Clegg and Trident A quandary. On one hand does one really need more missiles to blow up the world several times over? But on the other, Britain giving up her nukes would make her even more of an American protectorate, going against the good goal of putting Britons, not the US government, first in her foreign policy. Such deterrence seems a necessary evil. From Daniel Larison.
State daftness from the left: women aboard US submarines. I was shocked to learn they’re aboard fighting surface ships. PCness’ game of ‘gender, only a construct’ vs the reality of the sexes then handing out condoms and pills (but don’t the PC love nature? Oh, right, I’ll sit down and shut up) and, when that fails, abortions to handle the inevitable problems. Summing up, from ex-career Army officer Brian Mitchell, this breaks down discipline and morale (relationships and breakups etc. aboard ship and on post, and women can cry their way to a discharge more easily), and helps destroy marriages at home (even more damaging than the immemorial practice of servicemen on leave hiring prostitutes), and most women don’t have the physical strength needed for combat (now it takes five sailors to do what four could).
Of course the Church Times reports negatively about the coming ordinariates. But Fr North makes a point: Clergy in the Ordinariate would have to be in secular employment because the Roman Catholic Church could not raise the money — £64,000 in his case in London — to keep them in a house and stipend.
Taki on emotion in public to show off. Here he’s preaching a virtue I’m still working on, a reason I read Coverdale’s translations in the daily office. It’s calming. Stiff upper lip.
Common-knowledge-busting: ‘The Republicans are the pro-life party’. “Planned Parenthood received government grants and contracts of $305 million (34%) during fiscal year 2005-2006,” a “time we not only had Bush the Republican president but also a Republican majority in Congress.”
Libertarian conundrum of the day Does the no-harm principle extend to animals (right, what about food?*) when the intent is to make them suffer or (as argued when Michael Vick was convicted) are they just property according to the law? (We’re talking about, erm, animal-torture porn.) Is this a case where we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, forced to defend something horrible for freedom’s sake?
You find farmers who are unsentimental about animals: many ‘puppy mills’ (factory-style breeding of pet dogs) are here in Pennsylvania and I understand Amish own many of them.
*Vegetarians: turn against abortion and we’ll talk.
The mysterious, immutable Newman. Someone neither his conservative nor liberal commentators could put in a box but that didn’t make him a Modernist. Rejected by the Anglicans (rightly so according to their principles, which we see being played out among them now in their fights) for being Catholic; not trusted by the ultramontanes because he kept that cool Oxonian ‘patristic tone’ to the end. One of his own points, in his apologia, was that the middle’s not necessarily right but a muddle. From Arturo.
Western Christianity’s spiritual amnesia. Yes! But why doesn’t this mainline fave become Catholic then? My guess: it’s like when the neocons thrown out of power imitate us libertarians to get back at the Democrats in charge. The Modernists play high-church to score points against the fundygelicals, ‘the wrong sort of white people’. Like the neocons and the left both are parts of the same thing. In this case you see two progenies of English Calvinism, mainliners and fundygelicals, that, as usual, don’t like each other. Anyway the amnesia/manufacturing of history began at the ‘Reformation’ — there were no Protestants in 1095 — and accelerated among the upper classes in the 1700s, with much of the rest of the mainline still giving lip service to credal orthodoxy and orthodox morals (Catholicism’s cultural capital) until very recently (arguably they’re catching up with the Unitarians). From Tripp.
Originally a humble wooden chapel built on a parcel of farmland in 1905, the Church of the Transfiguration’s parish flourished to such a degree that a lower church was built for the parishioners in 1925 and the upper church was finished in 1928. Capable of seating over 2,500 people, it was one of the biggest and most magnificent churches in Philadelphia, but by the 1970s demographics had shifted in the urban center around it and it was eventually closed in 2000. after its closing it was purchased by a conman whose real-estate swindles imploded and all the while it sat unused, until 2009 when it was demolished and its stunning architecture relegated to the landfill.
An argument for eliminating state schools. They seem morally neutral and charitable but... Catholic immigrants 100 years ago found them Protestant and started their own schools, and today arguably the state schools are preaching for a bastard of English Calvinism, the American version of secularist humanism. (I’m secular: impartial as in fair.)
