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December 10th, 2013On Gollum and Graceby Joseph Pearce
I'm currently in New England with very little time to write anything for the blog. On Saturday I gave a talk on the Catholicism of The Hobbit at a Catholic parish in Stowe, Vermont, at which my compatriot, Fr. Benedict Kiely, is the pastor. Fr. Kiely will be known to StAR subscribers for his regular column, "The Sword of the Spirit". It was truly a delight to speak at his parish and to spend some time with the inimitable Fr. Ben. I'm now at Thomas More College, where I'm teaching classes on Chaucer and on The Lord of the Rings.
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December 9th, 2013No Such Thingby Dena Hunt
There is no such thing as a fictional biography. Period. There is no such thing as a biographical novel. Period.
Biography is—and should be—non-fiction. It takes enormous research to write good biography, and imagination is not a substitute for that labor. A would-be writer of biography might read Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots to see how it's done. Virtually every word is the verifiable fruit of research. The craft of a biographer is not in his imagination, but in his ability to organize into intelligible chronology often seemingly disparate facts, to use his expert knowledge of his subject to make suggestions about motivation, about the affects of the events he reports—not to "make up" that motivation, or those events. The best example of that kind of craftsmanship is Joseph Pearce's tour de force Literary Converts.
A novel, on the other hand, is fiction, the acknowledged product of the writer's imagination. That's why novels have disclaimers in their front pages. Fiction must have a setting in space and time. That means one or more geographical locations at one or more points in time—past, present, or future. So, a novel can be set in Cincinnati or Verona or Taiwan (or all of these) at some point in history. It may, therefore, contain elements, including historical characters, recognizable to the reader—but it is not a biography of those characters—it is a novel about its own imagined characters.
Something that calls itself a biographical novel simply offends. Fiction does not pretend to be what it's not, neither does non-fiction. but "fictional biography" offends every which way: This is the work of someone who not only does not love truth, but even disrespects facts. Worst of all—and I've seen two recently, both from publishers who should know better—are the so-called "fictional biographies" of saints.
"Trash" is not defined by objectionable language or scenes. In fact, the latter exists in many great works of literature, fictional and non-fictional, including Holy Scripture. Trash is, in a word, deceit.
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December 9th, 2013The Rise of the Priesthoodby Joseph Pearce
Here's some good news:
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December 8th, 2013Leaven and Original Sinby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, perplexing to most people, can be understood and applied to our lives with the use of a simple metaphor.
Your glorying is not good. Know you not that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened. For indeed Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Cor. 5:6-8)
Why do we "celebrate the feast" of Christ's sacrifice at Mass with unleavened bread? It's not simply because the Jews ate unleavened bread as part of the Passover to celebrate their deliverance in haste from Egypt, but also because to be "unleavened" means not to be infected with the corrupting yeast of "malice and wickedness", or the "leaven of the Pharisees", which is hypocrisy.
Since the Fall of Man, all of us have been born with this infection. If we let it, it "leavens the whole lump".
Anthony Esolen makes this clear in a stunning and disturbing article in Crisis Magazine. He quotes a young man who has written an advice column for other young men, giving them tips on how to convince their girlfriends to get an abortion when the girlfriend gets pregnant and resists the idea.
You need to bring up the subject of abortion with every ounce of verbal finesse and situation-appropriate sensitivity. You should sound as sincere as possible and tell her that you want her to be the mother of your children one day, but that now is not the right time to start a family. Explain you want to wait until you are further along in your career/life goals and you can afford to give your future family all the comforts of life you cannot deliver today. Finally, explain if she has the abortion now, you will be able to plan your lives together so that everything is perfect. Then, after she agrees and has the abortion, dump her. It's called a "hail mary" in part because of its difficulty to execute, so if you stay with her post-abortion and she becomes pregnant again you're really f*****.
Esolen comments ...
The writer recommends shameless lying. Is that a surprise? Isn't fornication itself, even for the mildest of people, all tangled up in evasions, demurrals, half-promises, and lies? The writer uses girls for his pleasure, but despises them. They are his toys, and when you're sick of a toy, you throw it away. Is that a surprise? And if the perfectly predictable result of the child-making thing occurs, and they make a child, his one thought is how to persuade her to throw it away, too. Why not? It is an accident (a piano falling upon your head from the tenth story of a tenement, that is an accident; begetting a child by the child-making thing is not), or it is s*** (which must be disposed of). No care for her sorrow or her health; no care for the child; no moral qualms at all.
When we find someone loudly affirming the goodness of something wicked, our first step should not be to try to persuade him otherwise. That would be to aim at but one tentacle of the cancer. The treatment must reach much farther down to the roots. But for the sake of everyone else within earshot, and for our own sanity, we should look to the nearby organs. You defend pornography, do you? Then be honest. Do you not also defend legal prostitution? Group sex, or any sexual escapades among consenting adults? Polygamy, for those who want it? Sexual experimentation among teenagers, so long as it makes a pretense of epidermal hygiene? Easy divorce? Abortion?
Jack Kevorkian did not only affirm the goodness of suicide. He was himself a murderer. His paintings were sufficient to lead any sane person to conclude that he was profoundly evil, or mentally deranged, or both—for evil is itself a derangement. The media could have sunk him into the public's contempt if they had only publicized those paintings, or probed the other cancerous organs in that man's moral psyche. They did not. They chose instead to bracket the one cause, assisted suicide, and ignore everything else. That plays into the devil's hands.
We must not do so.
In other words, we must keep the feast "not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth". For a little leaven leavens the whole lump, and the cancer of sin and selfishness spreads to every part of the body.
What does this have to do with the Immaculate Conception?
Mary is, from the moment her life begins, unleavened. She is as we were all designed to be, the "unleavened bread of sincerity and truth". She is granted that grace from the moment of her conception by virtue of Christ's then-future sacrifice - and though we (who have not experienced that extraordinary grace) must struggle to "purge out the old leaven" so that we may "become a new lump", she shows us what, as disciples, we may become.
For purity is productive. Faithfulness is fertile. Cleanliness conceives.
If we become as unleavened bread, then the leaven of the Kingdom can begin to work in us.
If we remain as we are, the cancer will spread and we are doomed.
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December 6th, 2013Exorcising the Curmudgeon with the Spirit of Christmasby Joseph Pearce
Call me a true Christian or just a good old-fashioned curmudgeon but I normally refuse to get into the Christmas spirit until it's fairly close to Christmas. I find the whole notion that the so-called "holidays" begin with Halloween vaguely absurd, at best, or utterly obscene, at worst.
Secular fundamentalism kills everything it kisses, and that includes the "holidays", which are certainly not marketed as "holy days". Halloween has ceased to be "All Hallows Eve" and has become a pagan necrofest. Thanksgiving (thank goodness) is still largely unpolluted by our deplorable epoch's kiss of death but that's because most of us are not really sure to whom or what we're giving our thanks, or what it is exactly for which we should be thankful.
Now that Thanksgiving is out of the way, the cynics, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, are trying to convince us that we need to spend more than we can afford for the Holidays (the word Christmas is avoided as though it were an expletive, and the word "Christ" is practically verboten).
Today is, however, the feast of Santa Claus himself. Yes, it's St. Nicholas' Day. This morning our five-year-old came downstairs earlier than usual, full of excitement to see whether Saint Nicholas had left a gift in her shoes. Her eyes lit up to see an effigy of the saint himself peering at her from her shoes. Her eyes lit up even brighter when she realised that the effigy was made of chocolate. Digging deeper into the shoes, she drew out some golden coins. Imagine her delight when she discovered that they were not made of gold but were made of chocolate too! Beside the shoes was a silver package containing home-baked star cookies! On such a day, with the light of the Christ child shining in the eyes of my own child, the curmudgeon was vanquished and the Christmas spirit was unleashed. I know it's still advent, of course, but St. Nicholas' Day can be considered a little Christmas, a tantalizing tidbit thrown to us as we await the Big Day itself.
In order to show that I am not as much of a curmudgeon as I sometimes believe myself to be, or at least as I sometimes pretend to be, here is a Christmas list that I wrote for the Imaginative Conservative:
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December 5th, 2013Here's when the Hobbit Special Actually Airsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
I got the air times wrong in my previous post. These are the correct times!
My appearance as J.R.R. Tolkien in Joseph Pearce's EWTN special on The Hobbit is as follows ...
BILBO'S JOURNEY: A CATHOLIC TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE HOBBITThursday, 12/05 at 11:00 PM ET (10:00 pm Central)
Friday, 12/06 at 9:30 PM ET (8:30 pm Central)An action-packed EWTN production revealing the Catholicity of J. R. R. Tolkien's classic and how Bilbo's adventure is likened to the journey of every Christian, which is to unite themselves with the will of Christ.
Readers from outside the U.S. have been asking me how they can watch this. It appears you can stream EWTN's U.S. feed by clicking here. Also note that Bilbo's Journey will be released as a DVD and sold through EWTN'S Religious Catalogue.
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December 4th, 2013Tolkien on EWTN!by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 5 I'll be featured portraying J.R.R. Tolkien in the EWTN Special Bilbo's Journey - the Hidden Catholic Meaning of the Hobbit with Joseph Pearce. The show airs at 9:00 pm Eastern / 8:00 pm Central - but it's preceded by an interview with Joseph Pearce on Life on the Rock at 8:00 pm Eastern / 7:00 Central. Be sure to watch!
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December 3rd, 2013GKC and Lionel Johnsonby Robert Asch
Through a sunset nook at night,
And saw the old Green Dragon
With the windows all alight,
And hailed the old Green Dragon
And the Cock I used to know,
Where all good fellows were my friends
A little while ago
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December 3rd, 2013Saintliness in Shakespeare - and in Lifeby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Anthony Pasquale has passed along a selection culled from a book by the late Fr. Robert D. Smith on the Catholic elements in Shakespeare. I've published the article in full on The Christian Shakespeare website.
Here is a very interesting portion of it on how sanctity works, both in Shakespeare's plays, and in life (note as well that the next issue of the St. Austin Review will be all about the Catholic Shakespeare).
In King Lear, Cordelia remains throughout the play loyal to her increasingly dispossessed and destitute father, King Lear. She finds that the Earl of Kent too has been immensely loyal, dressing himself as a poor man in rags so he could remain by Lear's side and protect him as much as honorably possible. Upon discovering Kent's loyalty, towards the end of the play, she says to him, "O thou good Kent, how shall I live and work to match thy goodness? My life will be too short and every measure fail me (act IV, sc. 7, 1). What a beautifully expressed tribute, especially from one who is so honorable herself.It is a stunning phrase, but when we think about it, it is more than this: it is a beautiful and uniquely Catholic one in three ways.First, the Church has always taught that saints exist. So much of what passes for literature implies that the whole world is full of corruption, that all people are equally evil, only in different ways. We, as followers of Christ, believe in the existence of saints, not just in heaven but here on earth. Not in perfection, to be sure. Even the saints have human flaws, but they possess withal a level of charity, a level of selfless love, that goes supernaturally beyond what we ordinarily see on earth. They are saints when alive, and everyone sees it but the saints themselves. The world is not full of corruption, but has many saints in it if only we look in the right places.Second, Cordelia, saintly herself, has this strong sense of moral humility. There is nothing self-righteous, priggish or presumptuous about her. Here again this differs from the worldly idea. How many narrators of worldly stories and novels imply that they alone are free of corruption? Cordelia, paradoxically, a saint herself, sees saints in this world, and sees herself as very much below them. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that saintliness can have many different manifestations, can show itself in many different ways and lines of conduct. Cordelia was a saint but did not dress herself in rags to help her father. But still, all saints have this sense of deep spiritual humility, again so much opposed to the proud spirit of the world.Third, Cordelia's words show that she has a firm grasp of another Christian, traditionally Catholic concept: that of the need to strive for perfection. She is not trying merely for adequacy in the world's eyes. So many think of goodness only in this sense. But the world's goodness is inadequate in the eyes of God. A good man in the eyes of the world today, for example, can be an abortionist, divorced and remarried, and unrepentant in both. Cordelia is seeking not adequacy in the world's eyes, but perfection. Both Cordelia and Kent go far beyond the world's standards for goodness. But in a truly Christian way, they are not looking for how far they have come but how far they have to go. That is what makes both of them beautiful in this world, very different from it, and saints.
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December 2nd, 2013The Advent of Magicby Dena Hunt
I was out shopping on Saturday. I didn't do much shopping, actually, since I don't buy gifts except for charity, but I enjoy that shopping excitement unique to Christmas shoppers. Stores were crowded still. (I wouldn't dare venture forth on "Black Friday.") The Christmas spirit is as alive as capitalism could hope for, seduction everywhere, and it's all quite okay because, well, it's Christmastime.
Few of the shoppers now think much about the "meaning" of Christmas, though where I live in the Deep South, there are probably more who think about it than there are in other places. "Jesus is the reason for the season" can still be seen on bumpers, on coat pins, and such. Pretty soon, all the Protestant churches (there's only one Catholic church here) will be scheduling and advertising their Nativity plays. We don't have to worry so much here about protests against religion in public life, especially at Christmas. Even militant atheists, it seems, soften up a bit at Christmas.
Why is that? Despite the complaints from many Christians about "the war on Christmas," even the most anti-Christian people still want it. They may hate Christianity, but they still love Christmas and somehow celebrate it. Do they ask themselves why? They probably explain it in Humanism terms—the evidence that humans love each other and buy gifts for each other, that Christmas is a celebration of peace, that it's a reminder of family and/or community, etc., etc. None of those explanations mention Christ, so they're all okay.
But that's not it. Those things can be celebrated anytime—and are. No. It's the magic. The lights, the music, the "break" from ordinariness. Tinsel and glitter and all sorts of dollar-store decorations that would, at any other time, be considered tasteless, even gaudy, are welcomed with childlike delight. It's all wonderful, joyful, magical. Science, humanism, secularism, and all the other modern gods must step aside at Christmastime, because Christmas is magic, not subject to reason, to secular creeds of any kind. "Christmas," explained one newly minted atheistic college freshman, to her despairing and devout mother, "is for everybody, not just for Christians." Okay. But explain the appeal, explain why it's okay. Why is it okay to love Christmas with such cheerful abandonment of atheist principle.
It's the magic. That "break from ordinariness" is a break in time and space in our ordinary lives. Why is it a break from Reality? Why do even the most dedicated and adamant non-believers feel it, know it, recognize it? "We all become children again at Christmas," they declare with self-indulgent sentimentalism, ignoring the question:Why?
The question is ignored because it has only one honest answer: Because Reality—that ultimate evidence of literally everything in the universe—is interrupted. By what? By the Incarnation. The simplest answer is always the hardest one to accept. We'd rather do all sorts of anthropological intellectual gyrations, or psychological/biological analyses, and all that stuff. But the truth is that reindeer, Christmas trees, pagan and non-pagan celebrations alike, all have their root source in the magic, the mystery of the Nativity, whether or not they believe. It's magic. It's other-worldly. And more: It's that other-world coming into—literally coming into—our world. It's the advent of the metaphysical into the physical. And it does so with or without our consent, and despite all our proofs against it. That's magic.
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December 1st, 2013Catholic Literary Connectionsby Joseph Pearce
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.
On Monks I did in Storrington fall,
They took me straight into their Hall;
I saw Three Pictures on a wall,
And Courtesy was in them all.
The first the Annunciation;
The second the Visitation;
The third the Consolation,
Of God that was Our Lady's Son.
The first was of St. Gabriel;
On Wings a-flame from Heaven he fell;
And as he went upon one knee
He shone with Heavenly Courtesy.
Our Lady out of Nazareth rode -
It was Her month of heavy load;
Yet was her face both great and kind,
For Courtesy was in Her Mind.
The third it was our Little Lord,
Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
He was so small you could not see
His large intent of Courtesy.
Our Lord, that was Our Lady's Son,
Go bless you, People, one by one;
My Rhyme is written, my work is done.
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December 1st, 2013G. K. Chesterton: A New Kind of Saintby Joseph Pearce
Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton, recently gave a talk in Colorado on the sanity and sanctity of GKC. Here's a link to the video of the talk: http://vimeo.com/78310350
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December 1st, 2013Honouring an English Martyrby Joseph Pearce
There is an excellent tribute article on the English Martyr, St. Cuthbert Mayne, in Crisis Magazine. Here's the link: http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/firm-under-persecution-st-cuthbert-mayne
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December 1st, 2013The Mysteries of Atheismby Joseph Pearce
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November 28th, 2013Our Infinite Sadness can only be Cured by an Infinite Loveby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Forget the right wing rage over Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation. It's hardly about politics and the economy, anyway. It's all about Jesus.
If you only read one paragraph from the Exhortation, read this one ...
Jesus' whole life, his way of dealing with the poor, his actions, his integrity, his simple daily acts of generosity, and finally his complete self-giving, is precious and reveals the mystery of his divine life. Whenever we encounter this anew, we become convinced that it is exactly what others need, even though they may not recognize it: "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23). Sometimes we lose our enthusiasm for mission because we forget that the Gospel responds to our deepest needs, since we were created for what the Gospel offers us: friendship with Jesus and love of our brothers and sisters. If we succeed in expressing adequately and with beauty the essential content of the Gospel, surely this message will speak to the deepest yearnings of people's hearts: "The missionary is convinced that, through the working of the Spirit, there already exists in individuals and peoples an expectation, even if an unconscious one, of knowing the truth about God, about man, and about how we are to be set free from sin and death. The missionary's enthusiasm in proclaiming Christ comes from the conviction that he is responding to that expectation".[208] Enthusiasm for evangelization is based on this conviction. We have a treasure of life and love which cannot deceive, and a message which cannot mislead or disappoint. It penetrates to the depths of our hearts, sustaining and ennobling us. It is a truth which is never out of date because it reaches that part of us which nothing else can reach. Our infinite sadness can only be cured by an infinite love.
