An Absolutely Wonderful Observation From The Beginning Of A Book Review

It’s been an interesting decade for thinking about religion. After 9/11 it finally dawned on people that religion wasn’t going away and that ignorance about it might well be debilitating. Many did not cotton to this news; the “New Atheists” represented not so much an intellectual challenge to religious belief, but rather an adolescent cri de coeur from those who felt their fervent unbelief beleaguered by reality and their Voltairean pieties insulted by the course of history. Cornered smugness is never pretty.


Soon several counter-thinkers came forward to return the compliment, abusing the abusers with contempt for their mistakes and scorn for their intellectual fantasies. More recently still, a wave of “New New Atheists” has emerged, exemplified by thinkers such as Alain de Botton and the team of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. They grant the value of some facets of religion, such as transcendence (what Kelly and Dreyfus call the “whoosh”) and, echoing antecedents like Auguste Comte, social ordering, but they affirm the generic idea of religion as at best a human-only institution so that they may dump all the awkward bits, like theology, metaphysics and that sort of thing. The superficial understanding and charity they offer to religion is a dodge, of course, but at least they’re polite about it.

A Real Journalist, Finally (Of Course, He's British)

As a journalist, you know you are doing your job properly when you manage to upset rich, powerful and entitled people who are used to getting their own way. And you know you've really got under their skin when they pursue censorship, the avenue of last resort since time immemorial.

Tuesday's Quotation

"If God is silent now at times when we long for some sign from Him, it is because by means of silence He can best make known to us His mind. His silence may mean that our request is so foreign to His will, that it may not be heeded without hurt to the petitioner. Or, on the other hand, He may be luring on our faith and inciting it to a more ambitious flight. Or, again, it may be that His silence is His way of telling us that the answer to our query or petition lies in ourselves."
- Charles H. Brent  (1862-1929)

This Week's Feast Days

July30th:


William Wilberforce [1759-1833] wanted to have a deep effect on his world and was torn between serving God in the church or in the realm of secular politics.  He chose the latter.  He served as a member of Parliament for 45 years and was the champion of causes such as religious liberty [that's when the government can't legislate one's morality; we're still working on that one in the USA] and the abolition of slavery [it took awhile for that notion to take hold in the USA, too].

Wilberforce, who was a member of our Mother church, the Church of England, tempered his secular political life and efforts with daily prayer and study of scripture.  In our time, and in our nation, this would have made him a figure of ridicule by the late night "comedians"; in his day, it ensured the end of institutional slavery throughout the British Empire.  I hasten to add that this took great resolve and just plain bloody-mindedness on Wilberforce's part; another reason to credit his faithful habits for keeping him both grounded and focused.

More of Wilberforce, and of his friend John Newton, who wrote a number of the hymns found in the Episcopal Church hymnal, may be found here.

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, kindle in your Church the never-failing gift of love, that, following the example of your servant William Wilberforce, we may have grace to defend the poor, and maintain the cause of those who have no helper; for the sake of him who gave his life for us, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

July 31st:

Ignatius of Loyola [1491-1556] was the founder of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits.  He was everything a truly great teacher should be: patient, learned, faithful, and [this is the important one, now] mystical.  Through these qualities, he created the most intellectual order of clergy ever known in the Western Church.

More on his life may be found here.

Almighty God, from whom all good things come: You called Ignatius of Loyola to the service of your Divine Majesty and to find you in all things. Inspired by his example and strengthened by his companionship, may we labor without counting the cost and seek no reward other than knowing that we do your will; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.

August 1st:

Joseph of Arimathea, who surrendered his tomb to be used by the disciples as a resting place for the remains of Jesus, was a tin merchant.  Whether due to the conventions of pious legend, or because of the presence of tin for export from the British Isles to Rome, Joseph is identified as the one who brought Christianity to the Britons.  More of his story and role in scripture may be found here.

Merciful God, whose servant Joseph of Arimathaea with reverence and godly fear prepared the body of our Lord and Savior for burial, and laid it in his own tomb: Grant to us, your faithful people, grace and courage to love and serve Jesus with sincere devotion all the days of our life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Global Warming Is A Religion

And it has just met its Luther.

