Blunt Talk

Who knew? Commencement addresses are good for something. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), speaking at Southwest Baptist University:

For more than three decades Congress has continuously renewed the Hyde Amendment, which keeps federal Medicaid funds from paying for elective abortions. The new health-care law gets around that ban by creating new funding streams to which the amendment does not apply, and new policies now use our tax dollars abroad to fund groups who promote abortion.

It is time to make the late Henry Hyde’s amendment permanent law and apply it to all operations of the federal government. It is the bare minimum that we should do to protect both unborn life and the conscience of American citizens who don’t want to be forced to facilitate the ending of a life.

Makes sense to me.

Nota Bene: Roy Blunt is not to be confused (as I did once) with Roy Blount, Jr., the humorist I know best from his regular appearances on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, but who I also bizarrely saw quoted on the menu at Pizzeria Uno tonight. More on that dinner tomorrow.

(via The Corner)

Crowned a Winner in King's Cuts

There has been a lot of concern about the restructuring and job cuts at King's College in London in the Philosophy world as well as among paleographers.

But one at least one victor has emerged. The final report is out, which notes:

Classics will work closely with the new Centre for Hellenic Studies and will house one of the joint appointments. As the largest and most diverse UK Classics department outside Oxford and Cambridge, it will retain its full range of specialisms, including its current complement in Classical Archaeology and Art. It will benefit from the appointment of a new lecturer in Latin language and literature to respond to strong (and growing) student demand in this area.

So there's at least a glimmer of hope for Western civilization.

Just what the world needs...

...a nice pocket edition of George Berkeley's Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous:

I love this book, but even I could have told them it wasn't a publishing winner. It is, as one might expect on the remainder tables at the Strand.

Ascension Thursday

Fr. Z has published his annual rant about the practice of moving the observation of the Feast of the Ascension from Thursday to Sunday.  This is silly he argues (correctly), since the feast was fixed for 40 days after Easter (a Thursday) from the late 4th century, reflecting that Christ appeared for 40 days after the Resurrection (Acts 1:2).  Pentecost, as implied by its name is celebrated 50 days after Easter on Sunday.

Thankfully here in the Ecclesiastical Province of New York, we've kept the traditional day, as have some other northeastern provinces and the Province of Omaha.

Fr. Z. misses, however, I believe, one part of why this change was sold so easily to much of the United States.

Before the calendar reforms of 1955, Ascension was celebrated with an octave. This meant that the Sunday following the Feast of the Ascension was a continued part of the celebration of the Ascension.  This celebration carried through all the way to the next Thursday.  Then you had two penitential days of preparation, a Friday and the Vigil of Pentecost, before the celebration of the Great Feast of Pentecost.  But with the "Sunday after Ascension" being just another Easter Sunday (of which we've already had a great many), the end of the Easter season is left rather shapeless.

Now, I don't advocate for moving the Feast of the Ascension to Sunday, but I can sort of understand why they do it.  There's something missing in those last weeks of Easter and shifting Ascension helps fill the emptiness.  You can guess what my solution would be...

Now for some appropriate music by Messiaen to accompany this post:

More Mike (Masonry)

I wanted to add one humorous aside to yesterday's commentary on Mike Potemra's post about predestination on The Corner.  He writes about author John Salza:

Just how conservative a Catholic is Mr. Salza? This should give some indication: Among his earlier books are Why Catholics Cannot Be Masons and The Biblical Basis for Purgatory.

While I'd hope explaining the biblical basis for purgatory isn't a particularly conservative concern, the Freemasonry thing does continue to be amusing. 

When Baronius brought out a book on Freemasonry a while back, we joked that you're not really a traditionalist publishing house until you have a book on your list about the evils of Freemasonry. This despite Masonic plots not being high on the list of things most people, even traditionalists, worry about these days.

Potemra on Predestination

I'm glad to see that Mike Potemra bringing up the forgotten doctrine of predestination in a post over at National Review Online. He's posting about a new book from TAN, The Mystery of Predestination According to Scripture, The Church, and St. Thomas Aquinas, by John Salza. However, his conclusion doesn't seem to be true at all.  Poterma writes:

[T]hat a Catholic writer is not afraid to deal so forthrightly with the central Reformation emphasis — that man is not loved by God because of any merit of which man himself is the source and author — is another indication that the ecumenical spirit is bearing rich fruit in our times.

Catholic writers have been dealing forthrightly with predestination all along.  Here are some modern guideposts:

• Joseph Pohle (1911) "Predestination" in the Catholic Encyclopedia (which lists a dozen 19th century references)
• Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1939)  Predestination (Incidentally reprinted by TAN in 1999.)
• Ludwig Ott (1953), Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma [excerpt] (Also reprinted by TAN, most recently in 2009)
• Fr. William Most (1971) New Answers to Old Questions (based on his work in the 1960's)
• The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) #600 and #1037
• Jimmy Akin, "A Tiptoe Through TULIP" (1993), This Rock magazine

This isn't really the fruit of ecumenism, it's just the continued handing on of the tradition.  In fact, Most and Akin's work (and perhaps to a degree Ott's) are part of an apologetic project that is in some ways opposed to much of what passes for ecumenism these days. Anyways, it's not as if we've suddenly started paying attention to John Piper and Marc Driscoll and rediscovered a biblical doctrine we'd forgetten about.  While I don't think that's what Potemra intended, it's not an entirely implausible way to read what he wrote.

