One more religious entry for today



It may be naff but I like it.

It’s official: there are no more Old Catholics in North America
From Deacon Jim

Actually it’s now like cross-filing in a primary election for school board: Dr Schori and her brothers and sisters are the local Old Catholic bishops.

Right, wrong and clueless
Mark Shea:

The Catholic faith has always taught that sexual relations between two consenting married heterosexual adult human beings not related already by blood are not just good but, among the baptized, sacramental.

The West got rid of the Catholic faith and assumed that its moral norms would just continue by inertia. The trouble is: In this world, inertia always encounters friction.

Once you gain the cultural victory, you make sure that you consolidate the victory with the might of Caesar.

What offends me as a libertarian about mainliners like the Jake-ites is not that they want gay Protestant weddings. Go right ahead! ‘It’s a free country.’ I want to keep it that way and make it more so (decriminalise polygamy). I don’t think they do. And I don’t need to bring the church or culture wars into it. Irrelevant here. Get the state out of it and have equal rights all round.

From the more culture-warlike T1:9.

Last known Titanic survivor dies
Millvina Dean, aged 97

Clem’s cousin
Fittingly it’s Catholic today, St Andrew’s Lithuanian RC Church. I understand from Bernie Kunkel this was John Notman’s dress rehearsal before building Clem’s in the mid-1800s and it may have been Episcopal then as well.

I’ve been in St Andrew’s; why didn’t I see the resemblance until he told me?

Meanwhile in Russian Orthodoxy
After three long days in the newsroom I went to what was listed as Vigil for the Ascension expecting to stand/sit back and leave once Vespers was done. I thought things might change as the rector (my father confessor — BTW he’s preached at Clem’s) is unwell, and on that I was right. Just me and two others on the kliros and a congregation of one. If I’d known and been well rested I could have put together a credible and even edifying version of the reader’s service of this from my books at home complete with kathisma psalms. It wasn’t pretty at times but we got through it.

Last Sunday I worked with a supply priest (lovely old man) who doesn’t speak English; after 17 years I understand at worst half of what I hear in Russian*. This week was the other way round: an OCA priest with no Russian (BTW Fr Mark he’s retired Navy) so he served in English whilst our Russian deacon and the choir did their parts as usual in Slavonic. As Father started the hours in English I saw an opportunity: whipped out Hapgood from the kliros and the congregation got Terce and Sext in my native tradition’s idiom (think of it as a prayer for the repose of the old heretical Bishop of Exeter’s soul). The extent of ecclesiastical change including liturgical innovation here: sometimes we have services in English! Good.

Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

— From today’s epistle (actually from Acts)

Slavonic inadvertently struck back: the reading was complicated, skipping a lot of lines, so once I finished the Slavonic I hestitated when repeating in English: ‘In those days’... silence as my eyes scanned the page. Fr Valery the Russian deacon bellowed ‘Премудрость!’ (‘Wisdommm!’) which I decided to interpret as a signal to jump to the Alleluia verses. So far no heresy trial for me.

Before the morning star thou wast begotten of the Father; before the ages thou wast conceived without a mother, even though Arius believed thee to be created and not God. He shamelessly confused the Creator with his creatures, thus deserving eternal punishment. Yet the Council of Nicæa proclaimed thee as the Son of God who is enthroned with the Father and the Spirit.

Having brought together all spiritual knowledge and having carefully pondered all things in the Holy Spirit, the noble fathers composed the Symbol of Faith in letters divinely inscribed. They clearly proclaim the Word to be co-eternal and consubstantial with the Father, unerringly following the apostolic faith.

You were the guardians of the apostolic teachings, O holy fathers, and as teachers of the true faith you professed the holy and consubstantial Trinity. Together in council you rejected the blasphemy of Arius; and with him you also refuted Macedonius who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. You condemned Nestorius, Eutyches and Dioscurus, together with Sabellius and Severus. Through your prayers, preserve us from all false doctrine and guard our lives blamelessly in the true faith.

