"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
This Republican wants to switch, not parties but churches. Fine, but has he been willing to take the Baptist plunge? It
Submersion is an issue in some places. A friend of mine has taken to Baptist church-going but hesitates at membership. Her being sprinkled as a child won’t cut it. Question for voters is, how did McCain do it?
Answer is, he didn’t. “I didn’t find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs,” he said. That must be a liberal Baptist church.
Sun-Times, encouraging comment on its breakaway Episcopal church in West Chicago story — here carefully noted but not yet commented on — received and ran this wholly predictable blast at “hypcrisy”:
”We’re a close family,” said Catherine Clark, 66, of Batavia [one of the breakaways].
“Anyone can come here — black, white, gay, straight — and be loved.”
This statement contravenes this congregation’s split from the gay-friendly Episcopal Church, wouldn’t you say? Maybe it’s some of that “hate the sin, love the sinner” [nonsense].
Bob
Well Bob, wherever you are, while defending to the death your right to call something nonsense when you yourself are espousing nonsense, I must disagree.
You can’t be serious about rejecting the idea of hating sin, right? I mean, would you decide you can love ax-murder, or wouldn’t you rather try to love the ax-wielder while hating ax-murder? The latter, I’m sure.
Now, if you reject sodomy in all its parts, why can’t you love the poor, misdirected sodomist?
No, Bob, whatever the failing, the hypocrisy for the Christian would be to love sin along with the sinner or, heaven forbid, hate both. The Christian can’t do either, being unwilling to identify people ineradicably with what they do.
Right?
16th after Pentecost at my old-style mass today. It led Father G. to talk about being humble unto death by crucifixion, as Jesus was: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
G. delivers without humor or self-deprecation or self-building or irony or handly allusions to the day’s headlines or accepted practices. It’s straight homiletics, unadorned and not too long and fitting for the solemnity of the occasion.
He goes into tradition, even to questionable stuff such as St. Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, finding the true cross in the 4th century. So what if questionable? It’s not a history lesson but a homily. You repeat myths for their inspirational value.
In any case, it beats the pedestrian nonsense you hear in most mainstream RC pulpits, delivered too often in cutespeak by holy salesmen. That’s my church-related thought for the day.
Found in a sports-lover’s blog:
Can we please never talk about how dominant Bowman is going to be again?
Dude, everyone can have a crap[py] game.
See Malcolm Kelley vs. Boise St.
Bowman is very good. Just not tonight.
Aw shucks.
Thomas E. Woods explaining why he’s a Catholic libertarian:
It’s not always easy these days to tell which of our two major political parties is the Stupid Party and which the Evil Party. But it remains true, as a conservative wag once said, that from time to time the parties collaborate on something that’s both stupid and evil and call it bipartisanship.
It’s hard to go wrong after a start like that, and he doesn’t. He slams Republicans for doing nothing to scale back government, named Dept. of Ed as plan for doing from Washington what is better done at home.
Dem candidates have nothing but plans for “looting the American population.” He doesn’t blame the Dem voter, however:
I can hardly blame someone who believes we owe our standard of living to labor unions and federal regulation: After hearing no other perspective on American history year after year, what else can the poor fellow be expected to think?
Etc. Beware, he’s a paleo, but like others of that stripe, he’s very stimulating writer — and talker: I heard him weeks back at DePaul and he’s a hot, hot lectern-user, let me tell you.
Who he is, in part: first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for his book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. I’m reading this: he’s wonderful on working over Catholics’ so-called social justice mantra.
He also has New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History plus The Church Confronts Modernity, and, most recently, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask.
For a look at a chapter of his How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization see ThomasEWoods.com.
This is lovely about the putative future first husband, Bill, here contrasted with his wife the candidate: Bill
is an oleaginous people pleaser, a cross between Franklin Roosevelt and the guy looking for a free drink at the end of the bar.
Jonah Goldberg could have stopped right there. We would have known what he meant. However, for people not like us, he added:
If he sidles up to someone who loves Tito Puente, he’ll be quick to say, “Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years!” If he meets someone who hates Tito Puente, he’ll shed a single tear and bite his lip that he just couldn’t get Puente’s albums banned, because of that awful Republican-controlled Congress. And sometimes he’ll please both parties simultaneously. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, when Bill comes to a fork in the road, he takes it. But in his eagerness, you can sometimes catch the duplicity.
I give him an A-minus, which is not bad from a former Jesuit English teacher.
Oh my. Just caught the Jesuit Father James Martin on with Stephen Colbert discussing Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul, and Martin is good! Perfect, I’d say.
“Dark night” as such never comes up, but there is repeated parrying by Martin of Colbert’s repeated reference to Mother T’s “not believing in God,” in view of recent stories based on her just published letters.
“Not feeling his presence” was the gist of Martin’s reply, made with perfect good humor. Look here for it.
Sir Thomas Browne offered advice for the thinking Christian believer in his Religio Medici (1642), along the way dropping memorable observations:
* The wisedom [sic] of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a grosse simplicity admire his workes; those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration. (Part I, Section 13)
I like that “devout and learned admiration.” He is describing a 1950s Jesuit approach to learning and religion and I suppose one of 2000s too.
Speaking of us, our persons:
[We] are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse volume. (I,16)
It’s the “bold and adventurous piece of nature” I have in mind here.
He looks to nature, “that bold and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all . . . the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens,” who have no written Scripture to learn from. Foolish we are, he says, to “disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.” Sounds like Wordsworth here.
As to the works of nature, “God is like a skilful Geometrician” who devises “according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art.” He has in mind God the Artist, operating not in a capricious manner.
So to give all credit to Nature as if it were acting alone is to do it for a hammer or pen for a building or poem. It is to “let our Hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honors of our writings.”
And so it is that “Nature is the art of God.”
Not bad stuff, I say, bespeaking a simple faith which many in our churches embrace. And many’s the preacher who could quote this fellow.
More bad news about Rev. Donald McGuire, the Jesuit, with the provincial, Ed Schmidt, sounding without a clue in this Sun-Times piece by its alert religion writer:
He’s been convicted twice, jailed twice — but his order lets him wear the collar, won’t say if he’ll be kicked out
Moreover, mum’s the word on whether the province has gone to Rome about him to get him literally defrocked.
Big image problem here in his nephew going after him as lawyer for the latest accuser.
“It’s time we took [the collar] away,” said Kevin McGuire, the priest’s nephew and a lawyer for “John Doe 116,” who’s suing the priest and the Jesuits.
Schmidt, however,
“can’t find anything in the Jesuits’ rules” permitting him to ask Donald McGuire to stop dressing as a priest.
A helpless giant, apparently.
Christian Sci Monitor has a wonderful story by a staff writer about his four-year-old adjusting to life in DC once he was helped to discover the DC Metro subway. They had moved from Maine, where the great outdoors were his playground. Now in the DC area, he chafed under restraints of apt. living but learned to love going underground.
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