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President To Face Down Monster Attack, Own Demons In Action-Packed Schedule

Un amor de narices

I am doing some translating of Fray Luis de León, a 16th Spanish theologian, who often paraphrased the Bible. However, his versions are often very unique sounding in that they try to render Semitic expressions into Spanish. Previous translations had not captured this aspect which also sounds very weird in the original Spanish.

For example:

«Yo soy amoroso entrañablemente, compasivo, ancho de narices, sufrido y de mucha espera, grande en perdón, fiel y leal en la palabra, que extiendo mis bienes por mil generaciones de hombres.»


Here is my translation:

“I am endearingly loving, compassionate, wide-nosed (i.e. slow to anger), longsuffering and waiting, great in forgiveness, faithful and loyal in words. For I extend My goods for a thousand generations of men” (Ex. 34:6-7).

Compare this with the NAB, RSV, and King James:

NAB
6
Thus the LORD passed before him and cried out, "The LORD, the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity,
7
continuing his kindness for a thousand generations


RSV

[6] The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
[7] keeping steadfast love for thousands

King James
[6] And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,
[7] Keeping mercy for thousands


However, we can then make the following Spanish joke:


O sea que Dios nos tiene un amor de narices. Ya caigo.

Advice for a Graduate School Potluck from Manolo

Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.

Dear Manolo,

I’m going to a graduate school holiday potluck with my boyfriend. I have never been to the school and I am not sure what to wear. My style is pretty conservative. What do you recommend?

Sandra


Manolo says, Ayyy! Merry Nonspecific Period of Non-Oppressive Festivities to all!

Let the Tofurkey and Macrobiotic, Bargain-Priced Sprouts flow like organic wine!

And now, let the Manolo stipulate that if the phrase “graduate school potluck” does not strike dread into your heart, you are not the feeling person. The very words alone conjure up the sort of lugubrious hilarity and culinary achievement one associates with Moldovan politburo lunches, sans the lubricating effects of vodka.

It is the little known fact that graduate students are among the most miserable peoples in the world.

Yes, the first year begins in high spirits, but then gradually, inch by inch, the lonely misanthropic gloom settles in, brought on by the low pay, the low status, the low self-esteem, and above all the low muffled beating of the unfinished dissertation, which, like the tell-tale heart, lies insistently beneath the floorboards of the mind.

Of the course, no reason you, the non-grad student, should not be cheery. Here is the Laugh from Franco Sarto, the perfectly partylicious affordable black ankle bootie.

(http://shoeblogs.com/2008/12/05/manolo-the-columnist-153/)

Desde las alforjas- from the saddlebags

Well I just got back from Thanksgiving with the 'rents and went through some of my books that I left there. Of which I brought seven or so choice ones home:


Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Poesía lírica

Sor Juana is the most important poetess of the Baroque era. Meaning, she is not included in anthologies as a gesture of pity but really measures up to everyone else.
Her long poem Primero Sueño details the journey of the human intellect in its quest to comprehend the universe. Very impressive stuff.


Garcilaso de la Vega

Poesía castellana completa


I had been looking for this volume and thought I lost it. Garcilaso was one of the innovators of Spanish poetry in the XVI who was able to adapt the language to Italian poetic meter with a balance and harmony of style unequaled by anyone.


Diccionario de escritores latinoamericanos (siglo XVI a siglo XX)

This is volume containing the biographies of the most important Latinamerican writers from the 16th to 20th centuries. Very cool.


The Essential Plotinus

Selection from Plotinus' works.


Giovanni Verga

I Malavoglia

A novel from the 1880's which popularized Il Verismo- as the incarnation of the Realist movement in Italy was called. It features down to earth proverbial dialogue and language, charting the fortunes of one family and their eventual decline.


Juan Ramón Jiménez

Platero y yo

A children's book about a village idiot and his donkey written in poetic prose.


Embajada a Tamorlán

A record of a Castilian expedition into Asia during the early 1400's. Features descriptions of Greece, and Constantinople right before it was captured by the Turks.
It was a diplomatic mission in response to a letter sent by the Mongol monarch Tamburlaine to King Enrique of Castile.

Ronald Knox

Captive Flames

A selection of addresses given over the years on various Saints.


Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels

I had to read this book in high school and really enjoyed the last book. But I have always wanted to read it again given my better knowledge of European Baroque culture.
Also my interest in satire is a plus. Along with the whole "damn human race" he nails the Whigs pretty good in this one.
Actually, it confirms what I have been forming in my mind for a while, that through out history Satire been cultivated by and large by Conservative elements in society. This goes contrary to the trend that the Counterculture ushered in during the late 60's but I think it holds true in the long and the thick of it from the Romans, who started the genre, up till now. More on this later.

Cardinal Stafford's Controversial Speech

Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: “Being True with Body and Soul”

For 51 years of priestly ministry I have been attentive to res sacra in temporalibus in American culture, i.e., “to the elements of the sacred in the temporal life of man” or, in a more Heideggerian idiom,“to man as the sacred element in temporal things”. In 1958 John Courtney Murray, S. J. was my guide. With further guidance from the Church over the years, I have learned that the nucleus of this principle, enunciated by Pope Leo XIII, maintains that the sacred element in secular life, especially our use of language, escapes the undivided control of the supreme power of the State. The secular life of man is not completely secular, nor totally encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and subject ultimately only to the political power. The sacred word within man in secular life transcends the control of the supreme power of the State. A person’s public life is not encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and not subject ultimately only to the political power.

President Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated 1802 letter to the committee of the Danbury Baptist Association asserting “a wall of separation between Church and State” formally denied the reality of res sacra in temporalibus. He introduced a latent and powerful virus which would eventually be used to diminish and then to wound mortally a theology of discourse in the public arena. It has led to the increasingly secularized states of the American union and their active hostility towards the Catholic Church. Some of these governments are threatening Roman Catholic adoption agencies because of their refusal to select same-sex couples as potential adoptive parents. They are forcing Catholic hospitals to accept medical procedures which are contrary to the dignity of the human person. They are insisting on hiring practices which will destroy the Catholic identity of health and social services under Catholic Church auspices. They have not refrained from coercing the individual conscience. Here the federal and state governments are enshrining the primacy of secular laws over against religious principles. These decisions are the legal and moral progeny of Jefferson’s insistence on debarring personal faith from the public forum. And this is only a beginning. Their seeds can be found in the 1787 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom sponsored and promoted by Jefferson. His self-proclaimed epicureanism and crypto-utilitarianism furnish the hermeneutical keys for interpreting the opening paragraph of his 1776 Declaration of Independence.

This evening. I will cover the following areas: 1) the narrow, calculative, mathematical mind and its manipulation of the humanum and, more specifically, of human sexuality since 1968; 2) the response of the Church’s magisterium in the encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae and teachings of later Popes; 3) other Catholic philosophical and theological responses to what John Rawls calls the “embedding module”, namely the increasingly disenchanted world in which we work and pray.

Furthermore, since this month, November, is the time in which the liturgy of the Church reflects on the final things - heaven, hell, purgatory and death, I will be attempting to strengthen the Catholic faithful, as St. John did in the Book of the Apocalypse, against the ever increasing pretensions of the state making itself absolute. For the next several weeks the Book of the Apocalypse will be read at daily Mass. The theme of that final book of the Bible is that the Battle of the Logos has always already been won on Calvary. In the immense conflicts associated with the teaching of Humanae Vitae, the overarching task of the Church is to make manifest for the faithful the apocalyptic victory of the Lamb in our historical time. The Church, the bearer of revelation, insists that the mysterious beginning and earthly end of every member of the human race is illumined by the light of the divine Logos. [“Every human being] comes from the source of light that irradiates him”. Finally, I will be using the word “apocalyptic” in the Christian sense of “expressing the fundamental law of post-Christian world history: the more Christ’s kingdom is manifested as the light of the world......the more it will meet determined opposition.”