— From tonight’s Vespers

BTW our resident nun, who doesn’t speak English, has been to Clem’s with our rector and loved all the relics.

*One of many great things about ‘Crime Story’: it’s set in Chicago and I can understand the occasional dialogue in Polish!

From Mark Shea

• The myth of Obama the bridge-builder between pro-life and pro-choice. On his quisling-puppet RC front men.
• Common ground? Douglas Kmiec, man of honour like Andrew Bacevich who won’t be played like other pro-lifers or dupe? Politically we can all get along but not how these sides think.

From the LRC blog

• Currency meltdown: how Jim Rogers thinks the markets will plunge.
• Pravda on America’s descent into Marxism. More.
• The power to license is the power to control. Houses of worship, take note.
• A sort-of anti-war song from Carrie Underwood. (The commercial YouTube page won’t let you embed.) Musically not my thing but notice the retro, Vietnam-era touches. So maybe the country-Western establishment hasn’t grown the stones to make a commentary on the futility of the present war yet. Still, it does give some degree of fair warning to young would-be brides and grooms. I’ll take what I can get. And/or her audience can learn about Johnny Cash.
• Different generations of American Jewish humour.

Dreher’s comment thread on the Cutié affair
I’m pretty far down in it (as High-church libertarian curmudgeon)

Veni, Creator Spiritus

Someone I know

DaVida is one of those women who really bug a certain kind of feminist. She’s a research biologist who works in a lab at Penn but takes equal pleasure in wearing evening gowns and big hats and in archery and riding.

— Brother Stephen

High Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes, white-gloved servers and all:

Recently I had a curé-hat sighting as one of the priests walked from the church and clergy house to the school across the street.

The Italian Market, South Philly


St Paul’s Church facing the north side of the market, recently a Catholic-revival showplace (when Fr Sangermano was there).

The mural is of Mayor Rizzo.

Fr Cutié, the Episcopalians, Telemundo and Bad Catholics
From GetReligion:

The poll shows, if I am reading the Spanish correctly, 61.78% agree with his decision.

Sorry but I’m not surprised.

If Bishop Frade and other liberalish Protestants (I’ve been told he’s a relative conservative in his church) think this sorry, squalid mess, their handling of it and this poll mean they have a beachhead in the Latin world they’re mistaken. They don’t understand Catholics including, among us, Bad Catholics.

Bad Catholics are not liberal Protestants/Modernist RCs. They don’t agree with the church, agreeing with mainstream secular culture (‘Father followed his heart, which has no rules’), but they’ll never change churches, and like the orthodox they know the church is unchangeable on these matters. They just live with it by largely or entirely opting out.

On the box: Walk the Line
I like it. Of course some of it’s fictional (the rift between Cash and his father). A limited singer with a lot of soul, Cash himself was coolness. ‘Not perfect but forgiven’, part of what Flannery O’Connor called the Christ-haunted South. I know what’s wrong with the film (glorifying adultery in the Hollywood way*) and with Protestant soteriology but still. A good-hearted man.

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you’d think he’s talking straight to you and me.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.

And I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believin’ that we all were on their side.

Oh, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
’Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

*The mainstream view today as shown in the film: one-night stands are bad but ‘true love’, whatever that may be, is good regardless of promises made and responsibilities undertaken.

From the LRC blog

• Sonia Sotomayor reminds Lew Rockwell: why are we in Puerto Rico? A legacy of McKinley’s anti-Hispanic, anti-Catholic views.
• Looks like a morale problem: general orders his soldiers not to commit suicide. What happens when you waste good men on stupid wars.
• Pop quiz: which side in American politics wants the government to censor the Internet?
• Goodbye, Two-Thousandaire-mobiles. Bad old-fashioned greed and the temptation to live beyond your means.
• How to spend like a frugal millionaire.
• On that note, George Carlin’s classic ‘Stuff’ routine.

Pond difference

Roman Catholics are only 7% of the population in Great Britain, while we are about a quarter of the population in the US.

