The plight of poor Russian immigrants
Почему всё думают, что это государственный вопрос? (Why does everybody assume the answer must come from the state?) And I don’t mean ‘Are there no jails? Are there no workhouses?’ Are there no Jewish or Russian Orthodox charities and mutual-aid societies?

Holy See to excommunicate embryonic-stem-cell scientists and the politicians who enable them

Bringing the Hagarenes to her Son
A wonderful idea of Joshua Snyder and the writer of this article but probably too optimistic as Muslims and Christians* have known each other for about 1,400 years and the former specifically reject the Trinity and Incarnation, the latter being the real reason for Marian devotion (that she is the Mother of God: we know little else about her life).

*Especially Eastern Christians, both the Orthodox and the Lesser Eastern Churches, sharing much of the same territory and culture (the Muslims got a lot of both from them).

Talking about real money
When ‘conservatives’ blow $500 billion

From Catholic Neocon Observer.

Government to defend marriage from dashing Reginald St Croix
From The Onion

The guilt of the environmentalists
There’s stewardship of God’s creation — conservation and IIRC a good point of crunchy conservatism — and then there’s this

Lt Ehren Watada
The first US officer to refuse to go to Iraq

From LRC.

And from the LRC blog:

‘Sir, no, sir’
Part of what stopped the Vietnam War

And:

Conservative Christians persist in their dangerous delusion that the United States is a Christian nation that will soon come to its senses by passing legislation in conformity with Christ's moral teachings. This means, inevitably, that they are willing to strengthen the control of Cæsar in exactly those areas of life where Cæsar's hand should never intrude.

- Dr Thomas Fleming

Like with the environmentalists, the destructive, sectarian, utopian dream of Plymouth Rock dies hard.

Only you can prevent ... children
Two condom ads, one displaying mainstream society’s hatred of kids and the other accidentally proving the Catholic view of sex and contraception

From The Curt Jester.

‘They believe we are hostile to them’
From Dancing with Sprites

RC reality
The magisterium tells the truth but:

If the Vatican tomorrow decided to ordain women, relax its stand on homosexuality, divorce, or anything else, do you think there would be an uproar in the American Church over it? Of course not.

Roman Catholics are no different from anyone else in society.

Functionally a big Protestant denomination.

Again, ‘as long as it’s a Wal-Mart’ doesn’t work for church.

This is a problem of the entire Christian experience in the face of postmodernity.

From Arturo Vasquez.

Marine in Fahrenheit 9/11 killed in Iraq

$37 million for a project the military doesn’t want?
Like the V-22 Osprey, the plane that can’t fly

Lefty hawks
• Democratic Party neocons, just like the people who brought you total victory in Vietnam and used the benevolent power of the state to end poverty and racism
• Yes, and burnt people to death at Waco and bombed Belgrade for no good reason
• All the evil foreign policy of the Republicans and wrong on abortion on principle!
• They wouldn’t try to use the Protestant religious right but rather would play on the backlash against it
• Their statism proves that they don’t really believe in civil liberties

From Brian Underwood.

More on Murtha
A personally decent man, not really a conservative (a well-meaning Rust Belt Democrat), who finally realised the truth about Mr Bush’s minders’ war

On Messrs Buffett and Gates’ charity
Lest one think they are returning to the socially responsible Christianity of 19th-century gentlemen. Yes, I’m jealous of their wealth, and agree with conservatives and libertarians that one benevolent rich man left alone by the state does far more good than state schemes, but this criticism from the Revd James Konicki and Dr Thomas Fleming via Joshua Snyder still is true. Knock Christian values off their foundation upon Christian theology and you get this.

Idiot RC neocon sites including blogs
Or the enemy of your enemy in the church isn’t necessarily your friend

From the LRC blog via The Gaelic Starover.

P.S. I am 180 both David Virtue and Archbishop Robert Morse on Mr Bush and his minders’ war.

The boutique church: Episcopalianism’s place in the mainline mush

...the Falls Church statement is sadly an all too typical example of what is being produced by "conservative" congregations still remaining within the PECUSA. While they correctly identify the fault line of division being between those who accept and reject the nature and authority of Scripture, and proclaim themselves to be "orthodox" (calling the American Anglican Council "orthodox" is a bad joke), in fact they identify orthodoxy with opposition to homosexuality while swallowing the camels of women's ordination, easy divorce and remarriage, contraception, etc.

And liturgical revision, Protestant views on the Eucharist, etc. They are creating the Episcopal Church, Mk II, without Broad Churchmen but without state coercion as well so it will eventually fail.

...the Episcopal Church begins its process of homosexual ghettoization. Stuart Koehl made a great reference to "Liturgy Queens" the other day and that is exactly what is going to happen. Homosexuals enthralled with the æsthetics of the sacramental rites and the intellectual cachet will flock to the Episcopal Church. Heterosexual families will drift away in twos and threes until all that remains are a bunch of stupid old hippies and gay men.

Is there hope in the broader Anglican Communion? I don't know, since the ... Church of England is infected with a lot of the same rot, and is even more desperate to shore up a disappearing membership.

I’m still thankful for the good it’s done — baptising and introducing people like me to the Catholic faith wrapped in Gothic architecture, good music, the idiom of Coverdale, Cranmer and the King James Bible, and tolerant conservatism — and hope somehow and somewhere all that will last.

How its separation from the Anglican Communion might play out

St Athanasius never proposed a two-tier fellowship with the Arian heretics.

- Ed Pacht

According to the article, and not the least bit surprisingly, Anglican liberals are quite upset. They sound like spoiled children of indulgent parents who suddenly find themselves suddenly getting punished for misbehavior previously indulged. Which they are, actually.

Hypocrites
Now that liberals have been given a good scare by the Pope (who might actually follow through and partially repair the Mass) suddenly they pretend to care how the man in the pew feels

How to do the Mass in English.

It is possible to have, as does the pope, a genuinely liberal mind and still be a perfectly orthodox Christian, a point not seen by those who equate orthodox Christianity with fundamentalism, repression, simple-mindedness, and the like.

From Mere Comments.

On trying to go back to your own tradition and finding hardly anything left
Anthony Sacramone on rediscovering a hard-to-find Missouri Synod Lutheranism

From First Things.

A house divided
The splintered Protestant religious right or why there won’t be an American theocracy (Deo gratias). And a pox on both their houses: I don’t like Slate’s condescension much better as it’s same as that ‘Law & Order: SVU’ shown last night demonising pro-lifers.

Political correctness breeds bigotry
Of course — both see people collectively as races first and individuals second

Economic effect of the Iraq war on US

Lying about quitting Iraq
Just like when establishment ‘conservatives’ say they’re cutting government (deficit) spending they’re still doing it and have no intention of stopping

Something’s gotta give, though, and in time you’ll see a real withdrawal/Iraqisation and a Saigon-like ending, a victory probably for a 1979 Iran-like government.

