Stages of conversion
Reads like Owen and venuleius but for dummies like me. Covers most of the pathology you see online. From Daniel Nichols.

The Bovina Bloviator on the debt-ceiling show

At this writing it looks as if a deal between the House and the Senate is just about in place, which will permit our government to run up an additional $3 trillion on the credit card, in exchange for some cuts now and more later (mind you, they are not really cuts, rather cutbacks in increased spending so as not to exceed the new debt limit).

While the agreement in itself may not strike debt hawks as all that substantial, something far more remarkable will have occurred upon its signing, something we have never seen before: the public fisc as a campaign issue. To that end, the terms of the deal, whatever they are, are almost immaterial. The recognition at last by some officers of the body politic and, even more important, the majority of the American public, that we are on the road to ruin, that drastic action (far greater than any deal made today) must be taken, a song sung in decades past by only a few lonely Cassandras and only to be ignored, should cause a collective sigh of relief, for it is doubtful now the song can be ignored any longer.

This would not have happened had John McCain been elected president. He and his fellow career Republican hacks, rightfully derided decades ago as “bookkeepers to the welfare state,” would, of course, have continued the spending party but would have done so “cautiously,” via nickels and dimes (i.e. mere hundreds of billions as opposed to trillions of dollars) so that our present indebtedness would not have appeared quite so ominous, thus making it easier to put off dealing with till another day. It took true visionaries like Barack Obama and his Democrat minions in Congress, with their visceral hatred and stupefying ignorance of free markets, to jack the national debt up into the stratosphere and thus, finally, get the country’s attention. You could say we owe them a debt of gratitude for that.

What do I think is really happening? Obviously I’m trying to do my bit here with the blog and with my token protest votes for Ron Paul and real Libertarian Party candidates, but this issue hasn’t really got the country’s attention, or most people think the answer is for the government to tax the rich and give the money to them, which is both wrong in principle and wouldn’t really work that way, white guilt will hand Barry O another term, the mainstream GOP still sucks and the country will still go to hell.

Sorry.

Miscellaneous photos
Palmyra and Delran, NJ:

My guess is this place is left over from a drive-in whose screen was torn down.
It’s always great to see a piece of real history doing its original job, like the phone booth in this place. I like the convenience of cell phones (a walkie-talkie in case of emergencies) but the sound’s awful so I hardly use the things; the old phones sound better.

Outside what used to be an Army-Navy store on Route 130, now selling mostly new camping gear. Reminds me of the movie Harry’s War.

A naval mine?


Anti-aircraft gun, probably from WWII, and torpedo.

Found and bought this souvenir mirror frame originally from Nepal.

Looks like a little mantel or altarpiece.

In the mirror: mostly liturgical books.

Things that haven’t been seriously revised in about 50 years.

Protestant intramural fight: conservative minister says Christianity’s true and Islam false; a mainliner reacts
Of course a Christian, let alone a minister, would say that! It’s only a problem if you deny a Muslim his – you guessed it – individual liberty, as long as he plays by our do-no-harm rule, which is not uniquely religious. What bemuses Chris Johnson, as I admit it does me (although I don’t blog to pick on the mainline; I try to be a positive Catholic blogger), is when the mainline bends over backwards to excuse practices that the politically correct usually and any decent human being hate. Which, to be fair, sometimes happens to libertarians: defending yucky things in the name of individual rights. When it crosses from the noble cause of defending individual Muslims from actual attacks (which I understand are very rare in this country, to our credit) to relativism actually giving a free pass to harming people because non-Christians and presumably non-whites are doing it, a Litte Anthony & the Imperials hit tune pops into my head with new lyrics: Dhimmi dhimmi coco pop, dhimmi dhimmi bop... Tell it to the Marines, or better still, tell it to the Greeks and other Balkan Orthodox peoples who lived that hell in the Ottoman Empire and commemorate their martyrs the third Sunday after Pentecost (the Greek parish church in the next town has a polished granite monument out front to the martyrs of Pontus in Asia Minor), who, if they cared what the nice PC churchmen thought, I’m sure would tell them to go screw themselves.

Interactive map of US newspapers, 1690-2011

Note that the “golden age” of newspapers was the period from about 1850 to 1890 when the number of papers increased more than four-fold from about 3,000 in 1850 to 13,489 by 1890, which is about the same number of papers as there are today (13,670).

And probably going down and down, the way of record shops and big chain bookshops.

Comment at T1:9:

Newspapers increasingly look like dinosaurs, alas. The web is replacing print as a major source of news. But when newspapers set up websites the amount of advertising revenue that the latter generate is only a fraction of what comes through print. If they charge for the websites few people subscribe, except for specialist publications. Meanwhile printed circulations decline and production costs escalate.

Summer Sunday Low Mass
7th Sunday after Pentecost:

Deus, cujus providentia in sui dispositione non fallitur, te supplices exoramus,
ut noxia cuncta submoveas, et omnia nobis profutura concedas. Per Jesum Christum, Filium tuum, Dominum nostrum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti, Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.

Translation.

Used for the 8th Sunday after Trinity, two weeks from now, in the old Book of Common Prayer and American Missal (what I hope will be the American ordinariate’s missal as it is, besides the translated Tridentine, for Antiochian Western Rite Orthodox; same gospel as today too):

O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; we humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Nice embellishment to the Latin text: it’s orthodox.

Like the parts of a High Mass in the scene in the opening credits of True Confessions, here are highlights to show you the look and sound of a traditional Low Mass. I didn’t upload the whole thing, only about 40 minutes including a fine sermon, because YouTube limits me to 2GB. The earliest Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes, Overbrook, run by the Mercedarian friars and the showplace of Pope Benedict’s renewal to West Philly and the Main Line. (The Sung Mass is eastward Novus Ordo partly in Latin.) For those who don’t know, the priest reads the epistle and gospel at the altar then, as shown here, repeats them in the vernacular. The prayers at the foot of the altar, or prep office as I call it, are done. In my opinion Mass begins when the priest opens the book and reads the introit and ends with the last blessing but of course I like the parts added on. You hear a few et cum spiritu tuos from the congregation but I don’t think it’s really a dialogue Mass.


By the way the hand missal I’m holding is a sturdy liturgical-movement treasure, the Maryknoll one (this one from 1957). No thous and thees but that’s OK. (I can have that during the week from Winfred Douglas’ diurnal.) Lots of Latin, sound theology and artwork from Beuron Abbey in Germany (the good kind of modern as NLM might say).

