The Reason Why (They Were Asked To Memorize)

On the 40th anniversary of the gunshots that ended Robert F. Kennedy's life, the New York Times published remembrances by his children: Kerry Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, II and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

This part from Kerry Kennedy was puzzling:

There was no quality my father admired more than courage, save perhaps love. I remember when one night after dinner he picked up the battered poetry book that was always somewhere at his side and read aloud Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” [link not in New York Times story --JRB] We listened aghast to the story of the soldiers whose commander orders them to ride into an ambush. They know they will be slaughtered, but they obey the command anyway. My father then explained that he and my mother were going on a trip and challenged us to memorize the poem while they were away. I did not win that contest, but one famous stanza has remained with me:

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of death
Rode the six hundred.

You may wonder why a father would ask his expanding brood of what would become 11 children to memorize a poem about slaughter and war. I think there were three reasons. He wanted us to share his love of literature and he wanted us to embrace challenges that appear daunting. But most of all, he believed it imperative to question authority, and those who failed that lesson did so at their peril.

But couldn't the reason he had them learn this poem be the idea cited first:

There was no quality my father admired more than courage, save perhaps love.

And the family's history would suggest a fairly literal reading as at least one of the reasons this poem was important to Robert F. Kennedy. Kerry Kennedy was born in 1959. Presumably, she wasn't memorizing Tennyson before she was five years old so figure 1964 at the earliest. At that point both of Robert Kennedy's older brothers had been killed in the service of the U.S. government. Joseph as a Navy pilot during in World War II. John of course as president. His Brother-in-Law the Marquess of Harrington was killed by a sniper during World War II. To me, at least, it suggests at least one possible additional reason the poem resonated.

The Catholic Blogosphere Boswell

It's under-appreciated that Matthew of the Holy Whapping is well on his way to becoming the James Boswell of the Catholic blogosphere (without the illegitimate children, whoring, venereal disease, excessive drinking &c., but with the secret conversion to the Church).

For examples, try this from today. Or this from 2004.

Everything Old Is New Again

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

At a time when many high schools try to put laptops or notebook computers into every student's backpack, Purcell Marian is focusing on desktop computers.

The co-ed Catholic high school will be ripping out its old desktop PCs this summer and replacing them with a system of "thin client" computers - essentially monitors and keyboards that lack hard drives but are linked to a few central servers.

Well it is in Information Technology as it is in Ecclesiastes:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, KJV)

When I first toured my high school in 1993 or '94 they were operating on a server-based computer system. By the time I arrived there in 1996 they had gone to a PC based system (with the exception of applications such as e-mail, which of course still ran off of central servers.) Now it appears schools are going back in that old direction.

(Hat tip to Rich Leonardi at Ten Reasons).

Hopefully my more computer savvy readers will forgive (and correct in the comments) any errors in this post.

Boundless on the Liturgy of the Hours

Boundless is published by Focus on the Family and has lots of great stuff in it, though often from a Protestant perspective, in accord with the organization's Statement of Faith.

Recently they published an article extolling the Liturgy of the Hours!

Be careful with those historic and traditional forms of Christian prayer. They'll lead you away from your Protestantism.

Making the article personally interesting to me, the author, the Rev. Jim Tonkowich has a degree in philosophy from Bates College, which is what I studied, and where I almost studied it. He's also President of the Institute on Relgion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. When I lived in Washington, the guy who was briefly my roommate worked there.

Die Soldaten

After reading this article in the New York Sun about Die Soldaten, due to be perfomed here in New York City next month, I was thinking about getting a ticket.

Despite my nervousness over 12-tone music, there's a dare in music which "is nearly impossible to perform."

Some clips are available on Youtube (the second seems to have the audio and video badly out of sync.) But looking at that second clip, I wonder if it's also music nearly impossible to endure.

Now We're Cooking with Gas

There's no cooking and no gas involved, but posting should be much more regular now that I've got reliable internet at home.

Some Good Comment Spam

So comment spam=Bad for the most part. But this one is so charming, I just had to post it anyways.

Maybe the Dry Cleaners Are Just Sans-culottes

The travails of being a member of the Legion of Honour.

For everyday use, chevaliers and officiers wear a special hue of deep red thread sewn in a thin stripe from the buttonhole to the outer edge of the lapel, while commandeurs wear a silver thread. The thread and other legionnaire pins are sold at a store near the Palais Royal in Paris.

These threads might get some attention in France, but are harder to decode in New York. “Every time I take a suit to the dry cleaners they try to snip them off,” said Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library and a chevalier. “It’s very expensive thread if you have to go all the way to Paris” to get it.

