It has been breathlessly and bogusly reported that Pope Francis has gone universalist on us. The Huffington Post did it, and theirs was a model of sobriety and theological sophistication next to – heck, I might as well name the hack – Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.
But reports of the Pope’s conversion to airhead have been greatly exaggerated.
[A]ll who do good, and all who do evil, and all saints, and all Nazis, and pirates, and Communists and Mormons, Swedenborgians, and Satanists, and plumbers, and students who are getting Fs, and little kids and old coots, and profoundly brain-damaged folk and really brilliant scientists, and tall, and fat, and short people, and Muslims, and atheists, and Jews, and Buddhists and everybody else with a pulse are redeemed. Stalin is redeemed along with St. Damien of Molokai, Jack the Ripper and St Francis of Assisi are both redeemed.
Mark Shea, Friends Don’t Let HuffPo Writers Do Theology
Item: IRS requests additional information from 90% of taxpayers claiming the adoption credit and subjects 69% to full audits:
So Congress implemented a tax credit to facilitate adoption – a process that is so extraordinarily expensive that it is out of reach for many middle-class families — and the IRS responded by implementing an audit campaign that delayed much-needed tax refunds to the very families that needed them the most.
IRS Morality: Defend Planned Parenthood, Deluge Adoptive Families with Audits (H/T Rod Dreher)
Apparently, Arizona legislators take turns on the opening prayer:
With members of the Secular Coalition for Arizona in the visitor’s gallery, Mendez, an atheist, asked House members not to bow their heads but to instead look around at each other “sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people of our state.” The next day, Rep. Steve Smith complained that Mendez’s remarks did not qualify as a prayer. He asked other House members to join him in a second prayer in repentance for there not being one the prior day.
Religion Clause, based on AP report. Mark this day, because I’m about to say something I won’t say often: kudos to the atheist who said the most uplifting thing he could say with integrity.
Rep. Smith apparently would have preferred hypocrisy, but he’s got that wrong: hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Honest atheism owes no tribute to the execrable MTD mish-mash of “civil religion.”
I was particularly struck by the spot in the book where you say that, even with you realizing it, your conversion to the Catholic church started when you saw the cathedral at Chartres. I think my conversion started in a similar way, more than 15 years before I actually came into the church …
In my senior year of choir, for the spring contest season, our program included a brief piece by Palestrina titled “Haec Dies.” Probably the first time I’d uttered any Latin besides “E Pluribus Unum. But our director translated it for us – we all knew “This is the day the Lord hath made,” of course — and explained that Palestrina was the guy who wrote the church music for the Catholics back in the Renaissance. Fair enough. We started working on it.
Eventually everything came together the night of our spring concert, which we held in the local college auditorium. Rod, there is a feeling you get when you’re in the middle of that polyphony, when it washes over you like warm sunlight, when the haromonies converge on that frequency that makes the hairs on your neck stand up and your bones hum with electricity and something in your chest surge. It’s a feeling that I think is similar to what you described in the book when you saw Chartres for the first time.
Rod Dreher, How Art Can Lead to God (quoting a reader from Texas).
My “Palestrina moment” was in the Fall of 1967, when the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club first laid eyes on one English translation (I’m not even sure it was translation; I think it was a substitute English text) of a movement from Rachmaninov’s Vespers. Clayton Halvorsen, the conductor, walked us through a few musical nuances before we began singing.
When there came a passage where the word “Gloria” began melismatically, pianissimo, adding voices as the volume rose, the hair stood up on my neck and I spun around to see who had snuck into the back of the room with tympani (answer: nobody).
Fifteen years later, my first CD was the Vespers, on Telarc, Robert Shaw, Conducting.
3o years later, I was officially Orthodox.
(I hadn’t mentioned yet that Bach Chorale is singing Grechaninvov’s Passion Week on April 12, 2014, Lazarus Saturday in the Orthodox Church, had I?)
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 