ex cathedra

Silly Files

2012-01-28T23:59:00.000-08:00

A series of X-Files episodes that are particularly overwrought. Skully no longer acting like a competent FBI agent but a helpless, breathy girl. And talking about deciphering writing from "an ancient Navajo alphabet"....which, of course, never existed.

Ideologies of time

2012-01-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

I can't stop checking out the slow motion train wreck at the PrayTell blog. The man who keeps whining repetitively that "they" stole "his" Mass and so now he doesn't go to church because what happens there "isn't Mass anymore." God, I'd like to smack him. Fuckin' baby. And the usual crowd, who will jump on anyone who disagrees with them, piling on accusations, namecalling, requirements for documentation, condescending outrage, etc. treat this man as if he were a sacred wounded and abused two year old. In the trade, it's called "enabling.

One of the recurring themes has to do with valuing things based on their age. "Well, that's just a medieval accretion" is one way of dismissing an idea or practice. But is the problem that it's too old, dusty and medieval, or not old enough, coming long after the New Testament? One of the more annoying women, the "We are Church" type, who has read a few books, today dismissed the Roman papacy because a professor recently wrote that prior to the end of the second century, the monarchical style did not exist. So I guess that makes it illegitimate for the Pope to rule the Catholic Church because it only started 1725 years ago? It's a quirky novelty?

On the other hand, Catholic feminism, all of ten minutes old, is revered as a Blinding Revelation of Higher Revolutionary Truth. "The Gospel and the Gospel's ways lay hid in night/ God(dess) said, "Let Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza be! And all was light!" (Apologies to Alex Pope).

You can smell the adolescent oppositional-defiant syndrome.

The Dominican house I lived in had decided to remove the rosary from the belt of the habit, because St. Dominic hadn't worn one; it became part of the outfit later on. But of course, St Dominic wore his hair in a tonsure and didn't have the flowing sleeves OP's now wear. The real issue, of course, was that the friars didn't like the Rosary*. (Or the tonsure, but the sleeves were cool.)

Hardly anyone is consistent in their ideology of time. It gets played out in politics, too. Conservatives tend to value a thing the older it is, liberals much less so. Unless, in both cases, it suits their ideological purposes. Conservatives say, "It's tradition." Liberals say, "So what?" Liberals say, "It's new and progressive." Conservatives say, "So what?"

*I never liked it either, to be honest. I appreciated it from an intellectual viewpoint, but hated reciting it. Especially in a group. My alcoholic great aunt helped me out with that when I was a child and had to say it as a penance or something. For those of you outside The Fold, the rosary beads are for counting a series of prayers, anywhere from five to fifteen sets of ten Hail Mary's preceded by an Our Father and closed with a Glory Be. My aunt told me that since God wrote these prayers and already knew them, there was no need to say the whole thing. Just the first two words of each one. I bought that one. Made it less boring.

War Horsesh**

2012-01-28T10:53:00.000-08:00

A friend took me to a matinee of War Horse. He paid, but only matinee prices. So I feel fine in saying the Academy-nominated Spielberg movie --while technologically impressive and with some powerful battle scenes-- was largely a waste of time.

A Ms Laura Steff at The Huffington Post opines at those of us eye-rollers:

To those who roll their eyes at the movie War Horse being nominated this week for a Best Picture Academy Award, let me say this: The movie is not, as some of those who haven't seen it suggest, just another sentimental story about a boy and his horse. It is not even primarily about a horse in the sense that the original British stage play is.

The cinematic version is much more. It is a story about the greed of the wealthy -- in this case, an English landowner -- and the powerlessness of the poor -- a family that grows turnips on the squire's land. We are reminded that poverty can tear a family apart, in this case pitting father against son and leaving mother to broker the peace.

The movie is also, and primarily, about awful, bloody, World War I ...

But as a Steven Spielberg movie in IMAX format, War Horse assaults us, both our mind and our body.

It conveys as clearly as any movie I've seen the utter horrors of war, the moments of grace that can occur between enemies and the costs to ordinary men and women who only wish to plow their fields and harvest their turnips.

Well, thank God it's not just a shamelessly sentimental and compulsively manipulative story about a boy and horse, but also about cartoons of greedy rich people, --ooooh----powerless poor people ---aaahhh--and the horrors of war ---eeeeeeh. So much less cliched. Not at all like an extended Dickensian version of Lassie, where the brave pup is stolen by bad people and while Timmy and his poor but plucky Mom weep at home, fights through danger and pain to get home by walking 800 miles in the snow.

At several moments, the very mildly etched characters make 90 degree turns you never saw coming, just to insure a link to the next heart-rending moment. Anyone ever heard of script continuity?

What this HuffPo woman, a "Pulitzer Prize winning journalist" --explains a lot-- fails to mention is that the whole plot is set in motion in the first place by the utterly irresponsible, self-destructive and free whim of the "poor turnip farmer."

And of the central equine hero, "Joey" the miracle horse, even my generous friend, who seemed to like the film, said, "He was no Mr. Ed."

Skirting the dark labrysrinth

2012-01-26T15:35:00.000-08:00

Doing some continuing ed for my license renewal this year, a transgender issue came up and I decided to head into cyberspace to check it out. Well, as things go, one link led to another and I found myself reading the feverish, grim and fanatical sites of the Sexually Offended Marginals. One woman, a very, very butch lesbian enraged by her invisibility as a Butch Woman --she is frequently taken for a man, and understandably-- is also dead set against transgenders, most especially ftms. It's just "self-hating and pointless self-mutilation in hope of escaping the masturbatory Male Gaze. You're not born in the wrong body. You're born in the wrong society!" Alice in Wonderland, with a dash of Stalin and Queer Theory. And some transgender sites have her in their sights for legal action. One flower child lovingly and tolerantly opined that since "we" are all one in our sexual orientations, as a community, we must do everything we can to take down "haters" like her. The victim-tyrant dynamic runs rampant.

And people think that religion makes you crazy.

Had some flashbacks about the grimly self-righteous and endlessly self-parsing identity groups, especially of wymyn, among the Queers back in Toronto when I worked in the AIDS field. Dark stuff, airless and deadly. And, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty nuts.

One thing

2012-01-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

In National Review, VDH asks the above question. Without reading his answer, I can offer one of my own.

Newt's dalliances show that female sexuality is far more provoked by power and money than by looks.

Hey Pope-a-thon

2012-01-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

Anti-pope Michael I of Kansas (upper left) watching Roman Pope Benedict XVI (lower right).

It's like Avignon-on-my-Blog.

No comment

2012-01-25T14:48:00.000-08:00

Really.

No, really.

Fragmenta liturgica

2012-01-25T11:45:00.000-08:00

One of the novelties cooked up in the RC liturgical reforms is the educational address to the faithful, right in the middle of the rite. On the surface, it is a form of connection between the priest and the people. But it accomplishes just the opposite. It emphasizes even more the difference between the cheerleader and the crowd. It has a way of insulting the congregation by assuming that it must be invited to where it already is or have things explained to it which it should know or having itself explained to itself.

There is a huge difference between a liturgy which holds you and carries you and one which you have to create by your own efforts, over and over.

In a healthier ritual, you can have a strong priestly role without this paradox, by having the priest just do his business with and in alternation with the congregation, not foregrounding his role by turning him into a cheerleader. But of course, no one's gonna ask me about that anymore.

Endless options and tons of words and text alternatives and expansions make for disorganized, sloppy, shallow, anxious and distracting worship.

The Boomer experts over at Pray Tell are upset that US Catholics are not upset about the new translation. They are getting the impression that the people in the pews don't really pay attention to the words. Duh. I coulda told them that.

Most Catholics don't really like to sing much in church, --although I remember very clearly that people used to belt out Pange Lingua and Tantum Ergo and Holy God We Praise Thy Name at Benediction long ago--- despite a half century of cheerleading, cajoling, etc. So why not just leave them alone? Let the cantor and the choir do all that.

The liturgistas are still mesmerized by the Vatican II groovy mantra about "full, conscious and active participation" when the reality always has been "partial, semiconscious and passive participation". And that's not such a bad thing. Unless you're a cheerleader.

PS I never liked the Gloria. Never provoked either imagination, thought, image or feeling in me. Just some dead text you had get thru. Like the whole messy entrance rites of the Roman Mass. Now the Te Deum, that was something you could engage with. But it's long. And stuck in the Office.

Not nice but (therefore?) wise

2012-01-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite short essays from a terrifically funny curmudgeon of the last century.



Holy Writ by H. L. Mencken (from the Smart Set, October 1923) Whoever it was who translated the Bible into excellent French prose is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France. Contrariwise, the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life wherever English is spoken. They did their work at a time of great theological blather and turmoil, when men of all sorts, even the least intelligent, were beginning to take a vast and unhealthy interest in exegetics and apologetics. They were far too shrewd to feed this disconcerting thirst for ideas with a Bible in plain English; the language they used was deliberately artificial even when it was new. They thus dispersed the mob by appealing to its emotions, as a mother quiets a baby by crooning to it. The Bible that they produced was so beautiful that the great majority of men, in the face of it, could not fix their minds upon the ideas in it. To this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples so effectively that, in the main, they remain Christians, at least sentimentally. Paine has assaulted them, Darwin and Huxley have assaulted them, and a multitude of other merchants of facts have assaulted them, but they still remember the twenty-third Psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, they are still moved beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts!) by the Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger. It is not much, but it is something. I do not admire the general run of American Bible-searchers -- Methodists, United Brethren, Baptists, and such vermin. But try to imagine what the average low-browed Methodist would be if he were not a Methodist but an atheist! The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to the same extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. Its toying with ideas, in the main, have been confined to its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the business to a harmless play of technicalities—the awful concepts of Heaven and Hell brought down to the level of a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown to 99% of its adherents. Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry—for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass must be a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big-top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle, even though he may sweat freely; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon-keeper in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Founding Fact

2012-01-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

What signer of the Declaration of Independence, who outlived all the others, although the wealthiest man in the Colonies and a major financial supporter of the Revolution, was prohibited in his home state from holding political office, practicing law or voting?

Answer here.

Occupy Reality

2012-01-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

I have chosen, for your edification, some segments from economist Thomas Sowell's recent essays in TownHall on economic disparity. Bolding is mine.

Section 1

People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end.

Nowhere have these achievements been random or representative of the demographic proportions of the population of a country or of the world. Nor have they been the same from one century to the next.

Yet these and numerous other disparities in achievement are resolutely ignored by those whose shrill voices denounce disparities in rewards, as if these disparities are somehow suspicious at best and sinister at worst.

Section 2

One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it.

This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.

What is not so obvious, but is painfully true nonetheless, is that colleges and universities can also turn out vast numbers of people with credentials, but with no marketable skills with which to fulfill their expectations. There is nothing magic about simply being in ivy-covered buildings for four years.

In countries around the world, people with credentials but no marketable skills have been a major source of political turmoil, social polarization and ideologically driven violence, sometimes escalating into civil war. People with degrees in soft subjects, which impart neither skills nor a realistic understanding of the world, have been the driving forces behind many extremist movements with disastrous consequences.

Section 3

Anyone who has ever been in a Third World country, or even in a slum neighborhood at home, is likely to wonder why there can be such dire poverty among some people, while others are prospering.
Both politicians and intellectuals have tended to have simple answers to that question, even if these simple answers have been different in different eras.

A hundred years ago, the prevailing answer was that some people are innately and genetically inferior. As often happens when a big idea seizes the imagination of the intelligentsia, their strongest argument is that there is no argument -- that "science" has already proved what they believe.

By the end of the 20th century, the pendulum had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. Now differences in achievements among classes, races or the sexes were seen as being a result of discriminatory treatment.

But the innumerable factors affecting human achievements are not only complex and hard to untangle, they offer neither politicians nor intellectuals the opportunity to simply be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Factors which present no opportunity to star in a moral melodrama have often been ignored in favor of factors that do.

Section 4

Different histories, geography, demography and cultures have left various groups, races, nations and civilizations with radically different abilities to create wealth.

Focusing attention and attacks on people who have greater wealth-generating capacity -- whether races, classes or whatever -- has had counterproductive consequences, including tragedies written in the blood of millions. Whole totalitarian governments have risen to dictatorial power on the wings of envy and resentment ideologies.

Intellectuals have all too often promoted these envy and resentment ideologies. There are both psychic and material rewards for the intelligentsia in doing so, even when the supposed beneficiaries of these ideologies end up worse off. When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Both politicians and intellectuals have made their choice.