Felix Rohatyn, the financier and former ambassador to France, said his silver commandeur lapel thread also posed problems. “Sometimes if I leave it on and send it to the cleaners, it comes back with the thing off because they thought it was a laundry mark,” he said.

Only France's orders of chivalry could get such sympathetic coverage in the New York Times.

Blowback

Not everyone's happy about Gregory Levey's memoir, Shut Up I'm Talking, about working for the Israeli Mission to the U.N. (I wrote about it before.)

The Jewish Week News reports:

Ben Harris, Levy’s predecessor and now a reporter for JTA, writes in a book review: “It’s not hard to read Levey’s memoir as a colossal act of betrayal.”

Harris writes that Levey portrays Israel’s diplomatic efforts as “ferociously inept and staffed by such insipid characters that no one should ever wonder why Israel seems incapable of convincing the world of the basic justice of its cause.”

But Levey defends his book, saying it was a “humorous take” about his experiences.

“I was just trying to bring light and humor to a situation that too often is taken too seriously,” he said. “It’s my own personal story and all I meant to do was to entertain. Everything in the book is true. Every incident is true, at least as I remember it. None of this should be taken negatively at all.”

The Sunday Serial

I've been a big fan of the New York Times' Sunday Serial since Scott Turow started writing for it in April 2006.

The latest is by Colin Harrison, a writer with whom I was not previously familiar. And from the second paragraph he's showing a virtue of the serial as a form: its ability to be absolutely topical, because of the shorter lead time compared to a book.

While they'd attempted this a bit in the past, I don't believe they've done it to this level of immediacy.

It all began the second Friday in April, a sloppy, cold day. People had finally stopped discussing Eliot Spitzer’s many complex urges. Oil had just hit $112 a barrel, but no one was shocked. People were getting worked up about the Olympics in China. The stock market, so recently up after being so recently down, was down again, and everyone I knew was hoping that the Fed’s quasi-legal voodoo might actually work, so that we wouldn’t all be sucked into a giant, cheap-dollared vortex of recession, inflation and coast-to-coast foreclosures. Then again, many of the folks in my firm had been slyly loading up on gold for months and no doubt counted themselves smart for betting against the American economy. Me, I’d done nothing to prepare for the fiscal apocalypse. All I wanted was to go home and have dinner with Susan.

I haven't liked (and therefore haven't read) the last two Sunday Serials. This one has grabbed me from the beginning.

Top Unread Books On Librarything

The rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and mark yellow books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Mark red those on your to be read list.

(the numbers (x/y) are x=(the number of people who've tagged the book "unread") and y=(the number of times the book has been added to Librarything)

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (236/9048)
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (211/8957)
3. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (183/11981)
4. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (176/10692)
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (162/12144)
6. Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller (158/10893)
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (155/8794)
8. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (152/6662)
9. The Odyssey by Homer (136/10961)
10. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (136/7179)
11. Ulysses by James Joyce (135/6258)
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (132/6269)
13. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (132/5955)
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (124/13771)
15. A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens (124/7463)
16. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco (120/7709)
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (119/7723)
18. The Iliad by Homer (117/8729)
19. Emma by Jane Austen (117/8954)
20. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (115/3827)
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (114/7123)
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (110/4810)
23. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (108/6167)
24. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen (108/18301)
25. The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova (108/6453)
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (106/8595)
27. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (106/13582)
28. The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger (105/11416)
29. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel (105/12699)
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond (104/7497)
31. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand (102/5988)
32. Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco (101/5621)
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker (100/6875)
34. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck (99/7817)
35. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers (97/6454)
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (97/9130)
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (97/5565)
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi (96/4406)
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot (96/4160)
40. Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen (96/8596)
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (95/5172)
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (94/11623)
43. The sound and the fury by William Faulkner (94/5047)
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (93/12425)
45. Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson (92/3526)
46. American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman (92/10333)
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (91/8875)
48. The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (91/7463)
49. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West… by Gregory Maguire (90/8909)
50. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce (89/6649)
51. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (89/7168)
52. Dune by Frank Herbert (89/9225)
53. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie (88/3252)
54. Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift (88/4861)
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (88/5363)
56. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (87/4128) (in abridged version)
    
57. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen (84/5066)
58. The inferno by Dante Alighieri (84/5874)
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (83/4381)
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (83/5798)
61. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (83/4608)
62. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess (83/6757)
63. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (83/4736)
64. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon (83/5963)
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen (82/6481)
66. One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey (82/5916)
67. The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (82/7748)
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (82/4440)
69. Anansi boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman (81/6540)
70. The once and future king by T. H. White (81/4294)
71. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (80/6970)
72. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy (80/5512)
73. A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson (79/6268)
74. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood (78/3978)
75. Dubliners by James Joyce (78/5534)
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (78/5386)
77. Angela's ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt (77/6353)
78. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison (77/5524)
79. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond (76/3825)
80. The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (75/2522)
81. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its… by Truman Capote (75/5478)
82. Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence (73/3169)
83. A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole (73/6063)
84. Les misérables by Victor Hugo (73/4695)
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams (72/6258)
86. The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (72/6369)
87. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (72/6647)
88. Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous (72/6351) (have read previously, but want to read newer Seamus Heaney translation)
    
89. A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway (71/5125)
90. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into… by Robert M. Pirsig (71/5559)
91. The Aeneid by Virgil (71/5060)
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (69/4629)
93. Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence (69/2563)
94. The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (69/4314)
95. The road by Cormac McCarthy (67/5108)
96. Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt (67/4128)
97. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding (67/2133)
98. The book thief by Markus Zusak (67/3556)
99. Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (66/3263)
100. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (66/3048)
101. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (66/3132)
102. Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire (65/5085)
103. Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro (65/4321)
104. The plague by Albert Camus (65/4614)
105. Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy (65/2947)
106. Cold mountain by Charles Frazier (64/4163)
107. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (64/2092)
108. As I lay dying by William Faulkner (64/3766)
109. The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (64/5195)
110. Underworld by Don DeLillo (64/2613)
111. Northanger abbey by Jane Austen (64/4521)
112. The English patient by Michael Ondaatje (64/3334)
113. The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri (63/2834)
114. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (63/2526)
115. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (63/3130)
116. Everything is illuminated : a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (63/4567)
117. The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (62/2052)
118. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (62/2673)
119. A people's history of the United States : 1492-present by Howard Zinn (62/3839)
120. The portrait of a lady by Henry James (62/2894)
121. White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith (62/4320)
122. The confusion by Neal Stephenson (61/2803)
123. Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson (60/3780)
124. The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene (60/2791)
125. The age of innocence by Edith Wharton (60/3128)
126. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (60/4187)
127. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (60/3212)
128. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie (60/3486)
129. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (60/3405)
130. The idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (59/3657)
131. Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story by John Berendt (59/3692)
132. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (59/2386)
133. Swann's way by Marcel Proust (59/2491)
134. For whom the bell tolls by Ernest Hemingway (59/4107)
135. Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (58/2886)
136. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (58/2028)
137. Pattern recognition by William Gibson (58/3226)
138. Invisible man by Ralph Ellison (58/3977)
139. Cloud atlas : a novel by David Mitchell (58/3184)
140. The good earth by Pearl S. Buck (57/3139)
141. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (57/2996)
142. Silas Marner by George Eliot (57/2350)
143. The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan (56/2420)
144. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (56/1748)
145. The thirteenth tale : a novel by Diane Setterfield (56/3620)
146. Naked lunch by William S. Burroughs (55/3291)
147. The system of the world by Neal Stephenson (55/2237)
148. A passage to India by E.M. Forster (55/3192)
149. Cat's eye by Margaret Atwood (55/2859)
150. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (55/2852) (in an abridged version)
     