St Ignatius Loyola drops out of today’s observance, outranked by Sunday, at least in the ’62 missal? Giving and not counting the cost, he understands.

A nice thing about first thing Sunday is even in the dog days of summer it’s cool enough to wear a suit and, to and from church, a felt hat.

P.S. Gotta love Fr Z’s lame-duck ICEL countdown for the Novus Ordo: we NEVER have to HEAR IT AGAIN.

Te Deum laudamus; te Dominum confitemur...

Five good things about ecumenism

• Good works in common like trying to bring our soldiers home from the foreign wars and non-government charitable work.
• The two sides can thoroughly understand each other and, one hopes, stop trying to kill each other.
• That said, because they now understand each other, everybody should know that corporate reunion can’t happen, when there clearly are two sides: Catholic/Protestant (infallible church); Roman Catholic/Orthodox (scope of the Pope); mainline/evangelical (duelling private judgements). So once you reach that understanding you can stop regular official talks except for occasional refresher courses.
• So trying to convert each other, nicely but honestly, is fair game. For example the ordinariates for one side; gay weddings for the other. Or, relatively tiny in both cases, Eastern Catholics and Western Orthodox. We’re talking rival one true churches when you consider the mainline collectively as one (claiming absolute power to change anything by vote). Zero-sum game. Ecumenism = you-come-on-in-ism.
• When the other Catholics you know are churchgoing Slavs and non-churchgoing Italians, it’s nice now and then to pun on the old Prayer Book, even if you don’t use it, and know somebody about your age who gets it.

BTW in the photo you can tell who the host and guest are by who’s vested and who’s in his choir habit, always so at these events.

The last Palestinian Christian village
Majority Greek Orthodox. From Daniel Nichols.

What’s a church building for?
From Fr L

Things anglo-catholicism/the ordinariates, the legit liturgical movement and Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival have in common
Interesting since a big part of anglo-catholicism I like, still very true in its surviving Continuing parts in the United States (though ironically they were always far less Roman Catholic-minded than the British now in the ordinariate), is it imitates 19th-century Roman Catholic practice, which arguably the liturgical movement was reacting against/trying to improve. (The Brits have long done modern practice.)

• It’s the Mass that matters. Pointing out the doctrine that the Mass outweighs devotions came naturally to a movement fighting a Protestant tradition of quarterly Communion and ‘Solemn High Morning Prayer’ (with ‘the elevation of the collection plate’) as the main service, not to mention at least quasi-doctrine (Articles, ‘Black Rubric’) denying the Sacrifice and Presence themselves. (An orthodox AC thought that despite everything his church was really the same as the RCC and tried to make it so.) Some mainliners call themselves AC because they now have weekly Communion and chasubles left over from ACism.
• A tradition of the office for everyman. Not uniquely Anglican: 19th-century Roman Catholic parishes retained Sunday Vespers, something that died out by mid-20th century thanks to radio and TV. Also not universally liked: English farmers and townfolk didn’t like losing the Mass in the 1500s and being talked at for long stretches in university English. But in the Evensong tradition it’s there.
• The vernacular and congregational responses, arguably from the Protestant Prayer Book but of course not bad in themselves. BTW interestingly next to nobody in the Catholic legit liturgical movement was pushing for all-vernacular and as recently as the mid-’60s churchmen still laughed at the idea.

The lowercase means the general tradition, also called patrimony, not necessary Anglican, which would be capital A and C.

‘I’ll Be Seeing You’
Like with ‘Mr Sandman’ (commercial: no, I don’t think that blob is as nice as a mid-century car), Nataly Dawn does a fine cover of a golden-age standard, this time without any hint of parody. An old soul’s voice along with her youth and beauty.

Gold: independent money
From LRC

Veronique de Rugy on spending cuts, the debt and the GDP
No, you don’t need to raise taxes (called ‘revenue’ as if the government were working to make an honest buck)

Seven rules of tyranny
From LRC

1960 Buick
Found one locally for sale

Ordinariate stuff

• The state of the English-Welsh one by Damian Thompson. Off to a good start but the Pope needs to protect it.
• An ordinariate blog from an Anglican in... Ireland? With God all things are possible. Background: living in a Catholic country, Irish Anglicans tend to react by being very Protestant. There are no orthodox Anglo-Catholics any more (except this person?); the few who used to be are now mainline Protestants with high liturgy. BTW most Irish Protestants are Presbyterians probably originally from Scotland. (Fun fact: Barry Fitzgerald was one.)

House approves revised Boehner bill
I take it the difference with Obama is no new taxes? That and a pushing a balanced-budget amendment sound good but raising the debt ceiling is not conservative so no.

Update: the Senate rejected it.

The liturgical movement: for good or for ill?
Fr Blake and NLM go back and forth, Fr B putting in a good word for folk Catholicism over the insipid ‘renewal’. Regular readers know I’m pro-liturgical movement, big time. Saying what I would have said in ’62. Considered liberal then and reactionary now. High Mass! Chant! Congregational singing! The laity learning the office! Let’s do some of it in the vernacular sometimes, such as the English texts the Anglo-Catholics came up with, or traditionalism is not about people wanting to speak Latin. Making the Mass and, lest we forget, the office in its several forms (from the actual breviaries, or the horologion for Byzantine Riters such as of course the Orthodox, to translated and simplified versions of them – Winfred Douglas, Collegeville, or for ByzRiters in English, Uniontown – to the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary), central is a valuable reform, based on Catholic doctrine (the Mass and office are the prayer of the church, the public prayer offered for you), but maybe, taken too far, it, like its bastard, the Vatican II ‘renewal’, it can be clericalist to the point of the laity forgetting how to pray.

Another Chronicles writer answers Trifkovic on Archduke Otto
Maybe he didn’t side with Muslims against brother traditional apostolic Christians for personal reasons (blaming Serbia and Russia for WWI because of course the war hurt his family) after all

Prayers to saints in the pre-Nicene era
From Energetic Procession

Cardinal head of renamed Congregation of Rites recommends kneeling Communion on the tongue
Like authorities after V2 wrongly recommended versus populum. Hope this one is as thoroughly implemented while the other one’s undone.


Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam æternam. Amen.
Sign that this Pope means business:

In Norwalk, Conn., when a groundswell of parishioner support encouraged pastor Father Greg Markey to restore St. Mary Church, the second-oldest parish in the diocese, to its original 19th-century neo-Gothic magnificence, he made sure altar rails were again part of the sanctuary.

Said Father Markey: “First, the Holy Father is requiring holy Communion from him be received on the knees.”

No debt-ceiling-deal petition
FWIW

Anglo-Catholic archive photos
Finding Anglo-Catholicism in my teens was a step along the way. I remember walking into a Mass at a full-fledged AC parish church for the first time, a little wooden church on the outside and 19th-century Roman Catholicism on steroids inside. I thought I’d come home.

Based on the consensus of the early church fathers so doctrinally you get, more or less, Catholicism, and, having begun in the aftermath of the ‘Enlightenment’ and Industrial Revolution, nostalgic for the Middle Ages, it was a conservative movement.

1800s Catholicism done in style and with some good English prose: this is what I think Pope Benedict wants the ordinariates to be. The 1,000 or so British now in them have long done the standard Novus Ordo but at least some with this style and Pope Benedict’s NLM retro one.

Five projects the US government is working on
From Cracked

How the US could collapse
From RR

Two Navy ships, never used, scrapped after 20 years
A tale of $300 mil of government waste

From LRC

• Yippee! The government might shut down.
• Volunteering is not more noble or useful than paid work.
• The blessings of capitalism.
• Raimondo on the debt: And as much as I agree with the “right” about their proposed solution – a radical cut in government spending – it is the “left” that has the most accurate analysis of who’s to blame.
• The coming pension theft. Because ‘you have to do your fair share’.
• Cutting the crap: definitions of DC debtspeak.

Churchmen on economics again: oh, please
The usual suspects, it seems. I’m not clear if it’s the American bishops’ conference (which can’t define doctrine) or just these two; I think Hubbard is a well-known Modernist. But anyway, this sort of democratic socialism has long appealed to the union-bred orthodox too. It’s not heresy, since no political position is doctrine. That said, please be quiet. One more time: the market helps the poor more and longer-term (‘teach a man to fish’ among other things); the government, the same one that kills babies, foreigners and our soldiers for no good reason and wants to force you to believe two men can marry, doesn’t (as refugees from old Eastern Europe will tell you). From Daniel Nichols.

Two dooms
The Anti-Gnostic:

The Norwegian Left now has its Reichstag fire and will exploit it for all its worth.

An event that was reported and quickly passed on by the press was the destruction of Serrano’s “Piss Christ” by Catholic young people in Avignon. Americans are fed a very careful diet of stories from Europe designed to impress them with how enlightened and content Europeans are. But then you hear about places like Avignon and Norway and it turns out not everybody is on board for the Great Neo-Liberal Project.

Europe has been behaving itself for over 60 years thanks to the heavy-handed presence of a US hegemon that has made clear the party line on globalism. The money for that arrangement is running out on both sides of the pond: Europe’s welfare-state pie is shrinking and the US can no longer afford its vast, trans-global military.

When the Europeans erupt again (as they have done periodically for their entire existence), I don't think it will be to defend globalism.

St Philip’s tomb found in Turkey
From Fr L

From RR

• Norway terror suspect says he had help.
• Raimondo on the Norse neocon on steroids.
• Norway’s history of peace. It seems so unfair that Norway should become a target of terrorism. Once the scourge of Europe, when Vikings pillaged their way across the continent, Norway is the world’s number-one exporter of peace and reconciliation.
• The war for humanity’s future is primarily a war for control of the use and exchange of information.
• FDR redux.
• Chairman Bernanke, is gold money?
• Learning from 1995-96 debt-ceiling debate.
• Armageddon after Aug. 2 not very likely.
• Why do governments at every level require a license for people to engage in consensual, peaceful activity? Neither cheering nor taking the culture-wars bait on gay marriage.
• Legislating morality.
• Ending the wars not a budget gimmick.
• The broad array of modern conveniences in the homes of the poor is the result of many decades of steady improvement in their living standards. Which is – you guessed it – market-driven.

Steve Sailer on the Norway incident
Specifically Anders Breivik, the berserk Freemason:

This evil bastard is one cold-blooded, rational Northern European. All of this Northern European efficiency can go terribly wrong when it turns to organized killing, at which Northern Europeans are the champs. The killer was, perhaps not surprisingly, a juicer. A neocon on steroids.