(1) The apparent triumph of what has been described as “the manipulable arrangement of the scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world” over the past several generations.

1968 was the year in which Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae (HV); it was the long-delayed and long-awaited encyclical letter on transmitting human life. It met with immediate and unprecedented opposition. American theologians were its choral directors. The encyclical arrived in Washington, D. C. in late July 1968. It had to contend with the chaos of assassinations, overseas wars, the conflicts surrounding the Democratic/Republican national conventions, indiscriminate killings, university strikes and riots, growing use of barbiturates, and ubiquitous insurrections within the cities. It preceded by one year An Aquarian Exposition, the for- profit, rock-music event staged on a Woodstock dairy farm in New York State. Since then, the chaos has become chronic, more insidious because partially hidden. If 1968 was the year of the year of “America’s Suicide Attempt”, 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion.

In the intervening 40 years the United States has been thrown upon unlit roads. There have been few, if any, “clearings” (Heidegger’s Lichtung). In 1973 alone the U. S. Supreme Courts’ pro-abortion decision was imposed upon the nation. Its scrupulous meanness has had catastrophic effects upon the identity, unity, and integrity of the American republic. It has undermined respect for human life. We have been horrified and uncomprehending witnesses for over two generations to America’s decline from “a mansion to a dirty house in a gutted world” . Yet honesty compels me to admit that this decision against human life is in historical continuity with the pragmatism on the part of the Fathers of the 1787 Constitutional Convention for the recognition of Black slavery and, following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, in continuity with the same meanness toward Native Americans on the part of the politicians, entrepreneurs and settlers. The 1803 event was a meanness enshrined shortly in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

The 1973 Court’s alteration has even more radically transformed the way we think about others, especially the least among us. Its inexcusable evasions about the dignity of human life, and their prolongation to the present, have condemned those of us who oppose it to disillusionment and bitter isolation. Both Republican and Democratic partisans have abused rhetoric on this issue. The President-elect is a skillful rhetorician. Civic life has been invaded with an anti-humanism so toxic that it is proving mortal to the body politic.

Nothing has been left untouched by the court’s lethal wand. Social engineering and the price-systems have infected all Americans with a pervasive, technological mind-set. Economics, administration, sexuality, language and, above all, human life are being manipulated by complex strategies of power. “Politics in turn becomes an arena for contention among rival techniques.” Obama’s campaign raised over $600 million, a record, and McCain’s over $300 million. An uncritical, unspoken “metaphysics of presence” dominates American life, both private and public. This new way of thinking has led to the creation of a worldwide colossus, America’s military. It is generally acknowledged that nothing in the nation’s economic, social, or political institutions approaches its influence. Freedom itself has been reduced to power.

Part II of Humanae Vitae, called “Doctrinal Principles”, ends with a description by Pope Paul VI of the “Serious Consequences of the Use of Artificial Methods of Birth Control”. His apocalyptic vision has been prophetic of the epoch we have entered. After 40 years of widespread contraceptive practice, the consequences appear now as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ravaging what St. Paul described as the “ten logiken latreian hymon - “the humanly proper worship” (Rom 12: 1) of the baptized. The demonic four are the following: marital infidelity; disrespect for woman, governmental despotism in the regulation of births, and the human body manipulated and destroyed as a technological artifact. The four horseman have been responsible for the calamitous meltdown in Western demographics and in real development. Sexual aberration has become a way of life for many. These four shades are insinuating their deathworks upon whole nations and cultures. The Middle East is an obvious example.

Mary Eberstadt in a recent article entitled, “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae”, commented on the prophetic vision of Paul VI, “Contraceptive sex.......is the fundamental social fact of our time.” She continues, “In the years since Humanae Vitae’s appearance, numerous distinguished Catholic thinkers have argued, using a variety of evidence, that each of these predictions [of Pope Paul VI] has been borne out by the social facts.” Human life has been conceded to the arbitrary will of the state.

Governments are dissolving religious and philosophical values and remaking them into the distortions of a dominant, cybernetic model. Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, Metamorphosis, is not far off the prophetic mark. The good has been drained of ontological content; it has become “a mere cipher, a monadic carrier of information, a unit of cybernetic science” . The British government has recently set as a national goal the manufacture of human life by technology. Its reductive anthropology allows the unprecedented to happen: the radical manipulation of the substance of the biological heritage of the human race. It has allocated £40 million of public monies for stem cell research. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair envisions Britain to be leader of the world in cloning human embryos for research. Potential benefits, he claims, will be huge. Furthermore, a consortium of leading British bankers and scientists have launched a £100 million fund to finance stem cell research. Plans are being made for a national stem cell research institute, costing £16 million. In 2005, the British Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt announced that the Government would spend more than £1 billion on biotechnology by 2008. 'We want to send a signal to scientists that Britain is open for business in some of the most controversial areas,' she said. It is not simply a coincidence that economics and technology dominate. Bankers, financial investors, and MBA executives are mentioned consistently with the scientific midwives of this cultural monstrosity, the nub of which is the forgetting of the question of God.

In the United States President - elect Barack Obama and the Vice-President-elect Joseph Biden, a Catholic, campaigned on a severe anti-life platform. Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, analyzed America’s descent since 1968-1973 into deathworks by summarizing Obama’s vision. George’s analysis appeared in the journal, Public Discourse. “[Obama] has co-sponsored a bill.....that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed. In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored would effectively require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning.”

The assumption undergirding the positions of Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, and Tony Blair results from a technological mind-set. Such technologically-driven men eventually may assert that human nature, until recently acknowledged to be a unitary composite of two polarities, body and soul, must not only be changed by technology, but, if necessary, be suppressed. It has proven to be the next logical step after the decision to control and manipulate technologically the origins of human life.

But ‘phusis - nature’, has been essential in Western metaphysics for describing the truth of beings. Martin Heidegger writing about the radical reduction of the goals of medicine to what is technologically possible, and its relation to human phusis, asserted that, in the past even until very recent times, “techne can only cooperate with phusis, can more or less expedite the cure; but as techne it can never replace phusis and itself become the arche of health itself. This could happen only if life as such were to become a ‘technically’ producible artifact. However, at that very moment there would also no longer be such a thing as health, any more than there would be birth and death. Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this goal of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e., its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only ‘meaning’ and where preserving this value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe. ‘Subjectivity’ is not overcome in this way but merely ‘tranquilized’ in the ‘eternal progress’ of a Chinese - like ‘constancy’. This is the most extreme nonessence in relation to phusis-ousia”

A similar technological mind-set has contributed to the recent economic turmoil. Hedge funds were heavily invested in the technology bubble. The October 21, 2008 issue of The Financial Times read, “Blame it on Harvard: Is the MBA culture responsible for the financial crisis?” Technology and operations represent a major component of the MBA imagination at work at Harvard. The news story described the 100th anniversary celebration of the pre-eminent Harvard Business School. “You would have to have a heart of stone not to be amused by this piquant accident of timing. Here, at the spiritual home of the Masters of the universe, distinguished graduates could only look on as that same universe threatened to collapse.”

2) The response of the Church’s magisterium.

