Priest Killed - Baghdad Today

Prayers for the most recent priest killed in a drive by shooting, Baghdad, Father Youssef Adel, Assyrian Orthodox Church.

"I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do..." - Jesus [Mt 12,04]

"For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, who I shall see on my side" - Job [19,25]

The Ninth Day

Brother D'artagnan notified me of this "Man For All Seasons" sort of film based on the true story of a priest at Dachau, The Ninth Day (2004). Looks worth checking out.

Europe In the House of War

Spengler speaks truth not myth in this important piece, Europe in the House of War: [h/t: Brussels Journal]

By proposing to concede a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury pushed his phlegmatic countrymen over the edge. No one is better than the British at pretending that problems really aren't there, but once their spiritual leader admits to an alien source of coercion and proposes to legitimize it, they understand that a limit has been reached.

Williams' exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the "House of War" in the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the "house of submission", or Dar al-Islam. Europe's governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant communities who refuse to accept these laws. "No-go" zones proliferate that non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence. Read all …

George Weigel's Call to Action

George Weigel, biographer of John Paul II, has a new book entitled Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism. Here's an excerpt:

It is, perhaps, ironic that, at precisely the moment when a religiously grounded, existential threat to the civilization of the West (Islam) has manifested itself with real power, a new atheism, dripping with disdain for traditional religious conviction, has risen up in the form of broadsides by bestselling polemicists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. Yet contrary to the claims of these new atheists and their call to the "maturity" of unbelief, a West that has lost the ability to think in terms of "God" and "Satan" and that has forgotten the drama contained in the idea of "redemption," is a West that will be at a loss to recognize what inspires and empowers those enemies of the West who showed their bloody hand on September 11, 2001. A West that does not take religious ideas seriously as a dynamic force in the world's unfolding history is a West that will have disarmed itself, conceptually and imaginatively in the midst of war.

Combatants for Peace - Israel

A toe hold of peace and a testimony to the power of forgiveness between a grief-stricken father and a prison guard.

Deadly Scimitar Phariseeism

Darfur refugee camp in Chad

Robert Spencer speaks about Wahhabi extremism @ FrontPageMag.com, ”Islamo-Fascist Bigotry: The Persecution of Believers”:

That jihad in Darfur features Muslims targeting Muslims. Such episodes, whether in Somalia, Darfur, or anywhere else, emphasize the need for peaceful Muslims to stand up strongly, in deed as well as word, against global jihadist violence. The sword of takfir ought to cut both ways, with peaceful Muslims willing to distinguish themselves from their bloody-minded coreligionists, and to repudiate their murders not just of fellow Muslims but of non-Muslims also.

Meanwhile, Islamic jihadists and Sharia supremacists continue, with increasing confidence and brutality, to impose – violently – their vision of Islam upon their coreligionists.

It is obvious to the readers of René Girard that we are seeing in this grotesque butchery the outlines of the primitive Sacred: yet another way of designating new victims for blood sacrifice. The parasitic resurgence of the primitive Sacred, sadly, has found an all-too natural a host in the "religion of peace."

How Providence Usually Works

... In the Knick of Time
New Advent relays the story of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, ”The Man Who Saved the World” one cold September night back in 1983.

A documentary is set to be released in 2008 that relates Petrov's heroism and judgment. Whew ....

The Christian Response... H. Karlson

An interesting post over at Vox Nova by our friend, Henry Karlson entitled Evil In The World. He says,

"The Christian response is never to say yes to the anti-Christian’s No to Christ. It is not to engage the spiral of hate and violence. It is, rather, to be a bold witness, bringing the light of Christ further into the situation, revealing even more that demonic content, and bringing to it Christ’s loving Yes to humanity."

I sense a mimetic theory truth to this observation by Henry.

Remember Me

Via Ironic Surrealism’s Velvet Hammer lady: it was put together, it is said, by 15-year-old Lizzie Palmer. No voiceover announcer. No fancy graphics. Just moving photographs, moving words, and a song. Powerful.

The Hard Command

In an article from the Washington Post, "Albania Takes Aim at a Deadly Tradition," an amazing truth about human nature itself is touched upon and passed over without realization.

In the realm of the Bible, the Sacred Scripture of the Catholic Church, a "given" is that vengeance is a major source of social catastrophe. As Gil Bailie says, "The first homicide, which is really a fratricide occurs [in my Bible] on page 4, and thereafter the thing is awash in blood. And it reaches its denouement by Christian standards at a ghastly public execution; then it finally culminates in scenes of apocalyptic violence ... What’s strange is that it just now dawned on us that this book is about violence. About violence, religion, and truth."