From Fr L

• Goodbye, good men, or how Catholic-in-name libs manufactured the vocations crisis. The galling thing about this push for women priests is that it comes from the very (few, mostly in Protestant countries and mostly old) men (priests) who have been engineering an artificial crisis in the priesthood for the last few decades. When I was in England I visited different parishes every weekend and hob-nobbed with the priests. They told me how bishops and seminary rectors would regularly reject young men because they were ‘rigid’ (code for orthodox). My own bishop rejected all convert clergy from the Church of England – even the celibates. A reason Pope Benedict is going over the heads of such and has started the English-Welsh ordinariate. Others spoke of how ‘England had too many priests’ and compared the situation to Peru where one priest covers a territory the size of Scotland and the ‘core communities’ are governed by the people with a ‘catechist’ in charge. They thought this was a wonderful thing and wanted to move their own dioceses to that ‘model of ministry’. Right, ’70s liberation theology, or the Communists loved Protestant congregationalism and anti-sacerdotalism because they could control it (why they always hated Rome); these were the kind of priests who (few) sold out to the Reds in ’20s Russia and ’40s-’50s Eastern Europe and China, this time dressed like hippies and I reckon considered cool because this was thought to be non-white (Latin-American). Why was that? So that by engineering a crisis in vocations they hoped to force Rome to sanction the ordination of married men and women. Same reason they pushed the laity giving Communion at the Novus Ordo (the rules say it’s supposed to be in literally extraordinary circumstances): soft-selling WO to the faithful. ‘Again and again in peace’ the Orthodox ordain the married but 1) of course the old libs don’t want to be like them and 2) the Western Catholic Church can change the rule but it wouldn’t necessarily bring back vocations (the American Orthodox’ born ethnic vocations are hurting). I wish I were exaggerating, but they told me this themselves. What they wanted was a ‘priest’s house’ for six or seven priests to live together and serve a whole deanery and the parishes would be led by ‘lay catechists’ who (of course) would be male or female. The lay catechists would determine the wishes of the people of God democratically and tell the priest what to do. How Protestantism works: everything is up for a vote; a claim of absolute power over reality. In other words, ‘If Rome won’t let us have women priests we’d rather have no priests at all.’ So, old religious orders of women, how’s that working out for you? Any vocations lately?
• On Protestant rebranding of churches, hiding denominational names. Like how many know the Crystal Cathedral is Dutch Reformed? It happened here. Lansdowne United Methodist turned into the Garden Church.
• The conservative megachurches (Southern Baptist for example) do it too as do, amazingly, Campus Crusade and Intervarsity by ditching the words Christ and Christian. Matthew 10:33. There’s a place for discretion but... The description of a mission trip to Egypt was, ‘We went there to help the people and talk with them.’ What? When I was growing up as an Evangelical the mission trips were all about ‘going out to the mission field to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with those who were dying in their trespasses and sins and therefore on their way to eternity in hell’. That sort of language was clear and had some, well... bite. This current wishy-washy stuff from the Evangelicals reminds me of old-fashioned liberalism. Most Evangelical Protestant theology is now post-modern eclectic (which is another term for relativistic cafeterianism).
• Fr L’s point: Essentially, whatever you see the liberal Protestants like Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ doing, the rest of the Protestants will slowly drift into about 10 or 20 years later. They will do so without the radical edge. It will simply become the default setting without anyone really noticing. So, for example, the Anglicans opened the door to artificial contraception in the 1930s. By the 1960s all Protestants had caved. The mainstream liberal Protestants ‘adjusted their teaching’ about divorce and remarriage and abortion and homosexuality and so forth. The rest of the Protestants are now spongy on remarriage and abortion and like to ‘remain silent’ about same-sex issues (as the mainliners are about to have gay weddings – again I defend their right to as long as they respect our rights). Yes. Fallible churches, by nature without a foundation, domino. The mainliners (and their elderly wannabes nominally in the Catholic Church) are turning into unitarians and the evangelicals are slowing turning into mainliners. (Rick Warren and the Purpose-Driven Life = Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller’s ’50s mainline positive thinking?)

The debt-ceiling-talks theatre
Watched this last night. Nice speech from Obama (I’ve heard him in person), especially the first part reminding the listener how George W. Bush and the GOP squandered Clinton’s surplus (second-term Clinton, boxed in by a hostile Congress, was a relatively good president, better than Reagan; yea, gridlock or there’s no government like... no government) on two wars (like the ones you’re conducting in Afghanistan, Libya and sort of still in Iraq?) and a prescription-drug plan (like ObamaCare?). But of course his sales pitch is to scare you into supporting his raising the debt ceiling, in which case it’s no ceiling at all, and keep feeding Leviathan by raising taxes. I’m not clear if the Republicans want to raise the ceiling too but keep their promise to the voters not to raise taxes, or not compromise on either; Boehner doesn’t sound half-bad but I don’t trust them. Cut the spending, for real, and slash and burn most of the government so you don’t raise taxes. Use the peace dividend from bringing the soldiers home to ease people off welfare (as I think Ron Paul supports), let the market correct itself, freeing up malinvestment, moving money, equipment and people into things productive, and you’re good to go.

But the boring old market doesn’t make boomer and SWPL voters feel good nor give them the power to tell you what to do, so this will never happen.

But I suppose it’s boring if you take what we have of it for granted. My parish church’s oldest members, WWII refugees from a Communist country, don’t.

Link from RR.

Church

• All roads lead to Santiago. St Nicetas of Paphlagonia: We salute you, James, fervent preacher of the gospel truth, who with Peter and John hold the highest position and the chief dignity among the apostles. We salute you, as one who drank Christ’s cup in advance of your fellow disciples, and were baptized with the baptism of your Saviour as he promised you, and are adorned with the double crown of apostle and martyr! We salute you, blessed eyewitness of the Word, you who see God, for you have changed one fishing-ground for another, one desire for another, and one inheritance for another; in place of things unstable you have gained those that last, and in place of an earthly passing world you have gained a changeless heavenly world. We salute you who, as you formerly had direct physical contact with the God-man on earth, so do you now, united with him in spirit, converse with him face to face in heaven.
• Goofiness from a few bad priests and a bishop, unsurprisingly mostly in Protestant countries. My comment. 150+ Americans and 300+ Austrians? Things are getting better under Pope Benedict but that’s still pretty bad. Dr Tighe: practically, women’s ordination has never helped the churches that adopt it. Riddle me ree, why has an innovation which has proved to be both poisonous in itself, and also a “theological carcinogen” to all “ecclesial communities” (apart from enthusiastic sectarians and some groups, perhaps, so far, from the “Holiness” Wesleyan tradition) that have embraced this pocky paramour, be viewed as being anything but totally baneful to the Catholic Church? Exhibit A, the Anglican Communion; Exhibit B, the Union of Utrecht Old Catholics; Exhibit C, the Scandinavian Lutheran bodies. IOW they made the change and even fewer go to them now. Liberal Christianity is self-defeating; the kids cut right past it and besides they don’t have many kids. Again, besides it not being up for a vote, what strikes me is in the Catholic world, outside of Protestant countries, this matter just doesn’t come up. The Holy Spirit guiding the heart of the church says no. Clerical celibacy: rule not doctrine. It can change but that wouldn’t necessarily boost the Latin Church’s vocations. The Orthodox ordain the married and their American vocations, certainly from born ethnic members, are hurting too. BTW Roy Bourgeois should be excommunicated for take your pick of reasons (such as, arguably with this vagante business, he’s joined another church).
• I’ve stayed out of the Corapi mess because 1) I don’t watch EWTN. I admire the immense good they do (especially in the past 15 years as they changed from charismatic to quasi-trad) but their ministry is to the unchurched and uncatechised, not to me. 2. If it’s true, it’s not news. Priests sin. (OK, I’ll say it. If it’s true, at least this undoubtedly masculine fellow’s into women.) That said, although I understand many orthodox Catholics’ hurt from all this, what strikes me is, to his credit, to this day, he has never attacked/turned against the teachings of the church for any reason such to justify what he’s accused of (quitting the order and the active ministry ≠ heresy), unlike, say, the self-serving Alberto Cutié.
• Diocese of Orange offers $50 mil for Crystal Cathedral. More from my archives on that. The highest bid so far. A beautiful building, and after Schuller’s misfortune I’d like to see it remain some kind of church, but NLM agrees with me it’s not suited for Catholic worship. However much money is poured into the project, the building will be resistant to Catholicization because it is not a church in the Catholic sense, but a large meeting-house. It is possible to convert a temple, the place of propitiatory sacrifice to pagan deities, to the home of the expiatory sacrifice of the Mass, but it is much less easy to turn an auditorium, with its relentless emphasis on sight-lines and open plan, into a cathedral. A converted Crystal Cathedral would be an immense glass shed with a lot of Catholic objets d’art strewn around it like a sort of museum, rather than integrated into the fabric. Exactly. It was designed to be a Dutch Reformed church, a preaching barn.