From GetReligion.

Bragging rights
As much I love antiques I admit this is progress. When I was a teenager I learnt to type starting on old machines only about 10-15 years newer than this in a loud room like a 1940s-1950s typing pool. Mechanically it was so hard that, even though I could remember the keyboard, at one point I was failing the course! Now of course with computers it’s easy and fun. (And newsrooms are blessedly quiet.) And of course as a YF ageing into curmudgeonhood I think it would be character-building for everybody to learn this way.

Photo from The Fedora Lounge.

Wars may be just but are not holy
From Sojourners. The thing is, I don’t think their man Obama cares.

San Joaquin: you can’t quit; you’re fired!
Take that! Something for Anglo-Catholic rectors in the Central Valley to frame and hang on their walls.

From Joshua

• Torture. God have mercy on us. Bill Grigg: Conservatives and others who revere the founders of our late Republic might recall that the men who won our independence and wrote the Constitution opposed a standing army, not only because it could be employed as an instrument of domestic tyranny, but also because it would offer irresistible opportunities for foreign adventurism. In this, as in so much else, the Founders’ wisdom has withstood the passage of time.
• An Old Rightist rightly rubbishes white nationalism. I read Steve Sailer. He dares bring up the unmentionable — the possibility, based upon test results including IQ and law-school admissions, of genetic differences including intelligence, on average, among the races. Now in itself that information’s not racist (it’s what you do or not with it... genes are only a factor; determinism is wrong) but of course some following this sidle up to racism and a few fall right in (the white-power movement wanting to base policy on race not merit, and the nativist anti-immigrationism that poisons my corner of the right — unlike many in it I lean towards open borders). Justin Raimondo gives some of the reasons why that’s not the answer. The answer: set a standard regardless of race and stick to it.More.
  

  There is a good reason to avoid the Taylorites, and their even cruder brothers-in-spirit in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi netherworld, and it has to do with maintaining the intellectual and spiritual integrity of the American Right. I agree with Pat Buchanan, who, in pointing out the disparity between his own ideas and those of David Duke, averred: “We come from different traditions.” Indeed we do. Taylor’s is the legacy of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, the Count de Gobineau, and that failed portrait painter from Vienna: ours is the legacy of Christianity, which recognized the centrality of the individual soul, and rejects collectivism, including racial collectivism, as inimical to freedom, reason, and just relations among men.

  From Taki.

What’s so progressive about progressives?
They’re reactionary and regressive really. Might this hankering for a feudal past be why some well-meaning Catholics, from what Michael Lawrence calls the drawbridge crowd to the saintly Dorothy Day’s followers to the crunchies, fall for this?

