Religion round-up

• American RCs as cultural Protestants. Pretty good and right up Arturo’s street. But there’s no such thing as Catholic economics, just economics. Believing in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand doesn’t make one a Calvinist! Think Salamanca. From AnarchoCatholic.
• How about a swop? Benedict XVI could kill two birds with one stone if he traded the RC subscribers to The Tablet for the conservative C of E Anglo-Papalists. Such a deal!!
• Damian Thompson is a great journalistic cheerleader, but what we need nowadays are realistic expectations, not wildly exaggerated hopes.
• Today’s ex-Christians: juvenile scoffers vs respectable classical pagans. Joshua writes: The Camille Paglias, the Umberto Ecos, and the Oriana Fallacis all have the intellectual honesty and courage to take the Catholic faith seriously, even if they disagree with her claims. But as Joe Sobran and Charley remind me, historically the really militant ones came from the Continent (the flip side of Catholicism’s all-or-nothing package deal but usually that flattens out to the Mediterranean/Latin-American laissez-faire approach that Arturo writes about) and the mild ones from the English tradition (the college common room and old-school Anglican friendly rivalries).
• On converts by Arturo.
• Related to this topic, Michael Liccione writes that Moretben has ’doxed, a traditionalist who’s not gone anti-Western. I like him. Always did. Once again the question that divides what is nearly the same church is: is the papacy divinely instituted with universal jurisdiction or a man-made rank for the good order of the church and with limited jurisdiction? (A far cry from Jack Chick or the Western liberals who really want more power to change things than an infallible church gives.)
• 90 years ago yesterday the sainted tsar, his family and their loyal servants were martyred. Reading Robert Massie convinced me of their goodness.