The issues now facing us are all entwined within the above-developed linguistic and actual deathworks informing Rawl’s “embedding module”. The response of the Church’s magisterium has been based on the ancient Catholic imagination recaptured happily by Pope John Paul II in his now famous phrase,”the nuptial meaning of the human body created as male and female.” The response includes “being true with the body and the soul.” The title of my talk has been taken from Francois Mauriac. He struggled for many years to overcome the unbending austerity and narrow rigidity resulting from the theological pessimism of the Jansenism of his childhood. In 1931 he overcame this heritage. Thereafter life became a creative drama that engages the fullness of the person by being true with body and soul. Mauriac’s “clearing” was where he discovered the dramatic convergence of form and content. The wholeness of two polarities is manifested within the unity of body and soul in the human person. David L. Schindler in a recent paper on human sexuality summarized his first principle supporting the differentiated unity of body and soul: “The Soul as it were lends its spiritual meaning to the body as body, even as the body then, simultaneously, contributes to what now becomes in man, a distinct kind of spirit: a spirit whose nature it is to be embodied”.

The Church’s response to the technological/scientific hegemony just described has not involved any condemnation of technology or of science as such. Rather is based on her recognition of the present spiritual climate for what it is: A New Ice Age. The great American poet and convert to Catholicism, Wallace Stevens, coined the image. “‘America was always North ....... ‘ where God was in hiding.” . We must turn south and even return to our origins, the desert. How? By recovering the structure of truth in its relation to goodness and beauty. Only a linguistic imagination that is analogical - and ultimately liturgical and sacramental - is capable of such rediscovery. In her devastating critique of the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, Catharine Pickstock has recaptured the apostrophic voice of Catholicism’s high desert origins, the responsorials first heard in the Sinaitic and Judean wildernesses. The poiesis of the Catholic imagination finds itself in the title of Pickstock’s book, After Writing: the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.

In his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (27), Pope Benedict XVI echoes what is partially anticipated by Pickstock, “The Eucharist, as the sacrament of charity, has a particular relationship with the love of man and woman united in marriage. A deeper understanding of this relationship is needed at the present time. Pope John Paul II frequently spoke of the nuptial character of the Eucharist and its special relationship with the sacrament of Matrimony: ‘The Eucharist is the sacrament of our redemption. It is the sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride.’ Moreover, ‘the entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church. Already Baptism, the entry into the People of God, is a nuptial mystery; it is so to speak the nuptial bath which precedes the wedding feast, the Eucharist.’ The Eucharist inexhaustibly strengthens the indissoluble unity and love of every Christian marriage. By the power of the sacrament, the marriage bond is intrinsically linked to the Eucharistic unity of Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church (cf. Eph 5:31-32)”. In Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II called for the celebration of the Sacrament of Marriage within the Eucharistic sacrifice to demonstrate the living connection between the two Sacraments. He thereby made more visible “the rich analogy between the una caro of the Eucharist and the una caro of the spouses through which their gift to one another becomes a particular form of participation in the Body ’given’ and the blood ‘poured out’ of Christ that becomes for the Christian family the inexhaustible font of its identity (with) its missionary and apostolic dynamism” . Here we sense the flavor of Karl Barth’s analogia fidei in explaining the origins and meaning of linguistics.

What are the philosophical/theological foundations for such assertions? What are the meta-anthropological presuppositions for this vision of linguistics, of reality? Two elements should be highlighted: the biblical image of God and the biblical image of man. In his first Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI proposes that the Bible presents us with new image of God - his Trinitarian self-oblation, the self-surrender characteristic of immanent Trinity - and with a new image of man, of which the most sublime sign is the Eucharist. “The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God’s presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus’ self-gift, sharing his body and blood” (13). The Eucharist builds up man and woman from within in the image of the Triune God and man learns the complexity of love: St. Augustine’s insight is helpful here: “Capit ut capitur. One grasps in being grasped.” Preeminently in marriage, the Eucharist draws with the cords of love each spouse in the depths of their interiority toward a mutual, total, integrally human, and fruitful self-oblation. The total giving of the Word in the Eucharist is the mirroring of the real language of the human body as created as male and female.

In his Wednesday audiences during the early 1980s Pope John Paul II called spouses to a deeper understanding of the theology of the body. When he described the prophets’ of the Old Testament use of marriage as an analogy of God’s relation to man, the Pope expressed the astonishing insight about the specific “prophetism of the body” . In interpreting this prophetic language, he indicated, one must “reread” the language of the body for “it is the body itself which ‘speaks’; it speaks by means of its masculinity and femininity, it speaks in the mysterious language of the personal, it speaks ultimately -and this happens frequently - both in the language of fidelity, that is of love, and also in the language of conjugal infidelity, that is of ‘adultery’”. A correct rereading must be done “in truth”. The human body speaks “a ‘language’ of which it is not the author. “Its author is man, who as male and female, husband and wife, correctly rereads the significance of this ‘language’. He rereads therefore the spousal significance of the body as integrally inscribed in the structure of the masculinity or femininity of the personal subject.” In other words, the human body as created by God as masculine/feminine is the Ursprache, the primordial utterance from the beginning. The “nuptial meaning” of the human body originally was the Adamic language.

All of these texts from John Paul II and Benedict XVI refer to the inner dynamic of the relationship between the two spouses. The subject of moral acts is each person, a dual unity of body and soul, a psychosomatic whole. Anything that smacks of a body-soul dualism is firmly rejected. One cannot attempt to free the soul from the body. When a human being seeks the truth and the good, his body is not an afterthought or an accident or a ‘tomb’ for the soul. The language of the human body, rightly reread, is a language by which “the likeness with God shows that the essence and existence of man are constitutively related to God in the most profound manner. This is a relationship that exists in itself, it is therefore not something that comes afterwards and is not added from the outside.” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church [CSDC] 109). In the words of the International Theological Commission, “Human bodiliness participates in the imago Dei.” They echo the ancient teaching of St. Irenaeus, “”the flesh ....was formed according to the image of God” .

As Archbishop of Denver, in 1996 I addressed a Pastoral Letter to the people of northern Colorado on the historical importance of a culture formed by the medieval Anglo-Saxon Sarum Rite and by the even more ancient Gregorian Sacramentary. Peoples in such a culture intuitively interpreted reality through the covenantal and bridal relationship of God and creation and of Christ and the Church. Consequently, they would find absolutely inapprehensible the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality activity as a valid moral option. Such activities are a direct assault not only upon the Sacrament of marriage but also upon the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

In light of all of the above realities, I cannot accept the judgement of Fr. Martin Rhonheimer, who in attempting to prevent the passing on of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, morally justifies the prophylactic use of condoms in a marriage in which one of the spouses is so infected. He summarizes his argument, “The immediate (or proximate) object of one’s choice in such a case is to engage in marital intercourse” and not “to ejaculate into a condom”. I agree with the conclusion of Bishop Anthony Fisher (and many, many other moral theologians) that Rhoneimer’s arguments are not only unconvincing but philosophically untenable and contrary to the Catholic theological and canonical tradition. Bishop Fisher writes about his agreement with the conclusions of [Janet ?] Smith, “Not only is condomized intercourse not a reproductive type of act, it can also be argued that it is not apt for uniting a couple ‘as one flesh’. In the first place the condom places a barrier to complete physical union: while this looks like ordinary sexual intercourse the couple fail, in fact, to touch in the most intimate way; arguably, they do not become ‘one flesh’.”

