Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• I’m all for ordaining openly gay men.
• LutherPunk on the new Antiochian BCP. They seem sincere about reviving 1950s biretta-belt parish practice for those who want it, even training some new priests to do it.
• Laughing at ex-Anglican splinter shenanigans is not just for liberals. More here and here.
• A liberal Protestant church has a committee on breaking its own rule by communing the unbaptised. Typical game-playing. Those who follow these doings (as I try to do less) know ‘let’s talk’ means ‘scr*w the rule; we’ll keep doing it’ (cf. ‘pastoral reasons’) or ‘shut up and obey me’. No wonder 100,000 culturally Mid-Western (straight talk; no games) churchgoers just started their own church (more) instead.

From RR

• LRC: the case against involuntary government.
• Ron Paul: cap and trade will lead to capital flight.
• Obama and health care: the development of economics was bad news for rulers who thought they were omnipotent.
• Misplaced faith: they have a lot of smart guys who know what they are doing.
• If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.
• antiwar.com: soldiers in Iraq are ill from burn pits.
• Britain faces new recession.
• Madoff’s small fry. Overheard at lunch yesterday from pensioners: ‘Madoff got 150 years.’ ‘Is that all?’
• The consequences of the culture of death.
• The ‘take your gun to church’ service and pastor predictably got a lot of laughs from liberal Protestants and they have a point (which they often don’t follow): the church is not a vehicle for secular causes. That said I imagine many of them don’t like his freedom message either (‘that rube ought to know his place and obey his moral superiors’). St Gabriel Possenti, pray for us.
• Why the GOP can’t sink Sotomayor. Never mind the culture-wars red herrings. Regrettably even the important constitutional issues like her defeat at one remove with Ricci don’t matter. With Senate confirmation practically a lock, big business plays nice with the likely next justice.
• Why adultery is still political suicide. Mores not morals but interesting. In many (most?) cases morals are none of the state’s business but mainstream society has a point that going back on your word with your spouse is blameworthy.

From @TAC

• Military expert William Lind on McChrystal’s mission. The Obama administration has decided to continue its predecessor’s Quixotic commitment to unattainable strategic objectives, i.e., changing entire societies. Afghanistan is to be made into a liberal, democratic, secular country with “rights for women” as defined by American feminists. That is baying for the moon, and it can have no other outcome but failure. Setting unattainable objectives makes doctrine irrelevant, because it guarantees defeat. America could have Alexander the Great as its commander in Afghanistan, with Napoleon and von Moltke as his deputies, and we would still lose. Both the left and the Protestant right think that’s OK because both think they’re better than you and know what’s best.
• Iran is not Eastern Europe.
• When will it register that leaving US 130,000 troops and 36,000 American contractors in-country does not equate to a massive “withdrawal?”
• Food, Inc. Between showing filthy chicken coops full of drugged birds that can barely move and cows packed in amongst piles of excrement, it explains how federal agricultural subsidies encourage the overproduction of corn. No wonder we use corn in everything, from feeding cows (where corn feed is linked to higher rates of E. coli) to making artificial sweetener for countless soft drinks. The FDA is supposed to protect us, it prods in the closing credits. But is it reasonable to assume that you will ever be able to trust Washington bureaucrats with protecting your children? The documentary’s most engaging interview is with small farmer Joel Salatin, who reminds us that the typical attitude of the central regulators — “we know what’s best for you — so comply!” — is the same kind of outlook that gets America into messy foreign entanglements.
• Well, it goes without saying one does not charge another with hypocrisy unless one tries to pass themselves off as “morally superior” to the other fellow or party. The modern GOP and its politicians have set themselves up for such charges and subsequently such downfalls if their politicians are exposed as being morally challenged. GOP candidates need to stop pandering to a base that will vote for their candidates regardless of whether they are as pure as the Holy Mother (and a base that votes for them on more than just “religious” issues) and they need to (hint, hint Mitt Romney) stop saying the government must “create strong families” because that is not something government can do nor should do. Again at this point I wouldn’t mind if the GOP went out of business.

From Joshua

• A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sin, but his own. Joshua explains.
• An assumption of the existence of God underlies all search for the truth, however buried that assumption may be, however oblivious the searcher.
• Identifying the banksters and their accomplices.

On consigning Vatican II to history’s dustbin
Gaudent angeli. As Jeff Culbreath and I were saying. From Arturo.

Also Frs Blake and Chadwick (more) touch upon why using even a noble political cause like pro-life as a substitute for Catholic identity doesn’t work.

Photo: St Paul’s Church here, from TNLM. Soon it will have weekly traditional Sung Mass.

Scotus rules for Ricci
Justice is served

• Prediction from the LRC blog.
• Steve Sailer on the matter.

Daniel Larison on anti-Russianism

Pope: tests confirm bones in Rome are St Paul’s

Don’t give up your guns

Prior to owning my own firearm, I was taught by my grandfather that a gun was a tool, just like a hammer, an axe, or any other farm implement. I was taught they were to be properly maintained and never misused or abused.

