Category: Blithe Spirit

A Catholic musician asks, How is our music?

Liturgical music is “too often merely serviceable, barely imaginative, and almost entirely a matter of patching things through from one cadence to the next.”

As Catholics, basically, we’ve already won the art contest. Any historical survey of visual or musical art makes it perfectly clear that the Church is peerless. In order to maintain “top chef” status, the Church in its art simply has to basically not ruin its own reputation.

It is worth asking whether we are currently meeting the standards that have been set over the two millennia. How is our drawing in the churches, for example? How is our sculpture? Do our churches show a concern for proportion and shape? How are we doing with verbal art, in hymnody?

And of course, how is our music?

She’s not looking to blame anyone, but says ” our devotion to God should involve the highest aspirations possible, particularly in our art.”

When art is excellent,she says, it “has the power to make one Christian’s devotion accessible to another..”

All based on the idea that worship should energize and comfort us.

Nanny of the Week: Is the minimum wage a nanny state policy? – Watchdog.org

Seattle makes the coveted $15 minimum wage, people lose jobs.

Welcome to the nanny state, folks. How so? What are nany-state laws anyhow?

First, they are deliberately intended to limit individual freedom by making certain choices unlawful, even when individuals who make those choices are not committing a crime or otherwise threatening anyone else’s rights to life and property.

Second, even though the laws are promised to be for the benefit of society as a whole, they almost always have unintended consequences that go far beyond the behavior they’re intended to prevent or make mandatory.

The minimum wage fits squarely inside both categories

And this is without reference to how they screw up the economy, especially for people who need lower (fair) prices and jobs most.

Tsk, tsk.

Supreme pontiff stumbles with “demagogic” commentary

Pope Francis has those old global-warming blues.

Some Catholics are criticizing Pope Francis for his stated positions on environmental issues. On April 28, a Vatican conference on environment and migration commenced that brought scores of business people, activists, and Catholic officials to the ancient city.
Among them is Jeffrey Sachs – a wealthy and influential economist who has sometimes been accused of leftist leanings.Also on hand is UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who had a private meeting with the pontiff.
The conference and Pope Francis’s previous statements on the environment inspired the ire, for instance, of writer Maureen Mullarkey.
Writing online in the journal ‘First Things,’ Mullarkey said “Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologised propaganda.”
What we can hear from the Pope I can imagine hearing in a Jesuit rec room of many decades ago. Batting around ideas. giving each other what-for.
Anyhow, there’s more more more here  . . .

George Soros’s Tax Bill – Bloomberg Business

Any story about this lion of the left gets my attention, espcially ones (the few) that show his money-mad hypocrisy.

George Soros likes to say the rich should pay more taxes. A substantial part of his wealth, though, comes from delaying them. While building a record as one of the world’s greatest investors, the 84-year-old billionaire used a loophole that allowed him to defer taxes on fees paid by clients and reinvest them in his fund, where they continued to grow tax-free. At the end of 2013, Soros—through Soros Fund Management—had amassed $13.3 billion through the use of deferrals, according to Irish regulatory filings by Soros.

They are a crafty bunch.