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November 27th, 2013There's No Place like EWTN for the Holidaysby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
I'll be on my favorite network a lot this Advent ...
- Bilbo's Journey - A Catholic Travel Guide to the Hobbit featuring Joseph Pearce with Yours Truly as J. R. R. Tolkien.
- Thursday, Dec. 5 at 10:00 pm Eastern / 9:00 Central - WORLD PREMIERE
- Friday, Dec. 6 at 8:30 pm Eastern / 7:30 Central
- The Surprise by G. K. Chesterton - a play with a fairy tale theme about the incarnation.
- Saturday, Dec. 21 at 3:00 am Eastern / 2:00 am Central
- Tuesday, Dec. 24 at 1:00 pm Eastern / Noon Central
- Thursday, Dec. 26 at 11:00 pm Eastern / 10:00 pm Central
- Saturday, Dec. 21 at 10:00 pm Eastern / 9:00 pm Central
- Thursday, Dec. 26 at 11:00 pm Eastern / 10:00 pm Central
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November 27th, 2013Chatting with Chestertoniansby Joseph Pearce
Richard Aleman of the American Chesterton Society has just sent me a link to the interview that I gave at this year's Chesterton Conference. The conversation includes a discussion on Tolkien, Solzhenitsyn, E. F. Schumacher and of course Chesterton.
Here's the link:
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November 25th, 2013A Solzhenitsyn Movieby Joseph Pearce
James informs me that the producer has hired Cyrus Nowrasteh (who directed the excellent THE STONING OF SORAYA M) to direct the film. Based on the director's comments, he seems to "get" Solzhenitsyn's monumental impact on the twentieth century. Hopefully, this will stimulate even more interest in the great man.
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November 25th, 2013Solzhenitsyn in Englishby Joseph Pearce
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November 25th, 2013Dancing with Devilsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
The title of this post is from a phrase Sean Dailey used, when commenting on my troubles with Facebook ...
You should have seen some of the hate leveled at Bishop Paprocki last week in some Facebook comboxes. I refused to join in. It would have merely been dancing with devils.
Now a man is never a devil, but we can be tools of devils, and there is a diabolical influence at work in people's minds today.
For instance, would an "argument" like this make sense to you, or to anyone?
A: That's a beautiful sunset - it makes the sky rose colored. I'm glad we can see it. What a shame if there were a shopping mall here obstructing our view.
B: The sky's not rose colored! You're wearing rose colored glasses! And what an arrogant jerk you are to suggest that shopping malls are not as good as sunsets. All things are equal. The sky is always equally blue - always and everywhere, even at night. Look at how much patience I have in dealing with someone like you, who are an irrational, smug prideful twit. People like you drive me crazy.
A: Well ... maybe it's not exactly rose colored, but it's not blue right now, and how can you simply shut your eyes to the fact of this sunset that's staring us in the face? Just look at it. Don't you see it? And as for shopping malls, they're fine for what they are, but when compared with sunsets ...
B: You're a racist, too. You see different colors in everything. And you HAVE NOT RESPONDED TO MY CRITIQUE OF YOUR ARGUMENT! I hate dealing with people like you. I'm out of here. You're being irrational.
A: What exactly did your critique of my argument consist of?
B: I refuse to repeat what I said. It's not worth my time. Scroll up and read it again! But you won't - proof that you're not interested in seeking the truth, but only in making your own bigoted case.
A: I have scrolled up and I'm still confused. Really, what did your critique of my argument consist of? For one thing, I'm not making an argument, just pointing out something we both should be able to see, if we both look at it. For another, our mutual "argument" consists of me saying the sunset is rose-colored, and you saying it's not. And calling me names.
B: You're the name caller! You just called me a "name-caller"! Name caller!
... and so on.
But the fact is that this is the way people argue on the internet. Seriously. This is the level of conversation you can expect to have on serious subjects on Facebook and elsewhere. You may think I'm exaggerating, but if you do, it's probably because you've never experienced this.
Let me analyze what's going on above and then show how it applied to my latest foxtrot with the devil.
Contempt for Reason is shown in the following ways during any internet discussion ...
1. WEARING BLINDERS. Refusing to see what's being pointed out; refusing to acknowledge what is right there before our eyes. Denying that the sky is blue - or whatever color it happens to be.
2. ASSERTING SUBJECTIVISM. Claiming that an opponent's position is merely his own private illusion. You're wearing rose-colored glasses when you look at that rose and call it rose-colored.
3. SNEERING. It's not enough to assert subjectivism, an internet opponent will not simply
- Refuse to see what you're pointing out (#1 above),
- State or imply that what you're saying must be a private mirage (#2 above),
but also
- Sneer at you for having some sort of intellectual or moral handicap for seeing this so-called mirage. If you see colors in nature, you're a racist.
So how does this play out in real life?
Yesterday I posted a series of Observations, one of which made the apparently radical claim that men and women are different and that when women go wrong sexually it's usually a sign of a more deeply seated psychological problem than when men go wrong sexually. Clearly, that's a bold conclusion that can easily be argued, but what happened was far from an argument.
This observation was shared by a Facebook friend, and a number of secular folk outside my circle saw it. There followed dozens of livid comments, all of which missed the point. Some people were mad at me for saying women were better than men. Some people were mad at me for saying that men were better than women. Some people were mad at me for suggesting that there was anything wrong with sluttish behavior in women. Some people were mad at me for suggesting that there was anything wrong with sluttish behavior in men. Some people were mad at me for suggesting that there was anything wrong with sluttish behavior at all in either sex. Everyone was mad at me for saying that there was any difference at all between men and women. When I foolishly responded and said, "Why are people angry that I'm pointing out that there are differences between men and women?" people got angry because I said they were angry. People called me a bigot. People dismissed me for being a neanderthal. A relative of mine even commented and said that I should only write about baseball - the implication being that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to men and women.
And the most indignant of my opponents said more of less the following ...
How dare you romanticize women in such a way! There is obviously nothing at all different between how men and women look at sex. To suggest that there is, is bigoted, prehistoric and offensive. Not only that, but then you jump in the comment boxes and say that you're simply pointing out something that's obvious. You say we're foolish to argue that men and women are the same. BUT NOBODY'S SAYING THAT! WE'RE SIMPLY SAYING THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM! Don't put words in our mouths! And respond to my argument! You refuse to respond to the points I am making! I have no time for people like you. You are despicable. You are why I hate the Catholic Church.
Funny, perhaps, but really not so much.
Because you can't argue with anyone any more in the world at large, it seems. Reasoned discourse has vanished because we hate loathe and despise Reason.
God is truth and that infuriates us and the demons who make us dance. We hate the whole idea of truth - particularly the truth that is imprinted in Nature, which is the evidence of God. And this is true whether I'm right or wrong about the psychology of sex; it's not the validity of my original assertion I'm defending, but the very process of rational thinking itself, which has not only been abandoned, but which is more and more held in contempt.
And if you are foolish enough to do what I did, to suggest that men and women are different and that unchastity is a sign of a psychological disturbance, particularly in women - if you do such a thing on Facebook you are apparently casting pearls before swine, and when they turn to rend you, you see the glare in their eyes, you feel the heat of their breath, and you catch the froth of their pig-slobber - and you know that the fury behind their barrage of nonsense is not of this world.
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November 25th, 2013Writing for the Imaginative Conservativeby Joseph Pearce
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November 25th, 2013Europe: Which Fascism Is In Fashion?by Kirk Kilpatrick
In a recent Aleteia piece titled "Is an Old Specter Haunting Europe?", Mark Gordon writes about signs of a fascist revival in Europe. I would like to take issue with him. Not that fascism isn't on the increase in Europe. It is. It's just that Gordon's list of fascist groups fails to mention what is by far the largest fascist movement in Europe— namely, radical Islam.
As Gordon notes, "There are worrying signs of a fascist revival" in Europe, but the majority of those signs, when they are not written in Arabic, say things like "Europe is the cancer, Islam is the answer," "Slay those who insult Islam," "Butcher those who insult Islam," and—for a little variety—"Behead those who insult Islam."
As Gordon also correctly notes, anti-Semitism is on the rise, but it is not simply the obsession of neo-Nazis and nationalists. Most of the anti-Semitism in Europe today is fueled by Islamic ideology. In Copenhagen, for instance, the leader of the Jewish community there has advised Jews not to wear yarmulkes and Stars of David in the streets lest they be attacked by Muslim youth. In some French schools, Jewish students have been advised to leave because the schools cannot guarantee their safety. In the Paris suburb of Villepinte, roughly half of the Jewish families have left in the last three years. JTA, a Jewish news agency, reports that much of France's anti-Jewish crime is committed by North African Muslims. According to Robert Sebbane, an eighty-one-year old resident of another shrinking suburb, "They chased us from Algeria, and they followed us here."
A recent survey by the Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union found that almost one in three European Jews has considered emigration, but right-wing anti- Semites were not their main concern. A plurality blamed "Muslim extremist views," followed by "left-wing political views," and finally "right-wing views." Note that "left- wing political views" is high on the list. In Ireland, a branch of the leftist Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions organization (BDS) has taped "boycott" stickers on Israeli products in a supermarket chain that operates hundreds of grocery stores in Ireland. Apparently, they have done so with the cooperation of the stores. Not coincidentally, the stickers are yellow, the same color as the yellow star arm bands used by the Nazis to identify Jews during the Holocaust. Moreover, European anti-Semitism often carries a semi-official sanction. For instance, public commemorations of Kristallnacht (the Nazis' two-day pogrom against Jews in 1938) are sometimes used as an occasion to berate Israel, the home of approximately half of the world's Jews.
Gordon writes of the "auxiliaries" that sometimes accompany the fascist right- wing parties and engage in street activism, intimidation, and violence. But these are arguably less of a threat than the "Antifas" (anti-fascists)—militant left-wing groups who join with Islamists in denying a public platform to critics of Islamic violence. According to Ned May at Gates of Vienna:
The Antifas are, in fact, widespread across Northern Europe, and reliably appear whenever any group even slightly right-of-center gathers in large numbers. They rain missiles down upon the crowd, vandalize property, and harass the police.
In short, anyone who dares to speak up against Islamic extremism can expect to be met with a bottle or a brick. According to a popular slogan "Fascism will come to Europe in the name of anti-fascism."
Another "anti-fascist" group with an Orwellian name is United Against Fascism. Using the same violent tactics as the Antifas, the UAF has successfully broken up numerous rallies and speeches in England, sometimes using darts to attack and silence proponents of free speech. While the Antifas enjoy only tacit support from leftist and socialist parties in Europe, the UAF is openly supported by many in the British establishment, including Prime Minister David Cameron.
In many respects, fascism has already arrived in Europe—but not in its right-wing version. In his insightful book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg makes the case that fascism is basically a phenomenon of the left. Goldberg asserts that the standard narrative which puts communism and fascism on opposite sides of the political spectrum is a convenient myth created by communists and leftists to serve their own interests.
Thus, the fact that most European governments are of the left-liberal variety is in no way incompatible with their employment of fascist policies and methods (it should be kept in mind that by American standards even "conservative" European parties are well to the left of center). The average European has very little say in his own governance and his right to free expression is tightly circumscribed.
Take, for example, the proposed European National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance. Section 4 states "There is no need to be tolerant to the intolerant." Section 6 calls for the establishment of a "National Tolerance Monitoring Commission." Section 8 states that "the government shall ensure that schools, from the primary level upwards will introduce courses encouraging students to accept diversity and promoting a climate of tolerance." Section 9 states "The government shall ensure that public broadcasting stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their program to promoting a climate of tolerance," and so on. In short, the proposed "Ministry of Tolerance" seems designed to serve the same purpose as the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984.
What is intolerance? Section 2 states "Religious intolerance is understood to cover Islamophobia." What is "Islamophobia?" The statute doesn't say. Apparently, that will be up to the judges to decide. In fact, the judges are already deciding. Over the past ten years numerous European citizens have been hauled before courts on charges of criticizing Islam.
In 2005, the Italian author Oriana Fallaci had to flee Europe to avoid prosecution for having written two books which had, according to the prosecutors, defamed Islam. In 2011, Lars Hedegaard, the president of the Danish Free Press Society, was put on trial for remarks he made during the course of a private conversation. He had simply observed that Muslim families in Denmark had high rates of child abuse, but that was enough to merit a hate speech conviction (he was later acquitted on appeal). Also in 2011, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian citizen, was tried and found guilty for the crime of "denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion." She had made the mistake of referring to Muhammad as a pedophile during a seminar presentation. This year, Mark Elchardus, one of the authors of a 426-page study of anti-Semitism in Belgium, was the target of a lawsuit by Muslim Vigilance, a Muslim activist group. His crime? He concluded that Muslim anti-Semitism is theologically inspired.
The cases above represent only a small sampling of similar cases throughout Europe. One would like to say that these are the high-profile cases but, unfortunately, very little attention was paid to these Star Chamber-like proceedings either by the European media or the American media. Have you ever heard of Lars Hedegaard? Oriana Fallaci? Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff?
You may, however, have heard of Geert Wilders, who is a member of the Dutch Parliament and the leader of a rising political party. He is mentioned in Gordon's article, but only in the context that "interested readers would do well to track developments involving Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party". What is left unsaid is that Wilders is considered by many to be one of the great freedom fighters of our time—an eloquent defender of free speech who has been compared to Churchill and to the leaders of the Free French during the Nazi occupation. Wilders, who along with his family has had to live in a government safe house since 2004, became a higher-priority target after the release in 2008 of Fitna, a short documentary film which juxtaposed scenes of terrorism with verses from the Koran. Fitna led to more death threats and also to a criminal prosecution for hate speech. After defending himself in Dutch courts for three years, Wilders was eventually acquitted, but not without losing valuable time that might better have been spent alerting his fellow citizens to the dangerous combination of creeping sharia and government appeasement.
As it happens, Wilders has also written about the rise of a haunting specter. In an October 2013 article he observed, "A specter is haunting the free world. Let us have the courage to call it by its name: It is the radical ideology of Islam with its political aim to abolish our freedoms and our democracy."
Which specter should Europeans be most worried about? There is a danger that extreme right-wing fascists may eventually gain enough power to constitute a major threat to the European order. But right now the balance of power lies with Islamic fascists and with their leftist enablers in government, academia, the courts and the media.
An old specter is haunting Europe? It might be more accurate to say that a very old specter is haunting Europe—a specter that pre-dates the fascist governments of the thirties and forties by many centuries. In this regard, it's worth considering that the most popular name for baby boys in Europe today is not Benito, or Adolf, or Francisco. It's Mohammed.
William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including Psychological Seduction, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong and, most recently, Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West. Professor Kilpatrick's articles on cultural and educational topics have appeared in First Things, Policy Review, American Enterprise, American Educator, the Los Angeles Times, and various scholarly journals. His articles on Islam have appeared in Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Investor's Business Daily, FrontPage Magazine, and other publications. He is on the Board of Experts at Aleteia.org.
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November 25th, 2013On a High Noteby Joseph Pearce
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November 25th, 2013Observationsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
- There are certain people who will treat you with contempt no matter what you do, no matter what you offer them in the way of graciousness or good will. It is a mistake to think that by offering kindness and forgiveness we will get similar treatment back in return. We should offer without thought of return, and without bitterness when our graciousness is spurned - though that requires a kind of heroic virtue.
Rather, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind even to ungrateful and evil people. (Luke 6:35)
- Women's sexuality is a much deeper and more mysterious thing than men's. Guys don't really care what they do with their naughty bits, as long as they do something. Women, however, understand instinctively on a very deep level the connection between sex and love and sex and motherhood and sex and the family. Thus, when women go wrong sexually, it's a more disturbing thing, both in its origin and in its result. Sexual perversion or acting out in guys is a more superficial symptom than it is in women.
- The reform of the culture is happening, though you'd never guess if you looked at the overall picture. It's happening independently, all across the country, here and there with grass roots origins. It's happening because of people who are called, who are answering the call, and who are suffering in order to answer the call.
- The key is to love without expecting to be loved in return, even though we have a claim to reciprocation in justice. But this does not mean squandering His seed by continuing to sow where the seed is being habitually rejected. We must love, but disinterestedly, which is to say without investment or hope of interest or return. For God gives the increase (1 Cor. 3:7). This is why we are to kick the dust off our shoes and move on when his word is rejected (Mat. 10:14) - because the increase is not our business, and if we get too invested, we are less able to give God the credit; we are more tempted to take ownership and to make the actions of others our own business.
- People will sometimes forgive you if you have harmed them. They will almost never forgive you if they have harmed you. Shame and the attempt to distance ourselves from it causes most of the problems between people. The easiest way to avoid shame is to blame the other person somehow for the wrong you've done to him or her.
- To illustrate that, I've told this story before. Once I had a client who owed me $600. They went months without paying, lying to me that the check was in the mail, etc. When I finally had to get a bit nasty with them, I suddenly became the villain, the source of all the trouble. They were in debt to me and I was the bad guy for insisting upon my rights.