I felt a great deal of mental anguish when I was tasked with putting a seriously injured or sick farm animal “out of his/her misery.” I was taught I had an obligation to that animal, just as I had been taught to take “ethical” shots on game animals. Such were the lessons of my childhood, many of them centered on firearms.

Our elected and appointed criminals have destroyed our constitution; stolen our country’s wealth; created rampant racism by polarizing the races; openly admitted to voting for legislation that adversely impacts millions without ever reading it; ... infested their ranks with sanctimonious moral midgets who cannot control their carnal cravings; totally corrupted the criminal justice system, putting the innocent behind bars while protecting criminal cronies; imprisoned hundreds of thousands for committing “victimless” crimes; installed political and social activists in black robes; lied this nation into illegal, immoral wars that killed and maimed millions, many of them our own misguided citizens; turned our local, state and federal police into elements that would make Heinrich Himmler and Uncle Joe Stalin proud; made ignorant boobs of our children with their socialized, Marxist educational machine, and done all within their power to destroy all vestiges of our republic.

Now, these moral cowards insist the only way this nation can remain safe is to turn over to them the only tool we have left to insure liberty, because they believe themselves to be of some higher moral and intellectual plane.

From LRC.

Obamacare

The marketplace, of course, doesn’t conceive of separate spheres, neatly carved up by statists. The laws of supply and demand don’t answer to Barry the Bolshevik. Private practitioners and providers, in extant and nascent markets for medicine, must know that if The Man and his Machine bring in a “public option,” offering coverage to whomever wants it, the marketplace will change.

Ever wonder why the president is so confident that the “public option” will be cheaper? Here’s why: a “public plan” is a subsidized plan in which prices are artificially fixed below market level. As sure as night follows day, overconsumption and shortages always ensue.

Because it enjoys a monopoly over force, the government is immune to bankruptcy. It covers its shortfalls by direct and indirect theft: by taxing the people, or flooding the country’s financial arteries with toxic fiat currency.

Other than to indenture doctors, the overall effect of forcing professionals to provide healthcare below market prices will be to decrease the supply and quality of providers and products.

From Taki.

From Stephen Hand

• The ubiquitous matrix of lies or why I spend much of my job rewriting copy: to stop some of this showing up in print and online.
• Drama, architecture, art and grace: Evelyn Waugh’s Roman Catholicism.

From Joshua

• Ivan Illich on the idea of the university: The ability of the university to fix consumer goals is something new. In many countries the university acquired this power only in the sixties, as the delusion of equal access to public education began to spread.
• Farrah Fawcett received the last sacraments. Deo gratias.

California, here we come
Take out the parts about race and immigration and it’s pretty good

Californians who are running away from the communities and towns in which they were raised have Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah and Nevada to head to. But when all of America arrives at where California is at today, where do the Americans run to?

From Chronicles.

On the city streets: making an indy film
In the hottest part of a summer day, take after take of a scene with a busker and the man with the duffel bag (playing a soldier?) and the older woman in turn dropping money into his open guitar case

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Above: Metropolitan Jonah speaks to ACNA. After a very long and... exhaustive study of the Tractarians... it was with this one vision that I was inspired... and it continues to be the goal of my life: ... to live and actualise, to be a part of and to participate as fully as I possibly can in the full integrity of the Catholic Church, the full integrity of orthodox Catholicism. More.
• The real issue in the conservative-liberal church wars is of authority. From Fr Longenecker. As I was saying.
• Russia: priests help cops shame deadbeat dads into paying.
• Two on Anglican Use RC: Fr Z and TNLM.
• LutherPunk: I just got the Antiochians’ BCP. Way better than the Book of Divine Worship, and about 25% the size.
• Picture of Pope Benedict at I Vespers for the feast of SS. Peter and Paul from TNLM.

Non-interference means not interfering
From Daniel Larison

Fertility, fidelity, marriage and congregations
From Rod Dreher. Probably unlike him I’m not pushing the use of state power to try and defend marriage (nor to push the left’s version of it). With libertarianism we can all get along.

Is Obama’s realism better than Bush the younger’s idealism?
A qualified yes

Obama, however, is not a pure realist. Obama seems willing enough to abandon the younger Bush’s nation-building quagmire in Iraq. But instead of doing the same in Afghanistan, withdrawing U.S. troops from that country, and using intelligence, law enforcement, and maybe an occasional Special Forces raid to go after al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Obama has elected to escalate the military social work in Afghanistan. This strand of Obama’s thinking more resembles the idealistic muscular liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton.

Was ‘the good war’ unnecessary?
From LRC

Why Merkel’s not keen on Obamanomics
Germans know better from their history. From Ad Orientem.

15 words you won’t believe they added to the dictionary
I’m for gaydar, screenager, cyberslacking and Frankenfood — new words that mean something — but agree on the rest. The sort of thing that keeps me working at my Paul Fussell-inspired editing.

While resilience is already a perfectly good word that means the exact same thing, bouncebackability does sound much more like something a semi-literate alcoholic might put on a résumé, giving it that added appeal of mouthbreathability words like resilience lack.

