Trivia that matter
Can you work out a seating arrangement for a banquet in Heaven?
If we weren’t limited to 4 dimensions… How about a “Hilbert table” with as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest?
Texan JMSmith:
I do rather hope that each of the many mansions of which Christ spoke is surrounded by parklands so broad that eternity will not suffice to ramble to their ends.
The definitive Catholic psychedelic synth folk tune.
I suspect atheist screeds have done less harm to God’s reputation than mincing mummery, unctuous prayer, and the imbecile literalism of almost all contemporary Christian art.
Because of Catholicism’s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren’t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.
Many of the characters in Converts, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that “The ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree”; Maurice Baring was “less interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments” and declared that “candles and incense never did . . . affect me”; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a “rational” approach to his faith, “remarkable for a lack of emotion”; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was “dogmatic rather than emotional.”
It’s just a bit chilly in Alaska today in the Fairbanks area. North Pole, by the way, is where you find the homes of both Santa Claus and St. Nicholas.
The cat is Balsa, named for the protagonist of Seirei no Moribito.
I sometimes wonder whether the “sign of peace” routine wasn’t contrived by some hardened enemy of the Church.
On Frank Meyer:
In his last illness, Meyer struggled with the momentous decision of whether to convert to Catholicism. Bill [Buckley] was a tireless emissary between Meyer and various confidantes. Bill reports that Meyer, from his bed of woe, complained that “the only remaining intellectual obstacle to his conversion was the collectivist implication lurking in the formulation ‘the communion of saints’ in the Apostles’ Creed.”
I’m sufficiently annoyed to facetiously propose an alternative: that a proper Christian education should be centered on abstract algebra (groups, rings, vector spaces, etc). Reasons:
- Deep exposure to math inclines students to the true philosophy: Platonism. Humanities pay too much attention to words, which inclines to nominalism.
- Ability to manipulate people (rhetoric) has greater moral hazard than ability to manipulate things.
- Unlike the classics, modern math has large contributions from Christians (Euler, Cauchy, Riemann, Cantor, etc).
- Scientists and engineers are hard-working nerds. Writers and artists are bohemian degenerates.
- Math does a better job than rhetoric or grammar in promoting clear thinking and rigorous reasoning. In math, one can’t win arguments by manipulating the meanings of words. True, classical students might study Euclid, which has the virtue of being proof-based. However, it lacks the breadth and profundity of modern mathematics, its training in abstraction, the recognition of identical structure in disparate systems, exposure to deep concepts like generators, homomorphisms, cosets, etc.
- The level of memorization required for a Latin-based education is an unnecessary barrier that math-based education evades.
- Math is God’s language.
The day after tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Eight years ago Amy Welborn took a page from Lileks and published a Gallery of Regrettable Lenten Food. The bag of fish sticks in the freezer looks more appetizing now.
I have yet to hear a sermon that was too short.
“Pre-Vatican II” includes everyone from the Hildegard of Bingen to Teresa of Avila to Edith Stein. Heck, it includes most of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton’s writings. “Pre-Vatican II” includes the life, witness and prayers of St. Francis of Assisi. “Pre-Vatican II” includes, well, every single Catholic thing that emerged before 1962, I guess.
Memo to Clayton Barnett: Steven’s discussion of Lain can be found here.
Stuff salvaged from posts I never published.
Maus:
In the 21st century, we have reached the point where Pius X’s observation that modernism is the synthesis of all heresies is beyond dispute. We’ve got Arian’s denial of Christ’s divine nature (I’m spiritual, not religious); Pelegian’s salvation by human effort (CRT, taking the vaxx jab); gnosticism (trust the experts because they F*cking Love Science™); and a soupçon of Donatism (evil white cis-het men are evil just like those icky pedo priests). It’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
From time to time a debate breaks out in outsider politics between those who prefer meta politics and those who prefer activism. The former takes the view that it is ideas that drive history so getting the ideas right is the priority. The latter notes that we live in the real world not the world of ideas. Keeping the groomers out of the schools, for example, is what matters now. You are not going to talk them out of it so you have to get involved in order to solve the immediate problem
This is a debate that has haunted conservative politics and it was something that haunted radical politics until the 20th century. Conservatives never solved the problem and it eventually ruined them. The reason is they committed to participating in a political system that leaves no room for conservative ideas. Once you sign onto the long list of left-wing taboos and mob rule, there is nothing worth defending. Conservatives became the tax collectors of liberal democracy.
Another non-surprising discovery is that [Bätzing] describes himself as a “conservative.” This is so if we take the word in its modern connotation as one who surrenders, gracefully, to the left. Surrender is precisely what he wants, saying he wants the Church to “change.”
I had planned to post a selection of epigrams for this year’s post-a-favorite-poem entry today, but Maureen Mullarkey’s commentary yesterday on Chicago finger food as served by Cardinal Cupich calls for more Lewis Carroll. So, here’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright —
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done —
‘It’s very rude of him,’ she said,
‘To come and spoil the fun.’
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead —
There were no birds to fly.
Here’s an old shape-note hymn, “Star in the East” or “Brightest and Best,” from William Walker’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. It’s actually an Epiphany hymn, but since “We Three Kings” is inescapable at this time of year, I figured I can post it for the Christmas season.
Southern Harmony is an interesting historical document, by the way. While it contains much worthwhile music, it also has such curiosities as “The Romish Lady.”
There was a Romish Lady brought up in Popery,
Her mother always taught her the priest she must obey;
O pardon me, dear mother, I humbly pray thee now
For unto these false idols I can no longer bow.Assisted by her handmaid, a Bible she conceal’d,
And there she gain’d instructions, till God his love reveal’d;
No more she prostrates herself to pictures deck’d with gold.
But soon she was betray’d….
Betrayed by her mother, she is thrown into a dungeon by priests, brought before the Pope and condemned to be burnt to death. Such was the state of ecumenism in the 19th-century United States.
There is extensive coverage of Fr. Emil J. Kapaun’s return to Kansas here. His tomb is in the Wichita cathedral, which for many years was my parish church.
There’s quite a bit more about Fr. Kapaun here.
Incidentally, the first high school I did time in1 was named for Chaplain Kapaun, but don’t hold that against him.
The fact that our gal Flannery is repeatedly castigated and critiqued for “racism” when….hoo boy ….have you read Hemingway lately?
Let me put it this way. I would have no problem teaching any work of O’Connor – even a story with a title like “The Artificial Nigger” to any group of students, while I would give serious pause to teaching something like The Killers or The Battler.
What’s the difference? Well, if you are agonizing over whether or not O’Connor was racist, you should take a look at those two stories, compare and contrast. In Hemingway, his narrators regularly describe and characterize Black characters by the n-word, and describe their characteristics in those terms – as qualities or quirks specific to Black people – but not called Black. In O’Connor, her characters may think racist thoughts and treat Black people poorly…because that’s what those characters would do. And racist characters are there, not just because they were in her world and she was committed to accuracy, but because they are, and are ultimately understood as, one more specimen of that thing called Pride.
It doesn’t make it super-easy to have students encounter these words and descriptions and views, but at least in O’Connor they are presented as expressions of specific characters living in a specific place. Hemingway, being a bit more abstracted from time and place in many of his stories, has his mostly objective narrators describe Black characters in racist, stereotypical terms.
In O’Connor’s world, racism exists in the world, but it is obviously a damaged part of a fallen world. In Hemingway, racist attitudes are just The Way It Is, no problem, no argument, no tension.
(Via Dale Price.)
So Flannery O’Connor was an irredeemable racist and must be expunged from our culture? Here’s “Revelation,” one of her last stories. Read it, and judge for yourself.