Liberal Jahiliyah

2012-01-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

One of the assumptions of the messianic Boomer generation --my demographic compatriots--is that prior to the 1960's, America lay in a state of darkness, ignorance and evil. What the Muslims call jahiliyah, the pitiful immoral conditions of a people prior to The Final Revelation. Racism, sexism, homophobia, the military-industrial complex, crushing conformity, religious tyranny. Oh, and anti-Communist hysteria.

Consequently, whatever institutions or groups were dominant prior to The Decade of Revelation must be cleansed, overcome, replaced or otherwise transformed in the image and likeness of the salvation-bearers.

As Mark Levin notes in his new book Ameritopia,

For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual is one-dimensional—selfish. On his own, he has little moral value. Contrarily, authoritarianism is defended as altruistic and masterminds as socially conscious. Thus endless interventions in the individual’s life and manipulation of his conditions are justified as not only necessary and desirable but noble governmental pursuits. This false dialectic is at the heart of the problem we face today.

This is why liberals are so attached to governmental regulation. Left to our own devices, "Americans" --and by that, for once, liberals recognize this as a White-majority and Christian country-- and our so-called freedom, we will oppress blacks, women, "the poor" and all the other victim classes.

Politically correct language is one great example of this. All ways of describing the now-privileged victim classes had to be rewritten in NewSpeak. Just because it was the language of the oppressors. We are now reaping the fruits of the whole thing with the White House incumbent, in that one of the articles of faith is that as long as a Democrat is in control, the Prime Mover of Justice and Inclusion is the federal government. A deeply lamentable outcome of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was, I now suspect, a terribly flawed and overreaching way of dealing with the problem of race.

I see it at the PrayTell blog, too, where variously adolescent commentors --and some of the highly educated and more sobre-seeming ones, too-- appear to hold a version of Alexander Pope's historical judgment: The Gospel and the Gospel's ways lay hid in night/ Then God said, "Let Vatican II be!" -- and all was light. To these cretinous children of the age, the mere mention of Latin, or the thought of kneeling, or of using non-kindergarten language for worship are all anathema. Reversions to the awful jahiliyah days "before the Council." As if Rome had finally caught up with the Reformation, which had been right all along.

These folks' attachment to either America or to their religion* , their patriotism or their piety, is quite similar. It is really just an attachment to their idea of how it should be and a deep rejection of how it actually was. As Downton Abbey's Lady Grantham says to Mrs Crawley, "You are quite wonderful, the way you see room for improvement wherever you look." This attitude is also a classic recipe for a bad marriage: "I love my idea of who I can turn you into rather than the unsatisfactory and hopefully temporary disappointment you have been until you met me."

*I am aware of the perfectly obvious fact that I do not practice mine and so I could be criticized for harping on others' attachments. As I have said before, my departure was not about something trivial, like a translation or a posture, but about whether one of the deepest parts of my soul was diseased or not, and my continuing interest in the Christian churches is largely in the health of one of the pillars of the West.

MaleSoul 37

2012-01-22T13:16:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted any images in the MaleSoul series
since the Fall of 2010.

But this image seemed to call out for it.

I like movies

2012-01-21T20:24:00.000-08:00

set in England in WWII.

I guess it's because that was pretty well the last time the Brits were likeable as a group.

Did you know

2012-01-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

that the amount of water on Earth has remained constant for hundreds of millions of years? We don't lose any and we don't gain any.

It just constantly recycles itself.

Am I a pointy headed intellectual or what?

2012-01-21T13:15:00.000-08:00

A religion site I visit had a contest the other day. Name this book:

I wrote that it was likely a Missal for the Maronite Church.

Answer today: A Missal for the Maronite Church.

From the dust in my synapses:

1. The language was Syriac, a form of Aramaic. I do not know the language, but I recognize the script.

2. The date of printing was Rome 1762. What Christian group who use Syriac would likely be having a book printed in Rome in the 18th century? One which was in communion with Rome then and used the West Syrian Liturgy.

3. Hence...tick, tick, tick. The Maronites. Indigenous Lebanese Christians who maintained their faith after the imperialist and colonialist conquest by the Muslim Arabs. They have long been (or, according to many of them, have always been) in communion with Rome. And since they only use Syriac/Aramaic for worship, I guessed it was a missal.

No prize, alas. Just the pleasure of being right. (Kinda scary though.)

Recognize this?

2012-01-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

...has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance....declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever...altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.

Sound familiar?

Hat Tip to IC.

Prescient Blooming

2012-01-21T10:44:00.000-08:00

Howard Bloom's 1995 The Lucifer Principle attempted to explain a lot of human history, evolution and behavior via a focus on groups, status and belief. Superorganisms, pecking order and memes, in his words. He was especially interested in Islam even back then. Muslims were interested in him as well.

"Arab pressure groups asked ever so politely that The Lucifer Principle be withdrawn from print and that nothing that I write be published again. They offered to boycott my publisher's products — all of them — worldwide. And they backed their warning with a call for my punishment in seventeen Islamic countries."

Bloom "contends that 'evil' is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and is woven into our most basic biological fabric." It is a vision which appeals both to my Gnostic and my conservative sides.

It has been a staple of conservative assessments of liberalism that part of what drives both temperaments is a differing view of human nature and the world. Liberals speak and act as if humans were basically good and capable of even greater goodness, under the right conditions. The actual state of the race (and lately of the planet) provokes in them the kind of emotional response seen on bumper stickers, pin and signs in San Francisco, Marin and other Centers of Enlightenment, Peace and Resentment:

Funny how her face reads smug and superior satisfaction rather than rage and concern.
Jus' sayin'.

Imagining that the world could be fixed --if only the right people were in charge of the government-- drives a utopian attitude. And usually leads to guillotines and gulags. Conservatives (and Gnostics*) see both the planet and the species as far too inherently limited and constrained for that kind of waste of energy. To paraphrase John Kekes, in a world full of the unpredictable and the contingent --both in nature's complex cycles and in human events--, where scarcity of (and hence competition for) resources is a constant feature of the effort to survive, and with a species both ingenious and at least as prone to destructiveness as to cooperation, liberalism is nothing more than an irrational cryptoreligious faith.

Speaking of philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives, a religious philosopher noted in comments this morning that one of those dividing lines, often unnoticed, is the old split in Western philosophy between nominalism and realism. One (oversimple) way of looking at it to say that realists believe that language and reality, words and world, actually do connect. Things both physical and mental can be described adequately, if not perfectly, by our speech. Nominalists split the two, untethering our language and ideas from the great realm of objects and concrete actions. Aristotle was a realist, for example. Kant a nominalist. Not to put too fine a point on it, realists believe that when they talk about the world, they are talking about the world. Nominalists hold that they are just talking to themselves.

One of the ways these two attitudes unfold is that realist thinks that things have natures. We observe and describe them, but we don't create them. So, for instance, a man, or a horse, or marriage are things that exist, definedly. For a nominalist attitude, one strange result of believing that your ideas are separate from external reality is that you are not bound by it and so you are master of your own ideas about it. Man, woman, marriage, etc. All these things become issues for self-definition. Just ask Humpty Dumpty or The Ministry of Truth.

I think you can see how this plays out.

And if you don't see this, you are not paying attention.

* It is a standard stance --a trope?-- in anti-utopians like Molnar and Voegelin that "immanentizing the eschaton" is a Gnostic idea, indeed, a defining Gnostic idea. Gnosis as special insight is a fair assessment, attempting to transcend the world-system through revealed & self-authenticating knowledge. But the second step of trying to implement a social or governmental program to actualize it is pure BS. The essence of Gnosticism is that the world is irredeemable. I would suggest that the totalitarian utopian drives of Marxism and Islam owe far more to Judeo-Christianity than to the Gnostics. I smell the same infection in contemporary neo-Constantinian "social justice" Christians, who very frequently use the metaphor of "building the Kingdom", a phrase which never, not once, appears in the Bible.

De rerum natura

2012-01-19T12:02:00.000-08:00

One of the best images around. Whoever did the cover illustration had a brilliant moment.

One of the reasons for my appreciation of Gnosticism is that its mythology, while not solving the problem of evil, placed the responsibility for the suffering and death in the world on the Creator rather than laying that burden on the shoulders of humanity. In orthodox Western monotheism, Christianity most especially, the created world became a place of moral and physical pain as a result of creaturely choice. Because of creatures, the Creation fell, cracked, broke apart, was perverted from its pristine original order.

In the complex theological myths of the Gnostics, it was a conflict within the divine world which gave rise to a creation that was therefore flawed from its very inception. Creation happened not as the free thought of an all powerful, wise and loving One, but as the messy working out of an internal divine drama. In this world, there never really was a Paradise. Suffering, death and moral evil were all built into it prior to the emergence of man. Who did not wreck the world by his free choice, but found himself inside a system he had no hand in building, and yet, as part of it, had to cope with.

Which more accurately describes, I think, both psychologically and evolutionarily, the human predicament, dilemma and condition.

Conversion stories

2012-01-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

can be an interesting (sub?)genre. In the religious realm, they are a staple. And in politics, too, though I suspect political conversion is rarer. Even in sex. Someone once did a study of gay porn --back in the archaic days when most of it was in print, pictures with stories. A significant number of the narratives involved a straight man being seduced by a gay man and discovering that he liked it, and more.

Like coming out stories, though, conversion stories can become repetitive. Here's a political conversion story, though, which moves the genre ahead of the recent crop of Jewish leftists who became NeoCons. A New York liberal Jewish woman who converted to Nietzschean anti-egalitarianism!

Her initial article here. And a followup with responses to comments here.

Bromides

2012-01-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Pope repeated one of the totally uninvestigated and oft-repeated assumptions of the last 50 years of Christendom, that the divisions among the Christian churches (and ecclesial bodies*) makes the Gospel less credible.

Really?

Does the split between Sunni and Shia do that for Islam? Do Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism put people off the Dharma? Did the splits in Marxism dampen the enthusiasm of their base?

My guess is that people are used to these religious divisions. They'd better be. The Christian Church has been fragmenting itself pretty well since day one. I bet in a lot of ways people take these splits as an indication of passion and seriousness**.

And if you check out Protestant denominations that are formed from amalgamation, United This and Uniting That...what kind of leverage or credibility do they get out of that? Do they thrive or fade? Do people actually see them as a sign of desperation in the face of oncoming extinction?

I think its just pablum.

*In RC language, "church" has a specific meaning because the Church of Rome considers itself The Church (with the Orthodox as slightly cranky siblings). Protestants, however, who rejected bishops and apostolic succession, have lost the sacramental priesthood and consequently have only the sacrament of Baptism, not Holy Communion or any of the others....which 5 others they didn't want, anyway. So these incomplete and defective church-like bodies are called "ecclesial communities." Pisses them off.

**More fun over at PrayTell. I clarified that I was not reading Luther's original intentions but his continuing course of action when I wrote that he "set about breaking up the Church." I referenced Gene Robinson and the effect of his ordination on the Anglicans. One of the predictable women said that being in the right was more important than "losing numbers" and even cited Jesus losing disciples over his "eat my flesh" discourse in John. And yet she and others are all googoo about reuniting the churches. So bringing divided Christians together in loving communion makes Jesus happy, but if you have a brief and want to split, it's just a crass matter of right vs numbers. So many of those folks are just, well, stupid.

Your tax dollars at work

2012-01-18T21:24:00.000-08:00

A mole in the local teachers union let me know how the educators of our youth are encouraged by their union to spend this Friday, a working day.

Occupy dayof actions January 20

This FridayJanuary 20th will be an exciting full day of multiple actions targeting therichest 1%. There will be dozens of individual actions throughout the day to participatein, but the union's Occupy SF Solidarity Committee is asking members toprioritize four specific actions in the afternoon (see below). Can you join us?

1pm • Occupy the Courts @ 9th Circuit Court of Appeals 95, 7th Street. Join us at the stepsof the Federal Court House to demand an end to the awful "CitizensUnited" decision and propose an amendment to outlaw "CorporatePersonhood." Music and art, too!

2pm •Ralph Lauren @ 90 Post (at Kearny) organized by OSF Labor Solidarity Committee. Last December's portshutdown down exposed the unfair working conditions of port truck drivers. Themoving "Open Letter From America's Port Truck Drivers on Occupy thePorts" went viral in the lead up to the shutdown as thousands ofonline activists (33,000 on Facebook alone) clicked "shared."

