than what we do today”. Instead, it will just be another toy in their bag of seductive tricks to defend their whitewashed churches, minimalist doctrine, and the fact that, compared to any church prior to 1500, their assemblies are barely shadows or ghosts of what a Church should look like.
So I offer you all my advice: ditch the history crap and jump on the Rick Warren bandwagon that is actually the future of your church anyway. Twelve-step is where it’s at, without all the pretensions of being linked to the past in any viable way, or the long venerable tradition of Western humanism. Who cares anyway? All that stuff isn’t going to get ya saved! Besides, instead of being a starving grad student mulling over Latin texts that you could give a rat’s ass about when the rubber hits the road, you could be making hella bank from megachurch SUV drivers with lots of disposable income. It’s not like you don’t have families and stuff. Anyway, cut all the pretensions of actually caring about history. Just be Protestants already and be done with it.
The culture of pretend: how psychotherapy keeps our communities sick. Our way of life “peaked” many decades ago. As Dreher has written, people were happier then even though the experts say they had no right to be. Empire has been about the task of destroying family and village systems, breaking down our sense of belonging and relatedness, removing opportunities for meaningful work and deep connection to a close-knit community or tribe for centuries, perhaps millennia.
Regardless of going about it all the wrong way because everything they were doing was based on what today can be regarded as outmoded crackpot science, Marxism has its heart in the right place: justice for the productive class. When Marxism identifies freeloaders on the backs of the productive worker, it sees it as its job to free the worker from the freeloader ... not burden the worker with more freeloaders. That is the exact opposite of what’s going on in what is seen as left-wing politics today, which claims to be the workers’ friend but burdens their productivity with taxes, regulations, and setting up workers to go to war against each other by dividing them into ‘unionized’ workers and ‘scab workers’.
Snubbing Eastern European victims or the common-knowledge strip-cartoon version of history: like, Hitler was bad because he was, you know, intolerant but the Communists were idealists. The collapse of the Soviet Union apparently has not been all that welcome by Mr. Obama’s political base, the extreme Left Wing of American liberals. These folks have always had a soft spot in their hearts and minds for experiments in collectivism. Any anti-individualist polity is for these folks a progressive undertaking since by their lights humanity makes progress when it moves toward lumping all of us into a huge mass to be guided by the likes of Stalin, Hugo Chavez, or Fidel Castro, all of whom want to impose on it a one-size-fits-all way of life. So it is very likely that skipping the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall was a calculated decision.
Some jottings about the news
