Just sayin’
‘Modern Islam,’ as the scholar Kecia Ali has put it, ‘is a profoundly Protestant tradition.’
Tom Holland, Dominion
Wicked good
Petey the Parrot served twenty-one months
On a rap for indecent exposure.
His Bishop paroled him and gave him a perch
On his pear-wood episcopal crosier.
He scolded the skeptics who labeled the bird
Unsuited for pastoral placement:
“I’m giving him charge of the CCD staff
And an office in Barney Frank’s basement.”
Chorus:
Hide the eggs, Gwendolyn, hide the eggs, Tom!
Hide the eggs, Kate and Kareem!
Petey the sinister Young Adult Minister’s
back on the pastoral team!
With an aawk! and a squawk! twenty months and you walk,
back on the pastoral team!
Petey was therapized, pampered, prepared,
Pronounced cured by professional weasels
Who shortly thereafter were found to have died
From a sorrowful shortage of T-cells.
The cops nearly nabbed him at Cock-à-Two’s Bar
But Petey was just enough quicker
To fly through the window, and home, where he found
He’d been named archdiocesan vicar.
[Chorus]
When the parents complained that his ministry style
Included non-standard relations,
The kindly old bishop asked Petey to screen
First his phone calls, and then his vocations.
It didn’t take long for the entering class
To grow from near thirty to—zero.
Now Petey’s a bishop himself, don’t you know,
And described as “The NCR’s hero.”
Paul Mankowski, The Ballad of Petey the Parrot (2006), via Jerry J. Pokorsky
Explain this if you can
I did not recall this anecdote from Iain McGilchrist, and the full context is the whole book:
At a Benedictine monastery in the South of France, chanting was curtailed in the mid-1960s as part of the modernisation efforts associated with the Second Vatican Council. The results could not have been more disastrous. The monks had been able to thrive on only about four hours sleep per night, provided they were allowed to chant. Now they found themselves listless and exhausted, easily irritated, and susceptible to disease. Several doctors were called in, but none was able to alleviate the distress of the monastic community. Relief came finally, but only when Alfred Tomatis convinced the abbot to reinstate chanting.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
East versus West
According to Bernard of Clairvaux,
Christ became human because “he wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.” This is a fascinating statement. According to it the Incarnation is not about God’s assimilation of humanity to His divinity, resulting in the prospect of man’s deification. It is about creating the basis for man’s emotional relationship to God. The fourth-century Athanasius had stated that God became man so that man might become God. It seems that for Bernard, God became man so that man might sympathize with God.
Fr. John Strickland, The Age of Division
Is there room in Scotland for Kate Forbes?
Lent began this week with a rehearsal for a crucifixion. On Tuesday, SNP leader hopeful and devout Presbyterian Kate Forbes was faced with something she must have known was coming: a challenge from journalists about her views on gay marriage, womanhood, and children being born out of wedlock. She did not flinch from spelling out what she thought. By Ash Wednesday, several of her backers within the SNP had publicly recanted, running scared from the ensuing furore, and Forbes was said to be taking “a break from media commitments”.
… Perhaps unaccustomed to the sight of a principled act of conscience from a Scottish politician, our modern-day Pharisees — otherwise known as newspaper columnists — swung into action to make sure it would not happen again.
As is their wont, several commentators pretended to be taking the room’s temperature while actually turning up the thermostat. …
[W]hat we have here is a clash of two religions. One of them is full of sanctimonious, swivel-eyed moral scolds, rooting out heresy and trying to indoctrinate everybody into their fantastic way of thinking. The other is a branch of Calvinism ….
Kathleen Stock, The crucifixion of Kate Forbes
He opponents may not be able truly to refute her, but they’re higher in the pecking order, and they buy their ink by the barrel, so they can cancel her.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 