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Friday, October 16. 2009
On Romanian Unity
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Posted by Mark at 06:05 | Comments (30)
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Tom Rosco, son of JDC member Fr Romey Rosco, continues the line of "this reunification will help bring unity in America." And how exactly does he see that happening? NO ONE in favor of the reunification has EVER answered that question, but continues to use it as a selling point of the grande plan.
I would question how the Episcopate shows some kind of humility by acquiescing to the foreign Patriarchate. If there was any humility here, it would be the Patriarch acknowledging that his parishes here really should come under the Episcopate...unless all the people who have immigrated here are just staying long enough to make some money and go back to Romania, in which case those parishes are more like foreign embassies serving transcient visitors. Otherwise, being in America should meaning being part of the American Church to which the Episcopate belongs.
(editor's note: I think you have hit two nails on the head with this comment. First, no one has explained how haviing 16+ ethnically based jurisdictions, all related to foreign patriarchates, builds unity towards an American Church. And that of course, is where you second insight comes in: this is not about an American Church, but maintaining ecclesiastical identities in America apart from the culture in which they find themselves. Is that a valid goal in the missionary context that is America? Yes, if the goal is never to create a local Church. But if so, then how does it promote unity in America? It would seem, rather, it institutionalizes our seperation and colonial ecclesistical status forever for the convenience of foreign Patriarchates, with all the negatives that implies.
An American Church then becomes a chimera, for there are no Americans, there are only Greeks, Russians, Serbs, Arabs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, etc. in America - forever. Or at least until 15 foreign Churches decide the time is right to unite them into one, which, as someone said, will be on the 14th of Never. The OCA's dream of an autocephalous local church composed of diverse groups may be dead in the water at the moment, but this path seems like a dead end right from the start. )
#1 Anonymous on 2009-10-16 06:19
The fact remains, "Local churches are under the omophor of local bishops." There are no Orthodox Canons stating that foreign bishops should rule over the churches or territories not under their immediate authority. There is NO DIASPORA; only local, indigenous growing Orthodox Churches with local bishops which RULE THEMSELVES. The Romanians in America under the OCA rule themselves according to Orthodox Canon Law. To go under the omophor of a foreign bishop, the Pat. of Romania, is NOT canonical nor how the Holy Apostles organized the Church. So, which is it, obeying Orthodox Canon Law and RULING YOURSELF or disobeying the canons and subject yourselves to foreign bishops?
#2 Anonymous on 2009-10-16 06:53
The idea that the OCA is an"American" Church is simply laughable. My family has lived in this country for almost three hundred years, but because I refuse to reject the traditions of my ancestors, I cannot belong to the OCA...but only to the Antiochian Archdiocese which has a western rite Vicariate. The OCA is simply the Russian Church utilizing, sometimes, English. That does not make it an "American" Church. The Romanians should return home.
#3 Dale on 2009-10-16 12:29
I don't know how you see the OCA as NOT an American Church. It's composed of all nationalities and 50% converts! Most ALL the OCA parishes use 100% English. You are just looking at the Western Rite? The Western Rite is American? The last I looked, the Western Rite is Roman.
The Romanians under the OCA RULE THEMSELVES. They can use all English, all Romanian or whatever. The key here is that they have full, ecclesiastical authority over their own churches. Even the Antiochians don't have that....
#3.1 Anonymous on 2009-10-16 15:02
Sorry, Dale, but for LOTS of us who were born in America and aren't Western Rite, the OCA is an American church. As a non-Russian, I have enjoyed being in a number of OCA parishes that included the traditions of various ethnic groups and yet were soundly Orthodox. The Western Rite deserves its own discussion, but don't trash the OCA because they have not gone there yet. Only the Antiochians have gone that route, and it has not been without some serious questions about what and how they are doing a western rite.
#3.2 Anonymous on 2009-10-16 16:51
Reply to Dale: Yes the OCA is an Orthodox Church in the US which is completely without a foreign Patr. It is true, its roots and traditions are Russian. Russian typicon, music set to English. However, lots has happen in the 30 years of autocephaly. Majority of our bishops are truly diocesan bishops and American born and many converts. Many of our clergy our converts. The Carpatho-Russian people from Austro-Hungary (1880's to 1914) came to America to be Americans.They reared their children in American schools. My parents (and their siblings, if alive would be in their 90's) are deceseaed. Their children the majority married other Americans and their families do not consider themselves Austrians, Czechs, Poles, Russians but Americans. Their roots were Orthodox Church from 866 -- 100 years before St. Vladimir baptized his people in Russia --and their ancestors were forced to be uniates. When they came to America they founded the majority of the Russian Orthodox parishes in the US. Because of communism the bishops here in America were left on their own to minister to the people, ordain clergy, educated clergy (two seminaries existed plus St. Tikhon's Monastery and Orphanage). They never went back home. They came to America for a better life and to have the freedom to be Orthodox, to own property and be citizens where they would be treated as equals. In Austria they were second class citizens (over 500,000 people came during these years). Many of the offspring of these immigrants have been absorbed into American culture and other western religious denominations. When I was a child in the 60's services were in Church Slavonic and I followed along with an English/Church Slavonic Divine Liturgy book (1963) and I still have it. Most of my siblings have left the Orthodox Church. Either they don't go to church or they go to a non-Orthodox Church. I attended Russian language school during the week and Russian folk dance classes, etc. The Russian bishops tried to russified the people. The OCA parishes are mixed with converts over the past 30 years and their children are craddle Orthodox. They have the faith in books (which did not exist in the 60's) to teach themselves the faith and their children. SVS Press did a lot of work translating religious books into English. Our Orthodox churches are not to be centers of preserving ethnic cultures, but places of worship of God in correct worship. There is not an American Typicon, perhaps someday there will be the blending of the best of the Greek Typicon and the Russian Typicon. Our music in our churches could be a blend of the best of all our traditions of the Orthodox world. It is time the bishops and Patr. got on board and did what is right for the Orthodox faithful in this country. OCA parishes today do not have Russian language schools and folk dance classes as the norm. There is nothing wrong with having Greek language classes, Romanian language classes, Russian language classes and folk dancing Irish folk dancing, etc. But each parish based upon its makeup can have a parish that is first christian with christian outreach and still celebrate its ancestral roots whether it is Scottish, Irish, Russian, Austrian, Czech, Serbian, Macedonian, or European (as my children state their ethnic heritage, eastern european and western european). If we are preserving Orthodoxy as a basis of our ethnic culture only and seen by other Americans as Greek Orthodox or Romanian Orthodon; then we aren't doing the Lord's work and being a shining light of Christ that others may want to become Orthodox. Its time to get priorities straight. Lets be honest the foreign patri. see American dollars helping their churches overseas. We can do charitable outreach to our fellow Orthodox overseas and honor those people and saints who gave much with their blood. Let's have a healthy united Orthodox church in the US/Canada, etc.
#3.3 anonymous on 2009-10-16 22:47
With all due respect, Dale, if I didn't reject the traditions of my ancestors, I couldn't be in the OCA either. Those sacrifices to Odin make a mess, and it just takes over the conversation at coffee hour.
As for whether the OCA is an American Church, get back to me when the Antiochians celebrate the Liturgy in Tlingit.
#3.4 Christopher on 2009-10-17 04:32
The autocephelous OCA combined with the AOCA would make a more "American" Church than the OCA alone. This Church in combination with most of the Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Carpatho-Russian, Greek, and Russian Orthodox parishes in North America would make a much more effective Orthodox Christian witness. This Church would also be far more likely to attract those of us who have been here so long we have no national identity other than being Canadian, American, or Mexican.
A greater autocephelaous North American Orthodox Church would also benefit Orthodox Christians worldwide by manifesting far more effective cooperative efforts to help our brothers and sisters around the world, and to attract other Christian to the ancient Faith.
#3.5 Marc Trolinger on 2009-10-17 06:21
The Byzantine rite is not "Russian." The Western rite is not "American." This is typical "Western rite" ethnocentrism shining through here. Imagine if Russians started complaining about using a Byzantine rite instead of a "Russian" one... that's the level of absurdity we have reached. Does every ethnic or national group need to have its own rite? The OCA is an American church because it is composed predominantly Americans, including many who are not of Russian or Slavic background.
#3.6 Ryan on 2009-10-17 06:24
I don't know about calling the OCA the "Russian Church" just because you have an aversion to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
The OCA's mission is to create an indigenous Orthodox Church - the vision of theologians like Fr. Schmemann. One would be hard-pressed to say the same of the Antiochian Archdiocese.
#3.7 Rdr. Nilus on 2009-10-17 07:01
Mark, while the part of my post referring to the EOC wasn't crucial to my point, I see no reason why you had to redact it. Editing comments seems to be increasingly at issue, as I've seen a surprising number of people complaining about it lately.
Earlier in the OCA's scandal, many (including myself) advocated closing this "comments" section because it brought discredit on the mission of OCANews as a whole. You resisted, saying it was essential for people to have the freedom to speak their mind. I came to see your point.
But now, you seem to be subverting your own cause, as it seems that commentators have freedom to speak their mind - as long as it jives with your inscrutable rubric of acceptability.
If there are errors of fact, don't redact them; address them in an 'editors note.' I don't comprehend redacting "vitriol" as plenty was posted against Herman and Kondratick, not too long ago. Again, you must make it clearer when you are making a redaction. Substituting "......" isn't clear enough.
You have suggested that people who disagree with your moderation are free to stop visiting OCANews. This is too similar to Herman's "shut up or get out" mantra, and is disappointing coming from you.
In truth, OCANews is not "just another blog" - it is an institution which has taken on a vital role in our Church. If you're going to promote "freedom of speech" then you have to actually go through with it.
Many have offered help running, writing, upgrading and moderating this site, but you haven't accepted. Why not? Why not open OCANews to its own sort of public accountability, by allowing other people to get involved? OCANews is not a private endeavor, it is a public institution, and it deserves to be treated as such.
In the mean time, why not provide clearer explanations of what you are redacting, and why?