From Cracked.

Requiem for a tarnished star
RIP Michael Jackson. Fred Astaire once rang him up to compliment him on his dancing.

Here is the video for ‘Beat It’ (can’t embed).

‘Why I can’t save the US economy’

Near Newtown Square, Pennsylvania

God himself supports bills that Jim Wallis likes
Who knew? From the LRC blog.

Detainees were also murdered at Bagram in Afghanistan
From truthout

From RR

• US eugenics legacy.
• No surprise: UN hates freedom, supports drugs prohibition.
• Online scams.
• UK: Woolworth’s returns as online shop.
• America closing to freedom.
• Discrimination which can be indulged cheaply through politics will prove costly in markets.
• We can debate endlessly whether the Constitution authorizes any president to “overhaul” the financial system. But I want to focus on a different matter: whether any president, with all his advisers, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system. My answer is no, and it is ominous that a bright guy like Obama doesn’t know this.

The strange, heartless glee at Mark Sanford’s downfall
Which is part of a story as old as the fall of humanity and thus a non-story, a private matter nothing to do with my interest in promoting liberty. I don’t pin any hope of that on the GOP so I don’t care if they’re ‘leaderless’ and they deserve to go down; this is only a distraction. From T1:9.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Conservative Episcopalians, ACNA as the Elizabethan Settlement redux and Metropolitan Jonah. Dr Tighe notes: to do any of the things that Metropolitan Jonah requires would bust up ACNA faster than I could say “Cranmer’s Ghost” or “King Charles’s Head.”
• Are orthodox Christians a ‘purity cult’, mainline jargon for those not on board with approving same-sex sex? ++Rowan Cantuar: We welcome people into the Church, we say: ‘You can come in, and that decision will change you.’ We don't say: 'Come in and we ask no questions.’ I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviours, ideas, emotions. The boundaries are determined by what it means to be loyal to Jesus Christ. That means to display in all things the mind of Christ.
• On the book The Empty Church.

On traditionalism and RC conservatives
From Arturo

Generation gap
Filter out the preoccupation with race and it’s good. From Taki.

The Kiev speech 18 years ago
From Daniel Larison

On fathers
From Michael Lawrence

From RR

• New US military cyber command.
• Beware federal meddling in the Internet.
• RIP Ed McMahon.
• ‘Unpredictable’ chance for Mideast peace.
• Celebrate Torture Day by punishing torturers.
• Pro-life and anti-intervention.
• Canada: gun registry hasn’t saved a single life.
• Car-free suburbia?
• The fourth estate is dying.

Obamacare: far worse than economically ignorant

I know! How about secular theme-party church services?
What ageing boomers the kids are into; yeah, that’s the ticket. That’ll bring ’em in. Christopher Johnson has a good understanding of it all as does Canon Houlding. It’s liberal-Protestant Pious Riot, not making Christianity better but rock music worse, driving away the actually religious (and would-be devout) and seen by hipsters as the preaching, posing, pandering and patronising bad imitation it is.

The 16-year-old baby
A mystery of science: a girl who doesn’t normally age

From Joshua

• Anti-interventionist immigrants. Today’s and tomorrow’s Mexican-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans will more resemble the Swedes, Germans, and Irish of a century ago than the Poles, Balts, and Cubans of the Cold War era. And unlike the Yankee (WASP) do-gooders (‘this war’s for your/their own good’) in all those periods.
• Not every child is secretly a genius.
• The sacrament of confession.

Bankruptcy
The cleanup from the Fed’s destructive boom. From LRC.

Jim Webb’s attack on the American gulag
From Chronicles

Talking truth to theological chicness
From Arturo.

Men and the church

Men and the church

Men like objectivity and Godwardness. The great Thomas Day has noted the same thing.

In Slav country in upstate Pennsylvania, at least historically, men and the church have come together in some places naturally with no marketing plan (which I’d bet you a case of Yuengling Black and Tans would flop):

The world of flannel hunting jackets, wedding receptions at union halls, 4th of July barbecues, and tailgate parties that represented my native Western Pennsylvania.

— From here

Or the Sportsmen’s Club bar in the onion-domed church’s hall.

Too often the Church has portrayed Jesus as effeminate. But Jesus, who flipped over the money-changers’ tables, is the Jesus with whom men can identify. The Jesus who is portrayed solely as one who eternally “turns the other cheek” has little in common with the American male. He was a man who faced down the authorities, antagonizing them, rebuking them, and challenging them to such a degree that it resulted in his suffering perhaps the cruelest death of all: crucifixion. Ultimately, he embraced the value that men hold highest: giving one’s life for a cause. A man will sacrifice his life for his family, for his country, for his friends, and even for his religion.

A hint why the Catholic priesthood is set up as it is: real men offer sacrifice.