151. The plot against America by Philip Roth (54/2828)
152. Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace (54/2222)
153. The mill on the Floss by George Eliot (54/2169)
154. Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller (54/2359)
155. The phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (54/2418)
156. Baudolino by Umberto Eco (54/2406)
157. The histories by Herodotus (53/2906)
158. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (53/2159)
159. The known world by Edward P. Jones (53/2066)
160. Notes from the underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (53/2892)
161. The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous (52/3036)
162. Utopia by Thomas More (52/2793)
163. The island of the day before by Umberto Eco (52/2168)
164. The last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (52/2317)
165. Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy (52/2429)
166. The woman in white by Wilkie Collins (51/2484)
167. Paradise lost a poem in twelve books by John Milton (51/2447)
168. Of human bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (50/1994)
169. The mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (50/2189)
170. Son of a witch : a novel by Gregory Maguire (50/2159)
171. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (50/2508)
172. Light in August by William Faulkner (49/2358)
173. Unfinished tales of Numenor and Middle-earth by J.R.R. Tolkien (49/2632)
174. Women in love by D.H. Lawrence (48/1873)
175. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (48/2166)
176. The moonstone by Wilkie Collins (47/2218)
177. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (47/1551)
178. The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake (47/1297)
179. Villette by Charlotte Bronte (47/1977)
180. The return of the native by Thomas Hardy (46/2040)
181. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne (45/2006)
182. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (45/1920)
183. That hideous strength : a modern fairy-tale for grown-ups by C. S. Lewis (44/1938)
184. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an experiment in literary… by Aleksander Solzenitsyn (44/1833)
185. The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas (43/1167)
186. The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams (43/0)
187. The glass bead game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse (42/1818)
188. The mysterious flame of Queen Loana : an illustrated novel by Umberto Eco (41/1651)
189. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (40/1495)
190. The tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (39/1410)
191. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (38/1414)
192. The ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke (37/1103)
193. The ground beneath her feet : a novel by Salman Rushdie (36/1214)
194. Vellum by Hal Duncan (27/493)
195. Freedom & necessity by Steven Brust (26/494)
196. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (19/0)
197. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel (17/0)
198. The Kor'an by Anonymous (11/0)
199. The Mabinogion by Anonymous (8/0)
200. The sketch book of Geoffrey Crayon, gent by Washington Irving (7/0)

(via the LibraryThing Blog and Writing Grandma's Book with an updated list of books from LibraryThing)

Cardinal Dulles and the Holy Father

I hadn't seen this anywhere until today, from Intentional Disciples":

The Pope is going to make a personal visit to Cardinal Avery Dulles in his bedroom while in Dunwoody seminary. It was not on his schedule. Cardinal Dulles is too ill to attend any of the events but no one deserves a private visit more.

Sherry also links to the text of Cardinal Dulles' final McGinley Lecture which he delivered recently.
(via Christ Our Hope, which was kind enough to also link here, and which I have side-barred.)

An Internship Gets Out of Hand

Gregory Levey gets in over his head as an intern for the Israeli Consulate at the United Nations:

On an excruciatingly slow August day in New York City, a resolution was coming up for consideration, apparently, at the U.N. General Assembly. ... "You should go," one of my superiors said to me. "It won't be a big deal. Just take notes." ... I went to the meeting hall and took my seat at Israel's place... Although I didn't recognize him, the Italian representative greeted me and shook my hand. Then he leaned in and said, "So you know, the vote is definitely going to happen today after all."

Check out what happens next...

His book (the above is from a Salon excerpt) defintely looks like an interesting read.

More on the Youth Rally

From For God, For Country and For Yale:

The hosts were drawn from TV personalities and news broadcasters. They either were completely unfunny or unaware. A news anchor from a local TV station turned to the priests and seminarians in the front and asked them on the main microphone if they were going to vote for Obama or Hillary. She was promptly booed by the entire crowd. Suddenly flustered, she tried to laugh it off by saying she respected the separation of Church and State. She was then booed once more by the entire crowd.

He's also been sidebarred.

Not really news

Via the New York Times, Gothamist picks up on the fact that Cardinal Egan may depart soon. It's just Canon Law folks, there's nothing secret about it.

Can. 401 §1. A diocesan bishop who has completed the seventy-fifth year of age is requested to present his resignation from office to the Supreme Pontiff, who will make provision after he has examined all the circumstances.

Tweaking the Paleo-cons

Richard John Neuhaus tweaks the noses of those who would call him a Neo-con.

Permit me a brief word on the several events. The first was not on the official program. It was the news conference on the plane coming over. The first question, not surprisingly, was about the sex abuse crisis. Benedict’s response might be described in other contexts as a preemptive strike. [Emphasis mine.]

Was Maureen Dowd really being clever?

That seems unlikely.

Joseph Bottum notes that Obama's friend is really a professor of education, which is something less than a professor of English. (I prefer my Ayers A.J. actually.)

(direct link to original Dowd column)

I must say I've been enjoying reading Bill Kristol in the Times.

The Cheese Shop

My favorite cheese shop in Manhattan isn't a shop at all... it's this tent at the Tucker Square Greenmarket. The folks who sell there are from the Bobolink Dairy. Tucker Square is named for Richard Tucker. He was a cantor and Metropolitan Opera singer. (And I bet he didn't wave his arm in the air...)

