Flannery O'Connor Quotes


On the title of her book "The Violent Bear It Away":
"One thing I observe about the title is that the general reaction is to think that it has an Old Testament flavor. Even when they read the quotation, the fact that these are Christ's words makes no great impression. That this is the violence of love, of giving more than the law demands, of an asceticism like John the Baptist's, but in the face of which even John is less than the least in the kingdom - all this is overlooked. I am speaking of the verse apart from my book; in the book I fail to make the title's significance clear, but the title is the best thing about the book. I had never paid much attention to that verse either until I read that it was one of the Eastern fathers' favorite passages - St. Basil, I think. Those desert fathers interest me very much." 

On grace and nature:
"I have a much less romantic view of how the Holy Spirit operates than you. The sins of pride and selfishness and reluctance to wrestle with the Spirit are certainly mine but I have been working at them a long time and will be still doing it when I am on my deathbed. I believe that God's love for us is so great that He does not wait until we are purified to such a great extent before He allows us to receive Him. 

Grace, to the Catholic way of thinking, can and does use as its medium the imperfect, purely human, and even hypocritical. Cutting yourself off from Grace is a very decided matter, requiring a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul...In the Protestant view, I think Grace and nature don't have much to do with each other. The old lady [the one who would've been a good woman if she'd been shot every moment of her life], because of her hypocrisy and humanness and banality couldn't be a medium for Grace. In the sense I see things the other way, I'm a Catholic writer." 


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:52
 
November 19, 2003   


 
It's come to this...

The priests of our parish were recently required to atttend a training session entitled "Protecting God's Children", aimed, of course at stemming the Situation. Over the past two years, all the priests in our diocese have now been fingerprinted and undergone background checks. 

I understand that decades of ignoring clergy abuse have come to roost, but this seems sad. What I don't understand is why the clergy are different from, say, school teachers or breadmakers or shop keepers or politicians. Are they REALLY more likely to abuse? Why can't police do their job and clergy do theirs? Police ought to arrest, try and convict guilty priests just as you would arrest, try and convict school teachers guilty of gross crimes. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:04
 
 


 
God Bless Brian Lamb!

There's something refreshingly anachronistic about him. Uber-liberal Michael Moore was on Booknotes Sunday wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. Lamb asked, with a straight face, what the "B" stood for. 

Lamb fascinates because his life is a mystery; he's a blank slate in a world where everyone's a pundit (one wag said that America is becoming dumber, but more opinionated - not true of Brian Lamb). 

Even though he's a mystery, you can pick up clues. He appears to be interested in and have a respect for religion, but when he peppered Jeffrey Hart with questions as to why the Catholic Church wouldn't allow women priests, I surmised he isn't a Catholic. He asked Michael Moore for his take on religion, though he never offers his own. 

Single, never married, Lamb appears to have a great love for history and for details some might think minutiae. He seems to have a mild obession with De Tocqueville and obscure Presidents from the 19th century (sounds like a "Jeopardy" category - "obscure presidents from the 19th Century, Alex!"). 

I'm curious about his spiritual journey. My sense is that anyone who is interested in politics for a long time eventually becomes interested in religion (often rejecting it outright, but at least they think about it) because politics is the poor man's religion, a way to effect change on the temporal plane only. Religion, or lack thereof, is often the "first principle" upon which one's politics (e.g. view of social issues like abortion) is based, rather than the other way around. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 13:17
 
November 18, 2003   


 


via Alicia. Sign acquired here

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:08
 
 


 
Avoid the Stacks. That Way Madness Lies! Bwahahhahha...

Local writer Bill Eichenberger interviews Library of Congress chief James Hadley Billington (now doesn't that sound like the name of someone who's the head of the LOC?):

A passage in the novel Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe resonates with Billington: 

The protagonist, Eugene Gant, reads books "insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands. . . . The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.'' 

"Well,'' Billington said, "when you are presiding over a library with more than 126 million items in it, you don't even have the illusion of covering even a small section of it. 

"I did get a note of congratulations from a distinguished scholar when I got this job (in 1987), and he wrote: 'Avoid the stacks. That way madness lies.' '' 

Billington hasn't entered the stacks in 10 years, because the library closed them to browsing. He denied the rumor that mad scholars have been roaming the library's 530 miles of shelves for a decade living off bookworms and condensation on the pipes. 

Before Rome burned, Seneca, counselor to Nero, wrote, "It does not matter how many books you have, but how good they are.'' 

"Very true . . . up to a point,'' Billington said, "although, with a collection like ours, you don't want to apply too rigorous a standard to what's a good book and what isn't.''


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:33
 
 


 
Belloc to Chesterton to Lewis ...(or Tinkers to Evers to Chance)

Tom of Disputations has an interesting post discussing to what degree sharp sarcastic humor is acceptable for the Christian. 

Three famous apologists defended the faith with varying degrees of "sharpness": Hilaire Belloc was bellicose enough to make an enemy of atheist H.G. Wells; Chesterton warm enough to count Wells a good friend. In Joseph Pearce's biography of Belloc, Pearce makes a compelling case that Chesterton's conversion was brought about in part by Belloc. And C.S. Lewis has said that Chesterton's "Everlasting Man" was instrumental in his conversion. 

So we have Belloc - to - Chesterton -to- Lewis. Kinder and gentler was each succeeding one, to the point where Lewis, in an effort not to offend, suggested only mere Christianity was needed, while he himself believed in the Real Presence of the Eucharist and the doctrine of Purgatory (even though the latter was explicitly ruled out by his Anglican Church). 

The kindler/gentler trend is not limited to apologists. From Trent to Vatican II, the swing has been towards the pastoral and away from the sectarian. Is this bad? I think not. But one could say: the state of Christianity got worse during that period of time - how effective could the "kindler/gentler" approach be? But what we do not know is how badly things could be. Imagine a world without C.S. Lewis and we imagine how much worse things would be. But Lewis did depend on Chesterton and Chesterton on Belloc. So Belloc deserves respect. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 18:27
 
November 17, 2003   


 
Tracy Bird and Fr. Mastroeni's Moral Theology class 

I study popular culture, often while sipping one of the national products of Ireland. 

During a recent study period, I heard country singer Tracy Bird's latest, which suggests a linkage and repeating cycle between thought, word and action in a colorful way: 


The drinkin' bone is connected to the party bone
The party bone's connected to the stayin' out all night long
And she won't think it's funny
And I'll wind up all alone
And the lonely bone's connected to the drinkin' bone
Vaguely reminds me of Theresa's moral theo professor, as quoted here:
Sow a desire, reap a thought,
sow a thought, reap an action,
sow an action, reap a habit,
sow a habit, reap a character,
sow a character, reap a destiny.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:21
 
 


 
Next Sat: Ohio State vs Michigan

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:06
 
 


 
What would a "liberal" Pope look like? 

The hopes and dreams of the Garry Wills crowd is that the next pope will be liberal. But isn't a "liberal pope" an oxymoron? A pope's very job is to conserve - to conserve the deposit of faith. The development of doctrine comes about as a defense mechanism against heresies. Heresies tend to drive development; the pope doesn't go out freelancing. 

Obviously church disciplines can be tightened or loosened, and that might be what some mean by a 'liberal' pope. But acceptance of homosexuality as not sinful, for example, will never happen because then the Church would no longer be conserving the deposit of faith.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:26
 
 


 
Coming Home Network Comes to Columbus

Had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Fr. McCloskey, someone who's long fascinated me (although not enough to join Opus Dei). The substance of the talk was not meaty (his discussion of the dead faith of Europe and the rise of faith in Africa and Asia I've heard many times before), but the sugary anecdotes were tasty. There is a kind of hope when the rich and powerful - like recent convert Robert Bork - bow their heads in humility and accept the waters of baptism. 

Fr. McCloskey had just gotten the opportunity to go into the Oval Office and meet the President and First Lady and said that what doesn't come through the television is the sheer physical vitality of this man, surely one of the most fit 55-yr old officeholders in the country - with the possible exception of the new governor of California. He told GWB that he and his Catholic Information Center pray for him every day (walks by the White House every day and says the Memorare) to which Pres. Bush replied, "that's how I can be comfortable in this job". 

I also got to see Joseph Pearce, although I didn't speak to him. I have all his books already so I didn't buy anything for him to sign. Reminds me of when I was young and met Hall of Famer Joe Morgan. I thought authors just signed their names, so when I got to the front of the line and he asked me how he should preface it I said "To Tom". Lame, lame lame. Now I think of lines like, "to a fine ballplayer". :)

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:11
 
 


 
Strange Bedfellows

Even some secularists are down on pornography:


“Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:03
 
 


 
One of the most irritating things is to hear a secularist tell me to leave my religion outside the public square. A former OSU professor does this this, saying that basing laws on religious doctrine are "anti-democratic". First, we aren't a pure democracy (we've got courts to insure that) and second I don't see anything MORE democratic than voting based on your religious principles (or lack thereof). If Christianity in America becomes watered down to the point where gay marriage is acceptable, then it will happen. If not, then secularists should quit complaining and prostelyze their atheism rather than trying to silence theists in the public square. 

He writes that laws made for religious reasons aren't democratic because some folks are "out of the loop". Newsflash - there are many people of faith who are "out of the loop" when it comes to the revelation that religious convictions shouldn't influence law-making. I also appreciated the irony in his speaking for God in saying that He isn't allowed to have preferences. I guess I’m out of the loop on that one.

Oldenquist also claims that religion should be kept out of politics because there are intelligent people of every faith, or no faith at all, which is true but beside the point. To attempt to ban religious arguments from the public square is like trying to separate eggs from batter. Philosopher E.A. Burtt said that the only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing, because thought and language are metaphysical. This is even truer of law-making and voting. Don't let secularists silence you.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 20:06
 
November 15, 2003   


 
Rally Time



Well it’s time to buck up. Garrison Keillor famously says he loves Minnesotan winters because “it keeps out the riff-raff”. That Nov. 3rd, 77-degree day at the lake looms large now, carrying as it does the weight of the coming four months. Facing a Jansenist winter, its grim embrace momentarily escaped, makes that day the sweeter.

The well-timed vacation day is a thing of beauty – part art, part science and subject to the elements like an old shed. This year, the weekend after the draconian knife slips – the end of daylight savings time – I gave myself a little momentum goin’ in. That day the grass waved green as Irish Republican flags. The sun percolated in an empty sky. Paul Theroux wrote of disreputable goings-ons in Hawaii and I cleansed the palate with a little Flannery O’Connor, the closest thing to a writer-saint as was ever invented. The radio played all the right songs, geese droppings were dodged, and the rhythmic lake ripples went on and on, even when you looked away. Like love. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 23:40
 
November 14, 2003   


 
Pieper's Book

We have a lot of November birthdays in our family, and between that and Christmas I tend to purchase a lot of books for people. This tends to bust my own book budget, because it becomes a "2 for you, 1 for me...3 for you, 1 for me" type of deal. "STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002" by Florence King, "Amata Means Beloved" by Mary Catharine Perry are hovering as possible buys. Another is Joseph Pieper's Faith, Hope and Love. From an amazon.com reviewer:

This book really cannot be praised too highly. Pieper's discussion is more deep and insightful than any psychology text I've seen, and he's not even trying to do psychology.

He uses traditional and technical words (like "sloth"), but this is necessary to distinguish shades of moods, emotions, and actions. I used to think of "slothful" as synonymous with "laziness" -- but this book made me realize what a huge difference there was. You could work hard every day, but if deep inside you know you could do great things, and you simply don't bother to do them, then you are guilty of sloth. Many Christians (and non-Christians) that I know, including myself, will recognize this as a part of their lives.
On the virtue of hope: a past Dominican friar used to emphasize the importance of realizing Jesus was fully human - in soul and body - because otherwise he ceases to be a model for us. If he is some sort of amalgaman of divine and human, some kind of 'superman' then it is hopeless to attempt to be like him. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 14:24
 
 


 
No Mr. Smiths

I'd carefully taped a couple of random half-hour segments from the 30-hour U.S. Senate debate that went on all night Wednesday and into Thursday. I picked the 3:00-3:30 and 5:00-5:30am slots. 

Now, as good a cause as it is on the merits (i.e. a desire by Republicans to get some of their judicial nominees filled), I must confess that my primary motivation was to see the senators looking like Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I was looking for dissheveled clothing, wild hair, unfeigned passion and unguarded remarks. I'd settle for a pained look caused by a full bladder. Many of the same reasons we watch the Jerry Lewis Telethon, or Dan Rather for that matter. 