From RR

• Breakthrough in fighting prostate cancer?
• Geronimo, a hero.
• Ivar Kreuger. 1920s stock manias were undergirded by Federal Reserve flooding markets with cash. And Kreuger was in his biggest operations an agent and helpmeet of the state all the way.
• Government doesn’t solve our problems; it creates them.
• ‘Socialism begets tyranny? Coincidence!’
• On Peter Schiff: the US is about to go broke and take Canada down with it.
• Ron Paul: international bailout brings us closer to economic collapse.
• EU tries to buy Ireland’s vote.

ACNA
The Elizabethan compromise redux only without the state forcing it together

It is because it leaves no room for faith, but ultimately only for opinion, that we have presumed to call this theory of the authority of a fallible Church impossible; it is because it has already broken down under trial that we call it reactionary.

— Dom Gregory Dix quoted by Dr Tighe

Crowdsourcing Big Brother in Pennsylvania
From Jerry Porter who asks ‘Who will watch the watchers?’

From Eric Sammons

• The bishop calls this shot.
• Conversion.

Modern high altar gone for good from Westminster Cathedral
From Damian Thompson

The end of Western hegemony?
From LRC

‘Top Gear’ video: road test
From Jerry Porter

Distracting Trumpet

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• All Saints of Russia and other respective countries. As a beautiful fruit of the sowing of thy salvation, the land of Russia offers to thee, O Lord, all the saints that have shone in it. By their prayers keep the church and our land in deep peace, through the Mother of God, O most merciful One. Again on venerating the other side’s saints.
• The devotion to the Sacred Heart, which in its symbolical meaning and as representing the love and tenderness of the Saviour towards His children, had found its way into the hymns and prayers of almost every private form of devotion, and commends itself to the more enthusiastic of every communion, as the most touching of all those exercises of piety which cluster around the suffering life of Jesus ... The Heart of Christ, whether to Puritan devotee, to the member of the High Church in England, or to those who had outwardly separated themselves from the communion of both, was the temple of a common worship — the home of common love. From The Devotion of the Sacred Heart, the Religious Tract Society, London, probably printed around 1876, pp. 8-9.
• Jeffrey Steel: It was my decision that it was not about me building my own church. It was not about a party within a church. The Church is the Church of Christ, his body. Everything in my mind with regards to ecclesiology came to see that I had to personally do all to avoid any sort of attachment that would obstruct communio. I was not lying but seeking the prayer for unity of Jesus. BTW until only a few months ago I didn’t know he was American or that his time in Anglo-Catholicism was so relatively short. Understandably I thought he was an English Anglo-Papalist. As an Anglo-Catholic, I sincerely bought into the ecclesial idea of the Catholic structure of a priest in union with his local bishop. That is very important in Catholic ecclesiology and there is a bit of an issue that I began questioning with regards to my not being in communion with the diocesan but a provisional one due to issues of sacramental priesthood. At the start, this structure brings up many Catholic questions about ecclesiology but I saw the necessity of it due to difficult circumstances in a broad church. So, I embraced the ecclesial oddity.
• He did it (he’s guilty), I understand the logic and rules (if a bishop acts as one in a church you’re out of communion with, he’s out — the Catholic churches say the same) and the diocese’s new arrangements in the long run are as untenable as the old ones. That said, Bishop MacBurney, one of his former church’s last Catholic diocesans, ought to frame this and put it on his wall.
• Bishop Fellay speaks.

A non-touristy Philly landmark
On Rocky’s waterfront: the SS United States, still the fastest ocean liner ever, winning the transatlantic-crossing prize for 1952 (3½ days) but rendered obsolete by jet airliners; as you can see it hasn’t sailed in 40 years.

From Mark Shea

• It’s a cult of fear and a fool’s paradise! Chesterton on inconsistent attacks on Christianity.
• Sin makes you stupid, part I: contempt or underestimating your opponent, ironically being blinded to him.
• Part II: hoping for the worst.
• Atheism virtually always has Christianity as the target, by the way, since one seldom finds atheists fulminating againt Quetzlcoatl.
• Is there anything the Internet can’t do? From the mainpage of Blogger:
  

  Become a JESUS CHRIST
  With an Online Pastoral Degree. Study Online, in your spare time.
  Christian.EarnMyDegree.com

  I think it’s the “in your spare time” thing that cracks me up the most.

From Stephen Hand

• Lied to again: more money for more war.
• When the cure is worse than the disease: what’s wrong by G.K. Chesterton.
• On human sacrifice by Mesoamericans and today.
• The priesthood of Christ.

From LRC

• Egomaniacal. What else would you call someone who writes an autobiography while still in his early 30s? And you’re not Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Sergey Brin (the young father of Google), somebody who accomplished something by that age. Sounds like he could use a lesson from the story of King Canute. Photo (story) from Stephen Hand — to be fair it doesn’t seem to be Obama’s idea!
• Right back at you, Mr President: ‘We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.’
• Speaking of charming, overrated politicians, back to Camelot? Stephen Hand’s interested in this too. More. Have anti-JFK people been played? AFAIK it sounds like history according to Oliver Stone (if JFK had lived he would have fulfilled certain ideals despite his actual record) but it’s plausible. (More likely history: he would have done exactly what Johnson did, getting the country mired in Vietnam, and Humphrey would have lost to Nixon in 1968 anyway.) The shooting does seem to have been a coup (Oswald was a US agent) but I don’t know why. RFK seemed sincere — that murder could have been orchestrated.
• ‘A massive assault [on protesters] led by government law enforcement agencies.’ No, that’s not today’s headline about the Iranian protests. It’s from an article describing how the mullahs of the GOP used the coercive powers of the state to squash protests of their policies just last year.
• More state worship from the NYT. Defending it at Waco.

