Too often, and for too long, American ‘Christianity’ has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it
From Arturo

Clueless

If you take the time to watch some of the congressional hearings in Washington or read about the doings of individual members of Congress, you end up shaking your head in disbelief. One such example of idiocy in action was the outrageous hectoring of the esteemed General Petraeus by a member of Congress by the name of Gabrielle Giffords. The gentlewoman asked the general just what he was going to do to put more emphasis on less environmentally damaging methods on the battlefield. She suggested that perhaps stabbing or clubbing enemy forces would minimize the carbon output in theaters of war. Clearly she never trained for combat.

From here.

From Mark Shea

• Modernist religiosity pwned. Local RC, mainline, boomer, swipple; it still works.
• Popular non sequiturs. Like ‘the Pope’s fallible but he has the power to make all the changes we want’.
• For somebody who styles himself a “Protestant apologist” to maintain, with a straight face, that the Eastern churches were more or less a collection of storefront churches with KJV preachin’, big hair, overhead projectors and no, absolutely no, sacraments, smells or bells until Rome infected them... that’s just milk-out-the-nose funny. It was sort of the other way round, Stuart Koehl told me. Around the nadir of the Dark Ages, when the Diocese of Rome itself seemed about to go under (corruption and irreligion), France came to the rescue. There was the Cluniac reform (St Bernard: the monks saved Western civilisation) and the terse, austere Roman Rite (why the collects are often so curt) got a transfusion from the more flowery Gallican Rite, a Latin but non-Roman one, which in turn had been influenced by the Eastern rites. That seems to explain the family resemblance of the Tridentine Mass (only a slightly edited mediæval Mass) and the Eastern liturgies (the Byzantine reached its final form in the late Middle Ages like the Roman).

Alpha Americans or apostolic Christians?
Nothing wrong with going for the best, Fr L explains; it’s when that becomes an idol

From Joshua

• Glenn Beck and the death of conservatism.
• Patrimony: more English choral music. Many days this blog is essentially a feed from his minus the music and the Korean stuff but here’s some music.

The difference between protection and a protection racket
From RR

A quintet of nos from LRC

• No microchipping of people.
• College isn’t for everyone. Paul Fussell, himself a university lecturer, called this 30 years ago: with the best or not intentions, ripping off the proles. Or just like circa 1940, only about 14 per cent of American kids go to college. Most of the rest go to things simply called colleges. A solution: Walmart University. Same or better schooling, lower price because of lower overhead and ‘no bull’.
• No more standing army.
• No something for nothing.
• For our own good — not. Red-light cameras: accidents up in one town. Serious accidents.

From Steve Sailer

• Because most of them are unteachable. A non-political, non-financial problem so there’s no political or financial solution left or right.
• He’s a movie critic: As Afghanistan evolves into Mr. Obama’s War, antiwar sentiment is at a low ebb among the press. In reality, The Tillman Story, directed by Amir Bar-Lev and narrated by Josh Brolin, is a lesser example of the documentarian’s art. Yet, it’s worth sitting through because of the light it shines on what’s becoming America’s forever war.
• Scientists square off on evolutionary value of helping relatives.

Half my problem with traditionalist Catholicism
I love most of the same things they love, but chafe at feeling required to hate all the same things they seem to hate, writes Jared B. here at Arturo’s. I’ve long understood the frustration. So among other things I became a libertarian too. More like 1962, like you can find among Pennsylvania Slavs, and less like a cult, or more like vintage Goldwater (and ‘shut up, Falwell’ too) and not, as Ad Orientem says, gloomy conspiracy theories about Freemasons, Jews, Communists, invalid Masses, women in trousers refereeing ball games and at university with the vote, sedevacantists and antipopes. (I know people from 1962; they’re not like that. At the same time I won’t jump on the bandwagon slandering Bishop Williamson.) The basics — doctrine, Mass and office — devotions and unofficial folk practices in their proper place, and lots of un-self-conscious tat (like the church porn Arturo criticises but not exactly). I love seeing cappa magnas without apology (and in a Roman Rite church wearing a biretta in choir) but am neither gay nor grandiose (clericalist, monarchist, fascist, theocratic); as Fr Rutler would say we’re sacerdotalists. I feel rather like Arturo about the Novus neoconnerie but admit I’m not following the theology-of-the-body argument he’s having.

While “old-school Catholicism” was the default religion of millions of people fifty to sixty years ago, its Potemkin-village manifestation will be a sort of ship in the bottle.

Our Mass is at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, so as not to disturb the “normal” Catholics.

Maybe one day it will be the default Catholicism of a self-selected elite, but to think that it will somehow take hold of the masses like it once did, or inspire the depth of creativity and thought that it once did, all I have to say again is good luck with that. It is like expecting the poetry of Rumi and the philosophy of Averroes to be produced from the ranks of Osama bin Laden and the Saudi royal family. Fundamentalisms are seldom fruitful.

Point taken; one of the same as mine in my 1962 link. Another way of putting that is it may be the default for a real remnant during real persecution, like the non-modern Ukrainian Catholic Church lived through for 40 years in modern times.

