Month: November 2017
Nothing happened
Somehow, a day passed without anything notable happening.
Well, nothing notable and edifying came to my attention.
The sky continued to fall down around Baton Rouge (here endeth my cryptic allusion, which some of you will get), and some Polish Catholics, with the help of a Jesuit priest, did a profane rap nuptial mass (6:23 pm November 1) that sets back the possibility of Orthodox/Catholic ecumenism by about 25 years.
So I’m going to step back to yesterday’s Performance Today, which reminded me of an earlier encounter (via From the Top) with Gateways Music Festival, a concept surpassingly wonderful, which I’ll let you encounter for yourself, without further ado.
Be edified.
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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
Tuesday, 11/7/17
Like a spider monkey with a lit stick of dynamite
I didn’t mean to do it, but in short order this morning I had collected three worthy snippets on how Donald Trump manipulates us. (The third is my favorite, sublimely succinct and almost poetic.)
Every president has his own strategy for dealing with periods of acute difficulty. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan worked to disarm their opponents with charm, grace and humor. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton moved to the center. George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to get down to business and to do something significant and concrete.
By contrast, Donald Trump heightens the contradictions. He tries to provoke unrest and discontent, with a clear intuition that they are his best friends. He creates demons and scapegoats. That’s also Stephen Bannon’s approach, and it captures what drew the two men together.
That might be smart politics. But more fundamentally, it appears to be Trump’s gut instinct, his go-to approach when cornered or in trouble. In some cases, his statements look uncomfortably like Russia’s Facebook ads.
…
While Trump’s characteristic strategy is to intensify social divisions, and to make what divides Americans as salient and visible as possible, that approach is more often associated with the left than the right (true to its Marxist origins).
(Cass R. Sunstein, Russia Is Using Marxist Strategies, and So Is Trump:
Moscow’s meddling in the U.S. election was aimed at stoking social tensions. Sound familiar?)
In the year since Donald Trump was elected president, the national news media has congratulated itself on a new golden age of accountability journalism.
And it’s true in many ways. The scoops have been relentless, the digging intense, the results important.
But in another crucial way, the reality-based press has failed.
Too often, it has succumbed to the chaos of covering Trump, who lies and blusters and distracts at every turn.
Of course, given the differences among news organizations, generalizing is a fraught exercise. Nonetheless, each news cycle is an exhausting, confusing blast of conflicting claims, fact-checking, reactions and outrage.
…
Trump drives the news, all day and every day, a human fire hose of hyperbolic tweets, insults, oversimplification and bragging.
…
And then there’s the huge influence of Fox News, which early last week was discussing hamburger emoji as the rest of the national media was reporting the indictments of Trump associates.
…
The president has been sowing those seeds of mistrust for many months, and cultivates them daily with extra-strength fertilizer.
Reporters “have so-called sources that, in my opinion, don’t exist,” Trump told Lou Dobbs of Fox Business recently. “They just ― they make it up. It is so dishonest. It is so fake.”
Of course, that’s not true. Reporters for legitimate news organizations do not make things up. Those few reporters who fabricate sources get fired and are driven out of the business.
(Margaret Sullivan, Media Columnist for the Washington Post, in Trump’s message of mistrust is sinking in, even in journalism’s new ‘golden age’)
[T]he president grabs the public’s attention like a spider monkey running through a church with a lit stick of dynamite.
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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Pretend this was Sunday’s blog …
The unbearable lightness of decline
I prefer blogs to Tweetstorms, so I’m taking the liberty of reformatting the latter as the former:
Just had a terrible encounter with what George Weigel calls Catholicism Lite. I won’t name the parish. I prefer the Old Rite, obviously, but even according to the rubrics and standards of the new, this was shoddy and irreverent.
- The Confiteor was not said (it’s too awkward, I suppose, to confess to the Blessed Virgin and the saints?).
- The moral instruction in the homily, such as it was, amounted to: We’re all good but we can all try a little harder.
- When crossing before the Tabernacle, priest and parishioners gave, at most, a little hasty nod.
- And I’m sorry but I can never get used to the Creator of the universe being handled casually by parishioners, male or female.
Remarkably, the pastor spoke of a vocations and Mass-attendance crisis in the diocese. But he couldn’t connect the dots between the unbearable lightness of his liturgical practice and this crisis. Look at the places that are thriving, Fr., I thought. They offer reverent liturgy, whether Latin or vernacular, Old Rite or New.
When the Church sets high expectations in Sacramental life and offers hard teachings, the people will rise and follow. But when Catholicism makes no demands, when it shuns our Lady and the saints and 2,000 years of Tradition, of course the people fall away.
I agree with Weigel: Catholicism Lite will not last. It’s dying. The priests who offer it are always, always in their 70s+. And there’s no reason to despair. Go to Tradition-minded parishes and you see packed pews. This is reality.
(Sohrab Ahmari, in a Tweetstorm beginning here)
As always, I feel awkward-but-compelled to blog on matters involving the not-my-Church based in Rome. For better or worse, it is what people think of in the U.S. when someone refers to The Church. Its scandals generally are imputed to western Christianity generally—and I fully intended to say “generally” twice (though “western” was a mistake).
It’s tempting to say that “the same thing happens in any church that gets lax,” but it strikes me as especially grievous when a contender for the title “The Church” sleepwalks though its service/Mass/Liturgy, and as insulting to Rome to say “it’s just exactly the same with liberal Methodists and Presbyterians, too.”
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“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
Sunday, 11/5/17
Saturday, 11/4/17
Your Friday assignment
Pour yourself your favorite beverage, turn off the cell phone and other distractions, and read the transcript of David Brooks speech to The Gathering in 2014. Nothing I could say would be funnier or of more enduring important than what he said that day.
Take heart! The page at the linked URL has both the introduction and the talk twice, so it’s only half as long as you might think.
How good is it? I had to add five new tags when I saved it: Adam 1, Adam 2, résumé virtues, eulogy virtues and invasive care. (The Gathering’s muse, Michael Cromartie, was a man of many eulogy virtues, as demonstrated by his many heartfelt eulogies, like here, here, here and here).
* * * * *
“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 