From RR

• Classical liberalism. Dean Russell from 1951: The first leftists would not be popular in America today. That is true because the original leftists wanted to abolish government controls over industry, trade, and the professions. They wanted wages, prices and profits to be determined by competition in a free market, and not by government decree. They were pledged to free their economy from government planning, and to remove the government-guaranteed special privileges of guilds, unions, and associations whose members were banded together to use the law to set the price of their labor or capital or product above what it would be in a free market.
• Getting arrested — whatever the charge and whatever the action leading to it — was itself the point, and seemed to be mostly a way of publicizing and amplifyng one’s sense of outrage, anguish, or commitment. Less like a civil-disobedience action, it was more like the action of a mourner who wails and covers himself in ashes, or a penitent who whips himself with a lash. Being arrested has become a sort of government-sponsored method of certifying the strength of one’s opinion. While this sort of thing seems mostly harmless, I am worried that people have come to confuse this sort of theatrical arrest-as-protest activity with genuine civil disobedience, and so are losing track of the actual practical power that well-crafted civil-disobedience campaigns and actions have. Part of my disillusionment with the pro-life movement. That and...
• An LRC pick: Both the humanist atheists and religious sectarians have a problem. Both camps try to marshal the state to further the “cause” thereby making the state the sole judge and arbitrator. The historically pro-war (for the good of humanity) religious left have the same problem regarding gay weddings. And...
• American Christians and torture. Lord, deliver us from your followers.
• Illinois state senate approves medical-marijuana bill.
• Cannabis tax and deregulation: cutting out the middleman.
• Birth of a cocaine factoid.
• Iraq-born teen cracks maths puzzle.
• Report: Iraq prisoner abuse photos depict torture, rape.
• Taxpayers could lose billions from General Motors revamp.
• Couple ordered to stop holding Bible study without permit.
• America’s anti-militarist heritage. Americans don’t have much historical memory anymore. That isn’t just because of the dumbing down of the educational system and the fact that most young people read very little on their own. It’s because most of what little they do hear about our history is colored by statist theology. But if you talk to some older Americans — people in their 70s and 80s — you will encounter a few who know some important things. First, they know that there was widespread opposition to the wars the United States fought in the 20th century; and second, they know that most of the opposition to war came from the “Right.”
• Who are they hurting? About the harm principle.
• Intimidation won’t further non-proliferation.
• Terrorism: the new Communism as a power-grabbing scare tactic.
• Wall Street’s scams, lies and frauds.
• It is one of the signs of our times that so many in the media are focusing on the life story of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. You might think that this was some kind of popularity contest, instead of a weighty decision about someone whose impact on the fundamental law of the nation will extend for decades after Barack Obama has come and gone. If you were going to have open-heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is or by the best surgeon you could find — even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer? If it were you who was going to be lying on that operating table with his heart cut open, you wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn about somebody’s struggle or somebody else’s privileges.
• Racial statements that would be inappropriate for a white man to make should be considered inappropriate for others to make. As bad as the prattling about “empathy” is, this is a very selective empathy. Empathy is merely a code word for judicial liberalism. And Sotomayor is clearly a judicial liberal.
• In picking Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama has confirmed that identity politics matter to him more than merit. While Judge Sotomayor exemplifies the American Dream, she would not have even been on the short list if she were not Hispanic. She is not one of the leading lights of the federal judiciary.

From the LRC blog

• Finger-painting with an iPhone.
• Mancow epilogue: Mancow concedes it’s torture but says the US should do it anyway. What a monstrous spectacle. So all you neocons, here’s your official position: waterboarding is torture, and torture is defensible. Admit you are pro-torture.
• Planning to leave the warm embrace of your Uncle Looter? Then the US Department of Homeland Security is going to fingerprint you as you leave the Land of the Free.
• Each corrupt country puts its own stamp on corruption, but the fundamentals are always the same. Now Republicans are “Shocked, Shocked!” that Obama Motors is closing Chrysler dealerships belonging to donors to the GOP, while those favoring Democrats are staying open and supposedly gaining market share (let’s leave aside the question, will anyone want to buy the product?). Funny, Republicans never inquired into the donations to the GOP from the defense industry and the notoriously corrupt “independent contractors” who stole tens of billions from the taxpayer during the Iraq War.
• So Republicans are upset that Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. Why? She was nominated to the U.S. District Court in New York by Republican George H.W. Bush and confirmed on unanimous consent of the Senate. Then, when she was nominated by Bill Clinton to be a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, 25 Republican senators voted to confirm her. And back when Clinton nominated the ultra-liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, only 3 Republicans out of 44 in the Senate at the time voted against her. The Republicans are a little late to be opposing Ms. Sotomayor.
• Ron Paul on all that. He and I don’t care what colour she is; what about the economy and liberty?