The art of manliness: how to firmly say no without coming off like a jerk

Patrimony: English church music
From Fr C

The myth of equality
From Taki

From Joshua

• White altruism: the children of Christendom.
• Los San Patricios. To paraphrase a leftist I can’t remember, if it came down to betraying my faith and family or betraying my country, I hope I’d be brave enough to betray my country.

A last word for now on an Anglican story, and a patrimonial blog split

• Clem’s and the bishop. I understand but he still ought to retire.
• Fr Chadwick and The Anglo-Catholic part ways. I admit I’m not clear why but ISTM there’s a difference of opinion whether TAC will be received corporately or if Rome will start the ordinariates from scratch and TAC will have to get in the queue with everybody else. I think the latter. It’s as close to corporate reunion as you’ll get; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth even though of course there are liberal RCs gunning for you.
  
  I think Anglicanorum Cœtibus was written mainly to the Anglo-Papalists in the C of E (FiF) — literally to ‘Groups of Anglicans’ — and not to TAC though of course TAC is perfectly welcome.
  
  IMO an American ordinariate would be mostly ex-TAC priests and not many laity, ‘the kind of people in the RC Anglican Use now’ as Fr C says. That means the AU will get a couple more American parishes, in the teeth of the liberal American bishops, and that’s it. It will be like the effect of Summorum Pontificum for the foreseeable future: pretty good in a couple of places but not nearly enough. American lay Continuers are not interested in being RCs; they’re like Bishop Grafton believing in their version of Anglicanism. There may be one other contingent coming in, my source tells me. All I may say is they’re not Episcopalians.
  
  The TAC corporate-reunion camp might also hope that Rome would grandfather in (dispense) the few former RC clergy they have. No. Theologically Rome can — it’s only a rule not doctrine — but to keep discipline it won’t, as the Apostolic Constitution clearly says.

Immigration and the class divide/war
Fisking a mainliner who happens to be the Episcopalians’ presiding bishop. First disclaimer: the writer is random; this appeared on my desk today in the newsroom, where I happen to be, among other things, the religion editor (an empty honour today compared to a decade ago as fewer people either buy newspapers or go to/care about church so that page is just ads from the few Protestant churches willing to pay to bother with advertising; to save ourselves we’re slowly switching over to being a news-video website... I don’t know what the churches will do). This blog doesn’t exist to badmouth the Episcopal Church. I understand the root difference with Catholicism — that’s right, infallibility vs Erastianism — so I don’t spaz over topical/surface issues (sex!), and I defend all faiths’ rights to self-governance and their properties. Second disclaimer: I’m an open-borders libertarian because individual liberty trumps the other issues.

Most Episcopalians are aware of, and probably invested in, the current public debates about immigration in the United States.

I can’t resist. ‘Good help is hard to find.’

Our biblical tradition speaks loudly and prophetically about God’s intent for a healed society in which distinctions based on nationality or ethnicity are transcended.

Ultimately but with a lot of tribal warfare along the way, the Chosen kicking ass and vice versa.

The Hebrew Bible speaks more often (38 times) and more vociferously about welcome for the alien and the sojourner...

The great prophetic vision of Zion is as a light to the nations, where all will worship God and do justice together (Isaiah 42:6-7; Isaiah 60:3), where people from every language, family and nation gather before the throne of God to build a city of peace and justice (Revelation 5:9- 10; 21:22-26). That overarching dream of differing peoples gathered to worship and build a just society also underlies the founding vision of the United States. Those American forebears claimed that vision of a “city built on a hill” to which the nations shall stream.

The Episcopal Church long has claimed a particular place in seeking to build those divine visions into reality through engagement with our political, economic and social structures – and not only in the United States.

...the local people are threatened by changes represented by newly arriving groups.

Partly true — see me above on liberty — but I’m getting thurible-smoke-sized whiffs of WASP American exceptionalism and implied class war. Like Seth MacFarlane on Republicans shipping other people’s kids to get killed in Iraq for no good reason:


These people and their 1.8 planned children aren’t competing with immigrants for low-level jobs or worrying about their jobs being outsourced. (Indeed the more self-consciously liberal they get, the whiter and snootier they get.)

So using immigrant minorities as pawns they get to simultaneously tell the Wrong Class of Whites they’re better than them (I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like that Nascar fan, who probably voted for Bush and McCain and clings to his gun and fundamentalist literalism and is too dumb to get his family away from the ghetto with a good-paying white-collar job. Loser.) and literally replace such with what they hope will be grateful peons who like Desmond Tutu (I’ll say it: one of their tokens) will hang on every word of their betters and have fun ‘vibrant’ cultures to loot.

Uncontrolled migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, for instance, actually has decreased by two-thirds over the last decade, and the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has declined about 10 percent. Violent crime in the border states has decreased significantly over the same time period. Yet most American citizens still believe that more people are coming and that violence continues to increase.

Good to know. Thank you!

Those fears, whether substantiated by declining employment opportunities or baseless prejudice, are contributing to increased tribalism across the globe.