Rhonheimer dismisses a meta-anthropological objection as a “psychological and perhaps aesthetic” concern, not a moral one. His body/soul dualistic rupture is enunciated with the repulsion he expresses over integral human copulation, “[I find it] intuitively repulsive to make the consummation of marriage dependent upon factual insemination of the woman’s vagina”. Should the wholeness of marriage in its consummation be considered repulsive? The human spirit finds its inner completion only as something honestly externalized, since the human spirit in this life is always already embodied. The body is the externalization of the spirit. The highest expression of human love is embodied in the total self-giving and self-oblation of a couple as “one flesh”.
What renders such repulsion intuitive? A meditation of the “one flesh” found Genesis two? But God described that unity as “very good” in Genesis one. A repulsive intuition before the image of man and woman integrally united as ‘one flesh’ is not only at odds with the biblical revelation but also with the Church’s reflection on that revelation. Pope John Paul II insists on the need for “a correct rereading in truth......of the spousal significance of the body as integrally inscribed in the structure of the masculinity and femininity of the personal subject .”

3) Other Catholic philosophical and theological responses to the “embedding module” of John Rawls.

I cannot speak highly enough of the reflections on these issues and others by those engaged in the Communio project. According to von Balthasar, Communio’s conversations with the American secularized culture is the project of the Church in the United States. It calls for “the greatest possible radiance in the world by virtue of the closest following of Christ”. Over the decades I have followed and benefitted enormously from reading your quarterly journal. I owe a special indebtedness of gratitude to David L. Schindler, a theologian, and his son, David C. Schindler, a metaphysician and theorist of knowledge. Their clearings have included signs marked “Where we are going!” and “Where we have come from”. I have already cited their works earlier. In these concluding remarks they appear again because they give light for one’s gaze on the mystery of “Being true with Body and Soul”.

David C. Schindler writes that “drama is the structure of being” . From that splendid insight it is reasonable to conclude that the conjugal act itself is a drama that reveals who each individual is and who each is to become. Its principle revelation is not who the individual always was. The meaning of the sacramental act - the summit of the sacrament of marriage in facto esse, is revealed only in the activity of the two spouses. The marital act in its wholeness is a fundamental interpretation or unfolding of the sacrament of marriage.

Each spouse is an actor of truth. Truth has its terminus ad quem, not in the mind of the knower, but rather in a tertium quid, a Gestalt, a structure resulting from the encounter between the appearance of the depths on one hand and the transportation of the seer into the depths on the other. Truth is profoundly relational. It involves the tension of various parts of the whole, the movement from horizontal appearance to the vertical depths. David L. Schindler describes it in this fashion: “The body, always-already informed by soul and spirit and actualized by esse, exhibits an order of love: the body bears within it, already in its creaturely nature as body, the sign of the human being’s constitutive relation to God and to others in God, the sign thus, of a communion of persons and the promise of the gift itself.”

As I mentioned earlier, one of the contested areas of pastoral life today is the predicament of a married couple one of whom has a mortally threatening disease which may be transmitted through the conjugal act. The confusion over this matter is becoming increasingly serious from a pastoral point of view. Fr. Martin Rhoneimer’s position undermines the anthropological teaching of Pope John Paul II and undercuts a coherent Catholic response to the crisis affecting human sexuality.

In concluding, I have underscored that the present crisis is ontological/epistemological and linguistic. At its foundations it is a crisis of signs, which means a crisis that is analogical, liturgical, sacramental. It was a constant theme implicit, sometimes explicit, in the discussions at the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome on the biblical word of God. The participants asked how does religious language refer to reality? The modern response since the Enlightenment has been an “inside-out” approach to epistemological foundations, not an “outside-in”. The Catholic religious education establishment in the USA after the II Vatican Council adopted a similarly subjective-experiential methodology based on an “inside-out” epistemology. Widespread religious skepticism was the outcome. Nothing is recognized as definitive and “meaning itself is forever postponed.” A movement toward “a dictatorship of relativism” is the diagnosis which Pope Benedict XVI has given to this phenomenon.

To counter this nihilism, the discovery of the “Gestalt” character of language, of the word, was pioneered by Hans Urs von Balthasar and brilliantly advanced by many, especially by David C. Schindler in his recent book, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation.

The following conclusions may be drawn from the foregoing. First, we must assert the rootedness of language, including the language of the human body, in ontology. A solidly unabashed metaphysics of being, founded on the real distinction between essence and existence, is essential for any recovery of truth and its objective structure. Postmodernists have rejected the tradition of western metaphysics, the concept of being since Socrates, and the real distinction between essence and existence. Metaphysics of this type is fundamental to any discussion of truth and its nature. Using Plato’s Phaedrus Catharine Pickstock has offered a devastating critique of Jacques Derrida’s theory of Supplementation by writing. She insists that his account “is tantamount to a metaphysics of presence” .

Secondly, Catholic scholars must explore the nuptial language founded upon the biblical text and upon the Catholic tradition and enriched by the teaching of John Paul II. Pope Benedict XVI affirmed its substance recently, “The Eucharist, as the sacrament of charity, has a particular relationship with the love of man and woman united in marriage. A deeper understanding of this relationship is needed at the present time. Pope John Paul II frequently spoke of the nuptial character of the Eucharist and its special relationship with the sacrament of Matrimony: ‘The Eucharist is the sacrament of our redemption. It is the sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride.’ Moreover, the entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church. Already Baptism, the entry into the People of God, is a nuptial mystery; it is so to speak the nuptial bath which precedes the wedding feast, the Eucharist."

Thirdly, an exploration of the relationship between the nuptial meaning of the human body and the Eucharist, as the triform Body of Christ, should be made. Its development by de Lubac and Pickstock would be advanced if accompanied by an awareness of the critical role of the Gregorian Sacramentary and the Sarum Rite had upon the West and especially upon Anglo-Saxon culture. That culture was informed with the perception of the nuptial character of reality. The high medieval poem, In a Valley of this Restless Mind illustrates this. The anonymous English Catholic poet had the same spousal vision of life as that of the modern French Catholic novelist Mauriac when he described the human as “being true with body and soul”. I wish to contrast his cultural vision with that of the dominant political and cultural classes today.

Before doing so, some contextual background of my criticism is important. In early 2003 as our country was preparing to go to war in Iraq, I spoke out against the war and on two occasions condemned the policies of the Bush administration for contributing to the lessening of respect for the dignity of the human person by the use of torture. In the same spirit today as a pastor of souls I do not hesitate again to flag some serious abuses against the natural and divine laws. Our own cultural ambience is not dissimilar from the period of the 1920's when European intellectuals were moving ahead with an understanding of something “new”. Graham Ward’s description of that period highlights elements which characterize the vision of today’s President - elect, the Vice-President - elect, and the legislators elected to assist them in implementing their vision. Graham wrote, “Briefly modernism’s programme was to ‘make it new’. It courted the unconventional and nonconformist in a conscious effort to overthrow the traditional perspective and stock expectations. Its dynamism was aggressive, disruptive and even apocalyptic. Hostility to the.........War fed its anger against the status quo and its desire for a creativity that would be transcultural, transclass and transfrontier.”

On November 4, 2008 a cultural earthquake hit America. Senator Barack Obama and Senator Joseph Biden were elected President and Vice President of the United States together with a significant majority of their Party in the federal Congress supporting their deadly vision of human life. Americans were unanimous in their joy over the significance of the election of a Black President. However, if Obama, Biden and the new Congress are determined to implement the anti-life agenda which they spelled out before the election, I foresee the next several years as being among the most divisive in our nation’s history. If their proposals should be initiated and enacted, it would be impossible for the American bishops to repeat in the future what their predecessors described the United States in 1884 as “this home of freedom.”

