I Need a Hero - The Dancing Inmates

Hey, help me out here, is this some kind of dance number or what? Check out this prison story.



Is it real? Well, check their song out HERE or view this 20 minute documentary, Jailhouse Rock or Holy Mass Officiated By His Eminence Cardinal Ricardo Vidal.

The Fun Theory

How far can you take the fun theory? Will it work getting more people to Sunday Mass? Don't get me wrong, the more reverent the worship services the better so I am not at all keen on some "fun theory" to get people to Mass. Yet you know there are a bunch of people on church committees who have invested in all kinds of "fun theory" trying to get a few more people in the pews.

So what? Big Deal.

Damien Thompson is sick of being pestered by “infants dressed as vampires, demanding presents.”

Aww.. Well, just shut off the porch light, draw the curtains, and hope - hope - no one plays a "trick" on you. Better yet, read The Drama of Hallowmas, get out the candy corn, and turn on the porch light. Trick or Treat, Limey!

Fr. Barron comments on the Vampire craze

Some interesting themes touched on by Fr Barron.

On The Frontlines

On The Frontlines
One of the medics interviewed is a son of my very close friend and doctor. Constant prayers are requested for a safe return home of our daughters and sons as well as an end to this conflict.

Faith in Action

My first day on the job at Faith in Action went pretty well. I am an assistant to the office manager working part time at my local chapter in Illinois. At first glance it seems very daunting in all the efforts everyone makes - double and triple checking - to make sure no one falls through the cracks. Our chapter is only 4 years old but has grown leaps and bounds.

I continue to operate our family retail business along side my brother, however as the economy has taken all the wind out of our sails AND my calling to some sort of ministry I felt like this was the place for me to explore and take a small step out of my comfort zone.

Our chapter has 17 parishes/churches in which we draw volunteers to help folks over 60 with such things as transportation, shopping, small household/yard jobs and friendly calls/visits. Many of the Faith in Action chapters have been long established and offer numerous services - all depending on the number and skills of the volunteers. Why don't you check out your local Faith in Action and see about volunteering today - a neighbor's independence depends on you!

Rev. Kirk and the Little People

And happy it is in these forlorn days of drab materialism that one such as I should chance upon a charming blather of blarney regarding the strange mishaps and disappearance of the Rev. Robert Kirk, scholar and naturalist, so to speak, of the hidden realm by one of our favorite Orthodox writers, David Bentley Hart. Herein are recorded these important matters as we draw near unto the important day of All Hallows' Eve. I give you, gentle reader: The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies.

The Scimitar - Primitive Sacred

An aspect of René Girard's concept of the primitive sacred involves the acquisition of certifiable sacrificial victims. The sacred needs victims to re-stoke the flames of what Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism" at its heart.

Therefore, the primitive sacred needs trip-wires so as to alert its religionists that "they've got one!" like this.

The gods of the primitive sacred - regardless of all talk of "monotheism" - reflect a similar and recurring need: the need for victims. Girard's three primary characteristics of the sacred carry essential tasks to keep the victimary cult at the center of such conventional culture strong and able to maintain social and psychological cohesion. These three characteristics are ritual, myth, and prohibition.

Ritual re-enacts the founding slaying of the deity-troublemaker who "rescued" the people when they were engaged in the "war of all against all" (Hobbs). By his death, they became a people. To keep the chaos and tumult from returning, a priesthood establish a ritual that replays this victimary origin of culture.

Myth is the subterfuge that lends the once violent mob a self-justifying, self-congratulatory story that keeps them from seeing the actual, structural innocence of their original victim - as well as their on-going ritualized victims' innocence. We "had to" sacrifice him (her, them); it was our "sacred duty."

Prohibitions provide the "trip-wires" that show us who has "trammeled" upon the deity's will and, thus, provide us with a necessary cache of victims, should a dissolution of our cultural cohesion call for a sacrifice to surcharge it.

The point is, the Scimitar has all the ingredients of the primitive sacred in a viral and quite active way in the world today. And regardless of its claims of "monotheism", its structure is at-one with all pagan "primitive sacred" religions.

Theater of Cruelty - For the Masses

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Dollar Collapse?

Is the sky falling? An eleven minutes to make you go buy seeds and start planning your vegetable garden for next spring.