I don't want to miss linking to these useful pre-Reformation texts:

• Aquinas, The Summa Theologica (1265-1274), First Part, Question 23
• Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints 

Addressing one of Potemra's other points:

But — unlike some other doctrines that are baffling to the intellect, such as the Trinity — this doctrine is rarely mentioned in Catholic pulpits and publications. (It has fallen into desuetude even among Protestants. I was, for almost three years, a member of a Presbyterian congregation — in the denomination gently mocked as “God’s frozen chosen” for its past emphasis on predestination — and, in three years of Sundays, it was mentioned in exactly one sermon. ...

Fr. Al Kimel (whose ordination I attended back in 2006) ran a series of articles on predestination on his blog Pontifications.  In part III, he tackles the difficulties of preaching the doctrine of predestination.  And its importance:

James Daane has explored the unpreachability of predestination in his book The Freedom of God: A Study of Election and Pulpit (1973). “Sermons on election are so rare,” Daane writes, “that even a regular churchgoer may never hear one…. And the rare occasion when a minister does venture to preach on election is more likely to be an apologetic lecture defending a particular form of the doctrine than a sermon proposing election as something in which the hearer should place his faith and ground his trust” (p. 14). This last sentence is important. In the New Testament predestination is not so much a doctrine to be taught as good news to be proclaimed. When the Apostle Paul writes that “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son … And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (Rom 8:29-30) he was not engaging in a bit of abstract theological speculation; he was proclaiming gospel to the believers in Rome and offering a powerful word of hope and encouragement. God has predestined you to glory! Therefore, you need not fear “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword” (Rom 8:35). The biblical language of predestination is first- and second-person discourse. It is a way of speaking the gospel to those who have died with Christ in Baptism and been raised to new life in the Church.

Fr. Kimel has more interesting stuff (though I'm not sure I agree with all of it) in part IV, about bringing back preaching about predestination.

More and different links...

I've updated the sidebar!

Some More Catholic History

This undated (but apparently pre-1969) photo comes from a Flickr set of a Catholic wedding held at St. Francis Xavier Church in Kansas City Missouri (good pictures of the interior as it is today).

It's an interesting piece of liturgical history.  First, this convert, who frequently sits way up front, is amused by the typical Catholic pattern of almost everyone sitting way, way back, even at a wedding.  The headwear of the women in the congregation is worth noting too.  Many of the women wear hats and the veils worn are small, not like the ones we usually see today among Catholic veil-wearers.

Some other liturgical notes:

There are six candles lit, suggesting this is perhaps a simple Missa Cantata.  Something I've never seen photos of before as far as I can remember.  Interestingly, there are no chairs or stools for members of the wedding party, suggesting they stood or knelt for the whole Mass.  At this wedding, the members of the wedding party   are all seated in the sanctuary. It would be interesting to look at a bunch of old photos to see what the various practices were over time and in different locations.

As far as customs go, the photos show that the priest wore a surplice for the wedding itself with no cope.

The dress of the servers in white albs or cassocks with white surplices is interesting, one I don't think I've ever seen before. This was (and is) as I understand it a Jesuit church (relevant because of, for instance, the Domincan parishes where servers were dressed as mini-Dominicans or mini-Dominican prelates.).  Was this a Jesuit thing?  Just an idiosyncratic  local thing?

In 1987, according to Wikipedia, the Church, designed by Barry Byrne in 1949-50, won a retrospective award from the American Institute of Architects.  More about the architecture can be found here.

The Big Band Strikes Back

An exciting report from the Village Voice on Bobby Sanabria and his Afro-Cuban Jazz big band:

This band also requires knowledgeable and gifted musicians, including at least two university professors, some half-dozen of their current and former students, and several veterans of what Sanabria calls "the salsa and jazz wars." Percussionist Obanilu Allende's power and agility, especially on the baril de bomba, stand out, as does trumpeter Shareef Clayton's pithy, bebop-inflected solos. These musicians' formidable gifts range widely, as do their ages: In March, 19-year-old Christian Sands sat in ably on piano, while Hiram "El Pavo" Remon, 79, handled the maracas with devastating sensitivity.

Before the previous week's gig, the band worked its way through "Worstward Ho," a composition by band member Chris Washburne based on a Samuel Beckett story. ("Disintegrate into nothingness," read one of the chart's marks.) Later, the group performed another of his tunes, "Pink," which punctuates a Cuban son montuno with brass hits worthy of Parliament. "This band is the best workshop I can imagine for my tunes," says the trombonist, a tenured Columbia University professor who has played on the New York scene for nearly 20 years. "Bobby is a torch-bearer in this tradition, but he's not a historicist. I can write stuff for this band that pushes the limits."

The FB Lounge is on East 106th between Lex and 3rd. Anyone Up for a Trip to East Harlem?

Another article about the same group from the New York Times

The Lacey Baroque

There's lots of research to be done in the history of vestments or at least lots of popularizing of that research if it's sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Two Sundays ago, I spotted this painting, "The Vocation of Saint Aloysius (Luigi) Gonzaga", by Guercino at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It's dated circa 1650, squarely within the baroque period. (You can click here for a better view and more details about the painting at the Metropolitan Museum's web site.)

St. Aloysius Gonzaga, S.J. died in 1591 at the age of twenty-three.

Look at his surplice.  In both shape and decoration,  I'm inclined to believe it's not what most of us would think of if someone wrote "baroque surplice".  While it's possible that it's a consciously antique style, the late 1500's are not very far before the baroque.  More likely (though further research would be necessary to be sure) this is simply what surplices looked like in the painter's day.

