St. Jerome Emiliani

Nella's Story

Okay, gentle readers. Prepare yourself for a mother's story of her daughter's birth and the realization that her newborn daughter has Downs Syndrome:

Love me. Love me. I'm not what you expected, but oh, please love me.

A Little Bit Married, eh?

Dr. Christine B. Whelan gives essential advice to couples whose only catechism on marriage was prime time television: Are You A Little Bit Married? - How to know if it's time to walk down the aisle or go your separate ways.

Gizmo from down under for our friend who loves fast cars

Holy Post Café

I saw and began reading a piece in the british Telegraph expecting the worst from its title, The Holy Post Café, but came away from the article feeling a bit differently.

This is the Holy Post Café. It's the first of that trinity of words that's the giveaway. This is not first and foremost a café or a post office. It's St Luke's church in the village of Kinoulton, in the Gainsborough lands between Nottingham and Melton Mowbray. The beaders are in the sanctuary, while the post office and cafe nestle behind the pews in which villagers sit and chat and pass the time of day.

I've come here with Dr Stuart Burgess, the Government's "rural advocate" and chairman of the Commission for Rural Communities, which once upon a time would have been called a quango. We meet in the Neville Arms down the road. With the leather sofas and contemporary dining furniture filling its small front bar, it's a Darwinian model of how the traditional village hubs of shop, pub and church are adapting, or dying.

Dr Burgess has been on something of a mission, since the closure of some 2,500 rural post offices was announced nearly two years ago, to establish alternative village postal services: "I've been travelling the country, cajoling." ("Encouraging," corrects his PR man). "Local businesses use rural post offices, but it's really the social dimension – they're critical for the elderly and a real focal point for communities."

The name of the Post Office's revival scheme, Outreach, isn't lost on Dr Burgess, a Methodist minister. "Outreach" is what churches call their efforts to minister to local communities. The target was to have 500 new Outreach post offices, ranging from mobile vans to services in alternative premises. That target has already been reached, with some 25 Outreach post offices either in churches or run by churches in local premises..More>>

Athos Digs Out

Yeoman's Work

Pistol Pete

Like the great Drew Brees, some of us recall with drawn breath the basketball wizardry of the great Pete Maravich.

Zmirak - Generosity of Tolkien

John Zmirak on discovering Tolkien as a boy, dis-enchantment by a Catholic sophisticate teacher, and rescue to re-enchantment. A must-read:

Tolkien spent his scant free hours constructing the parallel world found in his books, "Middle-Earth." He acted as its loving father, peopling it with a vast array of species. Instead of doing what most writers (trust me) settle for, the minimum needed to move the story forward, Tolkien showed all the Liberality of those medieval craftsmen who would carve even the backs of pillars that no man would ever see -- since they worked for the glory of God, Who would. Tolkien crafted for his creatures' use entire languages with alphabets and whole continents with maps. He limned out their history for thousands of years, from the mists of our own faded legends (such as Beowulf and the Brothers Grimm) all the way back to Creation. The opening of The Silmarillion describes the fall of a mighty angel and his expulsion from heaven. It begins:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad.

Tolkien didn't see his work as a piece of Catholic apologetics, but as something more ambitious. Tolkien hoped to create for the English-speaking peoples a literary myth -- as the Germans had in the grail legends, and the French in chivalric romances. The stories of King Arthur, Tolkien sniffed over his pipe, were actually Celtic, and too mixed up with French infusions for his Anglo-Saxon tastes. So he spent his life creating a replacement -- which, to his cackling delight, took root. Let's test that assertion: If you're reading this in English, write down the names of as many knights of the Round Table as you can think of. Now name all the hobbits you can. Case closed.