What Watts has conclusively demonstrated is that most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable. Around 90 per cent have had their temperature readings skewed by the Urban Heat Island effect.

This is why I read British newspapers. This story will never fit the US media narrative.

Things To Come

"...the coming clash over religious freedom in America will likely involve sexuality: abortion, contraception, pornography, same-sex marriage, and so on. On sexuality, progressives seem increasingly unable even to understand the worldview of traditional religious communities like Muslims, Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and the Catholic Church. The intuitions are totally different: what traditional religious communities can’t help but see as common sense, progressives can’t help but see as psychological repression and bigotry. Disagreement is profound. Clashes may be very ugly, indeed."

Please Remember All Involved In Your Prayers

Lightning bolt starts fatal Brooklyn church-rubble crush

I Finally Watched The Opening Of The Olympics

Did you hear the four Anglican/Episcopal hymns that were sung?


Jerusalem
Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer
Good Christian Men Rejoice
Abide With Me

Plus that hairy fellow sitting behind the queen was the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yukio Mishima

Recently, Amanda was visiting and decided to read my old paperback edition of The Great Gatsby.  Despite her private school and liberal arts college education, she had never read about Jimmy Gatz and his self-transformation into the mysterious millionaire of Long Island.  Remarkable, given what that education cost, eh?  She does, however, know that plastic is "bad" or something.

Anyway, she read the story and, when we were talking about it, she mentioned something that's been noticed by many a reader and critic.  Namely, F. Scott Fitzgerald rarely wrote a bad sentence.  I told her I found that to be true even in his later works, when he was surviving on a hot fudge sundae and two quarts of whiskey a day.  I really couldn't think of any other American writer of whom the same could be said.

There was, however, a Japanese writer who had mastered the art of composition; he, too, could not write a bad sentence, although he is not always well-represented by English translators.  He's pictured above in a moment of repose: Yukio Mishima, considered by many to be the greatest Japanese writer of the 20th century. 

He was, as opposed to Fitzgerald, highly disciplined in his physical life.  Instead of fortifying his art with whiskey and ice cream, Mishima was a body-builder and weight-lifter.  He despaired of the relative physical slightness of Japanese men of his generation, especially as compared with the American GI's who occupied post-war Tokyo, and sought to train that away through hard work in gym and dojo.  By 1970, he may have been the most physically fit man of letters the world had ever known.  This discipline is discerned in his artistic craft, as well, as his plays, short stories and novels are clearly the product of much careful labor and thoughtfulness, with no small portion of appreciation for the fractured and fractious beauty of the world.

He was also a little un-hinged.  Did I mention that? 

He died shortly after taking charge of a Japanese army headquarters building.  Yes, that's right.  He did that in 1970, armed only with a sword [and about three or four followers].  He did so in order to lecture the assembled soldiers on the need to re-claim the pre-war values of labor, faith, and industry.  Then he committed ritual suicide; the kind known as seppuku.  I'll spare you the details.

My appreciation for Mishima comes from his writings, as his novels in particular carry with them a beauty that is typically Japanese and cannot be produced in the same manner by any other culture.  It is an art that is difficult to master and no one has surpassed Mishima in this regard.  [Ironically, my Japanese students did not care for Mishima; not for literary reasons, but because they felt he was a cultural embarrassment due to the nature of his death.] 

Also, and as odd as this may sound coming from one of my profession, he turned his self-determined death into a form of art, too.  I appreciate it more and more as the 21st century seems to be a time when timid artists and writers compliment one another on their "courage" and "transgressive work".  Somehow, criticizing Republicans, Mid-Westerners, Southerners, Christians, gun-owners, the obese and the poor doesn't seem as courageous and transgressive as storming an army headquarters, urging an indifferent audience to claim values that had long since become alien, and then ritualizing self-slaughter in order to satisfy...well, perhaps that is best expressed in the quotation below.

"All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.  I want to make a poem of my life."

Oh, We're To Be Slow Now?

