From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...

Is the Belief in Global Warming a Secular Religion?

2009-12-04T10:48:00.002-05:00

Fr. Dwight Longenecker explains why yes, and I agree.

Obama's Afghanistan speech

2009-12-04T08:15:00.002-05:00

Peggy Noonan compliments it overall.

Does how a Democratic president who campaigned as the voice of change admit that his predecessor was right? How does a liberal Democrat lead a nation at war without the support or even the understanding of his base?

St. Ambrose, Benedict XVI, the Anglican initiative, and the Bishop of Calgary

2009-12-02T08:26:00.002-05:00

Great piece by Steve Kellmeyer. It is a work of homiletic art.

"...that they all may be one"

2009-11-29T20:41:00.002-05:00

Nice piece on the Eucharist and Christian unity by Fr. Christopher George Phillips. He makes an analogy of Eucharist and marriage that I think is apt, though it is strong.

"He Can't Take Another Bow"

2009-11-28T18:23:00.008-05:00

Peggy Noonan discusses the consequences when the President of the U.S. and leader of the free world fails to understand that he represents the world's greatest democratic republic.

Caldey Island- one of the "Thin Places"

2009-11-26T07:32:00.005-05:00

I presume that those who find this blog want to escape the corruptions of modernity and find sustenance in what T.S. Eliot called "The Permanent Things."

Here is an escape, even if all you can afford today is an hour with an internet connection: Caldey Island, Wales.

From the website:

Caldey Island lies cradled in the magnificent South Pembrokeshire coastline on the western fringes of Wales. It is one of Britain's holy islands. The Cistercian monks of Caldey continue a tradition which began there in Celtic times. More than a thousand years of prayer and quiet living have made this remote and beautiful island a haven of tranquillity and peace....

Caldey Abbey was built in 1910 by Anglican Benedictine monks who came to the Island in 1906. Under the direction of Abbot Aelred Carlyle, the building was designed by Penarth architect John Coates-Carter in traditional Italianate style....

The Anglican Community converted to Roman Catholicism in 1913 and sold the Abbey to monks of the Cistercian Order in 1926. They took up residence in 1929 and still occupy Caldey Abbey today....

Thanksgiving at Saint Augustine, Florida in 1565

2009-11-26T07:26:00.003-05:00

Any time people gather in peace to break bread and give thanks, that's good. Taylor Marshall discusses such an event, though it is out of the standard narrative of America's origins in New England with a little of Virginia thrown in. I love Thanksgiving, whether I'm north or south, and I loved it before I became a Catholic.

Catechism for Communicants

2009-11-25T07:39:00.003-05:00

A nice post by a priest and friar about reverence and proper form when receiving communion.

He is reluctant to do it, but little bits of irreverence add up:

'I really enjoy the kids, and I especially appreciate the preaching challenge at these Masses. Today I added an extra little homily. Normally I abhor the giving of instructions during Mass, but I just had to go over how to receive Holy Communion with the kids. We are blessed with some fine and diligent young people, but in my experience some of them receive Communion a little carelessly. I often surprise some kid who wasn't expecting me to 'go for the tongue' because they are holding their hands so low, 'do the pincers,' or present their hands with jacket sleeves over them. Inevitably I end up chasing some child or other down the aisle to make sure he has consumed the Host. Since this is embarrassing for the poor kid, and a little distracting for me--although I love having the reputation as a priest who does it when necessary--I wanted to give a little practical catechesis on being a good communicant at the end of my homily.'

The Mass is what we are, were, and will be, so it is more than important to receive the Eucharist properly.

"Silence is like a sea on which our thoughts sail."

2009-11-24T22:43:00.003-05:00

Saint Rafael Arnaiz Baron (1911-1938) died young, but gladly gave up his worldly concerns to become a Cistercian monk at the Monastery of San Isidoro de Duenas. He died during the Spanish Civil War and was canonized in 2009.

He wrote about silence:

30th July 1936

The Cistercian life is a life of silence; it is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the Cistercian monk finds in it his motive for meditation, or rather; that silence is a medium …. the place where the spiritual life unfolds.

Silence is like a sea on which our thoughts sail.