From LRC.

UK: Big Brother database to record lives of all children
From Brian Underwood

As if we needed another reason not to take Rush Limbaugh seriously

Murtha: US poses top threat to world peace
From truthout

‘Morality is for sissies’
Or ‘crackpot realism’ from the neoconnerie

From Verbum ipsum.

Viva el Cristo Rey
Martyred by the Spanish Republicans, those darlings of the left

If we had listened to the Popes on social justice this wouldn’t have happened.

- Essentially what a Spanish bishop said to Catherine de Hueck at the time

Corporal work of mercy: 30,000 aborted babies buried in Vietnam

From Katolik Shinja.

Newspapers are dying but the news is thriving
Old news, and of course it’s to do with new media like this one

My skills are transferable and I can make the switch but I think as long as there are small-town politics, high-school kids in sport and society balls, and money to be made from selling ads on those pages, my job is relatively secure.

Reading the article carefully I can see that in this medium (hint) my skills are still needed!

From Slate.

For the public good
From LRC

Jeff Culbreath on crunchy conservatism
• Which seems to have been called ‘granola conservatism’ (as you can see in this blog’s list of links) before Rod Dreher chose something alliterative.
• My old friend Jeff and I have similar differences as he says he and the crunchies would (he disagrees with a main purpose of this blog, anti-war activism).
• That said I too have reservations about the crunchy-con enterprise as a search of the blog shows.
• But it still strikes me as an American cousin of young fogeyhood, which of course isn’t a bad thing.

The story the NYT refused to kill
From Wendy McElroy

Iraq: fool me twice
From CounterPunch

Moral issues ≠ legal issues
From Huw Raphael

Mr Truman’s war
From Katolik Shinja

Mr Bush’s minders don’t care about ‘freedom’
They’re staunch allies of Saudi Arabia (some of whose subjects were most of the 9/11 hijackers), which persecutes Christians

Porn and the Sacred Heart
Now that I’ve got your attention...

From the time I was introduced to hardcore porn when I was eleven, I had been counting on marital sex to eventually save me from my obsession. But Jesus had something else in mind.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no prude and glad that, thanks to changes in society from flattering fashions to interest in nutrition and exercise, more people are healthier and more attractive for longer in their lives and having great (married, licit) sex. (Forty-year-olds don’t look old anymore, because they’re not! Deo gratias.) But this story is a powerful reminder that in God’s plan it’s not the be-all and end-all that advertising*, etc. in secular culture make it out to be.

From Cælum et terra.

*Not only does sex sell — what’s the hot model in the soft-sell advert to do with the quality of the car or mortgage being flogged? — but the perpetually aroused spend and consume more.

A black convert boomlet?
• The article is a bit condescending — this venerable tradition is seen as ‘colourful and ethnic’ (as misrepresented on ‘Taxi’ and ‘Seinfeld’); isn’t that special? — and doesn’t clearly distinguish between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox* (such as Copts and Ethiopians) but to be fair the rites are similar.
• Search the blog for more on Fr Moses Berry, an Eastern Orthodox priest.
• Also search for info on Bob Marley, who renounced Rastafarianism and died in the Ethiopian Church.
• Of course Ethiopians are no more related to the ancestors of American blacks than Russians are to Spaniards (opposite ends of the continent!) but it’d be better to join an Oriental Orthodox church than apostasise to Islam! I understand the latter participated in the slave trade, so Roots notwithstanding it’s an historically ignorant choice for asserting black pride. Then again the founders of the Nation of Islam knew next to nothing about real Islam: it’s obviously a reverse-racist lodge invented by apostates from Christianity.

Photo: Three Eastern Orthodox clerics: click to enlarge

On a related note, Recognised Internet Authority™ Stuart Koehl has long noted that neo-paganism is obviously an apostate Christian creation with its ‘harm no-one’ ethics. (Or, the white middle class intellectually goes slumming with feel-good ‘white magic’, etc.) Somebody sacrificing a chicken or a person (Aztec practice) to please the sun-god is a real pagan.

*Formerly accused of being Monophysites (‘Jesus has no human nature’, the teaching of Eutyches) because of language barriers and political reasons: the Oriental Orthodox countries hated the Greeks (Eastern Orthodox) and didn’t want to be in their empire. The Greeks then declared them outside the church.

Social isolation is becoming a mainstream problem

‘I don’t feel spiritual’
For those who belong to rites without the customs of daily Mass or extra-liturgical devotions to the Sacrament, and for those who have those things, there are always forms of the office, done either alone or corporately: full-fledged liturgical prayer and the second most important prayer of the church yet too little known to layfolk. You don’t need a priest to have them and can pray them at home.

Some versions:
• Roman
• Byzantine
• Anglican

From Fr Jim Tucker.

Entertainers: what don’t they know?
I’m not a WND fan but the insightful (and incite-ful?) Ilana Mercer has this to say about the overrated (not the sexiest woman in the world) Angelina Jolie

On the now-mainstream Marxist* belief that blacks can be absolved of responsibility for crimes (actually profoundly racist):

When speaking about crime and culpability (punishment is not an option), left-liberals like Jolie use the passive voice. Crimes are caused, not committed. Why, then, do Africans butcher, mutilate and rape their compatriots with clockwork predictability? Why do grown, Sierra Leonenean men hack off the arms of little Sierra Leonenean girls and rape them to shreds? Why is this repeated in Uganda, Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia – you name them?

Jolie offers a tautology: It’s ‘from the violence’ – ‘they had their limbs cut off from the violence.’ Or if you find this redundancy meaningless, she whips another bunny from her hat: blame ‘drugs, perhaps.’

…When it comes to Western inaction or American stinginess (which Jolie codifies as ‘the broader picture’), our iconic brainiac is quick to recognize both evil and linear causality: “We have – we colonized them,” she stammers…”

On national leaders with a hot-line to the Almighty:

Like Idi Amin, and the Prophet of Peace before him, Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, justifies his ...senseless slaughter with reference to a vision from God.

Like a certain adopted-Texan US president beloved by WND.

Note to Jolie: One doesn't need a multiple regression analysis to deduce that, besides endemic, age-old tribal strife, Islam** contributes more to the equation of violence in Africa than, say, lack of education. The latter makes for resignation; the former for extreme agitation.

Be that as it may, what’s it to do with us? The liberals have a point contra Mercer and WND: fix the causes of Middle Eastern anger towards us and most of the problems will go away. (Stop propping up the state of Israel and stop stationing Western troops in the Middle East.) Those few loons who do ‘hate our freedoms’ can be swatted like a fly.

