- How To Eat Like a Hobbit.
- Textual absorption.
- “You’re just as lousy as we are.”
- Another Russian free speech outrage.
- Don’t argue.
From The Distributist Review, How to Eat Like a Hobbit.
- The growing, preparation and enjoyment of food take up most of the hobbits’ time – food, not “food products.”
- At the heart of Distributist or Third Way thought is a belief in radical de-centralization, diversity and local control—particularly when it comes to the production of food. In contrast, the very essence of modern industrial food production is centralization, lack of diversity and national or corporate control.
- In recent years, ordinary consumers and health researchers have come to realize that this centralized industrial food production comes at an enormous cost in human health. The “virtual foods” we see on store shelves are mass-produced, chemically-enhanced synthetic products like the “fake butter” on movie popcorn, that look like real food but have all the nutritional value of chewable plastic.
- Of greater concern to Tolkien and the early Third Way thinkers, however, were the political costs of industrialized, large-scale, centrally-planned food production. When hundreds of millions of people are utterly dependent upon just a handful of large multinational corporations for their very survival—or, for that matter, a centrally controlled State—it gives new meaning to Belloc’s term for the modern citizen: servile.
- Practical step: Go organic.
- Practical step: Buy local only.
- Practical step: Eat in season.
- Practical step: Start your own garden.
- Practical step: Join the urban chicken movement.
- Practical step: Eat less meat.
- Practical step: Lobby for labeling.
Orthodoxia as a life of right worship modulated into a literate effort at remaining doctrinally correct. Worship provided the prime occasion during the week at which this literate effort could be exercised by giving austere attention to biblical texts under the tutelage of a learned ministry. The Bible became the syllabus by which ordained educators could instruct their unordained (and thus by implication unlearned) charges about doctrinal orthodoxy within a doxological setting whose other words and ceremonies were expendable. Liturgy had begun to become “worship,” and worship to become scripture’s stepchild rather than its home.
On Liturgical Theology, Aidan Kavanagh, Volume I Number 1 of Synaxis.
I’ve reduced my habitual reading of the Wall Street Journal Opinion page, but I always read Peggy Noonan and William McGurn if they’ve written something. Here’s a McGurn excerpt, part of a piece on “social justice” Catholic attacks on Paul Ryan:
[W]hat drives progressives bonkers is that he insists on talking about spending in terms of promises made to the American people. In this sense, “Can we pay for it?” is a moral as well as practical question.
Manifestly some bishops do not like Mr. Ryan’s answers. Then again, Catholic social teaching itself holds that the bishops possess no special competence on the subject. Applying the principles of Catholic social teaching involves prudential judgments that are the special province of Catholic laymen and
…
Unfortunately, suggesting that Mr. Ryan is a bad Catholic is the entire case. Stuck with the fact of Mr. Biden, who has long since made his peace with the party’s absolutism on abortion, progressive Catholics know that it would be laughable to try to present Mr. Biden as faithful to church teaching. They know too that clarity about church teaching does not work to their advantage. The only way to take on Mr. Ryan is to tear him down.
Think about that. In another age, Catholic progressives would have laughed at the suggestion that people were corrupted by reading certain works; now they believe Paul Ryan’s soul is in peril for his having read Ayn Rand.
…
Surely it says something about a movement when its most powerful argument against an opponent is this: You are just as lousy as we are.
James Taranto also takes on the pretense that Catholic Ryan is a slave to atheist champion of selfishness, Ayn Rand – and the newer, weirder, charge that he’s not Randy enough.
As every good western liberal knows, performance art is speech, and art is speech, and speech is good, except when it’s hate-speak, whatever that is. So I’m sure all good western liberals will rise in outrage against some Russian youth being sentenced to 5 or 6 years for expressing themselves. (H/T Daniel Lieuwen on Google+)
Don’t argue with an atheist, don’t argue with an angry man, don’t argue with a bitter man. Don’t argue with an atheist because man is by nature devout. Don’t argue with an angry man because man is by nature peaceful and calm. If you argue with an angry man, you argue with the devil. Don’t argue with a bitter man because man is by nature grateful, and thankful to God. What you should do is by acts of love and mercy pray that God would enlighten the person. You are not going to convince them by argument and logic.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 