(editor's note: Things are being redacted more often than previously for two simple reasons, of which you correctly identified one: Vitriol. It's getting worse, not better, and some of it is just over the top. Nor is it just personal: organizations and groups come into it all the time as well - like the EOC, the HOOM, Ben Lomand, the Jerusalem Patriarchate, Arabs, Converts, the Catholics, not to mention the OCA, new calendarists, old calendarists, ecumenists, the list is endless. I don't like, and am less and less likely to permit " drive by trashings" of whole groups. If you have a complaint, make it. Evidence it. And be prepared to take your lumps when others contend against you, without name-calling. If you are not willing to do that, don't expect me to sit back and enable consistent and continual bad behaviour. Not you personally, Nilus, but you know to what I am referring....
That being said, it is also the case that people are making more and more allegations, right and left, with no attempt to offer any evidence for them; asserting facts that, to coin a phrase, are not in evidence. If you are going to say " so and so" is a criminal, then cite the criminal action. Just saying so, doesn't make it so.
So Nilus, taking up your analogy, as an institution, think of me as a referee, because I want to see a free exchange of ideas and news - not a slug fest that degenerates into partisan bickering and absurdity ala theantiochian.org. I will not let this site go the way of that one. And if I am a bit heavy handed with the ellipses, I apologize in advance. I am willing to let my record - now that I am an institution - speak for itself. But no one is perfect, least of all me, but I am serious about keeping this site serious.)
#3.7.1 Rdr. Nilus on 2009-10-20 09:34
Thank you, Mark, for your comment on this matter. I have read with increasing bewilderment the level of downright rudeness and disrespect to our brothers and sisters in some comments you even let through. And I can only imagine the inappropriateness, sadly, of what you must screen out.
I would even, though I know that many would object, argue that none of us should be able to engage in "anonymous" drive by commenting.
I am a man under authority and I accept it. (Indeed, I freely chose it when i was chrismated an Orthodox.) And if I am afraid to state my opinion, with my name included, because of fear of reprisal, then it means I do not truly stand publicly by my comments.
We are all living in choice, my brothers and sisters. If you do not like your life, change it. But don't think for a second that I care that you claim you are an "Anonymous Priest" of the blah-blah-blah jurisdiction. As if I should pay attention because you claim you are priest? I don't even know you really are a priest, because you haven't included a name.
You say you're afraid to include your name because you don't know what your Bishop will do? Then shut up and accept the life you chose. But if you want me to believe you're a priest, include your full name and where you serve. And if you aren't willing to do that, then drop the "priest" (or reader, etc) part of your claim. Because your anonymous rant is as worthless as the next anonymous rant. Hell, how do we know every idiot who posts here is even Orthodox?
Well, for starters, if we give our full names and where we are under authority, it can at least be fact checked.
Keith Massey
Holy Elevation Parish (Moscow Patriarchate)
Hackettstown, NJ
You raise an interesting and very important question: what constitutes "American Orthodoxy", i.e., Orthodoxy in North America? Is it which rite is used in worship: the Eastern Rites of St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, and St. Gregory Diologos, or the "Western Rite"? (Can any reader point me to a complete, widely recognized Orthodox Western Rite that predates the establishment of the Church of England?)
In 1985 the parish in Southern California to which I belonged at the time was received into Orthodoxy at the hand of His Grace Clement, then Bishop of Serpukhov, of the Moscow Patriarchate as Western Rite Orthodox. We were Anglo-Catholics looking for a more stable home and chose Orthodoxy; we petitioned Moscow to receive us for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the OCA had no interest in providing for "Western Rite Orthodox". In 1989 I transferred to a nearby OCA parish because, although I was raised a Traditional Episcopalian, I had come to find the services of the Eastern Rite more spiritually nourishing. I chose the OCA parish rather than the nearer Serbian Orthodox parish because I understand neither Old Church Slavonic nor modern Serbian. Not once in my move from the Western Rite to the Eastern Rite did I think I was changing from an American into a Russian.
What of my ancestral home? My father's side of the family (Scots and Irish) has lived in the territory of what is now the U.S.A. since the second ship landed in the Plymouth Colony, almost 400 years. My mother's side of the family (Scots and German) has been in the U.S.A. for at least 90 years, but probably no more than 150 years. At a minimum, I am third generation Scots/Irish/German-American, but most importantly I am Orthodox. My Orthodox roots are in the North American Orthodoxy founded by the Saints of North America, both known and unknown.
#3.8 Mark C. Phinney on 2009-10-17 08:50
Dear Dale,
I agree with you that the general failure of the OCA and most other canonical Orthodox jurisdictions to deal seriously and creatively with the Western Rite is a problem. For some people, the Western approach is a more natural idiom for prayer and worship; and historically, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Orthodox Church worshiped in more than the Byzantine manner, even on the Holy Mountain itself, in the Amalfion. In more recent times, specifically in 1870, well before St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, Russia's Holy Synod issued a Western Rite Mass (in Latin, yet!) for the hoped-for flood of converts after Vatican I's proclamation of papal infallibility. And we know how vigorously St. John supported the restoration of the Western Rite in Orthodoxy. But to date, only ROCOR and the Antiochians have made any effort to restore a Western use, with varying degrees of success. (IMHO, ROCOR has made a better job of it.)
BUT how do you get from Western Rite to "American Church"? The Western Rite (Roman, Sarum, Ambrosian, Gallican and/or Mozarabic) is no more "American" than the Byzantine Rite is "foreign;" both evolved on a different continent in a different culture. And how does belonging to a jurisdiction whose primate is a citizen of and lives in a foreign land make you more "American" than those whose primate is US born-and-bred? [And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of why Canadians and Mexicans would want to be part of an "American" Church anyway.]
With respect, I must suggest you need to re-think your position.
Fr. Philip
#3.9 Igumen Philip (Speranza) on 2009-10-19 04:02
While Mr. Rosco sings "how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity" (Psalm 133:1) in support of the OCA's Romanian Episcopate uniting with the Church of Romania overseas, he ignores that such a move would actually create disunity, sundering "the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3) it now shares with Orthodox Christians of Albanian, Bulgarian, Russian and many other roots within the Orthodox Church in America. He also ignores the fact that such a move would mean shaping church life along the lines of the heresy of phyletism (identifying and organizing the Church in ethnocentric terms), rather than by the orthodox principle of territorial unity and integrity in a given geographic area. It's a matter of cultural roots trumping canonical norms one again. Why not have the American diocese of the Romanian Church simply join the Romanian Episcopate of the OCA, which would both unite separated brethren born of the same ethnic roots and advance the canonical territorial unity and integrity of the Church in North America? That solution would accomplish two noble goals and avoid unorthodoxy.
#4 Gregory on 2009-10-16 19:34
"Do not be afraid, but believe." Believe what? Have faith in whom? Most of us trust God, and believe in Him. Unfortunately, we do NOT believe that this Reunification idea is connected to what is good for us or the Church in this country. While we may be past the terrible days of Communism, it is naive to think that things are just fine now. Those who were shaped under its influence, including those in the Church, did not suddenly become some other persons the day after Ceausescu died. That is also reflected in a different mindset of people who live on the other side of the ocean. A prime example is the heavy-handedness we have seen on the part of the Patriarch already, announcing the "reunification" over a year ago as a done deal, and threatening his archbishop here to get it done, or he would, etc. To turn the Episcopate back over to the Patriarchate, for whatever brotherly love it supposedly would show (and why is that necessary in order for some new harmony to exist?), would show us to be poor stewards of the Church on this continent.
Believing in Christ, I am not afraid of the real Good News. But that still does not make reunification a good idea.
#5 Another anon on 2009-10-16 21:07
Dale, you are grossly mistaken. The OCA may be incorrect in not accepting the Western Rite (and that's debatable), but that doesn't make it "unAmerican." It is American incorporated, American led, its liturgigies are in English (with few exceptions), it has an indigenous presence in Mexico and has inaugurated a French-indigenous mission in Quebec. It's hierarchy is American and answerable to no overseas presence.
It is also a Christian Church, one that belongs to a body of Christendom that has existed for 2000 years. It has never asked you or anyone to "give up" your customs, but it has the obligation to not be conformed to the world.
Just a thought experiment here: it's obvious you love the Western Rite (as do I). However, how would you feel if a Baptist, Methodist, or other low-church convert asked, or demanded, that the OCA conform its liturgy to his life experiences, since after all, the low-church liturgy is "part of his tradition"? Just curious.
#6 George Michalopulos on 2009-10-16 22:14
All: the idea of the Romanian jurisdictions coming together in a "maximally autonomous metropolitinate" is sublimely ridiculous. Yes, I know, the churches' rift should be healed, but guess what? there's an American Orthodox Church. You're living here in America. Get over it.
#7 George Michalopulos on 2009-10-16 22:17
Almost as ridiculous as all of the Orthodox jurisdictions in America uniting under the OCA!
#7.1 Anonymous on 2009-10-19 19:17
Hetr. Jonah has said he'd be willing for the OCA to dissapear for the sake of a united autocephaous Church in North America. The idea of uniting "under" the OCA is laughable. The OCA merely provides a framework for union. But all of this will be worked out in the episcopal assembly under the leadership of the GOA archbishop.
(Editor's note: Don't hold your breath, Matt.)
#7.1.1 Matt Karnes on 2009-10-21 13:18
I was happy to see here a thoughtful article arguing a point which I know is not in line with the overall thrust of this website, namely, a fully unified American Orthodox Church. This shows that the site does further open discussion within our Orthodox family.
I have stated in earlier posts that I don't see the consolidation of the Romanians into an autonomous jurisdiction as a tragic step backward.
I was chrismated in an OCA parish and am now a member of a MP parish, but I'm American as you can get (Norwegian-Lutheran raised and a Cheesehead).
The Romanians within the OCA are already a non-geographical diocese. Let's be honest and admit that this is a concession to them on the basis of their considerable size. And because of that size, I believe that their unified voice will, in good time, further the cause of unity here in North America.
Or maybe we should just admit that the cause of unity in North America is currently so completely befuddled that it's hard to point at anything as necessarily being a detriment anymore. In God's good time, we will look retrospectively at a winding path toward our North American Orthodox Church. And it will be full of unanticipated graces.