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November 25th, 2013Evil at Workby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
You want to get attacked by the forces of darkness and irrationality?
And there is a malevolent and hateful legion behind it.
And if we hate anything more than nature, it's Reason.
The Irrational looms large and we are lining up to sacrifice to it. (If I've learned anything from Facebook, it's that).
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November 23rd, 2013The Hobbit: What Next Month's Movie Won't Tell Youby Joseph Pearce
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November 23rd, 2013Is JFK in Hell?by Joseph Pearce
My article on JFK and C. S. Lewis has just been published by the National Catholic Register (see the link below). I was both amused and bemused by one of the comments which accused me of believing JFK to be in Hell when my article states explicitly that it's not for any of us to usurp the final judgment of God on deceased souls (Dante's poetic license notwithstanding). I am reminded of Chesterton's complaint that it didn't matter how much he made the point of a story stick out like a spike, the critics would still carefully impale themselves on something else!
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November 22nd, 2013The Hobbit and EWTNby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Joseph Pearce writes ...
I'm at EWTN at the moment and had a sneak preview of the forthcoming Hobbit special on which we worked. It's truly superb and you are as wonderful as ever! It's being aired on December 5th.
Can't wait to see it!
We filmed two specials - one on The Hobbit and one on The Lord of the Rings. I have not yet heard when the second one will air. I play Tolkien in both specials and Joseph offers his insightful commentary on the Catholic elements in Tolkien's works. I'll pass long more info as it's passed along to me.
Here are Joseph and I in the marvelous Hobbit Hole set at EWTN when we filmed last spring ...
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November 22nd, 2013C. S. Lewis and Pope Benedictby Joseph Pearce
I'm currently at EWTN in Alabama where I've been filming various shows. I was also given a sneak preview of the hour-long Hobbit Special, which will be aired on December 5th. The folks at EWTN have done a great job with the editing. Jef Murray's art and Kevin O'Brien's acting are superb. It's an honour and a privilege to work with so many gifted people who are on fire with a love for Christ and Middle-earth.
Changing the subject, I received a good e-mail from a Catholic priest this evening on the subject of C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church which I'd like to share. My response follows.
I saw you on EWTN tonight, and your talking about CSL and the Catholic Church reminded me that as a Lewis fan of over 50 years, once an Anglican and now a Catholic, I have never heard quoted in relation to CSL and Catholicism this comment from a letter to Dom Bede Griffeths OSB of 8 May 1939,
"Nothing wd give such strong support to the Papal claims as the spectacle of a Pope actually functioning as head of Christendom." [C.S. Lewis Letters, 1988, page 319].
Is that not what we have been seeing for the 50 years or so? Wouldn't CSL have loved Benedict?
All good wishes, and thanks for all you do!
My reply:
Thanks so much for your e-mail.
I agree that CSL would have loved Benedict, as much as he would have been dismayed at the dismal array of Archbishops of Canterbury that have overseen the demise of Anglicanism in the past half-century. Were Lewis alive today he would have had the simple choice of Rome or Homelessness.
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November 20th, 2013Shakespeare - Private Papistby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Blog reader Rob Crisell, who is affiliated with Shakespeare in the Vines in California, sent along something I have never seen before - an icon of William Shakespeare. I imagine it's the only one that exists. The Latin phrase means Private Papist, a reference to the fact that Will was a secret Catholic at a time that this was against the law in England. As you can see it's very well done. The artist (or "writer" in iconography terms) is Nicholas Ivins.
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November 20th, 2013To Judge or Not to Judgeby Dena Hunt
Our Lord told us that we would be judged by the same judgment we make. He also said we shouldn't judge (at all), lest we be judged ourselves. But then again, he admonished us repeatedly to repent. How can we repent, lest we be convicted, and how can we be convicted, lest we judge? The Church counsels us to make a daily examination of conscience, but to what end, if we are not to judge? And how can we confess our sins, unless we know our sins? All the confusion in such apparent contradiction lies in language. Translations can't keep pace with evolving semantic nuances. That's one reason that reading is never mere passive reception of someone's monologue, but always active, and always a dialogue, even—or perhaps especially—when we're reading Holy Scripture.
What do we mean by judgment? When our Lord referred to "judgment," we know he meant condemnation. We should not condemn others, lest we be condemned ourselves. What he did not mean is discernment. Our daily examination of conscience, the source of our necessary repentance is not judgment, but discernment.
The deceiver's favorite device is misuse of language. He would have us believe that our Lord commands us not to discern, to understand, to comprehend, to distinguish one thing from another thing. The confusion of apparent contradiction is the result. So is the contemporary confusion of (mostly) well-intentioned people. The evil fruit of this deception becomes visible in such legal absurdities as "hate speech" and "right to choose," and other nonsense (literally, literal nonsense). The prototype may be "anti-discrimination," wherein we're commanded by the State not to distinguish one thing from another.
So, how can we tell who's leading us and who's misleading us? Examine the language. It's the word that reveals its speaker, just as it's the Word that revealed the Speaker.
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November 20th, 2013Love and Truth, Beauty and the Beast, Hamlet and the Rest of Lifeby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Love and truth will meet; justice and peace will kiss. (Ps. 85:10)
The meeting of love and truth is truly divine. Sometimes this is translated "Mercy and truth will meet" or "Love and Fidelity will meet". Either way, the point is that loving kindness can overcome the ugly truth, and faithfully so.
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable. - G. K. Chesterton
The fact is we are not lovable - until we are loved: loved by God, but also by others.
And there are always reasons not to love - I can think of a thousand reasons not to love you, dear reader. You get on my nerves, for one thing. And I'm certain you can say the same for me. We can always hold back our love out of a kind of squeamishness. This tends to be more the case in those who are sanctimonious, or even those who are virtuous but who can't stand the thought of embracing sinners - or real life, which is the same thing. What with everyone being a sinner, and life being a complex mess, there's no reason to embrace anyone or anything if you really think about it. So we are tempted to hold back in a picky and particular kind of way. Hamlet is like this in the beginning of Shakespeare's great play - a sulking adolescent for whom nothing is quite right that Mom and Dad do.
But of course Hamlet's dear old Mum and Dad do very little right and quite a bit wrong. Stepfather-Uncle has murdered the real father and Mommy, probably complicit, is lusty to get to it in the bedroom and is saving some money by using her old husband's funeral meats for her new husband's wedding appetizers.
In other words, if Hamlet is squeamish, he has a right to be squeamish. It's not only as bad as Hamlet suspects, it's worse.
I have known two people who opened up to me the kind of horrible vistas that Hamlet sees in Mom and Dad as his stomach drops. One is a stranger, the other was a good friend. They both revealed a stunning depravity of character that made me want to renounce life and become a hermit and a cynic (like Timon of Athens, another Shakespearian hero). The temptation is to hold out hope for such people - they can improve, they're victims of an abusive upbringing, they're not happy being selfish ... until you begin to realize that they sin as deliberately as you do, and that they would rather nurture their "precious" than sacrifice it and do good. You they'll sacrifice, their "precious" they won't.
And, barring cooperation with Divine Grace, this is probably a lifelong pattern. Most people never change. Some do, but most don't.
But here's the kicker - a thing is never lovable until it is loved. And love is not divine until it meets with truth, and only then will "justice and peace kiss" (as the next line of the Psalm exclaims).
Only when we can love someone despite seeing the ugly truth about him or her can we really begin to call it love.
This does not mean we have to put up with ugliness or abuse. But it does mean we must be realistic.
And love anyway.
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November 20th, 2013C. S. Lewis and Catholic Convertsby Joseph Pearce
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November 19th, 2013Rise of the Fellowshipby Joseph Pearce
Back in August 2011, I posted to the Ink Desk the trailer to a Lord of the Ringsesque indie film, "The Fellows Hip: Rise of the Gamers". The film has since been renamed "Rise of the Fellowship," and will be released on DVD and streaming video on December 3, just before the release of the next Hobbit film. For more details check out the site: http://riseofthefellowshipmovie.mymiddleearth.com/.
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November 19th, 2013C.S. Lewis at the Thresholdby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
OK, this will offend some of you, but please understand, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis, that while he was the first writer who opened the door of the Faith to me, and not to begrudge him in any way, still something needs to be said. I wrote to a friend of mine, whose admiration for Lewis knows no bounds ...
I'm sorry I get a bit defensive about my writers. Lewis is certainly very gifted, and as I say in my video interview from the conference, makes the best use of analogy of any apologist in modern times.But he stopped short. For understandable reasons, his Ulster background perhaps foremost among them, his squeamishness, his too precious and peculiar sensitivity. He stopped at the doorway gazing in. Ahead of him passed giants - there are things in Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien and O'Connor that tear into the very fabric of existence. Lewis catches a glimpse and plays around and gives us a share - but farther, deeper, richer go the others.
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November 19th, 2013Hamlet's Shadow on One Man's Lifeby Joseph Pearce
Hamlet of Morningside Heights
by Kenneth Craven
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011
98 pp., $52.99
Reviewed by Paula L. Gallagher
953 words
In his intellectual autobiography, Hamlet of Morningside Heights, Kenneth Craven describes the decades-long development of his academic scholarship and presents the fruit of that scholarship: a Pauline interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Craven's short book intertwines his life's story with his four major discoveries in Hamlet, showing how his experiences and his studies have caused his deep understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age.
Craven's autobiography focuses on his relationship with Shakespeare, Hamlet the character, andHamlet the play. He claims his profound understanding of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age results from having experiences, values, and perspectives similar to Shakespeare himself. Craven – and Shakespeare – has "crossed all 'the Division Avenues' of rich and poor culture."[1] Likewise, both Craven and Shakespeare were deeply involved in the artistic, literary world and in the business world. In addition to his Shakespeare studies, Craven was instrumental in developing the first graduate program for information sciences and was also a consultant for corporate infrastructure. Craven groups himself with Shakespeare and Hamlet as a fellow humanist, holding values opposite to the culture of the time. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, European culture was becoming more engrossed with the wealth to be gleaned from the New World; modern American culture emphasized self-serving, gainful motives. Craven says that each culture " . . . discounted virtues at an ethical price. . . ."[2] but that, like Shakespeare, "Fortune never motivated me … human balance motivated me."[3]
The fruit of decades of study, Craven's literary analysis of Hamlet in light of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, chapters 12-13, reveals four significant discoveries. His first discovery is that "(T)he revered wise saws of the old fool Polonius … were … a witty parody of St. Paul's ethical principles"[4] in Romans 12-13. Craven specifically details how Polonius has inverted St. Paul's words, preaching instead a " … to-thine-ownself-be-true everyday ethics."[5] St. Paul commands "love thy neighbor"; Polonius, "exploit thy neighbor."[6] The second discovery is in Act 2, scene 1, when Polonius directs Reynaldo to "ascribe vicious behavior"[7] to his son Laertes. The evils Polonius lists are the same evils which St. Paul instructs the Romans to avoid (Rom. 13:13-14). Craven's third discovery is that Shakespeare uses Hamlet's soliloquies " … as Paul's key recommendation as the means for a dedicated leader to discover divine providence."[8]Craven claims that Shakespeare's contemporary audience would be very familiar with Romans and would therefore clearly understand Polonius's reversals. Craven's final discovery shows how Hamlet is a Christian revenge tragedy, supported by Pauline teachings. When Hamlet murders Polonius, he " … suddenly realizes … that God's providence has been central to this event and has given him a sign that he is the true prince of Denmark."[9] In Romans 13:4, St. Paul writes that the prince is the minister of God's justice and wrath; only the evil need fear him. Hamlet realizes that he was the " … the foreordained minister of God" through whom " … divine authority superintended Polonius' death."[10] St. Paul's description of the prince as accomplisher of God's punishment justifies Hamlet's role as Christian prince and punisher.
In addition to providing a literary analysis of Hamlet, Craven's memoir chronologically depicts the lengthy and accumulative process of academic scholarship. It is not only what one studies and whom one studies under, but also one's personal background, experiences, and interests that affect one's scholarly fruits and successes. Craven studied psychology, theatre, Shakespeare, the literary convention of the old fool, Russia, and humanism. He studied under great academic leaders of Shakespeare scholarship, such as Oscar James Campbell at Columbia University in the early 1950s. Craven attributes much of his own success in academia to his studies and his mentors, but he also recognizes that his unhappy relationship with his strictly Puritan father, his experiences in the corporate world and with different social ranks, along with his strong love for theatre and entertainment, have all significantly shaped him and contributed to his understanding of Shakespeare
Craven concludes his book with an analysis of Hamlet's metaphor of man as "quintessence of dust."[11] He discusses Paracelsus's new concept of quintessence as the fifth element, in addition to the classical four: earth, water, air, and fire. Quintessence, the most sublime element, links the microcosmic individual's soul with the macrocosmic, unifying world soul. Craven also delves into the chemical and the religious meanings of dust. In Genesis, man is created from the dust of the earth. Dust, in classical chemistry, is the element earth. In this metaphor "quintessence of dust," Shakespeare has "poetically linked the unlinkable"[12]:
Juxtaposing Paracelsus' own concept of quintessence as the human zenith with his concept of dust in Genesis as the human nadir is a contradiction in chemical terms marking the vast difference between the untapped capacity of our spiritual natures and our fatal irredeemable tendencies.[13]
Hamlet is conscious of man's ability to ascend to the sublime and of his ability to descend into "primordial chaos."[14]
Kenneth Craven's Hamlet of Morningside Heights is a brief, but engaging and understandable autobiography of intellectual development and literary discovery. Craven reflects on the similarities between himself and Shakespeare, and himself and Hamlet, as humanist and as soul-searcher. He traces the history of his academic scholarship, the influence of his professors' mentorship, and the impact of his personal interest in theatre. Woven throughout the book, Craven analyzes the influence of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans on Hamlet. This autobiography is a fascinating window into the relationship between person, knowledge, and art, and demonstrates how reflection reveals the threads tying them together.
Paula L. Gallagher lives in Boynton Beach, FL with her husband and two cats. She enjoys reading, quilting and cooking.
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November 18th, 2013Tolkien and Lewis on TVby Joseph Pearce
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November 18th, 2013Me in MEby Joseph Pearce
No, the heading to this post does not indicate my embrace of the relativist mantra that "this above all: to thine own self be true". Only one of the me's is in fact me; the other is Maine, the New England state. Last week, during my latest sojourn in New England teaching at Thomas More College, I gave a couple of talks in Portsmouth, NH. Being informed that the state of Maine was on the other side of the river, I asked to be driven across the bridge so that I could add the state of Maine to the lengthening list of states that I have visited. I have now set foot in forty-one of the contiguous states, albeit only for the briefest of moments in one or two cases!
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November 18th, 2013The Labyrinthine Waysby Joseph Pearce
(Some Thoughts on Reading "The Man Who Was Thursday")
I am currently teaching a tutorial on some of the Great Works of the Catholic Revival at Thomas More College. As well as the TMC juniors and seniors who are taking the class, it is being audited by Peter and Mariellen Gallaher. I was particularly intrigued to read Peter's musings on Chesterton's Man Who wasThursday and would like to share them with Ink Deskers:
I'll not try to remember how much time passes during Syme's nightmare in Chesterton's novel. Nightmares, most of them anyway, only have a duration of one night, and quite possibly may last only a few seconds. Time, the orderly procession of instants that we have given the name Time, is turned to soup once the lights go out; chunks bobbing to the top and disappearing, slices partially seen, and all suspended in a flavorful broth of experience and imagination. Chesterton doesn't even have the fellow whose nightmare we think this is...or is it Chesterton's himself ?.. this fellow Syme, fall to sleep and dream, or awaken from it, though. So his nightmare, so called, begins with the words "A cloud was on the minds of men"? As with dreams in general, and nightmares in particular...the ones I remember at least, and I have an enduring memory of one that occurred when I was about three...they begin anywhere, and the beginning might just as well suffice for it as the middle. If that makes no sense, then that is what I mean by it.
Perhaps it could be said they begin before time, continue outside time (or as well within it, running forth and back and sideways) and finish God only knows where.
I was deceived by the book's first few chapters, expecting what I did not get, not getting what I got instead. I remember asking Mariellen if this was not the silliest ever detective story. Though I don't know now what her answer may have been I do recall that she was puzzled, too. I kept forgetting that this "thing" was at least a dream if not a nightmare, and thinking that things should have been done with some logic, and wondering if I was reading a more genial Kafka about a fellow in a place with "up so many floating bells down". I wondered if it would all turn into a Chagall painting with floating cows (http://www.chagallpaintings.org/iandthevillage.html ), or something like this guy's work ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJbOK2EGWXA) .
Then I thought of some kind of Mack Sennett/Keystone Cop comedy as a setting for the whole thing when I read about the anarchists hurtling down into the long tunnel to their meeting room while Syme and Gregory pointed guns at each other in a room full of bombs. I expected a Buster Keaton disaster scene, smoke and bits of buildings and Buster sitting forlorn and alone in the middle of a big mess when it all cleared. This couldn't be a nightmare. How could I believe that this absurdity was about a bunch of fellows who seriously wanted to abolish right and wrong (p. 38 in the Ignatius press 199 edition, P.54 in the one we used in class.) But of course there are plenty of folks around who think that is perfectly the right thing to do. I was working in Law Enforcement in New York in the 1960's and can attest, and I have relatives who were at work on Wall Street on 9/11/2001.