(WND fans are just looking for an excuse to send Latino kids overseas to ‘kill rag-heads’, and be killed, while they can stay home and, based on the adverts on the page, have a nice wank to Ann Coulter while listening to the mellow minstrelsy of Pat Boone.)

Unsurprisingly in her inarticulate way like ‘the herd’ who adore her, though she seems admirably and correctly against the war on Iraq, Mrs Pitt is also a statist who thinks government money extorted from citizens can solve the world’s problems (the neoconnerie are shown to be only a kind of liberal that way):

"[I]t's – it's done. It's – we're there. You start to see – the more times I have been to Washington, the more times you talk to somebody about, we have got to get money for AIDS orphans, or we have to get money for – whether it be any kind of response to any tragedy, often, the answer is, well, we're at – we are at war right now. A lot of money's going to war right now. We don't have – so – so, you start to look at it in a different way."

As for people like Anderson Cooper I’d have less of a problem with them if, as Mercer suggests, they’d come clean as good old-fashioned (rich) WASPs with a sense of social responsibility/noblesse oblige. In short be Christians and not parlour Marxists.

I won’t sign onto saying that colonialism was good for Africa*** but will join Mercer in praising Western values. It would have been better if Africa had followed through on the real meaning of the Statue of Liberty (nothing to do with immigration): that people adopt constructive change in their native lands.

*Though Marx and his friends weren’t exactly enlightened about race itself.

**Worth a look: Pat Buchanan on ‘an idea whose time has come’. From Katolik Shinja.

***I think she’s being provocative for its own sake here, maybe hoping for book deals like Ann Coulter’s.

Fun fact for St-Jean Baptiste Day
Or Julie Andrews didn’t come up with the musical scale:

Western music has... been influenced by the Church in countless ways, beginning with the very use of musical notation ... [neumes, square notes in Gregorian chant]. An especially interesting and little-known example ... involves the Divine Office for the feast of St John the Baptist, which uses a hymn called Ut queant laxis. [Quoting writer Michael Foley:] ‘An Italian monk called Guido of Arezzo (d. 1050) noticed that the melody of the hymn ascended precisely one note of the diatonic scale of C at each verse.’ He therefore decided to name the notes after the first syllable of each verse of the first stanza:

Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum, solve polluit
Labii reatum, sancte Ioannes.

[O for thy spirit, holy John,
Lips sin-polluted, fettered tongues to loosen;
So by thy children might thy deeds of wonder
Meetly be chanted.]

Ut was later changed in several countries to [the more euphonious] do.

- Thomas Woods from Latin Mass

‘Futurama’ is coming back (poster)
In 2008. From Samer al-Batal.

The latest WMD scare
Or another reason for Pennsylvanians to vote for Bob Casey instead as the lesser of two evils

From the LRC blog.

A hot button: whites adopting black children
Most of the problem, it seems, comes from nasty blacks resenting people who culturally are white

Historical note: I’ve heard Jackie Robinson on film and he had no black accent.

Calling vs occupation

The trouble with pro-war Christians
• ‘My Republican father hated this war’

My father called himself an "old-fashioned fiscal Republican" – meaning, he wasn't keen on social spending for the faceless public although, as was obvious to all who knew him, he could never say no to an individual in need – even at great cost to himself.

Daddy voted for both Bushes…but in the last years of his life, he grew increasingly unhappy with Bush Jr's war habit. Living for most of his life in a naval area, and having been a young sailor long ago in WWII, my father could really identify with all those fresh-scrubbed faces of military men and women flashed on the news, young people who used to be individuals but were now one of what some like to call "a number": US casualties in Iraq. He didn't see them as just statistics, but as well-meaning kids who'd had no idea, when they signed up, what they were in for.

For my father, as for many Americans, the clothing, language and mannerisms of Middle-Eastern people made them seem terribly foreign, inexplicable, or as he often assumed, "hot-headed" – especially when every single videoclip on TV showed Iraqis or Afghanis in the midst of war on burning streets.

But images of grieving dads holding their bloodied children, looking around desperately for medical help or solace? The sight of this made Iraqis and Afghanis seem quite real, understandable, and human to him. Daddy's compassion for grieving fathers often caused him to turn the channel, and eventually to turn against this "bad idea" of a war.

Daddy was a very good man, a Christian for sure... He was very uncomfortable – even embarrassed – by the GOP's new strategy of pushing "fanatical" religion into political life.

Like this attractive but seemingly sanctimonious and bratty girl who felt entitled to preach at her graduation, the latest martyr for the Protestant religious right. What she said may have been true and sweet but here’s some historical context. The same attempt to be impartial that muzzled her also in theory keeps the state schools from trying to convert Catholics, which 150 years ago they tried to do to immigrant kids. (Which is why the newcomers saved their pennies to build parochial schools.) The trouble is that this Protestantism has changed into secular humanism and they still proselytise (where Jared and Brittany can learn about Heather’s two mommies and how society is so mean to them, or how to put on a condom). Yes, teachers often are anti-Christian. There’s also the issue of whether there should be state schools at all but that’s for another day.

Semper why?

A friend of mine who used to cover wars for a living tells me I'm foolish to be so influenced by Marine Corps propaganda. Contemporary Marines are, if anything, more dangerous to civilians than the Army, because of the way they're juiced up in basic training (see Jarhead, the book or movie).

From LRC.

The mainline Protestant mush gets something right
Along with ending the Iraq war and divesting from the state of Israel: medicinal marijuana

The Hungarian uprising 50 years on: an unintended parallel
Yes, the Iraqi freedom fighters should be inspired by the religious Magyars who fought an imperial occupation by a superpower

Row over Nike World Cup advert
I think it’s a marvellous picture, art that’s too cool and steeped in religious symbolism to sell trainers. It doesn’t belong in church but it’s not offensive in itself. Quite the opposite. Like a hipper version of the end of Braveheart. The primal soul of England: Catholic.

From AmericanPapist.

Good-bye, ‘TOTP’ (more)
Like record shops or records for that matter, another victim of changes in the music business, especially the medium you’re using right now. As its original presenter said on the radio, like the hipper Radio Caroline its work is done and has been passed on to others in new media that do it much better. American readers may recognise it as pinched from ‘Bandstand’.

I really can't be bothered to go through the whole "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust..." speech. Does anyone mind if I mime it?