From RR

• Debt-ceiling crisis: how did we get here? Long ago, the United States paid for its declared wars by borrowing money. (‘Buy war bonds.’) It reduced that debt when the war was over, but after the Vietnam War, the nation just kept spending and borrowing. Right, faith-based economics only the faith is Keynesianism.
• Bondholders and victims: who’s less worthy of compensation?
• How to be a millionaire in one day! (On paper.) To understand why, try this experiment: Go to your local copy shop, buy ten reams of paper, and have them make five thousand copies of a piece of paper upon which you’ve written “one share of my company” and your name. Then take these five thousand “stock certificates” home and ask a friend to buy one for $200. (If necessary, assure him [or her] that when he gets around to making his certificates you’ll use the $200 to buy one.) Presto! You’re a millionaire! (Five thousand pieces of paper times two hundred dollars each!) Now this sounds silly, but how different is it really from what publicly traded corporations do?
• The terrorist threat we’re ignoring. a more systemic threat of terrorists or foreign governments exploiting our economy’s penchant for job-offshoring. How? By using our corresponding reliance on imports to stitch security-compromising technology into our society’s central IT nervous system. Sounds farfetched, right? That’s what I thought, until I read a recent article in Fast Company. Covering a little-noticed congressional hearing, the magazine reported that a top Department of Homeland Security official “admitted on the record that electronics sold in the U.S. are being preloaded with spyware, malware, and security-compromising components.”
• The evil eye: everybody tracking everybody.
• Libertarianism, the right and the left. Standard: fiscally conservative meets socially liberal is not half-bad under the right conditions (that is, if the social liberal doesn’t try to tell you what to do).
• Rather than creating jobs and spurring economic growth, the New Green Economy is a black hole for taxpayer dollars that kills job creation.
• ‘Without the government...’ We’re often told that the budget can’t be cut without all of us sacrificing. This is used as a rationale to raise taxes. But it need not be that way.

Music: Il Volo

Metal thieves: vultures of a fallen empire
From Taki

China’s family planning: illegal children will be confiscated

The one-child policy is not just a human-rights abomination; it has also worsened a demographic problem.

From T1:9.

Of course Archbishop Chaput’s not an ‘archconservative’
The Inky on him and me going GetReligion on The Inky.

I knew what was coming when I saw ‘archconservative’ in the Sunday paper’s front-page, above-the-fold headline. ‘Arch’ and ‘ultra’ are fairly easy ways for a biased reporter to slant coverage against someone. It’s like with ‘fundamentalist’, actually a specific term in American Protestantism (inerrancy, doesn’t believe in evolution etc.), not, as the mainstream media use it, any conservative Protestant who displeases them by not buying into their ideology. So it is with this. The archbishop himself’s right: he agrees with me that he’s not an archconservative. I’d define the term with all kinds of things an orthodox Catholic can believe but not all of which I agree with; my readers know which is which: the Tridentine Mass is at least better so let’s work to bring it back, and religious liberty is indifferentism (I’ll say that position’s allowable because Vatican II didn’t define doctrine) so people in error have no rights, chuck the Constitution, the work of unbelieving Protestants, make the church the state religion and bring back the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor. Now that’s an archconservative. Athonite monks are Orthodox archconservatives. The archbishop again seems to me, as someone said to me many years ago about Opus Dei, largely about ‘reformed religion and (what passes in America for) right-wing politics’ (ha – if you want real right-wing politics go to the Society of St Pius X in France). As I wrote earlier, sound on doctrine but low-church (he said he’s not interested in the Tridentine Mass), very ’80s John Paul II (when such people thought the silly charismatics were the great white hope of the church). The man who said that about reformed religion defined himself, like many Catholics in the early 1900s, as about ‘unreformed religion and left-wing politics’. Of course I’d change that for myself to ‘unreformed religion and most of the time not what passes for the right, but not the left either’. Yes, libertarian. So no evangelical culture-wars jazz to pick on those in error, as long as they respect our rights too. (So equality for gays but no state gay marriage, a wedge to try to force us to call it sacramental marriage. Forcing Catholic adoption agencies to close makes it pretty obvious.)

It’s interesting the writer is trying to be nice by pointing out Chaput’s positions on helping immigrants and on social services, which are sincere and based on his faith even if I don’t agree with the democratic-socialist means many such churchmen want. Such is left-wing piety too. (Me on immigration: individual liberty means all have the right to travel, but individual rights not group rights.) But I don’t think the mainstream really cares: they’re mad at him and the church for teaching the faith regarding sex including abortion. So he’ll be lumped together with Michele Bachmann in American right-wing politics and you’ll see ‘archconservative’ thrown at him a lot.

Bowling
Got a 140 last week (highest score so far: 156; I’m not a natural) and a young top player gave me a free lesson. I like my lanes. Built in 1950 so it’s like stepping back in time, from the curved wooden benches to the streamlined metal ceiling fans to the old owners’ name on the back wall (I’d have more pictures but am too busy there, of course, actually bowling), and the people are friendly. Lots of old West Philly folks play there. (Wii highest score so far: 232. I treat it as much like real bowling as possible – stand back! – for practice.)



Hooking the ball to get the spare.

I know it’s uncool to give yourself the thumbs-up but hey, it worked.



Homemade short lane: six-pin version.

Looks like scrapped old boards from a real lane.



Full 10-pin version.
It’s loud so it’s impractical but I want one anyway. I like the adrenaline-boosting rock too but my soundtrack, as you imagine, and if you could hear over the noise of the business at hand, would be about 50-70 years in the past.