I read further in the book and began to see all of the nightmare elements emerging; the gradual discovery by Syme that all of the men whose name are days are themselves policeman as Syme is, recruited by Sunday, how in some of my own nightmares this same thing happens. He learns he is not alone (and they do, too). He has allies. Evil reveals itself at a desperate moment not to be evil, but a harmless vision; a mistake. Remembered in the morning when fully awake, the nightmare becomes a kind of critical review, a deep response...at least it seems to me...and perhaps a solution to problems or questions facing one, facing me. Facing us all?
Several chapters into this novel, after many of the Days have been identified as police, philosophical police (though I've not bothered to figure out what 'school's of philosophy they each represent..who is the Aristotelian, who the Platonist, who the Thomist, who the Idealist, etc...has anyone?) I looked up in Genesis where Thursdaywould have been, and found it to be, well, what it is; the day the lights go on. And, I figured out the plot. I smiled and really did smack myself on the forehead.
But I still have some problem trying to figure out why Chesterton put six undercover agents of the philosophical police and their C.I.C., God, in as the Central Giverning Council of the Anarchists. The only thing I can figure out is that the nightmare isn't a nightmare at all. It is a kind of nonsense tale where, as in Through the Looking Glass, nothing is quite going to be the way it seems, and a snickersnee will cut nothing more than cheese.
That's what happens, anyway in the real world, the one controlled by a loving God, whom Sunday proves to be in the end.
I'm left on finishing the book with the picture from the poem that has possibly made the greatest impression on me, of the Holy Ghost who "over the bent world broods with warm breast and with, ahh, bright wings"; something I saw many years ago before I'd read the poem, or the book but had thought this about the matter:
The Mystery
I have glimpsed today the slow and constant dance,
Creations' song, before the throne of might and glory,
The wheel and fire, the majesty of movement there
Repeated down to dust and atoms, out to planets
And blackest space. Each part knows its place in adoration.
Birds and grasses fly and weave in windy syncopation.
Fish and waters far above primeval mud, move
Swift through spears and shafts of prismed light.
The aqueous ooze appears alive itself in fluvial movement
Endowed by ponderous gravity's touch; while ancient
Sharks, coelacanths and cetacean monsters glide in
Balneal luxury through abyssal eternal dark.
Down through pressing heat to nucleal fire
Burning eternal at the molten core,
Iron and nickel, granite and basalt compact
Mash, re-petrify and slowly explode, expand, up
With glacial agony through aeonic rock
Renewing earth's only skin over and over.
Always changing, ever new, outward swings
The dance of time, compass wide and atom deep,
Moving to the music of the Maker.
Through all of it pure angels move
The evidences of Love's self knowing;
And you, and I and everyone growing
Into It, to Them, outstretched waiting
For return, for end, for beginning.
Seeing as They have seen.
Being as They have been.
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November 18th, 2013Catherine of Aragon, and of Shakespeareby Joseph Pearce
I've received this very interesting critique of Henry VIII, a play co-written by Shakespeare, by the Spanish writer and critic Enrique Garcia-Máiquez:
A kind, curious reader has asked me why Shakespeare's Sir Thomas More had so much trouble with the censors (in fact, it was never staged), whilst Henry VIII, also Shakespeare's, also co-written and also pro-Catholic, was staged with no trouble at all. With no trouble, and even amidst great pomp and circumstance: let us not forget that The Globe was burnt to a crisp thanks to a cannon shot included in its exuberant staging (what a picture of Henry VIII, and what a Baroque end to William Shakespeare's public career!). I passed the question on to Joseph Pearce, author of the foreword to the Spanish edition of Sir Thomas More, and defender of the theory crediting Shakespeare with the authorship of the play. He says that the key is the difference in dates. During the ten years' lapse between the presentation of the one and the other, James I had come to power, and his politics had grown away from the Tudors'.
True. But William Shakespeare had also grown in subtlety. He must have learnt his lesson well, after everything he went through with Sir Thomas More. The message contained in Henry VIII is much sharper, more silent, dagger-like. So in order to strike, he must get much closer to the king, but stealthily. In Sir Thomas More, he sidesteps the thornier, more explicitly political issues; the mere presence of the martyr turns the drama –despite its intelligent, continuous play on humour—into a eucharistic play. And the May Day revolt, which (reasonably) so worried the censor, Sir Edmund Tilney, led the way to an explicit development of a very Catholic theory of power.
There are, of course, great all-around similarities; for example, between the Christian speeches by the fallen Wolsey and Thomas More as he nears the scaffold; and, almost literally, between this sentence of Catherine of Aragon's: "Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge that no king can corrupt", so similar to another sentence spoken by More in the play about him. But Henry VIII is a monument of literary cunning which has bewildered critics who were very sure of their own sagacity.
The picture of the king is complex only on the surface. At heart it is very simple, and shows that his will is his pleasure; but on the outside, what theological, diplomatic and courtly spirals, distracting whoever will be distracted. Henry sighs over Catherine: "Would it not grieve an able man to leave so sweet a bedfellow? But, conscience, conscience! O, 'tis a tender place; and I must leave her". There are some who, in the presence of Shakespeare, always repeat, "'Tis a tender place, 'tis a tender place". Indeed.
Shakespeare's portrait of Catherine of Aragon, so bewildering to so many, is a masterpiece of ambiguity. The Prince of Lampedusa, due perhaps to some atavistic Sicilian grudge against the Crown of Aragon, is outspoken on the subject, even forgetting his manners: "That unhappy prude, brimful of Spanish dignity and arrogance which were démodé even in Henry's England". However, he is also astonished to witness the sensation caused by Mrs. Siddons in the role of Catherine: "When the curtain fell, the house was half destroyed, the upholstery torn off the seats, the stuccos chipped off, the candles twisted in their candelabra. One Lord Dalbraith was seen in his box, eating a candle in order to give vent to his emotion".
That two-fold perception happens again to different critics. Harold Bloom prefers Wolsey's and Buckingham's adieus, but is perplexed to report Dr. Johnson's opinion that Shakespeare's genius is poured into Catherine, making her the equal of Cordelia, King Lear's worthy daughter.
Such disparity is due to the fact that Shakespeare, master of technique, plays at hiding his hand, letting emotion mysteriously draw the portrait of the queen in our souls. Whoever would understand her in all her personal, religious, political and matrimonial stature would do well to read Salvador de Madariaga's essay in Mujeres españolas. Shakespeare (who was doubtless well acquainted with her, having inherited the love she inspired in the people of England) does not dwell on those facts, nor does he quote the cultural admiration Erasmus felt for her, or her friendship with Thomas More, Luis Vives and John Fisher, nor does he quote this impressive dialogue between the King and Suffolk. Suffolk reports to the King: "The Queen will obey in everything except in what the two supreme powers rule". "What?" protested the King, "the Emperor and the Pope?" "No. God and her conscience". Shakespeare's dramatic genius preferred Catherine's dignity, her silences and her gestures to speak for her, and only left us the barest clues in the play:
—It seems the marriage with his brother's wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
…………………………………………………….—No. His conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
With an amazing economy, Shakespeare achieves Lord Dalbraith's fever or Dr. Johnson's admiration. Shakespeare was extremely careful: Thomas More is only vaguely mentioned once in the whole play. The playwright's great interest in More has been researched; his silence is very telling.
But Shakespeare's ironic master touch arrives in good time: at the end. At the end of Act V there is an exuberant eulogy to Elizabeth which, according to the dates given by Joseph Pearce and his political argumentation, must have seemed extravagant, even dangerous, in the court of James I, whose mother was executed by the Virgin Queen. Now we must call to mind the play's original title,All is True, which, in view of all that happened on stage and in history, must have struck the audience as deeply false, and funny.
But just in case we didn't get it, William Shakespeare really lets his hair down at the very end: "'Tis ten to one this play can never please all that are here". And then he adds (and note every word, and my bolded ones): "All the expected good we're like to hear for this play at this time, is only in the merciful construction of good women; for such a one we show'd 'em: if they smile…". The play portrays Catherine in a suspiciously neutral manner, and Anne Boleyn not too badly, and has just praised Elizabeth fulsomely. Three main female characters, one of which has been shown us as good; the good women in the audience will know who she is. Of course they will smile.
Enrique García-Máiquez (Murcia, Spain, 1969), poet and essayist, has published four books of verse, two volumes of his diary, and two collections of his newspaper articles. Together with Aurora Rice, he has translatedSir Thomas More, by William Shakespeare and others, into Spanish.
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November 17th, 2013Justice for Julietby Joseph Pearce
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November 17th, 2013A Wilde Endorsementby Joseph Pearce
I've just finished your Wilde and - you were quite right to be confident that I would - I enjoyed it tremendously. I had to sprint through a lot of Wilde for my PhD and have been keeping a eye on what's out there ever since. Hence I'm very aware of the huge amount of Wildeana that's shovelled out virtually annually: I simply did not think it was possible for anyone to come up with anything new. And yet you certainly and most spectacularly did: both a new and much needed approach, which really makes the lines of his life and his work much clearer, and - more astounding - new information and primary source-material. That alone is an extraordinary feat of scholarship. Gosh.I'm also now rather appalled at the unscholarly shenanigans that Ellman - of whom I was previously an unalloyed admirer - seems to have got away with. His book is, as you generously say, still a terrific repository of facts - but he has missed a lot of the truth. And some of the most important facts are, as you have also very clearly now shown, simply wrong. And wrong in ways than he should have known better than to permit himself. Yet he is still widely seen as The Definitive. Time will solve this, I suppose. I wonder what sort of reviews you got? I hope they fell at your feet.
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November 15th, 2013Court Rebukes Administration's 'Narrow' Religious Liberty Viewby Joseph Pearce
CHICAGO, ILL., November 15 (CNA/EWTN News) .- The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Obama administration's defense of the HHS mandate is "unsound and extraordinary" for contending that business owners cannot have religious freedom protections.
"The government's argument is premised on a far-too-narrow view of religious freedom: Religious exercise is protected in the home and the house of worship but not beyond," the court's Nov. 12 decision in Grote Industries v. Sebelius said.
"Religious people do not practice their faith in that compartmentalized way; free-exercise rights are not so circumscribed."
Compelling businesses owners and their companies to provide services such as abortion-causing drugs and devices, sterilization, and contraception "substantially burdens their religious exercise rights," the court wrote.
The government's argument that religious exercise claims are irrelevant to commercial activity would "leave religious exercise wholly unprotected in the commercial sphere."
"On the government's understanding of religious liberty, a Jewish restaurant operating for profit could be denied the right to observe Kosher dietary restrictions."
"That cannot be right. There is nothing inherently incompatible between religious exercise and profit-seeking."
The case concerned Indiana-based Grote Industries, a manufacturer and marketer of vehicle lighting and safety systems. The company's Catholic owners object to the federal HHS mandate, which requires employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and early abortion drugs, even if doing so violates their religious beliefs.
Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, argued before the court on behalf of the company.
"The decision rightly foresees the dangers of allowing government to have this kind of power," he stated Nov. 12. "If the government can force family business owners to act contrary to their deepest convictions under the threat of fining them out of business, it is a danger to everybody."
Bowman said a majority of other rulings on the mandate have found it to "excessively conflict with our nation's guarantee of religious freedom to all Americans."
"All Americans, including job creators, should be free to honor God and live according to their faith."
The decision suspends the HHS mandate for the Grote family and Grote Industries. It also suspends the mandate for the Kortes family and their construction company, Illinois-based K & L Contractors.
The appeals court ruled that corporations qualify as legal persons under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and may invoke its protections.
The HHS mandate is the subject of dozens of cases across the country, involving nearly 200 plaintiffs. Several courts, including appellate courts, have ruled in favor of those seeking injunctions against the mandate's enforcement upon them.
On Nov. 1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the appellants in Gilardi v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The court found that the mandate places a "substantial burden" on the religious freedom of Francis and Philip Gilardi, two brothers who are Catholic and who own of Freshway Foods and Freshway Logistics, granting the Gilardis a preliminary injunction against the mandate's enforcement.
The court said the Gilardi brothers are "trying to run their business in accordance with their religious beliefs," though it did not rule that the companies themselves have free exercise rights.
Circuit Judge Brown, writing the court's opinion, said, "we conclude (the Affordable Care Act) does … trammel the right of free exercise – a right that lies at the core of our constitutional liberties."
Moreover, that decision noted that some of the contraceptives are classified as carcinogenic by the World Health Organization and indicate an increased risk for breast, cervical and liver cancers, saying that "the science is debatable and may actually undermine the government's cause."
The International Agency for Research on Cancer – part of the World Health Organization – lists estrogen-progestogen oral contraception as a Group 1 known carcinogen, the same category as asbestos, tobacco products and ultraviolet radiation.
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November 12th, 2013Jesus Christ and Hellby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
How can we deny hell when so many of us have been there and back again?
He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation.
Time without seasons is a dreadful eternity; heat without light is the fires of hell; man without salvation is a prideful bigot lost in a big city and finding diversions to calm his panic - which is what "The Artificial Nigger" is about.
And it's what hell is about - the conviction that we are utterly worthless.
This is the heart of despair. This is the devil's great lie, which is whispered in our ear and which, though based on a grain of truth, is what takes away all hope. When we are not loved or when we have failed to love another - when we abuse or when we suffer abuse - our entire being is called into doubt.
Existence itself seems worthless in such a place, at such a moment. The very gift of being, the most basic and incomprehensible of gifts, the gift that flows from the nature and essence of God, who is Being itself - this gift is overcome by regret. We reach a moment where "it had been better had we not been born".
The heart of despair is this worthlessness. If heaven is love and the self-sacrifice of the cross, if heaven is a mercy that flows from the side of Jesus, a mercy that literally "redeems" us, that assigns us a value and purchases us back, then hell is the opposite of this. Hell is a selfishness that says, "You are useless to me" or "I am useless to you" or "Existence is useless in itself". Hell is the utter and complete lack of value, the absence of love that is only expressed by denial and betrayal.
In O'Connor's story, the grandfather and the grandson do a little dance. They are almost two aspects of the same person. The one looks like an ancient child and the other like a miniature old man. In a way, they victimize one another, and in an existential tango the heart of their shame is exposed. It is a shame that is not without foundation, not without cause.
But they are saved. Saved by an "artificial nigger".
It's something that can't be explained; you have to read the story. They are saved by their encounter with inner ugliness and with the grace of Jesus Christ, who comes to them almost (if you'll pardon the phrase) as the "nigger of the universe". They are saved from their own haughtiness, saved from wandering lost and in despair, saved from hell itself.
And when the grandfather finally experiences this mercy ...
He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.
And without this agony - without hell, without the heart of despair that this story reminds us of, without the cross that we build and the love and loyalty we mock and nail to it, our Faith is but a hollow shell, our liturgies a Mass of confusion, our lives a prideful aimless wandering through a dangerous and loveless jungle built by worthless men who value and redeem nothing.
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November 11th, 2013Loving the Unlovableby Dena Hunt
A couple days ago, Elizabeth Scalia wrote a blog post about the photo of Pope Francis kissing the man in St. Peter's Square who was covered with grotesque tumors. Of course, it was reminiscent of St. Francis kissing the leper. As usual, The Anchoress was eloquent on the beauty of the gesture. It set me thinking about a video I received that same morning.
I am what people call an "animal lover"; more specifically, a dog-lover. In my younger days when I had more strength and stamina, I tried to do some work in rescue, but I could not do much, because I confess I can't bear to see some things: I crumble, dissolve into tears, become helpless and useless. Now, a friend often forwards to me photos of adorable puppies or videos of dogs or other animals doing funny or heartwarming things, emails with subject lines like, "Your Awww Moment for Today." And I remember—it's burned into the memory, you know—of other images, not at all funny, but heartbreaking, and not at all adorable.
Hard is the heart of one who does not smile at the antics of a soft and warm, cuddly puppy exploring his little world. He is lovable; we say things like "how adorable!" But what about a dog, emaciated, chained and left to starve, bearing the marks of torture or open sores of neglect? Is he lovable?
Is this not how our Lord sees us in our sin? Is this not why he came? To save the sinner (not the righteous), to heal the sick (not the healthy), to love the unlovable.
It's easy to love those who love us. In fact, it's so easy it would be hard not to love them—our spouses, parents and children, our family and friends. Sometimes, though far too rarely, we may think about whether we really love them or whether we just love their loving us. (Says the old pop song, "I love how you love me.") Is our love just gratitude for the warm fuzzies of emotional security? Is that what our Lord meant when he commanded us to love? No. That's just an awww moment, like those sent to us in forwarded videos. To love is to love the unlovable, to love those who can't love us back, to kiss the leper, to rescue the abused animal, to save the sinner and not condemn him. And when we feel repulsed by the unloved's presence, we blame them—as though our inability to love them were their fault. It isn't. It's something much more serious: It means we don't even know what love is.
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November 11th, 2013English Lords at Georgetownby Joseph Pearce
Lord David Alton has sent me the link to an event at Georgetwon University at which he and Lord Nicholas Windsor spoke.
For those who are unaware of the splendid track record of Lord Alton and Lord Nicholas Windsor, they are both tireless warriors in defence of the unborn, doing much great work in Europe and the United Kingdom for the culture of life. Lord Nicholas Windsor, a cousin of the Queen, converted to Catholicism a few years ago and has been an indefatigable crusader for the pro-life cause ever since. Lord Alton has been supporting the pro-life cause in the House of Commons and the House of Lords for several decades.