But noooo....the entertainment value was nill. They looked blow-dried and professional as always. I didn't expect Orin Hatch to look like Otis Campbell on the Andy Griffith Show, but couldn't somebody look like they just got out of bed? 

It sounds as though I'm trivializing it. Perhaps. I do believe it's worth fighting for. But I suspected this event a publicity stunt. And publicity stunts need publicity, which this event didn't gin up. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 07:30
 
 


 
Reporting Live from Campus Crusade for Christ

We took our seats in the last row, the elderly folks amid the protean youth, a foretaste of what is to come. The girls looked prettier than in my college days, back when I had a gimlet eye, and they answered their cell phones with impressive alacrity. The boys had lubed their hair to form stray stalactites, something I'd have tamped down as an altar boy before Mass. 

A band played praise and worship music, the lyrics posted on a huge screen above them, obviating the need to thumb through a hymnal or squint since the words were big enough even for the near-sighted. 

Production values were keen; a short film advertised a men’s conference to be held next week by showing the word “PARTIES” against a black background followed by shots of empty beer cans, spent cigarettes, woozy characters of questionable sobriety. This was, I took it, the equivalent of showing prison bars and chain gangs to would-be criminals, a sort of “Scared Straight” for the fundy set. It didn’t exactly have that effect on me, at least until it showed a guy hugging the porcelain god (i.e. retching in the toilet). After the film a young man ascended the stage and said that the men’s conference would have none of what you just saw. 

Next, our reason for being there stepped on the stage. Our presumed future daughter-in-law was going to give a talk, which was enough to drag us from the comfort of our digesting meal. She described her circumstances growing up in a Christian home, and explained movingly how being away from home for the first time was the acid test for her devotion to Christ – would she choose the way of men or of God? 

We bolted after her talk, but on the way home there was a certain gnashing of teeth over her list of the support she’s received: Campus Crusade for Christ, close friends, etc.. – no mention of her boyfriend.

“It was probably a simple oversight,” my charitable wife said.

“Yes, besides, if I were a single male in that audience would I want to hear a girl mentioning her boyfriend? No way. She had to target her audience.”

“Yes it was for God and not for Matt.”

It sounded hollow even as we were saying it. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 07:26
 
 


 
Meta-Metablogging



Mom saw my blog!

Oy Vey
Before you think our friend is too sentimental, he adds that he wouldn't compare the erasure of a blog with "the burning of a 15th century Gutenberg Bible. But I believe that in the future, maybe even the most trivial of today's sites can be of interest to people." 

Varieties of Blog

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:39
 
November 13, 2003   


 
Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts


I've perceived a subtle difference between the way the left usually talks about power, and the way Christianity (in my view) talks about it. The message men -- especially straight, white, able-bodied men -- usually get from the left about power is that they have too much of it and others have to little, so they should share. The Christian message, on the other hand, is that you may think you have power, but that power is nothing compared to God. As far as God is concerned, the "privileged and dominant" are his children like everybody else. That's why they should see the beggars in the street as their brothers -- or as Jesus...That's why I said in the last post that a little more emphasis on God's power could be helpful in communicating with that group. If you only talk about how much power they have and how awful that is, you're actually building them up in a way. - Camassia

To say that The Da Vinci Code has taught one about Christianity is as absurd as saying Stephen King’s The Shining is the key to understanding the hospitality industry. --Ellyn of Oblique House

Those who don't want to be a burden on other people when sick or old are usually healthy people who have the ability to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so to speak. So being a "burden" on someone is resolved only when you become a 'burden' on someone and then realize your dignity is in who you are not in what you do. --reader Jeannie Schmelzer, helping me get over my allergens to burdenhood

People who live close to uncultivated nature don't know how lucky they are. Being so close to creation, which God saw and said was good (Genesis 1:31), makes one much more open to whatever else God gives us for our good. - Enbrethiliel of Sancta Sanctis

I’m not one to sit in front of the mirror to primp. However, I do take a few seconds to “look at myself”, because I believe that our eyes are the windows to our souls. I often do this immediately after reception of holy communion or confession. When I get into my car, I pull down the rear view mirror and take a look into my eyes…and I look, if you will, to SEE JESUS. It is something I started doing after my confirmation. It is the eyes that are the windows to our souls. A heart filled with love, filled with the Holy Spirit, has tender eyes. Looking into someone's eyes is one way I can touch their soul. If you don’t already, look into your brother's eyes and pray when you do. -Nicole of 'Notes to Myself'


I feel the same edginess when I am selfish with my time and hoard it, as when I give too much without stopping for renewal -- aka "me time." I have the same yucky heaviness of self and I lose my peace and sense of freedom - Kirsten of Summa Mommas

Equip yourself for the Christian life with these new Bible Belts™ for every person and occasion so that that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. A just man's pants fall seven times a day so keep that from happening with these great Bible Belts™. --Jeff Miller of Curt Jester, proffering a new marketing tool.

Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, said this in a speech last month: "André Malraux once asked a priest to name the single biggest lesson he had learned from hearing confessions. Without skipping a heartbeat the priest said, 'There are no grown-up people.'" A too-glib way of putting it is that men need to love something other than themselves to grow up, while women need to stop loving everything equally. --commenter on Camassia's blog

It's a bit thick to appeal to Sts. Augustine and Thomas over the recent popes, since both saints would have deferred to a pope in an instant. -Tom of Disputations

I've oft wondered whether or not my life is supposed to be an example to other. Of course, it's one big sign to others that reads: DO NOT LIVE LIKE THIS! -- smockmomma commenting on Davey's Mommy, being overly modest

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:47
 
 


 
Books vs Film

NY Times link:

[N]ext year should see the appearance of another Roth movie, "American Pastoral." Whatever the outcome, it's unlikely that this book will fall victim to that other hazard of adaptation: being all but rubbed out by the brilliant film version. Why? Because "American Pastoral" is probably too good a novel — in the way that Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" is too good to be erased by David Lean's classic film of same, and in the way, conversely, that Mario Puzo's "Godfather" is too bad a novel to avoid being trampled to death by Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather."

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, nonreplicable properties of the written medium; the more likely it is, to adapt Dylan Thomas, to move from language rather than toward language. Similarly, the finer the movie, the greater its tendency to emerge from visual images rather than flow in the direction of visual images. 

It's this dual fidelity — to one's medium and to one's profoundest imaginative urges — that, at the highest level, gives a work of art its mysterious soul. If one thing emerges from the scant filmography of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and John Updike, it's that no cinematic adaptation could help itself to their best work's moving spirit, and no self-respecting movie would ever try to. --Joseph O'Neill


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:46
 
 


 
Pity the Bishops

St. Martin de Tours was chosen bishop in an unorthodox way. So great was his reluctance that he was kidnapped and consecrated at gunpoint. (Just kidding about the gun.) 

But the first reading from yesterday's liturgy certainly gives one pause and explains the reluctance (Wisdom 6:1-11):

Hearken, you who are in power over the multitude and lord it over throngs of peoples! Because authority was given you by the LORD and sovereignty by the Most High, who shall probe your works and scrutinize your counsels! Because, though you were ministers of his kingdom, you judged not rightly, and did not keep the law, nor walk according to the will of God, 
Terribly and swiftly shall he come against you, because judgment is stern for the exalted- 
For the lowly may be pardoned out of mercy but the mighty shall be mightily put to the test. 
For the Lord of all shows no partiality, nor does he fear greatness, Because he himself made the great as well as the small, and he provides for all alike; 
but for those in power a rigorous scrutiny impends. 
To you, therefore, O princes, are my words addressed that you may learn wisdom and that you may not sin. 


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:38
 
 


 
New Religious Order Forming in Central Ohio

Children of Mary

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:30
 
 


 
Corrections & Retractions II

This could be a daily column. I should have a disclaimer on the blog, "thoughts I write do not necessarily reflect my thinking - see here for a more accurate rendering."

In this post, I might've implied an equality between abortion and the death penalty. I utterly reject and bristle at that notion and always have. There is no mercy and no justice in an abortion, while there is justice in the death penalty. 

When I said "equally persuasive", it was more a measure of who is doing the saying (the Pope), rather the argument. Our Pope speaks with heavy amount of persausion even when I don't understand it, which is why the Gulf and Iraq wars were/are so problematic for me. 

Also Fr. Damien is Blessed Damien now...he was beatified in 1995, which was over a hundred years after his death. Slow by recent saint-making standards. Thanks John!

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:22
 
 


 
Not that Margaret?

My 8-yr old niece recently had to write something about a saint. She picked St. Margaret because that is her great-grandmother's name. But her grandmother, in the course of research, found that St. Margaret of Cortona was a prostitute before her conversion. 

"How about St. Margaret of Scotland, sweetie?"

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 14:32
 
November 12, 2003   


 
Dark Beer Here! ...study finds dark beer is good for you


Story here.

Guinness proved to be about twice as effective at preventing the blood platelets from clumping and forming the kind of clot that can cause a heart attack.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:37
 
 


 
Eastern Orthodox Struggle with the War

...widespread Orthodox opposition to the Iraqi war, particularly by the bishops, was a source of discouragement, even dilemma, for some Orthodox Christians, especially when that opposition was accompanied, as it frequently was, by the comment that “the Orthodox Church does not accept or espouse a just-war theory; all wars are evil, and participation in them is necessarily and intrinsically evil.” This judgment, voiced by some of the names most respected in Orthodox moral theology, was a cause of bewilderment because, if true, it appeared to guarantee that the Orthodox Church, committed to an ethics of pacifism, would remain forever on the fringes of American life, along with other pacifist groups, like the Amish.

This was not a danger to which the Roman Catholic Church, with its robust and traditional theory of just war, was subject. The American bishops of that church could denounce the Iraqi war with complete safety on the point, because everyone knew that Roman Catholicism was not committed to a philosophy of pacifism. (One recalls that old-style Catholic pacifists, like Thomas Merton, were forever lamenting this fact.) Official Roman Catholic criticism of the Iraqi war, consequently, was consistently based on the argument that that projected war did not measure up to the traditional criteria for determining a “just war.” --Patrick Henry Reardon 


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:32
 
 


 
Why Not? 

In one of his books, Kinky Friedman expresses displeasure that the Catholic Church has not canonized Fr. Damien of Molokai. (Fr. Damien heroically served a leper colony and eventually died of leprosy.) From what I know about the good Father, it does seem like he should be on the fast track to sainthood. Does anyone know why it appears that our Pope, who has made so many, has not made him? I realize, of course, that God makes saints and that miracles are required, but it seems as though enthusiasm for his cause is a bit sluggish and I do wonder why. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:23
 
 


 
Flannery O'Connor Quotes


Flannery as a child

I have got to the point now where I keep thinking more and more about the presentation of love and charity, or better call it grace as love suggests tenderness, whereas grace can be violent or would have to be to compete with the kind of evil I can make concrete. At the same time, I keep seeing Elias in that cave, waiting to hear the voice of the Lord in the thunder and lightning and wind, and only hearing it finally in the gentle breeze, and I feel I'll have to be able to do that sooner or later, or anyway keep trying.

*

After the interview with the Time [magazine] man I am very much aware of how hard you have to try to escape labels. He wanted me to characterize myself so he would have something to write down. Are you a Southern writer? What kind of Catholic are you? etc. I asked him what kind of Catholics there were. Liberal or conservative says he. All did for an hour was stammer and stutter and all night I as awake answering his questions with the necessary qualifications and reservations. 



 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:57
 
 


 
Friends in High Places

TLS of Summa Mommas has excellent crew members.

The Blessed Mother is numero uno and in a special category much as my own mom is compared to my friends: 

- Blessed Margaret of Costello - bereft of the senses of sight and hearing, but full in soul.
- St. Pio - saint of the confessional, he had a great bullsh*t detector, which is something all the Irish need. 
- St. Thomas Aquinas - not for his work, but for his sanguinity at being called "The Dumb Ox"
- St. Therese of Liseux. 'If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, you will be to Jesus a pleasant place of shelter,' she wrote.
- St. Thomas More - because I was born on his feast day and my given name is the same as his. 
- St. Patrick - freer of Ireland from paganism
- St. Anthony, boyhood pal 
Claiming them is easy; just hope they claim me. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:19
 
 


 
Life Issues

This post is probably all wet, since I'm weighing in beyond my competence, but what interests me in some of the pro-war/anti-war talk is how a respect for life can seemingly be displayed in two opposite ways, almost as respect for religious truth can be displayed either by suppressing untruths (remember 'errors have no rights'?) or by promulgating truths. I recall presidential hopeful ('hopeful' might be a stretch) Alan Keyes defending the death penalty by saying that he respected life so much that those convicted of murder will lose their life. In other words, we'll send a message of how precious life is by denying it to the perpetrator. And Keyes was persuasive.