Inclusivitiousness
Or Christian liberals define doctrine too but we can’t change our doctrine once it’s defined. They can change theirs by vote. Anyway:

If you think homosexual activity is a sin, why are you still sharing a tradition with people who think you’re a contemptible bigot for thinking that? And if you fervently believe that homosexuality is morally neutral or indifferent, why do you continue to associate with churches or provinces that teach that homosexual activity is an abomination?

The line in the sand isn’t homosexuality but, again, church infallibility vs a claim to absolute power to change reality. The fight in some churches over gayness is just a symptom of that although the Protestants on both sides might not know it. The answer politically of course is neither SWPL democratic socialism (in which the SWPL ruling class tells us what to do) nor the religious right but libertarianism: Catholics and mainliners for example go to separate churches and govern themselves, and we all get along, maybe even working together to get the country out of the wars abroad and on non-government charitable work like emergency aid to the poor. From the MCJ.

Update: my predictions for part of American religion of interest to me and my readers.

The NYT wants the government to order you what to eat
BTW we all remember how well command economies work (not), right? From LRC.

Details on the Norwegian terrorist

The alleged mass murderer, instead of being fanatically pro-Muslim and anti-West, turns out to be fanatically anti-Muslim and pro-West (and pro-Israel). Indeed, his fevered brain was much influenced by such neocons as Richard Pipes. The children who were massacred had held a pro-Palestinian rally the day before, and the Norwegian government planned to recognize Palestine and get out of Libya, both acts eliciting the hatred of such as he. As to his religion, it is not exactly traditionally Christian.

I twigged that when I saw the picture of him in his Masonic apron. From LRC.

’58 Plymouth Fury
It reminded me of Stephen King’s Christine and the Buried Car publicity stunt in Tulsa that backfired (that was a ’57 Belvedere but they look alike). It’s a battleship like the early ’70s Bonneville I got to drive once; I’d like something a little smaller for a daily driver but the same style.







To achieve the special effects of the car regenerating itself after a smash-up, at least one car was crushed by hydraulic jacks mounted inside the car, which literally pulled the car in on itself. The film was run backward to give the illusion of the car restoring itself.

Roissy fisks a male so-con manifesto
Again not an endorsement of everything he says but smart and as the Anti-Gnostic has said, underneath the bluster often he’s substantially traditionalist

Why is China cracking down on Catholics?
It’s flexing its muscles, says an RNS reporter

With its status as an economic superpower now indisputable, China no longer has to cultivate the good opinion of Western nations that are literally in its debt.

Very scary, kids.

From T1:9.

More economically challenged Christians
Just like many Catholics, The Christian Century Denominations People Don’t Go to Any More doesn’t get it

I love the assumption that only government spending can create jobs. Right. I see millions of large and small business owners across this country confused and frightened. “How do we create jobs?!! What do we do?!!” they wail. “Help us, Washington-Wan-Kenobi!! You’re our only hope!!”

Didn’t unemployment go up after Mr. Obama’s stimulus package?

Yup.

From the MCJ.

Is it racist if everyone doesn’t own a house?
Thomas Sowell on another stupendous government disaster. From LRC.

Cute cartoon commercial for Ron Paul

Norway bombing and shooting: why?
Lord, have mercy. Looks like local fringe politics, ‘an extreme right-wing group’ whatever that means.

P.S. The camp shooter seems to be a Mason.

Interview with Ukrainian Catholic supremo
Metropolitan (Major Archbishop) Sviatoslav (Shevchuk). Seems like a nice fellow, and so young (five years younger than me!). The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the biggest Eastern-rite Catholic church (all Eastern-rite Catholics are 2% of all those under Rome). Originally (in its 1596 submission to Rome) covering Kiev and north to Byelorussia, since Russian expansion in past centuries (Kiev had been an integral part of Russia since the 1600s; AFAIK yes, the government and state church, a rival one true church, went after Greek Catholics) its homeland had been old Galicia (capital Lvov; ruled by Poland, or Austria when Poland wasn’t independent, since the 1300s), which the USSR grabbed during WWII. The far western Ukraine today. (The first East Slavs I knew were WWII refugees: went to my first Byzantine Liturgy with them. The iconostasis and the Cyrillic made them seem very Russian, more or less what ‘East Slav’ is, but they said they weren’t Russian and definitely gave you the impression that most of the Ukraine was like them.) Its survival underground for 40 years resisting Soviet rule, as a traditional Catholic church in modern times, was heroic. It surprised Rome by resurfacing in the Ukraine during glasnost, complete with acting metropolitan. Then it took back the parish churches the Soviets stole from them. The major archbishop moving his see to Kiev seems a bid to be the Ukraine’s No. 1 church; of course a one true church would do that. The Ukraine religiously is like Russia proper: mostly secular now but with a mostly Russian Orthodox churchgoing minority (and a couple of nationalist schisms from the Orthodox; one of them claims to be the country’s biggest church). As for the UGCC, I think it’s still the majority church only in Galicia (something like 80%; I wonder how many go to church). Most of it, certainly here and from what I can tell from priests from there, is a sort of ethnic conservative Novus Ordo in feel (Ukrainianness to them: a few Russianisms like Cyrillic to show they’re not Polish; lots of self-latinisms, old and some new, to show they’re not Russian). Rome wants them to be just like the Orthodox in practice but of course on board with the magisterium including on the scope of the Pope; again a one true church can respectably say nothing less. In practice only a few mostly converts in the West are like that.

BTW they went under Rome so the Poles would stop beating on them, which they didn’t.

From Daniel Nichols, who identifies with Rome’s vision for these churches.

Gavin McInnes on why he hates the right: WTF?
Awful. Is he serious? (Is he parodying the mainstream left or does he mean this?)

At first I thought that I was on the Huffington Post or Daily Kos. This came off like an immature lefty, ranting his emotional spew.