This link will take you to the presentation given by Lord Nicholas Windsor, Jan Graffius and David Alton at Georgetown University's Berkley Centre, Washington DC. The session was hosted and moderated by Professor Tom Farr. The presentation describes the purpose of the Christian Heritage Centre Project, the Collections held at Stonyhurst,and the challenges to contemporary religious freedom. Please share it with others.
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November 10th, 2013The Goodness of Tolkien and the Sins of Peter Jacksonby Joseph Pearce
My book follows the plot of Tolkien's story, following in Bilbo's footsteps on the journey to the Lonely Mountain and back again to the Shire, mindful all the time of the spiritual and ethical meaning that emerges in every stage of the journey. We need to remember that Tolkien referred to The Lord of the Rings as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" and we need to understand that The Hobbit is equally and as fundamentally religious in its deepest level of meaning. As such, Bilbo's Journey will enable people to understand and enjoy Tolkien's story in all its richness and depth. This, in turn, will make it easier for those watching the film to see the strengths and weaknesses of Peter Jackson's adaptation.
2. What´s your opinion about the previous film, The Hobbit I: An unexpected journey? How can we get deeper messages from this film with the book Bilbo´s journey?
If I am to be honest, and perhaps controversial, I would have to say that I was not very impressed with the first film. I thought that far too many liberties were taken with Tolkien's text. Some of the characterisation was appalling. Radagast the Brown, a Franciscan presence in Tolkien's story, was transformed into Radaghastly the Ridiculous, a drug-taking buffoon who is pulled around by a pack of Bugs Bunny lookalikes. In this sense,Bilbo's Journey helps to restore the magnificence and majesty of Tolkien's work after its abuse and molestation by Peter Jackson.
3. What´s the most important spiritual message that we can find in the book The Hobbit according to Bilbo´s journey?
At its deepest, The Hobbit is a meditation on the words of Christ in St. Matthew's Gospel that where our treasure is there our heart will be also. The dragon sickness in The Hobbit is similar to the evil effects of the power of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. It warns us that the thing possessed possesses the possessor. We are in danger of becoming possessed by our possessions in such a way that we become like dragons, or like Gollum, addicted to those things in our lives that are ultimately self-destructive. Such selfishness can only be overcome by selflessness, by laying down our lives for others in acts of self-sacrificial love. The Hobbit teaches us how to overcome our pride so that we may learn to love in the fullest way. This is nothing less than the most important lesson that we all have to learn. I thank God that Tolkien teaches such a beautiful lesson in such a beautiful way!
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November 8th, 2013More Wanderingsby Joseph Pearce
Having just returned home earlier today from an overnight visit to the Heart of the Beast (Washington DC) to do some TV work (on which more later), I leave early tomorrow morning for my next week-long sojourn in New Hampshire in my capacity as Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College.
Apart from teaching two mediaeval texts, The Song of Roland and The Song of the Cid, to my sophomore class, and Brideshead Revisited to the juniors and seniors, I'll be giving a few talks in an extra-curricular capacity. On Sunday, I'm giving a talk on Shakespeare's Catholicism at Christ the King parish in Concord. On Monday evening I'm giving a talk on my conversion in Portsmouth to a men's group, and on Tuesday I'm giving another talk, also on my conversion and also in Portsmouth, to an independent Catholic high school (St. Patrick's).
On Friday afternoon, Thomas More College President, William Fahey, will join me for a lively debate on the merits of distributism and subsidiarity, and, in the evening, staying with the theme of the Church's social teaching, I will give a talk entitled "Big Government, Big Business, and the Catholic Church", based on my book, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered.
I hope that Ink Deskers from New Hampshire might be able to join me at one or other of these events.
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November 8th, 2013Solzhenitsyn in Chinaby Joseph Pearce
I've just received the exciting news that the Chinese edition of Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile has been published. It's the first time that any Ignatius Press book has been published in mainland China. It is also the first time that any of my books has been translated into Cantonese, though not the first time that one of my books has been published in Asia, Tolkien: Man & Myth being published in Korean a few years ago.
In the unlikely event that anyone visiting the Ink Desk can speak Cantonese, or for those curious enough to want to see a cover image of the Chinese edition, here's the link to the book on the Chinese Amazon website.
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November 6th, 2013Theological Rewriteby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
I've been hired to rewrite the above ad to reflect a greater theological accuracy.
"Sadly, many of our beloved senior customers have gone to heaven. Or possibly to hell. Old Lady Bernice - yeah, she's in hell. Purgatory for some, I imagine - though von Balthazar would suggest that there is the outside shot that all of them are in fact in heaven; personally, I knew these women well and old Hans can Ur my Von Balthazar, if you know what I mean. Anyway, we need some new angels to fill our chairs. Not angels, per se, who don't have hair - at least not physical hair (after all, how many angels can dance on the end of a hairpin? ha ha - but I digress); but moral angels, by which I mean people of good behavior who tip me well. In brief, we need new customers. OK?"
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November 6th, 2013It Always Seems to Happen…by Dena Hunt
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November 6th, 2013Joining Me on a Pilgrimage to Middle-earthby Joseph Pearce
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November 5th, 2013The Great Evil of Daylight Savings Time???by Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
My Conspiracy Theory friends are (strange as it sounds) very angry at Daylight Saving Time, claiming it's the government's way of asserting arbitrary power over us, that it represents man's insane assertion of human will over Nature. After arguing with them all day yesterday, I've finally come up with a post that should suffice.
You might say I've sprung forward to the truth and fallen back on a handy explanation of it ...
If you're using anything other than a sundial (and we've been using mechanical clocks since the 13th Century), noon by the clock is almost NEVER noon by the sun at any place on the earth on any given day. Perhaps twice a year sun noon will correspond to mechanical clock or digital clock noon within a few seconds.
And this correspondence is rarely on the days of Spring or Autumn Equinox. This is because your location on earth will never be matched up with the "time zone" to the exact minute. Solar noon for Eastern Standard Time Maine will be far earlier than noon for Eastern Standard time Indiana. For that matter, solar noon for western Maine will be later than solar noon for Eastern Maine.
My point is we count hours for the sake of convenience, so that we can all plan things. The hours we count have some relation to the sun, but not an exact correspondence. This has been the case for about 700 years. Therefore Daylight Savings Time is really no big deal. It's just a way of adjusting a somewhat arbitrary system that is never in exact accord with nature.
But even making this case has been a struggle.
We live in strange times, whether Daylight or Standard.
Salisbury Cathedral, home of the world's first mechanical clock. |
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November 5th, 2013Guy Fawkes: A Penny for My Thoughtsby Joseph Pearce
When I was a child growing up in England during the 1970s, we looked forward every year to Bonfire Night, as we called it, or Guy Fawkes Night, to give it its official name. This involved making an effigy of Guy Fawkes, who had been executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and burning it on the family bonfire to the accompaniment of the flashes and bangs of fireworks. In the days leading up to Bonfire Night, my friends and I would position ourselves in shopping centres with our effigy of the "papist traitor" begging passers-by for "a penny for the Guy".
Today (November 5) is Guy Fawkes Night and all over England people will be continuing this ignoble tradition of burning effigies of a Catholic "rebel" and "traitor". I comment upon this institutionalized anti-Catholicism and the connection between Guy Fawkes and Shakespeare in this article published today by Aleteia: http://www.aleteia.org/en/politics/article/the-most-famous-catholic-terrorist-in-history-10324002
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November 4th, 2013The Bard and the Bishopby Joseph Pearce
Today is the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan (1538-1584). There are many stories about this holy priest and bishop but few know of his unlikely connection with Shakespeare and the English Martyrs.
The spiritual last will and testament, signed by John Shakespeare, the playwright's father, and hidden in the rafters of the Shakespeare family home in Stratford-upon-Avon, was written by Borromeo. It had been written by him as a means of allowing plague victims in Milan to confess their faith in extremis in the absence of a priest. It became very popular amongst England's beleaguered and persecuted Catholics as a means of confessing their own faith in the absence of priests to minister to them. It constituted a sort of "sacrament of penance by desire" for those who feared having no priest at the moment of death.
It seems likely that these "spiritual wills" were smuggled into England by the Jesuit missionary priests, including St. Edmund Campion, who stayed as guests of St. Charles in Milan en route to England from Rome.
We know that Campion stayed in the vicinity of Stratford as he journeyed north upon his arrival in England. It is a beguiling possibility that John Shakespeare and his teenage son might have met the future martyr on this occasion.
A further beguiling possibility is that the teenage Shakespeare may have met Campion at Houghton Hall in Lancashire.
Those wishing to explore the connection between the Bard of Avon and Catholic saints such as Borromeo and Campion should check out my book, The Quest for Shakespeare.
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November 2nd, 2013Mark the Music!by Joseph Pearce
"The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music."
Lorenzo's sublimely beautiful words in The Merchant of Venice herald the arrival of the sublimely beautiful Portia, the grace of whom seems to reflect the very Music of the Spheres. There is, however, a darker side to Lorenzo's words, warning of the danger posed by those puritanical souls who spurn all that is good, true and beautiful. Such lost souls are spiritually "dull as night", their "affections dark as Erebus".
Lorenzo's words came to mind as I read a feature article in yesterday's Washington Times about the Catholic composer Frank LaRocca, who is interviewed in the new issue of the St. Austin Review by our regular music columnist, Susan Treacy. Those wishing to learn more about this exciting contemporary composer of sacred choral music should read the superb interview in the latest StAR. In the interim, and to whet your musical appetite, here's a link to the article in the Washington Times:
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November 1st, 2013Pink Cloudsby Dena Hunt
The other day, I started to walk the dogs but had to take them back inside as soon as we left the driveway. I live on a corner. The entire intersection was brilliant pink—streets, corners, and adjacent lawns. It was not a thin film, like the pine pollen we get here every spring, but thick, solid-looking, like paint. A passing car revealed, however, that it was not solid; opaque pink clouds rose whenever a car passed. I would not go closer to investigate, so I knocked on a neighbor's door. It turns out there had been a road race very early in the morning, and the runners had chosen our intersection to dump huge quantities of some kind of pink powder over themselves and all the surrounding area. We didn't know what the powder was. What we did know was that we couldn't breathe out there and obviously I couldn't take the dogs for a walk.
This was all part of the world's turning pink during the month of October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Odd title, that. Is there really anyone in the world who is not aware of breast cancer? We're exhorted by pink headlines in the newspapers with their full-age ads, in shopping centers, grocery stores—everywhere—to be aware of breast cancer and give money wherever we see a pink ribbon image.
Well, what exactly is this "awareness" supposed to mean? Get a mammogram. Okay, everybody does already; after all, they're free. No other medical test is so free or so easily available. Mammograms alone, they would have you believe, constitute "prevention." But they don't prevent; they only detect. How does one prevent breast cancer? Not much info on that.
Actually, there is. And it's fairly simple. There used to be actual figures available about the connection between birth control pills/devices and breast cancer. There used to be figures available about the connection between abortion and breast cancer. The figures were conclusive and compelling: one's risk of breast cancer increased exponentially (to the point where we have today a virtual pandemic) with the use of synthetic hormones and/or abortions. But that was before Planned Parenthood took over breast cancer research. What happened to those figures? Well, now the website of the Susan Komen Foundation says there's "no evidence of a link." It's just disappeared, apparently…
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October 30th, 2013Sanity and Sanctityby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Joseph Pearce writes (my emphasis) ...
Yesterday, for the Feast of Christ the King in the Old Calendar, I had the inestimable joy of being present at a solemn choral Mass in the Extraordinary Form at Prince of Peace Catholic church in Taylors, South Carolina, which was followed by a Eucharistic Procession and Benediction. The Mass was a setting of Palestrina's Missa "Descendit Angelus Domini". The Prelude was Bach's Fugue in E Major and the Postlude was Alexndre Guilmant's Postlude in F Major. After the Blessed Sacrament had been placed in the Tabernacle following Benediction, the cantor, choir and congregation chanted the Christus Vincit.I was so moved by the sheer majesty and beauty of the whole glorious occasion that my eyes were filled with tears at the Consecration. This is the only Reality that really matters. The rest, all the cares of the world and snares of the devil, are mere dross by comparison. Never before was I as aware that sanity and sanctity are synonymous. They are One. All else is trivia!Deo gratias!
I spent last weekend in Kansas - at the Super 8 in Bonner Springs - working in my hotel room the whole time, except for our evening performances.
On Saturday I posted about the sex abuse scandal in the Church and the Bishop of Bling. This moved me almost to a level of despair. The thought that something we love may not be what we had imagined it to be, or that someone we love may not be loving us back - this is hard to endure. I do not doubt that the Church is what St. Paul tells us it is, the Body of Christ, present in eternity and also here on earth; and I do not doubt that Christ is Lord. But how can the visible Church be so shaken, so apparently ready to crumble? Just a week prior I had endured a travesty of the Sacred Mass at a rural parish in Southern Illinois, and this week I had to find yet another Mass while on the road, taking another chance at what I may run up against.
But what I found lifted my spirits and stirred my soul.
On Sunday I went to St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, run by the FSSP. I love the Latin Mass, but I've had my run-ins with "Radical Catholic Reactionaries" who use Traditionalism as a cover for hate and bile. So I was wary.
But my experience was exactly like that of Joseph Pearce. The music and the liturgy were spectacularly beautiful. As with Joseph, I was celebrating the Feast of Christ the King on the Old Calendar - for that was the Oct. 27 Mass in the Extraordinary Form. The church itself was very conducive to prayer and worship, with a statue of St. Rose above the altar, looking heavenward in a far-away gaze that transcended the material of the statue itself. The homily was solid and stirring, the first homily I've heard in a long time that sounded more like Catholic preaching than pop psychology.
St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, looking high above us all. |
And I thought of our sins.
Sometimes we sin completely in bad faith; but most of the time there's something odd going on when we sin. Often we are trying to regain our balance, to find an equilibrium, to restore something that's missing from our lives that we know should be there.
For example
- A husband or a wife enduring an unhappy marriage might commit adultery, not merely for the thrill, but in order to feed a starving need for love - for love that may no longer be present, in a home that has become devoid of caring.
- A young man or woman overcome with feelings of worthlessness, perhaps abused in some way while growing up, turns to drugs or promiscuous sex as a way to feel in control of themselves and others.
- A person who suffered neglect while being raised becomes a fiendish work-a-holic and perfectionist, making certain to compensate for the dread of insignificance he or she felt in horror as a helpless child.
"Somewhere you and I are talking and I am not so much ashamed, nor you so rightly scornful. ... This is good but something is better; this is glorious but somewhere I could feel more of the glory." - The Poet to the Princess in Chesterton's play The Surprise
It is when the Church calls us to that greater glory - a glory that we sense and that our eyes catch a faraway vision of every now and then - a vision of a gloaming of an eternal dawn; when the Church call us to this mystery, through the true, the beautiful, and the good - it is then that our hearts soar and our sins pale by comparison.
The rest, all the cares of the world and snares of the devil, are mere dross by comparison.
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October 28th, 2013Inside is the Lightby Joseph Pearce
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October 28th, 2013An Interview with the Catholic Book Bloggerby Joseph Pearce
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October 24th, 2013Dracula: A Walk on the Dark Sideby Joseph Pearce
As an appetizer for the forthcoming issue of StAR, the theme of which is "Outside is the Night: The Wickedness and Snares of the Devil", I'm posting this excellent article on Bram Stoker's Dracula from today's Crisis Magazine:
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October 24th, 2013From Hollywood to Holinessby Joseph Pearce
I've been fascinated for many years by the intriguing story of Mother Dolores Hart, who co-starred with Elvis in Loving You and King Creole as a teenage beauty before turning her back on Hollywood to pursue her vocation as a Benedictine nun. I was, however, completely unaware of the story of Mother Antonia Brenner, whose story parallels that of Mother Dolores Hart. Her inspiring story can be read here:
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October 24th, 2013Another Review of Race with the Devilby Joseph Pearce
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October 24th, 2013Three Talks in Kentuckyby Joseph Pearce
I apologize for the late notice but I'd like to inform Ink Deskers from the Louisville area of three talks that I'm giving this weekend at the Immaculata Classical Academy. I'll be giving the talks at a conference on the theme, "Reclaiming Catholic Culture: A Focus on the Family and Education". The first talk is tomorrow evening, followed by two further talks on Saturday morning. Further details are available on the Academy's website:
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October 22nd, 2013Sub-Culture and Sub-Catholicsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
(The following video shows the "major structural alterations" of Pruitt-Igoe here in St. Louis. I remember this well. Such is the fate of all inauthentic culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd7VOz_Wstg)
A Facebook friend writes (and I gloss a bit on what he writes) ...
What we want is authentic Catholic culture. This means three priorities: that it be authentic, that it be Catholic, that it be culture.Now, because we happen to live in Babylon (cf. Vincent McNabb), this culture is de facto (but not ipso facto) a sub-culture; but it is not intentionally sub-cultural as any kind of motivation.
[In other words, authentic Catholic culture is not necessarily a "sub-culture"; it wasn't that for over a thousand years; on the contrary all of Western civilization, including science, since ancient times, was produced by a Catholic worldview. The Catholic Thing and what it gives rise to is, however, in fact - de facto - a sub-culture now, since our dominant culture is now anti-christian.]