But of course the other side says, equally persuasively, that life is precious and that extends to the perpetrator of murder, for life that is not respected on the margins (i.e. infants, the severely handicapped, criminals) is not really respect for life at all.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:19
 
 


 
Corrections and Retractions

Prompted by a reader's email, I apologize for referring to my wife's church as "cult-like", which is a gross distortion. The fault surely lies with me. To an introvert, a harmless sales convention can seem 'cult-like'. 

Her church wants to avoid, understandably, stagnation, so there's a constant effort to keep things "pure" by accountability and by bringing in new people. Some thrive, though my mother-in-law appears burned out. She used to go to bible studies, small groups, Alpha groups - and now never goes to Sunday services. Perhaps she felt that it was an all or none situation. 

But my wife seems perfectly content to miss small group activities (she's studying for her MBA and has no time), so mea culpa. And how can I complain about a church who helped convert my stepson from agnosticism to Christianity?

Chris of Maine Catholic also points out, correctly I think, that just about every teen tests limits and flirts with danger. Fortunately, most of the time they get away with it. So it's not an issue of overconfidence in God as it is typical teenage behavior. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:09
 
 


 
Anathema vs Pastoral

I've always been interested in line-drawing (perhaps due to a lack of virtue) and of late I wonder how the Christian should debate. 

For instance, in the latest Crisis, Ralph McInerny responded to a criticism by saying words to the effect "I appreciate your teaching me Aquinas", which, in light of his books about Aquinas can only be seen as sarcastic. A minor off-key note, since it contributed nothing to the debate. Would JPII write it? No. Would Cardinal Newman? Probably.

That is mild of course. A famous Catholic blogger recently wrote that Andrew Sullivan thinks of the world only in terms of his "little Willie", which, as any guy can attest, is cruel only in its use of the diminutive. 

Perhaps no one can skewer like Fr. George Rutler, a priest in Manhattan whose rejoinders read like poetry. The passage below, about the Kennedys, is mild compared to his normal balpeen hammer blows:

In Boston, the Kennedys and the clergy made unlovely music playing each other like pianos. Current distress in that archdiocese may be traced in part to defective spiritual chromosomes in Joe Kennedy and Cardinal O’Connell. A generation later, an obsequious Cardinal Cushing greased the slide from the solid piety of the work-worn 19th-century Patrick Kennedy to a latter-day “I never worked a (!!**!#!) day in my life” Patrick Kennedy accusing the pope of bigotry. 

The decay of the Kennedy dynasty now is marked not so much by the hypocrisy of more colorful earlier generations, whose vice paid tribute to virtue, as by a dull humbug whose virtue pays tribute to vice. P. J. Kennedy dancing on tables and Honey Fitz singing “Sweet Adeline” are more splendid figures in their corruption than Kathleen Kennedy Townsend delivering confused animadversions on Galileo.
If this be vice, it pays a certain virtue to vice. 

Some negate, some affirm. Some stamp out heresy, others promulgate truth. Some fight wars, some are pacifists. I guess there is room for both in the universal church. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:28
 
November 11, 2003   


 
But What Would We Have to Talk About?

Amy's tired of treating symptoms; she tells it like it is:


The crisis is not met by issuing statements about those second-tier issues [pro-abort politicians, the fondness of Catholics for the Left Behind books and The Da Vinci Code....]. The crisis is met head on by admitting that in the past forty years, Catholics have lost sight of Christ, that you can sit in a Catholic Mass and not have any strong sense, week after week, that this about the passionate love that Christ has for you and calls you to embrace and share and live. That's the crisis. Catholicism, in its American manifestation, is hardly about Christ. It's mostly about insititutional concerns: membership, money, leadership and public perception. And contrary to current wisdom, none of those things happen to be God.
True. The fact that there are American Catholic pro-choice politicians, for example, says nothing about abortion and everything about the state of American Catholicism. My idea of fighting current ills has moved from donating to the "National Right to Life" PAC to giving away copies of Scott Hahn's "Rome Sweet Home" - because the source of the problem has less to do with politics than with love - as exemplified by Hahn's commentary on John 6. 

And last Sunday our priest said that we need to read the Gospels more often, explaining that otherwise "how will you get to know Christ?". How indeed. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:55
 
 


 
A Modest Proposal


Proposed new high school. Cost = $10,411

Recently our school district asked us to approve a new $60 million (say like Mike Myers in Austin Powers) high school. 

I'm sort of curious why it costs $60 million to build a high school, which is over half what it cost to build a state-of-the-art professional sports arena. (Which, when publically financed, are boondoggles, but that's another story.)

Why is it that kids got better educations fifty years ago with less technology and infrastructure? How is that children learned to read in one-room classrooms when the McGuffey Reader was de rigeur? 

Why not pay teachers $200K a year and have them teach in heated tents? I bet the education would be better because it's teachers who teach, not buildings. 


Proposed annual salary for this man: $201,200

Disclaimer: I am not a teacher and thus have no inherent conflict of interest. No school buildings were harmed in the making of this post. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:41
 
 


 
A tragedy for the local community recently occurred with the death of a 16-yr old student who was active at my wife's church. 

Outgoing and devout, he did missionary work in other countries as well as among his high school classmates. My wife knew him and his youth minister father and it saddened her to tears. 

Shortly after noon church service, without a drop of alcohol to "explain it", he drove over 100mph because he wanted to see if he could get the car airborne. He lost control, went into a ditch, flipped the car and hit a tree. The two passengers received only minor injuries.

I didn’t know him, but it irritated me that he could be so reckless. Does confidence in God overflow into areas of life it shouldn't? Popular and genuine among his peers (a combination in high school as rare as hothouse flowers above the Arctic Circle), he was much more courageous than me - and I'm not talking about driving habits - but perhaps, at age 16, you don't get courage without foolhardiness. 

I can’t help but think it God-appointed that neither of the kids he was with were seriously hurt. His parents, bearing the nearly unbearable burden, at least don’t have to have the additional weight of their child being responsible for another parent's nightmare. 

His memorial service was happy and enthusiastic, not sad. Which I didn't know what to make of. Given eternal life, a death is not the loss that it is to an unbeliever. But given the cult-like, 'put on a happy face at all times' aspect of this non-denominational church I had the proverbial 'mixed emotions'. 

But perhaps that is prejuidice. Our previous Dominican friar, half-Irish and half-Italian, said that funerals that involved both sides were always strained because the Irish half were joyful and the Italian side grim. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:36
 
 


 
On the other hand...

Sportswriter Mike Lupica, on Tim Russert's show, lamented the fact that you can't get to know ballplayers anymore. They're too afraid of being misquoted or thought ill of in an age of political correctness and gotcha journalism. Russert agreed, saying that it used to be you'd have a few drinks with a politician and they'd say "this is off the record" and you could get a sense of how they really felt about things. 

I think this feeds the popularity of blogs, this fresh outlet for saying things that are offensive to some (such as religious truth claims). And size matters. Our large Columbus Dispatch doesn't want to offend, while the free upstart (called "The Other Paper") gives you a fresh honesty, or, more likely, an unvarnished opinion. The person most honest is the one writing in his journal for an audience of one, and/or (hopefully) when talking to God. Blogs are a step from that but fresher than newsprint. Akim, a recent arrival to blogdom, has interesting things to say:

Blogs are terrific in the way they allow a peek into the inner workings of people. Not a very deep one perhaps but better than none at all. Bloggers write half for themselves, half for others. So the propaganda-factor is watered down and double-edged. I know I bullshit a lot here, but less than I would bullshit if I had to write an article instead of a journal entry. Therefore, concerning the above, I found myself spying on religious blogs - perhaps I'll finally find some clues there, to the illusive and the unspoken...

Also, I'm getting this odd feeling that some blogs start out original in the best personal sense of the word and then get screwed up by the popularity itch - turning politico or educational to feed the swelling crowd. So the best way to spot out peculiar stuff is still the random poke - fishing out the odd fish. I wonder if I'll find other ways eventually.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:31
 
November 10, 2003   


 
Interesting Quote

"Princes, great ladies, dancers, I explained to him, love a sad tale, so do the beggars by the city walls. But I mean to be a story-teller to the whole world, and the men of business and their wives will demand a tale that ends well." - from an Isak Dineson short story

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:25
 
November 9, 2003   


 
Politics and Religion

Conversations at family gatherings have that familiar dynamic - that which divides can seem more interesting than what unites. In other words, instead of talking about the weather or the OSU Buckeyes, we're drawn, like the sailors of Lorelei, towards debate that sometimes turns rancorous.

Ham of Bone has it bad; he tells stories of arguments with his inlaws that begin with "Bush is an idiot!", a mantra that his mother-in-law answers to every point he makes. She comes infinitely close to saying that Bone is an idiot (trying to say it as politiely as possible of course). He doesn't bring up politics and attempts valiantly to avoid ad hominens but they know he is conservative and it seems to be an invisible thorn rankling them. 

But, as Fulton Sheen says, win an argument, lose a soul. And as tasty as debate is at the family gatherings, his saying puts things in perspective since not everyone at the gatherings is Christian. 

Debate for the Christian in this scenerio seems a fool's game. Why take a chance of pissing someone off and endanger the possibility of being an instrument for God? For example, in a recent debate on the "gay days" at Disney World I said, "at least we can agree that Disney should give a heads-up on gay day so that parents who don't want their children exposed to that can elect not to go", to which came the reply that heterosexuals should give gays a heads-up when they come to the park. 

But in the end who cares about Gay Day at Disney compared to the souls of family members? If they consider me an idiot on matters political, they probably will on things spiritual. How about those Buckeyes! 

I know that gay days are different from tax policies, but I think we need more Dorothy Days in the world. I think they could speak the language of my in-laws. Part of what made Dorothy Day so special was that she was a political liberal but not a religious liberal. She didn't carry her liberalism into the church and instead was orthodox and loyal to the Magisterium. (Of course, I shouldn't carry my conservatism into church either. Conservatism in its pristine form is the absence of ideology so it should be easier.) 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:25
 
 


 
ex libris

The next generation of the 'books about books' genre will probably be 'books about books about books', in order to determine which of these type of books about books one should buy. 

Maybe one could ask St. Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of librarians. (How's that for a segue?) She lived during the 4th century and November 25th is her feast day: 

From all accounts she was well educated and very articulate. When she was 18, she converted to Christianity.

Her baptism made her aware of every Christian’s duty to proclaim Christ to others and she did so. She publically condemned the persecution of Christians by Emperor Maximinus and he had her imprisoned for it. In prison she converted many to the faith by her example and eloquence. 

Remember that Joan of Arc ‘heard voices’? Well, St. Catherine of Alexandria was one of the Saints who spoke to her.
–Sister Juliana D’Amato, O.P.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 20:39
 
November 8, 2003   


 
On Demonic Activity

I'm aware, somewhat subliminally, of the great spiritual warfare going on. But after reading Tom Hoopes' depressing article on the demonic in the latest Crisis, I think I prefer it remain subliminal. Reading it reminded me of how fragile we are, which is not a bad thing because we see our neediness, but after reading that article physical fragility seems as nothing compared to the mental and spiritual fragilities, of mental illness and the power of the demonic. God never gives us more than we can handle, but I was reassured by Godincidentally picking up a book I hadn't in years, the Letters of John Henry Newman, and flipping to this, which consoles in its familiar if unsatisfying recognition:

The most prominent difficult in Theism is the existence of evil: I can’t overcome it; I am obliged to leave it alone, with the confession that it is too much for me, and with an appeal to the argumentum ab ignorantia, or in other words, with the evasion or excuse, not very satisfactory...When I came to Christianity, I find this grand difficulty untouched; yet fully recognized. This coincidence is to me an argument in favor of Christianity, if Theism be true, as falling under the argument from analogy…Our Lord’s death to destroy evil is as tremendous and appalling a confession of the existence and of its power, as can be conceived. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 20:10
 
 


 
Bad News Blues No Mo'

I think I've been inoculated to the bad news blues, at least on the Church front. The priestly scandals, the liturgical abuses, the Da Vinci Code....water off a duck's back. Perhaps it's fatalism but I prefer to think of it, optimistically, in terms of the old Italian saying: "the situation is hopeless, but not serious". The Lord will find a way. Or as St. Ignatius' said: discouragement is not from God. 