"This reunification will help bring unity in America."
I cannot believe some people believe this idea.
I think even if people of ROEA reunite Romanian Patriarchate with this idea, Romanian Patriarchate may have different one.
So, how those two groups fill the gap?
If the Romanian Patriarchate are promoting 'unity' in North America, they must do same in other places in the world.
However, they have established parishes in Japan without having any consent from the Orthodox Church of Japan.
Why they create ecclesiastical disunity in Japan?
I think Romanian Patriarchate in present just promote the idea "România Mare."
#9 John M. Shoji, an Orthodox Christian in Japan on 2009-10-17 17:02
It is certainly good that brothers should dwell together in unity. And certainly good that old world wounds caused by communism be healed. But returning 1/2 of the Orthodox Church here in America with Romanian roots to the authority of European bishops makes NO SENSE. Traditions are lovely. The diversity that one sees here in America when it comes to singing and praying the liturgy and in the iconography and church architecture is wonderful. I love it as a matter of fact. But the fact remains that the majority of the people that belong, or more importantly, WILL BELONG to the church here in the future have never been to Romania. And will probably never go there. If the Orthodox in this country don't stop using the Church as a means to live in some small way the life of their grandparents, then these beautiful buildings will someday stand empty, locked up and will only be a beautiful testimony to a bygone era.
In making America Orthodox, we must bring a little of Romania here, Russia here, Greece here, Serbia here, Bulgaria here, Ukraine here, even Africa and, anyplace else Orthodox Christianity is found. But we cannot retreat into ethnic encalves here and expect that Americans are gonna get it.
I recently had a revealing interaction with a Romanian woman who I was hoping to have an interaction with about the Church. Her being cradle Orthodox FROM Romania and me being an American convert. It didn't go so well. When I was hoping to learn something special from someone who came here from the Old World, and despite her being baptized there in the Faith, she went into a relentless tirade about the Church and its long services, strict rules, unintelligable services, hypocritical clergy and yada yada yada. She could not understand for the life of her why we (me and my convert wife) would want to be Orthodox. During the conversation she also showed a complete lack of understanding of the basic tennants of the Faith, which with my rudimentary understanding was able to blatantly call her out on. Nonetheless, my point is that this kind of thinking in Europe, as I understand it, is not all that uncommon. Why anyone would want to subjugate ourselves to Churches overseas that have enough work to do in their OWN COUNTRIES is beyond my comprehension. We can learn from them and borrow from their traditions and cultures BUT WE MUST BECOME A CHURCH HERE IN AMERICA.
I belong to the OCA. Sure it isn't the answer. The OCA must be a piece of a bigger puzzle that is put together in the end. And I have a feeling that most people in the OCA would be willing to give up the OCA as we know it, if it were to result in Americans actually having A unified Church here. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
Anyway... everyone can just keep fighting over Old world, New world, Old calendar, New Calendar, Greek language, or English language, Byzantine chant or polyphony, slavonic in the servies, Romanian traditions or whatever.... so one can feel as though they are actually in the Old country during church. That way the Evangelicals can welcome your kids into their church and heretical teachings or the Roman catholics can get your grandkids to a mixed marriage. While converts study for months or years to find and come to this church. All the while painfully disrobing themselves of all the prejudice that comes with being protestant and against anything "catholic". Only to find Orthodox people here trying their darndest to be ANYTHING BUT Catholic in the true sense of the word.
The evil scandals and financial misdeeds that plague(d) the OCA and the Antiochians don't bother me nearly as much as the scandal of keeping the PEARL of GREAT PRICE hidden here while many Americans will never have the chance to know her.
Scott Yonkin
#10 Scott Yonkin on 2009-10-18 11:18
Afetr a long but incoherent introduction TR concluded in a typical circular logic manner that "Vatra Episcopate should be subordinated to the Romanian Patriarchate because it is good"(that is to say we should be subordinated because we should be subordinated).Anyhow.
In what way a subordination to a foreign body(the Romanian Patriarchate) should promote Orthodox unity in North America?
TR should know that sins had to be atoned before being forgiven(the case of the machinations of the Romanian communists and their religious contraption in North America,the so called "missionary" diocese).
Very conveniently ,and literaly pro domo!,TR didn't mentioned that the group of Vatra priests ganged into the Joint Commission of Dialogue(JDC) by swithching alegianes shows not whose friends they are but what sort of friends they are.
In the context it is strange how such a pathetic comment (that is TR's) was printed in a publication of a "Vatra" auxiliaru at a time when is an open attempt to silence any argument that favor the "Vatra"s status quo,that is unity in and with the OCA.
Alexandru Nemoianu
#11 Alexandru Nemoianu on 2009-10-18 13:03
I think the question of whether or not this is a good idea will largely depend on your vision for Orthodoxy in America. Do you see the Church as the Ark of Salvation whose mission is to extend the true faith to this land and its people? If so this is probably not an idea which will appeal to you.
On the other hand if you view the Church primarily as an ethnic social club this makes wonderful sense.
Under the mercy,
I am totally amazed at the OCA Holy Synods seeming complacency in the face of what seems to the ....actions being contemplated by Archbishop Nathaniel.
#13 Matt Karnes on 2009-10-18 19:44
Did anyone look at all the Romanian born clergy that's in the ROEA ? Look it up now on the oca.org web site. I need not say more because your minds our already made up. Who do you thing you're kidding ? You even have a Romanian born Bishop. I thought the OCA got their clergy from the native land, America. Very, very few American born clergy are in the ROEA. Why?
How many of their clergy have "green cards' and Are Under +ABN thumb.-- many came to this country without a release from their Bishops in Romanian and were taken in:however when they want to transfer to another Bishop, no way.It looks like +ABN will be the oldest Bishop in the OCA. but, Don"t Look to him for leadership.
#14 ANONYMOUS on 2009-10-18 20:40
"E pluribus unum." A major problem for Orthodoxy in
the West is the obsessive desire of each jurisdiction
to establish a single way of doing things. Often this
is for ethnic reasons (and I agree that many supporters
of the Western Rite are also ethnically motivated).
Thus Romanians in the OCA "have to be" in their own
Romanian diocese, because the main OCA "has to be"
Anglophone East Slavic. This encourages phyletistic
tendencies. (Sometimes, however, the underlying
reason is not nationalism but a bureaucratic mentality
which demands external uniformity as visible proof
of unity.)
Nevertheless: e pluribus unum. One of America's
cardinal values is diversity. If Orthodoxy is to thrive
here, it must abandon the need to make every parish
identical. I can think of no reason why Slavic, Albanian,
Romanian, Greek, Arab, converted-Anglican, converted-Latin,
and hybrid practices should not predominate in different
parishes of a theologically united American church.
Such unity-in-diversity should be possible in theory
within canonical administrative unity, but recent history
suggests that no-one wants it in reality. Until people do, the
uncanonical current situation will continue, because the
alternative is the extinction of someone's heritage.
George Michalopulos asks "Dale": "However, how would you feel if a Baptist, Methodist, or other low-church convert asked, or demanded, that the OCA conform its liturgy to his life experiences?"
I would answer that the operative phrase in this is
"conform its liturgy", which assumes that if there were any
low-church parishes, all parishes would become low church.
Why should that be the case?
Here is a counter-question: Absent low-church "Baptist-style"
parishes, is there even a remote chance that Orthodoxy will
ever catch on with large numbers of people in this country?
Norman Hugh Redington
#15 Norman Hugh Redington on 2009-10-19 08:44
What does 'unity' give us that we don't have today?
The only thing I see as a positive is tolerance. My church already is, so I don't care much about unity.
My church, by the way, is extremely unique. Past pictures show hundreds of ethnic Slavs, and today, there are only a couple left in the church from that bunch (and their children). The church was nearly dead and was brought back to life by a convert priest, and our parish is largely converts. What killed it? Ask me it was staying with the old language into the 90s that did it. I went there to one service and couldn't understand it and it was cold to keep the heat bill low enough for the 5 parishoners to pay for it, so it was about 5 years before I returned.
Once in awhile, we grace some of our foreigners or elderly with something sung or spoken in their native tongue, and that is the extent of it.
I think the truest tradition of Orthodoxy was local rule, and if the Patriarchs of Europe are the rulers of American churches; I'd say expect nothing good to come of it and you can reflect on my case story above.
Perhaps I've identified the greatest benefit to unity, simple local rule, but it isn't something most folks care about. Most folks just don't want things to change drastically in their lives.
I don't believe all Orthodox and other Christian churches in North America need to be unified. I believe Orthodoxy will steadily shrink if English is not embraced in the liturgy here in North America.
And the liturgy could be eastern, western, northern, southern, whatever... and I don't think it'd matter if the language weren't the local language.
..my thoughts as a largely disinterested third..
#16 Daniel E. Fall on 2009-10-19 09:54
Though not currently in serving the ROEA, I am one of only a handful of priests that were born in the US nurtured in and produced from the ROEA. I am disappointed with those who believe and teach that uniting the Episcopate with the BOR is a step forward (un pas inainte). It is, to me, just the opposite. Do not be enthralled by the promises of the BOR for "maximal autonomy," nor the spiritual riches of that nation, to give up on the ideals of the ever-memorable Archbishop Valerian and those pioneers priests and faithful who sacrificed so much to build a free and autonomous Episcopate.
It seems to me that those who advocate such a unity are unwittingly using the Church as a vehicle for political and/or cultural purposes. It would be better, in my opinion, to create a social and philanthropic entity to unite Romanians in the two episcopates in common work, like the now defunct "Union and League of Romanian Societies".
Actions speak louder than words. Any plans that might submit the episcopate and its parish churches in North America to a Synod Abroad would only marginalize it, and remove it from any meaningful dialogue on church unity. If the ROEA jumps the OCA ship, it will cease to be the forward looking ROEA, and will become nothing more than BOR Abroad, an immigrant entity, cut off from its historial roots here, increasingly meaningless to the lives of our faithful, disconnected from the mission of the Church -- a Romanian cultural club. May this never happen!
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Lowe's taps Apple's ARKit for new home improvement apps
Lowe's is pitching the apps as a way to solve problems posed by visualization.
Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Lowe's is pitching the apps as a way to solve problems posed by visualization.
The petition is edging very close to the one million signatures necessary to hand it over to the Mayor of London.
If adverts turn off visitors, the torrent search engine is hoping CPU borrowing can make up the revenue.
Patent clauses prompted many open-source projects to stay clear of the library or ban its use in future frameworks.
Gigya powers the registration and first-party data systems for multiple enterprises. Now SAP will use that information for better personalization and customer experiences.
The program is in partnership with August Home, makers of IoT tech like smart locks and smart home accessories, as well as delivery startup Deliv.
New features include Auto DevOps, productivity features like enhanced subgroups and expanded Kubernetes capabilities.
Updated: No more ride-hailing in the Big Smoke, it seems.
The report that HPE will cut around 10 percent of its staff comes as HPE continues its efforts to become "simpler, nimbler and faster."
The company also released the latest version of Apollo, its open-source autonomous driving platform.
The tool prepares data for immediate analysis or for training machine learning models.
Companies can configure Android devices before they're shipped to employees.
Cisco makes a big bet on transitioning its datacenter management business to the cloud, as part of its overall shift towards SaaS services.
Google wants more hardware manufacturing heft, but it's unclear whether HTC will be the magic potion the search giant is looking for.
Dell EMC, Microsoft, and General Dynamics have landed a $1 billion five-year, cloud-hosted enterprise services contract from the USAF.
Google's $1.1 billion HTC deal: Can Google learn from its Motorola miscues?
Big Data Analytics
IBM's Watson Data Platform aims to become data science operating system
Internet of Things
Itron acquires Silver Spring Networks for $830 million, eyes broader smart city, smart grid deployments
Oracle unveils "universal credits," license mobility for easy cloud consumption
Digital Transformation

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Ask Computer Networking Questions and Get Answers ASAP
Greetings,You mentioned that there is a "default" network listed? The Dlink's default wireless signal name is: defaultIf you press the reset button on the router, it will reset the signal name to default with no password.You can verify and change this by following the steps below:Follow the instructions below on a computer that is plugged into the router:- Go to http://192.168.0.1Leave the username blankThe default password XXXXX: default- Click the Wireless button on the left sideOn that screen all of your wireless information will be displayed.Please, update me on your status if you have any problems or questions.If you are satisfied with my help, please click the Accept button and I will in effect be awarded credit from this site for helping you. In any case, I wish you a great day.Thank you // Peace.
My preferred network is protected with a password. I was able to access that network last night. There are other laptops in the family that use that network. I do not want to use an unprotected default network. I want to use our families protected network.
As I said, under that advanced settings under preferred network our family's protected network is listed, but for some reason, my laptop will not link to it.
Please, perform the steps that I outlined above. I would like to verify that all the information that you have about your router is correct, before we begin.
Thank you greatly.
I cannot get the username blank. It says admin or user. It won't accept the password. I also cannot get the d-link to reset. It
What is the full model name of the Dlink router?
D-link 2XR. It has a small pinhole in the back to reset. I tried to insert a paperclip to no avail.
What is the Model name? The 2xr is not a model.
Wireless 180G MIMO DI-634 M
By default the password XXXXX XXXXX left blank
Does that let you login
Ok, great.Please, click the Wireless link on the left hand side.
Does the network name & password XXXXX up with what you have down for your records?
There is a lot of gobbledygook after MAC address. Nothing that make sense.
please explain
- Click on the Wireless button on the left side of the screen.
Do you have the correct information for the Network Name (SSID) and Password?
It has information about a MAC address and an IP address. Nothing that matches a network name or password.
Please, click the WIRELESS button
You are not currently, on the wireless page
Finally a screen with SSID labeled default.
Ok, change the SSID to your choice- For Security type, choose WPA PERSONAL- Enter a passcode and click the Apply settings buttonThe passcode will be your network password
It appears that your router was reset.
A reset it happen either by pressing the reset button or if there is a power surge and area.
OK. I will try it. Then how do I make sure my MACbook is recognizing the router? Do I reboot?
Once you change the network name and password XXXXX you must click the save settings button. Then wait 30 seconds and see if you can see the signal now.
It now says user account cannot reconfigure, so I need to start over using admin.
Does the router configuration page say that?
I need to reboot so I may lose you. I will log back on in a minute.
Ok, I will stand by.
The new default network with new passcode is listed and my macbook has just connected to the internet. Hooray! I am going to shut it down and see if it will still recognize the network when I restart it.
Ok great.
I will continue to stand by.
Do you have good news to report?
Bummer. I am once again having trouble getting on line. It asked for a passcode for the default network and then said my computer was unable to join because I entered an incorrect password XXXXX network name or I chose the wrong type of wireless security. I am about to go nuts here!
Safari can't find the server!!!
Did you change the network name? So it is not called Default anymore?
No, it is called default. Oh wait, the computer decided to get back online. I am going to try to restart one more time to make sure it doesn't have anymore "burps".
It may have just taken a moment.
I will stand by
Sorry about this. I am a computer illiterate.
No need to apologize.
I just want the #$%@&*!!! thing to work.
I understand your feeling ;)
I have been in your situation an uncountable number of times.
It would be nice if things, just worked.
Once again, very slow to tap into the network. It keeps searching and searching..... It never used to take this long.
When you turn it on for the first time, I always suggest leaving it alone for a good minute or so
The computer is on the default network with the new passcode and it supposedly is connected. Finally!! It is slower than hell!
Very good
Very good that it is online.
Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?
It continues to load like it is stuck. It still isn't right!!
Close Safari, and re-open it
I appreciated your help. It works but is interminably slow. It's not quite right.
It should be lightening fast. Still searching at present.
- Go to http://192.168.0.1- Click the Wireless link
- Change the Channel to channel 11 and click the Apply Settings buttonTest the speed once more.
It won't let me change the channel to 11. It is stuck on 6.
Ok, uncheck "AUTO" and do it.
Already did that. Now it works. It says for 11-G turbo mode, channel should be 6.
Disable the Turbo G mode please.
At least the computer likes that speed better because it is working. Once again, I will restart to see if everything's A-OK.
How do I disable that?
I am glad you chose to restart a few times.
Is the computer restarting?
Super G without Turbo? Is that what I should choose?
I had to reboot the router.
The MACbook still won't connect. How frustrating!!
How long has it been up?
Let's go back to the router page and change the Turbo Settings.
Set the SUPER G MODE to Disabled and save the settings
When I go to system preferences, under network, it goes to bluetooth. Then I get on Airport, click on default, the passcode is correct. I still can't connect. What am I doing wrong? The computer should recognize the network immediately without my having to prompt it every time!
What is the status of the wireless connection?
Now I can't get the Network page off the screen. It won't allow me to choose default any longer.
Airport is on but now will not connect to any network!!
Please, go back to the wireless configuration webpage and change the name of the wireless signal from default to something else.Also, set the super G mode to disabled and save all the settings
Rebooting again!!
I want to stick needles in my eyes. How about you?
I feel your stress
Restarted the MAC. Still can't get online. Why is airport showing no IP address now?
Because it is not connected.
Now it is showing a connection.
Still unsuccessful. No internet. I think I will go watch the rest of the Packers/Falcons game. I am really frustrated. Thanks for your help. I will have to contact D-Link on Monday.
You can click the Accept button now and leave any appropriate feed back.


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Queen Bey is doing the thing in Brazil.
The 32-year-old singer is spending the next 10 days in Brazil for her Mrs. Carter show tour, and E! News got some great scoop about where she's staying. Blue Ivy's mama has rented a mansion for 10 days — it's owned by Georgina Brandolini (who is the grandmother of Bianca Brandolini) — and accommodates 18 people.And guess what?


text:
"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, . . . Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . . ''
From "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400)
"Large numbers of people in travel costumes and leggings were passing by noisily on their way to and from the temple. In a room where the shutters had been raised, I waited for water to be heated, and as I looked out on the road I thought how each of these travelers must have his own problems, his own particular reason for making the pilgrimage.''
From "The Gossamer Years" by an unknown 10th-century Japanese noblewoman
"The world is wider than we can imagine . . . ''
From "Tales from Various Provinces" by Ihara Saikaku (1641-93)
|* * * * *
Are humans pilgrims by nature? The history of pilgrimage is as old as the history of sacred places — shrines, ruins, mountains, rivers, groves. Ancient Greeks journeyed to Delphi, medieval Christians to Jerusalem, Rome, Lourdes, Canterbury, Santiago de Compostela. Muslims flock to Mecca, Hindus to Varanasi on the Ganges, Buddhists to the Deer Park near Varanasi where the Buddha preached his first sermon. The hardships of the road are nothing to the religiously inspired. On Tibet's Mount Kailas, "mountain of the gods, axis of the universe," photographer Kazuyoshi Nomachi noticed among the pilgrims "a one-legged Hindu. Leaning on a cane," Nomachi writes in "A Photographer's Pilgrimage" . . . "he had walked from Calcutta, had been on the road 20 years; one step at a time he had hobbled up the Himalayas; now he was at a height of 5,000 meters. . . "
Pilgrims travel alone, in groups, or en masse, in throngs vast beyond imagining. Two million Muslims gather annually at Mecca; as many as 70 million Hindus assemble for the bathing festival of Kumbh Mela, celebrated every 12 years at each of four holy cities in India.
The solitude of St. Brendan's pilgrimage is awesome in comparison. Brendan (484-578) was a monk whose destination was Paradise. Sailing westward from Ireland, he came to an island in the Atlantic he called "The Promised Land of the Saints." There it was — Paradise. He was convinced, and others believed him. "His sacred island," the historian Daniel J. Boorstin tells us, "remained plainly marked on maps for more than 1,000 years, at least until 1759."