While reflecting about the profoundly negative impact of Obama’s vision on the humanum (and also of Biden’s), I recalled how current are the reflections of Mauriac upon his contemporary, an influential European author. Even though Mauriac disagreed with him on almost every point, he acknowledged his great intelligence and personal attraction. “But under all that grace and charm there was a tautness of will, a clenched jaw, a state of constant alertness to detect and resist any external influence which might threaten his independence. A state of alertness? That is putting it mildly: beneath each word he wrote, he was carrying on sapping operations against the enemy city where a daily fight was going on.”.

Similar characteristics were evident in Senator Obama’s talk before Planned Parenthood supporters on July 17, 2007 - tautness of will, a clenched jaw, etc. - where he asserted, “We are not only going to win this election but also we are going to transform this nation.........The first thing I will do as President is to sign The Freedom of Choice Act........I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law...........On this issue I will not yield..” During a town meeting in March 2008 in Johnstown, Pa., he spoke with equal determination on the necessity of universal sex education for preteens and teens, “I don’t want my daughters punished with a baby.” The President - elect did not qualify in any way the methods his single daughters might employ in the event they needed to avoid being “punished with a baby”, that is, giving birth to his grandchild. Obama’s vision is modernist and rooted in the Enlightenment. The content and rhetoric of Obama and Biden have elements similar to those described earlier: aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.

Catholics weep over Barack Obama’s words. We weep over the violence concealed behind his rhetoric and that of Joseph Biden and what appears to be that of the majority of the incoming Congress. What should we do with our hot, angry tears of betrayal?

First, our tears are agonistic. Secondly, we must acknowledge that the model for our tears is ancient. Over the next few years, Gethsemane will not be a marginal garden to us. A model, I suggest, is medieval. With an anonymous author, our restless minds search in a dark valley during this exhausting year. With him as our guide, we find a bleeding man on a hill sitting under a tree “in huge sorrow”. It is Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church and of mankind.

Thirdly, we listen to the words of Christ as narrated by our mediaeval ancestor. Jesus pointing to his gloved hands says that these gloves were given him when he sought his Bride. They are not white but red, embroidered with blood. He says that his spouse brought them and they will not come off. Fourthly, we focus our attention on the constantly repeated refrain of the Bridegroom and the reason for his “huge sorrow”, “Quia amore langueo - Because I am sick for love”. And finally, we find that before this vision of the wounded young man, our frustration and tears become one with his “huge sorrow” and we make his love for the unfaithful Bride whom he seeks and never fails, our own. I will close with a citation of this spousal model. It serves as a measure of what we need to recapture for the whole Church in 2008:

Upon this hil Y fond a tree,
Undir the tree a man sittynge,
From heed to foot woundid was he,
His herte blood Y sigh bledinge:
A semeli man to ben a king, (handsome enough to be a king)
A graciouse face to loken unto;
I askide whi he had peynynge, (suffering)
He seide, "Quia amore langueo. (Because I am sick for love).

I am Truelove that fals was nevere.
My sistyr, Mannis Soule, Y loved hir thus.
Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere, (because in no way would we part company)
I lefte my kyngdom glorious.
I purveide for hir a paleis precious; (prepared, a palace)
Sche fleyth; Y folowe. Y soughte hir so,
I suffride this peyne piteuous,
Quia amore langueo.

In the autumn of 2008 we must begin anew with that sentiment of our medieval brother. Quia amore langueo. With Jesus we are sick because of love toward those with whom we are so tragically and unavoidably at variance. The reader has now become one with the narrator who is addressed in line one as “Dear Soul”. As Humanae Vitae with the whole Catholic tradition teaches, we are to “be true with body and soul”.

James Francis Cardinal Stafford

499 translation published in Dappled Things

An English translation of a story I did has been published in the literary journal Dappled Things. It's a humorous take on the Spanish Civil War. You can view an excerpt here: 449. The full electronic text will be available after the next print issue.

The story of my life

What are we gonna do after Bush leaves office?

Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

Notes on a parable

(My latest translation from the Spanish)

In the rearguard in the big city, life was very sad. The smiles from the old days had frozen on their lips; the radio told nothing but news- sometimes good sometimes bad and people scraped by overcome with the memory of those boys that were losing their lives at the front.

The boys lost their lives at the front, singing light-hearted songs and reciting The Ballad of Whitehorse. They would laugh and drunk up the sober taste of risk, fear, and companionship along with their flasks of whiskey.

When they returned to the cities wounded or on leave a cloud surrounded them. It wasn’t only the aura of heroism but the light of an intimate and elemental happiness.

In the beginning only poor left-over sods and some laughable and extravagant patriots went to war. But little by little the number of volunteers grew until they became a multitude. Perhaps no one ever knew, not even the soldiers themselves, but these volunteers were deserting an emptiness, looking to grasp onto happiness and at times a little frivolity. No one knew it or said so and in any case it doesn’t matter because happiness is just another name for doing your duty but one with a better marketing campaign.

(from the blog Rayos y Truenos of the Andalusian poet Enrique García-Máiquez.)


The Spanish original:


Notas para un parábola

En la retaguardia, en la gran ciudad, la vida era tristísima. Las viejas sonrisas se habían helado en los labios, la radio no daba más que noticias —a veces buenas, a veces malas— y las gentes se arrastraban apesadumbradas con el recuerdo de los muchachos que se estaban dejando la vida en el frente.

En el frente, los muchachos, se dejaban la vida, y también cantaban canciones ligeras, recitaban “La balada del caballo blanco”, se reían, apuraban el sabor recio del riesgo, del miedo, del compañerismo y de sus petacas de whisky.

Cuando volvían a la ciudad de permiso o convalecientes, les rodeaba un nimbo. No era sólo el aura del heroísmo, sino la luz de una felicidad íntima y elemental.

Al principio, a la guerra iban los pobres mozos de reemplazo y algunos patriotas extravagantes y risibles. Poco a poco, fue aumentando el número de voluntarios, que acabó siendo una muchedumbre. Quizá nadie lo supo nunca, ni ellos mismos, pero esos voluntarios sobrevenidos desertaban de un vacío, buscaban el arrimo a la felicidad, un poco de frivolidad a ratos. O nadie lo supo o no se dijo; y en cualquier caso no importa, porque la felicidad es sólo otro nombre —con más fortuna publicitaria— del cumplimiento del deber.

And now for something completely different . . .

Indonesian Classical Guitar

Classical guitar music from Indonesia, what the %$%? Well I was just sent this link from the Indonesian e-mail list and it is quite good. I know a few things about this from a connoisseur's perspective having listen to compositions by Barrios, Tárrega and others.
His name is Juping Kristianto. The piece linked here is Becak Fantasy. A becak is the Indonesian rickshaw, or human taxi.



P.D.

Here is a recent article on Jubing in the English-language Jakarta post.

My Russian best

Here are a list of my favorite works of Russian literature complete with comments.


19th century

Griboyedov, Aleksandr

Woe from Wit

A great play about generations and the conflict of ideas. Chatsky, the main character, returns to Moscow after studying abroad to find that his hometown considers him insane for the new attitude and ideas he brings back.


Pushkin, Aleksandr

Poetry

His greatest poems include the Bronze Horseman and his novel in verse Eugene Onegin.

Short Stories

Besides being a great poet, Pushkin also pioneered the Russian prose tradition. His short stories are very stylish and concise.