Cinematic Genocide - Y'all Come

Most of us middle-brow Girardians know the truth of Robert Hamerton-Kelly's axiom: when the sacrificial mechanism at the heart of conventional culture begins to lose its ability to bring cohesion to its denizens, both anthropologically and psychologically, that culture will usually try to surcharge its waning mechanism in one of two ways. It will either increase the number of its victims, or increase the prestige of its victims: genocide or regicide.

From my curmudgeon's perch, it is clear that modern western man is a weenie, as noted by Australian anthropologist, Peter McAllister.

Maybe he's not even a weenie; perhaps a Vienna sausage.

Unlike his swarthy Scimitar brothers who will resort sacrificially to an occasional honor killing of a female relative, or fatwa against an author or government official (Talking point: where is the culture of the Scimitar in terms of the vitality of its sacrificial mechanism?), the modern western weenie merely likes his violence on Sunday afternoons in the autumn via the National Football League, the Stanley Cup play-offs, or, occasionally by going to the movies.

Weenie-Alert: The "genocidal" cinematic attempt to surcharge the West's sacrificial mechanism is coming up soon in a theater near you. November 13th to be exact. Here comes Roland Emmerch's mass extermination of humanity on a magical day in 2012.

And you can watch it with a tub of buttered popcorn and super-size soda. Good thing death is safely up there on the silver screen, and it's someone else doing the dying. I'm safe. Right? Right?

Kinda makes sense don't you think?

What if it is true?

The 13th Day
The True Story of Fatima

In a world torn apart by persecution, war and oppression, 3 shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal were chosen by God to offer an urgent message of hope to the world.

Based on the memoirs of the oldest seer, Lucia Santos, and many thousands of independent eye-witness accounts, The 13th Day dramatizes the true story of three young shepherds who experienced six apparitions of Our Lady between May and October 1917, which culminated in the final prophesized Miracle of the Sun on October 13th.

Abducted from their homes, thrown into prison and interrogated under the threat of death in the government s attempt to silence them, the children remained true to their story about the crucial messages from Mary of prayer, repentance and conversion for the world.

For the Record - Mike Flynn the Winner

In which Mike Flynn dismantles the usual atheist drivel about the "Dark Ages" and Christian triumphalism. [ht: Mark Shea]

Why, ... You NEKED, Boy !

For the record: an absolutely awesome post from The Anchoress: Who TOLD You You Were Naked?

Addendum: If God wants us to be vulnerable in our covenant, remember this fact next time you prepare for the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

And, just because, here is Robin Williams' exquisite rendition of the American legend of Pecos Bill:

Metanoia and Forgiveness

For all those who say the Catholic Church isn't "friendly" enough, or, worse, for those who say She "persecutes" those who alternative lifestyles does not match Her faith and morality, I say this. I want a Church that tells me, as per G. K. Chesterton, where I am wrong; not one that tells me in an expedient, oily, and "friendly" way where I am right.

The Catholic Church does not "persecute" me in telling me where I am wrong in my disordered passions, my choosing my will over that of God, She is doing me a favor. A huge one at that. And Our Lord in His divine mercy goes even further. He grants us a swift and healing sacrament of Reconciliation.

The Prodigal Son did not wait for his father to come and dredge him up and out of the pig stall. His disordered passions and willfulness took him into that "far country." He picked himself up and started trudging back to his father's homestead.

Once there, what happened? Read it - Luke 15:11-32.

St Luke the Evangelist

Saint Luke the Evangelist

Divine Mercy Chaplet - 3 O'clock Prayer

The Divine Mercy message is one we can call to mind simply by remembering ABC:

A - Ask for His Mercy. God wants us to approach Him in prayer constantly, repenting of our sins and asking Him to pour His mercy out upon us and upon the whole world.

B - Be merciful. God wants us to receive His mercy and let it flow through us to others. He wants us to extend love and forgiveness to others just as He does to us.

C - Completely trust in Jesus. God wants us to know that the graces of His mercy are dependent upon our trust. The more we trust in Jesus, the more we will receive.

Vengeful God vs. the Crucified and Risen

This should be enough to indicate that for the Scimitar, appeasing a wrathful god puts their religion at-one with René Girard's "primitive sacred." All conventional religions, from an anthropological point of view, do not share the biblical mandate to "LOVE the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength" (Mk 12,28-31). Indeed, conventional religions love their deity rarely at all.

