Sunday, December 01, 2013

Part of Why Pennsylvania Has So Many Churches?

I was reading David Brody's Steelworkers in America: the Non-Union Years. The book is about the period between the collapse of the steel industry craft union the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers until the onset of the Great Depression. The Depression would lead to the organizing drive that would eventually result in the formation of the United Steelworkers, organizing the steel industry on an industrial unionism basis. The book covers this intermediate period, the time of great Eastern Catholic immigration to Pennsylvania. Men came to work in the mines and the steel mills. The book provides an interesting insight into life in Pennsylvania during that period. Including this bit about how Churches were sometimes funded (pg. 116):
The Bethlehem Company deducted for their churches one dollar a month from the pay envelopes of its Catholic workmen.
That was a huge amount of money in those days. Many of these men made only about $15 per week.

Sunday, November 03, 2013

From Robert Hugh Benson

Discussion of papal primacy and particularly infallibility from Robert Hugh Benson's memoir of his conversion, Confessions of a Convert:
After my reception into the Church [a Catholic priest who had discouraged Benson's conversion] wrote to me again, asking how I had surmounted the difficulty [about papal infallibility] which he had indicated. I answered by saying that I could not be deterred by such elaborate distinctions from uniting myself to what I was convinced was the divinely appointed centre of Unity and that I had simply accepted the Decree [of the First Vatican Council] in the same sense in which the Church herself had uttered and accepted it. (pg. 87)

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Neo-Latinity in Early America

James Raven writes about neo-Latinity in early America in his review of Roger E. Stoddard's A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed From 1610 Through 1820 in the July 19 Times Literary Supplement:
One of many questions that Stoddard's work enlarges on is that of neo-Latinity. Several early American poems were written in Latin, and lively English translations from the classics also appeared. Richard Lewis (d. 1734), master of the Latin school at Annapolis and correspondent of the Royal Society, memorably announced the reign of civility in Maryland with his translation from Holdsworth, "Musiculpa, sive Kambromyomachia", a poetic narrative adapted from Homer about battles (at least in this version) between the ancient Welsh and mice (although Holdsworth's 1709 original is not mentioned in the entry for the Lewis 1728 edition). In 1741, Aquila Rose (1695-1723) offered imitations of Ovid's elegies of Scythian exile empathizing with intellectuals living in colonial backwaters. Historians have long debated the commercial and political significance of New World classical learning. Bernard Bailyn famously dismissed classical influences on revolutionary thinking as highly marginal (and his comments are echoed by others). According to Bailyn, participants exhibited amateurish and superficial learning. And David S. Sheilds, in his book Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997), quoted a poem by John Seccomb (1728):
At Ten this Morn. Dear Friend, Your Most,
Receiv'd your Packet by the Post,
Kiss'd the out-side, broke up the Seal-o
And promis'd Fi'pence to the Fellow,
Then try'd to read – But hah! what is't?
O vile! the Language of the Beast!
Chinese? or Syriac? – let me see, –
Amice selectissime
Magick! of which thy old Acquaintance
Knows not a Page, or Word, or Sentence,
But stands with Horror Half a Headful,
And cries, O terrible! O dreadful!

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Temptations on Feast Days

Elder Paisos was asked, "Geronta, why do temptations often occur on feast days?"
Don’t you know? On feast days, Christ, the Panagia, and the Saints are joyful. They treat people, giving blessings and spiritual gifts. If parents give gifts when their children celebrate their namedays and kings release prisoners when a prince is born, why shouldn’t the Saints care for us on special occasions, too? Certainly the joy they give greatly endures and our souls are greatly helped. Knowing this the devil creates temptations in order to deprive people of the Divine gifts: they neither rejoice nor benefit from the feast. Sometimes you even see when a family is preparing to commune on a feast day, that the devil will send them a temptation to fight and then not only do they not commune, but they don’t even go to church! That’s how the little demon does it, so as to be deprived of all Divine help.

The same thing can be seen in our own monastic life. Many times the little demon—tempter that he is, because he knows from experience that we will be spiritually helped on some feast—will, beginning on the eve of the feast, create an atmosphere of temptation. For example, he might get us to quarrel with another brother, and then afterwards torment us in order to overpower us both spiritually and bodily. In this way he doesn’t allow us to benefit from the feast, with its joyous atmosphere of doxology. But the Good God helps us when He sees that we had not given occasion, but that this happened only by the envy of the evil one. And God helps us even more when we humbly reproach ourselves, blaming neither our brother nor even the devil, who hates everything good. For his work is this: to create scandals and spread evil—while man, as the image of God, should spread peace and goodness.
From Family Life, by Elder Paisios the Athonite via the Orthodox Christian Information Center