High Mass from 1941
A traditionalist classic filmed in a Servite church in Chicago (they wear the hoods of their habits not birettas) and narrated by Fulton Sheen

From Fr Methodius

• What is worship? For many conservative Protestants it’s become an imitation of secular entertainment. Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better? You’re just making rock ’n’ roll worse. Bobby, I don’t want the Lord to end up in this box.
• Two kinds of people.

Some ‘hate crimes’ are more equal than others
Which shows the illogic and agenda of such laws as opposed to enforcing old laws to do with the harm principle (against murder, assault and battery etc.)

I wonder if the writers of Indiana Jones knew of this
From Taki

On the box: ‘The Outer Limits’ episode ‘Controlled Experiment’
(Embedding has been disabled.) Oxbridgean Martian anthropologists study early-1960s Earth with a period-looking time-control machine. Carroll O’Connor as few perhaps remember him. A sort of ‘Prime Directive’/don’t-change-history lesson but things aren’t deterministic... like God in his eternal now knows the outcome of everything but it all happens freely.

Leave Iran alone
From LRC

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• On the two one true churches.
• On venerating the other side’s saints. Arturo in a hard-line mood.
• On a vagante drag queen, ‘nancy vicars’ and Nats. In which I comment as High-church libertarian curmudgeon.
• The SSPX in the news. Comments.
• On monasticism old and new. Paul: These organizations are all but indistinguishable from what were called guilds, sodalities, confraternities, and orders of tertiaries, and have existed from before the Middle Ages right up until the present moment. But I think it’s a real mistake to refer to it as monasticism, and that it’s really only being done because that’s what “hot” right now in terms of spiritual writers.
• The Daughters of the King and the life and death of Elaine Ryan, Dr Schori’s mother, who became Orthodox. I have no idea why the Jeffertses left the RCs.
• RC numbers. These organizations are completely tied to government and big donor funding; and he who pays the bill calls the tune.

‘The responsible left’ funding Obama’s expanding wars
Of course! They’ve always believed in ‘humanitarian intervention’ as they think they know what’s best for the rest of us.

I forget where I read it but rather like the idea that in this neocon/left-liberal Punch and Judy, Bush (Cheney) was the bad cop and Obama the handsome good cop.

A tactical suggestion for the Sotomayor hearings
Call in a witness from the Ricci case. Of course! From Steve Sailer.

From Michael Lawrence

• Religion and violence.
• On being a night-owl.

From Taki

• Gottfried remembers the Old Right. Answering Charles Coulombe. I was thinking that for all of Pat Buchanan’s good points he wasn’t a palæocon.
• Palæos and Protestantism. Obviously I don’t think embracing the latter in the name of authentic American culture is the way. That said I understand the impatience with what a friend has called the drawbridge mentality rejecting classical liberalism and the market. I have yet to encounter more than a handful of paleos who believe that the Reformation was a good thing. Because it was evil.
• A reply.

From the LRC blog

• Who put the green in the Green Revolution?
• War and civil liberties under Obama.
• Scotus says there’s no right to DNA testing. Rubbish.

From RR

• After $196 billion, no proof UN programmes help. More.
• Hey, look, a distraction! Standing in the supermarket checkout line, I’m accosted by a slew of headlines: Has Jon been cheating on Kate? Has Kate been cheating on Jon? Are they going to split up? My question: Who the hell are these people?! And why should I care? It is hardly surprising to learn that the U.S. news media ranked last in its coverage of international hard news.
• Reason to mock the vote. Also, rights are inherent (from God, say believers) not from the state.
• Anarchy Day. Anarchists don’t wish to destroy anything other than the coercive collective of government, and the slave mind-set that empowers it.
• Neither the sickle nor the swastika. Whatever its espoused ideological roots, government murder is collectivism.

Two against the Fed
From Joshua

Wrapping himself in the seamless garment
Also possibly taking advantage of old Democrat-labour ties, playing RCs (he got their vote anyway — see the preceding) whilst stepping up the war in Afghanistan. And of course he’ll get away with it — all one need do is cry racism. There are Obamacons with honour — Andrew Bacevich — and then there’s this. Also, Bad Catholics don’t make war on truth even when they reject it. Can’t say that of those who are using them.

Rethink Afghanistan
From the Sojourners blog

Minimal orthodoxy
This difference among Catholics revisited. From Arturo: speaking truth to chicness.