The mainline merger into mush marches on
• Note the misleading MSM headline. Real meaning: ‘Traditional Christians are mean to gays’, which would be news indeed to Anglo-Catholics* I’ve known for up to 20 years. All are by definition welcome at a Catholic church. Even practising gays can come and pray, but not preach or receive Communion.
• The bit about the Presbys reminds me of seeing on the tele last night the amusingly surnamed Alan Cumming, possibly the world’s gayest Scot.
• Ed Pacht sums it up nicely: It would appear that the decision has been made to cut loose entirely from historic Christianity, and to be as offensive as possible in so doing. From this to invading Iraq, acting like some bratty teenagers... no wonder Europe thinks what it does of Americans.

*The site’s third most popular page for viewing and book sales, now slightly remodelled for your viewing pleasure.

Air raids on Afghans win war... for Taleban
Military expert William Lind explains how an army and air force still designed for World War II don’t ‘get’ guerrilla combat

From LRC.

US try at rehabbing image falls short
From truthout

Watching Blair sink

Israel engineers another cover-up

From CounterPunch.

Met reveals innovative strategy in War on Terror™
Conviction by Elimination

From The Rockall Times.

‘Enemy imaging’
Or ‘let’s revive the two-minutes’-hate stuff from 1979 — “Ayatollah Assahola”, ha ha ha — to gear up the proles for another invasion’

And if/when they do invade, who will they send? As a letter to the editor of my workplace pointed out this week, in a local rich high school’s graduating class (lots of SUVs with pro-Bush stickers) only two are going into the military. Now if the war is necessary to survival, to protect one’s own country, why is that so? (Search the blog for ‘Why are there such creatures as College Republicans?’)

From The Gaelic Starover.

Lux in tenebris?
St Paul’s-by-the-Lake, Chicago

Calvinism shatters into Unitarianism
American mainline Presbyterian shenanigans

Black fatherlessness: blame the state and the dole, not slavery
From Katolik Shinja

Reason not to join Amnesty International

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

- Louis D. Brandeis

As blog reader David Smith wrote recently paraphrasing the great G.K. Chesterton, liberals are often right about the problems but wrong about the solutions. One side wants a powerful state to tax and spend on invading Iraq, the other the Sudan.

Iraq war: ‘not conservatism’

From antiwar.com.

Lex orandi, lex credendi
Charley Wingate on the idiocy of liturgical revision, how making church childish doesn’t work and the anomaly of kids who agree with liberal church workers, a greying lot

As I answered this person yesterday in a private message-board:

At church this morning, a good friend of mine who serves as a cantor talked about theology a bit and I mentioned to her that I was an Episcopalian. We briefly talked about General Convention and how the effects may even split the Anglican Communion even more.

She also made a point that Roman Catholicism is still basically one big unit, despite some issues, the church with its orthodoxy is till somewhat a united body, rather than the Anglicans who are split into many splinter groups.

What Roman Catholicism has going for it are 1) the magisterium, which points to 2) a well-defined theology on paper, like the Lutherans. In practice it is just as crazy and divided as the Anglican Communion and often low liturgically too.

I guess my question would be is this:

1) Were we once a large united body as one Anglican community throughout the world sort of like Roman Catholicism is?

Sort of. It was more like a mildly Protestant version of the Orthodox communion. Anglicanism is really a collection of independent dioceses voluntarily associated. Before ‘the end of the world’ in the 20th century all had very basic credal orthodoxy in common and most shared the BCP (Protestant but Christian and implicitly Catholic liturgically). So except the very high and the very low — the Broad Churchmen hadn’t taken over yet — you had worldwide (in the British Empire and its breakaways like the US) a shared faith and a shared liturgy.

2) If so, what caused the initial split and was the issue of women being ordained a very big factor here in our own country?

My theory is that without state coercion the Elizabethan compromise that created Anglicanism doesn’t work and so the four brands of churchmanship — Catholic, Central, Low and Broad — naturally fly apart.

To be more specific, the problems pre-date the attempted ordination of women. Credal orthodoxy was fatally compromised at the Pike trial in the US in the 1960s — he was acquitted (but had the integrity to quit), which meant you could be an Anglican bishop and no longer Christian in your theology. (As recently as the 1920s an Episcopal bishop was deposed for denying the creeds are literally true.)

Fr Chandler Holder Jones brings up this item:

Union with Methodists?
My comment

Ukrainian Catholic supremo still asking to be a patriarch
Search the blog on this subject and you’ll read: great for the internal affairs of the UGCC, terrible for relations with the Orthodox possibly scuttling corporate reunion. Simply put the UGCC doesn’t care about the latter, or really being Eastern, or obeying Rome: it’s all about nationalism (Galicianism really, as most Ukrainians are Russian and don’t belong to that church), simultaneously showing you’re neither Russian nor Polish. A spite religion.

Russian Church’s liberal bishop in the UK has switched to the Greeks
Again there’s the irony in dealing with these people that the most admirably fervent, observant and Catholic-minded like the ‘undiplomatic’ Russians are the ones who don’t want to talk to Western Catholics whilst liberals seem friendly but for the wrong reasons (erm, get a sick-bag and imagine a pseudo-Byzantine Novus Ordo celebrated by a woman: a microscopic number of nominal Orthodox sound like that). Happily, though, most Orthodox ‘liberals’ like the late, great Meyendorff and Schmemann were/are really simply mystical, charismatic (in a good way) traditionalists, right reactionaries compared to Western churches’ Modernists. (Example: The attempted ordination of women ‘is the death of all dialogue’.)

Final rites for Fido and Fluffy
Somewhere a Muslim family with lots of kids are laughing their heads off

Neocons = neosoviets
From LRC

An historic anniversary
Unwittingly for liberty thanks to people with no interest in the subject

There were some who favoured admission on religious grounds. Not unlike some Zionist Christians today, they believed that they had a duty to admit them. They wanted to convert the Jews and hasten the Second Coming. Even though the Jews were re-admitted, this plan does not appear to have worked.

From David Holford.

On the Episcopal Church’s first lady presiding bishop

A bird flipped at the [Anglican] Communion and the Church Catholic.

- Fr Christopher Cantrell

There’s an interesting com-box message in Huw Raphael’s blog, an unconfirmed story about Mrs Jefferts Schori’s mother.

Update: The former Revd Alice Linsley will join the Antiochian Orthodox.

From All Too Common.

Art-film clichés
Thought of this watching the previews before A Prairie Home Companion yesterday.

Rushmore isn’t like that. It’s worth seeing.

From Charles Featherstone.

Happy 64th, Sir Paul

Rod Dreher and Slate on Garrison Keillor
Saw the film. It dragged in places and seemed self-indulgent of Keillor and Robert Altman but Meryl Streep is still beautiful (and can sing, it turns out — Lindsay Lohan can as well) and Woody Harrelson and the other fellow singing ‘Bad Jokes’ captured the folksiness and snark of the show. I understand it all started as Keillor’s way of sorting out his provincial past by making fun of it but he and his act mellowed and it became a kind of tribute. I’ve read Lake Wobegon Days, heard fiddler Peter Ostroushko live (search the blog for more on both) and liked them.