So family and ethnic identity are bad, imply these cosmopolitans. Not only do Cletus and Brandine have to watch out but so do José, Ivan (‘Bomb Serbia on their Easter!’) et al. The English Calvinists have spoken. You will be assimilated. You will drive a Prius. You will shop at Whole Foods. You will have gay weddings. Resistance is futile.

We all agree that American immigration law is broken. Human beings have packed up and moved for millennia, in search of food, shelter, safety, better climate, economic opportunity and freedom.

Here the good doctor and I are singing from the same hymnal. I said I’d be fair.

Manured by Praise
A blog that links to me (thanks) that’s worth reading

Me and my bubble
Fr Edward Tomlinson answers critics:

Two commentators on this site, ‘Jonathan in New Zealand’ and Canon Godsall, have suggested that those who endorse the teaching of the Catechism are ‘living in a bubble of unreality’. The argument put forward is that orthodox Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics (and presumably the Eastern Orthodox as well?) have as little credibility as flat-earth supporters in our refusal to accommodate liberal Anglican theology. I thank them for their contribution to this blog and now respond by seeking to expose the very shaky foundation on which this attack on traditional Christianity is being launched.

Which is to challenge the deeply flawed but widely held belief that humanity is somehow progressing and becoming more enlightened and pure...

From Dr Tighe.

From Joshua

• Amen to the Cordoba House imam.
• When the tribunal of the world condemns the church for heresy.
• Corny trouble: HFCS, the big C and big government.
• The evil of strategic bombing.

From Roissy
Standard disclaimer: raunchy style. He tells truths most are too nice to say: 1. Women are as evil as men. 2. Sex is fun. (About the only point he and mainstream society agree on.) 3. Forget trying to be nice with feminism and political correctness; women parrot that but really like men stronger than them, end of story.

• The limits on hypergamy.
• Cougars are make-believe TV characters. Many cougars have argued that since they are modern women with financial independence, they are free to pursue younger men for their looks alone. But this runs into two problems that are perfectly predicted by evolutionary psychologists; one, younger men don’t want them, and two, cougars, no matter their own economic independence, remain more attracted to older men with means, just as they did when they were younger and poorer. It seems the hindbrain which governs our sexual impulses is largely impervious to cultural shifts in mating market variables.

New heat beam to break up jail fights
The law-and-order part of me has no problem with this (legitimate use of force to stop one harming another); the suspicious libertarian in me sees cops abusing this on us. From John Boyden.

Пречистому образу твоему покланяемся, благий...

We bow before thy most pure image, O Good One, and ask forgiveness of our transgressions, O Christ God. Of thine own will thou wast pleased to ascend the cross in the flesh to deliver thy creatures from bondage to the Enemy. Therefore with thanksgiving we cry aloud to thee: thou hast filled all with joy, O our Saviour, by coming to save the world.

Today’s troparion is also one of the prayers the priest says before going into the sanctuary for the first time in a day, saying it of course in front of the Christ icon on the screen in front of the altar.

I have the image above.

BTW I think the Shroud of Turin is at least a mediæval miracle; there’s no way a forger could have pulled it off.

A Tea Party foreign policy
It’s pointless to fight big government at home while supporting it abroad says Ron Paul

Anglo-Catholic facts

• ‘The “Reformation” just translated services and allowed priests to marry; everything else stayed the same.’ Mostly false. True more or less when Henry VIII was alive; not really a Protestant he zigged and zagged, letting them have their way when it was useful for foreign policy (when he needed the northern German countries for something). After he died, his state church turned Protestant. The Articles of Religion make that clear. But even then there were high churchmen, with a ‘high’ view of church authority and the sacraments like Catholics. When that mixed with a romantic mood in England in the early 1800s, reacting to both the loss of faith at the ‘Enlightenment’ and the Industrial Revolution (so you had the nostalgic mediæval Gothic Revival in architecture, fitting what was to come), that invented Anglo-Catholicism. (The theological Oxford Movement met the architectural Cambridge one.) When the second generation of ACs started copying then-current RC ceremonial (better than today), you had ACism as we know it and high church came to mean ceremony not theology or authority (Catholicism has all three!).
• ‘The Book of Common Prayer is Sarum in English.’ False. See above.
  • This is Sarum.
  • This is the BCP.
• ‘Anglo-Catholics do Sarum.’ Mostly false. In the mid-1800s when the ACs hooked up with the Gothic Revival, they started to revive medieval ceremonial but that was soon overtaken by copying whatever current RC ceremonial was/is. A minority did it.
• ‘The RC Anglican Use is Sarum.’ (Pictured above.) False. Explanation.
• ‘Anglo-Catholics are wannabe Roman Catholics.’ Partly true. Understandable because an AC looks and believes more like RCs than Episcopalians but by definition he believes his church (the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion) is fully part of the Catholic Church so he says he doesn’t need to be an RC. The American version of ACism is big on its version of Anglicanism theologically, not being RC-minded. That said, in England there have been for about 100 years Anglo-Papalists who really are what this claims, using the Roman Missal (once the old one, now the new) and not the BCP or one of its Anglican equivalents. (Lots of this in London for example.) They’re the ones the Pope is reaching out to with the upcoming ordinariates. If they really are would-be RCs holding that Anglicanism is deficient, are they really ACs?
• ‘Anglo-Catholics are gay; they like it for the theatricality.’ Another partly true one. The romance and art have always appealed to male homosexuals and the clergy was a respected job/lifestyle for them to hide in, even giving them a reason (imitating Rome) for not marrying. But of course stereotypes don’t tell the whole truth. There have also been happily married ACs including priests... with children. And most likely sincere celibates too. (As in the Roman Catholic Church. Orientation is not a sin ≠ practice.) But it seems to me that as mainstream society (couples, families) has moved away from churchgoing, ACism’s gotten gayer and more exclusively male (which explains the partial truth that it’s mostly priests), sort of a hobby for some people. And now that Episcopalianism, where everything is subject to change by vote, counteth homosexuality unto righteousness, unto such little posterity as there may be for evermore, it’s no wonder such profess to be loyal Anglicans. I would have gone last Tuesday week: had not my partner objected.

