Tasty Tidbits 9/14/11 – Exaltation of the Cross

1. Praised by faint damnation.
2. Where does your coffee come from, heathen?
3. Merry pranksters at GOP Debates?
4. It’s hard to really chasten a stiff-necked people.
5. Tallying post-9/11 virtue and vice.
6. It pays to be gay.
7. Whimsy.
8. My lit candle for the day.

1

Tom Crowe makes the case, at CatholicVote.org no less, that many (including me) went overboard fulminating against Rick Perry’s Gardasil high-handedness:

I must say, though, I don’t buy the argument that the vaccine is a tacit message to girls to go have promiscuous sex. When an 11-year old gets a vaccine she likely has no idea what it’s for, just trusting her parents and the doctors that it’s important, as she did with all the previous vaccinations. It’s not as though the parents or doctors handed the girl a condom or IUD or bought her birth control pills. Fact is, Gardasil doesn’t protect against HIV, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, or even every strain of HPV, so there remain a goodly number of biological deterrents to promiscuity that the girl will understand.

Oh. I suppose. Can we change the subject now?

2

“There are, I think, few things as dangerous as a Christian sensibility without Jesus.” Fr. Gregory Jensen at the Koinonia blog.

He continues, quoting Douglas Wilson at Blog and Mablog:

[A]ctive denials have not erased the ongoing effects of our Puritan DNA. There is our sense of destiny, which comes from postmillennialism. There is our activism, which comes from the Puritan work ethic. There is the famous pollster question about whether America is on the right track/wrong track, which goes back to basic covenant theology — blessings for obedience and chastisement for disobedience. There is the idea of the need for American leadership in the fight against global evil, whoever it currently is, which goes back to the Puritan views of Antichrist. And there are our periodic spasms of introspection, which used to involve the Ten Commandments, but which now involve ethical shopping tangles and what country your coffee beans came from. Nobody but a Puritan could agonize over something like that.

C.S. Lewis wrote about living off “the whiff of an empty bottle,” or something like that. This is what that looks like, I guess.

(Something’s really bad in the design of the Koinonia blog all of a sudden. Most text is almost invisible against the background).

3

There were only a few raucous cheers for Wolf Blitzer’s “would you let him die” question to Ron Paul. I’m starting to think that there are some mischief-makers infiltrating Republican Presidential Debates to engage in outbursts that will, themselves, become discreditable news: f’rinstance “see how barbaric the Tea Partiers are.”

But if this, like the cheers for 234 Texas executions, was an authentic right-wing middle finger toward the elites, it’s certainly getting old, and it’s going to be a very, very, very long 14 months.

4

Fr. Thomas Hopko and Khouria Frederica Matthewes-Green have podcast reflections on 9/11  (Understanding Evil – 9/11 Remembered and Remembering 9/11 for the Right Reasons, respectively). Both remind us that God does chasten erring persons and nations. I tend to think that 9/11 was one of God’s gracious reminders if we allow it to be. (That is not to say that God killed 3000 people to give a bracing slap in the face to 300,000,000 others. God works for good in all things, though.)

That America so quickly returned, unchastened, to its consumerism (directed to do so by our “Christian” President, no less) and Babbitry is one of a very few things that takes me close to despair if I allow myself to think too much about it.

It’s part of the reason I blog, and it’s most of the reason that, although I try to end with a lighted candle, there’s so much preliminary cursing of the dark.

5

Theologian Miroslav Volf at Clarion Journal asks “Did 9/11 Make Us Morally Better?” and totes up the credits and debits.

He doesn’t give a final balance. The 5 debits outnumber the 3 credits, but do they outweigh them? You decide.

6

So much for the recently-coined, fairly plausible “nobody chooses to be gay.” Elmhurst College in Illinois is offering a diversity scholarship that would make me consider stocking up on pink shirts and light grey trousers.

Actually, I personally might answer ‘MYOFB” instead of “LGBTQ,” just as I skipped the “what pigment of the imagination are you?” question on the 2010 Census.

7

Hmmm. Wonder what he meant by that?

8

Today is the Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-giving Cross:

As the Cross is lifted on high,
it urges all of creation
to praise the undefiled Passion of Christ, Who was lifted up on it.
For by the Cross He killed the one who killed us,
and brought us back to life when we were dead.
He adorned us in beauty,
and in His compassion made us worthy to live in heaven.
Therefore we rejoice and exalt His name,
and magnify His infinite condescension.

…

Come, all you nations,
let us fall down in worship before the blessed Tree,
by which eternal justice has come to pass!
For he who deceived Adam by a Tree
is caught by the lure of the Cross;
and he who held under his tyranny the creature endowed by God with royal dignity
is brought down in a headlong fall.
The serpent’s venom is washed away by the blood of God,
and the curse of just condemnation is undone
when the Just One is condemned by an unjust judgment.
For it was fitting that the Tree should be healed by a Tree,
and that by the Passion of the passionless God
what was wrought on the Tree should destroy the passions of man,
who was condemned.
But glory to Your dread dispensation for our sakes, O Christ the King,
through which You have saved us all
since You are good and the Lover of mankind!

* * * * *

Christ is Risen!