I'm with this guy:

No, seriously: these things give me hives because I see a lot of middle-aged people sitting around in a living room, with all the right magazines on the table, the proper voices burbling on the radio in the kitchen, Volvos out on the street with COEXIST bumperstickers, and a bowl of organic carob-dusted peas on the table, or something. You know the stereotype: earnest types who still believe everything they believed in college. Who get a little thrill when they think of Woody Guthrie’s guitar: this machine kills fascists.

Number of fascists killed by that guitar: Zero. At press time.

So, I put parish news on the weblog, through mass e-mailing, on the parish Facebook page, pray that it gets put on the website, announce it in church and, let's face it, live in a small town where information is disseminated with ease and speed, and I still have people mad at me because they didn't know such-and-such had happened. Why, exactly, did I turn down that job in the Virgin Islands again?

Here's the US Virgin Islands:

Here's where I live now:



Thursday's Prayer

PRAYER OF THE SIXTH HOUR

O Lord,
You who have measured
The heights and the earth
In the hollow of your hand,
And created the six-wing Seraphim
To cry out to you with an unceasing voice
Holy, Holy, Holy,
Glory to your name.
Deliver me
From the mouth of the evil one, O Master.
Forget my many evil deeds
And through the multitude of your compassions
Grant me daily forgiveness,
For you are blessed unto the ages. Amen.

- attributed to Amma [Mother] Sarah, an early church desert anchorite

The Protean Nature Of Our Culture

“The equality people will have a fit about this, but I’ll say it anyway: I have gay-wedding burnout,” Mr. Shields, 35, said one day this spring. “I spent my 20s going to weddings, being in weddings, shopping for weddings, helping to plan weddings. In my early 30s they finally started tapering off, and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God, we’re over the hump.’ ”

He paused for dramatic effect. “Nope. Here come the Gays.”

Think Of This Weblog As An Educational Tool

Ten Saints of random things

A Quotation

Many people have a very strangely childish notion, that “praying in the name of Christ” means simply the addition of the words “through Jesus Christ our Lord” at the end of their prayers. But depend upon it, they do not by adding these words, or any words, bring it about that their prayers should be in the name of Christ. To pray in the name of Christ means to pray in such a way as represents Christ. The representative always must speak in the spirit and meaning of those for whom he speaks. If Christ is our representative, that must be because He speaks our wishes, or what we ought to make our wishes; and if we are to pray in the name of Christ, that means that we are, however far off, expressing His wishes and intentions.
... Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Sermon on the Mount [1910]

Jesus Sighting! Sorta.

Palm Bay man claiming to be Jesus held in crowbar attack

Dragnet: Scotland

Solway Firth cockle gangs are 'out of control'

This Week's Feast Days

July 22 [transferred this year to July 23]:

Mary Magdalene, and let's get this out of the way as soon as possible, was not a prostitute.  That particular legend grew from some curious readings of history and scripture during the early middle ages and has really, really taken hold in the popular imagination.  I suspect it's because Hollywood producers are attracted to the image of Jesus having a relationship with a prostitute, since they tend to view all women as representative of that profession in one manner or another and themselves as Messianic figures.  But, I digress.

The best pious stories of Mary M. may be found in Eastern Christianity, of which many may be found here. 

Perhaps the best is that of the "red egg":

A biblical Christian testimony concerning Mary Magdalene says that she was a woman of social status and wealth. Following Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, she used her position to gain an invitation to a banquet given by Emperor Tiberius Caesar.
When she met him, she held a plain white egg in her hand and exclaimed “Christ is risen!” Caesar laughed, and said that Christ rising from the dead was as likely as the egg in her hand turning red.
Before he finished speaking, the egg in her hand indeed turned bright red, and she cried “Christ is risen, for Jesus has burst forth from the tomb”. And she continued proclaiming the Gospel to the entire imperial house. This miracle turned many of them to Christ at that time.
Today, many Eastern Orthodox Christians end the Easter service by sharing bright red eggs and proclaiming to each other, “Christ is risen!” The eggs represent new life, and Christ bursting forth from the tomb. This began the tradition of coloring Easter eggs.