Prince Charles vs modernist architecture
From Rod Dreher

D.B. Hart essay: ‘The Myth of Schism’
Under Contents go to page 95

Long story short: Catholicism East and West is the same church except for the scope of the Pope (God-made channel of the church’s infallibility or man-made rank of the divinely instituted episcopate for the good order of the church?), the only insurmountable problem. (One that would remain if Pope Benedict succeeds in purging all the would-be Protestantism and its son, Modernism, from Rome.) For union to happen one side would cease to be. (Its rites would remain but something essential would change.) The ‘tous schismatiques’ view of a very few Greek Catholics is branch-theorism that ultimately says there’s no church.

An outline from Dr Tighe (who explains his position here):

It’s divided into four parts: I., “The Mythology of Division,” II., “Theology,” III., “Doctrine,” and IV., “Ecclesiology.”

In Part I he spends most of the time attacking ideas of “immemorial,” “fundamental” and “ontological” divisions between the Latin West and the Greek East (Romanides, Staniloae, Lossky and Zizioulas for the East and Przywara and von Balthasar for the West) as well as “1204 and All That,” praising JP II’s “Ut Unum Sint” and insisting that before 1729 (for Rome) and 1754 (for the East) few folk in either East or West thought that the Latin and Greek churches were completely separate bodies, one “The True Church” and the other “No Church.”

In Part II he says that there are no real “theological” differences between the East and the West, denying particularly those who assert that there are fundamental differences in Trinitarian Theology (divine simplicity and the filioque) or in regard to the “errors of Augustine” know what they’re talking about, or even that their views should be taken seriously by anybody.

In Part III he says that there are significant “doctrinal differences” while insisting that “doctrinal differences” are much less serious or “deep” than “theological differences.” After specifically denying that there are any such differences as regards the Assumption of the Immaculate Conception (so long as the notions of Original Sin etc. underlying the specific 1854 formulation of the latter are not taken as de fide), he concludes that there are two,” the filioque (not the teaching but the mere fact of its insertion in the Creed) and Purgatory (not as regards post mortem purification and healing, but, rather, the notion of penalties, punishment and “time”). He thinks that the mere presence of the filioque in the Creed, even only in the Latin Church, makes the prospect of reunion impossible, and its removal he sees as an absolute prerequisite for reunion. He thinks, on Purgatory, that “theological reflection” can bring about agreement.

In Part IV he reflects, rather inconclusively, on papal infallibility, thinking it could be formulated in a way that would be acceptable to the Orthodox (although his thoughts on this strike me as quite vague). A bigger problem appears to be “universal jurisdiction” although he doesn’t “name the issue” and his essay sort of segues into that underlying issue and then out of it again without any real concrete suggestions. Then he goes on to assert hat the real problem is “how to justify the continuing division” (ill-founded as he regards it in its origins and justification), when Christian unity is “an imperative” in face of the relentlessly advancing “soothing and saccharine nihilism” that is purveyed by the dominant Western culture and seems likely to triumph everywhere over the next few decades.

The essay is only eleven pages long (pp. 95-106), and it can be read in its entirety at the Google Books link.

The decline of English-language standards
From Sol

Imagine

The cultural revolution that came to power in the 1960s is turning the world into a vast cultural gulag. It is, in its essence, a totalitarian ideology. It will allow no pocket of dissent.

Can this societal loathing of the past and refusal to project itself into the future, shared by Quebec, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland and Britain and nearly all the western countries, as well as China, Japan and Korea, really be so easily explained by the standard feminist tropes? Can the hatred of the natural family and terror of motherhood, the rejection of such primal, elemental, instincts, really be put down to something as banal as the feminists’ political slogans about “choice” and “freedom”? Isn’t there something else, something deeper and more sinister, perhaps even something more eschatological at work? Simply from the natural point of view, how can any species abandon its own survival the way we have?

— Hilary

Mencken on music
From Michael Lawrence

A few days ago, as a belated birthday treat to myself and in celebration of the end of a long work cycle, I visited Bookhaven, Philadelphia’s finest vault of used books. This is one of those places in which there is always something to be found, even if it isn’t what was originally sought. On this particular day I had it in my mind to see if they had a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, one of three hymnals, all of which are Anglican, which are worth having.

Perhaps the most surprising essay in the whole collection is the one on Catholic Church music, in which Mencken lauds the efforts of Pope Pius X to resurrect chant and polyphony and shelve the operatic caterwauling that had been fashionable at that time. It’s not the kind of story one would expect to come from an agnostic.

From RR

• The enigmatic pro-consul. Few things have been as constant and steadfast as the policy of the Atlantic Empire in the so-called Western Balkans for the past two decades. From the early recognition of separatist regimes in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia to last year’s proclamation of the “Independent State of Kosovo,” the Empire has embraced and discarded logic and law, but maintained one ironclad rule: The Serbs always lose.
• A libertarian look at Harvey Milk. Why the late Cold War news expressions ‘Communist conservatives’ etc. weren’t oxymoronic; they wanted to use the old means to get what they wanted much like the left today really. Of course I’m more Burkean (political/societal ‘hermeneutic of continuity’) and don’t believe classical liberalism is about defending the rights of minorities as blocs but individual rights.
• Crimes against senior citizens show need for defensive arms.
• Unless the US president can break his hardline posture, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan could prove his Vietnam.
• A very smooth liar. I’ve heard him in person. True.
• The death-squad veteran in charge in Afghanistan.
• The Totalitarian Times. The NYT printed Communist propaganda and won a Pulitzer for it.
• Redistribution, an unnecessary evil.
• Health insurance isn’t.
• The ‘anti-war’ Democrats who sold out.