Rather, the rituals, prohibitions, and myths of conventional religions seek to keep their deities at arm's length, or secure in his or her temple, or as far from human contact as possible (hence the awe-full fear of the sacred and profane meeting).

But beginning with the covenant-making, covenant-keeping God of the Jews comes the slow and awakening understanding of a God Who loves first and invites humanity into a community of steadfast love rather than fear and dread.

The New Testament understands that nature of God the Father is fully vindicated in the death of God the Son at the hands of angry men, and His resurrection. If ever there was a clearer way of advertising the true nature of God, I don't know of it - and neither does the Teaching Office of the Catholic Church.

When the Veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom (Lk 23,45), the Christian faith says the power of the old primitive sacred fears and dread of the Sacred meeting of the profane was undone. God had come among us. Died for us. Rose to new Life for us. The bogey man of the gods and goddesses was destroyed. Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection was the true "twilight of the gods." The Sacred had "become flesh" and "dwelt among us, full of grace and truth" (Jn 1,14).

"I no longer call you servants," Jesus says, "I call you friends" (Jn 15,14-15). "Glory and trumpets!" as Sam Gamgee would say!

But this fear and dread dies hard where the truth of the Gospel still goes unacknowledged. Or is rejected by a Western culture that should know better.

Will the Scimitar ever pull away from its misunderstanding of God's true nature? I do not know. But until it does, we can be certain that it will continue to use any means - any means - to try to appease the angry, vengeful will of Allah. Wouldn't you, if you thought it was God's will?

Will the West regain its whole-hearted belief and Easter hope? Again, I do not know. But until it does, we can be certain that the neo-pagan recrudescence will proceed apace; even with its gussied-up, expensive-suited, Ivy League versions, replete with infant sacrifice. Its god is Moloch wearing a Mammon face.

I admire the Scimitar's misunderstanding of God's nature more than the Christ-rejecting neo-paganism of the West. Which, I wonder, will be easier to (re-)evangelize?

It Just Burns Me Up

Arright. You've seen it elsewhere, but never let it be said that the 4M's truculently refuse to fall for positive mimesis. I bring you The Onion's brilliant rendition of our President negotiating with wildfire.

Not such a bad metaphor for naive - check that - radical ideological hubris that won't acknowledge the Doctrine of Original Sin, eh?

Obama To Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire

Creating Space is an Act of Obedience

excerpt from the Magnificat

"Christ's act of creating space in himself for God is not self-mastery, but is itself already obedience, an obedience willing to take on whatever task the 'ever greater Father' gives." - Hans Urs von Balthasar

A Postcard, A Retreat, and Nietzsche's Man

I am back now from my all-too brief retreat at Holy Cross Abbey. Brief, but not without great benefit: Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Holy Eucharist on Saturday with Lauds, thirty minutes of Adoration before the Tabernacle (a plenary indulgence), and lots of silence, walking, and reading.

A book I am finding truly insightful for our times of tumult is Lucy Bennett's A Postcard from the Volcano – A Novel of Pre-War Germany. Historical fiction, yes, but historical fiction that shines a bright light on themes and structures of our own tectonic cultural fractures and violence.

Here is a choice tidbit from the protagonist's, Max's, grandfather: "It is good to be young, and capable of understanding that it's the hopes that need changing" (emphases added). Yeah, right.

An intuition from the Abbey Guesthouse: Nietzsche gave the West a double-barrel dose of his ennervating madness: (a) he described and affirmed a kind of man who accepted the 'eternal return' of the Dionysiac - vain, shame-based, vengeful, proud, bestial - while rejecting the Crucified One's way of forgiveness, mercy, long-suffering, and charity; and (b) that man whom he told Europe to imitate has strode menacingly and violently in the flesh onto Europe's stage in the flesh and in great numbers: the Scimitar's exemplar.

Our hero, Nietzsche's man! How can we, liberal, progressive, multi-culturalist, enlightened peoples, not accept him with arms outspread?

Europe and the West in agreeing with Nietzsche, yet possessed by the unacknowledged Spirit of Christ's concern for the victim and non-violence, quail before this swarthy, proud, "natural man." Would Nietzsche be pleased, I wonder?