This story from Albania is about revenge and the thirst for blood too, and that Albania is somehow trying to address this "problem" shows how poorly modern (how Belloc hated that adjective; it only means current, but carries the airs of pomposity and strutting) social science understands the depth of the Christian message. For that, we must turn to a retired philsopher from the University of Chicago, Leszek Kolakowski. In his Modernity on Endless Trial [Univ. of Chicago, 1990], this hardened old humanist and no Christian himself wrote the following about the benefits of this biblical faith for the world:

Our natural forces can find no safe shelter against evil; all we can do is practice the art of balancing opposing dangers. And this is precisely what the Christian tradition affirms in its statement that certain results of original sin are inescapable, and that if salvation is possible, it can only be through grace.

There are reasons why we need Christianity, but not just any kind of Christianity. We do not need a Christianity that makes political revolution, that rushes to cooperate with so-called sexual liberation, that approves our concupiscence or praises our violence. There are enough forces in the world to do all these things without the aid of Christianity. We need a Christianity that will help us to move beyond the immediate pressures of life, that gives us insight into the basic limits of the human condition and the capacity to accept them, a Christianity that teaches the simple truth that there is not only a tomorrow but a day after tomorrow as well … the strength of Christianity does not reveal itself in a theocracy or in a monopoly on the creation of rules for all areas of civilization. Its strength in this interpretation is manifested in its ability to build a barrier against hatred in the consciousness of individuals …

The requirement of the renunciation of hatred was a challenge thrown down by Christianity to human nature, and it has remained so. If Christians are to be found only among those who know how to meet this challenge, who are disciples of Jesus in the sense that they do not escape from the struggle, but are free from hatred – how many have there been, and how many are there now in the world? I do not know. I do not know whether there were more in the middle ages than there are now. However many there are, they are the salt of the earth, and European civilization would be a desert without them. [84-85, 92 - My emphases]

What Kolakowski discerns as "renunciation of hatred" is the injunction of Our Lord to forgive and even pray for our enemies. It is a short circuit not only in the escalation of violence written of between two Albanian families, but that of all human beings who fall for the satanic injunction of vengeance as their "sacred duty."

Christianity has only recently begun the hard work of not scapegoating as Jesus taught us. Some have fallen into a kind of nihilistic paralysis in the wake of not scapegoating as the principle of culture-creating and culture-sustaining, but this is simply the failure of accepting the grace necessary to live the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.

Other religions are just that -- religions -- that, by anthropological definition are built on sacred violence and hatred. Christians have the hard job ahead of living up to Our Lord's command: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father..." [Matt 5,44-45a]

And, echoing Kolakowski in a paraphrase, How many Christians are there who do not escape the struggle and are free from hatred in the world? I do not know. I do not know whether there were more in the middle ages than there are now. However many there are, they are the salt of the earth, and civilization would be a desert without them.

My Initial Take - We Have Made a Pack With the Devil

Guys, please don't leave me dangling out here, Porthos' post, which included 3 good articles, is too rich to leave behind without more comments. There is much good in them-ther articles, yet I am inclined to say that Lilla's essay bothered me the most as it offered much, but squandered everything by staying affixed to an un-grace-filled, dead language of modern secularism, Western culture refusing to look in the only place where meaning can be found.

Here is the article by Mark Lilla who is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.

The following is the last paragraph of the essay:

Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.

THE END! That's it? He leaves us to our own lucidity? I think the time has past for that kind of hands-off reporting.

I (Aramis here) can't help but think that as the Gospel, over time, prunes and purifies our 'political theology' centered on God, that granted we will experience sporadic human convulsions, which we will have to repent for, however to try to trivialize and minimize the Gospel in our lives, as we have tried to do with a political philosophy centered on man, leads to the Great Separation and in fact an expulsion of the Gospel. This compartmentalizing of man and God will only produce a more dramatic and violent return to paganism and the primitive sacred.

It seems to me that Lilla has attempted to clarify and in some ways justify the breach that our modern Western social sciences hides and that is our mimetic desire and our only salvation which comes from the True Transcendent Being. Lilla, like most intellectuals represent, quoting Rene Girard,

“A panic-stricken refusal to glance, even furtively, in the only direction where meaning could still be found dominates our intellectual life.”

God and Anarchy?

Does anarchy get too bad a rap? Wretchard at the Belmont Club undertakes a somewhat thick synthesis and reflection on what look like two interesting articles.

Addendum:
The two articles under consideration are excellent and deserve examination in their own right:
The Politics of God, by Mark Lillain the NYT (long!)
Anarchy Unbound, by Peter Leeson at Cato Unbound

What is it good for?

Bruce Bawer writes at length on "Peace" agitation/education in City Journal. H/T Instadpundit.