"Pilgrims were notorious liars and exaggerators," writes Chaucer biographer Donald R. Howard. Exaggerators certainly, their expanded truths a reflection of their expanded if undisciplined minds — but liars? Who can account for what the exalted eye sees, or thinks it sees, in strange places far from home? Boorstin finds in the "Guide de Pelerin," a popular medieval pilgrim guidebook, a tale about pilgrims who were refused hospitality at all but one house on a street in Poitiers, France. That night all the houses in the street burned down — except, of course, the one.
|* * * * *
Japan is a land of pilgrims. "An incredible number of people daily use the highways of Japan's provinces — indeed, at certain times of the year they are as crowded as the streets of a populous European city." So wrote Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician employed by the Dutch East India company and stationed in Japan from 1690 to 1692.
This, we must remember, was some 50 years after the newly-installed Tokugawa regime had shut the country tight against all Japanese leaving and almost all foreigners entering. Sakoku (closed country), the policy was officially called. Internal travel, too, was strictly controlled. The five major highways were policed from 53 sekisho — barriers, checkpoints.
"Commoners who traveled," writes Marius B. Jansen in "The Making of Modern Japan," "needed passports as well as barrier-crossing permits. Their documents were carefully (and tediously) checked, frequently supplemented by physical examinations to make sure no women disguised as men, or young boys dressed as girls, were trying to slip through. Applications for travel documents were also time consuming. . . . The travel document identified the traveler's sponsor and guarantor, and falsification of such information could cost all concerned dearly."
The pilgrim-poet Basho (1644-94) was held up one spring day in 1689 at a sekisho in the far north. "The gate-keepers were extremely suspicious," he wrote, "for very few travelers dared to pass this difficult road under normal circumstances. I was admitted after long waiting, so that darkness overtook me while I was climbing a huge mountain. I put up at a gate-keeper's house, which I was very lucky to find in such a lonely place."
The experience inspired a haiku:
"Fleas, lice/ the horse pissing/ near my pillow.''
National paralysis seems to have been the national goal, and yet Tokugawa Japan was in perpetual motion, mostly with pilgrims. Jansen speaks of "hundreds of thousands and then millions of ordinary people [thronging] the roads to Ise in festival fervor that sometimes bordered on the millenarian, many throwing themselves on the compassionate good will of villagers along the way."
The Ise shrine, dedicated to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, was the Mecca of Japan; everyone was expected to make a pilgrimage to it at least once in his or her life. There were, and are, numerous other pilgrimages — to temples of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, throughout the country; to the 88 Shikoku temples associated with the holy man Kobo Daishi (774-835), and so on. But "millenarian fervor" was Ise's alone.
In spring especially, writes Kaempfer, the Tokaido highway "is crowded with [pilgrims to Ise] . . . as people of both sexes, old and young, rich and poor, embark on this meritorious journey and act of devotion, attempting to the best of their ability to make their way on foot. Many of them have to beg for their board and food along the way; because there are so many of them, travelers are constantly accosted, and this is a great nuisance for people going to the court, even though [the pilgrims] approach with bare head and meek voice and say only once, 'My dear lord, please give the pilgrim to Ise a coin for his journey' . . .
"Yes," Kaempfer continues, "even unruly children who are to be punished for their misdeeds often run away from their parents to Ise, and when they return with a letter of indulgence, they must be absolved from any punishment. Because there are many of them and they are poor, one often sees them sleeping in the fields; on occasion they are lying at the side of the road, sick or dead."
|* * * * *
We can define "pilgrimage" strictly, as a journey to a holy site, or we can define it loosely as a journey in quest of enlightenment, enlightenment itself defined loosely enough to encompass — well, for example, a bath.
"Public baths," wrote Edo [Tokyo] novelist Shikitei Sanba in 1809, "are the shortest route there is to moral and spiritual enlightenment. Careful reflection shows this. It is a truth of Heaven, Earth, and all nature that everyone, wise or foolish, righteous or evil, rich or poor, high or low, goes naked into the bath. Shakyamuni Buddha and Confucius, Osan the maid and Gonsuke the hired man, all return to the shapes with which they were born. . . . Bathers enter the water freely, without a trace of desire. Both master and servant stand naked after they've washed away the grime of greed and worldly wants and rinsed themselves with fresh water — and you can't tell which is which!"
Every bath thus becomes a kind of pilgrimage. Chaucer would have been charmed. His Canterbury pilgrimage, like Japanese bathhouses, was daringly democratic, the chivalrous battle-hardened knight rubbing shoulders with the uncouth miller, the demure prioress with the lecherous summoner, the learned "clerk" with the unlettered reeve, and so on — conversation and tale-telling uniting them as the hot water did the bathers of Edo.
They talk much of profane love, much less of sacred love, and not at all of St. Thomas a Becket, the martyred 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury whose bones were said to heal incurable diseases and whose shrine was the pilgrims' holy destination.
Similarly, pilgrims to Ise were as likely as not preoccupied with matters other than Amaterasu. The Osaka novelist Saikaku shows us scenes on the road to Ise that would have made the Sun Goddess blush — or would they have? Perhaps not, in view of a rollicking myth in which she figures. Outraged by the unruly behavior of her brother the Storm God, Amaterasu hid in a cave. Deaf to the pleading of the heavenly deities, she refused to show herself — until one of their number danced a lewd dance. Drawn to the mouth of her cave by the laughter of the gods and goddesses, Amaterasu was seized by them and forced out of hiding. Light returned to the world.
Saikaku's mid-17th-century story is of Osen, a pretty young maidservant who "knew nothing of the ways of love," and a cooper, who knows one thing: that he is helplessly in love with Osen. An old crone, a semi-retired streetwalker and abortionist, offers help: "I can bridge the stream of love for you."
It proves easy enough to interest Osen in the cooper; the crone's account of him dying of love for her soon has the girl "dizzy with emotion." What should the next step be? The crone concocts a plan: "You must make a secret pilgrimage to Ise. Traveling alone together, you would become fast friends and could spend your bedtime hours sweetly, heart murmuring to heart of undying love."
Like the unruly children Kaempfer mentions, servants running off on pilgrimages without permission were to be forgiven on their return. To Osen's annoyance, "old Nanny" insists on going along too. Worse, they are joined on the road by Osen's fellow servant Kyushichi. An outing intended as a lovers' meeting thus turns into an awkward foursome, the two men in sly competition for Osen's favors.
After a miserable sleepless night at an inn, the party hires a horse, "Osen riding in the middle and the men mounted on either side of her. . . . On one side Kyushichi fondled Osen's toes; on the other the cooper reached up and put his arm around her waist; and each playfully indulged his secret desires as best he could. . . . None of the group," Saikaku remarks wryly, "had any real interest in the pilgrimage itself."
In Kyoto on the way home, the lovers finally manage to shake the intrusive Kyushichi, and in a room above a shop "they drank the cup of betrothal, pledging themselves to each other forever." The tragic ending awaiting them is years in the future; in the meantime, the Ise pilgrimage seems to have served the lovers well.
|* * * * *
Among the saddest of all Japan's pilgrims is the anonymous 10th-century author of the Kagero Nikki, known in English as "The Gossamer Diary" (or "The Gossamer Years," in Edward Seidensticker's translation). It was misery that prompted her to write, and misery that prompted her frequent pilgrimages, mostly to temples in the vicinity of Kyoto.
Her diary (more accurately a memoir) begins with a question: Has her life "been one befitting a well-born lady?" No one posing such a question answers it affirmatively. The second wife (among nine) of a great nobleman and leading courtier of the day, she is determined to settle for nothing less than a husband "30 days and 30 nights a month." It's impossible — her society didn't work that way, and she knows it.
When her chagrin and rage and resentment threaten to choke her, she embarks on a pilgrimage. Noblewomen of her time, even happier ones, had few other diversions. If not for periodic pilgrimages, their boredom might have crushed them.
"The beggars at the temple, each with his earthen bowl, were most distressing," she writes of Hatsuse, a temple north of Nara. "I recoiled involuntarily at being brought so near the defiling masses. I could not sleep, and with little else to occupy my mind, I found myself fascinated, even moved to tears, at the prayer of a blind man, not well dressed, who was pouring forth his petition in a loud voice without a thought that someone might be listening . . .
"I spent that night too at the main hall, weeping and praying. Toward dawn I dozed off and dreamed that a priest . . . came up with a pitcher of water and poured it on my right knee. It must have been a sign from the Buddha, an unhappy one, no doubt." Seven centuries later the fictional rake Yonosuke, hero of Saikaku's novel "The Life of an Amorous Man," makes a very different kind of pilgrimage to Hatsuse. Not yet 14, he has come to pray for his first love affair.
|* * * * *
"There's nothing you won't find somewhere in the world," wrote Saikaku, and he would not rest until he had found, or at least imagined, everything. Life itself to Saikaku was a pilgrimage, and the name of its shrine was Everything — everything there was to experience in this floating world, with its soap-bubble impermanence and its fleeting pleasures and pains. The beautiful and the sordid were one to him, all part of the world's teeming if ephemeral richness.
Yonosuke (meaning "man of the world") is born to a man about town and a courtesan. His father reforms, settles down, turns businessman, grows wealthy, but Yonosuke will have none of that, and with a fervor one can only describe as religious embarks on the pilgrimage Saikaku lays out for him. Courtesans were his priestesses, love his god. A more discriminating gallant might have contented himself with the elegant pleasure quarters of Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo, despising the more rustic entertainments elsewhere, but Yonosuke despised nothing, certainly not before he'd sampled it, and even afterward, his disgust could be sharp but never enduring. Not pleasure but "adventure, be it ever so crude," was the quest to which he willingly sacrificed all the so-called finer things in life.
The blurring of sacred and profane is characteristic of pilgrimage, always and everywhere. "Despite the ostensible religious purpose of a pilgrimage," writes Howard, Chaucer's biographer, "it was also the medieval form of vacation or travel. The institution had its dark, unrespectable underside. . . . Pilgrims not only told tales to keep themselves amused, they flirted and gambled, ate and drank to excess, swore, misbehaved even in the shrines themselves: we read of sexual escapades in dark corners, of pilgrims by the thousands carving their names or coats of arms on the tombs of saints . . . "
"Escapades in dark corners" indeed. Here's the young Yonosuke at Kurama Temple in the mountains north of Kyoto, "an object of pilgrimages . . ." Saikaku tells us, "because many a story had been related of how young strangers, meeting here for the first time, fell in love at first touch."