This is the problem with "Slumming Catholicism" and with "Hipster Catholicism" and "Traditional Catholicism" - not only that they try to set up a kind of sub-culture within Catholicism (which "Progressive Catholicism" also tries to do), but that they value primarily the [separatist state they find themselves in].
Now many of you will say, "Why put any adjectives in front of Catholic at all? Why must we see each other as Slum Catholics or Hipster Catholics or Traddie Catholics or Liberalist Catholics - or even "Roman" Catholics. Why can't we just be Catholics - in other words, fully conformed to Christ?"
And I say amen.
But what my Facebook friend is saying is that some groups in the Church adopt attitudes that deliberately separate them from the Body of Christ at large, and that separate them from the dominant culture in such a way that they will never effectively engage it.
Frank Weathers keeps quoting to me Pope Francis ...
"In every age the Church has called upon the arts to give expression to the beauty of her faith and to proclaim the Gospel message ... to bring redemption and rebirth to a world touched by the tragedy of sin and death."
The goal of the St. Austin Review, Theater of the Word, the American Chesterton Society, and even Grunky is precisely this transformation of culture through the arts - in the forms of writing, drama, video - a goal that ultimately delivers (by the grace of God) redemption to a world touched by the tragedy of sin and death.
Another Facebook friend remarks, in a comment about the ineffectiveness of contrived "ministries" that deliver no authentic culture ...
All the bonfires and street evangelization sessions in the world will not teach your kids joy or help them to think and to love the faith and the defend holy mother Church. Only good literature will do that, starting with Chesterton and Tolkien and Belloc. ... Because I still maintain that the best youth ministry for my own two sons has been all the Chesterton conferences I've brought them to all these years.
May we first and foremost then, do good work - as writers, actors, artists, teachers, parents. May we do work that honors God and grows from our faith in Jesus Christ. And from all that all authentic culture will follow.
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October 22nd, 2013Waugh on Wordsby Joseph Pearce
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October 22nd, 2013School Days, These Daysby Dena Hunt
I swap email forwards with a friend in the UK. This arrived from Julia this morning, and I thought I'd share it with Ink Desk readers. When I was teaching, I was often amazed at the lengths people would go to in order to avoid actually raising their children. Hillary Clinton, speaking for all the wise moderns, said that it takes a village to raise a child. The following (un)funny scenarios are what happens when we turn our children over to the village.
SCHOOL-1945 vs. 2012
Scenario : Johnny and Mark get into a fight after school. 1945 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up best friends. 2012 - Police called, and they arrest Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it. Both children go to anger management programmes for 3 months. School governors hold meeting to implement bullying prevention programmes.
Scenario : Robbie won't be still in class, disrupts other students. 1945 - Robbie sent to the office and given six of the best by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again. 2012 - Robbie given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADHD - result deemed to be positive. Robbie's parents get fortnightly disability payments and school gets extra funding from government because Robbie has a disability.
Scenario : Billy breaks a window in his neighbour's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt. 1945 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman. 2012 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care; joins a gang; ends up in jail.
Scenario : Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school. 1945 - Mark gets glass of water from Principal to take aspirin with. Passes exams, becomes a solicitor. 2012- Police called, car searched for drugs and weapons. Mark expelled from school for drug taking. Ends up as a drop out.
Scenario : Johnny takes apart leftover fireworks from Cracker night, puts them in a paint tin & blows up a wasp's nest. 1945 - Wasps die. 2012- Police & Anti-Terrorism Squad called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, investigate parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated. Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly in an airplane again.
Scenario : Johnny falls over while running during morning break and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. She hugs him to comfort him. 1945 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing footie. No damage done. 2012 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy and ends up gay.
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October 22nd, 2013Flannery's Prayer Journalby Lorraine V. Murray
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October 22nd, 2013More on the Strange Case of Shylock the Leprechaunby Joseph Pearce
The Moroccan version appears in Pinhas Sadeh's recent anthology of Jewish folktales. According to Sadeh's commentary, the legend is also very popular among Jews from Iraq and Iran.
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October 22nd, 2013Crud - Explainedby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
My actors and I were once booked to perform at a Catholic Family Camp somewhere in the U.S.
It was one of the spookiest places I've ever been to. The lack of maintenance was appalling - everything was leaking, badly in need of paint, dreary, run down - truly a Catholic Ghetto in the worst sense of the word. The crew and counselors take vows of celibacy - lay camp counselors taking a vow of celibacy. Doesn't that sound like fun? Kind of like being castrated in order to work at McDonald's.
"We're not a cult," one of the staff told me when we got there. "Every one in town thinks we're a cult, but we're not a cult!"
Before we performed, I was forced to sign a "rider" to our Theater of the Word contract that gave this camp the right to tape our performance and do with it what they wished - including broadcast it or put it on the internet - with no compensation or royalty to be paid to me. This was presented to me backstage right as I was about to walk on by the woman in charge, who carried a walkie-talkie and communicated with the higher-ups in mysterious tones as she followed people around the camp.
They had big names booked to speak at this event - and lots of people in attendance. But the facilities were worse than a meth lab Motel Six; clearly nothing had been done to keep this place up for twenty years or more.
And pictures of their foundress were all over the place - a woman with a bouffant hairdo, enshrined in every hallway. More pictures of her than of the Blessed Mother.
Now, say what you will - something is amiss there.
And its symptom is Crud.
In the murder mystery dinner theater business, I have known more than one owner of a mystery company who was a convicted felon.
And some of my employees have been a bit troubled. One guy, I later learned after I fired him, was telling every one of the actresses in my company that he was sleeping with all of the other actresses in my company. He even got one of the actresses to lend him $300 and when he didn't pay her back, he told her it was my fault because I wasn't paying him.
Another actor, I later learned (again after firing him) would travel with marijuana in his socks if we flew him out of town. He lived in a house that was filthy, and had a sham-ex-wife; which is to say, it was a divorce of convenience, so that the State of Missouri would pay the child support payments he welched out on - even though his wife and kids were still living with him - and even though he was working for money under the table and dodging warrants - it's just that the State didn't know that.
Another actor would vanish for three days at a time. He would insist upon getting paid in cash, and then we wouldn't be able to get ahold of him for 72 hours or so. When we would, we would wake him up - even if we called at 3:00 in the afternoon. He once traveled in a car with another actor on a 3-hour one-way ride and wouldn't stop talking the whole way, driving his partner crazy. "I shouldn't be alive," he once told me. "I used to have a drug problem. Once, while high, I somehow fell off a roof. I shouldn't be alive. But I've kicked the habit now," he said with pride. After he told me this, I paid him in cash and he disappeared for three days.
In each of these cases, something is amiss.
When Fr. Wehmeyer parked a camper on the parish lot and the maintenance man saw little boys going in and out of that trailer with Father at various times, something was also amiss.
You can usually smell it. It's the aroma of Crud.
And sometimes really bad art goes along with a disjointed brain. I won't go into detail here, but I recently watched one of the most horrid things I've ever seen, which was trumpeted as "Catholic theater". It made me want to become an atheist again.
It was as bad as the Catholic camp was in disrepair. It was as poorly conceived and executed as some scum bag stealing money from actresses and blaming his boss for it. It was as troubled as a camper on the parish parking lot. It wasn't just bad, it was sinfully bad. I mean that literally.
And, as one of my friends pointed out to me, the producer behind this fiasco has publicly made a very bizarre and patently false claim amounting to a kind of fraud. The producer has made a "claim to fame" that's rather nuts, and that could easily be falsified - though apparently no one has bothered to do so yet.
But it fits. It makes sense.
Because these things go together. They are symptoms.
When there's smoke, there's fire, and when there's crud there's more where that came from.
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October 22nd, 2013Shylock the Leprechaunby Joseph Pearce
In an Irish language version from the Aran Islands, "Shylock" is a Leprechaun. In a Scottish Gaelic version from the Outer Hebrides, he is implied to be a Northman. Most intriguing is a Jewish folktale from Morocco. In this version, the debtor is a Jew and "Shylock" is a Muslim.
In every version mentioned, "Portia" saves "Antonio/Bassanio" with the same prohibition against shedding blood.
This seems to confirm Chesterton's belief that the legend is a "medieval satire on usury" rather than a simple anti-Semitic slur.
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October 22nd, 2013So It's Come to This…by Dena Hunt
At one time, the Church forbade cremation because it was a pagan rite. I don't know when that got changed, but it did. Now, it's okay, and these days, cremation is the favored way to get disposed of. I don't think the Church had anything to do with that change; after all, I haven't noticed any overriding concern of the public about what the Church approves of or doesn't—so it's just a coincidence. But why is cremation now the favored way?
Money, for one thing. Cremation is a lot cheaper. And for survivors, there's a lovely finality about it that's just missing with an actual gravesite, which, some people feel, needs tending, visiting, and all that. But the main reason is—well, it's just so romantic. You can get scattered over the beach This has become so popular that I think some beaches might now be a little suspect. You might want to check the relative grayness of that sand. Or perhaps the mountains, perhaps your tomato patch in the backyard—wherever you want. The idea, of course, is to get scattered over the place that was most meaningful to you, that brought you the most joy in your life.
So now it's happened. Someone has had their ashes scattered at the mall. No kidding.
If you're an avid shopper, well, go for it….I guess.
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October 21st, 2013Racing with the Devil in Santiago de Compostelaby Joseph Pearce
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October 21st, 2013The Wandering Joeby Joseph Pearce
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October 21st, 2013Good Lives of the Saintsby Joseph Pearce
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October 21st, 2013Hipster Catholics and Eunuchsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
These, I am told, are "hipsters" - and I feel a sudden desire to puke. |
A friend and blog reader writes that he thinks one of the hallmarks of the new "Hipster Catholics" - by which he seems to mean the cool young crunchy "independent music" types who are more or less orthodox (unless a bit of heterodoxy suits them) and who are self-consciously and deliberately "counter cultural" and "independent" in a way that shows how seriously and deeply they really do identify with superficial things - that one of the hallmarks of "Hipster Catholics" is "lack of masculinity". Some of them, he even implies, have an "apostolate", which means they sponge off others while engaging in "ministry". This is kind of like living off Mom, Dad and student loans while getting your second B.A. in Art History at age 30.
He contrasts them with sober and mature men, who, whether lay or clergy, take responsibility for their own lives and families and finances and whose charity and friendships are more adult and realistic. And who, unlike hipsters, really don't care how they dress.
But what the hell is a "hipster", anyway? Until just now I had no idea what a "hipster" was, much less a "hipster" Catholic.
If they're anything like the characters described in glowing terms by this article, then let me state that - contrary to the universal call to Christian charity - I hate every single one of them.
And above all I hate this ... .
They form book clubs and meet in the back of the local open-mic cafe to chuckle over G.K. Chesterton – you wouldn't understand.
To use Chesterton as a shibboleth for the "in crowd"? Despicable. Hang every one of them. St. Gilbert would agree with me. At least Belloc would.
Meanwhile, I've been Hip since Sammy Davis Jr. used to use that word. And I've been Funky since before the Funk dried up. And I've been both intellectual and anti-intellectual at the same time - and that's hard to pull off.
But I have never been a "hipster" (or a "eunuch" for that matter, even though I'm married).
I am, however, getting to the age where I may soon need "Hipster Replacement Surgery", and if that happens, I'll be sure to let you know.
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October 20th, 2013The Precision of Abuse - Liturgical and Otherwiseby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Yesterday, on the road again, my actress and I attended a Vigil Mass somewhere in America. It was definitely America, though it may not have been a Mass.
The priest was a 70-something soft-spoken slow moving effeminate fellow, and the music was all the Bad Stuff, about a dozen of the worst "hymns" played over and over again on piano before Mass even started, kind of like an episode of The Twilight Zone where you're trapped in an elevator with horrible "muzak" and nobody else trapped with you seems to mind or even notice.
The priest assured us in the homily that when Moses lifted his arms and God's staff before the Israelites battling Amalek (Ex. 17:8-13), he was "giving them instructions on the battle," showing them where to attack and where to draw back, and so forth. Far from being miraculous (which the text implies, the strength of Israel growing when the staff of God was raised and faltering when it was lowered), this was merely a natural event. Moses arms being held up in a cruciform manner by Aaron and Hur was not a foreshadowing of Christ (as I've heard) but just an example of people helping people, which is why we're all here at Mass. Oh, and don't forget to pray.
He talked a lot about prayer, eviscerating the rather shocking parable of the Importunate Widow and domesticating it so that we all understood the message: "Pray. And come to Mass to be with one another."
Then, when the Liturgy of the Eucharist began, he not only improvised the "Pray, brothers and sisters" part (#29 here), but made up something that was wildly and strangely unrelated to anything I'd ever heard from the altar. No mention of "sacrifice" of course, but a totally ad-libbed thing that made no sense. So I figured I'd better follow along in the missal. And here's what I noticed.
His liturgical abuse was not accidental and merely an expression of a kind of misplaced enthusiasm, but it was, like the sexual abuse scandal in the Church, very deliberate, specific and precise.
For despite his homily's mundane emphasis on the need for prayer, every time the words "we pray" came up in the text, he deliberately skipped them. Every time Jesus was called the Son, he refused to say "son" and either skipped the words or made up something of his own. There were other patterns I noticed, and each was the result of a kind of careful forethought and deliberate planning: for he skipped only certain words and said only certain others. This man was no simple fool, carried away with a kind of "Spirit of Vatican II" sense of innovation. Soft spoken, harmless and dull as this priest seemed to be, he had an agenda and was exercising it.
Then we came to the words of consecration, almost nothing that came from his lips matched what was printed on the page.
He did manage to say "This is my body", and he said "This is the cup of my blood" (given up for all) - so I suppose this was indeed a Mass, but he improvised more surrounding the consecration than at any other point in the Mass. And it was all "feel good" stuff, but again I was left wondering, "Why skip we pray or similar phrases? Why object to the Son?"
Here James Kalb writes that we should be hopeful, realizing that our descent into cultural nihilism cannot last forever. He notes (rightly) that
Man isn't the measure, and ultimate reality comes first.
He encourages us to return to great writers and thinkers and to attain personal sanctity, and of course all of that is right.
But if a priest in a small town in rural America has been celebrating the Mass this way for forty years or more, without restraint or correction from his parishioners or from his bishops, and if a priest unopposed blithely but quite deliberately asserts his own queer but indefinable theology against the Church that sustains him, then what are we to think except
Man is the measure, and ultimate reality comes last.
There is an intent behind the things that are wrong in our Church and in our culture, and we are fools if we don't realize the deliberate and focused nature of what we are faced with.
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October 19th, 2013Lessons from the Devil on God and the Soulby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Walter Houston as the Devil, from the film version of The Devil and Daniel Webster |
It's not so much that atheists deny God. It's that they deny the soul, the one thing each of us knows intimately.
Let me explain.
I am tutoring a home-schooled student. I call what I do the School of the Kevin. This is an off-shoot of the Church of the Kevin, of which I am the founder and universal eparch.
And the good news is, in English class at the School of the Kevin, we get to read whatever I (the Kevin) want.
Yesterday we read a section of a rambling post-modernist novel called The House of Leaves. In the chapter we read, a family returns from a vacation to find that someone has broken into their house and added an extra room, a walk-in closet - which is a strange thing for a burglar to do. Even more strange is the fact that the head of the house, through careful measurements and a study of the blueprints, discovers that the house is 1/4 inch larger on the inside than on the outside. He becomes a bit obsessed with this crack in the laws of physics, trying to forget his sense of dread with coffee and a newspaper and a big breakfast one morning - but even the coffee in the coffee cup behaves in such a way that inspires a kind of nauseating awe and a confrontation with something that's far bigger than the suburban kitchen in which he sits.
We also read a short story by Flannery O'Connor called "A View of the Woods". It's about an old man named Fortune who dedicates himself to everything about the concept "fortune" - money, progress, the future - and in so doing ends up killing himself (twice, in a sense) in one of those violent and disturbing ways so typical of a Flannery O'Connor story. But before he does, he has a vision of this "view of the woods" (a view he's trying to snuff out by the construction of more and more objects of "progress" on his land) - a vision that is like a disturbing prophetic insight.
The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood.
What is this blood behind the woods, the "view" of which the old man is trying to cover up with the "rattle of everything that led to the future", what is this blood that is at the heart of an "uncomfortable mystery that he had not comprehended before"?
On the one hand, it's the foreshadowing of the violence that occurs at the end of the tale - in the middle of the woods. But on the other, it's the blood of Jesus Christ.
I imagine the suburban father from The House of Leaves sitting not in his suburban kitchen, but in his suburban parish, as a gay Marty Haugen tune and an insipid homily prevents him (as the "rattle" of fortune prevented the old man) from seeing, as Chesterton said, that the Church is "larger on the inside than on the outside" (like the suburbanite's house) and that if we deliberately obscure our "view of the woods" we won't see the dreadful and awesome sacrifice that's before our eyes, right there upon the altar.
And recently my student and I finished Orwell's 1984. I write in a recent post (Blank Checks and Reality Checks) about the dehumanization, the deliberate destruction of the soul, that fills that novel, when I point out the Ecce Homo moment, when Winston Smith is presented to us as the "last man" about to be sacrificed on the altar of progress and inhumanity.