The only - the only - hope for Europe and the West is not some finely nuanced revivification of sacramentality (that may come later on); rather, it is a sweeping and wholehearted return to belief God and in Jesus Christ as the true Son of God, the Word made flesh (Jn 1,14), rejection of Dionysus, and metanoiac affirmation of Our Lord's Church here on earth.

Anyone willing to give me odds on that likelihood?

Relationships and the Big Picture

A follow-up to the video below about Cardinal George, here is an excerpt in an interview he did with NCR on his new book, The Difference God Makes.

There are two things with which we [as Americans and as American Catholics] have a hard time: relationships, and seeing the whole thing. We’re very good at individual choices, which often separate us, and we’re very good at specializations, which also separate us. If there are lacunae in the culture that is ours, which we all have to love, it’s a lack of appreciation for relationships that you can’t un-choose and that are constitutive of your identity, and also this ability to see the whole thing, to see it as global, to get outside the national parameters that define how we look at everything, ...

Not being able to speak to Cardinal George's book, but from the 4M's perspective this little quote provides a clue into what René Girard and mimetic theory is about: relationships and coming into contact with the big picture. Check out our side panel and make it a point TODAY to learn about this man and his theory. Isn't it about time you get acclimated to the big picture?

George Isn't Sleeping Here

Cardinal George on the Last Self-Help Administration:

Nietzsche's Victory

Even those for whom mimetic theory is a closed - or, more accurately, never opened - book can see that the accusatory gesture carries with it a near-insurmountable power. Conventional power of observation are no match for it. A sanguine, detached position if silent becomes a collusion.

Pam Geller shows the power of the accusatory - literally in Greek, the satanic - gesture here.

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this is how mythologically blinding the sacred (speaking anthropologically) is on the self-proclaimed "progressive" minds, unregenerate as they are. Girard merely shines anthropological insight and data at the behest of the Catholic magisterium.

Discard the influence of the Gospel, and the conventional mind rapidly recrudesces to the pagan sacred, the so-called natural man, and the worship once again of the dark gods of blood (Lewis).

Lindau

Back to the sublime: the cover to the Lindau Gospels. Don't forget to visit the always true, good, and beautiful offerings at The Lion and the Cardinal.

Why the Marshmellows?

From the sublime to the ridiculous ... Welcome to the "Who Knew?" Department here at the 4Ms. Throw away that old VCR player? No way! Learn how YOU can recycle and redeploy all those really cool things inside that manufacturers DON'T want you to know about. And, don't forget the marshmellows!

St Bruno and the Carthusian Order

Thought this clip from "Into Great Silence" was a fitting tribute to Saint Bruno and the Order he helped found.

Haiku U

Patrick Madrid presents Catholic Haiku from Envoy insiders. Kind of tame, if you ask me. So I tried my hand at it, coming with nine years of teaching Catholic sixth-graders the gentle art:

Indifferent kids
Long to surf the internet
My CCD class

+

Empty stomach growls
Long lines trapse toward Altar
Final blessing, pah!

+

Ora pro nobis
I enter teachers' bathroom
No toilet paper

+

3:30 Vigils
Monks blow noses just like me
But I'm back to bed

Msgr. Charles Pope - Nixing Anthropocentrism

It is to God whom the glory belongs.

Memento Mori

A Little Guide for Your Last Days blog

Just a reminder. We not only have to live with our decisions. We have to die with our decisions.

Conservatism AND Liberalism Dead?

Steven Hayward in today's Washington Post Op/Ed has a piece that asks, "Is Conservatism Dead? No - Just Brain Dead." He writes,

The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption," Glenn Beck's new "Arguing with Idiots" and all of Ann Coulter's well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov's dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams's dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers.

Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works...MORE>>

Hayward elsewhere dismisses the tea party phenomena as "unfocused" and, as per above, sees Malkin and Beck as not sufficiently "intellectual" to warrant attention (he may have a point there).

Mr. Hayward sees only "Happy Meal Conservatism," which will, he posits, melt away very soon with the morning mist. What he fails to see is the "Happy Meal Liberalism" that he himself espouses. In the doubling rivalry in which he is caught, he fails to see that his stance is the equal and opposite of the conservatism that he and the WaPo scorn and flail at with incessant effort.

If Mr. Hayward wants to find true intellectual vigor, he will have to look to what he and other supposed gatekeepers of public discourse rejected and abandoned long ago; namely, the thinkers and writers of the Catholic Church. One could do worse than the likes of René Girard, recent inductee into L'Académie français, or the Holy Father, Benedict XVI.