Suddenly Yonosuke remembers something even better. "This is the night of the zakone in nearby Ohara," he whispered to his companions, "when all the villagers, young and old of both sexes, masters and servants, are allowed to lie down together and sleep at the portals of the Shinto shrine. It is a kind of vigil, a religious custom, and for once no restrictions whatsoever are placed on what the sleepers may venture to do. Aren't you curious? Let's go and see." Which, of course, they do.
The years pass. Old and wrinkled but still unsated, eager as ever to prolong the pilgrimage, accepting with a shrug that "after death he would willy-nilly be torn by the punishing demons of hell," Yonosuke sets sail for Nyogo, the mythical Island of Women. Provisioning his ship, he does not neglect swaddling clothes in anticipation of his looming second childhood.
|* * * * *
The Island of Women is the second mythical isle in our story so far. A third was destined to grow out of myth and into history: we know it today as the United States of America. Plymouth Rock was in fact no island, but the Pilgrim Fathers who colonized it in 1620 hardly knew what it was — a latter-day Promised Land, they supposed, where God could be honestly and truthfully served — as He no longer could, they felt, in the corrupted England they had left behind somewhat in the spirit of the ancient Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt. Joining them 10 years later was a party led by John Winthrop, who sealed the myth in immortal words: "We must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are upon us."
And there is a fourth mythical isle, an eerie Buddhist counterpart to St. Brendan's Island. Known as Fudaraku, it was to be found far to the south — near Cape Comorin at the southern tip of India, says one theory. To the devout, it was the Pure Land of Kannon, goddess of mercy.
On the Kumano coast of present-day Wakayama Prefecture was a temple, the Fudaraku-ji, at which a most peculiar tradition developed. Reaching the age of 61, the temple's chief priest would set sail for Fudaraku in a tiny boat.
Novelist Yasushi Inoue (1907-92) describes the preparations in a 1961 short story titled "Passage to Fudaraku": "The voyager would be confined in a doorless wooden box nailed securely to the bottom of a boat; his only provisions would be an oil lamp that would burn out in a matter of days and a small quantity of food. To be cast off thus from the Kumano coast meant certain death at sea. The instant the voyager drew his last breath, the boat would begin carrying his body speedily southward, like a bamboo leaf skimming the rapids, toward the isle of Fudaraku. There he would acquire new life, that he might live eternally in the service of Kannon."
The tradition, Inoue tells us, dates back to the 10th century. Over the next 600 years 10 priests are on record as having embarked for Fudaraku — and then, suddenly, amid the anarchy of the 16th century, there was a spate of embarkations, one after another — and Chief Priest Konko, Inoue's protagonist, finds himself unable, as his 61st birthday approaches, to resist popular expectations that he too will depart for Fudaraku, though his faith is weak and he is little inclined for martyrdom.
The voyage is set for November 1565. The months leading up to it he spends in seclusion, meditating and praying for faith that does not come.
The fatal hour arrives. Like a man condemned to death, he is led aboard the boat. "Workmen came aboard with a large wooden box which they placed over him. . . . There was a pounding as it was nailed to the boat. Presently the pounding stopped. It was dark inside the box . . ." So dark that, unable to bear it, Konko heaved his shoulder against the box until it splintered, and flung himself into the sea.
He floated to a nearby island and was put into a second boat, this time offering no resistance. But "thereafter," Inoue says, "the abbots of Fudaraku-ji were no longer expected to put out to sea when they reached 61."
|* * * * *
"And are we to look at the moon and the cherry blossoms with our eyes alone?" asks the 14th-century priest Yoshida no Kenko in "The Grasses of Idleness." "How much more evocative and pleasing it is to think about the spring without stirring from the house, to dream of the moonlit night though we remain in our room!"
As with the moon, so with pilgrimages. Why not dream a pilgrimage, as, for example, John Bunyan did. The full title of his classic work, published in 1678, is, "The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream" — dreamed, incidentally, in prison, for he had been arrested as a non-conformist preacher.
Bunyan's protagonist, named Christian, journeys, in Bunyan's dream, along a highway fenced by walls called Salvation, bound from the City of Destruction to Mount Sion, the Celestial City, "that I may be delivered from the wrath to come" — which, after many encounters and adventures simultaneously dreamlike and real, he is.
Japan's dream-pilgrim is no Christian; no Buddhist either. He is rather an anti-Buddhist, his anti-pilgrimage inspired in the mind of comic novelist Hiraga Gennai (1728-79) by the antics of a popular street performer named Fukai Shidoken (1680-1765).
A fixture of Edo's Asakusa entertainment quarter, Shidoken punctuated his lewd monologues with flourishes of the phallus-shaped baton that became part of his enduring image. Gennai's "The Modern Life of Shidoken" is pure fiction in the form of a mock-biography.
Asanoshin (Shidoken) is so intelligent as a child that his parents commit him to a life of Buddhist service. Unwillingly the boy enters the priesthood, and is absorbed in his studies one spring day when a bird lays an egg on his desk and flies away. From the egg emerges a beautiful, tiny woman. The woman grows to human size and leads him to a cave. In the cave he encounters the Vagabond Sage, who says of Asanoshin's monkhood, "What a waste! . . . I felt I had to save you so I brought you here." The boy is to abandon Buddhism, forget his learning, and instead, by means of a magic fan he is given, "travel between heaven and earth and learn about the feelings of people in many areas and countries . . . [and] while you're in a country, be sure to visit the places where people make love."
And so he does, flying by virtue of the fan to the Land of Giants, the Land of Tiny People, the Land of Long-Legged People, the Land of Long-Armed People, and so on. After many rambunctious adventures that would have horrified his former fellow monks, he lands with a party of Chinese on — we have been here before — the Island of Women, whose denizens, desperate for masculine company, soon exhaust all except Asanoshin to death.
He escapes at last, and returns to Japan. Old now, but rich in knowledge no Buddhist enlightenment could have given him, he draws crowds with his "wooden mushroom," and regales them with his hard-won wisdom.
|* * * * *
In Shikoku too, come April, folk "longen to goon on pilgrimages." The journey is called the "Pilgrimage to the 88 Sacred Places of Shikoku" — 88 Buddhist temples spread out along a circular, intermittently mountainous route of some 1,600 km. The white-robed pilgrims are called henro, the wooden staff they carry symbolizing the holy man whose presence they feel among them, the Shikoku-born Kobo Daishi (774-835), considered one of the greatest religious figures in Japanese history.
Tour buses and cars today make the pilgrimage easy, if that's what you're looking for — but is an easy pilgrimage really a pilgrimage? On foot it takes two months, sometimes more.
Along their way the henro pray for health, longevity, easy childbirth, whatever is close to their hearts. At one temple some decades ago a letter was found, a petition to Kobo Daishi, written by an anguished woman whose husband was having an affair: "So please, O-Daishi-sama, please punish Kimura Sachi, a wicked woman, and bring my husband back to me. Please!"
The pioneering feminist writer Itsue Takamure (1894-1964) was 24 when she made the pilgrimage in 1918. "To escape from a morass of depression, to try to find an answer to the problem of how to live, I undertook the pilgrimage," she wrote in a subsequent essay.
Her story figures in Oliver Statler's "Japanese Pilgrimage," an account of his own experiences as a henro in the 1970s. Takamure was an intellectual and a misfit, an anguished soul in a time when women were expected to know their narrow place and be content with it. She undertook the pilgrimage in the spirit of one "trying desperately to find myself . . . Undertaking dangerous travel without funds, I placed my life on the line."
Walking across her native Kyushu en route to Shikoku she hooked up with a 73-year-old man, an acupuncturist and masseur, "deeply religious but very stubborn. That night he dreamed that I was an incarnation of Kannon [the goddess of mercy], and he decided to accompany me on the pilgrimage." Unable or unwilling to fend him off ("it seemed fated"), she accepted his companionship. They walked and begged, begged and walked, sleeping outdoors whenever possible. At one temple she was accosted by "a henro with reddish hair, long and wild. . . . I waited, fearing what might happen, but finally he turned away. If I want to free myself it is best to let matters take their course. If someone wants to kill me I deserve it."
"The pilgrimage has become much tamer since then," Statler remarks wryly.
Takamure was four months on the road. In later life she lived with a lover in a "house in the woods" in Setagaya, Tokyo, writing from morning to night for 30 years, her subject the history of Japanese women. She is admired today as one of the first scholars to grasp that Japanese women had a history.
|* * * * *
"A beggar," wrote the vagrant priest and haiku poet Taneda Santoka in a diary entry dated April 6, 1932, "has to learn to be an all-out beggar. Unless he can be that, he will never taste the happiness of being a beggar."
Did Santoka taste it? If so, only fitfully. "I hate begging ," he noted on Dec. 19, 1930. "I hate wandering. Most of all, I hate having to do things I hate!"
Early in his career, Santoka (1882-1940) was a henro. Thereafter, and for the rest of his life, he was a pilgrim of a different breed, a most peculiar breed — walking, it has been said, some 40,000 km over the years, his destination nowhere, his purpose to be free of purpose, his harvest a mixed bag of miniature poems. The experts call them free-verse haiku. Make of them what you will:
even in my iron begging bowl hailstones
a drink would be nice now sunset sky
all day in the mountains ants too are walking
And so on. A most unaccountable character, Santoka. Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1882, he was 10 when his mother committed suicide by throwing herself into a well. The experience uprooted him, as well it might. A stint in a Zen temple was the most settled experience of his adult life. Ordained a priest, he turned his back on everything fixed, stable and comfortable in life. Always alone, he tramped the back roads of southwestern Japan, begging his sustenance, staying in flophouses, drinking as much as he could afford to, and writing poems.
autumn wind for all my walking . . . for all my walking . . .
"Where is the Way?" he was once asked.
"Under your feet," he replied.
Or under yours. Or under mine. The pilgrim who hasn't learned that hasn't walked far enough.