Of course I don’t like Mr Bush’s presidency any more than Keillor does but can imagine the arrogance and implicit error that Dreher describes.

On complaining about RC
Reasons and limits (more)



‘I said we don’t molest boys anymore — what more do you people want? Yeesh!’

From Deacon’s Blog.

In ‘Fluffya’
Hoisted with one’s own (bolshie) petard?
• AFAIK Ms Wicks didn’t do anything wrong to her workers.
• Spoilt middle-class kids playing romantic revolutionaries... like their boss at this posh little eatery?
• I wouldn’t have a problem with her if she were honest about being... a benevolent old WASP employer with a sense of social responsibility (yes, noblesse oblige) like the Christian John Wanamaker many years ago.

Common sense about gay marriage
And its consequence of state power used against religious people

Palestine and the state of Israel: cut ’em both loose!
Or why waste time and money on a piece of land with no oil under it and thus of no use even for selfish reasons? Of course the answers are 1) ‘a Jewish vote’ playing on 2) World War II guilt (not seeing the historical irony of persecuting the Palestinians) as well as 3) bad theology.

From Verbum ipsum.

Blog: What Does the Prayer Really Say?
From Fr John Zuhlsdorf, who was a Lutheran to begin with so we know he’s theologically and liturgically literate, describing objectivity and Godwardness (deprecatory language isn’t decorative), decoding mainstream church-worker gobbledygook* and showing how to type a biretta’d smiley

Change a keystroke and you get an Orthodox cleric in a skufia: {]:¬)>

On altar girls:

Has anyone told these girls yet that they cannot be priests? Like, ever?

On ‘big words’:

In Italian, the word is "calice". It isn’t a huge leap... is it? Remember. Those who say that we need to hear "cup" and those sorts of words essentially think we are are stupid.

*Evasive (‘mistakes were made’), obfuscating, patronising corporate talk, the kind of affected class Paul Fussell would have a field day with and I see as my job to eradicate from print.

The Orthodox tradition
Icons in the bathroom?
Of course there are good reasons why not!

And if you scroll down you can read that a claim often made that the Patriarchate of Constantinople depends on American diner money to survive may not be true.

What mainstream RCs think of us
• Here is the real story of the sincere but completely-at-sea Fr Ignatius and a picture. (He eventually was priested by the infamous Joseph René Vilatte who by then wasn’t Old Catholic anymore but a free-lance bishop, a vagante.)
• There is a penumbra of a scintilla of a point, and in 25+ years of doing this stuff I’ve seen and, early on, ignorantly fallen into overwrought piety, and seen religion abused as a mere expression of gayness, but abusus non tollit usum. (Maybe they didn’t teach Latin anymore at Mgr Stein’s seminary.)
• Unsurprisingly Mass-and-office Catholicism (search the blog) isn’t on this fellow’s radar.
• ‘Hasidic Catholics’? Devout observation of traditions fuelled by a charismatic (in a good way) joy? That’s supposed to be a putdown?
• Who’s been handing out the papal honours these past few decades?
• In fact I heard this stuff from mainstream RC priests 20 years ago. Some things never change. How reassuring.
• Anglo-Catholics: they don’t want you. Stay put.
• Let’s have a look at how smashing a success your renewal scheme has been, Monsignor (more).
• Mgr Stein sounds like he would have been happy in late 16th-century England except for all that highfalutin theology in artsy-fartsy language (like Shakespeare or something) in the Prayer Book and those pesky offices he’d have to read in church every day. ‘The Queen says “Renew! Be open to the Spirit!” or be hanged, drawn and quartered!’ Those were the days.
• Want mainline Protestantism dumbed down, without all that nice stuff, and maybe a couple of residual devotions to patronise the ethnics? Then Mgr Stein’s diocese is for you!

US government increasingly turning to data mining
From John Boyden

The new sexy ADA on ‘Law & Order’
Alana de la Garza

Update: she’s hot in character.

Also, snappy, stylish but nasty cop Joe Fontana, played by ex-Chicago policeman Dennis Farina, is being replaced with Milena Govich?! I reckon that awful show ‘Conviction’* she was in was cancelled.

*Or ‘let’s ruin “Law & Order” by casting, soundtracking and writing characters and sub-plots for it like “Ally McBeal”’.

US RC bishops approve improved Mass texts
Closer to translation than paraphrase. I’ll believe it when I see it, when pro multis is rendered correctly and ‘eastward-facing’ becomes the norm.

Christianity and women
Just like the average semi-churched (culturally lapsed Protestant) Anglo-American thinks church history in general is thus — ‘In the beginning there was God. And the Bible somehow. And Jesus. And all was right. Then (dum-dum-dummm!) those Catholics came along and mucked it all up (until the founder of my denomination set things right again)’ — so he thinks this about the church and the fair sex.

To give credit where it’s due, a de-bunking TV programme from Presbyterian minister D. James Kennedy had scholars point out that gnostics, who by definition looked down on the flesh including sex, not only didn’t treat women better than the church did (and their scriptures show that attitude) but would have found a Jesus who married and had sex utterly repugnant.

While we’re on the subject of that silly film again, here’s Lee Penn’s debunking article. (Members of Opus Dei don’t wear monk’s habits or have mescaline parties — some do use Spanish monastic-style physical penances — but then again Dan Brown doesn’t know much about religion.)

As I’ve said, debunking God as we think we know him as a hypothetical exercise has been done and better, from the plot of Star Trek V to Clive Barker’s novel Imajica.

From the LRC blog.

A traditionalist priest in Ireland on the right kind of ecumenism

Reform though can be radical even when authentic. We must all brace ourselves for immense changes in our relationship with the Orthodox for example. As undiplomatic a figure as Patriarch Alexis of Moscow has recently stated that Benedict will be the Pope whose “actions will become famous and will be remembered” for their positive effect upon relations between the two Churches. Too many traditionalists, precisely because they are not authentically so, see nothing but scandal here. On the contrary, the reunion of East and West is the most radically traditional program imaginable. Successfully accomplished, it would revolutionize the position of Christianity in the world and give pause to the secularists. These last are in triumphant mood, but they have met their match in Benedict.

Samer al-Batal writes: Wonderful! To see not simply tolerance and reserve, but hear an actual note of enthusiasm from traditionalists – not to mention a correction addressed to traditionalists with the wrong opinion – towards a plan of further improving relations with the East rather than finding them with the attitude of the Remnant paper lumping such a thing up under the label of ‘courting the schismatic enemy’ with the rest of the litany of complaints of scandal such as promoting homosexuality in seminaries* is music to one’s ears. This is more important because traditionalists open to the East are better relied upon to achieve progress on common ground with the Orthodox than the patronising gestures by Vatican officials who would like to see the Orthodox go the way of the Novus Ordo. The pope needs all the help he can get.