Gogol, Nicolai

Ukrainian Tales

Short stories set in Gogol's native Ukraine featuring stock characters like the lusty seminarian and the horrifying gnome creature Viy with eyelids that reach to the floor.

Petersburg Tales

The strangest part of Gogol, if that is possible. Contains such classics as the Nose, Nevsky Prospect, Diary of a Madman, and the Overcoat. Just think of a Kafka before Kafka.


The Government Inspector

Gogol's play about corrupt city officials and their scrambling attempts to cover up their crimes when they mistake a young stranger for the Government Inspector.


Dead Souls

The story of Pavel Chichikov who wanders rural Russia buying up the dead to serfs who have died in the last year before they are taken of the ledgers. A tour de force prose poem for the ages.


Lermontov, Mikhail

A Heroe for Our Time.

The main character, Pechorin, is everyone's favorite unfeeling prick who uses people for his own purposes before disposing of them. This collection of intertwined narratives is set in the majestic setting of the Caucuses.


Goncharov, Ivan

Oblomov

This novel is about an aristocrat that doesn't do anything. It's as if Alonso Quijano dreamt of being Don Quixote but never quite got around to it.


Dostoyevsky, Feodor

The House of the Dead

This is a fictionalized account of Dostoyevsky's time in a Siberian prison camp.


Diary from the Underground

This short story's main character is a unique creation in all literature.


Crime and Punishment

A maddening novel, like all of Dostoyevsky. A tale of intellectual pride and redemption. My favorite part of the novel is the ending.


The Brothers Karamazov

A challenging work. The character of Elder Zosima and Alyosha the monk in the world are classics. Also, one cannot forget the Grand Inquisitor as told by the atheist Ivan



Tolstoy, Leo

Anna Karenina

I have read most of this work but did not quite finish due to some unforeseen event. Yet I still remember many of the characters and descriptive language.


The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A novella about the decline and fall of an ambitious minor noble.


Vladimir, Soloviev

The Antichrist

An unforgettable fable of the end times.


Chekov, Anton

Short Stories

Chekov is one of the best short story writers in the history of literature.




20th century

Bely, Andrei

St. Petersburg

This experimental novel is akin to Joyce's Ulysses some 20 years later.

It portrays the conflict between the old guard and the rising generation that would head off the Revolution.




Bulgakov, Mikhail

Heart of a Dog

A novella about a Soviet scientist who takes a dog of the street and turns him into a man by altering his pituitary gland. A satire of Stalinist Russia.


Master and Margarita

A phantasmagorical romp through 1930's Moscow featuring the Devil and a cat named Behemoth.


Voinovich, Vladimir


The Ivankiad

A satire about collective housing in Soviet Russia.


21st century

(same author)

Monumental Propaganda

The history of a staunch Stalinist woman and the changing currents within the USSR political establishment from de-Stanlistization, Brezhnev and beyond.

Georgia on my mind

Continuing with the Orthodox theme I would like to comment a bit on the recent Georgian conflict by sharing a bit of this country's culture. Georgia along with neighboring Armenia were some of the first countries to establish Christianity as the official religion around the 4th century A.D.
I have saw a Georgian movie in my Soviet Cinema class at college. The language is very different than Russian complete with its own alphabet and artistic heritage. Here is an example:

შენ ხარ ვენახი, ახლად აყვავებული,
ნორჩი კეთილი, ედემს შინა ნერგული,
(ალვა სუნელი, სამოთხეს ამოსული,)
(ღმერთმან შეგამკო ვერვინა გჯობს ქებული,)
და თავით თვისით მზე ხარ და გაბრწყინვებული.

The above is a medieval Georgian hymn to the Virgin Mary which you can listen to here- Thou Art A Vineyard.


P.D.

Of course one can never forget the most famous Georgian of the 20th century- Stalin. They help to highlight the delicacy of the Russian-Georgian situation. But that's a story for another time.

A brush with an Eastern Orthodox Saint at the Greek Festival

This past Labor Day weekend we went to the Greek Festival at The Church of the Annunciation near downtown Columbus for the third year in a row. We go mainly because it is cheep, the food abundant and good, and the contact with Greek Orthodoxy is always interesting. My favorite part of course is going to the Cathedral bookstore to peruse icons and theological tomes. In previous years I had bought a book about the Ecumenical Councils as well as works by St. John Chrysostom.

This year; however, there was a clearance sale which included Russian Orthodox Saints' writing. For a Western Christian, Russian Orthodox thinkers are often more accessible in that they enter into dialogue with Modern Western ideas. Therefore writers like Vladimir Soloviev, Sergius Bulgakov can be very instructive in their critique of modernity and the concern for Tradition.
In this same vein, 19th century Russian Orthodox works like the Pilgrim's Journey contain much of the drama and pathos of the great Russian writers of the period all placed in a religious context. So it was a stroke of great fortune that I happened across a copy of My Life in Christ by St. John of Kronstadt.

Born Ivan Ilyich Sergiyev, he was a son of a poor family in Northern Russia near Archangel born around 1829. Ivan eventually became a parish priest near the Imperial capital St. Petersburg on the island of Kronstadt which was home to society's undesirables including sailors, convicts, and factory workers. From what I can gather he was the only married priest ever to be canonized in the Russian Orthodoxy. In Orthodoxy as in Eastern Catholicism the spiritual ideal centers around monasticism, so this fact is surprising and illuminative of his character.

My Life in Christ consists of his personal spiritual journal he kept over many years from the 1850's onward. This is a truly great work. What follows are two extracts:


How is it that the saints see us and our needs and hear our prayers? Let us make the following comparison: Suppose that you were transplanted to the sun and were united to it. The sun lights the whole earth with its rays, it lights every particle of the earth. In these rays you also see the earth, but you are so small in proportion to the sun, that you would form, so to say, but one ray, and there are an infinite number of such rays. By its identity with the sun this ray takes an intimate part in lighting the whole world through the sun. So also the saintly soul, having become united to God, as to its spiritual sun, sees, through the medium of its spiritual sun, which lights the whole universe, all men and the needs of those that pray.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Think oftener: Whose wisdom appears in the construction of your body? Who has ordered the laws of your thoughts, so that until now these laws are followed by all men? Who has engraved in the hearts of all men the law of conscience, so that until now it rewards the good and punishes the evil in all men? The Almighty, All-wise, and most gracious God! Thy hand is constantly upon me, a sinner, and there is no moment when Thy mercy leaves me. Grant me, then, always to kiss, with living faith, Thy gracious hand. Why should I go far to seek for the traces of Thy mercies, of Thy wisdom, and Thy omnipotence? O! how clearly these traces are visible to me! I, I myself am a miracle of God's goodness, wisdom and omnipotence. I myself--on a small scale--am a whole world; my soul is the representative of the invisible world; my body--of the invisible one.


My Life in Christ is accessible on-line by clicking here.


In addition to the above work St. John also wrote a number of poems touching on the spiritual life. He died near the end of 1908, three years after the Decembrist 1905 uprising, but before the real horrors would be unleashed.

Funny Russian Video

The Turbo Turtle

Category: Funny, Technology, Video |

This turbo turtle video actually is a viral video ad for one of the Russian cellphone providers selling fast cellular modems for laptops.

Comments (19) 4:52 pm

Screwed in '08

Baby for President


vs


Kitten for President

Stuff White People Like- Book Presentation

My Italian best

Duecento- 1200's

Saint Francis Assisi- Il cantico delle creature- (The canticle of the sun)

This is Saint Francis' hymn to creation including the Sun, Moon, Water, Air etc.