• 1. He has a point.
• 2. Trash but as a libertarian I defend his Scottish Presbyterian-rooted soul’s right to hate the church and say so. He’s not attacking our rights to believe and worship so fair enough. Falling into step with centuries of British and American culture; hardly like the badass attitude he affects. The evangelicalism of much of the American right (at least at the grassroots, Tea Party level; the neocons including the last president look down on all that and are using these people) has no theological foundation so it’s an easier target. I’ll still take St Thomas Aquinas tackling the case for the existence of God and thus the reasonableness of what McInnes is mocking over McInnes’ sophomoric rant.
• 3. Now he’s moved beyond ridiculing something to promoting actually hurting people. He’s verbally crossed the libertarian no-harm line. Foul!
• 4. I’ve never thought it was a choice; some people are born vulnerable to certain sins. Maybe there are some Christian rightists who do. Fair enough.
• 5. Fair and has libertarian cred. I’m not signed onto any crusade to pick on gays; they can define their relationships any way they like. They don’t have the right to use the state to force me to call it the sacrament of marriage.
• 6. See 3. Scratch this smartass and find a Nazi.
• 7. As much as I like black doo-wop – one of my pop-music sweet spots is the early to mid-’50s as big-band close harmonies and black r&b call and response, both great in themselves, segued into early rock – he has a point. There’s a place for the serious and angry stuff but who says blacks can’t enjoy sentimental or silly pop too? I’m not obsessed with rap; I hardly think of it. (One look at me and you know it’s not part of my world.) Some of it’s very good; it takes talent. I agree with the lovely upper-class lady I used to work with that it’s not music (no melody); it’s street poetry.
• 8. and 9. Smartass. Do you have to jump off the George Washington Bridge to know it’s bad for you? That said I’m with the libertarian position on being able to do what you want to yourself as long as you don’t hurt somebody else (and, regarding prostitution, there’s no such thing as consensual crime), no matter how self-destructive it is.
• 10. LOL. Fair enough.

From Taki.

From RR

• Poll: anger at government highest in 19 years. Good.
• Anti-censorship in the Internet’s infrastructure.
• Raimondo on not news really: ex-anti-war activist shills for Obama. Or the dopey rich kids protesting 40 years ago (Trashing an Ivy League library? Really? Oh, please.) really weren’t for peace but, in as far as any of them had principles other than being against the draft stopping their partying, really were Com-symps. (Or when Daddy, the Don Drapers who actually worked for a living, stopping paying their allowances, they wanted you to take his place through taxation etc.) Throw in stupid identity politics/group rights – a man who looks black can do no wrong, certainly in the White House – and there you go.
• Left-libertarian Wendy McElroy on Murdoch and freedom of the press.

Church

• Fr Len Black ordained a Catholic priest. Ad multos annos. It seems that Mgr Newton’s ordinariate isn’t just English and Welsh but British. I was wondering about that.
• Cloyne, based on what little I know. Nothing to do with Catholic doctrine but again not living up to it, something even Vatican officials, because they’re fallen human beings, aren’t immune to. Predictably the secularists and their mainline pets are crowing: since it’s not about church teaching, why? (And isn’t one of the mainline’s head ministers involved in a coverup or at least lax security too? ‘Gay church’ branding + policy of trying to spite Rome = this and worse was bound to happen to them sooner or later. Funny how a few bad priests get reported to death while naughty ministers get a free pass.) Politically I’m secular not secularist. It seems the clergy in these cases such as the retired Bishop of Cloyne deserve everything the government can throw at them, including jail, except violating the seal of confession (the American notion of religious liberty – I like Dev’s and Fine Gael’s historic good intentions but as a libertarian I believe the church flourishes most in freedom). The Irish won’t turn mainline Protestant; Bad Catholics know better. They may even hate the church but there’s only one church and they know they can’t change its teachings. (Throwing out corrupt bishops is another matter.) Also, I understand Irish religion’s always been cyclical: indifferent in 1800, pious in 1900 thanks to emancipation and a huge church revival, indifferent again in 2011. So my guess is the Irish will be stone-cold secularist like most of the rest of Europe now, but still Catholic in name like many Italians, for about the next 100 years. (If a lot of them end up in hell it’s another thing the corrupt clergy have to answer to God for, and he’ll make today’s Irish government look like pushovers.) BTW Dr Tighe taught me that the reason ‘Irish’ = ‘Catholic’ to the English-speaking world is... the English living in the Pale they ruled around Dublin put up a fight against the ‘Reformation’.
• I don’t get the hype about Archbishop Chaput. He seems just another JPII conservative Novus Ordo bishop, saying the right thing about the babies and sound on doctrine but toeing the party line of loving Vatican II. And ‘centrist, social-justice’... well-meaning but muddled like lots of Christians politically and economically? So you trust the same government that wants to force you to pretend two men can marry to do the best job of helping the poor? Okaaaaay. Sort of a moral-majoritarian culture-warrior, like transplanted evangelicals, and orthodox but low-church. Better IMO to be unfussily high-church and orthodox on faith’n’morals but libertarian with others’ errors as long as your rights are safe too... like many 1962 American Roman Rite laity or ethnic Orthodox or Greek Catholics (‘“Clean up America”? Yeah, whatever. Pass me the lamb, please!’); culture wars remind me of Hilary’s latest against online God-talk, or showing off. I certainly want to be faithful to the Holy Father and his teaching about the traditional expression of the Roman liturgy in the Tridentine form. I supported that and will continue to support that. It isn’t, however, my personal interest or direction. IOW business as usual. Other pro-Pope Benedict bloggers seem happy about him so maybe he’s more than that. More of the good (Our Lady of Lourdes’ eastward Novus Sung Mass, Tridentine at St Paul’s in the Italian Market) that happened under Cardinal Rigali minus the coverups of the clerical underage gay sex scandal? Chaput like Benedict seems to have a good track record on that. To be fair, IIRC most of that happened 30 years ago and most of what made the news recently are only accusations; innocent until proven guilty even if Protestant America already hates you. It’s easy to break the Eighth Commandment by sliming a priest, and Maciel and the other such cases don’t take away a priest’s protection under the rule of law. (Rather like the Casey Anthony case I didn’t follow; you may rightly hate her but I’m glad those legal rights and safeguards are there.) Ireland and Vatican officials seem to have had the opposite problem, flouting the rule of law. BTW it’s pronounced ‘shapyoo’; didn’t know that until I read it in an AP story.

Disengage from the US government

When a country works reasonably well – when the schools teach algebra and not governmentally mandated Appropriate Values, when the police are scarce and courteous, when government is remote and minds its business and works more for the benefit of the country than for looters and special interests, then pledging to it a degree of allegiance isn’t foolish. Decades back America was such a country, imperfect as all countries are, but good enough to cherish.

As decline begins, and government becomes oppressive, self-righteous, and ruthless yet incompetent, as official spying flourishes, as corruption sets in hard, and institutions rot, it is time to disengage. Loyalty to a country is a choice, not an obligation. In other times people have loved family, friends, common decency, tribe, regiment, or church instead of country. In an age of national collapse, this is wise.