*And what that causes.

Populist nationalists vs global progressivists
I’m a libertarian version of the former (censoring the Internet is a stupid idea).

From Rod Dreher (writing about David Brooks).

Why home schooling > state or even independent schools
And self-education better still

The price of madness

On 9/11, one of my colleagues and I were watching videotape of the planes hitting the World Trade Center earlier that day. He asked my response to this surreal atrocity.... Americans were now going to have to do some very deep soul-searching to discover why so many people in the world have such an intense hatred for America that they could do this...

Which on 9/11 I knew should happen but wouldn’t:

To this day, most Americans – be they for or against the invasion of Iraq; be they Democrat or Republican, “conservative” or “liberal” – show no disposition to confront the deeper implications of all this.

How did an America of H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, James J. Hill, Henry David Thoreau, and Anne Hutchinson manage to become a nation of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Halliburton, and Condoleezza Rice? How did the spiritual voice of a Ralph Waldo Emerson get replaced by Pat Robertson? What epidemic of pests has eaten away at the timbers of the White House since the days of Thomas Jefferson, producing an infestation of such anti-social insects as the Clintons and the Bushes? How was Tom Paine toppled as the all-time best-selling author by the likes of such scrawlers as Al Franken and Ann Coulter?

Of course Robertson and Emerson are really in the same spectrum of Protestant private judgement as Calvinism inevitably shatters into Unitarianism (as Archbishop Robert Morse said).

Saw Coulter on the box last night — obviously an affluent Connecticut WASP slumming and revelling in all the attention. (Even sounds a bit like Katharine Hepburn.) Somewhat pretty but with little really to say. An entertainer in the same genre as rude comedians. Rush Limbaugh in a little black dress.

The war in Iraq provides a microcosmic, time-lapse record of the moral collapse of a once decent society.

And don’t blame the gays, Hollywood or the devil’s music.

No, to make any fundamental challenge to such wholesale political wrongdoing requires a resource that most Americans gladly abandoned long ago: a set of clear and focused transcendent principles.

Which of course true religion offers.

In an age in which a collective mindset is expected to drown out the voice of the individual, philosophic principles have been replaced by public opinion polls.

Herman Hesse criticized a journalist who stated, in the years surrounding World War I, that a concern for the inner-focused life was “introverted rubbish.” Such a viewpoint would doubtless be shared by most modern Americans, including the war-whooping evangelicals* who make a pretense of being religious as they cheer on a war that the founder of their religion would have condemned.

The world’s schoolyard bully

From LRC.

*And other Christians.

Corpus Christi

...known in the calendars of the [Eastern Catholic] Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and the Ruthenians

Where it doesn’t belong because it’s not native to those rites. The Christian East never had any serious threat to Catholic belief in the Sacrament as Jesus’ one ‘full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice’ made present and the complete change of the elements — no large home-grown Protestant movements* and before that in mediæval times no Berengarius — so devotions to it outside the Divine Liturgy never happened. They weren’t needed. Instead, the early church’s emphases and piety are retained there: only one altar in church, only one Liturgy per day on it and the emphasis on the Sacrament in the Liturgy as symbolic food and drink. Exception: the laity’s full prostration to the ground during the procession with the Sacrament in the Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified Gifts (which is Vespers and Communion from the Reserved Sacrament) during Orthodox Great Lent.

(The Melkite service for Benediction seems entirely Byzantine Rite and is orthodox and very pretty but in fact is not part of the rite.)

*The Russians had the charismatic-like Molokans and Doukhobors but those churches remained tiny. Actually they’re like ‘oneness Pentecostals’: theologically they are no longer Christian.

‘A new day for Iraqis’
Samer al-Batal writes: The ‘girl blog from Iraq’ on Zarqawi and a tiresome, overused slogan

So now that Zarqawi is dead, and because according to Bush and our Iraqi puppets he was behind so much of Iraq's misery - things should get better, right? The car bombs should lessen, the ethnic cleansing will come to a halt, military strikes and sieges will die down… That's what we were promised, wasn't it? That sounds good to me. Now - who do they have to kill to stop the Ministry of Interior death squads, and trigger-happy foreign troops?

Samer: The man was likely more responsible for Shi’ite deaths than fighting American troops. (Not long before he bought it, he pre-occupied himself with bashing Hizbullah.) To add to that, armed violence in the country is decentralised, and so the poster boy’s demise should not be expected to hamper or put a stop to the ongoing attacks against military forces.

The bad company we sometimes keep in the anti-war camp
Samer: The gnostic reverend presents us with his concocted scenario of conflict between two polar principles: Unitarian tripe mixed with liberation theology’s worship of a worldly Christ vs. a mocking caricature of orthodox Christianity with its beliefs in the Church and its evangelical mission, salvation, and the divine Christ, the latter of the two packages in its genuine form being mistaken for something with which only Protestant pro-Bush neo-cons from the Bible Belt hold exclusive rights of association.

An anti-imperialist position and valid points on past mistakes involving the Church and the state as well as the cowardice of certain prelates today in the arena of politics don’t help in changing much of this from the load of codswallop that it is. [End.]

It’s like what’s wrong with Sojourners except I understand Jim Wallis is a Christian.

The world nuclear stage and non-proliferation
A glance by The Christian Science Monitor

Bill Buckley as a man, not a political pundit
Samer: Political differences aside, he has proven himself in action to be a good man and Christian, says Joe Sobran, inspired to write this column upon hearing that the man now has emphysema (Lord, in thy mercy: hear our prayer)

Gaeilge-related news for Daithí Mac Lochlainn:

Irish tongues are wagging in US classrooms
Samer: Interesting that it and Arabic share a common feature in the matter of possession: in the case of a definitive noun (referring to the possessed, or the noun not in the genitive case), the definite article is dropped, so ‘house of the man’, without ‘the’ before ‘house’. Also, like in Arabic, a common word order is verb-subject-object.

Pope: Rome and Constantinople, ‘truly sister Churches’
That’s pretty good except Constantinople isn’t a synonym for the Orthodox, like Rome is for Western Catholicism, any more than Bradford is for England or the UK. They’re a communion of churches with no capital.

Samer: Not so interesting as news, but there is a nice, almost paragraph-long excerpt from the Passion of Andrew, a 6th-century narrative

Google’s giant super-computing plant revealed

Britain: Nanny state’s Dad Pack
The boffins discover: to be a good husband and father, don’t have affairs while your wife is pregnant. Who knew? Now men can learn this from a taxpayer-funded information pack.