Ron Paul was calling out the Fed in 1983
From Mike Molloy

An Orthodox priest on anti-Western rubbish

The Latins have been on the wrong side of so many issues, like preserving the icons and holy relics during the interminable Byzantine iconoclasms, or resisting Byzantine heresies foisted with patriarchal and imperial authority... Arianism deserving some attention. As I recall old Rome supported SS. Athanasius and John Chrysostom when the East was out to kill them. Tisk, tisk. And then the Latins dare to make devotions to “Body Parts” made in the image of God and hallowed by the God-Man Himself in His episode of Incarnation. I personally don’t worship Body Parts but I do adore them... among my favorites the Incarnate Word at Bethlehem and His Crib at Santa Maria Maggiore, His Most Precious Blood from the Cross, the Saving Victim in the Mass and outside the Mass in Benediction and in Communions of the Sick. And then there is the Sacred Heart pierced for our salvation by the lance of Saint Longinus. Come to think of it, I have even reverenced the lance itself where he is kept at San Pietro on the Vatican Hill across the Tiber. For the simple believer it would seem all those bits hallowed by the God-Man would be worthy of adoration and Liturgical commemoration... including the Virgin Herself immaculate in all her life... possibly including her Conception? Or is that out of the equation on the basis of Calvinist reasoning... or Superdox deductive logic? Sorry to say, like most of the faithful I get my ideas from the language of Liturgy and prayer rather than from systematic theology or the abundant writings of Pop-orthodoxy.

Sotomayor, Ricci and the unmentionable
The Catholic and libertarian answer regarding the last is if it’s true, so what? Not what the left or the racist fringe want to hear. All people are equally dear in the sight of God but of course egalitarianism is a lie and unfair; all are not the same. Have one standard for all nothing to do with race and if more of one race get in, too bad. No quotas. As Ron Paul has said, stupid identity politics are a nasty form of collectivism. From Steve Sailer.

Divorced from reality

Family integrity will be restored only when families are de-politicized and protected from government invasion.

A PDF. From T1:9.

More bibs and bobs

• Archimandrite Zacharias on the heart. Which of course brings this 1870s quotation to mind. From a longtime friend of the blog.
• Fr Cutié is becoming an Episcopalian and marrying his divorced girlfriend. What happened to the old WASP gentlemanly values of keeping promises and honouring commitments (duty)? The man freely took a vow and disobeyed it and his bishop. Why would another Christian bishop consider bringing him on board? Looks like nothing but the upper-middle-class religion of self-esteem and other feelings. (That and anything handy to hit Rome.) If anything it validates the common knowledge about old Harry’s schism.

From Damian Thompson

• Pulling no punches about the Irish church abuse scandal. Which is as much to do with problems in Irish history and culture as problems with people in the church. Lest Brian M. think I’m attacking the Irish I’m not. I was tricked by The Magdalene Sisters seven years ago and then, of all people, Frederica Mathewes-Green, no friend of Western Catholicism (about which she knows little), pointed out how unfair it was (it wasn’t real history but composite characters in the course of a few years going through all the abuses at those places that really happened over a century).
• Anti-Catholic hate mail from the gay Christian movement. One reason I respect Huw is writing like this:
  

  I’m terribly embarrassed to call us “oppressed” in any but the most covert ways.
  
  When I hear families speak of how children-unfriendly the Bay area is, or when I hear people in San Diego complain about the Mexicans who do their laundry and water their grass, when I hear San Franciscans make fun of the Chinese, the blacks and “midwestern Christians”... I realise gays are just as stuck up as any of the other bigots out there. While the “gay movement” has been largely white, middle-class, secure — and ever more so in California! — it has largely ignored the injustices that it was helping to create and engender.

  No wonder he’s dropped Episcopalianism for an independent bishop’s church; the credal heterodoxy in practice got old fast and he knew better.
  
  And like him I don’t necessarily connect with conservatives.

From CounterPunch

• Rednecks talk plainly about Obama: The top dogs eat high on the hog and the little dogs eat the tails and ears. That’s what them bailouts is all about, and that’s the way it is no matter who’s president. So you might as well vote for the guy who looks like the most fun because you gonna be watching his ass on television for the next eight years.
  