This isn't to attack lace on surplices. Folks should be guided by the customs and rules of the place they live and the sensibilities of those they serve.  But it throws at least a little light on the customs of counter-reformation Italy, light of a different shade than we might expect.

Signs of Summer

If the weather of the last week hasn't persuaded you, here's a definite sign of summer's return.  The hot dog cart (yes, he's got a grill, but he seems to sell more dogs than anything else) has come back to the park near my house.

It makes me think of one of my first roommates, Pedro, who I lived with when I first moved to New York City.  He used to go back to the Dominican Republic every year during the winter and come back in the late spring.  His return was a sure sign it was time to put the air conditioner back in the window, which I did yesterday.

Ad Orientem... In Miniature

For reasons unknown to me, we have a small ceramic model of the Cathedral of St. Paul in the office of the Church of Our Saviour here in New York City.  This week, as I was leaving the Church, I noticed that our model has the front of the Cathedral pointed at the wall (above), hiding the facade.  So I turned it around, exposing the more interesting (to my eye) facade:

This side even has a pleasing Latin motto: "EVNTES ERGO DOCETE OMNES GENTES". It's a partial quote of Matthew 28:19: "Going therefore, teach ye all nations...".


I was pleased and thought I'd leave it that way.  But T. pointed out to me that with the door facing the wall, the architectural east end faced geographical east.  Advocate of ad orientem worship that I am, I turned it back around.

I Don't Oppose Technology, Really!

After yesterday's Luddite post about the evils of television, I wanted to followup so as not to lose my momentum with any emerging neo-Luddite readership.  (Would there be anything more ridiculous than a blog targeting the neo-Luddite readership? Probably.)

So, yesterday televisions, today telephones.  Gawker recently created a typology of text-messagers (huh, should that be "text-messengers"?). One of which is the following:

There are some people who love to text so much that the phone part of their cell phone has become completely obsolete. ...they are scared of a wonderful and time-honored mode of communication. We'd much rather text most of the time too, but sometimes a call is necessary. The general rule should be if there are more than three questions or the problem can not be solved in three messages, then just pick up the phone and have a short conversation rather than waiting for the back and forth of texting. Also, if someone calls, don't respond with a text unless the text says, "Can't talk now. I'll call later." If one party thought the conversation was best had on the phone, just have it on the phone and save everyone a headache. After all, without phones there would be no texting, so do the old gods a favor and give them a sacrifice now and again.

Rick Webb responds:

I am one of those people. But let me explain something to you. The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting. it was never okay. It’s less okay now. Telephone calls are rude. They are interruptive. Technology has solved this brief aberration in human behavior. We have a thing now called THE TEXT MESSAGE. It is magical, non-intrusive, optional, and, just like human speech originally was meant to be, is turn based and two way. You talk. I talk next. Then you talk. And we do it when it’s convenient for both of us.

They've both got some fair points. (Does this break the rules of blogging? Often it seems like you have to be like a potential Skull and Bones member: "Accept or Reject‽")

The most important point here, I believe, is in the second excerpt. It's something often forgotten when arguing about politics or society or culture. As much as we talk about "the new normal", the last 100 years is a flash in the pan in the scope of human history. You can't really make conclusive judgments about human institution or social convention in such a small time frame, given how hard it is to really change human nature. Less than 100 years after the coast-to-coast telephone call, we can't really say a lot about how we'll choose to use this technology over the long term.

(via First Things)

Smash Your Television

Blogger Adam Minter is writing a lot about the U.S. pavilion (left) at Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

One recent post discusses the presentations at the pavilion, which mainly seem to involve lots of watching of movies.  Minter quips:

Rather than experience a USA pavilion that exhibits American ingenuity, creativity, and accomplishment, I saw a pavilion that represents an America that spends too much time watching TV.

This is a key to cultural renewal in the United States and Europe. British essayist and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple writes in today's Wall Street Journal:

It is hardly surprising that those who do not experience family or social meals early in life exhibit the lack of self-control that underlies so much modern social pathology in the midst of plenty.

These social, or antisocial, developments have taken place precisely at a time when electronic means of entertainment have become available to all. For the uneducated, the world is an intolerably dull and slow-moving place by comparison with the excitement available at the press of a button or the flick of a switch. Why, then, move off your couch and risk the ennui of the real world? You can satisfy your appetite and occupy the vacuum of your mind at the same time, at most wriggling like a maggot in sawdust.

John Senior discussed this in 1983, though I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as he did... He wrote in his book The Restoration of Christian Culture:

[Y]ou cannot be serious about the restoration of the Church and the nation if you haven't the common sense to smash the television set. ... Its two principal defects are its readical passivity, physical and imaginative, and its distortion of reality. Watching it, we fail to exercise the eye, selecting and focusing on detail—what poets call "noticing" things; neither do we exercise imagination as you must in reading metaphor where you actively leap to the "third ending" in juxtaposed images, picking out similarities and differences, skill which Aristotle says is a chief sign of intelligence.

I sometimes take advantage of televisions in public places. But just as often, I find them annoying. Tonight, I was out to dinner with friends and since I was sitting facing the television, I found my eyes drawn to the motion and light of it, even when I didn't want them to be. Television demands attention, even when you'd rather focus somewhere else.

CC licensed picture of a television from videocrab via flickr. Also check out this great surrealist photo-composite by ξωαŋ ThΦt.