The Occupy movement continues its support of Port of Oakland workers and the"89%" of workers who are not unionized. The OccupySF Labor SolidarityWorking Group will be visiting Ralph Lauren to shed light on the unfair workingconditions, union busting, and environmentally unfriendly practices of itsaforementioned shipping company, the notorious multinational Toll Group, whichfired 26 Los Angeles port drivers attempting to unionize.

3pm • StateOffice Building @ 455 California. Join SFSU activists to occupy GovernorBrown's San Francisco office to demand that we tax corporations and the wealthy1% to restore education and other crucial services for the 99%. Support theMillionaires Tax and public education! Called by The Debt Offensive affinitygroup of Occupy San Francisco State University.

4:15pm •Grand Hyatt Union Square @ 345 Stockton. Join the Hyatt workers' picket that ends witha march to Sutter & Montgomery to meet up with OSF on the way to closingevent at 555 California. Hyatt, the most abusive employer in the hotelindustry, is run by a single family of billionaires, the Pritzkers. 11Pritzkers are on the Forbes 400 list of America's richest individuals. Hyatt isthe epitome of the 1%, and was instrumental in evicting Occupy SF from BradleyManning Plaza.

Along with Reagan's Nine Scariest Words

2012-01-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

"We're from the government and we're here to help."

These:

In support of Google and Wikipedia

2012-01-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

who are protesting the SOPA bill, and inspired by urgings from Trevor the OVO and Phil the OP (unlikely cyberfellows) I did something astonishing. I contacted Nancy Pelosi --who is, lamentably, my House of Reps rep-- by email to say NO to SOPA. Now I have to go wash out my software.

As Phil wrote, and I think Trevor would agree:

The basic question for me is: when has giving gov't bureaucrats more power to define and regulate our lives been a good thing? The internet is one of the last arenas of truly free discourse in the U.S.

Let's keep it that way!

Lost horizons

2012-01-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

Watched Frank Capra's restored 1937 Lost Horizon. Great B&W flick. The utopian underpinning is ridiculous, as all utopian underpinnings are, but there's drama and originality and humor, old-style acting chops from Ronald Coleman, and such great photography, great sets.

A drekkish remake, a color musical (!), was made in the 70s by Ross Hunter, Larry Kramer (yes, her) and Burt Bacharach. Oy. In the 1930's version, they could be faithful to the book, which makes it clear, in print, that the mission was to remove the "white people" from danger during a local Chinese rebellion. The hero, without prompting, affirms this, although he later shows some abstract humanitarian regret about it. But in the remake, it is only outside pressure which forces him to provide an exit just for "Europeans", now surrounded by Indians.

I also noticed in the film that hero Conway's brother, although played by a Nordically handsome 25 year old John Howard, was really a weak, self-indulgent and histrionic teenage girl of a character. Quite operatically so. Howard's need to escape Shangri-La only affected his brother, really. But in the remake, the blurb reminds us that "his ambitious brother sees it as a prison from which he must escape, even if it means risking his life and bringing destruction to the ancient culture of Shangri-La." From narcissistic baby to culturally predatory imperialist. Welcome to the new world.

Amen, brother!

2012-01-17T14:48:00.000-08:00

A Christian fundamentalist says Fundamentalism is now really a property of liberals and progressives. those who Know Best and because of their Tolerant, Open-Minded, Caring ways, lay their health, safety, sensitivity and inclusivity rules and regulations and priggeries on the rest of us, alas, as predicted by the prophet Alexis.

qui laetificat iuventutem meam

2012-01-17T10:18:00.000-08:00

He's young, but has a great combo of proportion, flow, strength, mass, etc.

Post-racial America, Eric Holder edition

2012-01-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

In this story, we see the Journalist Ethics Rules that ExCathedra has noted before. Info is freely given on age and gender. Absolutely silent on race or ethnicity. Hmmm. Waddaya think that means?

Well, here's the names of the little felons. I did not make this up.

Sic transit, continuing again

2012-01-16T23:23:00.000-08:00

Val Kilmer in his mid 30's, in the 1996 film The Ghost and The Darkness right after Batman..In his prime. Time, alas, has not been good to him.

Martin Luther and Martin Luther King

2012-01-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

Today is MLK's birthday. As I noted last year, piety will abound. While it is now not only acceptable but practically a sign of ethical evolution to note on Washington's Birthday --what's left of it as mixed and generic "Presidents' Day"-- that he was a slaveholder, it is still thought to be gross, in the worst possible taste and "racist" to note that Rev. Dr. King was a plagiarist and a serial adulterer. Talk about "the content of our character." As with so many others, his place in history was hugely enhanced because he was assassinated.

The Maoist feel of this huge piece is no accident.

It is emblematic of our times that although an academic panel in 1991 clearly judged his doctoral thesis to be seriously compromised by plagiarism, they did not feel that it was "useful" to revoke his degree. Craven cowardice.

To say nothing of King's larger political views. Views which match very much the views of the current half-Black incumbent in the White House.

Evidence for the above statement from both the Black Left and the White Right.

As for Martin Luther himself, over at PrayTell, the issue came up of whether he was a saint. I noted that at least from the Roman side, a monk who marries a nun and then sets about to break up the unity of the Church is hardly a likely candidate. I was serially instructed on my uncharitable, unnuanced, ahistorical and pre-Vatican II attitude and that mutual acceptance of responsibility was important for healing and the unity of the churches. And anyway, he just did openly what a lot of Catholics did on the side. (A great argument for canonization, that. Maybe I shouldn't give up hope for my own elevation to the altars.)

Sigh. Anyone who thinks that "the unity of the churches" is ever going to happen also thinks that there will be a female pope. That ship sailed quite a while ago.

And although there are a variety of voices there at PT, the original group, who see themselves as fellows of the monk-blogger in charge, find no fault to the religious left of them. Rome, on the other hand, can hardly ever do anything right. If the Reformation happened again, they would all run over fast. Indeed, several of them said they'd be Episcopalians except for "blooming where God had planted them." Pretty funny, eh?

Now Luther may well not have set out intentionally to break up the Church, but between his 1517 Theses and the 1520 condemnation and what he did by 1525, you can certainly see that breaking up the Church was not something he found distasteful. When he saw that the Peasant Revolt was claiming him as an inspiration, he moved heaven and earth to disassociate himself and stop them, but he never lifted a finger to halt the cracking apart of Western Christendom. Au contraire. Sorta like Gene Robinson, the divorced and gay Episcopal bishop, whose acceptance of ordination put the dissolution of the Anglican Communion on a rapid new footing. I don't know, but if you engage in a program of action with a very likely set of outcomes, and those outcomes start to happen, and you continue unabated with your program, how convincing is it to say that you bear no responsibility because you didn't intend this to happen?

My takes on the Reformation, and on the Civil Rights Movement, are mixed. I find little to like in Protestantism as a religion, --basically, I find it anxiety-driven, fetishizing of a fantasied primitive purity, and boring-- yet were it not for the Protestants, there'd be no America. L'Amerique vaut-elle bien une reformation?The continuing outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement leave me very unimpressed, to say the least. To put the matter at its most provocatively impolite, have Blacks, as a group, proved worth all the vast and historically unprecedented energy that's been lavished on them in the last half century? The more law and treasure and sympathy thrown at them, the less able they seem to get their group act together. After all that effort, --and all that gushing of guilty Whites--we get a 70% illegitimacy rate, a hugely disproportionate rate of criminality and incarceration, and Hip Hop. Oh, and Barack Hussein Obama. And Michelle. On my gloomiest days, I locate the confluence of MLK's movement (including the White governmental response to it) and the Vietnam War as the turning point in the nation's soul and its cultural fall into pointless self-erasure. But the most significant relationship of my life has been with a Black man. Without the social changes of the 60's, that would not have been possible.

Anyone who judges history judges, of course, from within history.

Amongst the unBelievers

2012-01-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

At Spearhead, a masculist webmag, a fella named Alcuin positively reviews Aidan Nichols OP's attack on feminism's attack on God the Father. I checked out Alcuin's blog. Boy, compared to him, I am a feminist running dog. The man is blunt. And smart. And about the huge feminist propaganda in so many movies (and commercials) , he is right on.

I can relate

2012-01-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

Part of a trailer from the second season of the hit BBC series Sherlock. Coming to the US in May.

Good news

2012-01-14T21:32:00.000-08:00

Sabbath varia

2012-01-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

John Barrowman, who plays Capn Jack Harkness in Torchwood, is an out and civilly unioned Scottish-American guy working mostly in Britain. But he does not like the word marriage for same-sex partnerships. One more reason I like him.

Private apologies make sense to me. I have given them and been given them. Public apologies, part of the civic media ritual of our dissolving society's obsession with victimization, give me agita.

Last night my ex, T, came over for dinner and somehow the Bible came up. He expects, expectantly, that in 50 years no one will read it. I declined to agree or expect. He challenged me for having been very angry with the church for years and now sometimes coming to its defense. He doesn't like variation. Or, on the other hand, immobility. Hard to please. Anyway, I explained that it was like a breakup. At first you can only see the bad side of your ex, but over time, when you settle down, you can differentiate between what you loved and miss and what you found yourself unable to cope with and don't miss. He changed the subject and we had a very nice evening.

Men at war. Kerfuffle of late over a video of US soldiers pissing on the corpses of Taliban. Shock and horror amongs the bien-pensants. I, of course, would give them a medal. On the other hand, a story about a young Chinese-American solider apparently driven to suicide by his platoon's serious and ongoing mistreatment. If the story is true, I'd put the cowards in the brig for a very long time. The one thing about men that I have a hard time with --even though I understand the evolutionary drive-- is a gang mistreating a weaker person. It's cowardly.

A couple of stories on line about people getting in trouble for noticing certain public male persons in religion acting effeminately. Dustups ensue. I have noted in my years in ghetto living that gay men will go to great lengths to change themselves to make themselves more attractive: going to the gym, taking steroids, cutting or dying their hair, plastic surgery to reduce with liposuction or enhance with implants, regrowing their foreskins or pumping up their packages, dermabrasion, tannings and tattoos and piercings and teethwhitenings, even, for God's sake, bleaching their buttholes*. But ask them to work on a voice or gait or manner or set of interests that's typical of a teenage girl or a celebrity diva past her prime and you'd think you had blasphemed against the sacred Mother of God in church on Easter. Suddenly the guys who contort themselves in fifty ways to change into something they deem more fuckable become the possessors of an inviolable True Gay Self that cannot be criticized without turning you into a Nazi Republican breeder who wants to put us all in concentration camps, like Bush.

I don't think that masculinity is simply a matter of butching it up. But it sure couldn't hurt.

*I saw the ad in the window of the local gay sex shop last week. One wag called it "BriteSmile for BungHoles".

Mirabili dictu

2012-01-12T23:58:00.000-08:00

A 2005 indy film, Confession, --also known as Deadly Secrets--is a riff on Hitchcock's 1953 I Confess. In both cases, a priest hears the confession of a murderer and then, unable to reveal the truth, finds himself accused of the crime. The newer film is set in a boys' school. Jonathan Meyers, like Hitchcock, ignores the fine points of canon law so as to ramp up the tension for his priest-protagonist.

Amazingly, there is only one passing reference to the clergy sex scandals; the issue here is murder, not sex. And amazingly, the priests are not cartoons; on the contrary. None of the standard lazy Hollywood cliches:

a. heartless orthodox organization men bent on political power
b. the misunderstood (usually lefty) victims of the above men
c. tortured but hot semi-believers having an affair
d. doddering clueless old capons with all the testosterone of Barney the Dinosaur*
e. nutcase exorcists or apocalyptic conspiracy freaks

Just as amazingly, they are recognizable as canons regular of Premontre and the film appears to have been shot in their abbey and boys school in California.

The accused priest who keeps the seal of the confessional is played low key by Cameron Daddo and Chris Pine, who has since grown up to be a startlingly handsome fella, plays the very bad boy. Not a great flick, but ok, probably an early effort, with the kinds of gaps and oddities you might expect. But for its refusal to follow the well-worn path in these matters, kudos.

*The abbot comes close to this but mostly because he is played by Tom Bosley, who has been this kind of character for ages.

PS. I just recalled a visitor I had back in my clergy days in the 80's, a man who was a screenwriter and was prepping a treatment to try to sell to television. Here was the plot: a man with AIDS, angry at the Church, goes to confession and brings with him a syringe containing his own blood. He sticks the needle through the screen and sprays the infected blood into the priest's face and eyes. A year later, the priest comes down with AIDS. He is subject to church discipline and public disgrace...and he is not able to explain what happened, because either A. it is a secret of the confessional or B. he forgot the incident!