The new Vegas mob war: rival museums! Hey, they stole my idea, the mooks. In Cherry Hill, NJ there used to be two rival chain Italian restaurants (one of which sort of plays on these cultural tropes and which I admit I like*; I choose to see it as a tribute) across the highway from each other and I had an Onion-like story idea based on that. One museum glorifies the state; the other the mob, like the Godfather trilogy. This is of interest to libertarians because look at Prohibition: often but not always organised crime is simply selling goods and services (alcohol, drugs, gambling, prostitution) that customers want but are demonised by the meddling government. That some of them are immoral is none of your business. (*So do some Italian-Americans — Donna and her family from New York have some respect for the place — but its number of stores in a place is interestingly inverse to the Italian population, who of course cook good food at home; there are none in NYC, North Jersey or Long Island for example. The places are full of mementos making them like fun museums: they even acknowledge the church. And yes, some of the food is good.)
Genuine British Catholics weren’t fooled and remained Catholics [omnes sancti martyres, orate pro nobis] while genuine British Protestants also weren’t fooled and eventually became Congregationalists [in Scotland, Presbyterians], Baptists [spun off from the Congregationalists] and whatnot.
Followers of conservative Anglican doings know who he is/was: Fr Tony Clavier on Anglo-Catholicism (from here: anti-Catholic hackwork from the New Yorker). I fear that many Anglo-Catholics who convert will discover swiftly that they miss the freedom and liberality – not the same as liberal – of the Anglican tradition. The tragedy of English Anglo-Catholicism is that it lost its nerve and wandered into an internal ghetto and thus became powerless. It ceased to drink from its own tradition and fell in love with a very selective and romantic vision of modern Roman Catholicism. And that last part’s (Rome as it should be, all according to Rome’s own teachings, with liturgical panache: ACs’ version of Italian style) bad because...? And Protestantism (never mind that he’s in a liberal Protestant denomination) is defensible because...? He’s right that part of ACism’s charm is the liberality, not liberalism (Modernism: heavens, no!), combined with conservative liturgics. The key, and I think the Holy Father’s fit for the job, is to sift the liberality from the liberalism, and besides those coming in are consciously saying no to the latter so no problem. Saying no to Anglicanism as an ism has been many/most English ACs’ point all along. Now the Pope, in order to shore up his Catholic revival in English-speaking lands (a working model of what he wants with roots in their culture) and not primarily as an ecumenical rescue (although it is and that’s nice), is giving them a solution. BTW it’s fitting that the woman curate in the New Yorker story is at Littlemore (which I’ve been to, long ago) and is friendly with the local convert RC priests; she’s proof that Newman’s apologia was right. Patrimony, sì; the Anglican tradition, no.
May procession: some of the Anglican Society of Mary last year. ‘This way, chaps!’
Sea power: retro is usually wonderful but not here Fred Reed, like Bill Lind on land warfare (we’re in the guerrilla/insurgent/4GW age), says the US Navy is wasting mucho bucks (of course: it’s a government agency existing partly for its own sake) to refight WWII in the Pacific. Like an Iraqi homemade bomb on land there are crafty ways to sink today’s capital ships, the aircraft carriers. Looking forward to expert remarks from my comboxes’ retired naval officer. From LRC.
95 years ago today: the Armenian genocide began Starting the big change from making newspapers (to be phased out over five years) to online video reporting, I went to a school assembly and service yesterday commemorating this, at a place run by proper nuns (not bad modified habits), Armenian Catholics from Armenia. As it’s the only Armenian school around it gets many Armenian Apostolic families (they have several local churches; I’ve been to one). At the end four priests — one Armenian Catholic (I’ve been to his church), vested (the Armenian chasuble/phelonion is cut all the way in front so it looks like a cope), and three Apostolic (not vested, in choir habits including a hooded monk) — and an Armenian Congregational minister (!) sang the requiem service, all in Armenian.
Essentially the Turks have been trying for years to wipe out the Christian presence in the lands they took and now call Turkey (especially Asia Minor: part of Greece).
Of course I hope to post a link to the video (can’t embed from that site) when it’s finished.