Since I May Not Be "Up Long Before the Day-o"

Here are the Waterson's singing the May Day song "Hal-an-tow":


Don't forget, it's also the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955.

Among other things, he's patron of the Catholic Worker.

Under 800... and above it again...

Briefly this week, I got the book count on my LibraryThing account down under 800 after pitching some books.  But, I also found some that I hadn't yet added to the catalog, so the count is above 800 again.

Most of those are in my bedroom here in Queens.  A few are still back in Virginia, but the one box worth not listed—because they're currently for sale on Amazon or slated to be given away to friends—bring the in the room count back up close to that on the LibraryThing account.

The photo with this post shows you some of the books that are on the shelves that sit on the left side of my desk.  It'll tell you a lot of what I've got "part read" and my current interests, obsessions, and aspirations, though I'm not sure what Numbers: Rational and Irrational by Ivan Niven is doing there.  Click here or on the photo for a larger version.

At brunch on Sunday we were talking about how many books we own... one friend claimed to own a lot of books, but admitted that it wasn't as many as I've got.  Mwhahah!  Our friend David, won the prize for the person there with the fewest books owned, since he of course owns none.  (If there was an actual prize, not just a theoretical one, someone might have disputed this conclusion.)

This reflection was prompted by these recollections.  And also by rediscovering a fun 2008 article from the New York Times Book Review in the pile of stuff I'm trying to clean off my desk.  Here's a taste:

In order to have the walls of my diminutive apartment scraped and repainted, I recently had to heap all of my possessions in the center of the room. The biggest obstacle was my library. ...it had begun to metastasize quietly in corners, with volumes squeezed on top of the taller cabinets and in the horizontal crannies left above the spines of books that had been properly shelved. It was time to cull. ...

Nevertheless, things had gotten out of hand. The renovations forced me to pull every copy off every shelf and ask: Do I really want this? I filled four or five cartons with volumes destined for libraries, used-book stores and the recycling bin, and as I did so, certain criteria emerged.

There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. “I’ve read ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” it says, and “I love Alice Munro.” ...

The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read. “I like to keep something on my shelf for every mood that might strike,” said Marisa Bowe, a nonprofit consultant and an editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.”

I lean towards the second method, I get rid of most things I've already read, but I've got lots of books I intend to read, lots.

Coming attractions: I've got some stuff about a Ukranian sculpture show I saw last weekend to post (including pictures), but it'll take some time to put together. Also a post on the Oxford Movement and liturgical changes at Smokey Mary's here in New York City.  If you're interested, leave me a comment on which one you'd rather see first.

My World Turned Upside Down (a very small part of it)

I'd long "known" that the British played the march "The World Turned Upside Down" when they surrendered to the American forces at Yorktown.


But, here's an interesting article from American Music suggesting that's probably not true (and, therefore, I didn't "know" it for all you epistemologists playing along at home).

Let’s begin with the basic historical question. What proof is there, that the British at Yorktown played a march that anyone living in the eighteenth-century called ["The World Turned Upside Down", hereafter] WTUD? The Yorktown/WTUD story was first published in Major Alexander Garden’s Anecdotes of the American Revolution . . . (Charleston, S. C., 1828), forty-seven years after Yorktown. Garden quoted a letter from Major William Jackson who described the surrender negotiations as though he had been an eyewitness, but didn’t mention that he was in Europe, not Yorktown at the time.

Apparently, in that same letter, Jackson also stated that a French fleet had sailed from Brest for America early in May 1781 at the instigation of his superior officer, Lt. Col. John Laurens. That French fleet was crucial to the victory at Yorktown, but Laurens was in no way responsible for getting it to America. In fact, that French fleet had sailed late in March before Laurens and his secretary, Major Jackson, arrived at Versailles. This shows that Jackson cannot be trusted for details of past events in which he was closely involved, much less for details of something that allegedly happened at Yorktown while he was 3,000 miles away in Europe.

...As published, Jackson’s Yorktown/WTUD story is, at best, a dubious “third-hand account”—Laurens(?) to Jackson to Garden—masquerading as an eyewitness report.

This Yorktown/WTUD story had been ignored for a long time. ... Then in 1881, Henry P. Johnston revived the Yorktown/WTUD story from Garden’s book (with credit), for his excellent Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis... Around that time a few people began to ask about the music so that search has been going on for just over a century.

The first to write that he might have found the WTUD music was John Tasker Howard, a music historian who about 1931 wrote a booklet, The Music of George Washington’s Time for the Bicentennial of Washington’s birth. Howard was a fine scholar who knew a great deal about American classical music and a lot about Stephen Foster’s songs but not much about the other songs of ordinary people and next to nothing about fife and drum music. (This last point is important. The surrender terms specified that the surrendering troops could beat British or German airs. “Beat” applies only to drums.)
...
John Tasker Howard learned that a 1642 English Royalist tune, “When the King Enjoys His Own Again” had once had a song text called “The World Turned Upside Down” associated with it (in 1646). He then suggested that this “King Enjoys” tune might also be the as yet undiscovered WTUD music. Howard didn’t know that WTUD text in no way fitted Yorktown.

Unfortunately for Howard’s guesswork, there is only one known period copy of that 1646 WTUD text; no evidence that it ever was sung; and no sign of any later reprint until 1923 when it appeared in Hyder Rollins's Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides Illustrating the Period of the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660! ...though Howard was tentative in his notes, his published music copy appeared with a bold face “The World Turned Upside Down” title in his booklet. The result is that unless you read Howard’s text carefully you can easily come away with the false notion that the “King Enjoys” music has been proved to be the WTUD music. In fact, the “King Enjoys” music was never known as WTUD until Howard published it that way in 1932!