Read all of The Generosity of Tolkien

Steyn - Environmental Fear-mongering

Mark Steyn takes on the melting credibility of the warming crowd - and their shoddy research:

Whenever I write about “climate change,” a week or two later there’s a flurry of letters whose general line is: la-la-la can’t hear you. Dan Gajewski of Ottawa provided a typical example in our Dec. 28 issue. I’d written about the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s efforts to “hide the decline,” and mentioned that Phil Jones, their head honcho, had now conceded what I’d been saying for years—that there has been no “global warming” since 1997. Tim Flannery, Australia’s numero uno warm-monger, subsequently confirmed this on Oz TV, although he never had before.

In response, Mr. Gajewski wrote to our Letters page: “Steyn’s column on climate change was one-sided, juvenile and inarticulate.”

Yes, yes, but what Steyn column isn’t? That’s just business as usual. A more pertinent question is: was any of it, you know, wrong?

Well, our reader didn’t want to get hung on footling details: “The disproportionate evidence supports the anthropogenic cause of global warming,” he concluded.

Yes, but how did the “evidence” get to be quite so “disproportionate”?

More here.

Chivalry in Our Dark Ages

"Servants of the Enemy look fairer and feel fouler"

Lest any fall under the illusion that the goal of chivalry is a nostalgic backward sigh or, worse, a peripheral movement unworthy of true Christian vocational aspirations, Rodney Stark reminds us that no less a figure than St. Bernard of Clairvaux - theologian, head of the Cistercian order, and one-time most powerful man in Europe - helped to found the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: the Knights Templars.

So much slander slops in politically correct circles regarding the Crusades that even well-meaning Catholic souls spout the poppycock spun by the likes of Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Fuller, von Mosheim, Barraclough, Gibbon, and, more recently, Mayer and K. Armstrong.

So it is well to read Stark's excellent introduction, God’s Battalions. And, as one who peruses the titles of books on sale at the bookshop of a near-by Cistercian abbey, Bernard of Clairvoux is still the object of great study and admiration even today. Stark writes:

Bernard was born into the nobility and raised to be a knight, but at age twenty he entered the Church. His knightly background was clearly reflected in the military structure he created for the Cistercians. Bernard also was an early and compelling advocate of chivalry, and many have suggested that he served as the model for the legendary Sir Galahad.

The Christian faith in general and the Catholic Church in particular is if nothing else (and it is a great deal More) historical. Legend in this case grew from fact. So, in the spirit of St. Bernard, let us not gainsay, gentle reader, the noble and ennobling vocation of Marian chivalry. Even in these present dark ages of neo-paganism, worship of Mammon, and shoddy thinking.

Up - Down-to-earth

The Pixar film UP is filled with the usual amazing story line, animation whiz-bangery, and laughs that any child has come to expect when dragging parents to a matinee or birthday outing.

What was unexpected was the four minute depiction of Carl and childhood sweetheart Ellie's marriage. As someone who has shared the ups and downs of realtime marriage for thirty years plus, I find it surprisingly heart-string pulling and, well, down-to-earth.

See it here.

Harold Ramis - Groundhog Day

'We are Nazareth'

Cardinal Schonborn says about current Europe:

“Sometimes I have the impression that what we are living now in Europe is exactly described in this scene,” the cardinal said. “We are Nazareth. . . We are tired of Him. With all our beautiful Cathedrals and monasteries . . . and the great witnesses of sanctity, we are tired of Him. We are looking for Buddhism, for all kinds of strange ideas, or simply secularism.”

Cardinal Schonborn said he is sometimes frightened by the vision of Christ going away from Europe. “Lord do not abandon us . . . Do not leave the Church in Europe,” Cardinal Schonborn said. “We have been so enthusiastic about you through all the great ages of Christianity in Europe, but then we have become tired about your words, about your requirements . . . We prefer the mainstream, the politically correct. . . We are tired of your Gospel.”

Cardinal Schonborn asked the congregation to pray that Christ would not “go away” from Europe, even while we want “that He reaches all countries of the world, all people of the world.”

Read all ...

It Worked in Cambridge

For the record: Victor Davis Hanson - As Predictable as Clockwork — the Obama Three-step.