They were around when I was a teenage Episcopalian to teach me traditional, pre-Vatican II high church, in beautiful English, when the official Catholic Church wanted nothing to do with it. Thank you!

Moving right along, from The Anglo-Catholic:

• Who should be the patron saint of the ordinariates?
• Keep rowing, chaps!

AC books for sale.

Rampant unreality
Bishop Williamson’s latest column:

On a private visit two weeks ago to the USA, my first since 2008, I was able to enter and leave the country with no personal problems, but on a two-hour tour which a friend gave me of a major American city, devastated by the recent economic downturn, I observed some daunting social problems:

As we drove towards the city past a handsome housing estate in the country, he said, “You see all these expensive-looking houses? They are in fact poorly built, cookie-cutter houses, way over-priced, bought with money out of nowhere from the Clinton era (1992-2000), by people living in a dream, from paycheck to paycheck, in a false paradise of high credit, materialism and excessive spending. If they lose their jobs, as many are doing, they will be lucky to get half their money back on their houses. The men have no real skill or trade. Theirs is a world of slick tongue nonsense...

“They are mostly white people who have fled from the inner-city suburbs where we are now arriving. Look around you at all the houses boarded up, abandoned, dilapidated, with huge gaps in between where the housing has been destroyed to give the illusion of prosperity. But the lost jobs will not come back, so there is no real basis for a return to prosperity. The neat houses you do see have been repaired or re-built with Government money borrowed by the broke city in accordance with unreal housing projects, because the neat houses will not usually be cared for, but will soon be dilapidated again. There is a kind of Government aid which can do more harm than good to the people it is supposed to help, by trapping them in their dependence on it...

“Now we are coming into the downtown where you see tall handsome buildings, but also few people circulating. The buildings go back to the 1920s when this city was a great industrial centre, but after World War II the USA began to lose its industrial pre-eminence. Around the Reagan years (1980-1988) began, as I see it, a false stimulus by the credit card being made available to the common man. In the 1990s a non-white mayor was elected here who did his serious best to bring business back to the city, and some of these handsome buildings are due to him, but he was voted out by his own people because he was not like one of them...

“The economy is hanging on a thread, yet most people think everything will be fine in a year’s time. They think it is lovely if the Government just prints or digitalizes more and more money. Five per cent of the people, or less, understand just how grave the situation is, and less than one per cent see religion as playing any part in their country’s downfall. People look only for Band-Aids, not for deep or real solutions. The whites have allowed themselves to be given a huge guilt complex, and they have caved in without admitting it. There is a huge problem that everybody senses and knows, but they are too afraid to talk about it...”

Yet within 50 miles of this city thrives an SSPX parish and school, unknown or disdained, yet embodying the one true solution: God.

South Philly

This isn’t stopped traffic. You know you’re deep in South Philly when you see double parking allowed by immemorial custom. Or something.


The Penrose Diner.


Blessed be her glorious Assumption.

Our Lady’s funeral
With the Russians: the Falling Asleep of the Most Holy Mother of God, commonly called the Assumption of the BVM. More.


The gospel at Matins (Orthros, really Lauds) is Luke 1:39-49 and 56, nearly the same as in the Pius XII Mass for the feast; that at Liturgy (Mass) Luke 10:38-42, from the Byzantine Rite’s common of the BVM, almost the same as in the Roman Rite before Pius XII’s changes plus another bit from Luke, 11:27-30 (sort of an ironic reminder not to lose focus on God himself), as in the Roman Rite common.

Orthodoxy’s social niche in America...
... is as a nearly invisible ethnic old-fashioned but mainline denomination, I think partly because of its smallness in the US and partly because of longstanding policy to blend in as much as possible and not to make waves. (But liturgically that’s not so... an advantage of not being on the radar?) This has good and bad points; respectively, normal parish life not a cult and being weak on teaching moral theology. (Roman Catholic moral theology is my gold standard.)

Discuss!

Some 9/11 victims’ families support Cordoba House
Of course! Islam didn’t kill them; our own foreign policy ultimately did.