The Great Pink Scare
• Of course scapegoating and violation of civil liberties are nothing new... and they’re back, rather the point of showing this.
• The church is right (and as the Pet Shop Boys sang ages ago): it’s a sin. It’s also none of the state’s business.

Dumping and flipping redundant churches

The property is dumped and flipped to unsuspecting not-for-profits or other owners at a low price. The new owners cannot support the cost of repairs/maintenance and the property deteriorates. This often adds to the blight in already depressed neighborhoods. The magic is that the Diocese is absolved from responsibility for these structures. Rather than the Bishop ending up in court for code violations, the not-for-profit does.

From Deacon’s Blog.

Secular scorn for parenthood doesn’t make sense
Even for purely selfish reasons

They're raising the people who will pay your Social Security benefits* and defend your country when you're past your prime.

Also, atheists do get into a state over belief in someone they say doesn’t exist.

From Mere Comments.

*Which will run out anyway — it’s arguably a state Ponzi scheme — but the point remains that the young will take care of you. At least you hope so.

Diverse clergy call for torture ban
The right kind of ecumenism/interfaith cooperation

The Protestant origins of US state schools and Prohibition
Proselytising Catholic immigrants and demonising drink

From Katolik Shinja.

L’Eglise — c’est nous!
David Virtue reports from Columbus, Ohio:

Bob Williams, of the Episcopal News Service indicated that a name change was in the works and that ECUSA will now be known as The Episcopal Church. Since there are 16 countries that make up the Episcopal Church, he said, it would be better to refer to The Episcopal Church, or TEC, rather than ECUSA which is in just one country. In the House of Deputies, outgoing president George Werner repeated the same news. "There are 16 other nations. The Episcopal Church is global." This seems to be a part of their strategy to emphasize their global involvement and concern with the wider Anglican world. It also sends a subtle message that, should the Anglican Communion decide to expel ECUSA, it would not just be throwing out the U.S. Church, but poorer places like Haiti and Ecuador.

Global, eh? I thought the Catholic Church was global and Anglican meant simply the part that happened to be in England. The Anglican Communion itself is a kind of perversion of that, a rival catholicity based on ‘empah’.

Now it seems the Episcopalians are bracing for being chucked out of the Communion* and are posing as a kind of spite communion of their own. More pseudo-catholicity.

Talk about delusions of grandeur! (Well, these are white upper-middle-class people... the main reason why this tiny, shrinking denomination gets inordinate media coverage.**) The US and a few protectorates in the Western Hemisphere = ‘global’. Rather like a city’s airport that has a couple of flights to Canada and Mexico calling itself ‘international’.

Jonathan Munn notes: ECUSA can’t really call itself the Episcopal Church at all. In the first place, it is only an episcopal church, the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox being [among the] others. [End.]

And given that ECUSA is in communion with the ELCA Lutherans who are in communion with the Presbyterian Church USA, Reformed Church, Moravian Church and United Church of Christ, how ‘episcopal?’ is it really? I still say that eventually all these white upper-middle-class liberal denominations will merge into one bowl of mush and continue to shrink.

*More on that here and here.

**That and the similar terminology make it a fun working model for liberals who want to spite Rome.

Amnesty International: EU and US ‘partners’ in CIA torture flights

Samuel F.B. Morse: ‘Why doesn’t my code get its own film?’
• He possibly would have liked Da Vinci as he was rabidly anti-Catholic
• Like the Western Union telegram, Morse code is now officially no more thanks to the Internet

Fiona Apple song reminds teen girl to act depressed

200 spam e-mails can’t be wrong!

From The Onion.

Fourth-generation hell
Military expert William Lind explains but does not excuse things like Haditha

Of course the extreme order of military culture is supposed to train the soldier’s mind so that he doesn’t fall apart in the chaos of combat... and commit crimes like in Haditha.

From antiwar.com.

‘Nobody important — just another sand-n*gger’
The racism of the establishment right

"It’s just like the war in Iraq."

"How so?" I wondered.

"Well, on the news reports, they’ll tell us the names of Americans who died that day. Or, at least, they’ll tell us whether they’re soldiers or Marines or whatever. Then they’ll say something like, "The attack also killed 400 Iraqis."

Then the Rikers guard – a petite woman who looks young enough to be a daughter to many of these students – chimed in.

"So on one hand we’re being told they’re not important for us to know their names. But then the President and his people turn around and tell us that they’re important enough for our young people to die for."

"Just like the doctor [in Nadine Gordimer’s The Town and Country Lovers]. He saw the girl as another colored girl. Yet somehow he was interested enough to **** her," added one of the youngest students in the room.

From LRC.

Affirmative action is (often well-meant) crap in English, Afrikaans or Xhosa

...a submission to Parliament by the University of Pretoria's Tuks Afrikaanse Studente to scrap affirmative action for those born after February 1990. ...Tuks representative Cornelius Jansen van Rensburg argued that most young white people born after that date knew nothing about the former apartheid dispensation and should not be penalised when looking for a job.

The essence of apartheid thinking was based on groups, group identity and group rights.

Which is how the PC left who claimed to oppose apartheid think! Marxist.

But the news article above seems to indicate that the apartheid brainwashing was more successful than we thought, and groupthink still lingers on.

From Notes from the Underground.

Quotation

A man whose capacity will scarce serve him to utter five words in sensible manner blusheth not in any doubt concerning matter of scripture to think his own bare Yea as good as the Nay of all the wise, grave, and learned judgments that are in the whole world: which insolency must be repressed, or it will be the very bane of Christian religion.

- Richard Hooker

From Apostolicity.

What about saints with no proof that they were real?
And what did the pruning of the Roman Rite’s universal calendar really mean? (It’s commonly misunderstood — jokes about ex-saints, ‘Mr Christopher’ and so on.)

From Whitehall.

Scientist who helped crack genome now believes in God and miracles
From John Boyden

Congratulations, US Senator Robert Byrd
• Seems a personally likeable, God-fearing Southerner
• Not a racist anymore — he was a man of his time
• Dead wrong about big government but with good intentions, trying to help his people (it’s still stealing from other citizens though) — an old-school Democrat
• Right about the war on Iraq, and right all along, one of the few American politicos who can say that

In ‘Fluffya’
A Latin people who ‘made it’ insult newly arrived ‘cousins’
The saga of immigration continues. Regarding the nativism, Signor Vento* should have a flashing ‘Huge Historical Irony’ sign over Geno’s. Those of us with long memories know that ‘wops’ were just as unwelcome.