  Nothing against Obama, mind you, but the last time I looked, the car plants was dead meat. Obama has never even come close to serving in the military, except for serving up that batch of hash in Baghdad. And there he was with his wife in a soup kitchen for God’s sake! Things has got so bad that we’ve got soup kitchens all over this country now. So, two millionaires in their armored limo drop by a soup kitchen, and this is supposed to make me feel good about my country?


• The man who murdered Count Folke Bernadotte. Or it’s not terrorism when European Jews do it. Didn’t you see Exodus? But it all goes to show that Israel hasn’t changed in sixty years. The psychotic Netanyahu, its new prime minister, has said he will continue to build illegal settlements, thus treating UN resolutions with the contempt for which he is well known. And the US will continue to support him, nuclear bombs and all.
• Torture and the American conscience.

From Mark Shea

• The classic tendency of the Leftist Nanny Statist toward moral chaos and statist hyper-control. Chesterton understood. Mr. Bernard Shaw said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. He prefers an iron rule, as in [Soviet] Russia.
• The culture that destroyed the economy.
• From here: the Catholic Church: here comes everybody. It did not take revelations of abusive Irish Catholics for me to see that Catholic history has a wide variety of sins and monsters to choose from. You’d have to be a complete idiot not to know about the anti-Semites, mafiosi, voodoo cultists, weird Mexican death cults, gifted torturers and murderers, corrupt clerics, and sundry other nasties.
• If you really succeeded in destroying the last vestiges of Christianity, you would also destroy... things like the university, the parliamentary system, English and American law, most of the literature of the West, the hospital, the orphanage, and, oh, well, pretty much the entire Western achievement. It’s the radical recklessness of such folly that takes the breath away. And all while patting oneself on the back for one’s decency. Nothing provides a better cloak for pride than outraged moralism.

Sexuality, marriage and covenant responsibility
Fr John Breck from 2004 on this

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• The saint who wasn’t? My comment. A related issue: the Roman Rite cleaning up its Universal Kalendar by de-listing certain saints (done to free it up for new saints and more important to keep the liturgical seasons with minimal interruption) is not decanonisation. They’re not celebrated worldwide but are still in the Mass and office as a local option. (Trad crabbing: I agree that removing saints known and loved worldwide and part of the culture was stupid like most other ’60s changes. It was seen by outsiders as a retreat or surrender.)
• ‘It’s trad, Dad?’ or whither conservative Anglicans? My comment (written after 16 and 10 hours on the job with little sleep). I retitled this Virtue Online story because after all what is an Anglican ‘traditionalist’? A Calvinist who celebrates quarterly at the north end in surplice and scarf? A Sarum revivalist? US 1928? US 1979 pre-VGR? Tridentine ACism dates back a century and a quarter at the most so that seems out of the running: in a way trad in larger Catholic terms but not in Anglican ones. From Eric Sammons’ fine blog.

Two Eastern Christian ones

• Fr Methodius on the Ascension. Including memorably bad preaching and a beautiful Anglican hymn. (He follows a Gregorian-date saints’ kalendar.)
• RC/EO relations again and the Ukraine.

A Greek Catholic encounters rude convert Orthodox
In other news dog bites man. Why I spend time with folk who make pierogi not the whitebread kids who read Palamas.

Taki’s Richard Spencer on Sonia Sotomayor
RR gets it right:

Once again, the only concern should be about Sotomayor’s ability to read the Constitution, adhere to the limits it places on government and those listed rights affirmed... in the Bill of Rights.

Sex, ethnicity and which church she does or doesn’t go to mean nada.

Christians are still fleeing Iraq
Because of what the US started. From Joshua.

Muslims are good folks
Don’t believe the hatemongering. From LRC.

Not pubs, thatched-roof cottages and What Ho, Jeeves
Nor the ’80s England I remember. UK nightlife today. From Hilary.

Audio: Fr Longenecker on the NWO and persecution

America’s first Greek Catholic church
More. From here.

TAC on Waugh

Evelyn Waugh died in 1966 and spent most of his last two decades wishing he had died in 1946 — or better still in 1446.

From Joshua.