But that would take a paradigm shift for Mr. Hayward, not to mention peeling his eyes off of his mimetic rival dance-partner, "conservatism".

NOT

This should make you more than a little slightly ill. Now we are seeing the squirm meter well into the red. NAMBLA - North American Association for Man-Boy Love Association - is not simply about queering. It is advocacy for the normalization of pedophilia.

And thus his royal I Wun-ness takes the country farther down the spiralling vortex of cultural meltdown. Well done, sir. Well done.

The Transitus - A Franciscan Devotion

Don't miss out, check for your nearest Franciscan parish so you can participate in a Transitus service tonight.

Feast of the Guardian Angels

For the record: over at Vultus Christi, Father Mark's superb reflection on our Guardian Angels, My Friend.

Fr Barron - Authority and Protestantism

St. Jerome

St. Jerome (c.1605) - Caravaggio

And more at The Lion and the Cardinal

When They Said 'Repent'

I wonder what they meant.
One of the Mass'keteers' favorite Jewish prophets, Leonard Cohen.

Crises - Knox

An atmosphere of crisis takes people different ways. Some get so wrapped up in their work that they never look beyond the edge of their own cabbage-patch. Others think in continents, and are depressed, nowadays, by the exercise; what is the use of doing anything, when everything is going from bad to worse? The Christian ought to rise above both those temptations. His daily work, his common human duties, are a charge entrusted to him. He believes in the sacrament of the present moment; what might happen, what is likely to happen, he leaves in the hands of God.

- Monsignor Ronald Knox

Mere Letterman

.
This is a clip of Leigh Nash (Sixpence None the Richer) explaining the band's C.S. Lewis inspired moniker on The Late Show. Once Dave settles down, he actually says something rather nice.
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Fraser - C. S. Lewis Song

Brother D'Artagnan, being a musician, probably is well-acquainted with Hillsong and singer Brooke Fraser. I admire any Christian musician who helps denizens of pop culture breaking into awareness of C. S. Lewis:

"C.S. Lewis Song"

If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy,
I can only conclude that I was not made for here
If the flesh that I fight is at best only light and momentary,
then of course I'll feel nude when to where I'm destined I'm compared

[CHORUS]
Speak to me in the light of the dawn
Mercy comes with the morning
I will sigh and with all creation groan as I wait for hope to come for me

Am I lost or just found? On the straight or on the roundabout of the wrong way?
is this a soul that stirs in me, is it breaking free, wanting to come alive?
'Cause my comfort would prefer for me to be numb
An avoid the impending birth of who I was born to become

[CHORUS]

[BRIDGE]
For we, we are not long here
Our time is but a breath, so we better breathe it
And I, I was made to live, I was made to love, I was made to know you
Hope is coming for me
Hope, He's coming

Life - a drama of the visible and the invisible - the art of amazement

The "invisibility of man" has been incisively described by Maurice Nicoll:

We can all see another person's body directly. We see the lips moving, the eyes opening and shutting, the lines of the mouth and face changing, and the body expressing itself as a whole in action. The person himself is invisible...If the invisible side of people were discerned as easily as the visible side, we would live in a new humanity. As we are we live in visible humanity, a humanity of appearances...All our thoughts, emotions, feelings, imagination, reveries, dreams, fantasies are invisible. All that belongs to our scheming, planning, secrets, ambitions, all our hopes, fears, doubts, perplexities, all our affections, speculations, ponderings, vacuities, uncertainties, all our desires, longings, appetites, sensations, our likes, dislikes, aversions, attractions, loves and hates - all are themselves invisible. They constitute "one's self."

Nicoll insists that while all this may appear obvious, it is not at all overt:

It is an extremely difficult thing to grasp...We do not grasp that we are invisible. We do not realize that we are in a world of invisible people. We do not understand that life before all other definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and the invisible. -- Living Time (London, 1952), ch. 1, quoted in Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, p. 33

What smites us with total amazement is not what we grasp and are able to convey, but that what lies within our reach is beyond our grasp - not the quantitative aspect of nature, but something qualitative. Everything is more than the sum total of its parts. Man is aware of it, but it is beyond description or comprehension.