text: >> INSIDER WIRE —For those still with jobs, there's a lot of shuffling taking place. Ingrid Sischy and Sandy Brant have just been named international editors at Russian Vogue and Vogue Deutsch; Robin Givhan of The Washington Post is relocating to DC from New York to cover Michelle Obama — she'll continue a fashion-focused weekly column; and Teen Vogue senior fashion editor Aya Kanai is moving to LA. [Hint, WWD, Papermag, Aya T. Kanai Twitter]


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My husband and I spent a lazy Saturday in a lighting showroom a few weekends ago. We've been working on a project to replace all the lighting fixtures in our home for a couple of years now, so we seem to spend a lot of time in lighting showrooms. But that particular Saturday was a bit special. We were finally picking out our last fixture—the overhead light in our bedroom. Sadly, this was the second time we'd had to pick out this fixture; we had bought and attempted to install a lovely chandelier in the bedroom the previous weekend only to belatedly realize that chandeliers and eight-foot ceilings don't mix. So after returns and refunds, we were at it again.
While wandering around the store and craning our necks towards the ceiling to study our options, my husband noticed an advertisement for ENERGY STAR® lighting fixtures and was immediately puzzled. How, he asked, was it possible for a light fixture to be ENERGY STAR rated?
Credit: ENERGY STAR
It's an interesting question, as ENERGY STAR ratings on light fixtures do seem a bit counterintuitive. After all, we typically think of residential light fixtures as just an attractive covering for the real energy user in the lighting equation—the bulb. And it is true that you can make any residential light fixture more energy efficient just by switching out your incandescent bulbs with bulbs that use less energy like CFLs or LEDs.
But ENERGY STAR lighting takes this idea a bit further, using special pin-based CFLs that last longer than ENERGY STAR rated screw-in CFL's, meaning that you'll spend less on bulb replacement over the life of the fixture. Too, ENERGY STAR light fixtures pay careful attention to efficient light disbursement, meaning that these fixtures will provide more even lighting where you want it. Many are also dimmable or include other special features, like motion sensors or automatic shut-off in daylight, to further help you reduce your lighting energy use. And the best part is that ENERGY STAR lighting comes in any number of attractive choices to match almost any décor.
If you're considering replacing your indoor or outdoor home lighting, you might want to give an ENERGY STAR fixture a shot. The ENERGY STAR Web site has more information on the benefits of ENERGY STAR lighting as well as a product listing. You can also see a selection of some of the ENERGY STAR rated lighting styles available.
In the end, my husband and I didn't buy an ENERGY STAR lighting fixture. I fell in love with another fixture first. But we did buy enough CFLs to fill the new fixture. And now that we've finished the lighting remodel inside the house, we're ready to shop ENERGY STAR for our exterior lighting.
Amy Foster Parish is on staff with the Washington State University Extension Energy Program and answers inquiries through the EERE Information Center.


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Marshall Neill was denied a double at the Temple Club's Irish Superbike meeting at Bishopscourt on Saturday following a last lap battle with Cody Nally in race two.
Portadown man Neill won the first ISB race in Co Down with a second and a half to spare over Meath's Philip McNally with David Haire third, but the experienced British championship rider had to settle for second best in race two after a fierce battle with Nally.
The pair were neck and neck on the final lap but Nally managed to get better drive out of the last corner to cross the line first, taking victory by a mere 0.77s with Lisburn's Haire again claiming the final place on the podium on the DHR/B&W Racing Kawasaki.
Neill, who was riding the Ryan McGill Joinery Kawasaki, said: "It was a good race but Cody just got the better run at the last corner and snatched it at the line. I can't be too disappointed with a first and second and I'm looking ahead to the first round of the Adelaide Masters now this weekend at Mondello Park.
"The track was a bit patchy in places for that second race and I had a slick on the back while Cody had an intermediate," he added. "We both had wet fronts fitted and it turned out that they weren't bad choices in the end and it made for a competitive race."
Neill intends to compete in the opening rounds of the National Superstock 1000 Championship this year starting at Brands Hatch on Easter Monday.
Meanwhile, Ryan Farquhar made his return to racing at Bishopscourt after a short retirement from the sport.
Farquhar's SGS International KMR Kawasaki team filled the top three places in both Supertwin races, with Jeremy McWilliams earning a double.
Farquhar took second in race one with Scotsman Keith Amor – also making a racing return this year – in third place.
In the second race, Farquhar was holding the lead from McWilliams on the last lap until he almost went down after losing the front of his Kawasaki ER6.
McWilliams went on to win, with Amor inheriting second place as Farquhar took to the grass before recovering to seal third.
"I was really pleased the way it all worked out," said Farquhar. "I gave Jeremy a race and when you're doing that against him at a short circuit you can't complain. I felt good out there and the bike was working really well – the three old men showed them the way around!"
The first Supersport 600 race was won by Haire, who had almost eight seconds in hand over Mark Hanna in second, while Mark Conlin claimed third ahead of Christian Elkin. Keith Amor was seventh.
Haire completed a 600cc double, but was made to work much harder in the second race, clinging on to take the win with 0.056s to spare over Conlin. Carl Phillips was third on the Sandown Racing Yamaha.
Christian Elkin was a double winner in the Moto3 (125GP) races, while Jay McCrum and Aaron Wright had a win apiece in the Production 125/250 and Moto3 newcomers class.


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Top Story Podcast 7/5/12
On today's Top Story…Are you considered a "right wing extremist" by the U.S. government? A lifeguard who left his jurisdictional area to save a life and got fired and ISP. Also, everything you wanted to know about Medicare/Medicade coverage and when you should sign up.
Click the play button above to listen to Top Story.
On a mobile device? Top Story Mobile
Looking for an older show? Check the Top Story Podcast Archive.


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Ashley Tisdale – 'The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1′ Premiere
Ashley Tisdale showed off her extension-free hair at Nokia Theatre LA Live for the premiere of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I. Though she has recently been showing off her bikini body, Ashley Tisdale proves she can work the red carpet as well as she can the poolside.
PHOTOS: Ashley Tisdale Wears Black Lace To 'Footloose' Premiere In Los Angeles
Ashley wore a white, long-sleeved, lace mini dress that is reminiscent of the black, long-sleeved, lace mini she wore to the Footloose premiere. I'm a personal fan of the lace look, so I say she can repeat that style as many times as she'd like. She complemented the white dress with a pair of cheetah print booties.
Don't forget to check out all our Breaking Dawn Part 1 Black Carpet coverage here.


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A few years back, former Colorado senator Gary Hart boldly waded into the blogosphere -- and before long, he was mired in cyber-muck.
"This was during the run-up to the Iraq war," recalls Hart, 69. "A number of people were saying, 'You've got to run for president' and so forth, because no one else was speaking out. So I opened a blog." He soon discovered that managing this addition to his old website "was very time-consuming, because the responders want you to engage with them. They say, 'I read your blog, and I disagree on this and this and this. Tell me what you think.' And if you start doing that, it's 24/7. It's like going to a public meeting, and everyone in the crowd says, 'This is what I think. Now I want you to say what you think of it.' Every one of them. And the other thing is, the haters are using the system, and they're trying to destroy it. These are people who are ad hominem, hate-filled, and they clog up the blogways with their diatribes and frothing at the mouth. And that kind of takes the fun out of it."
Hart's pop-cultural reputation, which pivots on the 1987 scandal involving model Donna Rice and a boat named the Monkey Business, suggests that good times have long been a major motivator for him, just as they were for John F. Kennedy, his political role model; the native Kansan volunteered for JFK long before toiling as the campaign manager in George McGovern's ill-fated 1972 presidential race or serving as a senator for his adopted home state from 1975 to 1987. But Hart was even fonder of Kennedy's attitudes about public service and civic responsibility than he was of the late prez's personal style, and he's spent his life in the public eye trying to promote them, with varying degrees of success. While his probing intelligence has always been impressive, his stiffness and formality prevented him from appealing to the voting masses on a visceral level, the way Kennedy did. In recent years, moreover, his frustrations have seemed awfully close to the surface. And why not? Hart warned about potential terrorist attacks well before 9/11, but not enough officials in the Bill Clinton or George W. Bush administrations bothered to listen.
Gary Hart
Professionally, too, Hart has suffered disappointments -- among them the dissolution last year of Courdert Brothers, the international law firm that employed him as senior counsel for more than fifteen years. Courdert was founded in 1853, and Hart boasts, "We had the first law license in Russia, the first law license in China, and we pioneered in Vietnam." But he acknowledges that the old-fashioned company couldn't keep up with changing times: "I used to address the annual partners' dinners and say, 'We're the best nineteenth-century law firm in the world.' But that was part of the problem. We just got eaten alive by much more aggressive, much more commercial and much more cutthroat competitors."
Despite such downturns, however, Hart shows no interest in bemoaning his lot. In conversation, he's surprisingly loose these days, as if his decision to accept the role of elder statesman (and let go of his obdurate desire to be a national candidate) has freed him up on a personal level. He still speaks in the sort of abstract academese that can leave lesser thinkers in the analytical dust, but he's relaxed enough to occasionally chuckle at himself. He displays more than a hint of self-deprecation when talking about his recent appointment to the Wirth Chair, a position named for onetime senator Tim Wirth (he succeeded Hart) that obliges him to oversee a fall course for the University of Colorado-Denver's Graduate School of Public Affairs. "Maybe you can help me define what I'm going to teach," he says, laughing, "because I've got to write catalogue copy."
Actually, Hart has plenty of ideas for the class, many of them culled from The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons, his latest book, which was published last month by Oxford University Press. "It tries to redefine the nature of security to include not just secure borders and the war on terrorism, but security of energy, security of the environment, security of the community, security of livelihood, and to broaden out from the Cold War what security really means in this new century," he says.