From the VDARE blog
This site is problematic: anti-immigrant and essentially anti-miscegenation, they seem to be chomping at the bit to have another Nazi or apartheid state, the mirror of the racialist collectivism of the left. In other words although one of their main premises — that there might be inherent differences in ability among races — is not racist as long as you don’t make that a basis for admission or other policy, they are racists as that’s what they want. Nothing to do with me or this blog. That said...

• The bad things that happened to the projects that Sotomayor used to live in were more or less the result of what is still Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy. But why should she worry? She’s going to work in Washington... and live in Georgetown.
• If your culture isn’t much into reading books — Sotomayor’s wasn’t — then you don’t have a “cultural bias” problem, you have lower scholastic aptitude.
• Affirmative action at the US Naval Academy. See above on making race a criterion, a sin of the left as much as it is of the VDARE people.
• The Milwaukee Project fraud?
• By the late 1960s Conant’s solution of tracking was coming under attack as concern shifted away from maximizing the individual potential of students and toward equalizing outcomes of racial groups. Tracking, the European way — maximizing the individual potential of students regardless of race — is fine. Egalitarianism or the lie that everybody must have an equal outcome, not equal opportunity, is not. If more of one race make it to the upper track, so what?
• The testing-industry gold rush.
• The Obamas and the CIA. Might he have been spying on Jeremiah Wright?

Saying goodbye to analog TV



Here KYW put up a Philco TV W3XE test-pattern slide.



A nice retrospective from Cincinnati.

Cartoon
From Just a girl in short shorts thinking about whatever

The only good that came of that election is it seemed to show people are now better than to vote against somebody because of race. The trouble is they still vote for somebody based on that.

90 per cent of waking hours spent staring at glowing rectangles
From The Onion

From CounterPunch

• Torture: an American legacy.
• How Obama will outspend Reagan on war.
• Beating and torturing children. All in a day’s work for the IDF.

From Taki

• Mr Obama, tear down this empire.
• Old palæos and new.
• The UK Independence Party.

Is Obama dissing the UK to pretend to keep his promises on torture?
From the Ship

The paper résumé is laughably passé, at least in some circles
From T1:9

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• In a week when you might have thought I was crowing about conversions (and I am happy about them), an intellectual Protestant’s criticism of RC conversion testimonies (parts II, III and IV). Of course I don’t agree with his conclusion, ‘even in the 1,500 years before Protestantism churchmen disagreed on essentials so might as well join/stay here’ (in that case, might as well stay home/jump off a bridge) but he makes good points. The faith is united on essentials and much else but not in lockstep; never was.
• This came from Arturo who comments on many conversions as a higher form of whiteness. I’d say it’s another contrast of two kinds of Catholics, the first more likely to be happy with protestantised services and testifying (albeit to true doctrine) like missionary Baptists; the second natural traditionalism not going in for that... where you’ll find me and Arturo. (I have my sacramental and prayer life but rarely watch EWTN.)
• The Dutch touch (named by Fr Hunwicke) or what made Anglo-Catholicism or at least Anglo-Papalism possible after Apostolicæ Curæ. None of the big Catholic churches, Rome, the Orthodox and other Eastern ones, recognise this claim really (all reordain ex-Anglicans) and considering the games vagantes have played with succession (groups no longer Christian — belief in the Trinity is optional/an opinion — claim it, and if a priest starts telling you about his ‘lines’, run) and that the presiding bishop of ELCA claims it I appreciate the view making orders and being in the church inseparable, or (I forget who said it) a Catholic believes his orders are valid (have grace, in Orthodoxese) because he’s in the true church; an Anglican argues for something approaching churchness because he says his orders are valid. To the Catholic churches being in communion is being a member. Of course Fr Robert Hart and company — following classic Anglicanism (that is, they’re conservative Protestants who claim orders) — believe what they do (like the old high churchmen, that their orders stand regardless of what others think).
• We’re not in communion but heading in the same credal, Godward direction. Derek on Episcopal ‘reform of the reform’. I’ve been saying what I’ve titled this about us. He seems to agree!
• Fr Z fisks a liberal’s (wannabe Protestant) article on the priesthood.
• St Metrophanes. O good shepherd who didst proclaim the great mystery of the Trinity and manifest Christ’s dispensation to all, thou didst put to flight the spiritual wolves who menaced thy rational flock and didst save the lambs of Christ who cry: Glory to him who hath strengthened thee; glory to him who has exalted thee; glory to him who through thee hath strengthened the orthodox faith.
• St Botolph.