So now the latest news from Tim Drake (link from Disputations) - about the mandatum coverup - neither surprises nor upsets. As Chesterton said: "I am very glad that our fashionable fiction seems to be full of a return to paganism, for it may possibly be the first step of a return to Christianity." 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 14:24
 
November 7, 2003   


 
Hokie Pundit is Steamed

Robert Bauer, understandably, doesn't like the talk about invalid Anglican orders. He suggests that Catholics aren't doing themselves any favors by alienating their closest theological relatives.* 

Implicit is the idea that some Anglicans can be courted into the Church, woo'd in by not mentioning theological differences. But something stinketh in such an arranged, loveless marriage. Instead of arriving in the Church with the Holy Spirit blowing them in, they arrive like forlorn castaways reluctantly accepting second best because of the election of a heretical bishop. Is that really best for them? Is a reluctant connection with the Church better than none? I know Catholics who don't accept much of Church teaching and I'm torn by conflicting emotions: one is the desire they leave the Church and grow and possibly find themselves back in it as 'completed evangelicals' as Mark Shea calls himself, or that they stay in hopes that the connection, however tenuous, will bear fruit. (Of course they may have related hopes for spiritual growth in me.)

I'm also not sure how humility comes into play. Whoever thinks Anglican orders are invalid is just following what the Church teaches. I don't see how he or any Catholic has a choice in the matter since we believe we are bound by papal authority. It's like chastizing an Amishman for not using electric appliances - it's not that he's arrogant in not using electric appliances, it's just part of what makes him Amish. 

* - a sharp reader points out that the Orthodox are our closest theological relatives and their orders are recognized.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 13:36
 
 


 
Many good things on Fr. Jim's blog including 

this:


Reading Luther or Kierkegaard (who are the Protestant thinkers I'm most familiar with), I'm impressed by the intense personal faith of the individual who stands naked before God and calls out for salvation. I'm impressed by the great personal responsibility that the classical Protestant takes upon himself as he picks up the Bible and, relying on his own mind and the Holy Ghost, attempts to figure out what God means to communicate to man and then bets his soul upon it. To me (and, I think, to most Catholics) this fearsome responsibility has something very distant and cold about it. It is awe-inspiring, but it also seems very, very lonely. 

In my faith, I don't think I've ever felt alone. The community of faith has always surrounded me -- physically, emotionally, intellectually. When I think of "faith," I think of something that has been passed along to me from the hands of another. I think of a brightly-painted chapel, with saints upon the wall who have believed the same things I believe; with giggling, gilded putti who find the world amusing; with the bones enshrined of martyrs, who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the things I read in the catechism. 


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 13:02
 
 


 
Kat ain't got her tongue

Lively writer lives up to her name.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 19:17
 
November 6, 2003   


 
From the Small World Dep't

The quote that follows is from Mrs. Culbreath, wife of El Camino's Jeff Culbreath. I think my wife could've written it almost word-for-word except she'd be less sanguine about sharing me with the fine ladies:

Mr. Culbreath loves the attention you ladies give him too much to disappear...You should know by now that he is a compulsive writer. He can't make a living writing so he needs an outlet. I'm too busy to admire his writing so I'm glad you fine ladies do it for me. I don't mind sharing him at all.
Reminds me of how surprising it was - though it probably shouldn't have been - to hear that another blogger's full re-conversion to the Catholic faith (not Jeff Culbreath, but someone else) was stoked by means similar to my own - by the reading of Scott Hahn's "Rome Sweet Home" and Karl Keating's "Catholicism and Fundamentalism". Just goes to show that we're all the same though we're all different. Now that's profound. Worth every bit you paid for it.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 17:15
 
 


 
Beating a dead (war) horse

I'm as sick to death as anybody of the argument "aren't we better off without Saddam?" as if that should drive the moral calculation as to whether the war was just. 

I'm also squeamish about the idea of pre-emption as a reason for going to war, although if I were in charge I'd read a lot of George Weigel and Michael Novak and see if I could squash my squeamishness. 

But what I honestly don't get - and I must be way off base because I hear nobody talk about this - is the larger picture. We tend to look at the 2003 U.S. invasion discretely, as a stand-alone event. 

But how is this invasion not a continuation of the first Gulf War when Saddam did not comply with the agreement made at the end of that war? 

Do we realize how brutal the economic sanctions were, how many thousands of innocent Iraqi children died? The U.S. was, rightly or wrongly, by far the main force behind the sanctions. I wonder if George Bush didn't think a shooting war almost preferable to the cruelity of sanctions that affected Saddam not one iota, his people greatly. 

I am interested in whether the initial Gulf War was a just war, and if the twelve years of sanctions were just, because if they were then I have difficulty in seeing how this one wasn't. Regardless, the decision to force Iraq out of Kuwait seems questionable in hindsight - it enraged a previously "sleeping hornet", Osama bin Laden. He dates his hatred of the U.S. to the day our troops landed on the 'holy ground' of Saudi Arabia. And once the hornet's nest is disturbed, you're dealing with it forever. But the alternative, to have done nothing, meant Saddam would probably take Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as was his goal (journalist Mark Bowden wrote a long article for The Atlantic that describes his schemes of Mideast domination). That would lead, I expect, to far more problems than the price of oil going up. Then the U.S. not getting involved would also look questionable in hindsight. 

Maybe what I'm missing is that the moral barometer is something that changes minute-by-minute depending on circumstances. So the first Gulf War might be just, but not the sanctions. Or the sanctions were just for the first two years, until they were seen as failures at which point they should've been dropped. Or...?

The obligatory disclaimer applies - what do I know? I assume that if my big picture argument (i.e. that the U.S. has tried to systematically deal with Saddam through three administrations) had much validity I would've heard it from my betters. I'm just glad I don't have to make those decisions.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:51
 
 


 
Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts


Dan Brown's book has made people who were turned off by Christianity and Catholicism see Jesus in a new light--not as the Son of God, but as someone real and worthy of being followed. -excerpt from a nonsensical letter written to Amy Welborn

The [writer of the quote above] is not exactly a linear thinker, so exposing logical fallacies or shortcomings ultimately get nowhere. These kinds of folks are intuitive feelers rather than rational thinkers. Both can lead one to God, but both are uncertain paths as well. The special temptation of the rational thinker is arrogance; the special temptation of the intuitive feeler is narcissism. Self-awareness and humility are the antidotes to both. --Mike Petrik commenting on the letter posted on Amy's blog

Prayer ought to be short and pure, unless it be prolonged by the inspiration if Divine grace. - from the Rule of St. Benedict, via a quizilla quiz titled "What Saint are you?", though I wonder at the Benedictine definition of 'short'.

Anyone who has taken a walk through a 15th century art exhibit knows that painters of that period always portrayed young men as angelic, typically with a flair for a feminine facial structure...The full painting shows Jesus and 12 other "persons." The Twelve. Not the Eleven-and-Mary-Magdalene; The Twelve. - the Mighty Barrister

When a man's spirits are high, he is pleased with everything; and with himself especially. He can act with vigor and promptness, and he mistakes this mere constitutional energy for strength of faith. He is cheerful and contented; and he mistakes this for Christian peace. And, if happy in his family, he mistakes mere natural affection for Christian benevolence, and the confirmed temper of Christian love. In short, he is in a dream, from which nothing could have saved him except deep humility, and nothing will ordinarily rescue him except sharp affliction. --John Henry Newman, via William Luse of Apologia

The Ninth Simple Rule for Dating My Teenage Daughter, should I ever have one: take her to one of these [Girls Gone Wild] contests, and I will have your testicles in a Ball jar, atop my television. - Kat of Lively Writer

I think George MacDonald is near the mark in his saying about parables: "They reveal to the live conscience, otherwise not to the keenest intellect." The point is that parables are not principally discursive instruction about such-and-such, but a call to conversion of heart. Once the penitent sinner responds to the appeal, and thereby becomes a disciple -- literally, a "learner" -- then he can be taught the truths of the kingdom en clair. But to teach the propositions first would be to gratify curiosity rather than to announce the kingdom. -commenter P. Mankowski on Disputation's blog

Although I am not a Poor Clare nun, I do have a vocation--that of wife and mother. And it is filled with unending repetition of mundane tasks...The days I am unsatisfied are the days I have looked on my tasks as mere 'work.' I don't want to live in the 'job domain.' -TLS of Summa Mommas 

The moral rectitude of the subject of ordination does not interfere with the conferral of the Sacrament of Orders. If proper matter and form are observed, an intention to do as the Church does is present, a valid consecrator is the minister, and a valid subject is the recipient, a man is raised to Holy Orders even if he is living in open concubinage with three different people. The second point is that, in the eyes of the Roman Church, the whole question is moot, because Anglican Orders are invalid to begin with. Arguing over whether Robinson's situation invalidates his consecration is kind of like arguing over the circulatory system of unicorns....I do think it's a bad thing to have departed from traditional Christian orthodoxy in the matter of same-sex relations. But the Anglican Communion has departed from traditional Christian orthodoxy in far more serious ways on numerous occasions since Henry decided to rid himself of Catherine. When a church has been without a valid Eucharist for five centuries, it's hard to get worked up about the fact that they now have an openly gay bishop. - Fr. Jim of Dappled Things

She said that even though I am clearly as set in my ways as any of them are, I am not pigheaded at all. What a nice compliment! In return, I should probably say something like, "Of all the bra-burning, Germaine Greer-reading, Pope-hating feminists in the world, you are my favorite! -Enbrethiliel of Sancta Sanctis

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 13:17
 
 


 
The End of Irish Catholicism?

Interesting review of Twomey's The End of Irish Catholicism?:

Twomey notes the absence of any genuine theological tradition in Ireland, even among the clergy. He contrasts the Irish situation with that which prevails in France (a country with a strong tradition of secularism and anti-clericalism) where the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger, can tackle in an erudite and convincing manner the major questions afflicting society and debate them in public. As Twomey observes: “When he (Lustiger) enters the fray of public debate, he does so from an unapologetically theological perspective, and yet without any trace of dogmatism.” He goes on to say that no matter how difficult the situation was in France, the church there continued to think, and think theologically. 

This has not been the case in Ireland.... The Irish Catholic has developed under the stewardship of David Quinn (another feisty and accomplished lay defender of the Catholic Church), but it is nowhere near possessing the intellectual and cultural finesse of its foreign equivalents. Twomey makes the following point in relation to why we have fallen on such fallow times in terms of intellectual debate on this island: 
“The real materialism of the Church in Ireland is not manifest in the excesses of the nouveaux riches, but in her serious disinterest in serious thought of any metaphysical or theological nature.” 

France, a country I know quite well, is a place where the value of the intellectual argument takes precedence over the person who presents it. You are not automatically labelled a fundamentalist if you express interest in the Catholic novelist, Georges Bernanos, for example. 

Is France a role model for the faith? I must be missing something. I'm tempted to think that thinking is overrated if secular France is the result. (Although it is true they have no priestly scandal business there.) Here is a provocative quote from Twomey, found in the first chapter here:

...one may well ask: how Catholic was ‘traditional Irish Catholicism’? ...Traditional Irish Catholic culture, I will argue, carried within it the seeds of its own decay despite its apparent power and splendour in days of yore. Those seeds were primarily of an intellectual, more specifically, of a theological nature, and their fruit is what amounts to a crisis of faith today.

The Church on earth is by its very nature a Church lurching from one crisis to another: it is after all, in more traditional parlance, the ‘Church militant’, the mystical Body at war with the evil within and without the Christian community. Christians are always a threatened species, and the Church is in every era confronted by what seem to be insurmountable difficulties. But it has always emerged renewed by the struggle. Today’s crisis, I am convinced, will in time yield a new flowering of Church life in a new environment, that of modern Ireland, though not without considerable effort and, even more, help from above. That help is assured. Less assured is our indispensable contribution. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:32
 
 


 
Educashion

Amy shares a frightening letter...

We know that challenges to the faith are myriad. The breakdown of the family is one - it is much more difficult for someone to trust in a benevolent Father if their own father went AWOL. But what of education? 

Reading about the success of the Da Vinci Code, and its acceptance in some quarters as fact, leaves me wondering what part the failure of education plays in undermining faith. A certain amount of learning might have an inoculation effect on heresy. Too much leaves you more suspectible, since pride enters.

I've heard that the average high school graduate in 1940 received the equivalent education to the college graduate today, to the extent one can measure. A few generations ago you had to learn Greek and Latin and read the classics in the original. Now you don't have to read the classics at all. Catechesis and theological knowledge have surely paralleled this decline. 