Pope's Visit to New York City

I was lucky to get tickets for the Youth Rally at St. Joseph's Seminary when Pope Benedict visited the city. I took the 1 train up to the end of the line and then the 1 and 7 buses out to Dunwoodie. I walked up Seminary Ave... arriving in the opposite direction from most everyone else who arrived via group buses that stopped at Yonkers Racetrack and then shuttle buses taking them up the hill. This puzzled the police on guard duty, who asked me how I got there...

Seminary Ave. was the Pope's motorcade route, I believe, and yellow ribbons (the Vatican color) were on the trees. So was this hand lettered welcome sign.

I watched most of the events from the top of the hill. This gave me a great view, but it meant I couldn't really hear. Luckily the Pope's great speech was posted online. I followed along on my phone. The wonders of modern technology. I was compensated, also, by being somewhat in the shade. Many of the folks down below got sunburned.

At the end the Pope came up and drove right in front of where I was standing, only about fifteen feet away. This picture was as he drove further on. An exciting (but tiring day.)

Confraternity of St. Peter

I've sent in my membership application for the Confraternity of St. Peter, run by the FSSP.

They also have a cool page just for English-speaking members.

And they have lapel pins... like any excellent organization.

Papal Politics

Excerpt from the Joint Communiqué of President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI
(my emphasis)

The Holy Father and the President devoted considerable time in their discussions to the Middle East, in particular resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict in line with the vision of two states living side-by-side in peace and security, their mutual support for the sovereignty and independence of Lebanon, and their common concern for the situation in Iraq and particularly the precarious state of Christian communities there and elsewhere in the region. The Holy Father and the President expressed hope for an end to violence and for a prompt and comprehensive solution to the crises which afflict the region.

This is probably one of the places in the world the Pope can have the most impact by something other than simple suasion, given the Maronite power in Lebanon. It's interesting to see him flex his muscle there.

Grace Leigh's Blog Is Excellent

Visit it here and it's been added to the sidebar.

Report: Cardinal Levada for New York

So says Kreuz.net, but that seems very unlikely.

For one thing at 71 isn't he too old?

Hayes was 51. Spellman was 49. Cooke was 47. O'Connor was 64. Egan was 68. Though that's not too many data points and they do seem to be trending a bit older. But Spellman and Hayes were both dead by 71.

(via)

The Man Who Saved Winchester Cathedral

He worked underwater six hours a day for five years to shore up the structure's foundation.

(via)

McCain's Loyalty

Slate reprints the touching story of John McCain's loyalty to his friend Morris Udall, even when nearly everyone else had fallen away.

Late, but worth it

The Fall 2007 issue of Modern Age has arrived in what is now the spring of 2008. It was worth the wait though.

The issue, presumably the last of the 50th anniversary issues is bursting with interesting articles. The theme of the issue is "Conservative Reflections on Neglected Questions and Ignored Problems".

So far I've read with interest James Kurth on "The Tragic Death of the Hapsburg Empire" and Catesby Leigh on "Building More Value into the World We Build". The latter, describing conservative approaches to architecture, was an excellent complement to Dino Marcantonio's recent lecture on traditional Catholic architecture.

The Distortion of a Religious Tradition

That's what one Hindu priest calls "partner yoga" describing it (and the American practice of yoga generally with an interesting metaphor.

Imagine you go into a Catholic Church and there's something called genuflection, where you go down on one knee," he said. "What if a person comes out of the ceremony -- which is supposed to be about their relationship with God -- and they say, wow, my legs feel a little sore! And they go home and open up a shop and have people do genuflection for an hour to disco music. And partner genuflection, at that! It's completely taking it out of context.

He Must Have Weighed the Same as a Duck

Church of England minister resigns his license (roughly equivalent to being suspended in RC terms, I believe) after being exposed as a witch.

Traditional Candlemass in New York City

The following has been passed to me for publicity.

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Traditional Candlemass

On February 2, there will be a (traditional) Solemn Mass at Our Lady
of Good Counsel. The church is located at 230 East 90th Street,
between 2nd & 3rd Ave's.

The traditional blessing of candles will start at 1pm and it will be
followed by a procession inside the church and then the Solemn Mass.

Fr. Richard Trezza [SJH: I believe he is OFM] will be the Celebrant,
Fr. Matthew Talarico, ICK will be the Deacon and Fr. James Miara [SJH:
Diocesan] will be the Subdeacon.

All are invited and encouraged to attend.

Please, share this information with people who might be interested in
attending this Mass.

R.I.P Bobby Fischer
1943-2008

Cold war hero... fugitive from justice... ex-American citizen... troubled soul. Requiescat in Pace.