July 24:

Thomas a Kempis wrote The Imitation of Christ, a 14th century volume that is still in print and still in use to this day:

Remarkable for its simple language and style, it emphasizes the spiritual rather than the materialistic life, affirms the rewards of being Christ-centred, and supports Communion as a means to strengthen faith. His writings offer possibly the best representation of the devotio moderna that made religion intelligible and practicable for the “modern” attitude arising in the Netherlands at the end of the 14th century. Thomas stresses asceticism rather than mysticism, and moderate—not extreme—austerity.

July 25:

St. James the Apostle [brother of John, son of Zebedee] is remembered on this day.

As a member of the inner circle, James witnessed the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:37, Luke 8:51), the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2), and Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:33, Matthew 26:37). James and John asked Jesus to let them sit, one at his right and one at his left, in his future glory (Mark 10:35–40), a favour that Jesus said was not his to grant. James was beheaded by order of King Herod Agrippa I of Judaea; according to Spanish tradition, his body was taken to Santiago de Compostela, where his shrine attracts pilgrims from all over the world.


July 26:

The Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of which next to nothing is historically known, are remembered mostly through pious legend.  This quotation below is the best that I can find:

Joachim and Anne were a rich and pious couple who had been married for a long time, but found themselves childless. The couple prayed fervently for a child and promised to dedicate their first born to the service of God. An angel appeared to Anne and told her, "The Lord has looked upon thy tears; thou shalt conceive and give birth and the fruit of thy womb shall be blessed by all the world". Joachim also received the same message from the angel. Anne gave birth to a daughter whom she called Miriam (Mary), who was conceived without sin. As a child, Mary was taken to the temple and her parents suffered great sorrow but at the same time joy for fulfilling the vows they had made to the Lord.

July 27:

William Reed Huntington [1838-1909] was one of the pillars of the Episcopal Church when it was at its height as an institution of influence and spiritual foundation.  The text of the sermon preached at his Office of Burial may be found here.

This prayer, familiar to all faithful Episcopalians who attend the Holy Week liturgies, was written by Huntington:

Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Isn't It Pretty To Think So?

"More importantly: sometimes, just once in a while — like when human blood is still being cleaned and wounds bandaged, and shocked parents are clinging a little tighter to their children — it might behoove us all, and perhaps even make better people of us, if we can just resist the urge to score a cheap political point or exploit emotions, and give a bit of respectful silence to the grief in our midst; to acknowledge that sometimes, the only appropriate words are offerings of sympathy and prayers, and that anything further is just rampant ego, giving always-divisive evil yet another assist."

Bob Manry

Look at that expression above. That about sums it all up, doesn't it?

Robert Manry was an editor for The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's daily newspaper, back in the 1960's.  He had a mid-life crisis of sorts, after being diagnosed with a heart irregularity.  Did he start of program of exercise and diet?  Sorta.  Did he boost his spiritual life through meditation?  Sorta.  Did he achieve new purpose and greater health?  Oh, boy, you have no idea.

You see, Manry bought a 15ft. sailboat [well, technically 13 feet, 8 inches] and decided, despite the fact that he was a novice freshwater sailor for whom Lake Erie was the largest body of water he'd ever attempted, to sail from Falmouth, Mass. to Falmouth, UK.  Yep, across the North Atlantic.  By himself.  In a 15ft. boat.  Named Tinkerbelle.

Like all serious American nutcases, he kept this intention mostly to himself.  No wonder, as his friends might have tried an intervention.  Or thrown a net over him.  When he asked for a leave of absence from The Plain Dealer, they said "no".  So, he quit.

In case you're wondering, he did make it.  Also, The Plain Dealer now found that their former employee was the toast of sailors around the world and much in demand by the world media.  Oops.

His story in brief may be found here.  If you want, you can still find copies of Tinkerbelle, his tale of the odyssey, from used book dealers.

What made him a hero for me was that he spoke dramatically to our Boy Scout troop about his experience and inspired at least one of us to try to live the life of a waterman whenever possible.  In fact, I would eventually buy a later version of his boat myself.