I bet this guy is churning out drek now for the SyFy channel.

I just realized that

2012-01-12T12:20:00.000-08:00

I have zero tolerance for Zero Tolerance.

The sacred digital divide

2012-01-12T10:37:00.000-08:00

FBook tried to get me to friend an old work colleague. The very straight guy who got all girly and gushy about Obama's smile. His profile included a link to this site:

Founded          2010

About              SacredAgentis the first interactive online source of personalized wisdom.

Company
Overview        Our intelligent software “Agent” learns about yourtroubles and hopes, and selects insights just for you from 5,000 years of theworld’s most respected secular and spiritual sources--including psychology,literature, science, and sports, in addition to the major religious traditions.

Whether you’re a devout practitioner of a particular tradition, interested inan interfaith blend, or prefer exclusively secular wisdom, SacredAgentwill deliver insights that meet your needs.

SacredAgent delivers wisdom as a unique multimedia experiencewithin a stunning visual and auditory landscape. We invite you to explore thisnew path in your journey.

Description            NOTE (APRIL 28, 2011): The SacredAgentwebsite cannot handle the traffic it's receiving. We've taken the site downwhile we upgrade the site architecture and server infrastructure. We plan toreactivate SacredAgent soon. To receive a notification when we'reback up, please "Like" this Facebook page. Thank you!

So I went over to the website to get my shot of the interactive online source of personalized wisdom. And got this.

Now THAT's thinking outside the box

2012-01-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

From Five Feet of Fury, theory meets an unspeakable reality. LOL.

Classic

2012-01-11T23:50:00.000-08:00

Which great man of the West in the last two thousand years
--king, philosopher, warrior, statesman, you name it--
could this face not fit?

The Company of Men

Politics on the ground

2012-01-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

Remarks and reflections from a bantering session with a friend this morning.

Aside from certain sexual and reproduction-related issues, can you name me any issues on which progressives/liberals do not require

1. more money out of my pocket in taxes
and
2. more regulation of increasing areas of behavior?

They fulfill James Burnham's prediction of the managerial state. Not a socialism where private property is owned by the goverment, but --as with National Socialism in Germany, btw-- private property is so heavily and closely regulated and controlled by the government as to make an actual takeover almost superfluous.

My friend was disgusted that certain members of the Christian Right --one of his personal betes noirs--have declared that regardless of Mitt Romney's politics, they cannot vote for him, because a Latter Day Saint in the White House would legitimate the religion of Mormonism. Because he is a dog lover, I asked him if he could vote for a politically compatible Muslim, given Islam's designation of pooches as unclean animals whose presence in a house drives out angels, deprives one of virtue and makes prayer impossible. Well, of course he would not vote for such a person with such a stupid religious view. I dubbed him the Canine Right.

Speaking of dogs and progressives, my friend expressed some very un-Christian wishes about progressive and dog-concerned SF supervisor Scott Weiner, one more of our secularist Calvins here in Geneva-by-the-Bay.

Did I say something about progressives, money and regulation?

Kimball on Burnham

2012-01-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

The wishful-thinking partisans of Catholic "social justice" teaching ought to take heed, but will not.

Published in 1943, TheMachiavellians is ostensibly an exposition of, and homage to,some modern followers of Machiavelli.Its larger purpose isto distinguish between the sentimental and the realistic inpolitics. Dante (in De Monarchia), Rousseau, and thearchitects of the French Revolution are prime examples of theformer: they represent “politics as wish”: noble, optimistic,ultimately futile (indeed, ultimately “reactionary and vicious”in Burnham’s judgment).

Machiavelli and his heirs belong to the latter camp. They sawthings as they were and faced up to unpleasant facts abouthuman nature. Because they saw humanity as it was—in itsimperfection, its treachery, its unceasing desire for power—theywere the true friends of liberty. They did not exchange realfreedoms for pleasant-sounding but empty idealities. Theyunderstood that all political freedom is imperfect freedom, wonthrough struggle, preserved with difficulty, constantly subjectto assault and diminution.

From Kimball's essay.

Some too-close-to-home observations:

Being an ex-Catholic is not the same thing as being anon-Catholic, and an ex-Catholic with a taste for theologicalargumentation is a decidedly strange hybrid.

If he occasionally exaggerated theextent or imminence of the evils he described—Burnham was liberallyendowed with what Henry James called “the imagination ofdisaster”—he was fearless in opposing and exposing thetotalitarian temptation. Which is to say that he was fearless inopposing and exposing the most corrosive, most addictive, mostmurderous ideology of our time.

Burnham’s essential intellectualfailing, Orwell thought, was in“predicting a continuation of the thingthat is happening.”Nazi power is on the rise, ergo it will continue irresistibly;American capitalism is in crisis, ergo it will necessarilydisintegrate—except that the rude, unkempt force of realityintervenes, transforming those ergos into “might have beens.”

His “besettingsin,” Orwell said, is to overstate his case: “He is too fond ofapocalyptic visions, too ready to believe that the muddledprocesses of history will happen suddenly and logically.”(Orwell makes the arresting observation that, during the SecondWorld War, the smarter Brits were often the more pessimistic:“their morale was lower because their imaginations werestronger.”)

Burnham's Law

2012-01-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

I find myself continually impressed with the insight in James Burham's statement that

the liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself."

Morally disarmed. Without moral standing. At the complete beck and call of. Capitulating to.

Eric Holder's people

2012-01-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

Affirmative Action Political Correctness in the military now. Doesn't that make you feel safe? After her, maybe they'll find a nice Muslim from, oh, say, Fort Hood, to run things.

From bad to WTF?

2012-01-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

The baptismal font in the Sistine Chapel, modern 1996 version

and the brand new one just installed for use at Epiphany 2012

Designed by a priest-professor of liturgy in Rome, "the new font is presented as an olive tree, whose base is a stone taken from the Jordan River, and whose top is a shiny golden ball representing the sun, which, when opened becomes a shell containing the water for baptism."

Here it is with the top on...

This certainly calls for a caption contest...

Representin'

2012-01-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

Like "discriminatory" and "exclusionary", the word pair "overrepresented" and "underrepresented" are politically loaded rhetorical devices designed to block thinking and to serve a progressive agenda. Even the dictionary definition of underrepresented acknowledges that it describes "inadequate" representation rather than "disproportionate." Disproportion simply describes a mathematical difference, while inadequacy clearly inscribes a complaint and implies a need for remedy.

No one ever complains that Blacks are overrepresented in basketball or the civil service, only in prison or on death row. Jews are underrepresented in the military; when was the last time you heard a hue and cry about that? Blacks are underrepresented in the ranks of combat troops: where's the NAACP calling for more of them at the front lines? But to get more of them as firemen or cops, we have the Federal government preventing qualified Whites from taking those jobs.

This is part of the fraud in the diversity/inclusiveness game. Blacks are 13% of the US population. Jews are 2%. Shall we make a law requiring that their "representation" in every walk of life, profession and activity shall match that number?

The real issue is wanting to have historically less or un successful groups become numerous in positions of power, wealth and prestige. As if mere numbers granted this and the lack of same were due to some nefarious plot.

This whole paradigm is overrepresented in BS and underrepresented in reality.

Hell hath no fury

2012-01-08T15:33:00.000-08:00

Ah, vox populi, vox populi. An empowered laywoman cheerleader, outraged and paying attention, having just seen a dinner theatre version of Les Miserables, takes her stand against priestcraft privilege and foreign oppression. In the spirit of Scarlett O'Hara she cries, "I'll never be kneeling again!"

Hang in there! We can overvome this ridiculous liturgical crackdown from the Rome. Let’s just keep praying that the next pope is a Vatican 2 pope. As an English speaking Catholic, I refuse to kneel at any part of the mass. When priests are required to kneel, then I’ll kneel. I knelt enough as a youngster and refuse to go there a again. We need to assert our baptismal rights at the table and stop walking on liturgical eggshells! WE are Church, NOT Rome! WE celebrate! WE believe!

People like her have been "praying that the next pope is a Vatican 2 pope" since John XXIII died in 1963. Howzat werkin outforya, sistah?

Big ideas

2012-01-08T12:24:00.000-08:00

And not from Newt Gingrich.

I much enjoyed talk radio host and constitutional lawyer Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto and am looking forward to kindling his new book, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America.

His manifesto made the case that the real issue in US politics underneath the usual Right vs Left divide is Statism, a love of governmental expansion which "big government conservatives" share with liberals/progressives. A quote from the upcoming text shows the same concern.

The Table of Contents indicates a review of utopian politics in Plato, Moore, Hobbes and Marx, then a review of American ideas via Locke, Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, with his own take on the utopian drive. Being a Five, I think I will enjoy this.

When I was a student at Columbia U in the 60's the American "revolution" was looked down upon for being so restrained and un-revolutionary. Just an uprising of the bourgeoisie. Hardly worth even calling a revolution. But the French, now there was a real vision, something really compelling.

Thomas Sowell is an excellent purveyor of insight on this topic. In his Conflict of Visions and The Quest for Cosmic Justice, he points out the utopian drive that always brings about its opposite. John Kekes is on the same page.

And, of course, your humble servant ExCathedra.

Enantiodromia again

2012-01-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

On a religion column I read, the writer attacked gay sexpundit Dan Savage for creating a vile Google search item against social conservative candidate Rick Santorum. Mr Santorum --a big government prig who seems to have nothing noteworthy or startling to offer about our current economic malaise-- tends to roll bestiality, masturbation, abortion, gay adoption and buttfucking into one big package of badness. Mr Savage, a sexual libertarian, did give vent to his deeper darker side on Bill Maher by wishing that "all the Republicans would fucking die."

Wow, what a choice for iconic figures. My thought is, "A plague on both your houses."

Why not?

2012-01-06T01:03:00.000-08:00

In a sidebar of one of the blogs I read, part of a Twitter feed:

Ron Paul is insane. And he hates Jews, blacks & gays.

I am not a fan of Ron Paul. He's an ideologue. He has a few good attitudes, and a bunch I do not buy. (And then there's that whiny voice.) Leaving aside the ambiguities of whatever "hating" means*, why should a libertarian be fond of three of the most reliably and vehemently statist-voting (Democrat-voting) groups in the country? After all, we have a president who doesn't even seem to like his own country very much, especially the bitter part, full of "typical White people", which clings to guns and God.

*The supposedly all-loving Jesus actually required it. Lk 14.26

The pace of the jackals

2012-01-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

Watched both the original 1973 film, Day of the Jackal, and its 1997 remake, Jackal. The original is much better. Far less blood but far more suspense. Edward Fox's charming sociopath looks even more smart and dangerous by comparison with Bruce Willis' plodding and detached thug. Bad direction, I suspect. Willis changes his appearance more than twice as often as Fox, but that cannot give his character much mystery or appeal.

The original film depicts an attempt on Charles de Gaulle's life in the early 1960's. Especially from the standpoint of 2011, much of the tension generated by the story lies in the cumbersome and primitive information and communication technology of fifty years ago. Technology with which I grew up and was quite familiar. Rotary phones (if you were in a hurry, I remember how long it took for the dial to circle back around for each number), tape recorders, typewriters, records full of paper in stacks of folders, no faxes*. No computers, no internet, no cell phones, no smart chips, no databases. One whole section of the movie requiring a phalanx of white male police detectives in white shirts and ties and cigarettes, working over days, would now be covered by a thirty-second clip of an single vegan Asian woman in leotards working at a keyboard, with a huge wall-sized screen and hookups to all the centers of the action. It really is astonishing how we become defined by our technology...(he says as he blogs.)

The mere three decades between the Cold War world of 1963 and the post Soviet (but still pre 9/11) world of 1996 belies the massive social change as well. (The watershed year 1968, however, was just a short while later.) Jackal I asks for $500K for his career-ending work, for Jackal II, $70 million. Shot in England, France and Italy, Day of the Jackal is full of...actual English, French and Italians. 99% White. The government, military and the police are entirely male. People at airports are all dressed up. France and Italy have borders, with guards. The constant cigarette smoking** and the drinking of hard liquor --things which are now, if I am not mistaken, practically illegal to show on screen-- likewise indicate how much life has changed in one lifetime. In Jackal, we have major characters who are female or Black or Russian, the enemy is the Russian mafia and the good-guy terrorists are IRA and ETA.