And what is this "dehumanization" but loss of soul? What keeps the suburban father from sleeping or enjoying his ordinary breakfast, but an encounter with a mystery he had tried to forget in a deceptively domestic setting? What drives O'Connor's old man to murder and suicide but a glimpse of something that awakens a soul he is trying to suffocate? What does the Unreality of the dystopian society of 1984 strive to do above all other things but destroy the part of God that is in man - his soul - and thereby destroy man himself?
All torture is an attempt to destroy the imago dei, the image of God in man, the soul. All Unreality is an attempt to do the same, by obstructing our view of the woods beyond and the sunset that paints them as red as the blood of the Son of Man. Every denial of the ineffable - of awe, mystery and dread - is an attempt to construct either a House of Leaves or a simple House of Cards.
But we read one more story yesterday, "The Devil and Daniel Webster", about a simple New England farmer, Jabez Stone, who sells his soul to the devil, and the patriot Daniel Webster who saves him. For Webster (the great orator and politician), in speaking to a jury of the damned which is about to condemn his client (Jabez Stone), reminds them that the soul is an eternal thing, and that man (try as we might to destroy him) is made of more than flesh and blood.
Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed him as he was−an ordinary man who'd had hard luck and wanted to change it. And, because he'd wanted to change it, now he was going to be punished for all eternity. And yet there was good in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn't help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. And he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it − it took a man to do that.
We all know what this inwardness is. We know that it's in hell where a man ceases to be a man, and that's what makes it hell. We know that dehumanization, Unreality, and even death can never extinguish the very flame that materialistic atheists continue to snuff like a bunch of nervous firefighters.
We know the soul of man, and we know we are often in danger of losing it.
And if we know the soul of man, we know God. The evidence is before our eyes like a view of the woods. The evidence is in our hearts.
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October 17th, 2013The Soul and Sustainabilityby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
"The natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure; it is a wondrous work of the Creator containing a 'grammar' which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation." (Benedict XVI)
Liberal Christians would agree whole-heartedly, until you point out that this applies to sex as well. Sex is more than "raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure". It contains a "grammar" which sets forth "ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation."
All they're teaching my daughter in college (Fontbonne College, a Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelete school) is "sustainability". They teach it in every class - even classes that have nothing to do with the environment.
I wonder what would happen if they taught "sustainability" as applied toward the natural moral environment and not just the natural physical one?
Sexual hedonism, for example, is not "sustainable". Sleeping around is not "sustainable". Buggery is not "sustainable".
For that matter, stealing, lying, killing and greed are not "sustainable".
Is it not time for an environmentalism of the soul???
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October 16th, 2013No Small Thingby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
A theme on my blog recently has been love.
"My love is all that matters. And this is who I am." [This is what God said to the writer of this letter the day he saw the World Trade Center collapse on Sept. 11, 2001].I appreciate that you want something more, that you want to know what it is God expects of you. I am still learning to preach to such people, people whose lives and calls to follow Jesus have been quieter and less brutal than mine.
But you know what? It is no small thing to hear, and to say, in a violent and brutal world, in a world where many easily use others for pleasure and profit, "God is love." When there has been no real love in your life — and my wife has another such story, for being a pastor's daughter means little — then the most important question you will ever ask, and you will ever want answered, is "will someone ever love me?" It may be tawdry and sentimental and demand little from far too many comfortable folks who fill churches (though to be honest, so does supporting the troops and opposing abortion and loving Israel, mostly because such things as political postures require little discipline or sacrifice, and they don't really form people in the image of Christ — and this is true also of mistaking the welfare state for the Kingdom), in many of the churches I have been in — in rough places, hard places, places full of broken, unwanted people — there is nothing more important than to grab hold of that love and know that despite all the world does and has done, that love is yours.
It is no small thing.
This being my birthday, I am reflecting upon the past year and more.
What I have learned more than anything else this past year is both that "only love matters" and that many people have no experience of love; such people spread a great deal of misery, betrayal and pain.
This is hard to comprehend, hard for those of us who have been blessed - blessed with families that were more or less loving, with spouses who have loved us deeply and whom we have loved, with good friends along the way, with a vocation that we have loved and that has somehow loved us back.
What gives us joy in life is not our two-car garages, our suburban ranch-style houses, our bank accounts or our gadgets. What gives us joy is love - being loved and giving love. And love is like health - when it's there we tend not to notice it, to take it for granted. When it's not there, the pain can be intense.
It is hard for those of us who have known love - who have known God - to understand the pain of those who really haven't.
We assume God. We count on love. We forget that people exist like the writer of the letter to Rod Dreher, who would gladly fly planes into American buildings in order to express their rage. We look with disgust at girls like Melissa, who can't imagine herself ever worthy of love and who voluntarily endure abuse and call it love. We tear our hair out at atheists who make it their life's goal to deny that anything really exists or that anything is worth existing, including love or self-sacrifice. We trust our episcopacy to protect our children, not realizing that behind the mask of piety that many of them wear lurks (for some) a culture feeding on hedonism and perversion, and not on love - certainly not on love for natural and innocent things like children or even normal, happy things like an attraction to women.
And we are in a Church that has a dreadful subculture of "Radical Catholic Reactionaries" whose one common thread is not love of Latin or a Puritan streak or a hatred of Jews, but an utter contempt for the Christian commandment, "Love one another". This is behind the right wing Catholic anger at Pope Francis - for he dares to preach and live this shocking thing called love, in ways that unsettle and disturb us.
God is love. Not the "luv" of indulgence preached by false prophets, but a love that includes judgment and mercy both, a love that made us and that sustains us, a love in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). It is a love that condemns sin, for sin keeps us from love. It is a love that embraces the cross, for bearing the cross is the expression of love. It is a love that makes the world, that gives the world the life of His only son, that re-makes the world.
It is a love that is no small thing.
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October 16th, 2013On Loveby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
From an email to my friend, whose birthday was yesterday (mine is today).
My friend knows my wife Karen and the shock we've had this week, learning Karen has uterine cancer.
I write ...
So few people know true love. Karen and I have shared true love for 31 years. Even if she is taken from me to an everlasting life beyond this one, the gift of love we've shared on this earth is a gift from God Himself. That gift is God Himself. I knew that from the moment of the diagnosis, though I had a bad day today (we both did); still, it is the love that will get us through this.
Many people have never known love, have no idea what it is. To know love even for a moment, much less for 31 years, is an unbelievable blessing. When you don't know it, you come up with substitutes for it, parodies of it. And those substitutes and parodies all involve form of use and abuse.
But love is transcendent. It is a great gift. We never are worthy of it. We never rise to its level. We always mix in some sin and selfishness, some confusion and pain. But it is the very life of God Himself. And he shared it with us the day we were born, and in so many ways ever since.
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October 15th, 2013The Love of Beautyby Dena Hunt
A friend sent me the website of a priest in England. Fr. Simon Henry (who has posted here on the Ink Desk before, I believe) recently celebrated the twenty-second anniversary of his ordination and made this post on his own blog:
He talks about how his love of beauty was found suspect when he was in seminary.
Nowhere is the voice of Satan more discernible than in a condemnation of beauty. I've learned to beware that voice as a spiritual poison—especially when it issues from a Catholic mouth. The contempt/disdain/hatred (it's a matter of degree, not of kind) of beauty has its origin in the Puritans' hatred for the Church. When it finds expression within the Church herself, its destructive power is increased exponentially.
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October 14th, 2013Please Pray for my Wife and Meby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
We found out today that my wife Karen has uterine cancer.
She will be getting a hysterectomy, and if the cancer is confined to the uterus, that will cure it. If it's spread, she will need chemo.
Please pray for us!
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October 12th, 2013Preview of the November/December Issueby Joseph Pearce
Michael Martin looks at Vladimir Solovyov on "the nature of evil and the coming of the anti-Christ".
J. C. Whitehouse delves into the depths of "belief, the dark night of the soul, and faith".
Philip C. Kolin interviews fellow poet Paul Mariani about "the Jesuit tradition of spirituality".
Artist Cornelius Sullivan is inspired by the "archangelic vision" of St. Michael in Rome.
Artist Rodd Umlauf sees beauty through art in a full colour art feature focusing on his work.
Susan Treacy interviews Catholic composer Frank LaRocca.
John Beaumont returns to "C. S. Lewis and the Mad, Bad, or God Argument".
Kevin O'Brien interviews the Devil.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker laughs at Lucifer.
James Bemis goes back to the future in his movie review of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fr. Benedict Kiely echoes Walker Percy in asking "what else is there but the Catholic Church?"
Mark Dudzik reviews Francis: Pope of a New World by Tornielli.
Sr. Gertrude Gillette reviews Candles in the Dark by Pearce.
Joshua Keatley reviews True or False Possession? by Lhermitte.
J. Frank Pate reviews The Miracle of Father Kapaun by Wenzl and Heying.
New poetry by Charlotte Ostermann and Michael Benson.
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October 9th, 2013Homeward Boundby Joseph Pearce
After a gruelling week of lectures, talks and meetings I fly home from Chile today on an overnight flight. Apart from the twenty hours in the classroom teaching a course on Tolkien at the Universidad Gabriela Mistral, I have spoken to around 600 schoolchildren about The Hobbit and to a gathering of university professors and high school principals on "the quest for a true education". In addition, I´ve had a number of fruitful meetings with Chilean academics working to build authentic Catholic education in this part of the world. And, of course, I´ve enjoyed great food and wine in the company of my Chilean friends.
It will be good to return home to my wonderful wife and children, taking with me many memories and blessings. Deo gratias!
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October 9th, 2013The Feminist Defence of Sexismby Joseph Pearce
Christine Odone has written an excellent condemnation of the way that feminists embrace sexism in the name of a woman´s right to kill babies:
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October 9th, 2013Political Convertsby Joseph Pearce
Further to my last post concerning recent correspondence with a British Nationalist who has been received into the Church, I thought I´d share this intriguing article by Ed West, an occasional congtributor to the Ink Desk, about the leader of the controversial English Defence League:
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October 9th, 2013Connecting with My Pastby Joseph Pearce
In the wake of the publication of my latest book, Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love, I have been contacted by someone who is still involved in radical politics but who has recently been received into the Church. I thought that my reply to his e-mail, in which I outline my current political position, might be of interest to visitors to the Ink Desk:
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October 9th, 2013A Blessed Feast of Cardinal Newmanby Michael Lichens | http://coffeecatholic.wordpress.com
Today is the feast of Bl. Newman, a man whose impact cannot be overstated. Obviously, many of us here at StAR can attest to Newman's impact on our own conversion, even if only indirectly through England's Second Spring.
To read more about Newman, please see Joseph Pearce's piece up at Catholic Exchange, which was excerpted from his Preface to The Quotable Newman.
I personally will never forget the joys of seeing Newman's study at Littlemore and praying in the same chapel that he did. This was part of Thomas More's Oxford Program, of course I was there to focus on Chesterton but Cardinal Newman was always looming large. To men such as Tolkien, Belloc, and other great Catholic converts, Newman was like a man leading an army with a lamp out of a dark cave.
What are some of your Newman experiences?
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October 7th, 2013Epiphany Is a Rare Thingby Dena Hunt
Epiphanies are rare, thank goodness.
At least, they are for me, and I'm very glad of that. If I were one of those people who seem to live in a continual epiphanic state, I would worry about my health. Although our souls are formed in the divine image of God, our bodies—and therefore our sensations—are totally physical bits, very much the ordinary earth-stuff. Being suddenly filled with a bright light is much more likely to portend a retinal detachment than a celestial visit. But, barring stroke, or some sudden spasm amongst the synapses, it may be a real (metaphysical) epiphany. I suppose one way to know is to check and see how the experience left you.
Epiphany can channel sudden, often personal, insight, bringing some truth home with a thunderclap when no degree of exterior verbal persuasion would have had any sort of effect at all. Once, I suddenly discovered—quite literally in a flash—that all I'd been saying about someone in criticism (which I had believed to be merely "analytical") was actually true of me. This kind of sudden awareness, though it can be painful sometimes, is a grace.
So this is what happened today—but a little context, first: I know we must always listen to anyone's words with only one ear; the other ear should listen to the speaker himself—especially if that speaker would claim to be unbiased, for such a claim already reveals at least self-deception. To believe in that modernist myth of "atonality," born of the desire for techno-mechanistic human perfectibility in order to dispense with God (who is alone objective truth), is to invite deception of ourselves as well as others. Come to think of it, however, isn't that exactly what the modernist twentieth century was most noted for? Another thing, much less historically noticeable but a direct parallel nonetheless, might be the now-permanent estrangement between art and the public. Contemporary students are often surprised to learn that up until the twentieth century, poets actually made a living writing poetry. They did not live that now-caricatured life of elegantly impoverished dependence on government handouts (called "grants") claiming to be misunderstood. Before the twentieth century, people actually read poetry without being forced by college syllabi; they even bought it. Of course, that was before atonal… Etc. Sorry. Forests often distract from the tree at hand.
So, all the foregoing explains why I was surprised today when a writer fell from a pedestal I'd put him on. The experience was quite a nasty one, really, rather like a shock. The surprise was not that he fell, however, but that I'd put him there. I read a passage and heard the sound of a pedestal cracking in that acid-silky tone of concealed envy, a passive-aggressive moral prissiness that was the more destructive for its denial of itself, its "atonal" presumption of disinterestedness. But as bad as it was, it was not the writer's fall that constituted the epiphanic moment, but the pedestal; i.e., I do not fault the writer for his fall, but myself for the pedestal.
We should never do that (become tone-deaf) to anyone—least of all, perhaps, those whom we most want to trust, those in whom we most want to "believe." It's so unjust. But it's an odd human perversity: we are skeptical; we disbelieve, suspect, doubt, the words of the only One who is worthy of our trust and put faith instead in the words of clay-footed mortals—whose claim to be atonal should be the very trumpet of deception. The divinization of humanity failed. You'd think we might have noticed after the bloodiest, most patently evil century of human history.
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October 7th, 2013Kind Wordsby Dena Hunt
I met a sweet and funny lady named Erin Cupp (who knows all the jokes already about her name) on my trip to the Writers Conference in August. I knew she wrote a blog. Now I discover that she bought a copy of my novel Treason—she has posted a lovely review of it on her blog: http://erinmccolecupp.com/
Many thanks, Erin. Glad you liked it.
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October 4th, 2013Reactionaries and Relationshipsby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
Marcus Grodi has written a reflective post on Pope Francis and the need to convey Christ through a living relationship of love. My reflections on it follow ...
In 1980, when Jimmy Carter decided we should boycott the summer Olympics to protest the Soviet action in Afghanistan, a friend of mine called this decision "neurotic".
I asked him what he meant by that.
"We are fooling ourselves if we think that by removing ourselves from human contact anything good will come. Only by relationships, and only in reality, does man attain sanity and health. We can't change the Soviets if we don't do simple things like play games with them."
Of course, a case could indeed be made for the decision as a political strategy, but the point is this: when we become reactionary and pull away from contact, we harm ourselves and others. Isolation is never good - unless it's a kind of retreat or hermitage for the sake of prayer (prayer itself prevents us from being isolated from God, and from others).
We live in a world that is more and more hostile to us. We live in a Church that has neglected basic human decency (in the case of the abuse scandals) and in many cases has abandoned the very God it claims to serve.
It is very tempting to pull away, to build a bunker and narrow down our worldviews, to form the perfect Church or the perfect world, even if it's only in our minds. Either way, such perfectionism, however "devout" it might be, is another form of Unreality. And Unreality, as I've been writing lately (especially here and here), is always anti-Christian and always eventually produces a hell on earth.
And speaking of hell, and the man many of you consider to be Satan - we now learn that even President Obama says he admires Pope Franics! Of course, he won't immediately convert and become pro-life ... but imagine a dialogue between the Bishop of Rome and the President of the United States. Pope Francis has been in dialogue with an atheist - why not with Obama?
And even though Obama and the Democrats spin Francis as if he were saying abortion and perversion were OK (which he's not), Obama actually gets it (at least to a point)
He said the Pope was "first and foremost thinking about how to embrace people as opposed to push them away. How to find what's good in them as opposed to condemn them."
That is exactly and precisely correct.
Yes, we must always preach the first words of Jesus after His ministry began ...
"The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15)
... for repentance from sin is part of the good news - but it starts with care and concern for another person. It starts with love. And that's the good news - love.
There are people in my life I haven't spoken with in years - deliberately. There are people who get mad at me and shut me out, and there are people I get mad at and shut out. But that's not Christian - fun though such self-righteous indignation might be, that's not Christian. Yes, there are times when it would be dangerous or somehow sinful to have an ongoing relationship with someone - but to write another person off entirely (no matter what that person has done or who he is) is to dehumanize, to erase an image of Christ in your midst. And usually we can communicate without the danger of hurting or being hurt, of sinning or being sinned against. Usually we are simply feeding our pride when we expel and cut off; usually it's not for the sake of healing but for the sake of vengeance or shame.
If you are boycotting another person, the way we sometimes boycott the Olympics, think again. If you have isolated yourself from him or her, reconsider. Friendship may not be possible, but contact is always human, always good, and the only avenue by which one heart might change another - and by which our hearts may conform to His.
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October 4th, 2013Blank Checks vs. Reality Checksby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
You would think that if we really were able to get exactly what we wanted, we would be happy. But that is hardly the case. Precisely and exactly the opposite is the case.
On Tuesday I posted about what I consider the primary symptom of life without God - Unreality.