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Christ, Son of God, forbearing and compassionate, have pity in thy love as our creator upon the souls of thy servants who are at rest, especially upon the souls of thy servants the one and one-half million Armenians who lost their lives as victims of a genocide perpetrated against the Armenian nation during the First World War, and for whom we are offering these prayers. Be mindful of them in the great day of the coming of thy kingdom. Make them worthy of mercy, of expiation and forgiveness of sins. Reckon them and glorify them with the company of thy saints at thy right hand. For thou art Lord, the creator of all, judge of all the living and the dead, and to thee is befitting glory, dominion and honour, now and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Quit Korea.More.Our true policy toward North Korea should be one of benign neglect.
Obama’s not black.More. But because of the coincidence of his absent African father he’s long wanted to be and learnt how to use that politically. I don’t think it necessarily gave him the presidency: being handsome, generally appealing and not George W. Bush did. (McCain was Cheney without the Bush sock puppet.) A sepia JFK on whom people projected their dreams (including Obamacon with honour Andrew Bacevich). Tried the Dem thing in ’06 and it didn’t work. (In ’04 I voted for Badnarik and honked for Kerry.) Still more. Also, from Steve Sailer, what about the CIA?
This just in: Dentists don’t want you to know how the health reporter mom from [your hometown here] who lost 50 pounds in two days by obeying this one rule discovers the shocking truth behind acai berries [picture of pretty French newsreader nothing to do with berries] when Obama tells her to go back to school after getting her house refinanced for free discovered how to whiten your teeth all naturally.
Good intentions in Arizona. This is understandable but it’s not a Hispanic issue; it’s one for everybody. (You have the right to move anywhere and the people there have the right to hire you at an agreed-upon, through the market, wage. Don’t base the law on Steve Sailer’s racial theories.) No identity politics, please. As Thomas Knapp notes, the president has no constitutional power to control immigration. It’s like well-meaning pro-lifers wanting the feds to stop abortion. Murder is not a federal matter.
Baghdad’s secret prison. We overthrew a secular government and former ally that was no threat to us (no saints but that was none of our business) and put the Shi’ites (the bad guys in Iran 30 years ago) in power.
Covert government information warfare. Like when a company invents a fake Internet fan base for a product only older and more sinister. The Soviets did this and following their example the CIA used non-Communist leftists the same way. The state still does.
‘Extremist.’ Prior to September 2001, anyone who suggested that the U.S. government lead a crusade to “rid the world of evil” would have been labeled both an extremist and a loon. I wish that were so but I don’t think it was. The common-knowledge versions of the US Civil War (that it was fought to free the slaves) and WWII (save the world from fascism, a wrong but not necessarily evil system, as in Spain and Argentina... and hand half of it to the Communists), Wilson’s entry into WWI and of course the Democrats going into Vietnam (read The Quiet American) were very much of that type.
Predictable mainline mush Including from the wishy-washy conservatives (whether they want to keep their pretty church buildings or collect their clergy pensions soon).
A religion pretending there is such a thing as gay marriage is one seceding from the human race and one that will shrink. But don’t try to outlaw it.
How many think this will get Frisco, Fire Island, Greenwich Village and Philly’s Gaybourhood flocking to Lutheranism?
Me neither.
Reminds me a little of the myth of sex-mad Swedes (which comes from a 1960s Italian porno). The Scandie attitude to sex is matter-of-fact but hardly any hanky-panky goes on, certainly not out in the open.
As Fr H said of the many screaming hypocrites, he says:
What precisely is the moral basis on which the atheist critics of the church found their ferocious disapproval of this activity, while they take a pretty much Kinseyist anything-goes attitude to almost all other sorts of sex?
What’s right and wrong with this story? Sorry, no link. The ‘lede’ as we call it in the newspaper biz shows you what you need to see.
Philadelphia Pentecostal clergy endorse Joe Sestak for commitment to community and public service.
I’m a (not secularist) secular (classical) liberal so of course I say for fairness’ sake (including the free public practice of religion) that religion has no direct say in government. So why should a politician try to get a denomination’s endorsement? Why should a denomination have a PAC? That said, hooray for public displays of religion. But obviously Pentecostal here is code for black. (Here Northeastern white pols are being condescending and wouldn’t tolerate this from whites.) Blacks shouldn’t be a bloc either: no collectivism in the form of identity politics. Funny how two progenies of Calvinism that didn’t like each other, the old Dutch rule in South Africa and SWPLs, want to lump people together like that.