I recommend Day of the Jackal. An excellent thriller in every way.

*And even faxes are fading away, I think, in favor of printing a pdf file direct from your computer screen. Nowadays I arrive at the airport dressed very casually, partly because of the Muslim-inspired security procedures. And I already have my boarding pass with me, printed at home. The crowding of the planes is the downside of the fact that air travel is now much cheaper. And I can make all the arrangements from my laptop, without a travel agent --remember those?

**I once worked with a local gay man who was ashamed of his smoking habit. I remarked what a strange world we lived in, that a man who had sex with other men could be open and public about it with little concern, but had to hide his cigarettes for fear of moral censure. Puritanism does not disappear; it simply migrates.

My Ivy League education

2012-01-03T17:22:00.000-08:00

did teach me one thing: the difference between disproving and disapproving. One of my philosophy profs pointed out that in argument, most humans' use of language is not really different from apes grunting in approval or disapproval. No content, only reaction.

I have discovered that conversations, and especially arguments, are very often not about what they are apparently supposed to be about.

I had a confrere in the Dominicans who was quite self-satisfied and haughty but really pretty dumb --he was a laybrother who was taking advantage of the postVatican II egalitarian fad to get educated.
I used to take delectatio morosa in trying to get him to enunciate an idea rather than just emote with words. Practically impossible. He'd come back from a movie and say it was good. "What was good about it?" "I liked it. It was enjoyable." "What particularly made in enjoyable?" "It was good." And so on.

It was not until his brother came on a visit, however, that I realized that I had misjudged and underestimated the man. Compared to his Neanderthal sibling, he was an evolutionary leap, a wonder of nature.

But I digress.

It is common as air to read commentors supposedly take down their interlocutors' opinions by saying, "That's racist" or "You're an anti-Semite" or "bigoted" or "discriminatory" or "hateful" or "insulting" or "offensive". Et cetera. But none of that is an argument. None of it touches on the truth or falsity of the proposition, factually or logically. It's just ape-talk, grunting.

A truth of wide application

2012-01-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

2500

2012-01-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

Since I started this blog in late 2006, I have posted 2500 times. (Sounds like a confession.) When I began it, I wondered if I would be able to keep at it for very long. Now it's five years later.

Since Blogger began keeping stats on the site just over two and a half years ago, Ex Cathedra has has over 144,000 hits. And my monthly peak in December 2011, over 12K, was the highest ever. What that means I have no idea, since a target composed of 2500 postings is pretty easy to hit.

I doubt very much that I have had anything genuinely creative to say. One of the purposes of this site is for me to blow off the steam that most of my friends, liberals, don't want to hear. (I can't really blame them; I don't want to hear their liberal stuff, either.) Most of my ideas about politics, sex and religion have remained stable for the last five years or so, except that they are probably more irascible. My combination of identity, interests and opinions --a happily man-loving man of right wing attitudes--is not too common, though. So, even if unsavory, I might be thought of as unusual.

Just a face in a crowd

2012-01-02T18:32:00.000-08:00

A screen cap from a video of crowds in Rome at Christmas. Striking fella.

Words on parade

2012-01-01T14:14:00.000-08:00

However noble the military calling, plenty of evidence exists that boredom and incompetence are as rife as ever. I believe that the word Snafu (Situation normal, all fucked up) was an invention of soldiers. Another exhibit, this list of current Air Force slang expressions. Even though these people are not as smart as John Kerry, the vocabulary is both apt and imaginative. Many are applicable to civilian life for sure:

BLAMESTORMING - Sitting around discussing why a mission failed and who was responsible.

SEAGULL COLONEL - A colonel who swoops in, makes a lot of noise, and dumps stuff all over everything.

SALMON DAY - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

ASSMOSIS - The process by which some people seem to absorb success and promotability by kissing up to the commander.

ADMINISPHERE - The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the wing level. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are generally profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking the boss . . . he's 404, man."

GENERICA - Features of the Air Force landscape that are exactly the same no matter which base one is at, such as Burger King, Robin Hood, the BX, and AMC terminal. Used as in "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what base we were at."

OHNOSECOND - That minuscule fraction of time after hitting the "enter" key or clicking "ok" in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

For the times, they are un-changing

2012-01-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

"At New Year, an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of...calendars."

Two professors, of astrophysics and applied economics respectively, have proposed a new and rational calendar. You'd never really have to buy a calendar each year because every 364-day year would essentially be the same, repeating over and over...at least until Dec 21, 2012 when the world will end, according to the Mayan calendar. It's more efficient for business and banking, they say, as well as making scheduling easier.

Retaining the sevenday week, --an absolute requirement for Christians, Jews and Muslims-- they come up with four quarters of three months each, with 30, 30, then 31 days. Each date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas always on Sunday, Memorial Day always on May 28th, 4th of July always on Wednesday, etc. Your birthday would always fall on the same day of the week.

Since Mother Nature is not as rational as professors like to be, instead of our current quadrennial Leap Year, with its one extra February day, every five or six years (they have a list) there would be an extra week added after December, to bring the days back into alignment with the solar seasons. In those Hop Skip Jump Years, there'd be 53 weeks and 371 days.

There was a time in my life when my rational nature --I do have one--, my desire for order and my obsessive-compulsive streak would have made me very much in favor of such a project. It's impressive, but my first reaction now to this plan ---partly because it does seem so do-able--- is "No!". It is not out of loyalty to Pope Gregory* but for the same reason that I want to keep the 12 hour clock, the dollar and the English measuring system. Because anything which smacks of further rationalizing and regimenting uniformity on a global basis wipes out locality, plurality, definition, tradition and familiarity. Even the complexities of the current calendar feel somehow more human than the professorial time machine.

The professors then propose an even more destabilizing change: the abolition of time zones, so that everyone on earth would follow Greenwich Mean Time...now neutered and de-Eurocentricized by calling it Universal Time. This means that everywhere on earth right now, as I write, it would be 6.22 pm or 18.22. But in San Francisco, it's 10.22 in the morning. For these two guys, the business benefits would outweigh the unbelievable strangeness of people in England having a Nine to Five working day, but in San Francisco it would be a Two to Ten day? This would disconnect clock time from any relationship at all to the light/dark flow of morning, noon and night. Seems nuts. Next we'd have the Star Date numbering system from Star Trek?

China already has one official time zone for the whole country. I am told, however, that people keep a second clock so they know what time it really is!

*Although now that I think of it, it's quite a comedown to have your calendar no longer euphonically and nobly named after a Roman Caesar (Julian) or a Pope (Gregorian) but two Baltimorian academics: the Hanke-Henrician?

Chilling blasts from the past

2011-12-31T14:42:00.000-08:00

In the last week, two cyber-brushes with my churchly past left me feeling anxious and claustrophobic.

One was in a comment exchange with a Catholic guy who participates in the Courage program, a 12-step model for keeping Catholic homosexuals celibate. As XCath readers know, I am pretty clear that the RC teaching on sex, once you accept its assumptions, is pretty clear and pretty consistent. I can sorta understand gays who continue in the Church and just quietly ignore their dissonance with this issue; after all being Catholic --as my continued interest shows-- often feels genetic. But the idea of choosing to sit in a room with other homos and accepting the judgment that our capacity for full-on connection with other men is disordered and then trying pathetically to refrain...it makes me feel as if all the air has suddenly gone out of the room. I know there a few high profile "same-sex attracted" Catholic bloggers who seem energetic and ok with themselves, but they would not be me. Thinking of the whole Courage thing really makes me feel as if someone turned out all the lights and is trying to strangle my soul to death.

The second moment was coming upon a newsletter about my old Dominican priory. Though I loved the Order in a lot of ways, I can't say that I always enjoyed living with all the other friars. Some of them, even then, I found hardly tolerable. (And they returned the favor, by the way). Hearing about their current carryings-on, and especially a very laudatory piece about one of the very strangest of them...again, that claustrophobic feeling.

Like some people, some things are best appreciated from a discrete distance.

Alas

2011-12-31T13:21:00.000-08:00

it is January 31st and no one has yet wished me a Happy Kwanzaa.

Is it just because I'm a guy?

2011-12-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

Scene in a movie where a girl is taking off on her boyfriend, yelling, calling him contemptuous names, gesticulating up close, shouting, taking everything he says in his defense and turning it into an insult, all the while following him around the room as he attempts to move away from her...and when she corners him and he finally explodes and pushes her, she acts as if some incomprehensible evil has appeared out of nowhere and he is An Abuser of Women.

What the hell did she expect?

Glass houses

2011-12-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine loves to say, "People in glass houses gather no moss."

Don Cheadle --no favorite actor of mine-- will start in a TV drama, House of Lies, described thusly:

A subversive, scathing look at a self-loathing management consultant from a top-tier firm. Marty, a highly successful, cutthroat consultant is never above using any means (or anyone) necessary to get his clients the information they want.

Funny how people swallow the conceit of TV or movies showing "subversive" or "muckraking" ethical take-downs of amorality and greed. Last I heard, neither the TV corporations or the huge Hollywood corporations were paragons of Quaker righteousness. Nor are these noble actors working for peanuts. To say nothing of the media conglomerates who supposedly brave the risks of speaking truth to power. Capitalist corporations all, based on the pursuit of profit.

Nothing wrong with that. But the pretense. Gathers no moss.

Christmas' bloody aftermath

2011-12-29T14:38:00.000-08:00

Going by the Western liturgical calendar, after Christmas day we have a bunch of martyrs: Dec 26, St Stephen who died by stoning, Dec 28 The Holy Innocents killed by Herod's men, Dec 29 Thomas a Becket, killed by Henry II's men (a strange foreshadowing of Thomas More killed by Henry VIII's men). And in the old calendar, the Octave Day, January 1st, marked Jesus' own "first-blood", his circumcision.

Good will toward men indeed.

Am I a supremacist?

2011-12-29T13:53:00.000-08:00

My first shrink pointed out that I have a somewhat counterphobic personality. I only wish it were moreso; I'd be a lot more accomplished and happy. But it partly manifests itself in my attraction to things that are forbidden. So there's a transgressive vibe to it, as well. Although I give the impression of solidity and stability, there is a quirky restlessness in me that has proved to be a commanding theme in my biography. I would not have signed on for it. It has caused me a lot of trouble. But there it is.

I first noticed it when I was a young monk and was trained to meditate in the Jesuit style of imaginative narrative, considering Biblical images or stories and retelling them to myself, imagining myself in them, then making affirmations, etc. Dreadful stuff. I found that with my perfectionist streak --and bubbling terror over my eventually triumphant homo-sexuality-- being in the mental company of the twice-born kept me in a rather permanent state of anxiety and vulnerable to social control cues from my religious environment.

Then, at Columbia University, I read Jung's evangelical pseudo-biography (written by his adoring secretary Aniela Jaffe), Memories, Dreams, Reflections and discovered The Shadow. I consciously embarked on a subversive strategy (very post-Moderne) of listening for my "bloody-minded" thoughts instead: anger, fear, desire, grief, etc. The good stuff. I eventually became less anxiously aware of my own dark side, but without moral judgment being compulsive. "When Brother So and So opens his mouth and gives his stupid opinions, I'd like to strangle him and pee on his corpse" kinda stuff. Rather than being horrified at my sinfulness, I tried to remain curious. "Hmm. Interesting. How...human." Such a stance has helped to make me a decent therapist. My patients are almost always more terrified of their savage selves than I am. There are few outrages I cannot or have not imagined myself performing.

Most people don't think as much as react, in complexes. I certainly am driven by my own, both the known and the unknown, but I try to carve out a little bit of consciousness now and again. Although I sometimes wonder if what I think is consciousness is just a smarter complex that has duped me into believing I have gained some distance from it.

Anyhoo. So when someone, repeating the command of Jehovah not to eat of that one tree over there --and we know how that first attempt at crowd control turned out--, tells me I cannot think about or consider a point of view, I immediately become curious about it.

White supremacy. Well, what can be worse than that? The old reductio ad Hitlerum or, in a US context, ad Bull Connor and the Klan. For most people it is literally un-thinkable.

Some of my closest relationships are with "people of color". Black and Asian. Maybe one sorta Hispanic. Wonderful people whom I love or like. Jews, even! But this is not about individuals.

