- Penn prayer prelude.
- Golden Oldies.
- Pretense.
- Overt recklessness.
- Incense, prayer and saintly intercession.
- Investment Tip.
- Cavemen and Salesmen.
- Orthodoxy for Anglicans.
* Temporarily renamed in honor of the Nativity Fast, about which Mystagogy has some more information.
Facebook friend, a prominent Evangelical, thought the pre-game (mid-field?) prayer at the Nebraska/Penn State game was a wonderful gesture and a real sign of hope. Most blogs I read criticized it “from the Right” as a treacly effort to re-baptize what already is more a cult than a sport.
Thoughts? (I didn’t see it.)
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Beach Boys’ first single and of the Rolling Stones.
Suddenly, my wife is feeling very old, while I’m ready for a new Woodstock. (It’s a Ying-Yang thing.) But this time, everyone, please keep your clothes on. Nobody wants to look at naked people our age.
I must have lost track, though. I thought Jim Morrison had died. But there a video of him and The Doors singing the Reading Rainbow theme. (HT Jason Bennett on Facebook)
And to round things out, the poem Voices on Jukebox Wax conjures up those days that are so astonishingly remote, though history is “rhyming” again.
“We are what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote in his third novel, Mother Night (1961), “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He was a scrupulous pretender who heeded his own advice.
So It Went: A New Biography of Kurt Vonnegut Is a Portrait of an Artist who Cultivated a Scruffy Image. (HT Arts & Letters Daily)
I don’t know or care where David Ignatius is supposed to be on the conventional political spectrum. His column Thursday was very good. “What is it about ‘covert’ that the Republicans don’t understand?”
Abbot Tryphon a few days ago wrote a meditation on “Why Ask The Saints?” It’s really quite good as a defense of saintly intercession against Protestant objections, including, as is so often the case, scriptural support that Protestants just didn’t underline when they were underlining seemingly important things in their Bibles.
Not only do those in heaven pray with us, they also pray for us. In the book of Revelation, we read: “[An] angel came and stood at the altar [in heaven] with a golden censer; and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God” (Rev. 8:3-4).
And those in heaven who offer to God our prayers aren’t just angels, but humans as well. John sees that “the twenty-four elders [the leaders of the people of God in heaven] fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Rev. 5:8). The simple fact is, as this passage shows: The saints in heaven offer to God the prayers of the saints on earth.
America is in political decline in part because we’ve elevated salesmen—people good on the hustings and good in the room, facile creatures with good people skills—above people who love the product, which is sound and coherent government—”good government,” as they used to say. To make that product you need a certain depth of experience. You need to know the facts, the history, how the system works, what the people want, what the moment demands.
Peggy Noonan, A Caveman Won’t Beat a Salesman. Needless to say
Fr. Geoffrey Korz, proud Anglican, sets out to find historic English Christianity and finds (to his surprise) Orthodoxy.
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Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 