Fr Rutler on the improved English translation of the Roman Missal
From NLM

The Fox News Enemies of America Venn diagram and a chart of the Fox News hierarchy
From Cracked

Church

• Do stormtroopers marry? Fr Ed Tomlinson on war movies and violent video games.
• Huw: American Christians are wusses. Pretty good but while the Greek Orthodox and Melkite laity in Syria are one church I don’t think they think their priests are interchangeable with Anglican priests and Baptist ministers.

Today’s hail of bullets: libertarian sermonising from RR

• Another feather in Carter’s cap.
• On state blowhards and bullies.
• Answering LRC’s Gatto, who makes good points but... on good teachers. In my special interests I’m mostly self-taught (score one for Gatto; schools hate that) but teachers broadened my horizons so I learnt of the plight of 19th-century American Indians for example... and introduced me to seriously learning languages (Spanish, a good non-threatening starter foreign language; then they and I taught me Latin, Spanish’s mother on which I’d already made a big down payment by learning Spanish; I learnt Russian on my own). They taught me many of the basics of European history, which is to learn Catholicism. As for the gaps in my knowledge, either sloth, mea culpa, or if I don’t like it, I didn’t retain it and/or it dragged down my average.
• The Dems deserve to lose. So do the Republicans.
• The anarchist insight.
• Know-Nothing labour myths.
• Welcome to America: you’ve been lied to.
• Libertarians are politically homeless.
• Debating America’s surveillance state.
• The fool’s errand in Afghanistan.
• The deficit is a sympton; spending the disease.
• Obama and stem-cell research. I knew he was a ghoul on abortion.

From Joshua

• Contraception: two anniversaries. The slightly arrogant so-con neocon finger-waggers at NOR get it half-right. The idea that if you feel you ‘need protection’ you have no right to do what you want here is not peculiarly RC as modern society would have it; it’s simply Christian and most churches have dropped the ball. Unsurprisingly Anglicanism (nobody tells the king who he can’t sleep with, or Erastianism has been its core all along, plus it’s been twisting in the wind since the ‘Enlightenment’) was the first to cave but surprisingly as recently as 1908, simply mirroring a more orthodox society, it strenuously objected to the practice. Also surprising, conservative T.S. Eliot, who famously declared himself an Anglo-Catholic (a 19th-century back-to-basics reaction against the twisting) back when people knew and cared what he was talking about, waffled on this (putting him only jump removed from the revisionists today); less surprising, old-time middle-of-the-roader C.S. Lewis did. Here’s where NOR gets it wrong. Beyond the no-harm principle the government has no business socially engineering left or right. It’s the churches’ place to say it’s wrong; the government’s to defend people’s right to be wrong (yes, privacy) within the bounds of that principle.
• Here NOR shoots and scores! Back in Eliot’s and Lewis’s day the liberal Protestant clergy were all for progress against those backward Catholics, being very keen on, sieg heil, eugenics. They were hawks too (wanting to fight WWI for progress’ sake) back when fundies, as recently as 1936, were doves.
• Galileo. The Bible does not teach science. Part of the beauty of Catholic theology is it works whether the earth revolves around the sun or not.
• Austrians vs distributists. The Ordinary Magisterium, under which the Papal Encyclicals to which the Distributivists constantly refer, is as far as I know, fallible. Also, they tend to be written in a way that leaves much room for interpretation. For example helping the poor (corporal work of mercy) is an imperative of the gospel; the political means to do so is open. Or economics is science and the church doesn’t teach science.
• Orestes Brownson: the rule of law and the law of nature.
• The political education of Andrew Bacevich.
• If aggressor nations are to be bombed, why not the US?

From Taki

• Derb on immigration. Sympathetic to the 1920s American controls. Playing devil’s advocate I hear him and Vaile. Like you love your own family and culture why not say ‘we like being an Anglo-Saxon country’? And as the Anti-Gnostic says, English culture created the liberal society I want. And to turn it around, who’s really offended if for example Italians want to keep an Italian society etc.? But... there are whiffs of apartheid and the Nazi idea of each people developing separately, a collectivism and determinism of the right as well as the left. So no sale. Individual liberty wins (yes, again, an idea from English culture, one you fight to save simply by applying its no-harm principle).
• Is China a threat?

From LRC

• Gatto on the real history of state schools. Mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century and social engineering that combined characteristics of the cotton mill and the railroad with those of a state prison fuelled by philosophical visions approaching religious exaltation in intensity – that effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions and historic American libertarian attitudes. Sounds like what I understand Ayn Rand was on about. And the sort of thing Matt Groening to his credit satirises all the time with Springfield Elementary on ‘The Simpsons’.
• Raico on classical liberalism. Always worth a read.
• I admit I’m not prepared other than trying to be frugal but here are 10 ways to get ready for the economic collapse.
• Jim Rogers: ‘we never got out of the first recession’ and there’ll likely be another in 2012. End the Fed and take a meat-axe to taxes and spending (Keynes is crap) like Ron Paul wants to do.
• How to get a haircut. I like barbershops but 12 years ago, after my Italian-born barber with a ‘you’ve stepped back in time’ shop died, I gave up, got a clipper with clip-on combs and barber scissors and haven’t looked back (save once: went to a nice traditional barber and obviously again didn’t like the result). I miss the shop but it saves money and I like the result.