What's different about today is that it's not so much there are atheists and agnostics, it's that there are atheists and agnostics who have no respect for faith. And I think that's partially a result of a lack of education. The Pope wrote Fides et Ratio in part to defend reason, understanding its relation to faith. Camille Paglia, an agnostic who respects faith, wrote about the demise of education in Slate and Bryan Cones responded tellingly:

I long for the education my older professors got (the old priests, that is) -- a good liberal arts seminary education, an incredibly broad graduate education in language, history, philosophy and theology. Unfortunately, I don't think it exists anymore -- creating an updated version would be a worthwhile challenge -- and I sure as hell don't want a doctorate in the "latest thing," which will surely be worthless in a year. One can only take so much play with language -- cleverness can really only go so far. Truly accurate analysis requires piles of knowledge, and most of what I've read is a lot of nothing."
I wonder if even the heresies are getting watered down as a result. From the Filioque dispute in the 11th century to sola scriptura and sacramental disputes in the 16th to "did Jesus have sex?" today. Oy vey. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:02
 
November 5, 2003   


 
sex, truths and Avis rental

A blogger I read describes herself as "barely Catholic" and says she remains tenuously connected because "our guys try harder", meaning our priests. They leave some skin on the table (pardon the pun) by virtue of their celibacy while Protestant ministers draw a pass. 

This "Avis attitude" is one I understand.

When I was a teenager I remember being underwhelmed by the presence of married deacons at the altar. What charlatans! They are "playing priest", dressing in robes without paying their theological and disciplinary dues. I considered priests the real McCoy mostly because of the celibacy requirement. For a boy with raging hormones that was nothing short of heroic. (Come to think of it, it still is, although I have much more respect for the difficulties of married folks now that I am one. As a teen with a sex-centric view of life, I thought anyone getting "regular sex" should shut up and never complain about anything.... Hambone and I now scratch our heads in disbelief at men in their 60's buying Viagra since we're rather looking forward to an age when the libidinous burden weighs lighter.)

But I've since come to imperfectly understand that God calls us to different tasks that all call for humility and all of which are potentially heroic. I was reminded of that in this Disputational post concerning St. Martin de Porres: 

"It was only out of obedience to a direct order from the prior of the Dominican house where St. Martin served as gatekeeper and doctor that he agreed to become a friar. Out of humility, he would have preferred to remain an unvowed associate."
Wow. How about that? And if I were around back then I suspect I would've missed the unvowed associate for the other friars (at least until the miracles came). I might've thought him the medieval equivalent of a married deacon. But sometimes the one trying the hardest isn't wearing an Avis uniform - or any uniform. It only matters what God sees. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 18:22
 
November 4, 2003   


 
Isn't Anyone Trying to Find You?

I see this song, popular with young people, as a concealed longing for God and a sign of how rich the harvest is. May the Harvestmaster sends workers. 

To answer the heading: God is.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 18:21
 
 


 
The Stamp Connection ...a parody?

MADISON, WI (AP) -- Dan Green, longtime philatelist and author of the book How Stamps Saved My Life, has written a new book entitled His Secret Hobby, a book that suggests Jesus was a clandestine collector of Roman and Greek postage stamps. 

"I've written it in part to banish unhealthy attitudes many in this country have towards philately, the accusations of nerdishness and the like. Healthy, well-adjusted people engage in philately all the time and my point in writing this book is to suggest that Jesus was no different," he said in an interview last month.

Green is accused by anti-stamp conservatives as seeing Christ through the lens of personal bias. They point out that extant texts do not appear to back his assertions. 

"That's all hooey," Green replies to critics. "The absence of proof only proves the truth and effectiveness of a conspiracy. And there are some indications. For example, in Botticelli's masterpiece The Presentation there's a man in the temple background - just to the left of Joseph - examining what appears to be a stamp."

Rev. McBrien, our go-to-guy for all things Catholic, said that it is likely Jesus collected stamps if it'll lead to woman and married priests. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 11:52
 
 


 
Excerpts from Flannery O'Connor's Letters

I think that what you want is not a Church that can be 'liberalized' but one that can be 'naturalized.' If there were a scientific explanation or even suggestion for these supernatural doctrines, you could accept them. If you could fit them into what man can know by his own resources, you could accept them; if this were not religion but knowledge, or even hypothesis, you could accept it. All around you today you will find people accepting 'religion' that has been rid of its religious elements.

We are all bound by the Friday abstinence. This does not mean that the sin is in eating meat but that the sin is in refusing the penance; the sin is in disobedience to Christ who speaks to us through the Church; the same with missing Mass on Sunday. Catholicism is full of such inconveniences and you will not accept these until you have that larger imaginative view of what the Church is, or until you are more alive to spiritual reality and how it affects us in the flesh.

The Church has always been mindful of the relation between spirit and flesh; this has shown up in her definitions of the double nature of Christ, as well as in her care for what may seem to us to have nothing to do with religion - such as contraception. The Church is all of a piece. Her prohibition against the frustration of the marriage act has its true center perhaps in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. This again is a spiritual doctrine, and beyond our comprehension.

*
The dissecting language [of the Karl Adam book] repels me too; this is what is known as The Pious Style. I will send you something without the Pious Style [although] the only places you can really avoid it are in the liturgy and in the Bible; and these are the places where the Church herself speaks...


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 07:00
 
 


 
The Dog who Chased Turkey and Deer Thinking Them Ducks and Dogs

Flush
O righteous dog
those heretical turkeys
and bounding killdeers 
who tramp the mission path!

Flush, Obi
those winged Thanksgiving meals
and antlered Hopalong Cassidys
who thrush the brush
of our wooded retreat.

Flush, my boy
the strangers in the 'hood
the dogs in seersucker suits,
the ducks with jangly necks.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 06:59
 
 


 


Pondering GWTN

It seemed a rite of passage. My mother’s impatient desire that her kids see Gone With the Wind was tempered only by our youth. I was just seven years old when I was traumatized (I forgave her last year) by the stark horror of Mr. O'Hara's madness. The sight of his wife's shrine at Tara could not have been more gothic if the body itself were there. 

Actually I wasn't seven. I think I was sixteen. (The age of first viewing shrinks with each telling.) But what makes this movie so iconic? How does it drive to the nerve of the human condition? 

I wonder, half-seriously, if you can measure your spiritual condition by how you view Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler versus the long-suffering Melanie and Ashley Wilkes. For the phenomerone-driven teenager, it’s all Scarlett and Rhett. The more discerning, or spiritually advanced, appreciate Melanie and Ashley. 

The casting was knowing: the pretty Scarlett and handsome Rhett juxtaposed by the interiorly-prettier Melanie and more honorable Ashley. Are Scarlett & Rhett deemed more ‘interesting’ by viewers and if so, why? Are their inner demons more interesting than those who are unfailingly charitable? 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 17:48
 
November 3, 2003   


 
Leisured Means to a End  ...or tales lazy men tell

Please pardon the obscenity implicit in blogging about leisure when most of the developing world has very little of it and the following will seem, and is, self-indulgent at best. My only defense is that the average hunter-gatherer worked 15 hours a week, albeit without cable or internet access. (Disclaimer: I don't know how social scientists figured out that the average hunter-gatherer worked fifteen hours a week when there were no social scientists among the hunter-gatherers.)




Unmerited Grace
November.
Central Ohio.
Seventy-seven Degrees.

*
Time stretches inexorably from Ivory Tower time, that time of collegiate ease that somehow combined two antipodal things: a sense of importance with a sense of leisure. I've noticed that it's getting harder to ‘trick’ myself into relaxing, into believing that I can be absorbed for a purpose other than regeneration and renewal.* Leisure becomes a means to an end, something it resists fiercely. When leisure becomes utilitarian then leisure seems to know and ceases to become that means. For she by her very nature loathes utilitarianism and can smell it out. The result is that it takes longer to fool the lyptomatomus (a made up region of the brain that recognizes when you are attempting to make leisure a means to an end). 

For some, it is only by day four of a week long vacation that they even realize they're on vacation - i.e. that they are sufficiently relaxed to relax. This “point at which you relax” often moves steadily westward (i.e. takes longer) as your body and mind become harder to fool. Your mind logically thinks: why should I fully relax and let down my carefully constructed work-ethic (weak as it is) only to have to erect it again on Monday? Would it not be best I simply don’t relax to avoid a jarring re-entry?

* - prayer can take on this quality, a sort of a "Lord, get me the graces to get thru this day" instead of "what can I learn from you this day?". A defensive posture instead of an offensive one, if you will. An attitude that seeks not to learn about or from Him but to get something from Him. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 17:24
 
 


 
The Great Ism of Our Time: Individualism

Camassia has an interesting post about individualism in spirituality. I've often wondered if the problem many moderns have with original sin is a result of having a too individualistic notion of things, a mindset brought about by our current alienation. Many think it unfair that we should suffer for the sin of Adam (who we don't know from Adam), but I wonder if the Israelites or pre-Renaissance Christians thought it so problematical given that they were quite used to thinking of themselves as members of clans who would rise or fall together. They were accustomed to thinking of themselves in one "ark". 

The bible is replete with examples where the individual seems fortunate mostly by virtue of the community he is living in. The tribe of Israel served as the OT version of the 'scandal of particularity'; they were the Chosen People and in the Passover event they were saved via blood on the lintel, something made possible by familial connection. 

In the NT Jesus referred to us as his sheep which recognizes our communal situation and our need to be led. A small irony is that today even those who call themselves individualists and resist authoritarian influences end up dressing and thinking alike.

One morbid way of thinking of ourselves collectively is to consider that everything is recycled. Everything. The Hebrew word for "Adam" means 'dust' or 'clay' and as he was, so are we, even in the material content of our very cells. We can think of our bodies as the ancient doors in Psalm 24...our ancient physicality drawn from the physical substances that preceeded us: 

Lift up your heads, O you gates; 
lift them up, you ancient doors, 
that the King of glory may come in. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 22:29
 
November 2, 2003   


 
the power of blogging

As much as I try to keep up with all things book, I would know nothing about the Da Vinci Code but for Amy Welborn. (I never look at the fiction best-seller lists due to picky taste in fiction.)

But my aunt just read Brown's book and is worried, thinking it possibly truthful, and asked my father to ask me to refute it if I could. I knew just where to go. Couple quick hits and I'm here. 

I sent along the Sandra Miesel link and Envoy link. Heresies flourish via the modern media - especially the web - but possibly so do their antidotes.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 20:43
 
 


 
Interesting article on secular and sacred uses of horror, via Summa Mommas. 

I wonder what E. Michael Jones would say?

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 13:00
 
 


 
Holy, holy, holy, All the saints adore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before Thee,
Who was, and is, and evermore shall be.

- from hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy"

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:58
 
 


 
Da Vinci Code

Amy describes the growing popularity of the Da Vinci Code and I think she's on to something:


My fundamental distress with this whole matter is what has happened, when you get down to it, is how this whole phenomenon works to distract the world from the truth of Jesus. Be interested in Jesus as a figure in esoteric hypothesizing. Let yourself be fascinated by conspiracy theories and be taken in by flawed logic and historical fantasizing.
I know young people who are fascinated by the Gospel of Thomas but have never read or shown interest in the canonical gospels. I think we can all fall prey, of course, to what is beguiling rather than what is real. As another blogger put it so eloquently: "Most people would not even cross the street to witness an unobtrusive act of patience being put into practice, but they will cross an ocean to visit the locale of an alleged apparition." That's not to suggestion the apparition isn't real, but it is beguiling and can distract if not put in a larger context. 

Some Christians-by-birth look to Buddhism or Zen or eastern religions in part because the faith they grew up with is not 'exotic' enough. I fall prey similarly by missing God right in front of me all the time. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:02
 
October 31, 2003   


 
Kaus on Blogging

He makes the case for it here via Touchstone.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:45
 
 


 
Paglia Post

The Camille Paglia post suprised some, which surprised me. I thought much of what she said was self-evident (if you're sufficiently masochistic, read the random stream of "most recently updated" links on blogger.com). She is admittedly brilliant and interesting. But only relatively; i.e. not compared to God. It seems some gratitude might be in order by our providing contrast! :)

What bothers me is her disparagement of words, but Paglia is coming at it from her worship of all things Italian. (How else to explain her Madonna fetish?) Italians love spectacle - opera, fashion and the visual. Images strip-mine the imagination - if the movie was better than the book then the book wasn't that good. 

But then I'm of Irish extract. And the Irish aren't know for art or spectacle right?

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 17:30
 
October 30, 2003   


 
A Rough Algorithm...why internecine rivalries are always the worse



Level of my annoyance at being disagreed with =

((importance of the issue) + (view of how simple the issue is to grasp)) X (degree to which interlocutor 'should know better')
It may seem as though how simple something is to grasp and the degree to which your interlocutor should know better are the same, but many issues are complex only to someone who doesn't share your assumptions and or education.