And as the sea is crossed by all kinds of boats, sometimes small sloops, at other times by proud and majestic ships, so the sea of our silence is also populated sometimes by small schooners with white sails, at other times by scrubby fishing boats that send up a lot of smoke, and at other times by trans-oceanic liners that sail serenely and majestically through the waters.

The silent life can very well be compared to the sea, a calm and tranquil sea. The soul in silence is like the sea, unruffled by the slightest breeze. Through this silent soul sail thoughts of God. The more silence, the more the peace and serenity enable it to be in the presence of God.

The Trappist is in love with his silence, as is the sailor with the sea.

But in life all is not peace. The pilot often struggles through tempestuous waters. These waters are not always still and sometimes grow weary of being calm, and roar, and hurl themselves furiously against the shores, as if they were the cause of its ill humour. So it happens with the soul that, being quiet in God, finds its peace disturbed by failures in silence.

The monk, when breaking silence, involuntarily speaks of worldly things, of his memories, of his tastes and desires... of himself. And so the sea is agitated.

Ah, if he spoke only of God... but even then, it is so difficult to avoid offending God with the tongue! Let us be silent then we Cistercian monks. We came to the monastery to seek God in the silence of our souls... let us be silent, and let us not agitate the waters of our recollections, of our passions, of our self-love.

Let us be silent, when we are being consoled by the divine Jesus, as well as when we are alone with our Cross.

Let us be silent. Let us keep silence, for in it we will find, if we know how to look for it, our treasure, which is God.

Let us then love silence, as the sailor loves the sea.

Let us pull away from the shore... let us sail out to sea, where we no longer see land and the horizon merges with the sky; let us raise our eyes to the heights where God is; and then we will see that our peace in the world grows to the degree that our silence does, and it will be complete when it is as wide as the seas that cover the earth.

The Virgin Mary star that guides seamen, will lead us and enlighten us when we enter the night of our solitudes.

The life of the Cistercian monk is... love of God, love of Mary and silence among men.

More here and here.

Bl. Miguel Pro

2009-11-24T12:29:00.002-05:00

Mark in Spokane comments on the Mexican martyr, who was to Mexico what St. Edmund Campion was to England.

"Modernism and the Magisterium"

2009-11-24T07:15:00.002-05:00

Fr. Dwight Longenecker discusses the different effects of modernism on the Anglican communion and the Catholic Church.

Learning to appreciate silence

2009-11-24T07:00:00.003-05:00

Being a talker by habit, I am learning that it is an impediment to holiness. As I get older and realize that "over the rainbow" is closer than I thought it was, I have to ask myself what I want to accomplish in this life. I keep coming back to the monks, who give their lives to glorify God.

Would it be possible for me to be silent and quiet (no radio or music) for a day? That doesn't seem much to ask, but when we are silent, we must find peace with God and within our souls. Thus, today I think about and pray for those Cistercians who give their lives to prayer and silence.

"Pictures from a Vanished Country"

2009-11-22T21:58:00.002-05:00

A photo essay of the German Democratic Republic, 1949-91.

Christopher Hitchens on Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan...

2009-11-22T15:30:00.002-05:00

He says:

'The three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred.'

I have written quite a bit about the love of death in the modern world. Unfortunately, when people love death and are willing to take innocent people with them, you often have to give them what they want before they give you what you don't want.

The Dean of Harvard Medical School...

2009-11-20T07:25:00.003-05:00

Criticizes the healthcare bill. His criticisms are fair, and nobody can accuse him of being a tea-partier from the fly-over region.

He says:

'Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

'Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that's not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform.

'In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

'Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.

'In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.'

"Still Here After a Rough Year"

2009-11-20T07:17:00.002-05:00

Peggy Noonan is thankful this Thanksgiving, and she polled some of her friends:

'Jim, who owns a small business, told me that as 2009 began, with all its troubles, "the number of frowns" he saw on the street "was overwhelming." He decided to take action. "I now make a conscious effort to smile at people in the street, in a bus, while waiting in line. It's such a simple form of connection, and it only takes one smile returned to make a difference in my day, and I hope the same is true for the other person smiling back." He hopes to start "a smiling epidemic" in Chicago.'

Megan McArdle on Dave Ramsey...