BTW Sestak is my congressman. He was part of my last venture of trying to tactically vote Democratic (in which I voted a mostly D ticket for the first time) to cause a good change (the great referendum on Bush and the Iraq war in which the GOP deservedly lost Congress): I was being an Obamacon two years before Obama’s election. Never again. It didn’t work so of course I didn’t fall for Obama.
Hear, O Israel.David Lindsay touches a politically incorrect third rail: why so many Jews are of the left and how their worldview is different from Christians’. It’s been noted elsewhere that it’s partly a reaction to persecution but also that the values and behaviour (like being enterprising) that not only saved them from extinction but made them thrive in Western countries are not leftist! (They didn’t get where they are by asking the government to take care of them.) Also, Zionism plays so well among evangelicals because they don’t know or don’t want to know about Levantine Christianity, forms of Catholicism.
Pædocommunion: discuss! I’ll start. It’s obviously not doctrine so saying it’s necessary, like claiming services must be in the vernacular to be valid like some Protestants did, was condemned by Trent. That is, you can do it in your rite but a Catholic doesn’t have to. BTW I’ve been told some Metropolia Slav parishes — Russian Orthodox dioceses, Ruthenian parishioners — in the rust belt at least used to have Solemn First Communion for the 7-year-olds right after they first go to confession, because these churches used to be Greek Catholic.
Of course baroque is da bomb but NLM also rightly appreciates The Other Modern, the artistic branch of the legit liturgical movement (Mass-and-office and really interested in the East as well). The first half of the 20th century, through the early 1960s, the good ’60s: not pastiche but original art that follows the principles of Catholic doctrine and the old Roman Rite.
Some of my comments in that thread (warning: long convert manifestos but with a few nuggets of Catholic truth), one and two. Not to be harsh, and like Perry I don’t believe in the thing either, but I appreciate the irony of writing a 2,500-word post about being completely over something. Then again there’s Newman’s autobiography.
For articles more learned and spiritual than I can come up with there’s Fr Stephen Freeman.
The Pope-hunters From LRC. The left are out for blood. Non-Catholic libertarians aren’t normally ‘haters’ (to use one of the left’s favourite putdowns) like this but the few such respect his rights.
An increasingly desperate secularism can only find meaning through ridiculing the religious.
... is limited specifically to those areas where there are the fewest Republicans: Hollywood, academia, and the media. Whenever similar attitudes start to be directed at corporations or Wall Street, party leaders and activists become very hostile to populism.
I’ve long been acquainted with a version of this. In this case the political leftism is either of the modern kind or comes from the intended charity of orthodox Anglo-Catholicism past (which often described itself as socialist), in this resembling the Democratic politics of city and rust-belt American Roman Catholics and 1930s Catholic Action (Dorothy Day). Theologically sound but economically naïve and politically wrong.
Of course you can be friends with all kinds of people and God uses any means he wants but both as Catholics and as libertarians our alliances with the left just like with the right are always only provisional.
Reason and morality: a necessary connection? Yes: the ancients and the Schoolmen rightly understood reason as conforming to reality not the modern(ist) ‘create your own reality’.
Scandal: when is it whistle-blowing and when is it the sin of detraction?
The evolution of TV-watching. According to my company’s CEO, TV news is still No. 1 but I’ve long thought it’s next in line behind the newspapers we still print as bound to disappear one day at least in its present form. (We’re phasing out the papers over the next five years.) First blogs, now tiny videocams and YouTube: many/most now have the means of production. Wonderful!
Why are there slum-dwellers? Throwing money at people who are not very bright and have a gutter culture feels nice to the naïve but doesn’t help. Add to that it usually means stealing your and my money by force (pay by yesterday or else!) to throw. The answer of course is real equal opportunity: no handouts, no quotas, no collectivist identity politics.
Hooray for mediocrity! Self-esteem claptrap whilst the Japanese and Indians are excelling in maths and science? Dreher acknowledges that for a strapped state school, even mediocrity is hard to reach. That banner does sounds like something ‘The Simpsons’ would make fun of, Seymour Skinner and Edna Krabappel having Groundskeeper Willie put it up in Springfield Elementary. The thing is its leftish fans would say the answer is to throw more stolen money down the state schools.