English court: blogger has no right to anonymity
From Michael Lawrence. Photo of Mr Ahmadinejad from Mark Shea.

Unsurprisingly the illiberal left-liberals of the religious left don’t like blogs either.

From RR

• Survey: Americans’ support of Israel drops 20 per cent in nine months. Good.
• Palestinian journos jailed for reporting on Gaza invasion.
• UK: secret inquiry into Iraq war will report after the election.
• Microbe wakes up after more than 120,000 years in ice.
• Why doesn’t the market produce non-smoking bars?
• Indulging our health-care fantasies.
• Ten things you can do to stimulate a new economy.
• Obama must prosecute Bush-era torture enablers. Not that he will.
• Is Iran’s election America’s problem?
• Federal ‘fusion centres’ aimed at Second Amendment, free speech. Or my Ron Paul car sticker makes me a terrorist.
• Fighting fascism with fascism.
• Republicans are never more dangerous to the cause of liberty than when they are out of power.
• The big power grab.
• Letterman/Palin: dull meets dumb. Offensive in parts, nothing to do with this blog. I don’t like Letterman. There’s a lot to like about Palin: for example her looks and her frontier-sized lust for life that makes her even sexier. I wish her nothing but good. But I’d never vote for her. As a friend of the blog has rightly said she’s ‘woefully unqualified’ regardless of her political positions and from the account I’ve read of her incompetence in Wasilla, like Letterman (in this case because of her beauty?) she has a bit of the smug bully in her character. I wonder if, based upon her remarks about the disabled, Mercer does as well.
• Degrading art.

Film about little guy battling huge, morally bankrupt organisation made by huge, morally bankrupt organisation
From The Onion

A welcome sight on my way to work
Working 1930s trams

Talking about the harm principle

Pope urges new vision of modern economy
Which frankly sounds like the old well-meant vision of many Christians liberal and conservative of outside meddling ‘for the common good’, not understanding the science of the market (the invisible hand) and that today’s débàcle was not caused by the free market but mercantilist corporatism, which by nature requires state meddling to dispense favours

Freedom in the economic sector must be at the service of “human freedom in its totality.” And this freedom must be responsible, “‘the core of which is ethical and religious.’”

The harm principle. No problem.

From T1:9.

A correction to the Amtrak-cop story
Mr Peterson writes:

Officer Larkin was sympathetic during the arrest; rather as Officer Larkin stated, it was a Lower Merion police officer who knocked the coffee cup from my hands during arrest.

This week from Fred Reed

In the news I find more on torture. I’m so proud. Home of the brave, land of the free, though we may pull your fingernails out. Sadism is sexual. People don’t do it who don’t like it.

Next, I see that some guy named I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket claims he has been elected prez of Iran again. It seems that he is being threatened by the Prime Minister of Israel, who for some time I believed to be named Bibi Nut-and-Yahoo. Why don’t I care? Sounds like a personal problem.

Meanwhile North Korea threatens South Korea with nuclear war, and the US pledges noisily to defend the South at all costs. Why? The South has lots more population and industry than does the North. If South Korea wants to defend itself, it can. If it doesn’t want to, I don’t care. I’m not Seoul’s mother.

Next, I see that the US has killed thirteen more civilians with drone strikes in Afghanistan. Lovely. What fun. I picture some wet-lipped CIA psychopath goobering at his screen in search of someone to blow up. It’s a cinch they don’t know who they are aiming at. The CIA has never been very good at intelligence, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the spirit of the thing. Besides, Afghans breed like flies. If you splatter one kid with a really neat drone, got buttons, got knobs, they can beget another.

Next, California is broke. Good. They deserve it. It’s not as if bankruptcy were an act of God, like getting hit on the head by a giant meteor. It was deliberate stupidity. Spend more than you make, and you end up on the street. I’m supposed to feel sorry for that? I’ve known roundworms with better sense. As I understand it, the Democrats refuse to cut spending and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes. See? A lobotomy in two-part harmony. Sounds like the whole country.

From RR.

Fr Hunwicke on the Tudors and the banner of the Five Wounds

It was so Christocentric, yet the central PR lie of the Protestants was that they were the ones who were restoring Christocentricity to religion.

We wyll haue oure old seruice of Mattens, masse, Euensong and procession in Latten as it was before.

My standard line on Orthodox-RC relations
From this conversation at Ad Orientem

‘Change we can believe in’ has come to mean ‘believe in but not see, like the tooth fairy or making a wish on a dandelion’
From Huw

Del Shannon on ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1965

Bad Movie Heaven on THIStv
Even more ridiculous than A Small Circle of Friends (likewise thinking it’s the coolest) but in a way more authentic as it’s actually from 1969: Sonny and Cher’s idea of a hippy art film. That about says it all! (Also how their daughter got her name.) She’s rude and annoying. Groovy. Probably a combination of the Bonos’ cluelessness and many hippies really being like that. I’d rather spend time with the film’s early 1960s-ish normal people. I’ll give the Bonos credit for seeming to like Russian melodies: the incidental music has that tinge.