It is also one of the earliest poems in an Italian romance dialect, Francis' own Umbrian variety.


Trecento- 1300's

Dante Alighieri- la vita nuova, le rime, la divina commedia

The best part of Inferno is where Dante meets his old teacher Brunetto Latini sent to perdition for metrosexuality. Also, he condemns the soul of the pope of the time to Hell letting his body walk the earth.



Cecco Angiolieri- Poetry

Basically the anti-Dante. In his poem s'i fossi foco, he talks about getting back at his father and burning the entire world.


Guido Cavalcanti- Poetry

Dante's friend a fellow poet. His heart wrenching verses are the stuff of legend.



Quattrocento- 1400's

I would say Petrarch and his Canzoniere but it has been so successful it has outdone itself in a way. So there are better Petrachists than the old man himself by the 16th and 17th centuries.


Cinquecento- 1500's

Ludovico Ariosto Orlando furioso

This is an intense epic poem that keeps getting better along the way.



Niccolo Machiavelli Il principe

This book has a very bad reputation, yet it is immensely entertaining to read.


Here I would also put Machiavelli's play La Mandragola, but while I find the play fluid and strangely modern I can't say I like it that much.


Seicento- 1600's

Giambattista Marino- L'Adone

A full-blown baroque poet often compared to his Spanish contemporary Gongora. His poetry is all about surfaces and textures such as the human body.



Settecento- 1700's


Cesare Beccaria Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crime and Punishment)

A study on crime and punishment as they existed in penal codes and the need for reform. One of the first scholars to argue against the death penalty.


Ottocento- 1800's

Giacomo Leopardi- Poetry

Deeply pessimistic, oddly beautiful poetry.



Alessandro Manzoni- I promessi sposi (The Betrothed)

The best Catholic novel ever written. Set in 17th century Milan during Spanish rule, it is the story of an engaged couple and their struggle to get married when things get out of hand with bandits, food riots, and disease. The best character is Don Abbondio, a bumbling cleric who does just enough and yet still doesn't do much.
Manzoni is the grandson of Beccaria and so had an intimate knowledge of legal history. He parodies many of the laws and legal codes of the time in the novel. Indeed, part of the work's appeal is its view of the limits of human law.



Giovanni Verga- I Malavoglia (The Malavoglia family)

A novel from Verismo, the Italian movement of Realism. This novel tells the story of the decline of a merchant family in Sicily. The narrative incorporates a lot of colloquial, spoken language such as proverbs to give it a real-life feel.



Novecento- 1900's

Dino Buzzati- Il desserto dei tartari (Desert of the Tartars)

A soldier named Drogo is sent to a remote fortress on the outpost of an enemy border. Thing is, there hasn't been an attack in about a hundred years. So not much happens at first but routine. In essence, the novel delves into the monotony of modern life via a militaristic/bureaucratic fable.



Luigi Pirandello- Il fu Mattia Pascal (The former Mattia Pascal)

A man tired of his hum-drum life goes to Montecarlo for a weekend and wins big. On his way home he finds out that they have mistaken the body of a stranger for his and as a result he has been declared dead. He takes advantage of this to start a new life with his wealth. Yet he is still haunted by his past.



Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz)- La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's Conscience)

Zeno Cosini tells his life story at the urging of his psychologist, which evolves around his attempts to quick smoking. This novel is unique in both style and form. Italo Svevo was the pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz a business man from Trieste (formerly part of Austro-Hungary). He represents the melding of the cultures of Central Europe, Southern Europe, and Judaism. A very interesting author.


Umberto Eco- Il nome della rosa- The Name of the Rose

One of the better historical novels about the middle ages. The style of the narrative, in fact the language itself makes you feel as if you're reading a Latin manuscript. The only criticism would be the characterization of some aspects of the inquisition but other than that it is an intriguing read that delves into the medieval mind.



Italo Calvino - Se una notte d'inverno un viaggatore
(If on a winter's night a traveler)

This work begins with a man reading a novel which ends suddenly. He goes to buy the next installment only to find that it is another book and so on and so forth. This goes on for ten cycles. It's an extended experiment in meta-fiction something like what Cervantes' does in parts of Don Quixote.

The Gospel of Obama

(Source: The Times online)

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
Background

* Obama fears the Blair effect as tour continues

* The Europhiles are not the future, Mr Obama

* The Bugle - Barack Obama is coming to Europe!

* Our leaders go after some Obama magic

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the

Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child's very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares.

From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered “Hosanna” and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.

In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace.

As word spread throughout the land about the Child's wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child's journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it.

And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times.

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him.

And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”



(Source:Mark Shea)

A collage of quotes from sycophantic supporters and Obama's own speeches.


The Beginning of the Gospel of Barack Obama, the Son of God (According to Mark Shea)

1:1 As it is written in the AP Manual, "Behold, I send my press corps before thy face, who shall prepare thy way". And so it came to pass that pundits went forth into all that country, preaching a vote of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And lo, these pundits spake by the Spirit of the Age, going into all their towns and cities and declaring:

1:2 "He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians. . . .[he is] the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century." - Gary Hart

1:3 "Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings . . . He's our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence." - Eve Konstantine

1:4 "This is bigger than Kennedy. . . . This is the New Testament." "I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often. No, seriously. It's a dramatic event." - Chris Matthews

1:5 "[Obama is] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time." - Toni Morrison

1:6 "Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves." - Ezra Klein

1:7 "Obama has the capacity to summon heroic forces from the spiritual depths of ordinary citizens and to unleash therefrom a symphonic chorus of unique creative acts whose common purpose is to tame the soul and alleviate the great challenges facing mankind." - Gerald Campbell

1:8 "We're here to evolve to a higher plane . . . he is an evolved leader . . . [he] has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in the Unvarnished Truth." - Oprah Winfrey

1:9 “I would characterize the Senate race as being a race where Obama was, let’s say, blessed and highly favored. That’s not routine. There’s something else going on. I think that Obama, his election to the Senate, was divinely ordered. . . . I know that that was God’s plan." - Bill Rush

1:10 Therefore did the multitudes go out to Obama in the wilderness of Iowa, Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Utah. And seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

1:11 Blessed are those who Believe. For they shall say, “Yes We Can!”

1:12 Blessed are those who say, “Yes We Can!”, for they shall audaciously Hope.

1:13 Blessed are those who Hope, for they shall speak of Change.

1:14 Blessed are those who speak of Change, for they shall Get Fired Up.

1:15 Blessed are those who Get Fired Up, for they be baptized with the Spirit of the Age.

1:16 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst during long rallies, for they shall drink the waters of Evian and I shall not lose my photo op.

1:17 Blessed are we. For we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the Change that we seek.

1:18 Blessed are you, when men shall question you, and ask specifics, and seek all manner of policy detail for clarity’s sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for so persecuted they the vague-minded which were before you. They shall drag you before TV cameras and microphones, and ask all manner of questions about specifics and you shall give testimony to me before the kings of the earth. But he that remains vague until the end shall receive a great reward in the Administration that is come.

1:19 And behold, great multitudes from Idaho, Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington followed him, And more than ever believers were added to Obama, multitudes both of men and women, so that when he came by they might at least touch the hem of his garment.

1:20 And the All Knowing Quantum Field of Intelligence did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Obama, so that handkerchiefs were carried away from his body to the worshippers, and spirits of cynicism came out of them and they were found dressed and in their left minds.

1:21 Many who heard him were astonished, saying, "Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom given to him?"