2009-11-19T22:55:00.007-05:00

I first heard Dave Ramsey on the radio when I was a law student in Nashville, his home base. Each day he exhorted his listeners not to borrow money. Once he was asked about whether a young person should borrow money to go to graduate school, and he said absolutely not, that it would be better to go to night school than to graduate up to your neck in debt.

So, the irony for me is that I probably would not have heard of Mr. Ramsey for several more years if I had not moved to Nashville, yet I moved to Nashville in order to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend Vanderbilt University Law School. Mr. Ramsey could not talk me into transferring to the Nashville School of Law. I am very proud to be an alumnus, though those glossy magazines Vandy sends me might be amortized over ten years at $5,000 an issue.

But Mr. Ramsey was right. I graduated from law school, took the biggest salary I could find in a large city, and was miserable. I eventually escaped with my family here to Yoknapatawpha County, which is semi-rural and on the edge of a large Southern city. I work for someone else (a major reason this blog is anonymous) and remit enough each month against my student loans to pay for a nice vacation home (or liquidate my other debts). My wife and I are just getting our financial ducks in a row in order to reduce our debts significantly. We pray that the recession does not blast us, and I am very grateful for my steady work.

Because success in so many things is in executing the fundamentals, it was very interesting to see Glenn Reynolds' link to Megan McArdle's piece on Dave Ramsey, and her follow-up piece.

Ms. McArdle is a libertarian whose politics might be considered moderate and who religion is largely unspoken, yet she recognizes that Mr. Ramsey's medicine for America is both radical and needed. She summarizes his financial teachings as follows:

■Cut up all your credit cards and promise never to use them again.
■Do not borrow money for any purpose whatsoever, with two exceptions:
(1) You may take out a 15-year fixed rate mortgage where the payment is no more than 25% of your take home pay;
(2) You may take out a bridge loan to cover the underwater portion of a car, boat, or other asset loan, if you are selling the asset in order to get out from under the payment.
■Sit down at the beginning of every month and do a written budget in which you allocate every dollar you expect to earn.
■Take cash out of the bank and use it to pay for your non-automatic purchases: eating out, groceries, gas, parking, clothing, etc.
■Pay off all of your debt as quickly as possible.
■Give ten percent of your income to charity.
■Save fifteen percent of your income.
■Don't declare bankruptcy unless they bailiffs are actually on their way to your house to evict you, seize your furniture, and put your family on the street.

Mr. Ramsey's evangelical style and the adoration of his fan base do not impress her, but she finds his teachings regarding borrowing money (don't), saving money (do), and giving away money to others (10%), financially and morally sound, even if her MBA training makes her doubtful of some of his investment advice. She says she has received more emails for her piece on Mr. Ramsey than on anything else (and she blogs in The Atlantic).

I must say I concur with her judgment. Like Ms. McArdle, I have figured out how to cope after grad school and to be prudent and disciplined. She notes:

'Americans aren’t going to fix our national financial problems until a lot more people decide to drop out of the “normal” competition to see who can borrow the most money in order to bid on a fixed number of homes in affluent school districts and places at selective colleges. You don’t need to be a Christian to look for a better way. Even an unbeliever knew enough to listen up when he saw the bright light on the road to Damascus.'

UPDATE: Ashby Jones of the WSJ reviews a paper by my tax professor at Vandy Law School, Herwig Schlunk, which concludes that borrowing money to finance a private graduate school education is generally a bad investment.

"Living Memorials for Those Who Served"

2009-11-14T22:28:00.005-05:00

Ivan Maisel writes on the stadiums built as memorials to our war dead and veterans. I grew up attending games at Legion Field in Birmingham. The dedications of these stadiums in the 1920s have a sense of reverence and a lack of cynicism that is foreign today. Maisel writes:

"Standing here in the shadow of this everlasting monument," [George] Huff [U. of Illinois Athletic Director] said, "we can, and we will, resolve to keep alive that spirit which they so nobly exemplified in camp and on the field of battle."

The ceremony concluded when Lew Sarett, Illinois '16, read his "Ode to Illinois," a poem of seven stanzas that traced the history of the state from pioneer to that very day.