Example 1: The Catholic who is "pro-choice" (i.e. pro-choice after pregnancy):
a) Importance of the issue: 1.3 million babies a year = 10 (on 1 to 10 scale)
b) View of Simplicity: a separate DNA exists within a mother's womb = 8? (10 for partial-birth abortion anyway) 
c) Degree to which your opponent should know better: For a Catholic = 10

So for me the pro-abort Catholic = 180 on scale of 0-200.

Example 2:
Level of annoyance at a liberal Democrat disagreeing with me on tax policy:
a) Importance of the issue = 3 (taxes in a split Congress will not radically change either up or down)
b) View of Simplicity of the Issue = 5
c) Degree to which my opponent should know better = 1* 

Hence, a mere 8. 

The formula implies an 'annoyance parity' between importance of the issue and how simple it is to discern; this is a recognition of human nature as it exists rather than logical assertion. Even minor things tear at communities - seemingly minor things from an outsider's perspective. But what they miss is a) they are not minor to the community involved and that b)'they should know better' is off the charts within a community given common assumptions and level of education.

I've noticed that I am susceptible to the views of those I respect. For example, I may change my diagnosis of a sickness if a doctor tells me my view is false. Similarly, if someone shares my assumptions and faith but has a much firmer grasp of church teaching in a certain area, I'm liable to moderate my opinion. My view of the simplicity of the Terri case, for example, went from a "10" to a "5" after reading commentary by those who have studied the issue. 

* -- Reasonable people can disagree at what point punitive tax levels inhibit production, for example, and to what degree lowered production levels might serve a greater good. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:47
 
 


 
Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts



'Since the first Pope we have not Petered out.'......'You got Tradition in my Scripture. You got Scripture in my Tradition. Two great tastes together at last.' --Jeff Miller of Curt Jester, offering possible Catholic Church mottos after hearing of the Episcopal Church's 'We're here for you'. 

What I want is a living will that says, "Please don't kill me, even if saving my life entails getting someone get off his lazy ass to put a feeding tube in my stomach." I suppose doctors used to assume that patients wanted to live, but after seeing the Terry Schiavo fiasco I think a legally-binding document saying "Please don't kill me" might come in handy. --Bill of Summa Minutiae

The Russell Kirk story was the inspiration behind our getting rid of broadcast television nine years ago. The point is that you can't be a real conservative without a healthy aversion to television and the "virtual reality" industry. Does this include the internet and St. Blog's parish? Yes, I believe it does. - Jeff Culbreath of Elcamino Real

The first couple years after initiation, I didn't feel the burden of carrying the Cross as much as I do now, but then, my love for Christ was not as strong then either, it was more a feeling of gratitude. - commenter Ben on Swimming the Tiber

Just as the illiterate cannot read books like those who are literate, neither can those who have refused to go through the commandments of Christ by practicing them be granted the revelation of the Holy Spirit like those who have brooded over them and fulfilled them and shed their blood for them. --St. Symeon, The Discourses, Discourse 24

I've told my wife that I have no objections at all to being a burden on her or on anyone else, but I may be in the minority on this. Almost everyone I've heard express an opinion has, in essence, recoiled in horror at the thought of being physically helpless. Very often, they say they would hate to lose their dignity by needing others to feed and bathe them....But here's the thing: The dignity you can lose isn't much worth holding onto. True human dignity is part and parcel of true human nature. That cannot be lost; it can only be failed to be recognized. --Tom of Disputations

I started thinking of despair, and of Denethor, because I was reading the new issue of Crisis. Now I like Crisis, but if I read too much at once, it begins to speak to my lack of hope by revealing the many weaknesses in the Church and the strengths of her enemies. I am tempted, like Denethor, to exclaim “Against the power that has arisen there can be no victory!” As the Psalmist says, “If I had said ‘I will speak thus,’ I would have been untrue to the generation of thy children” (Ps 73:15). It’s hard, but every now and then I get a glimpse of what is unseen.... If I could maintain that vision, I should be, I think, psychologically incapable of despair or any other sin. - Henry of Plumbline in the Wind 

Florence King has remarked that she is ultimately less suited to writing fiction than to writing non-fiction, because she cares more about what people think than about what they do. -- Eve Tushnet's friend 'The Rat'

God wants that my soul is saved...I must obedience to God. These are the two certainties....
1. Since God wants my salvation, I must obey it (to obey it to save my soul).
Or:
2.Since I must fulfill its will, then, I must try my salvation (to save my soul to obey it). 
Second she is purer ... (Simone Weil says).
Naturally, this is closely together of its other annotation "If my eternal salvation were on this table as if outside an object, and did not have more to extend the hand to take it... I I would not make it without have received the order"... and that it is as well a species of answer - unexpected to the last paragraph of the ethics of Spinoza. - Hernan of Fotos

For one who is virtuous, who has a well-formed conscience and is able to act with prudence in difficult moral situations, it is indeed possible to act swiftly and without delay or ponderous consideration of what moral precepts are involved and at stake. I certainly don't dispute this nor do I doubt that many truly virtuous folks have responded appropriately in some of the current cases in the news...But, frankly, there has been a kind of lurching about. Folks from all sides are getting white-hot about events in the media that most have no personal knowledge of. --Mark of Minute Particulars

When I went back to Portland earlier this year I would say that it is even more permeated with new age religions then it was before. The majority of signs and bumper stickers reflected a spirituality based around nature worship. I felt totally out of place and like a intruder there. Spiritually and politically the place was like antimatter to me and I felt like at any moment while walking down the street that people would point at me and scream like the aliens did in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." - Jeff Miller of Curt Jester

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 11:13
 
 


 
Interview with a Ghost

Is anyone else bored with ghost stories on the radio? All I hear are call-in shows with people telling of haunted houses. I think this must be to relieve the talk show host of having real live content by letting listeners do the work. And/or people must really eat it up. 

Personally, I'm looking for ghost stories with a little more substance, a little more flesh if you will. The ol' rattling of the dishes schtick is getting old. How about an interview with a ghost? 

Terrri Gross: Welcome to NPR. Hopefully you'll feel right at home since we invoke the ghosts of liberalism daily.

Ghost: Yes I know. We get NPR here in Purgatory, can't get FoxNews though. Thank you for having me.

Terri Gross: When did you begin to haunt and why did you feel it necessary?

Ghost: I was young and I needed the money. Rimshot! Seriously, it's just somethin' to do. When I was alive I used to put a lot of time into home improvements and I bonded with my house, I guess a little too much. So when I see folks messing around with it - what's up with the velvet Elvis crap! - I tried to discourage their handiwork.

Terri Gross: Did it work?

Ghost: Not as well as I would've liked.

Terri Gross: You died in 1758. What is it about we moderns that most bothers you?

Ghost: You feed your kids Fruity Pebbles. All that suh-gar! Oy vey.

Terri Gross: [chuckles] Are you, er... were you, Jewish?

Ghost: No, I just play one this time of year.

Terri Gross: If we might get serious for a minute, what exactly is a ghost? You mention Purgatory, but are you real or a figment of our imagination? Are you a demonic manifestation? A disembodied spirit?

...And that's where we lost transmission. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:04
 
 


 
Camille Paglia Blogs About Blogs

"The blog form is, in my view, the decadence of the Web. I don't see blogs as a new frontier but as a falling backwards into word-centric print journalism -- words, words, words! 

Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There's a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one's mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there's no editing -- it's free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn't masturbation -- you've got to self-edit. 

Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren't this dreary meta-commentary, where there's a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture. 

If bloggers want to break out of their ghetto, they've got to acquire a sense of drama and theater as well as a flair for language. Why else should anyone read them? And the Web in my view is a visual medium -- I don't log on to be trapped on a muddy page crammed with indigestible prose.

Every writer must work on his or her prose to find a voice. No major figure has emerged yet from the blogs -- Andrew Sullivan was already an established writer before he started his. A blog should sound conversational and be an antidote to the inept writing in most of today's glossy magazines. 

As a writer, I'm inspired not just by other writing but by music and art and lines from movies. I think that's what's missing from a lot of blogs. Most bloggers aren't culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric "gotcha" mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space -- voices on it should have energy and vision." --Camilie Paglia


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:49
 
October 29, 2003   


 
Another Times link on Murray's new book:

Why, he wondered, when he factored in population growth, did the achievement rate in Europe appear to plummet beginning in the mid-19th century, a period when peace, prosperity, cities and political freedom were steadily increasing? In the sciences, he decided, the decline was largely benign, reflecting the fact that in many fields the most important breakthroughs have already been made. But for the arts his diagnosis was grim: a collapse of social values and the advent of nihilism. 

In a word, what modern Europe lost was Christianity. While other major religions, like Buddhism and Daoism preached humility, acceptance and passivity, Mr. Murray writes, Christianity fostered intellectual independence and drive. In his account it was Thomas Aquinas who "grafted a humanistic strain onto Christianity," by arguing that "human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him." And where post-Aquinas Christianity thrived — in Europe between 1400 and the Enlightenment — so, too, according to Mr. Murray, did human excellence. 


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 12:55
 
 


 
Never looked at it that way...

Celibacy in the Latin Church serves as a constant reminder of the other-worldly, eschatological nature of the church. It serves the same function in the life of the church as the liturgy in the other Catholic Churches. The liturgy in the West has for over a millennium been minimalist and has become increasingly banal and this-worldly. A married clergy in the Latin Church would accelerate the secularization of the church, and probably not increase the availability of priests. --Leon Podles

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:52
 
 


 
Quote from Evelyn Waugh Novel... from Weigel's excellent review:

Guy's prayers were directed to, rather than for, his father [at the latter's funeral Mass]. For many years now the direction in the Garden of the Soul, "Put yourself in the presence of God," had for Guy come to mean a mere act of respect, like the signing of the Visitors' Book at an Embassy or Government House. He reported for duty, saying to God, "I don't ask anything from you. I am here if you want me. I don't suppose I can be of any use, but if there is anything I can do, let me know," and left it at that.

"I don't ask anything from you": that was the deadly core of his apathy, his father had tried to tell him, was now telling him. . . . Enthusiasm and activity were not enough. God required more than that. He had commanded all men to ask.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:51
 
 


 
A Scatological Masterpiece

Fine post about what crap it is to imagine our personal dignity is tied to controlling our bowel movements. 

I do admit to be worried about that syndrome where you lose verbal impulse control and start randomly spewing obscene words... (Given that I used "crap", "scatological" and "bowel" in the previous paragraph perhaps I have reason to worry.) Would hate for the epitaph to read, "showed remarkable creativity in stringing epithets". Yet we are all kings by virtue of being human as Tom disputes. 

For the King of the Universe to be mocked with a crown of thorns says everything I need to know about how important we are in the Lord's eyes and how utterly small our embarrassments are by comparison. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 20:43
 
October 28, 2003   


 
Catholic Chic & Waugh-Waughing the Flak Catchers

Amy has the definitive list celebrating Evelyn Waugh, including this gem.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:39
 
 


 
The Usenet-ing of the Literary World?

NY Times reviews a reviewer - Dale Peck, literary critic with a scorched earth attitude:


The question arises: Why should we care what Dale Peck thinks? The short answer is, He's interesting..... Writing in The Believer, a hip, new literary journal she founded with Vendela Vida and Ed Park, Julavits produced a pleading essay, ''The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing,'' that was essentially a critique of Peck's approach....Julavits's perhaps self-interested manifesto on behalf of kinder, gentler reviews (she was about to publish a novel of her own) contains the valuable insight that hostile reviews represent ''a critical attempt to compete, on an entertainment level.'' In other words, critics like Peck can be more fun to read than the books they review. Opprobrium resonates in a way that praise seldom does. 

Witness the recent storm over Martin Amis's new novel, ''Yellow Dog,'' ....Fischer suggested that reading the book was like discovering ''your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating.'' The press was ecstatic to have a new controversy. John Sutherland, the London-based critic, acknowledged that Fischer's review was ''a diatribe that most of us can now recite by heart.'' 
The fact is, negative reviews do stay in the mind longer than raves.
That negative reviews should be more memorable than the prose itself reminds me of what Lance Morrow, author of "Evil: An Investigation", said this weekend on one of the TV chat shows - that evil is more interesting to humans than good. A result of original sin? It is far easier to tear down than build up, which is why I'm pessimistic on Iraq. (Just to bring as many topics together under one post as I can.)