Friday, August 09, 2013

The Gospel Shatters Our Expectations

Orthodox priest and theologian David Bentley Hart writes in the most recent First Things (August /September 2013) about how we should look at Christian civilization in its historic glories, with its historic flaws, and considering its current "exhausted" state. The article is titled "No Enduring City" and while I don't agree with every one of his judgments, the conclusion is luminous:
So perhaps the best moral sense Christians can make of the story of Christendom now, from the special vantage of its aftermath, is to recall that the Gospel was never bound to the historical fate of any political or social order, but always claimed to enjoy a transcendence of all times and places. Perhaps its presence in human history should always be shatteringly angelic: It announces, even over against one’s most cherished expectations of the present or the future, a truth that breaks in upon history, ever and again, always changing or even destroying the former things in order to make all things new. That being so, surely modern Christians should find some joy in being forced to remember that they are citizens of a Kingdom not of this world, that here they have no enduring city, and that they are called to live as strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

Sunday, July 07, 2013

Modern Myths and Dissipated Ones

William Logan writing about Sylvia Plath and modern myths:
The two myths that defined the fifties for itself were those of Marx and Freud. We still live in the ruin of those sacred myths (the Christian myth is of longer standing but more dissipated effect). If half a century later Freud doesn't command the old belief, we have labored so long in the age of the ego and the subconscious, of the Oedipus complex, of Eros and Thanatos, of compensation and sublimation, of projection and transference, it is difficult to imagine how people will explain themselves without such terms. ... It's a mistake to condescend to a thinker as subtle, if at times brilliantly wrongheaded, as Freud.
(From "You Must Not Take It So Hard, Madame," originally published in Salamagundi, summer-fall, 2002 and republished in The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin.)

Saturday, July 06, 2013

The Boston Press in '68 ... and Every Year

In "The Short Season," a 1968 New Yorker article, Roger Angell describes the Boston press during Red Sox spring training in 1968:
Morning training sessions at Chain-O'-Lakes Stadium, in Winter Haven, were studied with a mixture of excessive optimism and unjustified despondency by the immense Boston press corps, which has traditionally been made uneasy by success.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

The Praying Parrot

From Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping:
A tiny old lady named Ettie, whose flesh was the color of toadstools and whose memory was so eroded as to make her incapable of [pinochle] bidding, ans who sat smiling by herself in the porch, took me by the hand once and told me that in San Francisco, before the fire, she had lived near a cathedral, and in the house opposite lived a Catholic lady who kept a huge parrot on her balcony. When the bells rang the lady would come out with a shawl over her head and she would pray, and the parrot would pray with her, the woman's voice and the parrot's voice, on and on, between clamor and clangor. After a while the woman fell ill, or at least stopped coming out on her balcony, but the parrot was still there, and it whistled and prayed and flirted its tail whenever the bells rang. The fire took the church and its bells and no doubt the parrot, too, and quite possible the Catholic lady. Ettie waved it all away with her hand and pretended to sleep.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Kimball on Kramer on Modernism & Postmodernism

"Modernism" is a word with many meanings. As Hilton [Kramer] understood the term, it describes not just a particular style or period of art but an attitude towards the place of culture in the economy of life. This may be the place to say a word about abstract art. Hilton is sometimes regraded as a champion of abstract art. It would be more accurate, I believe, to say that he was a champion of good art, by which I mean art that, whatever its genre or technical prowess, was palpably true to our experience of life. An inventory of Hilton's criticism shows that he wrote, as often, and as enthusiastically, about figurative as about abstract art. Unlike Clement Greenberg, he never thought (as Greenberg wrote in 1959) that "the very best painting, the major painting, of our age is almost exclusively abstract." If modernism, as Hilton put it, remains "the only really vital tradition that the art of our time can claim as its own," it was not because of its association with abstract or other "experimental" forms of art/. It was because modernism recognized that traditional sources of spiritual nourishment had been irreversibly complicated. The "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the "sea of faith" that Matthew Arnold descried in "Dover Beach" was now an inextricable part of our our cultural inheritance. Preserving or reclaiming what was vital in that inheritance, and adapting it honestly to the vagaries of new experience, was the high and serious task of cultural endeavor. Hilton loathed everything that traveled under the banner of postmodernism not because it was "playful" (as was sometimes said) but because it betokened a terrible cynicism about the whole realm of culture, which is to say the realm of human engagement with the world. Postmodernism, said Philip Johnson, a doyen of the genre, installed "the giggle" into architecture. He was right. But that giggle bespoke not the laughter of joyful affirmation but the rictus of a corrosive and deflationary snideness, a version of nihilism. It is not always easy to distinguish the two. That was part of Hilton's genius: an unerring instinct for the fraudulent. 
 --Roger Kimball, "Hilton Kramer & the critical temper," in The New Criterion, May 2012