This is the beginning of all genuine religion. Because of man's astonishment with the world and himself, he recognizes the masterly hand of God. He ponders over the grandeur and sublimity of God. When seeing God as the foundation of all mystery, he starts to feel Him in his bones, in all that he does, feels, thinks and says!

As has been said, the tendency to take everything for granted and the indifference to the sublime is the root of all irreligiosity. It is a way toward the secularization of the world. Religion is a protest against taking things for granted. It is the art of living in amazement. -- Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Leighton, Bell, and Debussy

The Maid with the Golden Hair (1895) - Edward Lord Leighton

All Sound, No Music

Anthony Esolen writes on some important cultural realities. Pay close attention to what he sees as indicatives and imperatives.

Recently my family and I watched The Sound of Music for perhaps the twelfth time - probably the last great musical that Hollywood ever produced. It made me wonder if I could list the reasons why such a movie could not now be made.

These reasons I offer below; but it seems to me that they can all be united under the single assertion that the intellectual, imaginative, and emotional palette of the American people has suffered a terrible constriction, a reduction to the tedium of lust and greed and the thirst for power. It is not so much that Hollywood would not make a movie like The Sound of Music as it is that the people themselves would be hard pressed to understand it...MORE>>

Readings for Sunday

Sunday, September 27, 2009: Liturgy Reflection from JP Catholic University on Vimeo.

Bacon Your Pardon

You know, I've had rare experiences that Lewis described as Joy in my life, usually unbid, unlooked for, unrepeatable. Now, finally, someone has done the unthinkable, unimaginable. It seems that Joy - or something near to it - can indeed be purchased (be still my foolish heart). You may find the path to it for yourself here.

Just One Judge

Good news. Good thinking. Hopeful, redemptive, penitent. [ht: CMR]

Find more videos like this on Catholic Mountain

Mining for real words

Till We Have Faces

“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean… ‘to say the very thing you really mean…that’s the whole art and joy of words.’ A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years…you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” - Queen Orual from Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

Orual realizes that before the face of God all questions die away and even all words die away. THEN "when Christ is revealed - and He is your life - you, too, will be revealed with Him in glory." Colossians 3:4

Uniting Both Lungs?

ZENIT's Robert Moynihan reports on that a Recent Meeting Could Mark Turning Point.

One Thing Leads to Another

Jill Fallon over at Business of Life uncovers the shocking news. It was all about Hot food not sex.

I could have told them that. I find a woman stirring apple butter over a fire vvvery attractive.

Grace is Sufficient

The greatest temptations I face are self-pity, despair, the panic that robs the good of intellect. Your grace saves me from them, O Lord. It is sufficient.

Today grace taught me right before my chemotherapy treatment that I loathe it because I, too, was raised in a culture that disdains the body in a kind of Gnostic angelism. Walker Percy astutely observed that those caught in this plight make occasional attempts at re-entry by means of bestialism. I thank you, Lord, that you excised that temptation at my Confirmation.

Chemotherapy is a blessed reminder that the body is, is good - imago dei, and that I am no gnostic. Let the chemo always remind me, O Lord.

Knox - In Men's Hearts

CHRISTENDOM HAS BEFORE now taken up arms in its own defence; or even in a pathetic attempt to recover the Holy Places. Christian princes, before now have tried to spread the faith at the point of the sword, always, or nearly always, with disastrous results for religion. But the substantial victories of the Church have lain, always, in the sphere of the human conscience. Christ has reigned, not in the councils of nations, but in men's hearts.

- Monsignor Ronald Knox

Bicycle Artist

Via the Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys - Ryan Leech

Screens Dripping with Blood

David P. Goldman - remembered fondly by many readers as 'Spengler' in his cloaked identity - notes a six-fold increase in horror/gore/slasher movies since 1999 in Be Afraid – Be Very Afraid.

As occasional Girardians, the 4 Mass'keteers might discuss this trend, and, of course, we invite others to do so as well.

Brown's Banal Blather

I'm with her about Dan Brown

From one who has been known to write staggeringly bad prose (and howlingly inconsequential poetry), I choose to throw a stone of disdain in the direction of an author destined to make millions more from his bad writing. I present to you, Dan Brown’s worst sentences.

I prefer Providence to destiny, you see.

Amazing Grace, Amazing Guitarist

Puer, Puer, Pitiful Me

A question: Do you happen to think this is entirely appropriate psychological discernment (the fellow is a practicing psychotherapist) or scapegoating? Or, would you put your money on something in between? Why? Explain.

