Tag: poetry

Samaritan Woman/Midfeast

Colonizers

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Fissiparous

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion.

“Fissiparous” is my favorite blanket term for the innumerable clans descended from the Reformation. It sounds appropriately sinister to me.

Lofty rhetoric, grubby reality

When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know

Catechesis

If you read through the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-4th century), you discover that they have a strongly moral character. The “theology” is quite simple and straight-forward. The extended period of catechesis (often three years in length) was about turning Roman pagans into believing Christians. The habits of the heart (another word for “character”) take time to change or be formed. They are, indeed, the product of a lifetime.

…

We modern people have been nurtured in the heart of a great project and the character of “project managers” has been deeply stamped on us. We expect our own salvation to be something of a project and that w e should be its managers. How frustrating it is to be told that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.” How can we manage the project of our salvation if we do not know what it is we are working towards? How can we tell if we are any closer? Our modern character is formed to expect upward movement – improvement. But St. Sophrony taught that “the way up is the way down.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

One of the things I can’t un-see

In my youth, we zealous Evangelicals condemned Roman Catholic Bibles for all the annotations that we thought distorted the Bible’s message. We did so, with no sense of the absurdity, while clutching our Scofield Reference Bibles, with notes that, for instance, put Genesis Chapter 1 at 4004 B.C.

This is the sort of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve seen it. That the dispensationalist heresies of the Scofield Reference Bible have (or so I understand) become passé in Evangelicalism doesn’t change that. Newer Bible versions with study notes fill the void, though perhaps the antipathy to Rome has diminished (I simply don’t know).

The Mother of God

Despite the clear views of the original Reformers, the Church’s devotion of honor and love for the Holy Virgin Mary is one of the greatest stumbling blocks for today’s Protestants to overcome. As on many points of Orthodox doctrine and practice, the Protestant view has devolved radically since the time of the Reformation. For evangelicals in particular, the traditional veneration offered to the Theotokos through praise and prayers evokes not merely theological objections, but often highly charged negative emotional reactions.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Thoughts from a freshly-minted Saint

No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end.

St. Seraphim Rose, newly-Canonized in one North American Orthodox jurisdiction, via Michael Warren Davis.

The most tragic Orthodox downfall I’ve seen personally fit that pattern.

This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

I John 1:5-7

Southern Gothic

Her stepdaughter, Kate, is twenty-five, fragile, sensitive, a weak woman raised by a strong one. She yearns to have her suicidal despair overcome through raw experience. Storms make her feel wonderful. Sometimes, she tells Bolling, she stays up all night having “revelations.” The happiest moment of her life, she claims, was when she was in a car crash on the Natchez Trace. Her fiancé was killed. She survived. “I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, characterizing a portion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

I guess I thought of this as “Sunday fare” because it reminds the reader, albeit with Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures”, just how screwed up we humans are.

I like the Southern Gothic writers, I think, because their literal meaning is opaque; they write what feels like long, evocative poetry.

No graven images

It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?”

(Margaret Hartmann, Gold 22-Foot Trump Statue Definitely Isn’t a False Idol).

After a 22-foot gold statue of Donald Trump went up outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project, felt obliged to explain at its “dedication” that “this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.” (Margaret Hartmann, ibid.)

Two observations:

  1. Any Protestant who approves of this statue should never again accuse Orthodox Christians of idolatry because of our icons.
  2. Responding to Orthodox Christians saying “We don’t worship icons,” a common Protestant response is “The hell you don’t! You bow and kiss them!” An Orthodox apologist responding to that denied that bowing and kissing was worship, but sort of understood Protestant confusion: “Protestants venerate God and worship nothing.” (Obviously, that stuck with me.)

Incomplete Renunciation

Please let me have
a 10-room house adjacent to campus;
6 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, formal
dining room, frplace, family room, screened porch, 2-car garage.
Well maintained.
And let it pass
through the eye of a needle.

(Marilyn Nelson, in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology)

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

February 19, 2026

Never smoked?

This is the 50th anniversary of one of the times I quit smoking. The last time I quit was maybe 7 to 9 years later (of that time, I lost track) – long enough ago that, as I understand it, my history of smoking is no longer medically relevant. Some of my medical records even say, incorrigibly as history but perhaps accurately as a medical term of art, “never smoked.”

The cultural shift against smoking in my lifetime has been remarkable.

Punked

[Poet Rolfe] Humphries may be best known, these days for a literary joke. He had received an assignment from Poetry magazine for a “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion,” in which, the editors asked, there needed to be one classical reference per line. Humphries sent in the requested poem, which appeared in the June 1939 issue, and began: “Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again, / Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone.”

But the poet nursed a hated of Nicholas Murray Butler, the long-time president of Columbia University (who, it must be said, had no editorial role at the Chicago-based Poetry magazine), and so Humphries built the poem as an acrostic, the initial letters of each line spelling out “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.”

“Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person,” the magazine apologized later that summer, and I have to say that while I appreciate snide poetry, my sympathies are with the editors who got used in the incident.

Joseph Bottum, commenting on the poet and his poem A Song for Mardi Gras.

Perspective

When it’s the most powerful nation on earth conducting a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries (one of which had precisely nothing to do with the inciting incident), leaving upward of a million civilians dead, revenge becomes a temporarily useful virtue. When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.