The truth is, I don't want to live in a world run by or dominated by their ethnic groups. I am perfectly content to live in a society with people of more than one race, ethnicity, religion, etc. That's all I've ever known. But I want my group to be in charge. If I had to choose, or could, I'd like to make sure that straight* White men of generally Christian backgrounds dominated the world I live in. Doesn't mean other folks --including homos-- could not live and be happy there. (Apparently, given our immigration patterns, they agree with me.) Just that they would not be in charge.

(I don't even want to live in a world without liberals! I just don't want them in charge.)

With few exceptions, for example, places dominated by Blacks are not places anyone else wants to be. Including a lot of Blacks. Hispanic countries, again with a few exceptions, seem to be in constant states of unrest and conflict. Asian countries can be very good at creating prosperity and stability, but not so great for liberty. The impact of voting women has, over the long term, only helped the Nanny state become even more of a suffocating Mommy, including culturally: would our current Western obsession with health and safety, and its accompanying stifle of regulation, be likely without the support of women? I remain of the opinion that places created and dominated by straight White men --for all their faults and exceptions-- are by comparison with the rest of the world, the best places for prosperity AND stability AND freedom ---all three-- for people of all kinds**.

Is that a "bloody-minded" thought? Does that make me a "white supremacist?"

*Straight I am not, of course, so I am not looking for absolute mirroring. And the performance of homos in groups is not, over the long haul, inspiring.

**Within limits, obviously. Every state has the right to regulate immigration based on its own best interests. It is not a "human right" live to wherever you want.

Two thoughts with coffee

2011-12-29T10:21:00.000-08:00

First. In the liberal mind, poverty is always the result of injustice. Those who have less have less only because those who have more --usually only non-Democrats-- have more. It is an astonishing idea. But it always makes "poverty" an issue of class struggle. And it pathologizes success (for non-Democrats).

In a "just world", a utopian fantasy which liberals refer to shockingly often --and I include anocranial Catholic "social justice*" doctrine-- there would be no poverty. On another planet and among another species. Angels, maybe?

But then, as anyone knows who cares to investigate, "poverty" is an utterly elastic word, far more useful as a rhetorical device than as a description of condition.

Second, one of the most overweening and symbolically tyrannical acts of the American government is the Americans With Disabilities Act.For a tiny minority of the population, the Federal government has required massive spending by private concerns and on private property. It was preceded by the Civil Rights Act and all the subsequent anti-discrimination laws, the jaw-dropping overreach of Kelo, and its progeny continues with Obamacare Individual Mandate.

*I like smart-mouthed Kathy Shaidle's definition of social justice as "the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems."

Light and structure

2011-12-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Beautifully simple and dignified, no?Classical New England.

First Congregational Church, Bennington, Vermont

Ironically, this reminds me of my old liturgy professor, the leonine Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann. Sometimes, he said, he longed for the simplicity of Protestantism, with its sheer white imageless walls and clear glass, its stark and powerful central pulpit, preacher in black gown, and orderly clean congregations listening to The Word of John Calvin's God. But then, he would say, he knew that before long, he would grow "homesick for the flesh-pots* of Orthodoxy, the extravagance, the scheming, the feuds, the obsessions."

*Exodus 16.3

I have nothing to add

2011-12-28T20:31:00.000-08:00

except to note that the Mr. McCree of the story has a page on my blog and it is by far the most popular.

PS. I lied. I do have something to add. Whatever happened to LGBT solidarity? The transgendered contingent is supposed to be supported with unwavering solidarity, but some homo guy also likes a woman and he's a traitor? LGBT, the sexual Yugoslavia, and just as stable.

Elementary Watson

2011-12-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

Never was a fan of Jude Law. When he was young, there was something dissolute and Dorian Grayish about him. He did nothing for me. But in the two Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films, I quite like him. Interesting vibe between Sherlock and Watson in these films, a homosocial passion and friendship. A lot of the energy of the plots comes from Sherlock's jealousy about Watson's fiance. And they are fare more equal, this classic pairing of hero and sidekick. As with Leonardo di Caprio, Law is older and grown up and projects some gravitas. The 'stache, stubble and sideburns don't hurt, either. Plus, I do have a thing for the way men dressed in late Victorian and Edwardian times: the coat, vest and cap thing...Anyway, this Dr. Watson is pretty good.

One of the things I like

2011-12-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

about my friend Bill --he's the guy with the male wolfdog named Molly, not "B"-- is that he is so full of contradictions that he makes mine seem congruent.

He's the "Christian nihilist" who is both tenderhearted, passionately (overly so IMHO) concerned about the suffering of innocents, but convinced that the world is without meaning. He weeps over "O Holy Night" and lavishes care on his friends --me included--, but thinks God is guilty of moral monstrosity and that the human race is worth less than a dog.

By comparison, my few odd combinations of, shall we say, paradox appear like sweet reasonableness.

If "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", then his and mine are large minds indeed.

Speaking of B, we've had some very convivial times over these holidays. A most likeable fella. Life is passing strange.

One of many

2011-12-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

left-loving hypocrites. This one in a collar. (But CofE, so who's surprised?)

And this one in a dress. Maybe she and the oft-vacationing Michelle Antoinette can meet for drinks and a healthy lunch.

Dear God

2011-12-27T12:49:00.000-08:00

When will it stop?

Ancient images

2011-12-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Christmas, especially as I grow older, is made inevitably of memories.

Although this shot is from 1910 or so, when my family moved to this parish, St Boniface, Elmont, after the War, it looked exactly the same: convent, church, rectory.

And this image of the sanctuary, also from early last century, is very much as I remember it. The carved Gothic altar and reredos rising up like some divine castle. All the painted statues: the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mother, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, St. Marie Cabrini, the Infant of Prague, St Joseph, St Anthony of Padua...and later, a large smooth Pieta right by the communion rail. Increasing wealth, by my time, had paid for a ceiling mural: bishop St Boniface, with an ax in his hand, standing on the felled sacred oak of the Norse god Thor. Like so many things from childhood, it seemed far larger and more grand than it now appears to have been.

I was an altar boy here and learned the old Latin Mass, choreography, music and responses. I was in the fourth grade, probably 8 or 9. Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis...and the complex case ending changes in the Confiteor: ...beatae Marie semper Virgini, beato Michaeli archangelo, beato Ioanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, then with a change of verb, beatam Mariam semper Virginem, beatum Michaelem archangelum, beatum Ioannem Baptistam, sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum...I remember the smell of the sweet red wine and the incense and the beeswax of the candles, the creak of the priest's shoes on the altar steps, the muttered sacred words, the complex gestures of hand and head...Masses read low and sung solemn high, funerals, weddings, Benediction.

In the old Mass, the priest usually consecrated just one host, the large one that he would consume. For the communion of the faithful, he would open the tabernacle. That was something, if you were up close. It was covered with an embroidered silk veil, like the Temple, and with carved bronze double doors with a key, and when it opened, there was a second veil, all white, and the insides were bright burnished bronze. There were kept the ciboria, the "vessels for food", plated with gold and holding the impossibly light and white communion wafers, already consecrated. When I was a kid, I used to think that they were created ex nihilo by God inside the tabernacle like manna and that the priest would reach in to retrieve them for us. It was a magical world. And it was absolutely real to me.

It was in that church one muggy Sunday that, because of an overflow crowd, I had to sit upstairs in the choir loft and found myself in the midst of Mozart's Ave Verum. I thought my heart would leap out of my body. I never forgot that feeling.

Duh

2011-12-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

The local parish church in the Castro, Most Holy Redeemer, is for grays and gays, lots of homosexuals and the remaining local old folks* celebrating "God's inclusive love". A rave review on Yelp enthused:

Finally! After a year and a half of (admittedly half-hearted) combing through the city to find catholic services that touch my soul, I found it at Most Holy Redeemer Church this past Sunday.

The music inspired me, with two notable solos, one by a heavily tattooed man who sang Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah**." The whole congregation joins the choir with gusto, and the result is uplifting.

Amazingly, a succession of local bishops (including one who is now cardinal and Papa Ratzinger's successor as head of the Holy Office) have mostly let the place be. But once in a while the boyz overstep the line and get smacked. And then whine, as if shocked and surprised. But it seems to have the quality of a well-practiced dance.

They used to have the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a thoroughly and offensively anti-Christian group of cross-dressing adolescent drama queens, run a bingo game in their basement. One of them even got the surprised bishop to give him/her communion. Then that was over. And they recently invited three prominent Protestant gay clergy to speak at their Advent Vespers series. The bishop said no. Big surprise. One of them felt "disrespected."

I suppose that it is really a judgment of prudence, but one that seems stunningly obvious to me, that the Catholic Church cannot and therefore will not say OK to same-sexuality. As I have said before, if you make that kind of exception to the Natural Law Sexual Axiom, then the whole edifice of its sexual ethics comes tumbling down. How likely is that? Especially given the repercussions in relations with the Eastern Christian world --which Western liberals don't even think about but which Rome thinks about a lot-- and its effect in the Third World, where those patriarchal cultures have no sympathy for fagginess, and on mission work in competition with Muslims, who could then proclaim that the Catholics are in favor of ass-fucking. Both on the level of theological theory and ecclesiastical survival, "Gay is OK" is a non-starter.

The Catholics are also not gonna ordain females to the priesthood. Or have the Pope elected by lay people. Or open up the Latin rite priesthood to married guys. The groovy days of "the spirit of the Council" are gone. At least in the real world.

Aside from their, to me, pointless posturing about this dead-end issue, they do a lot of good things, practical things. And the ringing of the bells is a nice traditional sound. I have not been inside the place for many years, although when I was waiting for my liturgist friend B from Canada after services several weeks ago, you could hear the music on the street and it sounded very good. They are that Catholic rarity, a congregation who actually sings. Maybe they think of the music of the Mass as a set of show tunes.

_______________

*I was tempted to make a crack about it being a congregation of old women of all ages and genders, but since this is Christmas, I paraleptically forbore.

**I received an Italian Christmas e-card with the chorus from this song as its background. As the culturally-alert sender noted, the lyrics seem otherwise distinctly unXmasish.

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Good King Wenceslaus

2011-12-26T10:11:00.000-08:00

looked down, on the feast of Stephen.

St. Stephen, that is, deacon and the first Christian martyr, whose feast is the day after Christmas. He died by stoning. St Paul --before his conversion and change of name from Saul-- watched the clothes of the stoners. The story here.

When someone threatens to burn a Quran, the world is in an uproar. But when Muslims in Pakistan --and elsewhere--burn Christians...not so much

Christmas 2011

2011-12-25T07:53:00.000-08:00

The old religion

2011-12-24T13:34:00.000-08:00

A tableaux vivant of the Nativity in SF's Italian North Beach section last night. Artfully fuzzy foto credit to RCI.

Peregrinus expectavi

2011-12-24T11:23:00.000-08:00

...pedes meos in cymbalis.

Blond extra-terrestrial Sally Solomon on 3rd Rock From The Sun (great comedy show) shares her disappointment at the darker side of experiencing Christmas* on Planet Earth:

Humans! How can they take something like shopping, something so pure and natural and good, and turn it into something so ugly?

In what seems to be turning into an annual event, our resident peasant underclass in action. Aside from being grossly overweight, our homegrown barbarians can afford $200 sneakers. America. Ya gotta love it.

* The series is from 1997 and so it was still acceptable to celebrate Christmas...

A Christmas miracle

2011-12-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

A Catholic professor of "social doctrine" who, briefly, does not sound like an anocranial moron:

ZENIT: In your book you describe a certain antagonism between "multiculturalism" and "political correctness" that may seem counterintuitive. What is going on in these cultural trends?

Father Williams: Though the worldview underlying both multiculturalism and political correctness may be basically the same -- a postmodern form of secular humanism -- the trends themselves express an age-old problem regarding unity and diversity.

Multiculturalism, along with its sisters "pluralism" and the "celebration of diversity," is a centrifugal movement away from uniformity and toward the greatest possible diversity, often for its own sake. Cultural differences are valued just because they are different, and people are encouraged to accept and embrace these differences in an open and nonjudgmental way. One lifestyle is considered as good as any other, and to think otherwise is "intolerant."

On the other hand, we can also observe the contrary trend, that of political correctness, which exerts a centripetal pressure toward uniformity of speech and values, and seeks to limit the actions of those who think differently. Here certain standards are held to be universally binding, and those who step outside these bounds are held accountable.