Not to put a kink in your ruminations, but here's why an increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The Exaltation of the Cross
Adam Elsheimer c. 1600

I'm a day late...the Exaltation of the Cross...think about it...really think about it...

. . .Both Jews and Gentiles rejected Jesus that day. Both Jews and Gentiles believed in Jesus that day. The cross has thus blurred the distinction between Jew and Gentile, but has starkly delineated the distinction between believer and no-believer.

May the thoughts of our hearts be disposed to become ever more profoundly faithful before the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Before the eyes of an aggressively disbelieving world may it become ever more clear that we are believers who long for the eternal life offered to us through the cross of our Lord and the sorrows of our Lady. – Fr. Richard Veras “What is Crucial About the Cross” Magnificat

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

from C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength
Mark's encounter with Dimble:

"One thought prompted him to cling to Dimble as a lost child clings to a grown-up. Another whispered to him, 'Madness. Don't BREAK with the N.I.C.E. They'll be after you. How can Dimble save you! You'll be killed.' A third implored him not, even now, to write off as a total loss his hard won position in the Inner Ring at Belbury: there must, must be some middle course. A fourth recoiled from the idea of ever seeing Dimble again: the memory of every tone Dimble had used caused horrible discomfort. And he wanted Jane, and he wanted to punish Jane for being a friend of Dimble's, and he wanted never to see Wither again, and he wanted to creep back and patch things up with Wither somehow. He wanted to be perfectly safe and yet also very nonchalant and daring--to be admired for manly honesty among the Dimbles and yet also for realism and knowingness at Belbury--to have two more large whiskeys and also to think everything out very clearly and collectedly. And it was beginning to rain and his head had begun to ache again. Damn the whole thing. Damn, damn! Why had he such a rotten heredity? Why had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so irrational? Why was his luck so bad?"

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The Exaltation of the Cross...think about it...really think about it...

Better to be Normal than Boring

I guess it is safe to say we are proud of our Normal status.

Our Lady of Sorrows

The Seven Sorrows of Our Lady

Hear Us Now, or in 2010 - You Choose

From Reason.TV (sorry about the overlap, guys)

Hut! Hut! HUT!

To commemorate the first Sunday of NFL coverage, two items for fans. First, the story of a super young man, Michael Oher (pronounced 'Orr'), rookie Left Tackle of the Baltimore Ravens (74). Watch for the upcoming movie version of The Blind Side (2009) of Michael's life story.

He hasn't lived long enough for a "life story?" Just wait, ju....st wait. I've read the true story. This will be the better than fiction; better than The Natural, better than Field of Dreams. His foster mama is played by Sandra Bullock, and she nails the spirit of Michael's real foster mother.

Next, a re-post of the scary accurate passing arm of New Orleans' Drew Brees. He is a god. Watch Bree throw for the record of passing yards this year.

Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Madonna (1493) - Pietro Perugino

Life Imitates Art or Vice Versa

Photographer Tran Huu Dung shows that apparently Claude Monet was a realist. [ht: Arts and Letters Daily]

Truth Shall Set You Free

A most important matter to consider on this of all days is motivation. WHY? is the haunting question lurking in the most hardened hearts of New Yorkers. For the truly concerned as well as curious, Bill Siegel at Family Security Matters unveils vital information for all non-Scimitar folk who do not want merely to avenge or retaliate or fall into doubling rivalry with the Scimitar:

In Judaism and Christianity, the other Abrahamic religions to which Islam is rooted and tethered, there are mechanisms for the adherent to reach some degree of internal stability and mental comfort. For Christians, even if one commits the worst of sins, there is still a path through acceptance of Jesus Christ and His forgiveness, to find one’s way to eternity in Heaven. For Jews, there are mechanisms, in part centered around the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, coupled with specific required actions depending upon the sin, to earn back the Almighty’s graces. And even in the grand non-Abrahamic faiths, including Hinduism and Buddhism, the architectures of the belief systems provide roads to reach internal peace.

Such is not the case with Islam. Islam, essentially, has paradoxical provisions. On the one hand, a Muslim’s fate is sealed before birth and not revealed to him. On the other hand, there are acts which are believed to induce or reduce favor with Allah and can count as evidence on Judgment Day. Consequently, a genuinely engaged Muslim can never be sure where he stands in eternity and is given both the duty to try to influence the outcome while being told (as his destiny is already written) he is impotent to change it. “Change the unchangeable” is a double-bind command that is extremely difficult to mentally navigate.