Shield is one of three new Hart tomes to arrive in recent months; the others are God and Caesar in America: An Essay on Religion and Politics, issued by Golden's Fulcrum Publishing, and James Monroe, a volume in "The American Presidents" series from Times Books that he took on at the behest of distinguished historian and Kennedy intimate Arthur Schlesinger Jr. And these efforts have hardly exhausted him of opinions. He often writes op-ed pieces about current events for the likes of the Washington Post and the New York Times (they're labeled as blogs on gadfly Arianna Huffington's www.huffingtonpost.com website, but Hart doesn't think they qualify) and weighs in eagerly and candidly on all manner of media topics. Consider his observations about Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
"Everyone reads Tom Friedman, and they should," Hart points out. "And by the way, his takes on energy and a variety of other things were all in the report of the U.S. Commission on National Security that my friend [Republican ex-senator] Warren Rudman and I chaired five years ago. So Tom's just kind of recycling stuff we said then. Nevertheless, Scotty Reston and Tom Wicker and journalists from their era never used the first-person pronoun. They wrote in the third person, and wrote in detached ways about policy: 'Here's what's going on in Washington, this issue is being debated.' It was never'I' or 'me.' But you go through Tom's columns, and you get the first-person pronoun fifteen times: 'I talked to this guy,' and 'He said to me,' and 'I have this opinion.' It's all about him."
Granted, Hart briefly uses a similar approach in the opening portion of God and Caesar in order "to qualify myself to get into the debate" about the growing influence of fundamentalist Christianity on the political process. "I was raised in an evangelical church -- the Church of the Nazarene, which is the same one that Dr. James Dobson comes out of," he notes. Dobson's family was well acquainted with that of Hart's wife, Lee, who stuck with him through the Rice controversy and beyond; her father, the late Dr. S.T. Ludwig, was a senior Nazarene leader and onetime president of Oklahoma's Bethany Nazarene College, where the Harts met circa the '50s. But the comparisons of Hart and Dobson end there. "I find it ironic," Hart says, "that the same God that made me a liberal Democrat made James Dobson a conservative Republican."
In Hart's view, the distinctions between politics and religion, which he studied at Yale Divinity School, are stark. "Politics is a system of compromise. With the two-party system, basically, neither side can have its way entirely," he maintains. "And religion is about absolutes: good and evil, right and wrong. That's part of what its mission is." This is particularly true, he feels, of the fundamentalism presently exerting so much pressure on Republican lawmakers. "If the gospel of Jesus is judgmental at all, it's judgmental against rich people and things like that," he says. "I read the gospel totally separate from what the religious right is up to, which is intolerant, illiberal and unforgiving -- and that's not what Jesus taught."
L'affaire Rice gives Christian conservatives a built-in excuse for rejecting Hart's theories. "They can say that I was a sinner," he points out. "But, of course, the Bible says we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. They just don't admit it." Even so, Hart tries his best not to write off all fundamentalists as casually as he suspects many of them dismiss him. He hasn't met Ted Haggard, who, as the senior pastor of Colorado Springs mega-church New Life and the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is a rising star on the religious scene. But based on a chat with NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw, who interviewed Haggard last year for a report about fundamentalism, he's curious to learn more about him. "Tom told me that Reverend Haggard is a pretty decent, sober and thoughtful fellow and I should get to know him and talk to him," he reveals. "He said he's not as extreme as some of the other ones are, and he has great doubts about whether they should be up to their eyeballs in politics. I gather that at least some part of his personality is questioning all of this."
The Brokaw mention may smack of name-dropping, but it's also indicative of the circles in which Hart continues to travel. He's an in-demand guest at networks such as CNN, and back in 2004, he appeared on the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes to plug another of his literary efforts, The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century. Still, he doesn't shy away from criticizing the TV-news medium in general for what he sees as a lack of substance.
"I can remember that when I was in office, the morning TV shows were dedicated to public policy," he says. "You'd turn on the Today show and they'd have serious discussions of health-care problems and Cold War issues, and they'd have people from Congress on. Now it's all about lifestyle. It's cooking, it's dressing, it's celebrity-oriented, it's promotion of other television programs on the network, it's sensationalism. I think the heirs of William Randolph Hearst have taken over the whole industry."
A big reason for this shift, he believes, is the increasing concentration of media ownership. "The First Amendment was not introduced into the Constitution so Rupert Murdoch could make money," he declares. "There's a duty that comes with the protection of the press, and that duty is to inform the American people. And further, there's a political obligation here. Ninety cents of every campaign dollar goes to the media -- to television and radio advertising and those who put it together. If you want to break the back of corruption in Washington and put a stop to the Jack Abramoffs and others, you've got to reduce the cost of campaigns, and the only way to do it is to give free time to candidates. And who's going to oppose that? Every television network in America. None of the campaign-reform proposals ever have free media time for legitimate candidates anymore. They just don't bother, because the power of the media -- and the lobbying of the media -- comes down on them like a ton of bricks. And they have the local affiliates behind them. They'll have Denver's 4, 7 and 9 get hold of you and say, 'This is outrageous. You can't take this stream of revenue away from us.' You get hammered all over the place."
He's just as exercised about the ideological forces brought to bear on media outlets and the willingness of so many to succumb. "The Rocky Mountain News is a conservative-to-right newspaper. They have their own point of view, editorially and otherwise," he says. "But the Denver Post, which was more liberal, has become almost non-partisan, if you will. I think it was intimidated by the right, which has done a brilliant job of that, by the way. The right is always talking about 'the liberal media, the liberal media,' but you turn on KOA and it's wall-to-wall conservatives -- Mike Rosen and Rush Limbaugh and all those guys. So when they're attacking the liberal media, who are they talking about? They dominate the airwaves." Of late, Hart thinks the Post has gotten a bit bolder about folding what he calls "liberal points of view" into a mix that he describes as "real fair and balanced," but he understands why the paper may have drifted from its progressive moorings: "When anybody disagrees with the right, they can generate thousands of e-mails to an editor. And that's very intimidating."
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For his part, Hart shrugs off such tactics and speaks his mind -- something he's done to a greater degree than most politicians throughout his career. But such autonomy came at a cost, according to Mike Medavoy, a Hollywood executive who served as the financial co-chairman of Hart's 1984 presidential bid. In You're Only as Good as Your Next One, his 2002 autobiography (penned with Josh Young), Medavoy suggested that Hart's 1988 bid for the White House might not have gone down with the Monkey Business if it weren't for certain aspects of his personality. "Gary was a loner in Congress," he wrote, "and his overly cerebral nature alienated some people." He concluded that Hart "has a brilliant mind but has not been able to fully contribute to the country he loves, which is a tragedy."
Predictably, Hart doesn't buy this theory, in part because his contributions continue through his books, his upcoming UCD course, his involvement in contemporary politics (he recently endorsed Bill Ritter's gubernatorial push) and appearances during which he espouses his principles to a new generation. "I think young people are, by and large, idealistic," he says, "and they want to find a way to do good for their country."
He'd be proud to think that his example might inspire such youths -- but when it comes to exchanging blog comments with them, that's where he draws the line.


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Transcription from 10 Jan 1895 unidentifed Lebanon newspaper submitted by Arne H Trelvik 11 June 2003
Death of a Bright Little Boy.
Willie Prescott, the second son of Mr. and Mrs. John A. Blair, died very suddenly last Tuesday morning about 5 o'clock, at the age of 14 year and 4 months. Willie had not been well since last Friday, when he complained of having a head-ache. Nothing was thought of it as he was subject to head-aches, but on Saturday he was not so well and a physician was summoned, who prescribed for him, and he was at no time considered dangerously ill. The moring of his death, as his parents were seated near him, he felt for his heart, gasped and all was over. Willie was a bright, gentlemanly little fellow and was loved by all who knew him. His young mind was always filled with good, hid life was unstained and left bright evidence that his home was on the other shore.
The parents and brothers and sisters have the heartfelt sympathy of all in their sad bereavement. The funeral will take place from the residence on Orchard avenue this afternoon at 1:30 conducted by Revs. Reed and Scott.
This page updated
© 2003 Arne H Trelvik All rights reserved


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Have Honda Questions? Ask a Honda Repair Expert.
2001 honda accord 116,341
Will it shift and move in forward gears just not reverse?
Sounds to me that you need a clutch. Even the best of drivers will burn up their clutch at 120k. You must meet that criteria. If you shift your trans into any gear and is does not move, chances are that you are in need of a clutch.


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The afterglow of the Olympics has a shelf life, and that's fine with David Wise.
The gold medalist in the inaugural ski halfpipe event in the Sochi Games, Wise is nearing the end of a post-Olympics tour he described as "pure chaos." Visiting the Salt Lake City office/ski manufacturing site of 4FRNT, the company's part-owner reflected Thursday about the last month. He appeared on the "Ellen" show, took his wife and child to Disneyland and was treated to "David Wise Day," declared throughout and particularly observed in his hometown of Reno.
"All these crazy things that I never expected to happen in my entire life have happened all in a space of, like, three weeks," he said.


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80's Dan: The McDLT
Dan finds something magical in his rediscovered time capsule.
Plum Dumb
2/27/2014 05:25:27 am
Love this sooo much!
Plum Dumb
2/27/2014 05:32:03 am
Seriously though, I want the McDLT back, I hate how the lettuce gets soggy and the pickles ALWAYs soak into the bun and make it a little mushy.
5/18/2014 03:26:28 pm
Actually, they did bring it back, just under a different name and sans the awesome box! It was the Deluxe, I think. You know, the one that advertised the fresh ingredients and all? I know my mom loved it because she also loved the Mc DLT
6/7/2014 03:00:31 am
This is yet another episode that makes me really hungry... specifically for meat.... I kind of want to eat a unicorn.
9/18/2017 07:37:14 am
its the best movie i watch i very like it
Leave a Reply.
A Sitcom Style Throwback:
Brad stars as 80's Dan, a figure magically transported into the present. Along with his sidekick Rob the Robot, Dan becomes roommates with the lovely Dolly (Jillian Zurawski) and attempts to expose 80's greatness to not only her, but his neighbors The Crabtrees.
December 2012


text: I took out an old Ricoh 35ZF that my Dad had and put a battery and a roll of Ilford Delta 400 in it. These are a few of the frames that I snapped Tuesday morning testing it out. These are 1/250'th @ f/16 which is at least one stop overexposed and then developed in D-D23 for 5+4 minutes. No attempt was made to be artistic (as if I could be anyway ), these are just point and shoots. Ricoh pics It's not a bad little camera - very simple to use - lightweight and compact. cheers eh?