The end of Transfiguration RC Church
Sad — this tabloid piece crosses the line from journalism into editorialising/advocacy but I like this:

If you are a knee-jerk Catholic who reflexively leaps to defend the church from any criticism, save it for someone who didn't spend 12 years in classrooms with nuns. They taught me that to be Catholic was to leave people somehow better off than we found them.

That applies of course to those who want to cover up the gay-priest scandal, making excuses for the clerics who did just that.

*An ill wind, or just a lot of hot air.

Rule of law > mob rule

A liberal political order can provide a space where fragile individuals are protected from the enthusiastic certainties of their fellow citizens, a concern that populism can give short shrift to.

From Verbum ipsum.

The arrogance of the Episcopal left
It turns out they believe in absolutes too

Episcopal fact and fiction

Why men hate going to church
Following up on this

Dissing Narnia
On this

From new link GetReligion.

Patriarch of Moscow and Old Believer metropolitan of Moscow meet

Rod Dreher on Ann Coulter

RIP Fr Matthew the Poor (Matta el Maskeen)
Apparently a very holy Coptic monk who was like one of the Desert Fathers of old

Blowback in Iraq
Shi’ites and ‘Mafia-style politics’ fill the void created by the American-led invasion

Rove won’t be charged in CIA leak case
Sad but unsurprising

From The New York Times.

On Westerners using icons
From Fr Marco Vervoorst

P.S. Note the proper High Mass being done at a youth conference. They know the way to relate to kids is not to patronise them.

RC liturgical revision as a revival of nativism
As in the Americanist heresy. As a conscious statement of their own class pride, inverted snobbery, they hate well-spoken orthodox liturgy: as Thomas Day described, Irish contempt for things perceived as English. But unconsciously this is also condescension, a kind of contempt for culturally working-class people (‘they’re too stoopid to understand real liturgy’). Yo, Vinnie, that’s what your reverend fathers in God really think of you. Rather like Billy Joel in ‘Just the Way You Are’: often taken as sympathetic but actually patronising. Some good insight from the Revd James Konicki.

O GOD, send forth thy Holy Spirit into my heart that I may perceive, into my mind that I may remember, and into my soul that I may meditate. Inspire me to speak with piety, holiness, tenderness and mercy. Teach, guide and direct my thoughts and senses from beginning to end. May thy grace ever help and correct me, and may I be strengthened now with wisdom from on high, for the sake of thine infinite mercy. Amen.

- St Antony of Padua (more)

...sent to preach the Gospel, his wisdom and fluency were very marked, and drew on him such admiration of men, that the Pope, once hearing him preach, called him The Ark of the Covenant. One of his chief points was to expend all his strength in attacking heresies, whence he gained the name of the Heretics' everlasting Hammer.

Bush the elder wanted to sack Rumsfeld
From The Gaelic Starover

National shame at World Cup

When the Americans leave their hotel in Essen to travel to their opener against the Czech Republic, an ever-present convoy of police, State Department officials and private guards will encircle them. The U.S. bus is the only among the 32 teams that doesn't display the country's name.

Joshua Snyder writes: Let’s chuck the Empire, go back to the Old Republic, and give it a try.

‘War on Terrorism’ is a stupid title
From antiwar.com

Простите меня
Kalashnikov regrets the proliferation of his invention, the AK-47, the world’s most widespread weapon

‘Respecting’ your victim
The Guantánamo suicides

Mindless in Seattle
The obvious racism and Marxism of the state schools

And:

I wonder how the parents of soldiers would have responded had their boys come home from high-school and announced "I'm going to become a hit-man for the Mafia"? Would these parents proudly proclaim their youngsters' career choices on the bumpers of their cars?

From the LRC blog.

Waco revisited

When a Waco gun dealer from whom David Koresh – the group’s leader – and some Davidians had purchased firearms called Koresh during a visit by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) agents, Koresh invited the agents to inspect the Davidian compound at Mt. Carmel, hardly the act of someone with something to hide. Instead of accepting his offer, the agent-in-charge chastised the gun dealer for communicating with Koresh!

The reason for the raid was not suspicion that the Branch Davidians possessed weapons illegally, as the government and National Geographic portrayed, but to shore up support for the BATF at budget time because of negative publicity over sexual harassment, and heavy handed treatment of gun dealers and owners for minor, mostly paperwork, infractions. The agency was also looking for favor from an administration dedicated to gun control.

It is interesting to note that since Hurricane Katrina, there has been no criticism of survivalists.

Interesting pose by the government: burn people to death to show how opposed to violence you are.

From LRC.

RIP Roman Marynowych
From November 2005: The Lawrence Welk of Ukrainian-language TV in the US with an endearingly bad half-hour show on various Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American doings — dancing the гопак for example. (Loved the theme music: does anybody know the title?) If you were learning Ukrainian or a related language like Russian it helped because he spoke so s-l-o-w-l-y he was easy to understand! Sounds like a holy person as well. He helped build this (interior shot), where he is buried. Дуже добре.

‘May God bless you — добранiч!’

Сердечно дякую.

(Quick cut to the choir singing Tchaikovsky’s Трисвятое from his music for the Divine Liturgy.)

P.S. The articulated eight-sided onion-dome cupolas are a uniquely Ukrainian baroque style.

Believe it or not I like this church
Sensible liturgical Lutheran taste in a very modern style. Of course I very much like the old St Peter’s too. The religion here apparently is high-church liberal Protestant but my point is you could easily have the old religion in this setting.

The Lorica of St Patrick
And the hymn based on it

I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity

Lee Penn writes: The Sunday after Pentecost on the Western calendar has traditionally been known as Trinity Sunday — so this feast occurs on June 11. This year, the Eastern Orthodox and [high-church] Eastern Catholics celebrate Pentecost on June 11 — and we also call Pentecost the Feast of the Holy Trinity [Троица]. So this year, East and West celebrate this Sunday with a common purpose. [End.]

Interestingly AFAIK the Sarum Use of the Roman Rite counted ‘Sundays after Trinity’ (a feast-day begun by a mediæval Pope), which is why the Book of Common Prayer does.

If the state has gay marriage why not polygamy?
Exactly. Get the state out of the marriage business.

In the eyes of the church the state already licenses polygamy in the form of serial monogamy.

I understand that many of the few Americans polygamists are on the dole anyway.

Blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it was considered pretty crazy, has called this the “polygamy diversion,” arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different because polygamy is a mere “activity” while homosexuality is an intrinsic state that “occupies a deeper level of human consciousness.”

What narcissistic tripe. Then again that way of thinking is archetypal/stereotypical of ‘gay culture’.

One way in which they are categorically different actually favours polygamy: the former is against nature and the latter not (it was practised in the Old Testament with God’s blessing, impossible for the former).

From Fr Joseph Huneycutt.