But, don't let all that stop you from singing along heartily with the English Civil War royalist version (revived by modern Jacobite sympathisers):

Ouch!

Blogger Mark Bretano publishes a correction:

The Archbishop of Canterbury is not Rowan Williamson but Rowan Williams. I suspect I was confusing him with Rowan Atkinson, another comedian.

Via this comment on Seraphic Singles.

Ex Scientia Tridens

A recent panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation on Sea Power in the 21st century. It's also available as an MP3 download.



The full rundown on who the speakers are, etc. is at the Heritage web site. One of the speakers is a blogger at Information Dissemination, where I learned about the panel discussion. It's stuff that's interesting, but not overwhelming. I especially liked their recent post on the Gates/Iran memo, which suggested to me that I probably have not yet achieved a sufficiently high level of deviousness to succeed in a political career.

The Inches That Matter

As much as I've come to loath the New York Times lately, this is one of the more interesting embed pieces I've seen from Afghanistan. There's a long piece on Afghan snipers (including the old assault rifle vs. battle rifle debate) and a companion video of Marines in a firefight. Reporter C.J. Chivers is one to watch.

Some Solzhenitsyn

From In the First Circle:

It was two days before the Nativity of the Mother of God, and they were reciting the litany of the day. It was an inexhaustibly eloquent outpouring of praise for the Virgin, and Yakonov felt for the first time the overwhelming poetic power of such prayers. The canon had been written not by a soulless dogmatist but by some great poet immured in a monastery, and he had been moved not by a furious excess of male hunger for a female body but by the pure rapture that a woman can awake in us.

(p. 169 in the new Harper Perennial edition)

Kids Those Days (1563)

From Canon Law on Marriage by Adolfo N. Dacanáy:

A third problem [with the law Tametsi of the council of Trent enacted in 1563] arose from the fact that the "assistance" of the priest was merely passive, for which reason the so called "surprise marriage" became a problem. [Continued in footnote:] The contracting parties, with a party of their friends would literally break into the priest's residence, rouse him from his sleep, and express their consent to marriage even before the poor pastor realized what transpired. Partly for which reason, the present code prescribes that "only that person who, being present, asks the contracting parties to manifest their consent and in the name of the Church receives it, is understood to assist at a marriage. [C.1108.2] It is also for this reason that the marriage rite should include the minister actively asking for the consent of the contracting parties rather than their merely expressing their consent spontaneously and unasked.

What We Have in Common With Pope Michael

We have discovered recently that we share something with Pope Michael of Kansas (note: not to be confused with Pope Michael I of Alexandria).  One of our recent blog posts recommended (/warned people away from) the web site Booksalefinder.com.  Indeed, Pope Michael agrees with our recommendation:

I recommend finding the library book sales in your area at book sale finder. [Link in the original --SJH] Book sales serve two purposes. Sometimes you find some good books. It is also a good recreation, and we all need to take a break from our work and rest. I also plan my longer trips by way of used book stores. Some thrift shops have proven quite useful.

We recommend, beloved sons, that you keep an eye out for the Pope Michael documentary due to be finished and released soon, it's the work of alumni of the Notre Dame film program.  We viewed the original short film with pleasure and look forward to the full length version.

A tip of the tiara to Three Double Swings for introducing us to the film about His Holiness.

Et tu, Jay?

The new New Criterion arrived in the mail yesterday. I turned first, as I often do to Jay Nordlinger's "New York Chronicle", a recounting of the musical goings-on for in the capital of the world since the last issue. I especially enjoy reading his New Criterion column since the passing of the late and lamented New York Sun, where he was a regular music critic.

I was merrily reading along and came to this:

Over the two nights, we learned once more that [the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam] is an ensemble of great value, an adornment to Holland itself. I had a jarring thought: How will the RCO fare under sharia?

Now, I admit that my first reaction was to laugh out loud. I expect this is the reaction the author expected from New Criterion readers and for which he hoped.

But, (you knew there was a but coming right?) Nordlinger is also the music critic I respect because he's written, "Music dwells in its own realm, unless it is freighted with words that constitute political baggage." And even closer to the bone, he said this an interview:

Sometimes performers inflict politics on the audience, and I of course take that into account when I write – but that happens seldom. I sort of pride myself on not letting political views color any of my music criticism – even in blatantly political works, like, oh, "The Death of Klinghoffer" (the opera by John Adams). There are certain musicians whose politics I despise, but I would never hold that against them, musically. (You would probably want an example – I'll give you Daniel Barenboim, whose views on the Middle East are roughly Arafat's.)

A group like the Kronos Quartet does frankly political things – commissions political works and so on. That you have to deal with.

But, in the main, I'm an art-for-art's-sake guy. (Which is a "conservative" position, incidentally.)

While Nordlinger's aside here isn't really about the music itself, it diverted me from the music which is really the topic of the article. Indeed, I turned back to the front and read this month's "Notes & Comments" column "Islam vs. Islamism" before turning back to Nordlinger.

This isn't, of course, the same as a musician commissioning a "political" work. More like a comment from the podium about how great Obama is while the stagehands reset for the next piece. And that wasn't quite what I was looking for in the "New York Chronicle" on the Ides of April.