Islam, however, does afford a solution. There is one (and only one) guaranteed way to ensure a road to Paradise: to die in Jihad as a martyr. (Oops! Did that just say “Jihad?” How does one die in the peaceful internal struggle against one’s own lusts and appetites?)

The Koran and Islamic literature are clear that Jihad entails a contract with Allah whereby, if the Muslim fights for Allah’s cause and dies, Allah will reward him. While most of the Koranic references to Jihad” are military in nature, Allah’s cause can be fought in other, non-violent ways as well, including Jihad by converting others, or “Civilizational Jihad” or, as Robert Spencer has coined, “Stealth Jihad,” the seemingly innocuous infiltration into Western civilization to destroy it from the inside.

Violent Jihad, however, offers a more direct path to death. While suicide is generally considered forbidden in Islam, dying in Jihad is exalted. He who dies while carrying out Jihad automatically bypasses the grave and Judgment Day and earns an immediate pass to the eternal pleasures of Paradise, all the while avoiding the eternally unbearable torment of Hell.

More>>

If you want to hear more about the fascinating understanding of soteriology from the Scimitar viewpoint, Erwun Caner shares it in his testimonial as convert from the Scimitar to Christianity.

Religionists in the Scimitar fear hell. They see precious few ways out. Martyrdom bypasses judgment. It isn't the virgins, it is, as Siegel says, the hell. Talk about a no-brainer.

Blessedly, there is an alternative. I write about it in A Little Guide for Your Last Days. We have a Savior who is One-with God who loves us more than we possibly imagine or conceive. There is no need to be a martyr to an unworthy image of the Almighty who sees us as mere pawns and slaves. Come to the true God who wants all to be free, joyful, loving, and At-home for all eternity.

Frightful Pleasure

Daniel Mitsui tells us, according to G. K. Chesterton, why gargoyles grin.

Mantegna

Madonna of Victory (1496) - Andrea Mantegna

Nativity of Our Lady

Daniel Mitsui has the scoop.

For Those With Ears to Hear

The wisdom of G. K. Chesterton distilled through a discerningly faithful mind of Dale Ahlquist:

...the evil of big business has an evil twin sister: big government. When government tries to right the wrongs created by capitalism, it creates an even worse mess. The idea of socialism may sound good: to provide houses and food for everyone. However, in order to carry this out, State officials would have to inspect houses and regulate meals. The State has found it easier, Chesterton points out, to provide the building inspectors without providing the builders, and easier to restrict the diet without providing the dinner. We have simply "added all the bureaucratic tyrannies of a Socialist State to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a Capitalist State." The result is a loss of liberty and an assault on the common man.

G. K. Chesterton - Apostle of Common Sense, p. 159

Labor Day

St. Joseph the Carpenter (1642) - Georges de La Tour

Jack Webb Schools I Wun

Huge ht: The Anchoress

Theological Virtue - Hope

(This) is the great hope that remains at the end. We cannot find truth on our own, but Truth, which is a Person, finds us. - Pope Benedict XVI

Make It Easier, Jesus

You'll get more followers. You know, Salvation by Consumer Lite. Get a focus group, conduct marketing strategy, refine, streamline, repackage your message. Get it now?

The Voiceless Victim

At The Catholic Thing, Austin Ruse, President of the New York and Washington, DC-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) sums it up: We Americans have many generous impulses, but we have become blinded and hardhearted by failure to protect the poorest and most defenseless among us – by abortion.

YooHooooo...what about me?

There is a lot that this political cartoon by Lisa Benson tells and much more just below the surface. As a "dealer" - a store owner I see our "lot" being plowed under by a mighty tide - an ideology based in socialism and the inevitable worship to the many past pagan gods.

If we think these gov't programs are just suffering a few quirks, but the sentiment behind them will show us the way back toward progress wait till we blanket ourselves in the big 'O's national health care program. Suddenly the caption in the cartoon above is not spoken by 'dealers' but individuals who will be lost in a system much more drenched in darkness and murky waters than what we have now.

With a Better Tailor

George "I stole the debate book" Will opines - he is an An Ivy League Huey Long.