(Photo Source: Chris Lott via Flikr under a Creative Commons License)

Liturgy and Nostalgia

Nathanial Peters has a good blog post at First Things.

But why should it be consider nostalgia at all when young people prefer the older form of the Mass? As the Archbishop points out, they didn't experience it "back in the day". So why think that is the cause of their desire for it now?

To the broader question, why this (non-nostalgic) desire for the old rite. The preference comes because they have experienced it. It's celebrated all over the United States, in Europe, and increasingly in other places. Almost anyone who wants to can now find celebrations in the larger cities of the.

With respect to the Archbishop, I know my liturgical formation isn't finished. And if his exposure to the old Mass ceased at age 23, I bet his wasn't finished then either. If there had been a real option for him to retain the old Mass even his opinions might have been formed differently.

Finally this quote shows that he's seriously out of touch:

It’s true that many times there were exaggerations, which happened for the most part in a time when we could say there was disorder in the church.

If the Archbishop visits Mr. Gillibrand's website he'll see that the disorder hasn't ceased everywhere. I've seen this kind of "celebration" myself in the U.S.

Support for Huckabee

No, it's not THAT Fulton Sheen. It's Michigan State Rep. Fulton Sheen.

(Public domain photo from the Library of Congress via Wikipedia. Taken 1952, by Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer.)

The Winter Antiques Show

... opens at the 7th Regiment Armory today. I hope to check it out while it's in town.

There's a writeup in the New York Sun.

Visiting the Met


A successful visit to the Met. Ghiberti's doors for the Florence baptistery, or rather, some of the panels, were on display. It was the last day for the exhibit and that was the big reason for the visit.

They're excellent, but I was a bit frustrated with the lack of technical detail available to those of us not willing to buy the catalogue. How exactly do lasers clean the doors? The New Criterion essay summed up the exhibit well.

I also checked out the reinstalled Wrightsman Galleries, pre-revolution french period rooms. They're reviewed here.

I went to middle school and high school in Deerfield, Mass., which is a museum town as well as a town with several private schools... There are around 2-dozen museum houses there (sorta like Williamsburg, but w/o the living history interpretation). So I've long been interested in this sort of thing. And (as it should be considering that it's the Met, it was well done.

But I was most excited by the fact that Hubert Robert's landscapes for the Chateau de Bagatelle of the Comte d'Artois are back on display in these galleries.

I saw these when they were briefly on display a while back. Check out this article if you don't know the story of the Chateau.

You could design, build and decorate a Chateau (a Church) in 65 days right, Matthew?

Images:
"Ghiberti's doors"
Picture by "unertlkm"
Used under a Creative Commons License

The Bathing Pool
Hubert Robert (French, 1733–1808)
Oil on canvas; 68 3/4 x 48 3/4 in. (174.6 x 123.8 cm)
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.29)
The Metropolitan Museum

Rick Brookheiser on Obama on "The Corner":

...a man who could not have used certain restrooms forty years ago is in the center ring, not as a freak in the manner of Alberto Fujimori or Sonia Gandhi, nor even as a faction fighter in the style of Jesse Jackson, but as a real player. One of our great national sins is being obliterated, as the years pass, by the virtues of our national system. I don't agree with Obama and I don't particularly like him, but I am proud of this moment.

Interestingly, Obama himself is a marginal black man—half white, half Kenyan—but that is often the way ethnic gains are made in American politics. The first Irish and Italian mayors of New York, Richard Croker and Fiorello LaGuardia, were Protestants. And Harry Golden said of Barry Goldwater, that he always knew the first Jew to be president would be Episcopalian.

Halo Three reviewed in Slate:

More important, there are two new modes that will help the game retain an NFL-like parity six months or a year from now.

The first is the "theater," where gamers can watch their most recent online matches to see what they did wrong and, more important, to see what other gamers did right. That's right: Halo 3 now has game film. (It's only a matter of time before Bill Belichick becomes a Halo 3 master.) Don't understand why you got killed 75 times in the first five minutes of an online skirmish? Flip on the theater mode to watch the game from your opponents' perspective, to see how they beat you.

I'm art...

Well, that's assuming this is art, I suppose.

(Now the philosopher in me is demanding that I point out that, even if it is art, I'm not art... I'm in art or something.)

George Will on the Closing of Antioch College:

During the campus convulsions of the late 1960s, when rebellion against any authority was considered obedience to every virtue, the film "To Die in Madrid," a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, was shown at a small liberal arts college famous for, and vain about, its dedication to all things progressive. When the film's narrator intoned, "The rebels advanced on Madrid," the students, who adored rebels and were innocent of information, cheered. Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of liberalism and apostles of social improvement that it had not found time for the tiresome task of teaching them tedious facts, such as that the rebels in Spain were Franco's fascists.