From RR

• Rand Paul: Balance the budget!
• The next US senator from Kentucky (who sounds a lot like his papa) explains his name. From Joshua.
• On really respecting the police: hold them to a higher standard not a lower one.
• Sin, regrets and public policy.
• Scottish Kirk sidesteps issue of gay ministers. More.
• Raimondo on Obama.
• Obama’s betrayals.
• Banking on fear.
• Justifying Iraq with torture.
• Setting a higher standard for making war.
• Openness for thee not for me.
• What the Gitmo speech means for civil liberties.
• New Yankee Stadium, the house that taxpayers built.
• Sovereignty 101: why the Second Amendment is absolute.
• Cindy Sheehan on Memorial Day.
• They died for nothing. A history of America’s wars.
• Remembering why we remember. It’s a bit cliché but here are Peter, Paul and Mary with Pete Seeger doing one of Seeger’s classics (from T1:9). He just turned 90.
• Memorial Day or Government Day?
• An anarchist looks at Memorial Day.
• On not ‘supporting the troops’. Liberal critics of the Iraq catastrophe have long demonstrated that they do not disagree with the basic foreign policy methods and goals put forth by conservatives (and by neoconservatives as well). Certainly, they do not: over the last hundred years, liberals have utilized endless global intervention in service of worldwide American hegemony, usually more determinedly and more bloodily than the conservatives themselves (always excepting the criminal reign of George Bush the younger).
• On high-tech cowardice and bullying.
• Just one more thing, soldier. RR editor Thomas Knapp notes: The Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) is no more ‘involuntary service’ than ‘stop-loss’ is. Both are specified in the contract, and no one is forced to sign the contract.

From LRC

• Survival tactic: staying out of debt.
• On not retiring.
• Torturing the rule of law.

Did Bill Ayers ghostwrite Dreams of My Father?
I know it sounds like neocon shark chum but as a writer and editor this interests me. Hey, for a few grand Obama could have hired me to clean up his grammar and punctuation.

Is Switzerland the only country that puts up statues of leaders esteemed for staying out of wars?
From Steve Sailer

From Joshua
Sort of a tour of Anglicanism with the middle history (including this beautiful picture) chopped out

• The Henrician schism on video. Two early martyrs. Orate pro nobis.
• Separation of gays and state, something liberal Protestants don’t get because like old Harry’s mates they know what’s best for you.

From the LRC blog

• Even Keynesians are seeing Ron Paul’s point.
• The Nork nuke.
• Memorial Day. More. The late Harry Browne: when we pretend that we live in a free country because of all the people who were killed in the government’s senseless wars.

Memorial Day in Lansdowne, Pa.
I agree entirely with revisionist history of the American Civil War and WWs I and II (the isolationists were right); that said I’m as moved as anybody by black Union re-enactors, WWII and Korean War vets (one praying a long collect in the Tudor style) and the town’s WWI and WWII monuments at the high school. Hats off to the mayor for balancing things out with her appropriate, respectful peace speech.

If you click the globe-topped WWI monument picture you can see the British royal arms on it. I’ve been told the town used to be solidly old-school Republican. They were more common-sense about those wars; it’s still nice to see that ‘WASP’ tie to the mother country.


Today this gorgeous Presbyterian church flies a flag which shows the élite’s political shift as well as who won Protestantism’s fundamentalist/modernist war here in the 1920s. Keeping the pure heretical doctrine of John Calvin is Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church in a converted house up the road.

Veterans I’ve known include two men on opposing sides defending their homes: my late rector, who was a fire-watcher atop St Paul’s in the Blitz and later a Royal Navy rating, and a Ukrainian, in his 90s when I knew him, who wore German grey in Vlasov’s Russian army fighting the Soviets.

Fidelium animæ per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen.

On schisms nothing to do with religion and on ethnicity
Very Eastern Christian subjects those. (Whatever you think of the Anglican row, it is about religion.) My two kopecks start here.