From LRC.

Redesign: what if the opening credits of ‘Mad Men’ were like a movie’s from the period?
By Paul Rogers

Because most of them are unteachable
Derb at Taki

The single biggest impediment to job growth today

Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we’d tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling.

Bernie Marcus is right. But the MCJ is wrong about putting any hope in a Republican government. It’s been done and found wanting.

George Carlin rant
From Pactum Serva. Warning: language. After all it was Carlin.
This can be taken leftwards or libertarianwards but I hear him.

The left: Today’s robber barons – ‘the people who own this country and you’ – are capitalism’s fault.

Libertarians: Those robber barons, using the government to wipe out their competition, are not the real free market. The left doesn’t really stand up for the little guy and certainly not for Middle America; they’re elitists who want to own you too.

The paleo and crunchy right (at least the crunchies about corporations they don’t like): Big business isn’t really conservative; it destroys local traditional values.

Libertarians: True when it uses the government like we said above. Other than that, what’s immoral about a company efficiently serving its customers better than romantic small businesses? They don’t want to own you; they just want to sell things to you. Fine with me. When the distributists make a product I want to buy, we’ll talk.

You’re right: answers in a couple of good combox threads
Interestingly the thing in common in both answers is WWI

• Regarding Trifkovic and Larison accusing Archduke Otto of siding with Muslims and globalists over brother traditional apostolic Christians (though a rival one true church), that is, the Orthodox, nomen nescio answered this for me early on: lest we forget, Serbia and Russia proximately caused WWI so, right or wrong, that would explain the should-have-been emperor’s chilly feelings towards them. Or put another way, besides the tsar being his family’s political rival, it was personal, ruining their fortune.
• JFK wasn’t the 1900s’ worst president; Wilson is a much bigger contender but he didn’t live in the TV age, have Don Draper style or seem to personify the hopes of white ethnics so people don’t worship him. Actually they hardly remember him. He got away with it.

The US capital shouldn’t be Tel Aviv

For those who missed it and those who just might care, the new American Ambassador to Israel is Dan Shapiro, who was sworn in by Hillary Clinton in front of a power-packed audience on Friday. Shapiro described his passion for the job and said that President Obama had instructed him that Israel’s security is his top priority. Now some of us old-fashioned types have long believed that an American ambassador is supposed to represent US interests, but that is apparently no longer the case, at least when Israel is involved. Even assuming that Obama is dissimulating just a tad to burnish his pro-Israeli credentials, the assertion that Israel’s security is job number one should be producing some indigestion somewhere in the media or punditocracy, but, alas, I cannot find it.

From @TAC.

Was JFK the 20th century’s worst president?

As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I began to think that John F. Kennedy probably was the worst American president of the previous century.

In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.

Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam.

What most remember about him are his good looks, the image pumped out for years by his father’s public-relations machine for the Ambassador’s own political ambitions (and ambitious he was – that’s why his boys went to the top Protestant schools) and, part of that, Camelot, created by Jackie, also good-looking, a culture snob with great taste; some say old Joe bought her off.

It wouldn’t have made any difference even medium-term if he’d lived (so why did whoever kill him?). Tonkin Gulf would have been cooked up, there would have been a landslide in ’64, the country would have been mired in Vietnam, the spoiled affluent partying kids would have turned on him and Nixon would have beaten the Dem in ’68.

Lots of people forget that Vietnam was a liberal crusade.

From the MCJ as is this: still not Fonda Hanoi Jane.

Vet quote

I stomped through the jungles, missed holidays with my family, slept with one eye open for fear that I might have my throat slit or a grenade tossed in my bunker, etc., etc. And while I was doing these things, the very freedoms I was supposedly fighting for were being stripped from me and I now realize that I was only a pawn for the NWO bunch. I killed innocent people who had not attacked my country nor even threatened it. I was a hitman for the banksters. If we were attempting to secure freedom we failed miserably!

From LRC.

Two from the MCJ comboxes on church
Editing out most of the mainline-bashing. (This blog’s POV is Catholic. ’Nuff said.)

On church and the sexes:

Ma observed that if the choir ever became 60/40 that would be the end of a mixed choir. “There’s a critical balance,” she observed. “Once you get too many women the men leave. Men don’t like hen parties.”

On the rise and fall of immigrant religion:

Recently a Lutheran whose name I can’t recall penned an article describing the demographics in 3 phases:

1. Immigration phase–plenty of Lutherans coming off the boat = growth.
2. Prolific phase–Immigration trickles, but Lutheran families still having 4-6 children. Most stick with the faith = less growth, but at least replacement.
3. Decline phase–Lutheran families now having 0-2 children, those children jumping ship in the face of concessions to Leftist moonbattery = down the toilet.

That’s pretty good, Scott W., only the Lutheran experience as you well describe it reminded me much more of the American Orthodox and American Greek Catholic (who are Slavs not Greeks) one, because all are ethnics, than the Episcopal. The WASP Episcopalians haven’t been immigrants for about 250-300 years! Eastern Christians haven’t had a big sellout to Modernism (Vatican II hardly affected the Greek Catholics, thank God) but they’re still losing people like crazy as the old die, the young move away from the old ethnic towns and marry out/assimilate, and the Orthodox convert fad fizzles (about 60% don’t stay – the reason for most of the few conversions is still somebody marrying into an ethnic group, just like My Big Fat Greek Wedding). Makes me wonder how the conservative Lutherans (non-mainliners; confessional Lutherans with distinctive semi-Catholic theology and practices) such as the LCMS and, much in the news lately because of former member Michele Bachmann, WELS are faring. (Both German churches AFAIK; they came over reacting to theological compromise in their homeland.) I think you’ve pretty much nailed the Scandinavian-American Lutherans who are now mainliners and sort of merged with the Episcopalians.

The Greeks, the Russians and the Roman Catholics are staying afloat in America thanks to immigration. There’s always been some Greek, the Russian has been since the fall of Communism and Roman Catholics get lots of members on the books who are from Mexico, so their numbers don’t nosedive, even though, as the Anti-Gnostic and others have pointed out, many such newcomers are irreligious or at least non-churchgoing and there’s attrition to evangelicalism.

Bye, Borders
The ’90s powerhouse is as obsolete as your CD collection for the same reason

(Buy books, music and much else from Amazon through me!)

Here’s LRC’s Karen De Coster with more.