Know that the broken hosts
Of martial-moving ghosts,
Who gave to a warring world their last full breath,
And won to immortality in death,
Hovering in stadium shaft and tower height,
In memorial court and buttressed peak,
Shall watch for you, and speak
To you of Great Moments in a Greater Fight.
O Men of Illinois, in war and peace and play,
So may we live that when the crucial fight is won,
And the long race run,
These spirits of an elder day
Shall bend to each of us and say:
Well done! Well done!
Yours is the will to win. Well done, my prairie son.

[Photo gallery of memorial stadiums here.]

"Just the facts, Mr. President"

2009-11-12T22:46:00.002-05:00

Peggy Noonan recommends bluntness rather than soaring idealism from the President when he discusses Afghanistan.

Fort Hood Massacre

2009-11-11T23:40:00.006-05:00

Let's not call it a "tragedy." It was a massacre, morally no more defensible or excusable than the murders committed by Charles Manson or Ted Bundy.

If there is a lesson to be learned, the massacre at Fort Hood could have been avoided if we Americans would quit mixing sentiment, language, and military strategy and tactics. Military plans and orders are supposed to be written in plain English, and when our own native speakers become incapable of giving commands and writing orders that make strategic or tactical sense, soldiers and civilians die.

The sentiment in question is political correctness, which is that tendency to hammer language into moral equivalencies at all costs. Political correctness is a sentimental inability to call anything evil and a reluctance to call anyone of minority background incompetent or even traitorous for fear of being labeled a racist or fascist, which in this culture means the end of almost any career advancement.

Once sentiment controls language, language itself becomes useless. Language becomes the means for the disarming of common sense instead of identifying urgent needs and plans of action. Bluntness, the most important tool of the soldier in a crisis, is encumbered by the multi-layered soft fabrics of political correctness. Nobody can say that the "Emperor has no clothes!"

On this theme at Pajamas Media, Victor Davis Hanson refuses to call the shootings at Fort Hood a "tragedy:"

'So I am tired of the use of the word “tragedy”—the Greeks’ original invention that grew out of a “goat song”. True, it has come to mean “calamity”, but tragedy’s essence is a central character, flawed rather than inherently evil, at war with, and at the mercy of, larger, immovable forces like fate, destiny, and the gods that overwhelm an Oedipus or Ajax—through a fatal flaw, hubris, or happenstance. The horrific resulting collision can bring education and even entertainment to an audience— Aeschylus’s “learning through pain.”

'Sorry, Major Hasan just doesn’t rate. He was not a “tragic” figure, just a tawdry murderous killer, who in premeditated fashion bought guns, planned his killings, and tried to locate his personal failings within some sort jihadist war against the West. Our slain soldiers were the result of an evil act, a one-sided horror story, not a collision of human and divine wills.'

Ed Driscoll notes the silliness of not trusting officers and soldiers to carry firearms who are sworn to defend their country. They are not children. They are defenders of the free world, and if they cannot be trusted to carry sidearms (if not rifles) during a war, then they are not worthy to defend us. I cannot think of a better way to promote discipline and readiness than to have our soldiers be prepared to defend us at all times, whether in Texas or Afghanistan. Driscoll regrets:

'In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. For the most part, only military police regularly carry firearms on base, and their presence is stretched thin by high demand for MPs in war zones.

'Because of Mr. Clinton, terrorists would face more return fire if they attacked a Texas Wal-Mart than the gunman faced at Fort Hood, home of the heavily armed and feared 1st Cavalry Division. That’s why a civilian policewoman from off base was the one whose marksmanship ended Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage.'

Finally, Phyllis Chesler believes we Americans, a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, are mature and thoughtful enough to distinguish between Muslims who send their kids to local schools and Jihadists who believe in a divine order to blow up those same schools in the name of Allah. To presume that Americans are incapable of identifying a shooter as a Muslim without putting on the white sheets and hoods and hanging the local Muslim cab driver or teacher is ludicrous. I will grant that in every society there are anarchists posing as moralists who would enjoy such violence, but Americans have largely shown great self-control since 9/11. There is nothing wrong with identifying our enemies as professed Muslims who have inverted their religion to justify killing innocent people. Those who believe that history demands they kill Americans, Jews, Westerners, and others at random and show a willingness to do so must be discouraged, thwarted, detained, deported, imprisoned, or even killed, not promoted to major in the United States Army.