Centralia article
You have to click on the pictures of the pages to read them

Poetry: ‘Ode to the Yard Sale’
By Gary Soto. From Pentimento.

From Anglican Patrimony

• Fr H in action at St Thomas’, Oxford, the little old church by the train station.
• Forms, uses and rites.
• Audio: Fr Kelley on the Oxford Movement. Latitudinarianism won; arguably it was the English Church all along.

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From Ad Orientem

• Orthodox schemanuns, their strictest form of nuns. The one wearing the crucifix just like a Russian priest is not a schemanun but an abbess.
• The down side of the trad world: a rather gloomy place full of dark conspiracy theories about Freemasons, Jews, Communists, invalid masses and the like. And like our Old Calendarists it is a movement that is forever fragmenting with ever crazier groups out there including sedevacantists and antipopes. Yes, you’re looking for something sane and an explanation for what happened and end up in a cult that’s not really the Catholic Church. As opposed to something like normal parish life around 1962 you can find among Slavs in upstate Pennsylvania.
• People I’d probably like being in a coalition with: Modern Whigs.

Why do they hate us? It’s not about religion

What is desired is freedom from coercion.

From CounterPunch.

Church bells
From Tea at Trianon. A joy of living in my town is I can hear (pictured at top) the old Presbyterian church’s bells ring the hours and the Catholic church’s in the next town the Angelus.

Byzantine Rite thurible with bells:



Sanctus bell adopted by a Byzantine Rite church:



The late Mgr Stephen Dutko at the consecration.
In the Church of England the vicar technically is supposed to ring the church bell twice a day to call the villagers to Morning and Evening Prayer (the office).

The five stupidest ways movies and TV deal with foreign languages
From Cracked
‘Star Trek’ only whipped out the universal-translator mike once in the original show; most of the time everybody just spoke English.

To be fair to Red October (entertaining book) it handled this well, having the actors try to speak Russian at first (like the jokey beginning of Mel Brooks’ remake of To Be or Not to Be: ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ in Polish), then the camera zooms in on somebody’s mouth and when it zooms back out everything is in English for our benefit (like the reason you don’t put on Chekhov with Russian accents; the characters would be speaking the same language anyway so it would only be a distraction). Then when the American submariners and spies board the Russian sub, the crew ещё раз говорят по-русски: a hatch opens and a sailor yells to the strangers, ‘Сюда!’ (‘Over here!’)

More religious satire that might not s*ck
Fleshing out the Bishop 60 Years Ago. And of course he’s an Anglo-Catholic.

From the LRC blog

• They don’t bother to read the laws they pass.
• Bring the Guard home.
• D’Souza to Tea Party: SUCKERS!
• Montgomery County recreation officials have been quick to point out that the data collected through their vein scans ... will not be available to other county departments or police. Meaning of course it will happen.
• The same government wants to own your children too. It wants to tag them electronically for school. The same government that said your Soash would never be used as ID.
• Another declared end to an undeclared war. Rename the 49,000 soldiers still there and presto! What’s he going to do next, land aboard a carrier in a pilot suit?
• Make Sept. 11 Government Blowback Day.
• Books do not sell.

From Steve Sailer

• Because most of them are unteachable. He tells a truth everybody else’s too nice to say. It’s not racist if you don’t politicise it. That is, don’t waste tax money on a shiny new school most of them won’t appreciate (except to tag it creatively soon after it’s built) but don’t block individual liberty either with apartheid (Bantu education, not giving the talented exceptions a shot at higher education because of race). So who ought to give the talented few a shot? Hard, largely thankless apostolate, trad religious orders? I’m nasty enough to want to see a white kid, expected to polish his transcript or résumé with such ‘social action’ (Teach for America! ... just what they want, some white kid coming in and telling them what to do... it’s a bad school but it’s their school), tell his teachers Sailer’s answer just to watch them react. (Of course somebody that vulnerable probably isn’t in a position to be kicked out of polite society so kids just play along; it’s the system.)
• The up side of WASP competitiveness including SWPLs.
• Leeches? Unlike him (he skates into determinism... eugenics?) I’m an open-borders libertarian: work hard and play by our rules (easy really: don’t harm others; beyond that, knock yourselves out) and all are welcome (I don’t care what race you are, what religion you practise or if Sailer hates your wedding customs). But he has a point here. A country lets in somebody super-talented, rightly asking ‘What can you do for us?’ then out of charity invites his whole immediate extended family, including people who never contributed to the system to live out their day off it, who in turn invite their untalented cousins who likewise are a burden not a help to their hosts.
• The well-meaning government forcing banks to give mortgages to people who can’t afford them was stupid and helped cause this depression.
• The news as self-parody: Surprisingly, though, the focus of modern fact checks is rarely what we 20th-century fact-checkers would have underlined as checkable facts. Instead, Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking.

More church
We have a good relationship: I like posting them; you love reading them. So here are some more.