An exaggerated emphasis on diversity easily falls into moral and cultural relativism, where right and wrong lose their meaning and any action or belief is considered equally good and valid. An exaggerated stress on unity yields the opposite problem: a cultural dictatorship where citizens are obliged to walk in lockstep with the reigning set of social mores, whether they embrace them or not.
In the end, for all of us the important question becomes: Where should we necessarily be united as a society and where should we allow for, and even encourage, diversity? This is particularly significant in organizing our modern western democracies, since at some point we must define what is non-negotiable for the survival and flourishing of our society, and what should be left to the free exercise and decision of individuals and groups.

He does point out the contradiction between the surface celebration of multicultural diversity and the underlying drive to uniformity of thought and speech. People of all races and colors thinking exactly the same programmed and approved thoughts. Cultural relativism winds up creating secular humanist dogmatism.

I saw Nunny kissing E--lvis.

2011-12-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

HT to a Presley who is not Elvis and not a nun for this story about Elvis and a nun.

I went to Mass there many years ago. They were going through a lot of strange fads then--driven, unsurprisingly (!), by their Jesuit chaplain-- but Rome eventually intervened and they seem to have calmed down and returned to being staid old Benedictine nuns, carrying on pretty much as the monasteries of St Benedict have for the last 1500 years. Except for kissing Elvis.

Reading this almost ruined my afternoon

2011-12-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

VDH continues to chronicle the demise of his California homeland at the hands of alien thugs and thieves, with the gelded government as an accomplice.

There is, of course, a vague code of silence about who is doing the stealing...In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans — ... Everyone knows it; everyone keeps quiet about it...

Was it Toynbee who said that civilizations usually die by suicide?

Conviction

2011-12-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

After reading one of the continuing melt-downs at PrayTell over the new English translation of the Mass, it dawned on me that the histrionic priest-commentor was someone who as much as admitted that, were it not for inertia, he'd be an Episcopalian. So the doctrinal differences between Rome and Canterbury, to say nothing of the dogmatic agnosticism of the US Episcopals, mean far less to him than the syntax of a prayer. As a local friend recently said, "inane content, but excellent style."

Multiculturalism explained

2011-12-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

Liberal ghosts

2011-12-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Kathy Shaidle, whose ill humor makes me seem like Will Rodgers, I ran across an article about the problems facing Canadian educators in dealing with a new crop of immigrants: Gypsies. It is now PC to call them "the Roma people", but they're Gypsies. The article is written in excruciatingly PC style and content. And it is bullshit.

Are there any indications that the Gypsy/Roma are much different today than they were fifty or a hundred years ago? No sedentary civilization has been able to assimilate them and their neighbors uniformly loathe them. All the hand-wringing and PC hectoring comes down to two things: a blind belief on the part of liberals that everyone is, at heart, like them and yet, that (certain select) people who are not like them must be properly assessed and placed in the victim/oppressor paradigm, accommodated, and alternately celebrated and sympathized with.

This twinned paradox is at the heart of liberalism's moral disarmament in the face of anyone it considers "underprivileged" : a combination of narcissism and self-hatred. As Burnham pointed out, the liberal faith allows people who are in the process of deteriorating to believe that they are doing it out of higher ethical motives.

One of the things I hated most about liberalism was its requirement that I deny what was in front of my face when it suited the agenda. On the one hand I was required to believe that "our schools were failing our (sic) African-American youth" when in fact it is their own cultural decay which makes many of them uneducable. However, no such blinders were required when assessing the various social pathologies of Redneck Whites, and no such sympathetic effluvium was forthcoming. Much to the contrary. Eventually I began to see that the liberal worldview was riddled with such lies and in the end that it was founded on them.

In the meantime, the Gypsies, as they always have, will waste civilized people's time and use up civilized people's treasure, some of which they will destroy or steal.

A note on language. I have said this before, but it bears repeating. One of the very successful means by which the cultural Marxists have continued their Gramscian march is by regulating our language and thereby regulating our thinking and feeling. When we are told by our elites that all our words for "the oppressed and marginalized" must be replaced by new and correct words, the implied and powerful meta-message is that everything in the Old Dispensation was wrong, mistaken, self-serving, insensitive, and evil. In essence, prior to the last 50 years or even less, the Western world was one vast factory of error, bigotry and oppression. The result is to make educated Westerners ashamed of their own culture and ripe for the lies of multiculturalism, feminism, and all the other interlocking diseases of the liberal project.

Camp of the Saints

2011-12-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

If you thinking the Vatican city-state (pop. 800) doesn't have a problem with illegal immigration, you're right.

So I'm thinking that the Pope should share the burden --for the sake of the "justice and peace and the dignity of the human person" we hear so much about-- and we should have a coupla thousand illegals move into the Vatican and set up tents and portopotties and campfires in the gardens. Lotsa room back there.

Africans... and a lot of Muslims. And then make sure there are "adequate means for the redistribution of wealth" that His Holiness called for the other day.

What a shining example it would be.

Delectatio morosa.

Equivalication

2011-12-20T10:49:00.000-08:00

Is there anything so mind-numbingly narcoleptically, robotically, predictable and boring, a complete waste of a good education, as a liberal Jesuit stuck in the 60's? Oh, right, an American nun of any order stuck in the 60's.

Tiz a puzzlement

2011-12-19T18:26:00.000-08:00

A documentary on gay bars in small towns in the South. The surrounding Bible Belt culture is not friendly, of course, making homo life claustrophobic and sometimes dangerous. But damn, the drag queens. All over the place. Inescapeable.

Aside from the obvious problem, you know what strikes me about drag queens? Utter lack of originality, like some freakish verbal-visual loop of histrionics and sadism played over and over and over. You meet one, you met 'em all. Boring as shit.

Aliens in high places

2011-12-19T10:51:00.000-08:00

The despicable Eric Holder's wallet tells us what is already evident in his actions, that he is indeed the Black Attorney General. Wasn't Reconstruction supposed to be over?

Free(k) market

2011-12-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

From the San Francisco Chronicle's selection of past stories for the day.

1911

Dec. 20: Police Sergeant O'Keefe has been called on to crack some pretty hard chestnuts but none like that he faced yesterday when a young woman walked into the police bureau at the Ferry Building and abruptly inquired: "Where can I buy a baby?" The enquirer was Mrs. H.A. James, who explained that she thought she could not present her hubby with a more appropriate Christmas gift than a bouncing baby boy and she further declared she wanted to buy, borrow or adopt a little one with blue eyes. Mrs. James was directed to the San Francisco Nursery for Homeless Children and she departed eagerly to look over the waifs and select one to bring her husband Christmas joy.

I'll bet she got a baby more easily than you can get a dog now.

HT to faithful Quranicle reader B.

Running

2011-12-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

Marathon is a film about poet laureate William Meredith and his partner Richard Harteis, also a poet, but almost three decades his junior. After seventeen years together, Meredith suffered a devastating stroke. With help from some friends and family, and opposition and interference from others, Harteis dedicated himself to the long and exhausting task of Meredith's rehabilitation and care. They continued together for another sixteen years --Meredith wrote again, gaining even wider recognition--until he died at age 88.

Poems are hard to read
Pictures are hard to see
Music is hard to hear
And people are hard to love

But whether from brute need
Or divine energy
At last mind eye and ear
And the great sloth heart will move.

I often say that it's rare to find characters in gay movies who are either likeable or worthy of respect. Meredith is an introvert, upbeat but shy. Harteis --who still writes-- is no saint, but worthy of great, great respect. The acting is not notable, nor is the direction nor the script, nor the music especially. But the moving story is about love and honor and fidelity. Going the distance. One with the other. Both with each other.

The two oaks lean apart for light.
They aren't as strong as lone oaks
but in a wind they give each other lee.

Daily since I cleared them I can see
them, tempting to chain saw and ax—
two hardwoods, leaning like that for light.

...bandaged comrades, lending each other lee.
...yoked in this yoke:
two men, leaning apart for light,
but in a wind who give each other lee.

Separated at birth

2011-12-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

Clint Eastwood & Hugh Jackman

Great nooz!

2011-12-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

Federal Judge: Enough With the Stupid Names
March 2, 2008 · 234 Comments

By Bill Matthews

After Judge Cabrera’s historic ruling, little Clitoria Jackson will likely undergo a name change.

(DETROIT) In a decision that's expected to send shockwaves through the African-American community, and yet, give much relief to teachers everywhere - a federal judge ruled today that black women no longer have independent naming rights for their children. Too many black children and many adults bear names that border on not even being words, he said.

"I am simply tired of these ridiculous names black women are giving their children," said U.S. Federal Judge Ryan Cabrera before rendering his decision. "Someone had to put a stop to it."

The rule applies to all black women, but Cabrera singled out impoverished mothers.

"They are the worst perpetrators" he said. "They put in apostrophes where none are needed. They think a 'Q' is a must. There was a time when Shaniqua and Tawanda were names you dreaded. Now, if you're a black girl, you hope you get a name as sensible as one of those.

Few stepped forward to defend black women—and black women themselves seemed relieved.

“It’s so hard to keep coming up with something unique,” said Uneeqqi Jenkins, 22, an African-American mother of seven who survives on public assistance. Her children are named Daryl, Q’Antity, Uhlleejsha, Cray-Ig, Fellisittee, Tay’Sh’awn and Day’Shawndra.

Beginning in one week, at least three white people must agree with the name before a black mother can name her child.

“Hopefully we can see a lot more black children with sensible names like Jake and Connor,” Cabrera said.

His ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by a 13-year-old girl whose mother created her name using Incan hieroglyphics.

“She said it would make me stand out,” said the girl, whose name can’t be reproduced by The Peoples News’ technology. “But it’s really just stupid.”

The National Association of Elementary School Teachers celebrated Cabrera’s decision.

“Oh my God, the first day of school you’d be standing there sweating, looking at the list of names wondering ‘How do I pronounce Q’J’Q’Sha.’?” said Joyce Harmon, NAEST spokeswoman. “Is this even English?”

The practice of giving black children outlandish names began in the 1960s, when blacks were getting in touch with their African roots, said historian Corlione Vest. But even he admits it got out of hand.

“I have a niece who’s six. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t even pronounce her name,” said Vest, a professor at Princeton University. “Whenever I want to talk to her, I just wait until she looks at me and then I wave her over.”

ROTFLMAO. Read a story about some kid named Marcos going to a year's in juvie for using a box cutter to slash the throat of Tyquane Parker-Greene, who bullied him. I googled "fake black names" and this story came up. One of the commentors expressed her outrage at this racist story. (In fact, qite a few of them failed utterly to see the satire for what it was....Diagnostic?) The following commentor wrote to her, "Here's your crown, Queen Stupid." I'm still laughing.

Who could say no to him?

2011-12-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

"You want some money and the keys to the car? Sure. Here ya go."

From the ghetto to the ashram

2011-12-17T13:42:00.001-08:00

The evils of globalization and modern technology:

A snarky aside

2011-12-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

If the Catholic Church has decided that it cannot provide special Masses, etc. for homosexuals, lest it condone their immoral behavior, why does it provide them for massive numbers of criminals who are in continuing violation of the law?

VDH on illegal immigration

2011-12-16T11:40:00.000-08:00

Something the traitorous American Catholic bishops and the legions of bleeding-heart nuns should read, even if they miss ExCathedra's POV.

I lived for many years --and became a citizen of-- a bilingual country, Canada. What an incredible waste of time, energy, effort and money on the whole French/English game. Were it not for the fact that doing so would split the Maritime Provinces from the rest of the country, it would have been better for everyone to let Quebec go.

I have noticed a trend --anecdotal impressions only-- that when liberal Americans despair of the homeland, as during the Bush years, their impulse is to leave. I supposed part of that is the large number of Western places that are more decayed, uh, I mean liberalized, than we are: nearby Canada or EuroDisneyland. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend either to look for places within America where they can be more left alone --Wyoming or Idaho-- or they imagine the break up of the country so that people who are essentially in a cold civil war can part ways and leave each other in peace.

NYT solves Biblical mystery!

2011-12-15T20:15:00.000-08:00

The authorship of the New Testament's Epistle to the Hebrews has long been a mystery. Beyond the obvious fact, from its content, that it was written by a Hebrew, it was hard to attribute securely. Now the NYT has solved it. Who said the Grey Lady was doomed?

Buried within a biobituary piece we discover that Hebrews' oft-quoted phrase (referencing Abraham's mysterious visitors in Genesis 18) in 13.2

Continue to offer hospitality to strangers,
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares

was actually written by William Butler Yeats! Who knew that Yeats was a Jew? To say nothing of, a time traveller.

HT to GetReligion, which follows the Fourth Estate's constant and invincible ignorance about religion.

Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev's 15th century version of the Hospitality of Abraham,
allegorized by Christians into a revelation of the Holy Trinity.
I have a copy of it in my entrance hallway.

While I'm at it. Two liberal religious memes that irk me: that Christianity "stole" the Old Testament from the Jews and that it is "anti-Semitic" to read the Old Testaments --or even to call it that-- as prefiguring Christ. Christianity began as an utterly Jewish project. The New Testament was written by Jews (with the possible exception of St Luke) . Hebrews is a classic example of one of them re-reading his Scriptures as a prefigurement. And as for the "stealing" part, I quote to this earlier post.

And while I'm at it, let me once more smack the highminded and uninformed who accuse Christianity of "appropriating" the Hebrew scriptures. The first Christians were all Jews and the Jewish scriptures were imposed, if you want to be adolescent about it, on the first Gentile converts. Saint Paul's battle was to liberate Gentile converts from the burdens of accepting the whole Mosaic Law in order to accept Christ. They were all "Jews for Jesus." The first Church Council was about precisely this. That Council continued, in a way, Jesus' own freedom in re-interpreting a holy text while leaving the words on the sacred page. (Rabbi's are not untalented about this either!)

The only serious challenge to the Old-plus-New Testament Bible came from a second-century bishop, Marcion, who found the Jewish writings and their complicated God incompatible with his view of Jesus as purely good and benevolent. He not only rejected the whole Old Testament but reduced the New to St Paul's letters and a single Gospel, a shorter St Luke. It didn't fly.

But if Christianity had, like Islam, asserted its own holy book uniquely and rejected its predecessor, the world would be a quite different place, I think, and Christianity a very very different religion. Alternative history speculation to follow at some other time.

Shots in the dawn

2011-12-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

Some reactions to the morning's cybernews and bloggery:

Over at PrayTell, the whining and foot-stamping continues. Part of the shock amongst the liturgistas is that most Catholics adjust to the new lingo without a tantrum. Rather than seeing this as an indication that the PT folks have overreacted, they judge the PiP (People in the Pews) to be listless sheep, or victims so beaten down by evil patriarchal clergy that they lack any hope in their own power. God, it's silly. Some of the priests are going to the barricades and using the old translation and two regular commentors in particular continue to devolve. One is a woman named Sandi, whose only comments have ever been in the Che Guevara style, the so-called "prophetic" stance: full of bile and contempt and utterly unveiled wishes for death on the Catholic powers that be. The other is a pathetic ball-less male named Sean, who whines over and over: "It was the only Mass I have ever known and they took it from me. They took my Mass away from me." The owner of the blog is a Benedictine monk who has a big problem with the process of the translation as well as the outcome. Unfortunately, by letting voices like these remain unblocked, he let the whole thing come off as proof positive that Chicago Cardinal George was right back in 1997(!) that "liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project."

An award-winning American journalist-rabbi posted an editorial which feared that if Tim Tebow wins the Superbowl, the next things you'd see is hordes of evangelical Christians torching mosques, bashing gays and beating up immigrants. Some days, despite my counterbalancing instincts, my anti-Jewish nerve gets really provoked, making me think that Kevin MacDonald has a valid point. And it is precisely Jews like this who do it. It's people like Rabbi Hammerman who create the very anti-Jewish emotion that they fear and then wonder why people hate them. Usually it's secular Jews like Chomsky or Zinn or Alinsky. In this case the arrogant, offensive moron is religious. (Unless he's a Reform rabbi, in which case that's up for discussion.)

GK Chesterton said that "America is a nation with the soul of a church." (Sorry, Rabbi, if that bothers you.) The politicians sound like preachers and the preachers like politicians. I thought of it yesterday when passing on the street a member of a group I do not like. An ethnic group. It dawned on me that nowadays the religious function of exhorting people to benevolence has become the message of the government. It is now distinctly un-American, according to the hierarchy in cultural and legal power, to harbor suspicion or dislike of any ethnic or behavioral group...except, of course, white rednecks and Republican Christians or the 1% (outside Hollywood or the Democrat party elite). To mandate a default moral attitude of benevolence to strangers is not the role of the State. But in churchly America's liberal State religion, that has been the message of its bully pulpit. Extraordinary. Canuckistan PM Pierre Trudeau famously remarked that "the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." Even less, in our souls.

I don't like Rick Santorum. He's a prig. But in standing up to the traitorous American Catholic bishops about illegal immigration, he has my support.

None of the current crop of Republican contenders for 2012 is an unmixed bag, as you will learn both from the very busy Democrat-loving media and from intra-conservative debating. True enough. But compared to the feckless affirmative action poseur currently and so offensively in that role, any of them will do.

An un-first, it seems

2011-12-14T15:02:00.000-08:00

Apparently conservative Christian Touchstone's blog did not reject my comments on samesex marriage. I went back and found another post on the subject, with a gay man commenting quite vigorously in opposition to the editor. I tried again and my comment showed up. Musta been technical.

OBTW 3

2011-12-14T02:01:00.000-08:00

Inspector Lewis, of the Brit Masterpiece Mystery! series, always solves his crimes, of course, -it's in the script -but in every other way is a total asshole.

Fox vs The Rest

2011-12-13T23:34:00.000-08:00

CABLE NEWS RACE
VIEWERS NITE OF 12/12/11

FOXNEWS O'REILLY 3,271,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 2,168,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 2,030,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 1,440,000
9 million		52%

CMDY DAILY SHOW 1,642,000
CMDY COLBERT 1,281,000
3 million		17%

MSNBC SCHULTZ 877,000
MSNBC SHARPTON 830,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 797,000
MSNBC MADDOW 722,000
3.25 million		19%

CNNHN GRACE 696,000
CNN COOPER 634,000
CNN PIERS MORGAN 604,000
2 million		12%

John Kekes on a roll

2011-12-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

From a lecture to academics in 2004:

"I now ask you to consider the stifling of opinions on our campuses. When did you last hear of anyone defending fundamentalist Christianity or the superiority of Western civilization? Who has been allowed to express the opinion on our campuses that homosexuality is a perversion, that there exist racial differences in intelligence, that women’s place is in the home, that the Holocaust is a fiction, or that America is a force for the good in a corrupt world?

You may say that such opinions are justly stifled because their expression harms others. But if you thought that, you would be well-advised to think again. For if by harm you mean, narrowly, serious injury, such as murder, torture, or battery, then neither the opinions nor their expression harms others. And if by harm you mean, broadly, injury to the interest of the people affected, then you would have to be opposed to all laws and regulations which prohibit people from doing what they want or place burden on them that they do not wish to bear. You would, then, be committed to the absurdity of having to oppose laws about taxation, social security, immigration, and health care, since they injure the interests of those who are forced to pay for them. The truth of the matter is that the opinions stifled on our campuses run counter to a prevailing orthodoxy that abuses its power and prevents the expression of opinions it opposes.

This coercive stifling of opinion permeates daily life, not just our campuses. It is very hard to think of an area of life that is free of the exhortation of intrusive moralizing (bolding mine). We are told what food is right or wrong to eat; how we should treat our pets; what clothing to wear; how we should spend our after-tax income; how precisely we should phrase invitations for sex; what kind of bags we should carry our groceries in; when and where we are permitted to pray or smoke; what jokes we are allowed to tell; who should pick the fruit we buy at the supermarket; how we should invest our money; what chemicals we should use in our gardens; by what method of transportation we should go to work; how we should sort our garbage; what we ought to think about cross dressing, sex change operations, teenage sex, and pot smoking; we are forbidden to inquire after the age, marital status, drug use, or alcoholism of job applicants; we are liable to be accused of sexual abuse if we spank our children or hug our neighbor's; our 19 and 20-year olds are permitted to fight our wars, but they are not permitted to buy a beer; we are not supposed to say that people are crippled, stupid, mentally defective, fat, or ignorant; and we must not use words like "mankind," "statesman," or "He" when referring to God.

What makes this coercive moralizing even worse is the hypocritical double-talk by which it is presented. For the stifling of opinions is said to be required by toleration. Its defenders advocate toleration of discrimination in favor of minorities and women (but not against them); of obscenity that offends religious believers and patriots (but not African-Americans and Jews); of unions' spending large sums in support of political causes (but not corporations' doing the same); of pot smoking (but not cigarette smoking); of abortion (but not capital punishment); of the public lies of Clinton (but not of Nixon); of hate speech against fundamentalists (but not homosexuals); of sex education in elementary schools (but not prayer); of jobs open only to union members (but not private clubs open only to males); of lies about American imperialism (but not the Holocaust); of sacrilegious of language (but not of language that uses "he" to refer to all human beings); of scientific research into just about anything (except racial differences in intelligence); and so on and on.

We are awash in this ocean of hypocrisy, lies, and falsifications."

Puppies of the Lord

2011-12-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

This piece of drivel from the new Master of the Dominican Order.

Agitations and reports of civil unrest have made the news in recent months and continue to do so in several countries of the world. In one place, it is the determination to be freed from oppressive, authoritarian regimes. In another, there are groups who are questioning those systems, particularly economic systems, that seem to want to manage the world in spite of the inequality they establish between men and the serious anxieties they create, especially for the young. Here and there, often forgotten voices are making themselves heard, reminding us that the human being wants to be an actor in his own history, and aspires to freedom and justice. They are opening new horizons of hope for a habitable and sustainable world for all.

Same old "justice and peace" rhetoric, a thin baptizing of the leftEuro statist worldview, one of the worst effects of the 1960's Vatican Council. In typical pontifical fashion, he names no names but we all know what he means. He takes the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements to indicate some kind of abstract desire for agency, freedom and justice versus capitalism. The Arab Spring brings totalitarian Islam to power in place of generic Arab tyrants, and as for OWS, what a pathetic mess. The final insult: "They are opening new horizons of hope for a habitable and sustainable world for all." Oh, yeah. OWS is all about habitability in their dirty, dangerous, parasitical groups of tent-hovels, and the Arab Islamic tide is all about sustainability.

One of Karl Barth's worst pieces of advice was to tell preachers to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

Since I am an exOP, I can say, "Get your head out of your ass, Father Master."

Here it is in the original Frenchman's French, where, being in French, it sounds even more like the pompous BS it is:

Indignations et soulèvements populaires ont fait ces derniers mois et font encore l’actualité dans plusieurs pays du monde. Ici, c’est la détermination de s’affranchir de régimes autoritaires qui s’affirme. Là, ce sont des groupes qui mettent en cause certaines logiques, en particulier économiques, qui semblent vouloir gouverner le monde en dépit des écarts qu’elles creusent entre les hommes et des graves inquiétudes qu’elles engendrent, en particulier pour les plus jeunes. Ici et là, ce sont des voix trop souvent oubliées qui se font entendre, rappelant que l’être humain veut être acteur de sa propre histoire, et aspire à la liberté et à la justice. S’ouvrent ainsi de nouveaux horizons d’espérance pour un monde habitable et soutenable par tous.

Merde.

PS. This reminds me of an incident when I was in the Order. After enduring a couple of hours at a large conference of French-speaking friars arguing over the merits of different living arrangements, I suggested that we might try an experiment: set up a community on the lines discussed and then in three or four years, evaluate the experience. There was a kind of embarrassed silence and then the discussion continued. I wondered if my French were worse than I thought.

As the meeting finally adjourned --without a decision, btw-- one of the friars turned and said to me, "C'est charmant, le pragmatisme anglo-saxon." "Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, how charming."

Anyone who thinks that Americans are culturally arrogant has never met a European. I learned that day that for Frenchmen whose Order's motto was Veritas (Truth), Veritas had little to do with Realitas. And as the Master's note indicates, as we say en francais, "Ca continue."

PPS. I expressed my unhappiness at the blog of an OP with a conservative politics. His response:

The Master is no doubt speaking out of his own "'68 Experience." He's very much part and parcel of his generation of justice/peace Euro-Catholics, though I think he's probably more sensible than most. I haven't read the piece but keep in mind that the euro-media paints the Tea Party/GOP as only barely more tolerable than Nazis. So, he's likely springing off what most euros believe to be accurate portrayals of the OWS movement. I've found that even the most sensible euro OP's can't get their heads around anything other than left of center social democracy. American-style republican democracy with a healthy does of capitalism is beyond them.

Anyway, most younger friars read the Order's justice/peace stuff and then promptly ignore it...most of the J/P types in the Order studiously avoid pro-life issues so we generally think that their rallying cries for bottled water and recycling are hollow.