Or perhaps Andrew Cusack had time-traveled with some friends and was sitting in the audience.

There was (is?) a branch of Antioch in my hometown... Until this round of articles about the closing came out I never understood how they could pack a whole university into an office building.

Hat tip to the Cranky Professor.

News From Russia
An interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Meanwhile, Russian news agency Interfax reports:

"Meeting between Pope Benedict and Patriarch Alexy becoming more likely - Vatican official"

Company Rents Pets to Animal Lovers
I don't remember who I talked about it with, but I thought of such a thing myself a few months back.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - ...a company that contracts out dogs by the day to urbanites without the time or space to care for a pet full-time.

Marlena Cervantes, founder of FlexPetz, bristles when people refer to her five-month-old business as a rent-a-pet service. She prefers the term "shared pet ownership," explaining the concept is more akin to a vacation time share ... than a trip to the video store.

FlexPetz is currently available in Los Angeles and San Diego... She plans to open new locations in ... New York in September...

Interesting thought
A commenter at The New Liturgical Movement writes:

Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of a development similar to that which in the Byzantine Tradition led to the Liturgies of St John Chrysostom and St Basil the Great.
--Fr Tito

Oratorians in the Archdiocese of New York
Their congregation has just gotten final approval.

There Are Liturgical Mistakes...
...and hillarious liturgical mistakes.

Rich Leonardi's son was accidently baptized "Benedict Arnold Leonardi."

Point Break, Best and Worst in a Genre:

If Big Wednesday is the most serious surf film ever made, Katherine Bigelow's Point Break (1991) is surf cinema's biggest missed opportunity. Roughly based on Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn's acclaimed "surf-noir" novel, Point Break—with a studio budget and an able director—could have nailed the visual splendor of surf and surfing in the same way it nails its sky diving sequences. (Point Break, weirdly, is the best sky diving movie ever.)

From Slate

How To Read the NYT Fast
The Jack Shafer method, from Slate:

When time allows only a quick lap of the news, I navigate my broadsheets thusly: I read the hed, the lede, and the first couple of paragraphs of every story that appeals to me with the same care the reporters and editors assembled them, which is to say with high concentration. I then read the piece through to the first quoted source and scan the rest until I encounter a paragraph whose topic sentence promises additional novel information. The longer the article, the more likely I am to shorten the scanning process by jumping to the three-quarters mark, where I often find something close to the beginning of a brand-new—but related—story. Then I speed-read to the finish.

Catholic Films:

This Cornell Society for a Good Time post inspires me to post about another excellent movie with Catholic elements in the theaters, at least here in New York.

"Strike" or "Strajk" or "Die Heldin von Danzig" is a film about the founding of Solidarity in Poland.

The film, in Polish with English subtitles, is a German and Polish co-production.

It's a fictionalized version of the story of Anna Walentynowicz whose firing sparked a Lenin Shipyard strike that led to the founding of the Solidarity movement.

It makes much of the inspirational power of His Holiness John Paul II for Polish Catholics.

A review is here.

Our Pastor's New Book:
I haven't read it yet, but I really liked one of his earlier books, The Cure D'Ars Today: St John Vianney.

(And of course I go to Our Saviour most Sundays and often during the week to hear his sermons and participate in the Mass he celebrates.)

From The Brothers Karamazov:
"Some will say, perhaps, that Alyosha was slow, undeveloped, had not finished his studies and so on. That he had not finished his studies is true, but to say that he was slow or stupid would be a great injustice. I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at the time it alone struck him and presented him all at once with the whole ideal way out for his soul struggling from darkness to light. Add to this that he was partly a young man of our time--that is, honest by nature demanding the truth seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold our strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish--such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them."
pg. 26, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Rhode Island Bishop slams Rudy
The article is politically and theologically informed and also well written.

Is there anything Google can't buy?

Google buys Feedburner.

File this under "Missing the point"
Un-fried "Latka Crisps".

Gotta Watch Out For Those Baseball Questions:

But perhaps nothing was so tortured during the show as its ending, when the governor was asked how he could be both a Red Sox and Yankees fan. This has no real political import, but fans engaged in the famous rivalry are so passionate in their hatred for their opponents that it's impossible that anyone could be true booster of both teams. Richardson's answer (too lengthy and unwieldy to replicate here) was a triple threat: implausible, shifty, and likely to please no one.