The Silent Amen

A great comment from "matthewj" over at MusicaSacra.com:

...this is a personal pet peeve that I work on with my cantors and choir all the time: don't close the books the second the final note has been cut off! Give the hymn a second to sink in. Could you imagine if immediately after reading the last line of the Gospel the Deacon slammed shut the Gospel book as though he was so glad it was all over? Sing the final note, wait a moment, then quietly and discreetly close your book. If the hymn is really a prayer, you don't need to close it the second the prayer is done, as though you're terrified that more prayer might be waiting and ready to come out of that book. Take a moment, a silent Amen if you want to think of it that way, before going on your merry way.

The Times They Have A Changed

Worship at the Church of Our Saviour, where I go on Sundays, looks like this:

So I was amused to see this 1990 article from the New York Times:

The Church of Our Saviour is also presenting an unusual, fully costumed dance performance on Good Friday at 3 P.M. Joseph Alexander will perform Marcel Dupre's difficult organ setting of the Stations of the Cross, and members of the Players Project will perform the choreography created for the work by Anna Sokolow.

That would never fly these days! At three o'clock on Good Friday, we hold the Liturgy of the Lord's Passion. Our Stations are a bit after five and are traditional.

I'm glad I did it...

...but I won't do it again, well not in the same way anyways. After Church and brunch at Docks on Sunday, I walked part of the way home.  I walked up Second Avenue, turned east, checked out the Church of the Holy Family (not as ugly as I expected) and then headed up First Avenue.  Then I walked across the 59th Street Bridge. It's pretty ugly.  While I enjoyed walking across the Brooklyn Bridge last year, this bridge is not much fun at all.  The view is not as good as the view from the Brooklyn Bridge and you're on the lower deck and right next to loud traffic (bottom photo).  Even my good photo (top) was taken through a chain-link fence.  The trip also involved lots of worrying about whether bicycles would hit you or not since they rarely stayed in their lane.  Once I get to Queens, I hopped on the subway to ride the rest of the way home.  I've done two of the bridges now.  I'm thinking about trying to walk over all of the bridges between Manhattan and the rest of the city before the end of the summer.

Rambusch in 1942

In 1942, Popular Science Magazine published a neat article with many photographs showing the process for making stained glass at New York's Rambusch Company. The entire article is available on Google Books:

Catholic New York on Annunciation Mass

Catholic New York, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of New York has published a very nice article about the Feast of the Annunciation Solemn Mass for Life held at Holy Innocents and organized by our Knights of Columbus Council:

Cardinal Egan Presides at Latin Mass for Annunciation

By MARY ANN POUST

The traditional pageantry and sense of reverence that accompany the Latin Mass were on full display at Holy Innocents Church, during a Solemn Mass celebrating the feast of the Annunciation and the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's encyclical "The Gospel of Life."

Cardinal Egan presided and preached at the March 25 Mass, saying in a homily that the occasion marked not just the Annunciation and the encyclical's anniversary, but also the fact that "we have brought ourselves together to celebrate Mass in the extraordinary form...with graciousness and devotion."(more)

This is a (low quality) image of the beautiful photo from the article which I took with my camera phone.

A Dangerous Web Site

Book Sale Finder lists book sales around the country. Just what your local used book addict doesn't need.

Housekeeping

So you may have noticed a trend, I'm trying to post every day. We'll see how long it lasts.

Meanwhile, I just noticed (Google Buzz actually was good for something!) that my friend Paul has got a newish blog going. It's called "Three Double Swings", which as a pretty darn good name. ("Sedes Sapientiae" was already taken; beggars can't be choosers.)

I'll put it up on the sidebar if I ever get around to updating it.

Stop Helping!

Marc Thiessen's latest in the Washington Post is titled, "Pope Benedict is not like Nixon". I know he's responding to Timothy Shriver, but sheesh! These are not the headlines (and I know it may have been written by a copy editor, not by Thiessen himself) we want to read from the defenders of the Pope.

No Horseradish Shortages

If you grow your own. Not something I'd ever even thought of, though it has to be grown somewhere.

This is awesome.

The Hartford Courant has provided a one-stop shop for Red Sox fans living in enemy territory. Their Rivalry Central blog reflects Hartford's divided loyalties and provides a run down on all the news of the day for both the good guys and the bad guys.

Graphic from here.

They don't make 'em like they used to.

An obit ran in the New York Times today for former Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar. Obviously his career was before my time. This sentence impressed me:

Cuellar had a 24-8 record in 1970, when he led A.L. pitchers in victories, complete games (21) and winning percentage (.750) and pitched the Orioles to a World Series championship with a Game 5 victory against the Cincinnati Reds.

It's that bolded part that caught my eye. Nowadays, that's unheard of. Wikipedia says the last pitcher to pitch 20 complete games in a season was Fernando Valenzuela in 1986. Of course, it's nowhere near the top-100 list for complete games in a single season, but the latest season on that list is 1892 and to break into it, you'd have to pitch 51 games in a single season.

Transit Trouble

New Yorkers love to argue about transit. They love to argue about what's the best way to get from point A to point B. Should you take the F or the 7, the 1 or the A. Folks who don't own cars will debate the pluses and minuses of the various highways and expressways in the City.

Hilariously tonight as I was coming home, I saw two people actually get into a shoving match on the street over what train line to take and where to transfer to get to their destination.

Maugham on Beauty

From Somerset Maugham's novel Cakes and Ale:

I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser start than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion. When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian's Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty—sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love—because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: "Qu'est-ce que ça prouve?" was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Pæstum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the æsthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore. (pp. 139-141)

Some Solzhenitsyn

Also from The First Circle:

Rubin could not and never did listen for long. His idea of conversation (and this was how it usually went) was to strew before his friends the intellectual booty captured by his mind. As usual, he was eager to interrupt, but Nerzhin gripped the front of his overalls with five fingers and shook him to prevent him from speaking.