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 14:24
 
 


 
Philip Trower Excerpt --from "Turmoil and Truth"

In relation to the world, the Church or Christian people fulfils somewhat the same role as the tribe of Levi did for the other eleven tribes in Old Testament times, while the relationship of the clergy to laity within the Church is not unlike that within the tribe of Levi between the priests proper who alone could offer the temple sacrifices and the rest of the tribe dedicated to lesser forms of temple service...

Were it possible for a pagan ruler to understand these truths without himself becoming a Christian - that is recognize that the fidelity or infidelity of his Christian subjects could affect the well-being of his country as a whole - one could imagine him forcing Christians to live up to their own vocation under pain of death. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:42
 
 


 


The British Library Reading Room

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge --
   Honey and wax, the accumulation of years--

Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
    The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In prince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
   And cherishing their hobby or their doom
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
   This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting;
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
   A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles - the ancient terror -
Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
   The guttural sorrow of the refugees.   --Louis MacNeice


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:42
 
 


 
Hardest Working Folks in Blogdom?

A few weeks ago George Will discussed gay marriage with a liberal pundit. Will asked what principle would allow gay marriage and not bigamy. The liberal commentator just shrugged and said we draw lines all the time, what's one more? 

Those who believe in a Creator attribute to him consistency in moral judgments and it remains for us to discover those judgments (where there is doubt) rather than to just despair of finding them. There are underlying principles. 

I believe, for example, that the RCC is the most consistent on issues of sexual morality than any group excepting those who believe in no morality. Is the view perfectly clear? No, but the clearest among the alternatives. 

All of this is prelude to giving kudos to Tom of Disputations and his merry band of commenters who are doing some really heavy lifting at St. Blog's in attempting to discern the moral framework behind the Terri Schiavo case, and for that they should be commended. 

My pastor once said that "if you understand the principles, you can do a lot less reading", which is to say that if we can figure out the principles concerning end of life issues we won't have to study so much. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:04
 
October 27, 2003   


 
Rendering of Scuplture Purchased by an Art Illiterate

Like Zeus he sits
    a horned devil
purchased off some piazza in Rome
holding some atavistic charm.

'Throw that away!' 
she said, when I got back
'what pagan thing is that?
I’ll not have it in our home.'

It found a closet
my little Roman miscue
until one day I learned 
that Michelangelo had sculpted Moses.

Now he hangs redemptively
on the bookroom wall
rescued from the closet's noisy indencies
looking mildly pissed off. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:49
 
 


 
Henry Canby - the ol' lech

I bought an antique book, more or less at random, at a Tampa bookshop this summer because I was on vacation which meant it was not just my right but obligation to buy something. It was by Henry Seidel Canby, authored in the 1930s about life in the 1890s, in which he waxes nostalgic about what he called the "age of confidence". The passage below has enough of a ring of truth to be interesting though I don't quite know what to make of it. To set it up, he says the '90s were a time in which at social gatherings the sexes would intermingle for a bit before dinner but afterwards, to the great relief of both the men and the women - they would divide by sex and go into different rooms: 

For these men and women (good friends all) had tacitly agreed to look upon each other as sexless, and that was becoming fatal to their companionship. By convention as strong as faith, they left out of their relationship precisely that which might have made it as stimulating as a meeting between a congenial man or woman and sympathetic woman. Hence my father and the wife of his oldest friend, stranded in a corner, relapsed into silences... Hence every man was all man in his club or business or at the saloon bar, but less than man in the company of any respectable woman but his mother or his wife. And every married woman was less than woman in mixed soceity because her sex was dormant, canalized, inhibited...It is enough that the most settled should know that their nature is still tender, and inflammable by nature if not by will. We, in our early middle age, talked to middle-aged women as if they were cinders - agreeable, yes, admirable often, interesting often, yet cinders, good for home walks and garden beds, but long emptied of fire - and like cinders they responded. --Henry Canby
My mother-in-law says that one of the things she likes about her non-denom church is that she feels "safe" because no one looks at her in that way, which is certainly understandable. For others, perhaps, there is a bit of disappointment if no one recognizes that their "nature is still tender, inflammable by nature". 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:46
 
 


 
How Was Church?

My wife and wife's family are evangelical Christians who have a habit of asking a question that was never asked in my parental household after Mass: "how was church?" 

It was never asked growing up in my Catholic home presumably because the Mass is much more unvarying than Protestant services. Unvaryingly good and unvaryingly bad. 

Unvaryingly good because in receiving the Body of Christ there is no such thing as an "unsuccessful Mass". The Book of Revelation's revelation that Mass is heaven on earth means that "how was church?" is like asking "how was heaven?" 

But unvaryingly bad given the liturgical sufferings, stylistically, we endure with the Novus Ordo. 

But the question could mean "how attentive and prayerful were you in church?". Now that varies. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:01
 
October 26, 2003   


 
Writing the Great American Blog

Funniest unintentional line I've heard in awhile was from my friend Bone. I'd asked why he didn't start a blog and he said, "I only write for money", which is ironic because he's never been paid. But he has one complete and pristine screenplay which he says he can show his kids and someday grandchildren and for which he is justly proud. 

I jokingly told him I have a finished book too - I could vanity-press my blog tomorrow and presto, instant book. A book without plot, rhyme, reason or genre but two hard covers with pages in between. Charles Murray, quoted in a post below, thinks nothing published in the last fifty years will last anyway so how much different are blogs? (Not that I'm defending mediocrity. I'm just saying that most books and blogs are sisters in their ephemerality.) 

Anyway I know I would love to read a blog or journal of my favorite aunt, who died in 1973. Or of my great-grandfather James. And not only because I'm related to them but also because it is interesting reading about average Joes and Janes grappling with the problems and moral dilemmas of their time, especially given the hindsight that history provides. 

The writer Anne Lamott was on CSPAN's BookTV Saturday and said "even if you only write your stories so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child - still to have written your version is the most honorable thing to have done. Against all odds you have put it on paper so that it will last."

Two hundred years from now if people read blog posts about partial birth abortion or about Terri's case they may either think "how barbaric those people were! They were like ancient Rome." Or "what antiquated scruples those people had!". I hope for the former but fear the latter. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:38
 
October 25, 2003   


 
ex opere operato

Interesting link on sacramental efficacy.

Update: A related post by Fr. Jim via Sancta Sanctis

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 01:19
 
 


 
Survey Says..?

One thing few bloggers discuss is how their blog is received by their families. I wish Chris of Maine Catholic would survey that with his question o' the week, but perhaps I'm the only one who's curious. 

I know Oblique House has a strong familial presence but I don't know about elsewhere. 

My question: do your spouse/kids/parents/friends know about your blog and if so do they regularly read your blog or are you a prophet without honor in your own country? Email or press the comment button for best results. 

Personally, I haven't given this URL to my wife and stepson because they are evangelicals and I don't want to have to constantly tamp down my Triumphalist tendencies. (Doubt they'd read it much anyhow.) 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 00:28
 
 


 
Be Not Afraid

Mark of Minute Particulars offers his typically fresh perspective in this post. Regardless of the merits of his argument*, I found it vaguely inspiring that anyone would even make such a point in era when marriage as "the two become one flesh" has become so devauled. So I'm reading his post more broadly and not contra-Terri, but pro-marriage: 

If we enter a marriage freely and appropriately (at least in the context of the Sacrament of Marriage), then prenuptial agreements or any kind of arrangement that anticipates malice from a spouse would be abhorrent to the giving of oneself completely to another. When you get married, you ought to, as the cliché goes, "work without a net.".... If we are too quick to lump the actions between husband and wife in among actions between friends, acquaintances, and strangers, we might indeed save more lives. But I wonder if our ability to see the depths and magnificence of our dignity as human beings would be diminished or even obscured by this? 
I'm interested in this notion of safety nets. In the political sphere, welfare is 'safety net' writ large. It is (or was) often not so much a safety net but a safety harness, locking families into generational dependence. What is it about safety that is so damaging to the human soul that multiple generations would suck at its ennervating teat? 

I'm not suggesting that there shouldn't be gov't safety nets nor that folks on welfare have it easy. And I'm guilty of sucking at ennervating safety teats. Folks in corporations, for example, often trade safety for the adventure of sole proprietorships. (Of course, it's easy for me to say that - I sense this is one of those situations where both sides look longingly at their neighbor's grass.) 

Safety Second?
Can this be applied to the spiritual sphere? Were the Pharisee's corrupted by the "safety net" of the Law, which gave them a seeming risk-free existence salvation-wise? Did it make them risk-adverse in accepting a different-than-expected Messiah? Did they "ghetto-ize" themselves too much in a desire to avoid sin but fail to love? 

A conservative temperament like mine tends toward risk-aversion. But it seems as though tolerance for risk ought to be higher for the Christian, higher because of trust in God and higher because love covers a multitude of sins.

* -- Personally I'm a complete "Vatican toady" on the issue. I don't want to live one minute longer than my Papa bishop says I have to, nor one minute shorter. I've not blogged about Terri because everyone else is doing it so well and - it's a cliche but true - I have nothing to add. My reaction to what almost happened to Terri was horror but I'm neither a medical professional like Peony nor a theologian like Tom of Disputations which inclines me to simply 'let others marshall arguments, evidence and hash and re-hash it and then I'll come in at the end and read the results. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:38
 
October 24, 2003   


 
Interview

Steve Sailer interviews Charles Murray, author of "Human Accomplishment : The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950":


Q. Who was the most accomplished person who ever lived? 

A. Now we're talking personal opinion, because the methods I used don't work across domains, but I have an emphatic opinion. 

Aristotle. 

He more or less invented logic, which was of pivotal importance in human history (and no other civilization ever came up with it independently). He wrote the essay on ethics ("Nicomachean Ethics") that to my mind contains the bedrock truths about the nature of living a satisfying human life. He made huge contributions to aesthetics, political theory, methods of classification and scientific observation. 

Q. You argue that one big reason that most of humanity's highest achievers came from what used to be called Christendom was ... Christianity. Did you expect to reach that conclusion? 

A. Michael Novak foretold I would come to that conclusion, but I didn't agree at the time. I didn't think you needed anything except the Greek heritage and some secular social and economic trends to explain the Renaissance. 

Q. You found that per capita levels of accomplishment tended to decline from 1850 to 1950. Would you care to speculate on post-1950 trends? 

A. I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question. 


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 15:35
 
 


 
More Jack

This is turning into the Jack McKeon blog isn't it? Anyway, I came across this from the LA Times via John at the Inn at the End of the World:


Finally, for the Marlins to win this championship, somebody also has to get McKeon to the church on time. He is one of the few people in sports who claims to attend daily Mass, and actually does.

On his office wall is a picture of St. Theresa of Lisieux. He prays in the car, prays in the dugout, praying for hits and runs and lost souls.

As a baseball writer covering McKeon's wild San Diego Padres two decades ago, I remember strolling into the team hotel around dawn, just as McKeon was leaving for morning Mass.

"You really do go to church every day," I said.

"Somebody's got to pray for you guys," he said.

When we later engaged in a theological discussion based on my discovery of his devotion, he said he felt there was only one true religious mystery.

"I've been reading all these letters from Paul to the Corinthians," he said. "Don't the Corinthians ever write back?"


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 10:27
 
 


 
Consolation for Red Sox Fans?

I'm guessing not....from Cap'l Gang:


MARGARET CARLSON: I don't think you have to make it a -- there's a no curse. To make it interesting, I mean, it's very interesting. Mickey Calsiu (ph), who writes for "Slate" magazine says that, you know, if the Sox and the Cubs were to win like any other team, oh, they'd have a party, you know, their salaries might go up a little bit, but then they'd be just like anybody else, and now they're the two most famous teams in the world.

NOVAK: That's really incredible stupid. I'm sorry.

CARLSON: Bob, I'm going to put a curse on you if you don't stop.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:17
 
 


 
Clear as Mud?

I'd been tempted to consider reluctance by bishops to provide clear moral guidance concerning end of life medical decisions to be a function of wanting to avoid controversy. 

After all, Pope Paul VI gave us Humane Vitae (a heroic act for a man who was, by nature, not confrontational), and there is the opinion that he never wrote another encyclical because of the reaction to HV. 

But after reading Tom's post, I guess it must be a prudential matter... although I'm leery of comparing burdens and benefits given that "burden" is such a highly subjective term. Reminds me of the "health of the mother" clause that pro-aborts hide behind; if the mother has a headache that's reason to end a pregnancy. 

Even for those with the best of intentions weighing how burdensome something really is can be difficult. And for scrupulous souls it must be especially trying. 

