Here’s today’s Tasty Tidbits I’ve thought worth memorializing. Orthodoxen in particular might want to read item 6, which links to a post at the Orthodoxy at Purdue blog (which also appears on the St. Alexis website’s homepage):
- I’m ballast (but please don’t throw me over if it gets stormy).
- “… it’s probably you.”
- Cecilia Bartoli.
- Debut of the Journal of Christian Legal Thought.
- The Strong One(s).
- Three excellent AFR Podcasts.
- A perceptive Orthodox podcast on economics.
- A different take on Mormon electoral odds
1
Sometimes I think it’s my role in life to be ballast. If the Ship of State is leaning Left, I rush to the Right. By conventional reckoning of Left and Right, I’ve been moving Left since Dubya tacitly declared endless war in his delusional Second Inaugural Address. But in living memory, my views would have appeared, and probably were in fact, conventionally Right.
That shift “Left” does not mean I’m a Democrat. Until that party abandons the “vote your vice” abandonment of working-class values, begun decisively in 1972, I can’t imagine that. I even deny that I’ve really shifted to the Left (of that semantic debate there is no end), since both “Liberals” and “Conservatives” today are liberal in the historic sense. I’ve come, with others on the Front Porch, to appreciate place, and limits, and that’s profoundly conservative.
I think the real problem with both idiotic wings (and the center) today is that we’re witnessing democracy’s flame-out in America. As democracies are prone to do (I know we’re a “Republic” in some sense), we’ve voted ourselves a bunch of promises — economic and sexual — that reality will not let us keep, yet no candidate dare say that. Our politics makes it impossible for an honest man to be elected (though a few may manage re-election without lying if they’ve been there so long and are so well entrenched that they run unopposed or Quixotically-opposed).
Oh, for a Statesman or two! We might salvage a few things at least!
2
“[I]f you’re not paying, and you don’t know what’s being sold, it’s probably you.” (Doug Masson, paraphrasing me.) That, in turn, reminds me that in a poker game, “if you don’t know who the patsy is, it’s probably you.”
And now the mutual admiration circle is closed.
The subject was my blunt assertion that the reader/viewer/listener is the product being sold by commercial media. The News of the World phone hacking scandal illustrates: a child victim who was already dead apparently had her phone hacked by reporters who wanted people to think she was still alive to keep them “tuned in.” The technical details are less important than that “news” was manufactured. What better proof could there be?
And, on the buzz about the Casey Anderson trial that set Doug and me to musing:
A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty. That’s because only one person is on trial in a criminal case, and if that one person is acquitted, then by definition there can be no justice for the victim in that trial.
…
For thousands of years, Western society has insisted that it is better for 10 guilty defendants to go free than for one innocent defendant to be wrongly convicted. This daunting standard finds its roots in the biblical story of Abraham’s argument with God about the sinners of Sodom.
Abraham admonishes God for planning to sweep away the innocent along with the guilty and asks Him whether it would be right to condemn the sinners of Sodom if there were 10 or more righteous people among them. God agrees and reassures Abraham that he would spare the city if there were 10 righteous. From this compelling account, the legal standard has emerged.
Alan Dershowitz at the Wall Street Journal (in front of pay wall)
3
Thanks to The Anchoress for reminding me that Cecilia Bartoli is phenomenal.
4
I look forward to getting acquainted with the Journal of Christian Legal Thought, which may be (it appears) a reinvented Christian Legal Society Journal.
After perhaps 25 years of membership, I dropped Christian Legal Society, as if Charlie Brown had finally stopped trying to kick the football Lucy teed up. I hung in as long as I did in hopes of getting some glimpse of what it might mean to be a Christian lawyer, but again and again all I got with Evangelical Protestant piety and enthusiasm, unaware of its own provinciality. Even when I was a Calvinist, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that. As an Orthodox, I was positively uncomfortable.
Some Catholics whose blogs I follow have enthusiastically commended the new effort, and the price is right: $0.00.
5
With tongue totally removed from cheek, I offer these more-or-less-apt Bruce Cockburn lyrics (song title: The Strong One) for soul physicians — especially Priests in liturgical Christian traditions:
Isn’t it hard
To be the one who has to give advice?
Isn’t it hard
To be the strong one?I see the skyline blurred through the plastic on your back screen door
Not unlike the faces of the people who keep turning up in the places we go
The ones we’d never see if things weren’t going so well
When I was a torn jacket hanging on the barbed wire
You cut me free
And sewed me up and here I amIsn’t it hard
To be the one whose phone rings all day everyday?
Isn’t it hard
To be the strong one?Mouths move without vision — without regard for consequences
Eyes fill with memories poisoned by intimate knowledge of failure to love
Sometimes, sometimes, doesn’t the light seem to move so far away?
You help your sisters, you help your old lovers,
you help me but who do you cry to?‘Cause isn’t it hard
To be the one who gathers everybody’s tears?
Isn’t it hard
To be the strong one?
6
It’s not my intent to turn this blog, ever, into a forum for Eastern Orthodox Evangelism. If you find something interesting or winsome, there’s some chance that it’s the result of me being a partially-formed Orthodox Christian after 14 year or so of study and worship. If so, “come and see” (at an Orthodox Church, like 1418 S. 24th in Lafayette). So much for that disclaimer.
But I went riding my bike tonite, and listened to three Ancient Faith Radio podcasts, as is my wont to do (though not exclusively) while riding. And perhaps I was just in a receptive mood, but I thought I got some good ones.
I’ve posted them elsewhere, so as to make it easy to skip for non-Orthodox readers and easy to find for the Orthodox.
7
Clark Carlton’s podcast digressed from theology and philosophy to deliver “My Two Cents on Capitalism” in response to some other Ancient Faith Radio podasts that he, like I, apparently found economically credulous and historically crude (though he left that message entirely tacit as he set forth his own 2¢). He also put in a good word for Distributism and some Protestant dude named Roëpke who I’ve heard of but perhaps should get to know along with Catholics Chesterton and Belloc.
The podcast is highly recommended for anyone who “doesn’t get” my frequent remarks about crony capitalism, state capitalism and such.
8
Wall Street Journal’s “Notable and Quotable” clued me in to some interesting polling data on voter attitudes toward Mormon candidates. The focus has been GOP Evangelical primary voters, but a Mormon might be in greater trouble with Democrats and Independents in the general election. The WSJ is behind a pay wall, so I’ve linked the original at National Review.
My question about Mormons, including Mormon candidates, soft-pedaling their distinctiveness (“Nobody here but us Christians, ya’ darned heretics“) remains.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 