(p. 39)

Arguably...

Bill Simmons writes on Espn.com:

Q: Today is Saturday, aka College Football Day. I am pretty sure I have heard the word "arguably" said at least 15 times on the studio show I am watching. By them saying "Florida is ARGUABLY the best team in college football," are they actually making an argument?
-- Josh, Wilmington, Del.

SG: This is the cousin of the "having said that" argument Seinfeld and Larry David had on the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" season finale. Either you think Florida is the best team in college football or you don't. By declaring the Gators are "arguably" the best, all you're really saying is that someone could argue they are the best -- which makes no sense, because anyone could argue anything and that doesn't have to mean it's true. If I said Dirk Nowitzki was "arguably" washed up, you would argue, "Wait a second -- he's been great this year; that's the dumbest thing you've ever said." And we would be arguing. In other words, you just proved my point. So "arguably" is a word that means nothing other than, "I don't really believe this, but I'm throwing it out anyway."

These Shoes Are Awesome

I love Harris Tweed. People complain about our offices being too cold in the winter. I'm kind of hoping they're as cold as people say so I can break out the tweed jacket.

But here's an alternative for folks with hotter offices: Harris Tweed sneakers from Converse.



hat (shoe?) tip

This Is Not a Good Idea

Reuters reports that the Colonel of the Papal Swiss Guard floated the idea of letting women be guardsmen:

After more than five centuries protecting popes, the Swiss Guard may consider opening the ranks of the world's smallest army to women, its commander said Tuesday.

"I can imagine them for one role or another. Certainly we can think about this," Daniel Anrig, who took over the post late last year, told Italian television program "Studio Aperto."

Not to go all Bishop Williamson on him, but if the Vatican military starts signing up women we will know the idea of the complementarity of the sexes is close to being completely dead.

The Swiss Guard is an actual bodyguard, though you wouldn't know that from the article:

Clad in flamboyant striped uniforms, the guard's role is largely ceremonial and many of its members still carry around a medieval weapon -- the halberd, which is a combination of spear and battle axe.

They wear natty uniforms, but they're fully trained Swiss soldiers who then receive additional training when they arrive at the Vatican. Sure they look smart standing post at the Vatican, but that doesn't mean they're not actually guarding the place. The Pope isn't safe, remember Mehmet Ali Ağca? They're not qualifying on the SIG SG 550 just for the fun of it. The Guard's protective detail role also often gets missed, because they do it in mufti, not in the brightly colored uniforms.



Amazingly, the Swiss Guard has an online store. You can get Swiss Guard Swiss Army Knives and Swiss Guard Swiss Watches (sadly no Chocolate or Cuckoo Clocks.)

Morion tip to Fallen Sparrow

Defiance

Defiance, with actor Daniel Craig playing the leader of a band of Jewish partisans during the Second World War, was a pretty darn good movie. I went to see it in Times Square the weekend it came out. The film really got the crowd in the theater riled up. Lots of New York City Jews and descendants of Jews were there.

There was an incredible (in the unbelievable sense) comment on the movie in the New York Times. Jacob Heilbrunn writes that recent books have "exploited" the Holocaust and films have "infantalize[d]" it. Clearly it's true that falsified memoirs do exploit the Holocaust. But I think Heilbrunn is mistaken in what he writes about Defiance:

By choosing Daniel Craig to play the Jewish partisan commander Tuvia Bielski, complete with white horse, Mr. Zwick turns resistance to the Nazis into an action film, an emotionally glorious moment. As rousing as this vision of Jewish combat may be, it does raise a problem identified by the historian Raul Hilberg in his memoir “The Politics of Memory.”

According to Mr. Hilberg, “when relatively isolated or episodic acts of resistance are represented as typical, a basic characteristic of the German measures is obscured ... the drastic actuality of a relentless killing of men, women and children is mentally transformed into a more familiar picture of a struggle — however unequal — between combatants.”

There's plenty of clarity in the film about the brutality of the Nazi regime and the uneveness of the forces. That knowledge is what makes the movie exciting. But there's a more mistaken notion here. A piece of media doesn't need to tell us everything that is the case. It's just responsible for communicating one story. Indeed, no movie could tell the whole story of the Holocaust with justice. To fault one for not doing so is mistaken.

Now let me add a sketchy theoretical postscript. There's some sort of modern notion at play here: the idea of telling the whole story in one gulp, the idea of the objective unbiased observer (or newspaper, etc.). Indeed, the hope of a complete human understanding of the world without mystery or occlusion. A forgetting that for now "we see through a glass, darkly".

I'm close to just in time to make this less than a month between posts, however, the topic is an older one, but I wanted to get the newspaper clipping off my desk.

The Funniest PSA I've Seen in a While

Politically Incorrect Politically Correct Speech

Mark Steyn catches Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano using an incredible euphemism for terrorism. She says:

In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

But shouldn't that be "person-caused disasters"?

Where's Whit?

On the New Criterion's blog Michael Weiss has a piece on why we need Whit Stillman now. It turns out, Stillman does have a feature in pre-production. Hopefully it won't be vaporware! He was interviewed about it and other things by IFC when Metropolitan was available on Hulu recently (it's not anymore). I'm not overly optimistic; his name has been attached to other projects that haven't gotten made.