Obama, the soldiers and US Memorial Day
From The New American

Remembering Rolling Thunder and war today
From @TAC

Photo: Belmont Hills, Pa.

Many English towns have a much bigger version of this, full of names from World War I.

Burkesque

Tradition acts as a check on the pretensions of the modern age. While change and innovation is essential in science, technology and business, in government and politics it is to be regarded warily. The state is a blunt instrument, easily destructive in its efforts. Bound down by history and law, it can become reasonable and almost humane.

From here.

Taki on Trek
Parts I and II. I’ve long thought the Vulcans and Romulans were fictional versions of the Japanese: traditional, reserved, disciplined and capable either of being peaceful Buddhist monks or fierce warriors.

Catching up with Mark Fiore

• On the left turning openly pro-torture but those who know history know that’s not new. We’re seeing a repeat of Clinton: the neocon prats are making real-conservative noises again.
• Fuzzy the conciliation caterpillar.
• Old vs new media. Fun as I’ve got a foot in both.

Shock-jock tries being waterboarded and admits it’s torture
From The New American and also on The Holy Cause

Worth mentioning: the Second Council of the Abbaye
Which guest of honour Brother Stephen described as ‘the downtown rendezvous point for everyone I’m meeting from the Catholic mafia’ this past Thursday night. (Is NoLibs ‘downtown’?) Regrettably we didn’t ‘get some kind of discount for going to a place called Abbaye wearing my habit’. Anyway it was a meeting of me, him, brother libertarian anarcho-Catholic and church organist Michael Lawrence, Bishop Tim Cravens, Fr Joseph Menna and parishioner Lyngine Calizo of an independent church, Clem’s altar server and cantor extraordinaire Andrew Nardone, Clem’s parishioner Tom Gorczynski and lay theological adviser/non-libertarian political sparring partner Paul Goings and wife DaVida.

Don’t miss Brother Stephen’s Flickr photos featuring his many travels, historical Catholic photos and Pope Benedict’s revival under way at the Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank.

The Sunday of the Man Born Blind and SS. Cyril and Methodius Day
New Western kalendars celebrate the last two on the 14th February as it’s the anniversary of the death of St Cyril

Cyril and Methodius, inspired by God, you became equals to the apostles by your lives. As you were teachers of the Slavs, intercede with the Master of all that he may strengthen all Orthodox peoples in the true faith, and that he may grant peace to the world and great mercy to our souls.

The paper they’re holding shows the azbuka, the Russian alphabet (Cyrillic) named for St Cyril; this Greek-based one replaced the one he came up with.

How many here have worked with a supply priest who doesn’t speak English when your knowledge of his language is functional but not fluent?

(The liturgical language is Slavonic, Russian’s older cousin.)

From Sunday’s Vespers:

O Word, thou art the light that lighteneth all. O God, thou art the eye of our body in this world. We acknowledge thee as the Creator of sight. Today from a mixture of spittle and dust thou didst re-create sight for the blind man. In times past thy fingers did make both clay and sight. Today he receiveth both from thee. Until this time the blind man was unable to see the sun. Now he seeth thee, the gentle Sun and Creator of all, who in thy love hast made and fashioned us.

The man who was blind from birth asked himself, ‘Was I born blind because of the sin of my parents, or am I a living sign of the unbelief of the nations? I am not content to ask whether it is night or day; my feet can no longer endure tripping upon the stones. I have not seem the brightness of the sun nor have I see the image and likeness of my Creator. Yet I beseech thee, O Christ our God, to look upon me and have mercy upon me.’

Commemorating SS. Epiphanius and Germanus (and, among others, St Ethelhard the Archbishop of Canterbury):

Ye have driven away the intellectual wolves from the Church of Christ with the staff of your teachings, O blessed bishops. Ye have surrounded her with a solid wall of reasoning and have presented her whole and unharmed to Christ. Pray to him that those who in faith keep your noble memory may be delivered from corruption and danger.

Icon of St Matrona, the blind seeress

Orthodox-RC relations again
My comment