1:22 And they were amazed at him. For he went throughout the land, preaching new wine for new wineskins and the multitudes came to him in prayer and supplication.

1:23 Therefore did his disciples proclaim: "If any one thirst, let him come to Obama and drink. He who believes in Obama, as the scripture has said, 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" He is the Chosen One consubstantial with the Father and the Paraclete.

1:24 For Obama is our peace, who has made the two Americas one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility. Now, speaking in vague generalities, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Obama, from whom the one big organism, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love of him.

1:25 And behold, there appeared a great wonder in the heavens, a woman clothed in stylish raiment, with Jimmy Choo heels under her feet and necklace of 12 beads around her neck, interceding for the faithful.

1:26 And there appeared another wonder in heaven: Behold! A great dragon in a pantsuit. And her tail drew the third part of the superdelegates, and did cast them into four star restaurants to schmooze them.

1:27 And there was war in heaven: Blessed Michelle fought against the dragon; that old serpent, called Rodham, and Clinton, which deceiveth the whole electorate.

1:28 There were signs in the Sun and moon, and Blessed Michelle appeared unto millions on televisions, iPods, and streaming computers warning that the consummation of all things was at hand and saying "He that is whole needeth not the physician, but he that is sick. Thy broken hearts are restless till they rest in Obama."

1:29 And behold the Good News spread and multiplied, so that the monks of Clooney came to him and declared, “Master! I will follow you wherever you go!” and a sister of the Halle Name went before him, making straight his path, lest at any time Obama dash his foot against a paper cup.

1:30 And on the third day, he rose in the polls.

1:31 And the dragon was exceeding wroth, and went to make war on with the remnant of uncommitted delegates. But though she struck at his heel, he crushed her head.

1:32 For lo, all that was written by the pundits must be fulfilled, for it was necessary that Obama go from race to race and glory to glory, for he is with us always! He is the Alpha and the Omega of American History, who was and who is and who is to come. For the Metaphysical Force is with him.

1:33 Amen! Marana tha! Come, Lord Obama! The Spirit of the Age and the Brights say, “Come!” Even so, come, Lord Obama! And we shall have no God but Caesar!”

Election in November

Pontificator's Laws

First Law: When Orthodoxy and Catholicism agree, Protestantism loses.

Second Law: When the Bible alone is our authority, the Bible ceases to be our authority.

Third Law: It’s one thing to read Scripture and the Fathers; it’s quite another thing to read Scripture through the Fathers.

Fourth Law: A church that does not understand itself as the Church, outside of which there is no salvation, is not the Church but a denomination or sect.

Fifth Law: When it comes to doctrine, earlier is better, except when it’s not.

Sixth Law: When the Church Fathers and the Rabbis of the Talmud agree on a commandment of God, odds are God spoke it.

Seventh Law: Justification by faith is not a theory of salvation; it is the verbal and sacramental enactment of salvation.

Eighth Law: Any christology, soteriology, or ecclesiology that undermines the Church’s evangelistic mission to the heathen and their baptismal conversion to Jesus Christ is wrong.

Ninth Law: If a Catholic cannot name at least one article of faith that he believes solely on the basis of the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, he’s either a saint or a Protestant.

Tenth Law: All dogmas of the Church Catholic are infallible, but some are more infallible than others.

Eleventh Law: It doesn’t matter how vigorously you protest your belief in the eucharistic real presence: if you are not willing and eager to prostrate yourself before the Holy Gifts and adore, worship, and pray to the glorified Lord Jesus Christ, present under the forms of bread and wine, you really do not believe in it.

(Taken from

http://pontifications.wordpress.com/pontificators-laws/)

Eddie Lawrence- "The Old Philosopher"

Book Meme

Grab the nearest book, turn to page 123. Write down the fifth sentence:

The people of the golden age lived without the advantage of learning and lived under the influence of instinct and nature.

(The Essential Erasmus: The Praise of Folly)

Excerpt from Barchester Towers

A goodly man- Septimus Harding


The novel Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope is a hilarious novel about politics and religion in Victorian England where all the moral ambiguity of human life is made manifest. Somehow all of this is made funnier when applied to clerics.

One of these individuals, Mr. Harding, is inspirational in his conduct and character.

Here is an extract from the novel in which Mr. Harding laments the shifts coming about in the Church of England and the culture in general toward faddish mores which lack any real substance. Another character, Mr. Slope, represents said shift.


Take this and transfer it to the Humanities and the Intellectual Life and you will understand my suffering. Where innovation is deemed solely for innovation's sake alone and all that is True and Beautiful is banished as old-fogey and politically incorrect:


‘New men are carrying out new measures, and are eating away the useless rubbish of past centuries.’ What cruel words these had been; and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era; an ear in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at every thing that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh—or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, and write up to it too, if that cacoethes be upon us, or else we are nought. New men and now measures, long credit and few scruples, great success and wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live. Alas, alas! under the circumstances Mr Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live. This new doctrine of Mr Slope and the rubbish cart, new at least at Barchester, sadly disturbed his equanimity.'

Jimmy, Jimmy

Hilarious video.

A Tajikistani worker singing Bollywood songs during a work break in a Russian factory.

The Douchiad: Part the Third- Republic of Douches

Honorary citizens of Douchistan.


Nestled amongst the stans is the little-known country of Douchistan, the only country to be forcibly separated from another against its will. It appears that the inhabitants of Kurmenistan thought that people to the Southeast were total douches. Bigger douches even than their former supreme ruler Saparmurat Niyazov.

In Douchetown, the capital city, is a main square which has a giant, monumental douchebag carved in granite. Every year they have a celebration commemorating their expulsion and the formation of Douchistan, declaring honorary citizenship to worthy individuals.


Congratulations! to:



Richard Dawkins





Supposedly an Evolutionary Biologist, Dawkins now spends his time writing polemical tomes advocating the New Atheism. Someone has forgotten to tell him what science is and how philosophy and theology deal with the question of God. What we get instead is a badly thought out rehash of 19th century scientism.

If you look at the rest of the world only English-speaking countries have real controversies over the Evolution vs Religion question. Largely because of douches like this who attack their opponents with ad hominem arguments that taste of straw.


As if the positing of a completely random universe doesn't contradict all moral posturing in the first place.


P.S. Read the Church Fathers, especially Augustine.




James Cameron



From Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2 one would have thought he has a bright future ahead. But it was not to be. There was the ultimate chic flick writ large which cheapened the noble story of Titanic. However, thus far all could be forgiven. Cameron's douchehood only became apparent upon declaring "I'm king of the world" at the Academy Awards. His wife summarily divorced him, even she couldn't stand this giant douche. Then came the documentary Forgotten Tomb of Jesus which just solidified him in the annals of douchitude. Anyone with a passing knowledge of First century Judaism or Actual History, for that matter, could see this dookie coming.



Ward Churchill





Each time you fill out Human Resource forms dealing with race and gender involves a moment of truth. Especially for the white man who would gladly check Pacific Islander to qualify for some funds for over-priced higher education. This guy actual went all the way through with it and became chair of Ethnic Studies at Colorado, Boulder. Add to this his "Little Eichmann" theory which blamed the victims of the 9-11 attacks for their fate. They were wholly responsible for US policy in the mid-east thus they deserved to die, falling like rag-dolls from burning buildings. Nice.
If you don't find this moral reasoning disturbing then try again.
Yes, we are all connected and share, to an extent, the iniquity of our society but we also are responsible at an individual level.
Its called individual and collective judgment in eschatological terms. But these are judgments reserved to God alone not to douche-wad professors.