From Slate

The New French Foreign Minister
Christopher Hitchens says he'll vouch for this socialist's neo-conservative bona fides

Had the Socialist Party won the election, it is highly unlikely that such a distinguished socialist would ever have been allowed through the doors of the Quai d'Orsay. (Yes, comrades, history actually is dialectical and paradoxical.) In the present climate of the United States, a man like Kouchner would be regarded as a neoconservative. He was a prominent figure in the leftist rebellion of 1968, before breaking with some of his earlier illusions and opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—the true and original source of many of our woes in the Islamic world. The group he co-founded—Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières—was a pioneer in the highly necessary proclamation that left politics should always be anti-totalitarian.

from Slate

Richard Posner likes Century Schoolbook.

And why one artist likes Palatino (Paltino Linotype is the font for this page, but only if your computer has it installed...)

From Slate.

Hermits Alive!

The Camaldolese Hermits of Monte Corona in Ohio now have a website!

Obviously there's some cleaning up to be done here, but on a time when I can investigate the css/html more...

Posting this so I can link to it for the new banner....

The Hapsburgs

A leftist critic, A.J. P. Taylor, has described the family that had once ruled over much of Central Europe (and for a while the Spanish empire) as follows: “While other dynasties are episodes in the histories of nations, for the Habsburgs nations are episodes in a family history.”

(Via Taki's Top Drawer)

This had me chuckling:

These young folks from Cornell are at their marriage preparation class (emphasis mine):

This whole while I was simply watching the spectacle unfold with a polite and attentive face, while the Doctor scribbled furiously on his note pad. I was quite taken with the general hilarity of this situation, in which my poor fiancé, himself a trained moral philosopher, was forced into being “instructed” in philosophy by this thoroughly confused, thoroughly modernist little man. He couldn’t stay silent forever, though, because we were eventually prodded for input. What were our “values?”

The Doctor explained, in a somewhat strained tone, that the concept of a “value” was itself a modernist (and thoroughly unCatholic) idea. I couldn’t faithfully capture the whole of his brief lecture, but my description of the session thus far should be sufficient to illustrate just how wrongheaded (in a truly pernicious way, though these poor souls obviously could not be accused of any deliberate malice) their presentation really was. They were advising us to go through life juggling weighing the pros and cons of every decision according to the guiding question, “What is important to me?” They wouldn’t presume to tell us the right way to live; rather, they wanted to help us break down the different possibilities, so that we could ponder what sort of life might suit us best. Their closest attempt at Catholicity was to ask, “What were Jesus’ values?” Of course they gave the sorts of soft, fuzzy answers that one would expect out of weak-minded liberals. It seems to me more correct to say: Jesus didn’t have any “values.” He simply lived his life in perfect obedience to the will of the Father.

Of course the couple understood the Doctor’s speech not at all. The only thing they managed to surmise was that he didn’t believe in values, from which they seemed to conclude that he was some sort of nihilist. With every subsequent activity the woman would begin, regretfully, with, “Well, this will be difficult for people who don’t believe in values…” and she’d glace at the Doctor.

The Pope (via John Allen) On Reforming the Church:

In São Paulo Friday morning, Benedict insisted that the saints of our epoch are the "true reformers," quoting his own homily during his first foreign trip in Cologne, Germany: "Only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come."

Yes, the graphics have dissapeared. I'll get around to fixing that.

Interesting comments from the Pope

Especially interesting are his comments on the Synod document, which he says will be signed soon, being a diocesan bishop besides being Pope, and on prayer.

Excerpts and link to more here.

Catholic Blog Awards

The Catholic Blog Awards have been announced. I registered, but didn't vote. The huge list of nominees (many of whom I wasn't familiar with) was just too daunting. But it looks like every single one of the categories is topped by an excellent winner.

Perhaps the one exception is "priest blog". I love WDTPRS, but they're are just so many good possibilities.

Sensible advice from "Dear Prudence"

To ease your burden of coming up with a theme for each of your "at least" five baby showers, cancel at least four of them.

OK, Steve wins the prize...

At the top of each of your posts is an empty div tag. Inside that tag is a style attribute with a clear: both rule.

That is what is causing the problem.

Turns out that in Blogger under Settings --> Formatting there is a setting for "Enable float alignment".

That setting "Allows image and text alignment options using the <div clear:both> tag. (Choose "No" if you are having post layout problems.)"

It was turned on, now it's turned off and things work right again.

Thanks, Steve.