• Demolition OK’d. As I like to say, as a libertarian ‘secular liberal’ I defend churches’ rights to govern themselves and to do what they want with their property, even if it’s spiteful and financially foolish like kicking out a rebellious relatively conservative congregation after your latest change in doctrine and selling their old building to non-Christians with a history of aggression against Christians, even though the rebels offered you more money for the place. ‘It’s a free country’, I really hope. (I’m not just using that as a pose hoping to eventually take over and turn on you. Honest.) But what about when that goes against historic sites and/or historic preservation, as in this Philly story via John Boyden? (Of course Assumption closed. There is no more parish, just rundown shops.) The obvious libertarian solution is for a private pious association (devoted to St Katherine Drexel for example) to try to buy the building to make it a shrine; if that doesn’t work (the archbishop or now owner Siloam says no) then sorry, Charlie.
• Photo from AMM: Ex-St Ludwig’s, which I’ve been to in my urban exploring. Once upon a time Brewerytown was, of course, German. Of course Prohibition killed Brewerytown. So St L’s was an early victim of white flight, closing in the mid-’70s IIRC. The black church using the undercroft was kind enough to let me into the upper church, now essentially a ruin as you can see here (but with much still there, such as the crucifix above the high altar — Why hast thou forsaken me? — and Stations of the Cross auf Deutsch). The black pastor at ex-St Gregory’s in West Philly was likewise kind, proudly showing me the church he uses (which has most of its Catholic furniture intact but disused).
• Also from AMM: Holy Ghost Orthodox Church, Phoenixville. Been here a few times as well including on a Sunday. Obviously taken around Christmas. Like upstate. 1930s split from the Greek Catholics in Mont Clare not at all about theology or morals but clerical celibacy and local vs diocesan ownership of parish property. They just wanted to be left in peace. Still 1962 essentially, which is great.
• Bishop Fellay: Vatican official thinks Novus Ordo will disappear in 25 years! Pope Benedict’s renewal may catch on. The men who pushed the NO are mostly dead and its boomer fans are starting to die. How many other 80-year-olds have a young following like him? The kids may well mop up, deprotestantising and becoming again more like these Orthodox.

Mass-and-office Catholicism at home: at Lauds
Winfred Douglas’ Monastic Diurnal

Unplugged.

From Joshua

• Byrd’s Ave verum corpus by the Tallis Scholars. Polyphony: like chant a music of worship and unlike opera not a worship of music or music getting in the way of worship. I understand he was an interesting type in his period of English history: while most villagers were literally forced into being what Christopher Haigh calls (and writes: his use of lowercase differs from mine) parish anglicans (accepting the new religion but treating it like the old; that is, they remained mediæval Catholics at heart but not outwardly) and there were committed radical Protestants (Puritans) and rich Catholics who could afford to pay off the cops (fines etc.) and practise in peace, he was probably one of the Church Papists, Catholics who outwardly conformed to Anglicanism most of the time and would nip off to confession and Mass occasionally with the recusants’ underground church (which was martyred). (Vicars and parishes remained crypto-Catholic into the 1580s.)
• Hunting and gathering doesn’t change; it just gets more expensive.
• Hyperinflation.
• A kind of memorial: the blogs the dead leave behind.
• Our enemy Israel.

From RR

• The City of Big Brotherly Love.
• Liberaltarians are so Noughties.
• How libertarian is American heritage really? From Sherman’s war crimes to the greatest generation cheering the New Deal and marching off to war, not so much?
• Civil liberties are fundamental.
• Should the rich pay more in taxes?
• Why Dems should propose a “people’s tax cut.”
• Teachers’ unions and civil-rights groups block school choice for black students.
• I don’t care but (sarcasm) the Muslim Obama.
• Gridlock is our greatest hope.

Church

• AP’s bias covering the improved English translation of the Roman Missal. Terry Mattingly calls them on their no-popery.
• Why Catholics don’t understand economics. An LRC pick.
• I defend a church I don’t agree with’s right to govern itself. As I do here and here. (Different doctrine from but similar principle of authority as us, or of course we’re ‘episcopal’ too.) And its property rights, a big libertarian talking point.
• The grace of God in courtesy.
• A patrimony of passion?
• An RC revert nicely challenges the Orthodox. The only real issue dividing the two sides remains.

When compromise trumps apostolic tradition

When compromise trumps apostolic tradition
True since a certain archbishop went off the reservation to give his king an annulment. Fisking George Weigel.

No challenge facing Benedict in Britain, however, will be greater than the challenge of re-framing the Anglican-Catholic ecumenical dialogue, which is on the verge of de facto extinction.

The formal talks are worthless; let them die. As Patriarch Jeremias of Constantinople wrote to the Lutherans in Tübingen, let all future correspondence by only for friendship’s sake (like the vicars my age and older who read me and get my cultural references). Beyond that as Charley says ecumenism’s accomplishment has been teaching/clearing up misunderstandings; the Catholic and Protestant sides understand each other well now and are no longer trying to kill each other. But yes, formal talks are a waste of time.