In our daily lives Unreality seems rather harmless. If we create fictions and try our best to shore up and maintain them, the comfort we get from our make-believe is rarely outweighed by the negative consequences of living out-of-sync with the Truth, unless we become drug addicts or gambling addicts and something rather dramatic happens. Only occasionally does Real Life shove in our faces the Reality we've been avoiding. I knew a man, for example, who had a five-month fling with a young woman who had absolutely no real concern for him, and the illusion was quite pleasant until she revealed her true colors and left him suddenly and violently, with an open hole in his gut. The reality was obvious to any independent observer, but very easily ignored by him - for he was the beneficiary of the illusion. Likewise, those who live in the pleasant fiction that nothing they do with their bodies matters are rarely jarred awake from this pleasant lie until a heart attack or a stroke or something equally serious comes along.
But sooner or later we get checked. And even when the check is not sudden or dramatic, God's Reality (which I call Judgment) has a way of checking our Unrealities little by little every day. This "reality check" consists not so much of us "checking in" with Reality, but with Reality "checking" us, in the sense of a body slam that halts our progress. And when Reality can't intervene and check us, we suffer. I have known a few extremely wealthy people, and the worst thing their money does is shield them (and especially their children) from the consequences of bad behavior. You might say that Blank Checks can ward off Reality Checks.
And the same principle applies to groups - if we get what we want as a society - without the intervention of Reality - we become miserable, cruel and unhappy.
And the greater the Unreality, the bigger the Hell.
Perhaps the most tangible portrayal of hell in all of literature is George Orwell's 1984. Orwell's hell is a hell on earth, and it shows exactly what happens when this principle is carried out in society - the principle that devotion to Unreality makes us miserable and keeps us from anything resembling the Kingdom of God.
Orwell's dystopia is a culture that is devoted to Unreality. It is a satanic society, the one aim of which is power, for the purpose of becoming God and of destroying man.
"We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable,"
says O'Brien, the Inner Party member, who is in the process of torturing Winston Smith.
How is this philosophy different from what almost everybody believes today? We believe in "gay marriage" and trans-sexuals and the harmlessness of sexual license because we believe there is nothing called "human nature". "We create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable." There is nothing objective about who we are or why we were made. There is no design. There is no form. There is only one thing blending into another, for there is no "thing" there, distinct from any "thing" else. We believe in nothing, and in our power to mold the Unreality of life into the False Reality that suits us. We are gods, sad little gods in a sad little universe that just happened along by chance and the only thing we can do is indulge our appetites, and there's surely no harm in that, as long as we change our own protean forms to suit the demands of our will, our will that grows ever more perverse and hateful.
And we think we can do it. We think we can alter Reality itself.
And we think it will make us happy. But the more we get what we want, the more what we want turns vile, perverted, cruel and angry. Indulgence leads to spoiled children, and spoiled children are miserable.
'And do you consider yourself a man?'
'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.'
O'Brien the tormentor proves to Winston that he is the last man by stripping him and leading him to a mirror, where Winston Smith sees the effects of months of torture and starvation - he looks like one of the ghost-like figures from Auschwitz. His hair is falling out. He is emaciated. He is filthy. His teeth are rotting. The torturer reaches in and yanks out a loose tooth.
'Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.'
This is Orwell's version of the Ecco Homo - "Behold the Man" or better ... "Behold Man!"
This is who we really are, at least when we "follow our bliss" and our bliss comes from Unreality and not from Him who is the source of all Reality. We are tortured, starved and robbed of love and compassion. Worse than that, we are the torturers, the manipulators, the tormentors.
This is what Christ showed us when Pilate brought him out bleeding and bruised and mocked and scourged. This is Man - both the starved and tortured man being held up to ridicule and death, and the well-fed authority figure who is putting him through this. This is man given his own way, bereft of the Way the Truth and the Life: he is a pitiless victim and a heartless victimizer. He is an aborted fetus and an abortionist pocketing the cash for the killing. He is a boy whose life is forever scarred by what the priest did to him in the sacristy and he is the same priest offering Mass and telling his parishioners what a great sin it is to spread rumors about him. He is Winston Smith, destroyed by a mad society hellbent on eradicating Reality, and he is O'Brien, the dehumanized "new man" who is placidly torturing him.
He is Christ crucified. And he is Pontius Pilate, crucifying Christ and washing his hands of the deed at the same time.
This is man, when man devotes his life to his own selfish desires, when man loves sin, when man loves what is Unreal.
Behold - man! |
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October 4th, 2013The Catholic Heroes of Franceby Joseph Pearce
Jim Morlino, who will be known to many vistiors to the Ink Desk as the producer and director of the excellent film, The War of the Vendee, is now working on a hard-hitting docudrama about the Vendee War - shooting on location in France. He is aiming for a spring 2014 release.
Here's the trailer:
Hidden Rebellion Trailer v.2 from Navis Pictures on Vimeo.
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October 4th, 2013A Postcard from Chileby Joseph Pearce
The reason for my somewhat protracted absence from the Ink Desk is a visit to Santiago in Chile where I´m teaching a course on Tolkien for the Universidad Gabriela Mistral (UGM).
I arrived here on Wednesday morning, following a gruelling 25-hour journey from South Carolina, via Newark NJ and Toronto, Canada. After the briefest of times to freshen up, I had lunch with two of the UGM professors who have become good friends over the years. We were also joined by a professor of mediaeval history from St. Louis University who is in Chile to give a paper at a mediaevalist conference that UGM is hosting. He is a fellow Englishman, indeed a fellow Essex Man, being born in Chelmsford about thirty miles from my own birthplace in Barking. We were both a long way from home, in one sense, but in another sense were very much at home with the kindred spirits that we have come to know at this fine Catholic university in the heart of the Chilean capital.
I have now taught eight hours of the twenty-hour course, during which we have thus far covered Tolkien´s philosophy of myth, as expounded in his famous essay "On Fairy Stories", his short story "Leaf by NIggle", his poem "Mythopoeia" and as exemplified in the Creation myth in The Silmarillion. Today we will be doing The Hobbit and beginning The Lord of the Rings, concluding the course on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
Yesterday I had lunch with the President and Dean of the university and, following yesterday´s class, I went out for an evening of conviviality with a priest and three seminarians from Communio e Liberazione. The topics of conversation included Chesterton, distributism, and E. F. Schumacher.
This morning I fnally found the time and energy to work-out in the hotel´s gym and am all set for another exciting day of wining, dining and teaching, though not necessarily in that order!
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October 4th, 2013Obama "hugely impressed" by Pope Francisby Colin Jory
The news of the moment is that President Obama has expressed unqualified delight at the performance of Pope Francis.
If I were Pope Francis, and I learned that Barack Obama has been skipping around the White House, doing cartwheels and continuously shouting "Yippee!" and "Yee-Haa!" in his ebullience over my performance, and only breaking his celebratory antics to lean out the window occasionally and give the rude-finger salute in the general directions of Cardinal Dolan and Archbishop Chaput (one salute with each hand) while shouting triumphalistic insults at them, I'd reflect very hard and deep on what I'd done and refrained from doing that has so delighted him.
What I wouldn't do would be to kid myself that since I think he's a great guy and he thinks I'm a great guy, he'll be really interested to have one-to-one dialogue with me and hear my point of view on world and American issues, then formulate policy in ways to please me.
On the other hand, since in an interview with a declared atheist journalist a couple of days ago Pope Francis stated that "The most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old", I'm certain that President Obama would be eager to dialogue with him on these themes, and to express wholehearted agreement with anything the Pope might care to say on them. After all, if you were Obama, wouldn't you? It would be a no-cost (to Obama) way of cementing a wonderful budding friendship, and ensuring that the Pope keeps beaming benignly on him, and saying and doing nothing which might displease him. Pope Francis, for his part, might feel flattered beyond measure if he learned that he was becoming known as Obama's Pope.
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September 30th, 2013The Dangers of Big Governmentby Joseph Pearce
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September 30th, 2013Holy Matrimonyby Joseph Pearce
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September 30th, 2013Pornography as the Cultural Primer for Homosexual "Marriage"by Colin Jory
Kevin O'Brien's St Austin Review post on the enormous influence ubiquitous pornography is having in eradicating any sensitivity to what sex is really for, and thus undermining opposition to homosexual "marriage", is most insightful and important. Because of the internet, hard-core pornography is not merely readily available, but is almost unavoidable without particularly good internet filters. It subconsciously inculcates and cements in the mind – above all that of young males – the unquestioned assumption that anything that turns you on sexually is OK. The very idea that any variety of sexual act should be "privileged" by being regarded as alone proper has not only disappeared among a very large segment of the populace, but there is no brain-space left for it to re-lodge –all the space is occupied by porn images, jumbled together inextricably.
In the Australian state of Victoria, the secularist sex-cultists which are hugely "privileged" in the government schools, as in government schools everywhere else, have persuaded the politicians of all parties to rubber-stamp their latest variant on their intentionally filthy and filthifying, desensitising, psychologically abusive sex ed. curriculum. Now pornography studies are to be formally part of that already-pornographic curriculum, with students – always boys and girls compulsorily together – forced to watch on audio-visual media the full range ofpornographic sex acts and "discuss" how they feel about engaging in them.
Although the Catholic bishops of the State are all orthodox, one can be certain that they will continue to turn a blind eye to the situation. After all, unlike clerical paedophilia, it doesn't cost them a cent! It would be a different story if every time any children in a government school were filthified, degraded and violated by stock-standard pornographic sex ed. the local Catholic bishop was fined, say, £5,000 if he did not protest. Then there would be massive episcopal and general Church outrage at the defilement, since something important would finally be at stake – money! (Perhaps, on the other hand, it would be better if the Victorian bishops said nothing, since an episcopal letter they put out a while ago on homosexual "marriage", and which I have heard was authored by a particularly smarmy, effeminate, affected bishop whom I have met over the years, was so cringing, crawling, and ingratiating to the homosexual and secularist sex-cult activists that it was almost designed to be counter-productive – it was tantamount to a flag of unconditional surrender!)
It takes no Merlin-type occult second sight to infer that the Vatican bureaucracy is behind the near-total silence of almost all bishops everywhere, whether orthodox or not, on sexual and sex-related evil, including abortion, filthifying sex ed., and the ugly, thuggish, oxymoronic homosexual "marriage" racket. The imperative is obviously for the "teaching Church" to treat the Church's teachings relevant to these evils as merely journal-entries in the Church's moral behaviour ledgers, necessary for accounting purposes but of no relevance to the real world and not to be publicised, let alone promoted. This is the policy which was manifestly concocted on-high in consequence of the uproar, above all the uproar among the educated, prosperous Western middle-class within the Church, over that miraculous Encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Episcopacies everywhere were let know that it was now policy that the Church's teachings on sexual morality be kept locked in the closet, like Freemasonic or Knights of Columbus/Knights of the Southern Cross regalia of old, so as not to provoke unpleasant disturbances inimical to a clerical bureaucratic cosy life.
I remember when I was young, probably early in my University years, being told a supposed joke which had oral sex as its punch-line. (A fellow had a red ring around the base of his penis, which turned out to be lipstick.) I'd heard my quota of sexual jokes which were at least amusing, but I simply couldn't see that there was anything remotely funny in a joke which required one to imagine oral sex. It was no more conceivable to me that anyone could engage in such sex than it was that anyone could engage in coprophilia – sex acts with (literal) turds. Then came Linda Lovelace and "The Story of O", and the ever-intensifying sanctification of contraception, and soon the once-inconceivable was being regarded as routine and unobjectionable. Is it any wonder that homosexuality has acquired cult status among the secularist power-cults and those in their thrall? After all, by the now-prevalent standards, homosexual sodomy is the purest form of sex, innately free from the main primitive side-effect of heterosexual sex, conception, and much less generative of that other annoying side-effect, unsought emotions inducing permanent, child-rearing-related bonding.
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September 29th, 2013The New Norm: A Generation Raised on Pornby Kevin O'Brien | http://www.thewordinc.org
WARNING: I get a bit graphic here, and it's an adult topic meant for some adult readers. I am writing about the biggest change in our culture since the pill, and I'm pulling no punches. This article is not for everybody.
There is a New Norm, and we're not even seeing it. The New Norm is a generation raised on porn, and consequently showing symptoms of a kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). That sounds like a stretch, but read on ...
Here The Witherspoon Institute looks at the correlation between Porn Use and Supporting Same Sex Marriage.
The article concludes (my emphasis) ...
In the end, contrary to what we might wish to think, young adult men's support for redefining marriage may not be entirely the product of ideals about expansive freedoms, rights, liberties, and a noble commitment to fairness. It may be, at least in part, a byproduct of regular exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts.
This relates to my recent post, which is an article in the Mail Online, about how unbelievably depraved sex acts are now the norm to 14-year-olds who have been exposed to them online.
'Nugget, what's that?' asked Jonny.'A nugget is a girl who has no arms or legs and has sex in a porno movie,' chortled one young, pimply boy, to an outburst of embarrassed laughter from some, and outright revulsion from others.The adults in attendance were incredulous at the thought that not only did this kind of porn exist, but that a 14-year-old boy may have actually watched it.
My friend Paul Rhodes writes (again, my emphasis) ...
You have NO chance of winning the debate by hoping that some innate disgust with buggery will sway people's minds against "same sex marriage".
First, buggery doesn't disgust most people anymore. The mainstreaming of porn has in fact made buggery attractive. Buggery has lost its power to shock.
And I reply ...
What I am just beginning to realize is that, when I said, "Why are we so foolish to think that unrestrained sex will not lead to human misery and depravity?" and a Facebook friend replied, "Well, why would it?" - this is the "new norm". It is beginning to dawn on me. We realize that the elimination of all gun control and laws against homicide would lead to barbarism; but we can't see that the elimination of moral laws regarding the weapon all guys "conceal and carry" - the penis - and any social norms prohibiting the harm that unrestrained use of said device and its corollary produces - we can't see that eliminating such things will obviously and inevitably lead to something even lower than barbarism.
Honestly, people can no longer see that unrestrained sexuality is extremely dangerous. It's not obvious any more.
Recently I've been writing about my new favorite show Catfish on MTV. I wrote about one of the young ladies featured on that series, a girl who is enthusiastically enduring an abusive live-in relationship ...
At the age of 15 she was in a residential treatment center for self-abusive behavior (which is typically cutting, burning, self-mutilation).She is probably a victim of sexual abuse ... and now she tells the other man in her life - a man who actually does love her - that she's not good enough for him. She's staying with the live-in (the jerk) because she doesn't feel worthy of the good guy.It is hard to imagine what abuse and neglect can do to a child. I have known some very intelligent and capable and spiritually sensitive people in my day who were unable to enter into any kind of mature loving relationships because their fathers abandoned their families, their mothers tormented them, or a darker secret like molestation or suicide lurked in the shadows.
Here's the deal and we don't want to see it. Sex is oriented toward the family. Trivialize one and you trivialize the other.
Culturally speaking, divorce and remarriage pave the way for contraception, and contraception paves the way for pornography.
And pornography is a form of abuse. It abuses those who produce it and it abuses those who consume it - adults and children both. And the effects of this abuse are just beginning to be seen the world over, for we now have a generation formed by pornography - you might almost say raised on porn - from their earliest years.
This is a vast change in human behavior and in the molding of human nature, and we are totally ignorant of it.
I know many young actresses, but most are seriously religious. The few young women I do know who are avowedly secular have the following traits in common. ...
- Lesbian encounters are considered a necessary rite of passage, whether you are attracted to other women or not.
- Violations in the bedroom - physically repulsive and abusive sex acts - are considered normal, even those that are most degrading to women.
- Becoming a mother is the worst thing you can do; it will ruin your figure and your career and it will take away your freedom.
- Becoming a single mother, however, is sometimes fun because babies are cute (but husbands aren't) and you can always get state aid to help you raise them.
- Pornography is fine and dandy. Even the kind that incites guys to attempt the abusive sex acts described above.
- The Orgasm is more important than any emotional intimacy. Sex is about the "O" and nothing else. Nothing else. This is why it can be done alone, with a guy, a girl, an object, or any number of participants. It is an intense physical experience and it entails a kind of power over others. That's it. Physically it's fun and it gives a rush of power over others; that's why you do it. Porn, therefore, is a very accurate depiction of human sexuality. Real-life sex is just like porn; porn is just like real-life sex.
- Women are not designed for anything in particular. They are simply men without penises; and the men who have penises are the enemy.
- The fathers they have had or known are typically weak or absent - sometimes for several generations in the family.
- The mothers they have known typically compensate by becoming over-the-top.
- They think "Gay Marriage" is all about fairness - after all, gay male best friends are a blast; they love to go shopping and talk catty about your girlfriends, so why do anything to make them unhappy?
- Being sexually promiscuous is OK - but the word "whore" is still used to describe other girls who do this (but never used to describe yourself when you do this). Sexual promiscuity seems to mean sleeping with anonymous strangers or a string of one-night stands or with guys or gals you barely know - and doing this a lot over a short period of time. It does not mean having dozens of partners in succession and dumping each and moving on to the next, as long as each sex partner lasts a month or so. That's not being promiscuous.
- Love is over-rated; comfort is where it's at. Find somebody you can be comfortable with. Set the bar low, and settle. Shack up, or get close in other ways. But when you become mutually un-usable to one another, move on in a heartbeat and don't look back. He'll do it to you; you do it to him.
- The meaning of life is use, not love.