Update: To clarify my confusion: the burden of the caregiver is irrelevant, it is the wish of the patient, to the extent that can be discerned. And if it can't be then it's a simple matter of "erroring" on the side of life. 

Zippy's comment on Disputations says: "Being a charity case is one of the most difficult vocations out there, but it is also one of the most spiritually rewarding to all involved."

Henri J. M. Nouwen gave up his writing and thinking career and for the last five years of his life severely disabled patients. When asked why he gave up so much he said "because they give me so much". 

So, in 'opposite world' (as my wife refers to the world view of Christianity), the notion of 'burden' is problematic. If you are the patient you could look at the burden on your caregivers as a gift. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:26
 
October 23, 2003   


 
Security Blanket

Some are born evil, some achieve evil, and some have evil thrust upon them - and there is nothing more evil than what was just thrust upon me: an electronic book reader, aka a PDA. 

E-books strip reading of the sense-pleasures, of broad white margins, scented pages and architectural flourish. Real books are Eastern liturgies, e-books the low Mass. 

And yet when my wife offered me her old Palm pilot, what couldst I do? Her company told her it was obsolete, apparently because it was not "in color". 

For a tenth of a second I was conflicted between two great biases: "if it's free, it's for me" and "real readers read real books". 

The first won out and I am no longer conflicted. I carry the PDA as an amulet against boredom, secure in the knowledge that any long queue can be eased by what is contained therein. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 16:26
 
 


 
Like Children Playing

My uncle Mark is an environmentalist of first order. His ardor for things natural has been intense for over forty years, ever since his first issue of National Wildlife magazine arrived (pornography for nature lovers). 

We were discussing the possibility of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska and he said "it doesn't matter if no one is there or even ever goes there - knowing that an utterly unspoiled place exists gives me joy." 

I thought of his words while reading Hernan Gonzalez's post, which was inspired by this picture:



(Orginally in Spanish; translated here roughly via Babelfish:)


"For me it is a joy and a consolation; like that one feels like when seeing children playing, but more stop and better; or, to put an example in the other end: like the one to have a feeling the happiness of God distantly, and to be glad of that.

And when they leave the objetores to object that "I against the nuns do not have anything; but that works, that helps the patients, that they do something; nuns who only say... why serve " ... they give desire to answer - badly-that to only see them, only knowledge that they are, she cheers to us and she gives forces us; although only outside for that - but she is not for that -, even measured in terminos that inmanentes, already they would be more useful than anyone of these objetores, in general so activists in the ideas as sterile in works." --HJG


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 09:29
 
 


 
Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts


I know why the caged whale sings --title of a Kairos guy post

How long do you suppose it would be between the time an authoritative "Declaration on the Use of Feeding Tubes" was issued, which provided precise and unambiguous guidelines for all cases, and the first time the statement, "The bishops are exceeding their spiritual authority by meddling in medical matters," was made? --Tom of Disputations

My post on Saturday was partly inspired by my own frustration with the individualist attitude toward religion, which ultimately comes from my frustration with the modern individualist attitude towards everything. I am certainly glad for the freedom that I have in this society compared to others I could be in, especially as a woman. But the dark side of basing society on elective groups is that a lot of people...never really find them. -Camassia, who recently elected to join a Lutheran church. 

Openness to the Other requires specificity, not vagueness; attention, not conformity; humility, not pride.... Artists are almost never aesthetic relativists. That's because they know they aren't good enough, and they know they need to improve, and they want to know how! --Eve Tushnet

Te acompaño en el sentimiento --Hernan Gonzalez, offering words of healing as I approach my little Gethsemane.

Go Warn the Children of God of the Terrible Speed of Mercy --line from Flannery O'Connor's "The Violent Bear It Away"

'Stop the Bus, Stop the Bus!' Fearing the worst, he did so, and from the back three [inner city] kids pile out of the bus. My friend got out with the other counselor to break up whatever is going on and they see the three kids with cameras taking pictures of one of those vast fields between Columbus and Dayton. One of the kids says, 'What's that?" pointing to the crop growing at the side of the road, and my friend answers 'Corn.'--Steven Riddle

[Oscar Wilde] wrote in De Profundis...that the evil of sin is not in what one does, but in what one becomes. The Gnostics were wrong: the sexual sins touch the soul as well as the body, and they can change the soul for the worse. Dietrich Von Hildebrand explained, "Every manifestation of sex produces an effect which transcends the physical sphere and, in a fashion quite unlike the other bodily desires, involves the soul deeply in its passion," and "The unique profundity of sex in the physical sphere is sufficiently shown by the simple fact that a man?s attitude towards it is of incomparably greater moral significance than his attitude towards other bodily appetites. Surrender to sexual desire for its own sake defiles a man in a way that gluttony, for example, can never do. It wounds him to the core of his being, and he becomes in an absolutely different and novel fashion guilty of sin."

"Whoever denigrates marriage also diminishes the glory of virginity," said St. John Chrysostom, one of the most kick-butt Saints of all time. "Whoever praises it makes virginity more admirable and resplendent. What appears good only in comparison with evil would not be truly good. The most excellent good is something even better than what is admitted to be good." --Enbrethiliel of Sancta Sanctis

Only Anglicanism could produce C.S. Lewis. Only Anglicanism gone bad could give us John Shelby Spong. Orthodoxy can give us Dostoyevsky when it's good and Rasputin when it goes bad. No other tradition could. And Catholicism can produce both John Paul and, when it goes sour, Antichrists like Hitler. Same with American Protestantism: at it's best you get saints like Billy Graham or Jim Eliot. At its worst, Brother Bubba's Informercial Gospel Hour.--Mark Shea

'Well, I guess you could call him a vegetable. I called him Oliver, my brother. You would have liked him.' --Christopher de Vinck writing of Oliver, his brother who was severely disabled from birth, unable to communicate and barely move --via Amy Welborn

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:56
 
 


 
Cap'n Jack

Article on Jack McKeon's Catholicism written back when he managed my sainted Cincinnati Reds. I'd wager that ol' Jack is wiser than many modern theologians because he understands that it's all about prayer. Broadcaster Thom Brennaman, engaging in the hyperbole so necessary for announcers and bloggers, called Jack "the most likeable man ever to put on a uniform". 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 18:05
 
October 22, 2003   


 
What's the best, most accessible book on Christianity you have ever read?

Interesting survey.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 18:05
 
 


 
Blogger Meets Blogger...film at eleven

Reports of Columbus, Ohio's backwardness must be greatly exaggerated. How else to explain the presence of one Mighty Barrister in our fair city? (Business reasons.) The Barrister and I had a Guinness at O'Shaugnessey's Pub (okay he had a Guinness, I was on lunch hour and so was reduced to a Sierra Mist).

Twas very nice to discuss various & sundry things with someone so totally in sync church and faith wise, something rare in my circles. Not just a Catholic but a 'conservative' one (I know, people hate labels...how about one who knows what the word 'Magisterium' means?).

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 18:04
 
 


 
Hilaire Belloc and Islam.

Psalms for every need (link via Disputations).

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 19:56
 
October 21, 2003   


 
For Best Results, Keep Moving

I happened to be downtown Sunday and ended up watching the finish of the Columbus Marathon. Having never run a race longer than 9.3 miles (it seemed like only 193 miles), I stood gap-jawed as wave after wave after wave of runners finished twenty-six miles. It seemed as though these folks were filling some sort of primeval need; you can't run a marathon without a life-changing training schedule. 

During the Middle Ages, melancholy was most often attributed to scholars, the erudite equivalent of the 20th century office worker. A 17th century axiom went something like, "Oh how much misery is escaped and frustration averted by frequent and violent agitation of the body!"; i.e. exercise lessens depression.

In "The Joy of Running", Dr. Thaddeus Kostrubala says that humans, after many millennia of activity as hunter/gatherers, paid a huge price mentally in becoming mostly sedentary. 

There are surely spiritual causes too. Walker Percy wrote that in an unnatural culture, it is not normal to be normal. When depression is the major illness in a society, as it is generally recognized to be in ours, then you begin to suspect something is amiss. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 14:36
 
 


 
Feasting on Books

Went to the library Sunday and picked up Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast. Borrowing a book inhibits procrastination; I read it immediately and enjoyed it. My new rule of thumb concerning books should be: buy only books I don't want to read, borrow books I really want to read. (I knew I should've borrowed the Summa.)

Some excerpts from "Babette's Feast":


Young [Loewenhielm] till now had not been aware of any particular spiritual gift in his own nature. But at this one moment there rose before his eyes a sudden, mighty vision of a higher and purer life, with no creditors, dunning letters or parental lectures, with no secret, unpleasant pangs of conscience and with a gentle, golden-haired angel to guide and reward him.

*

Nay, but an absurd thing had lately been happening to General Loewenhielm: he would find himself worrying about his immortal soul. Did he have any reason for doing so? He was a moral person, loyal to his king, his wife and his friends, an example to everybody. But there were moments when it seemed to him that the world was not a moral, but a mystic, concern...He found himself longing for the faculty of a second sight, as a blind man will long for the normal faculty of vision.


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:48
 
 


 
Racing to Compromise

Country artist Patty Loveless recorded a song entitled You Can Feel Bad if it Makes You Feel Better and musing on that last post I think there's something to that. I feel better, aided by some consolatory emails. Is it oxymoronic to praise God for the ability to whine? 

Popular country music is for me what democracy was to Churchill - excreable but for the alternatives. Being relentlessly middlebrow means classical music is beyond my reach; rap and rock and pop repel. So I'm left with country.

Fortunately, one of the two country music stations in town decided to boldly play "old" country - George Jones, Willie & Waylon. But the station didn't want only "old" listeners (nevermind that Johnny Cash had a big 20-something following) so after a giddy week or two they began spiking their playlist with 90s pop country songs, songs already played one bazillion times just a few years ago. 

The other radio station in town, in a reactionary move (not wanting to be known as never playing classic country) began playing 90s pop country songs and labeling them "classic country".

So we're left with two stations playing mostly 90s pop country songs and NO one is happy, not the ones who like old country nor the ones liking new country. 

This can happen with political parties to - the rush for the middle becomes so intense that the left and the right are left for dead. 

And it can happen to Christians, when we seek to compromise our way to lukewarmness - pleasing neither ourselves or God. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 08:46
 
 


 
Visiting Dante's 9th Circle...so you won't have to

I've been on one cruise in my life. My wife has never been on a cruise. So in an act of spectacular husbandly devotion I said 'yes' when she asked with all her heart to go on one with two couples I don't know (one works with her and the other knows the one that works with her). I know enough about the male half of the duo who works with her to be concerned. Concerns grew a bit when I learned I have to buy a purple shirt for some photo opportunity at the formal dinners. My guess is that someone thought it would be funny if all the guys were dressed in suits & purple shirts. Pretty funny 'eh? 

Since I am a curmudgeon by nature, deliriously happy reading anything by Joseph Pearce, the idea of the enforced sociability of a nightly 3-hour dinner with strangers has me writing this, pre-agonista, for therapeutic purposes. 

I don't expect a pity party. Lord knows a cruise by any other name is heaven. But the awful secret about cruises is they make money on alcohol and they lose money if people ask for seconds on steak. The answer to this is simple: sit the people down at tables of eight or more strangers. (Hence, alcohol.) Give them lots of little "pre-game" snacks like salads, fruit-like concoctions, and bread. Bring on the main entree - i.e. da' meat - only after two hours and four glasses of wine have elapsed. Voila! They won't ask for seconds and the bar bill will be high. 

Call me a cynic and call me late for dinner.

Of course, ideally I would look upon this as a chance to meet new people, bond, and get into those religious discussions Olde Oligarch is famous for. Ideally. 

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 11:06
 
October 20, 2003   


 
Interesting Dispatch review on book above:


Not long from now, according to essayist Gabriel Zaid, more people will be writing books than will be reading them. 

This phenomenon is probably already true with poetry. 

'If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take us 250,000 years to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.'

But Zaid is not an elitist. And he's certainly not arguing for the avant-garde, which stakes its life on being 'other'. While 'uniformity is boring and numbing,' nevertheless, 'absolute differentiation isolates us.' 

In other words, 'What is desirable is not that all books should have millions of readers, but that they should attain their natural readership.' --Bill Eichenberger


 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 17:35
 
October 19, 2003   


 
Context

Oh profligate dandelions
who summer in Hilliard, Oh
grow I wistful at your stubborn roots:
I’d dance an Irish jig
to see you again mid-December.

 posted by TS O'Rama @ Comment @ 17:28
 
 


 
Grounded

I love the root crops,
the carrot who hides her grace
bene