Omar El Akkadm One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Ah, those touchy conservatives!

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It.

Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry 

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now.

Do you see the theme there?

… In the current era, when right-wing rhetoric amounts to very little more than sneering and bullying—“liberal tears,” “cry more,” etc.—it should be no surprise to see our friends on the left arguing that if x discomfits or hurts conservatives, then x must be good, which is the subtext of those Slate headlines. But I do not think that this sort of thing is really a reaction to the Trumpist style, inasmuch as it precedes the emergence of that style as the dominant form of expression on the right. “Your uptight Christian parents are going to hate this!” is a very, very old marketing ploy, one part “Banned in Boston!” and one part “Republicans pounce!” Incidentally, I spent a lot of time with right-wing gun nuts, and I have yet to meet one who is upset that nice suburban liberals are buying firearms—and the Slate report has not convinced me that these fearful conservatives actually exist beyond the anecdotal level.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

Conservatisms

I graduated from Chicago in 1983, and at about the same time a group of people graduated from Dartmouth. We all moved to Washington about the same time. I knew them, and some of them have become famous, like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I came out of Chicago earnestly reading Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and all that, and my friends and I became pro-conservative. But the Dartmouth Review folks were not pro-conservative, they were anti-left. So in retrospect, I can see how big and vast a difference there was between people that I thought were part of the same movement. The sad news is that they now dominate conservatism and the Republican Party. Whereas my friends became Never Trumpers.

David Brooks

Caricatures

I spent most of my adult life thinking ill of [Jesse] Jackson, probably because of his infamous “Hymietown” remark in the 1984 presidential race … Then, about seven years ago, I met him for breakfast in New York. The man I spent an hour with was gracious, reflective, engaged, knowledgeable and more than a touch sad, probably because he was aware of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. It reminded me that people are never the caricature that others make of them, and that there can be a lot to like and learn from people with whom we often disagree.

Bret Stephens

Shorts

  • It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. (George Will of VP JD Vance)
  • After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet. (James Van Der Beek)
  • Attention without feeling is only a report. (Poet Mary Oliver)
  • I’m at peace, and I’m excited, but my Oura Ring will tell you I’m not sleeping well. (David Brooks on his departure from the New York Times to take an interesting new position at Yale.)
  • The problem is that he overreacts. It’s like going to a doctor with acne and the doctor says, “You know what will fix acne? Decapitation.” That’s Trump. What he’s doing with scientific research is horrific. (David Brooks again.)
  • The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. (Margaret Thatcher via Bret Stephens)
  • President Trump — who’d dip himself in gold if he were confident that it wouldn’t seal his mouth shut and prevent him from yammering. (Frank Bruni)
  • Someone who had been a Catholic longer than five minutes would perhaps grasp the irony of claiming a minority group had dual loyalty. (Sarah Stewart on the antisemitism of Carol Prejean Boller, washed-up beauty queen, “influencer,” and recent Catholic convert.)
  • My job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. (A headmaster at the Stowe School, quoted by David Brooks.)
  • Vigilence is metabolically expensive. (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

The Sacred Veil

I was listening this afternoon to a choral composition by Eric Whitacre, who probably came onto my radar with this a few years ago.

The unfamiliar composition was playing softly, and I was multi-tasking, paying little heed to the words (though a few caught my attention a bit).

Then suddenly I heard something that jolted me. I’d never heard a chorus do anything like that before, and no wonder: it sounded unbelievably difficult.

It was in a setting of this short poem:

Listening to your labored breath,
Your struggle ends as mine begins.
You rise; I fall.

Fading, yet already gone;
What calls you I cannot provide.
You rise; I fall.

Broken, with a heavy hand
I reach to you, and close your eyes.
You rise; I fall.

The piece is titled You Rise, I Fall, and it’s part of the larger piece The Sacred Veil, Whitacre’s setting of a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri. The poet describes it:

This work features a series of poems written about my relationship with my late wife Julie, her battle with ovarian cancer, and the grief I experienced as a result of her passing in 2005. This is the most intensely personal poetry I have ever written, and it evoked exquisite and heart-breaking music from composer Eric Whitacre.

If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favor and ferret it out somewhere, somehow. I heard it recorded by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

But keep the Kleenex handy.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

by William Butler Yeats

<!– (from The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats) –>

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

“An Irish Airman foresees his Death” by William Butler Yeats. Public domain. (HT Writer’s Almanac)

Amo, Amas, I love a lass …

I could call it “Haikuly yours III,” but I’ll save that because (a) this one’s public domain now and (b) I know this poem and can sing it rousingly:

Amo, Amas

by John O’Keefe

Amo, Amas, I love a lass
As a cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip’s grace is her nominative case,
And she’s of the feminine gender.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Can I decline a Nymph divine?
Her voice as a flute is dulcis.
Her oculus bright, her manus white,
And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Oh, how bella my puella,
I’ll kiss secula seculorum.
If I’ve luck, sir, she’s my uxor,
O dies benedictorum.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

(“Amo, Amas” by John O’Keefe. Public domain.)

For what it’s worth, I can still sing the Portugese national anthem from memory, 42 years after the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club learned it for our European tour. Rote memorization is odd.