Here's a scene from towards the end of The Last Days of Disco:

Thanks for the Link

Union News picked up my post on Jimmy Hoffa and the Secret Ballot. Thanks guys!

Latin vs. Greek

I've been reading G.K. Chesterton's A Short History of England. (The full text is available from the Gutenberg project.) The book includes an interesting section comparing Latin and Greek learning. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to St. Thomas More, but the comparison itself seemd worth sharing.

[St. Thomas More] was an innovator in things more alluring to modern minds than theology; he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pagan. His friend Colet summed up that escape from mediævalism which might be called the passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debates they are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growth of this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog-Latin. It would be nearer the truth to call the mediævals bi-lingual than to call their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a possession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say that he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this Greek spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected the splendid intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages; we can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense of barbaric, or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet of "Chevy Chase." The wealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit, loveliness, and civic heroism, had so recently been revealed to that generation in its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seem a trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of the Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eyes of More we are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over an English landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the level light of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of the Renascence; England passing from the mediæval to the modern. Thus he looked forth, and saw many things and said many things; they were all worthy and many witty; but he noted one thing which is at once a horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over that landscape said: "Sheep are eating men."

.

Who are the new religious intellectuals?

Andrew Sullivan claims:

The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor.

It would help if Sullivan could explain who America's leading public intellectuals are. It's possible that the lack of Christian standout intellectuals is partly because there are few standout intellectuals generally. Intellectual culture is more fragmented than it used to be.

Beyond that, there are leading Christian intellectuals. Here are some of whom Sullivan might have heard who are formidable and accomplished minds and don't live in any particular religious ghetto: Marilynne Robinson (called by Sullivan's paper "world's best writer of prose"), comedian Stephen Colbert, Gary Wills, Kathleen Norris, and Tim Keller.

Card Check Quip

Jimmy Hoffa suggests the ballot box isn't a cornerstone of democratic freedom:

"Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?" Hoffa said. "Town meetings in New England are as democratic as they come, and they don't use the secret ballot. Elections in the Soviet Union were by secret ballot, but those weren't democratic."

Mark Steyn has a great comeback:

The day Jimmy Hoffa shows up at my Town Meeting is the day we move to paper ballots.

Of course, town meeting governments sometimes do use secret ballots either for votes over a certain dollar amount or when a certain percentage of the voters request it.

The debate calls to mind Jill Lepore's outstanding New Yorker article on why the U.S. adopted the Australian Ballot (that is the secret ballot) for most voting in the first place. It happened surprisingly late.

Watch What You Say

Lest anyone be confused, let's give the last word on this one to Leo XIII:

The generally held argument that this sort of struggle washes away, as it were, the stains that calumny or insult has brought upon the honor of citizens surely can deceive no one but a madman. ... It is, to be sure, the desire of revenge that impels passionate and arrogant men to seek satisfaction. God commands all men to love each other in brotherly love and forbids them to ever violate anyone; he condemns revenge as a deadly sin and reserves to himself the right of expiation. If people could restrain their passion and submit to God, they would easily abandon the monstrous custom of dueling.

--Pastoralis Officii, September 12, 1891

A Bad Argument

The NY Post gives four reasons to oppose the Obama mortgage plan. This one is pretty silly:

It sends the wrong message to children about dealing with the consequences of decisions.

Won't somebody please think of the children?!

Indian Food

I'm hoping to get out for some Indian food again soon. This listing from the New York Times of resturaunts offering "More than Tandoori" caught my eye.

The Poet PM

The recently installed Prime Minister of the Belgians, Herman Van Rompuy is a blogger. Amongst the entries on his site are his original haiku (translations below from the WSJ):

Voice
When a friend is dead
You above all miss his voice
But you still hear him

Winter
As the last leaf falls
Naked branches show themselves
Winter shows itself

Hair
Hair blows in the wind
After years there is still wind
Sadly no more hair.

Updates

I've made some updates to the sidebar. It lists some of my friends' blogs and other things I read. I'm hoping to get some substantive posting up over the long weekend. I'm also looking to buy enough bookshelves to let me get rid of the last of my boxes from moving in September. We'll see if either of those actually get done! In the meantime, watch the shared items and status feeds for shorter updates.

I Love This Lede

Tina Brown, like the poor, we have always with us, apparently. Having made the transit from Tatler to Vanity Fair to The New Yorker to the ill-fated Talk, she has at last fetched up, like every other bit of journalistic flotsam, including yours truly, on the Internet.

James Bowman on ArmaVirumque.

A Successful Trip to the Strand

A very successful trip to the Strand Bookstore today. What makes it very successful? I left with fewer books and more money than when I arrived. Well, not very much more money... 16 cents.

I sold the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Handbook, The Leopard, Extreme Measures, and The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time.

In return, I got The Letters of Adam of Perseigne. It's got a 40 page introduction by Thomas Merton.

Cardinal Tettamanzi's Decalogue Against Temptation

1. Do not forget that the devil exists.
2. Do not forget that the devil is a tempter.
3. Do not forget that the devil is very intelligent and astute.
4. Be vigilant concerning your eyes and heart. Be strong in spirit and virtue.
5. Believe firmly in the victory of Christ over the tempter.
6. Remember that Christ makes you a participant in His victory.
7. Listen carefully to the word of God.
8. Be humble and love mortification.
9. Pray without flagging.
10. Love the Lord your God and offer worship to Him only.
(via Sancte Pater)