Binary thinking about the Tea Party, about which I’m very cautiously optimistic. Since we live in the Land Where There are Only Two Sides to Every Question, those are your only choices.
From LRC in honour of America’s tax day My feelings about the Fabs are mixed. As one critic said both one of the best and most overrated bands, in the beginning sort of a karaoke of the best American ’50s sounds (Paul McCartney started off doing impressions of Little Richard), then original early-’60s smooth pop, retro whimsy and finally then-cutting-edge rock. But an instrument of great evil (as an old friend who largely formed my worldview once told me), an emblem of the cultural destruction in their decade. The world may have been better off if they’d remained a cult phenomenon in Liverpool or at most the UK for a couple of years, end of story. That said, as you can hear in this number, songwriter George Harrison had a good libertarian streak (as well as a sincere but misguided religious one) as does everybloke Ringo Starr: ‘Everything government touches turns to crap.’ I guess the boomer fans missed/forgot that. Enjoy the song.
I understand Walter Cronkite is to credit/blame for Beatlemania. After JFK was killed he thought his audience needed cheering up so he reported on this teen craze in England.
The endgame is near. Thomas Knapp notes: Why do I find myself doubting that the right will let the left do all the work of eradicating liberty?
What an activist of 43 years has learnt. Essentially that the political process corrupts. I think I join the cultural right in criticising her call for an end to cultural standards on sexual behaviour. Cultural standards such as the church’s, sì; state standards, no. The church is in the truth business and should be voluntary. It’s none of the state’s business.
On taking back the country from both parties. During the Bush administration and Republican-majority Congress, the rallying cry of liberal Democrats was that it is time to “take our country back from theocrats, neocons and fascist Republicans.” Riiiiight. ‘Question authority, man, but not mine, because I’m better than you; see how cool I am.’ The theocrats were never a threat, the neocons do suck but they’re only the left’s bastards and fascism isn’t limited to the GOP (Mussolini for example was a man of the left). And the current Republican tone is only a replay of the 1990s when they were mimicking us to get back at Clinton. Glad they boxed him in; he ended up the best conservative president in recent memory.
Make TV shows where noble district attorneys figure out how to twist laws around to prosecute anyone they find personally offensive. But treat any defense lawyer who cites the Constitution to defend his clients as slime.
Stealing is not charity any more than if like a digital Robin Hood I borrowed your identity, siphoned a few bucks out of your bank account and gave that to somebody I thought needed it. Interesting line about tithing: the state as substitute church, or the devil is the ape of God.
Liturgical uniformity?No. It’s not traditional and we’ve seen enough of the bad kind of uniformity. So have the American Missal for the Americans, Ordinary Form with panache for the Brits and English Missal (the Extraordinary Form translated with style) as an option for all.
Defining churchmanships. In the combox, the Revd Vicki McGrath remembers the old Episcopalianism: the stress on apostolic succession essentially defined it against (other) mainline Protestantism and gave us in the late Anglo-Catholic movement (which we didn’t see as a movement) the idea that we were in the Catholic Church, as odd as that now seems. The other Bishop Robinson like David Virtue rather sees us historically as at least misguided. In a way they’re right: what we thought was Anglicanism isn’t (answering this). As for the centrism he likes, without strong doctrine and ecclesiology that centre boogies around a bit — so for example in Episcopalianism gay marriage is centrist — and as Newman wrote in his apologia, historically the middle’s not always right, viz. Monophysitism. Starting at old-school Central and coming on board high churchmanship early on, I was just a kid taking in at face value the good liturgics, sonorous prose and, more important, the Catholic doctrine sincerely taught. To the larger church we go!
Like the Tower of Babel, false ecumenism in the form of common texts is crashing down. A mainline counterfeit of the Catholic unity in the Roman Rite and the Byzantine and other Eastern rites. One reason for the failure besides mainline decline is better Roman Rite texts as part of Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival. As Charley has said, the lasting accomplishment of ecumenism is not union but better understanding (me: let’s teach the Protestants about the true faith) so the two sides aren’t trying to kill each other.
Some jottings about the news