The death of that once-promising dialogue would have been unimaginable 40 years ago.

No. Reunion war’n’t never gonna happen.

Then, in the aftermath of Vatican II, it seemed possible that Canterbury and Rome might be reconciled, with full ecclesiastical communion restored.

Well, the operative word seems seemed. Just like the stupid media and stupid or malicious Modernists were going around to the parishes, convents and schools saying everything could change now, just like Protestants. As Consuelo the maid says on ‘Family Guy’ in her gentle, iron-willed way, ‘No, no, noooooo’.

That great hope began to run aground in the mid-1980s, when the Church of England faced the question of whether it could call women to holy orders (a practice already under way in other member communities of the worldwide Anglican Communion).

John Paul and Willebrands made quite clear to Runcie that the bright hope of ecclesial reconciliation would be severely damaged were the Church of England to engage in a practice that the Catholic Church (and the Orthodox churches) believed was unauthorized by apostolic tradition, and in fact contradicted that tradition.

Yes, that sucker-punched me at the time. ‘You were wrong. We’re Protestants. F*ck you.’ Then I grew up and learnt that what with Erastianism and a fallible church, blaming the girls makes no sense. They’re being consistent (Anglican); I wasn’t (trying to defend something that wasn’t really Anglican).


‘I’m a cricket man and when the umpire says I’m out, I’m out.’
(Another possible character for this blog, reflecting its spirit: the Bishop 60 Years Ago.)

While admirably candid, Dr. Runcie’s attempt to explain why the Church of England believed it could proceed to the ordination of women demonstrated that Anglicanism and Catholicism were living in two distinct universes of discourse, one theological, the other sociological.

A punto, compare. Esattamente. One’s Catholic; the other’s Protestant.

For Runcie advanced no theological arguments as to why apostolic tradition could be understood to authorize the innovation he and many of his Anglican colleagues proposed; rather, he cited the expanding roles of women in society as the crucial issue. Sociological trends, Runcie’s letter implied, trumped apostolic tradition — which was not, of course, something the Catholic Church could accept.

Right. Our approach: ‘I can’t. I’m only the Pope.’ And among the people, for the most part, except in Protestant countries, the matter just doesn’t come up.

The same issue recently re-emerged in the Church of England’s debate over the ordination of women as bishops.

That horse’s run out of the barn. (About 450 years ago actually; only you’re seeing more of the effects now.) Again they’re only being internally consistent.

Flying bishops don’t make sense: you’re still in a Protestant church. And:

Elements of sanctity, intelligence, and beauty have been nurtured in the Anglican Communion for more than four centuries by the work of the Holy Spirit, who distributes gifts freely, and not only within the confines of the Catholic Church. Thus there have been great Anglican theologians and noble Anglican martyrs in the Anglican Communion, which has also given the world a splendid patrimony of liturgical music and a powerful example of the majesty of the English language as a vehicle of worship. None of this has had much, if anything, to with a “tradition of compromise.”

Right. The Tractarians thought they were in the one true church like we do; the notion of begging radical Protestants to tolerate them they would have rightly seen as unmanly nonsense.

The Holy Father will be there for a state visit, to beatify Newman and perhaps unofficially to rally the troops coming into the ordinariate once it starts in a couple of years.

Via Dr Tighe.

The government is watching or will be via GPS
From more than one person

From Cracked

• Badassery caught on camera. My picks are above: 10, 8, 7 (not really badass, just horrible for that poor woman; the dog: ‘B*tch touched the Frisbee, man’) and 5 through 1 (stiff upper lip, chaps).
• Baffling flaws in sci-fi technology.

From RR

• We’re getting there, and to give Obama credit: there are now fewer than 50,000 soldiers in Iraq. The trouble is: Afghanistan, maybe Iran (Ron Paul: the good news is he hasn’t invaded; the bad is he might) and everywhere US soldiers are stationed abroad. One more time: this is a soldier; this is a troop.
• Not so fast: contractors.
• Good sign o’the times: politicians think appearing pro-gun will get votes.
• Yankees being practical: Mass. towns decriminalising pot.
• Prudes running Facebook on the same subject.
• Believing the state protects people from big biz is really naïve.
• Libertarians never should have allowed themselves to be associated as a movement with “the right” and we shouldn’t make the same mistake with “the left.” But we should all be willing to treat anybody with an interest in expanding liberty, if only in one area, as a potential ally.
• Glenn Beck is not a libertarian.
• Advice on how to debate with non-libertarians.
• Palin’s all media hype.
• P.J. goes to Afghanistan. His ’80s books are hilarious; met him once. Lew Rockwell: Although “libertarian” P.J. O’Rourke was funnier when he wrote for Rolling Stone, and made fun of people in US colonies, he is still funny as a neocon at the Weekly Standard, doing the same job. To his credit, he makes no bones about his alliance with CIA radio and the empire.
• Classical liberalism one and two
• California vs fiat (make-believe) money in 1865. The Legal Tender Act of 1862 allowed the US Treasury to print paper money that was backed only by the good faith of the US government.
• Separation of school and state. Reminds me of LRC’s John Taylor Gatto.