Sentiment killed the proper use of our language before Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009. Chesler says:

'Fake phrases and fake concepts like “Islamophobia” gave Major Hasan all the cover he needed. Even soldiers and other psychiatrists in the American Army were afraid of reporting Hasan’s Islamist (not Islamic) rants lest they be seen as “racists” or as “Islamophobic,” lest they be written up, demoted, even dishonorably discharged. The politically correct concept of “Islamophobia” was as much behind the trigger as Major Hasan was.

'Islamists are very clever and have launched a successful campaign to treat a totalitarian and apartheid system as a persecuted race, as a victim. The terrorist jihadist is always the victim. There is no anti-Muslim backlash. Hell no! The fact that Major Hasan was not ejected from the army because his colleagues feared death by lawsuit/loss of their careers is perfect proof of that.

'The term “Islamophobia” is a deliberate attempt to combine criticism of a belief system with hatred of a people because of the color of their skin. Thus “Islamophobia” is wrongfully allied with the real horrors of racism. “Islamophobia” is a nonsense term. A “phobia” is an “irrational fear.” “Claustrophobia” is irrational because enclosed spaces do not tend to kill you.

'But given the permanent intifada against Israel; a high level of Muslim-on-Muslim crime, including terrorism and honor killings; a fearfully mounting death toll; and the realities of Islamic (not Islamist) gender and religious apartheid, we actually have many reasons to be fearful of some – certainly not all – aspects of Islam. Women, gay men and Jews have particular reason to be fearful. As do civilian commuters in major European cities, tourists in Asia and Africa, and American soldiers on military bases.

'It’s not “phobic” to be worried about Islam/Islamism. It is eminently rational, given that since 9/11, there have been more than 14,000 jihadic attacks against civilians around the world. This does not include battlefront statistics. But to think that the answer to any criticism of Islam or Muslims is to demonize its critics and to indulge in exaggerated self-pity is to make the world more dangerous for us all.'

Self-honesty is essential, and if our language is so disembodied, neutered, and disemboweled by sentiment to make it impossible to identify and fight our avowed enemies, the massacre at Fort Hood on November 5 is only the beginning.

UPDATE: Political correctness is a false set of manners. Truly good manners uphold human dignity to all without being false. Political correctness demands that people ignore the obvious for social gain.

Germaine Greer's legacy...

2009-11-11T23:37:00.001-05:00

Quentin Letts blasts the end of modesty in Britain.

Camille Paglia on the healthcare bill...

2009-11-11T23:32:00.002-05:00

She says:

'As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

'A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!'

Left flank on healthcare reform upset about abortion restriction in bill...

2009-11-11T23:22:00.002-05:00

I believe the status quo is better than anything that could pass. At this point, I am glad that the pro-life Democrats won the day on Saturday because the U.S. Senate is going to have a hard time putting together a bill that can get to the floor for a vote, and if such a bill passes, then Nancy Pelosi gets squeezed between liberal Democrats who demand a vigorous public option and abortion funding, and Blue Dog Democrats who cannot vote for either.

My political creed for modern times: "Gridlock is good. The Spirit of 1787 lives on!"

Veterans' Day 2009

2009-11-11T22:54:00.002-05:00

Today at our local commemoration of Veterans' Day, our speaker, a fine man who lost an arm to a grenade in 1966, discussed "ordinary people doing extraordinary things." He told more than a dozen good stories of veterans who excelled either as soldiers or later in civilian life. It was one of the best speeches I have heard on this occasion. One of his "ordinary people" is Army Specialist Monica Brown.

Much of what happens in our country saddens me, but I remain optimistic, if not always sunny, because we produce fine young people willing to risk everything to serve our country and their fellow soldiers.

20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

2009-11-09T08:29:00.004-05:00

This is a day for joy and thanksgiving. As reported in the WSJ:

'Yet if the West's stand in Berlin demonstrates anything, it is that moral commitments have a way of reaping strategic dividends over time. By ordering the airlift in 1948, Harry Truman saved a starving city and defied Soviet bullying. As importantly, he showed that the U.S. would not abandon Europe to its furies, as it had after World War I, thus helping to pave the way for the creation of NATO in April 1949.

'By holding firm for 40 years, Truman and his successors transformed what was supposed to be the Atlantic alliance's weakest point into its strongest. To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.

'Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system.'