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.

=============

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.