Silent communion

Christian meditation may sound like an uneasy hybrid, but that awkwardness is hiding something important

Post-Modern Art Is Nonsense, Of Course

From pickled sharks to compositions in silence, fake ideas and fake emotions have elbowed out truth and beauty

Yeah, and true religion, too.

[And yes, I'm a Scruton fanboy.]

Relax, Leave The Guns To The Professionals

Or, Guess the State

Resident: Deputies search wrong home

Plus, this stunning quotation:
"[Captain] Patrick, who for the past three years has routinely failed to follow the public records requirements of the Ohio Revised Code, was also unavailable."

Grandparent To USDA: No

USDA to Grandparents: Read Government Bedtime Stories to Encourage Healthy Eating

Lenten Wave #27

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." - Edmund Burke

The Feast Of John Donne

Donne was one of the Metaphysical Poets of the late 16th/early 17th centuries; he is often considered the founder of that school of English verse.  This is how I was introduced to him, at any rate, when I was a public school student.  I would be a teenager before anyone bothered to tell me [or I bothered to discover myself] that he was also a priest in the Church of England whose highest office was that of dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Our clergy had a noble and nimble history in the arts and the intellectual life once upon a time.  While there are still pockets of resistance to contemporary educational trends, the bulk of our academic attention is now claimed in more facile disciplines.  Oh, well, nowadays we'll have to let a strongly worded letter to the editor or online comments about the Tea Party or gun owners suffice as our literary effort.

Much more of Donne's life may be found here.

A Hymn to God, the Father

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.      

Almighty God, the root and fountain of all being: Open our eyes to see, with your servant John Donne, that whatever has any being is a mirror in which we may behold you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Archaeological News

Archaeologists in Britain said on Sunday they had solved a 660-year-old mystery, citing DNA tests which they said proved they had found a lost burial site for tens of thousands of people killed in medieval London by the “Black Death” plague.

An Obituary Of Note

Hobie Alter, modern surfboard and small sailboat inventor, dies

Not only did he and Grubby Clark invent the lightweight, foam-core surfboard [what most people are thinking of when they use the term "surfboard"], but he also invented this:

The ubiquitous Hobie catamaran, familiar to beaches and shorelines throughout the world.

Lenten Wave #26

"A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live." - Thomas Merton

But What Will It Do To The Surf, Dude?

After Sandy, feds mull plan for artificial islands off New Jersey, New York

"For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of his country' when the guns begin to shoot."

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) blocked the release of the names of hospitals where 19 veterans died because of delays in medical screenings, leading to calls for transparency from news outlets and a bipartisan group of Capitol Hill lawmakers.

Huh? This Could Have Been Phrased Better

US Forces Japan to return some land to Japan

Doesn't sound like this would be too hard.

What A Marvelously Pungent Film Review. Rock People? Really?

Where was I? Oh yes, Noah is a terrible, terrible movie. As a story, it doesn’t attain to the level of the worst of the cheesy Biblical movies made in the fifties. Aronofsky broke the first and sacred rule of storytelling: you have to make the audience care. We never cared about Noah even after he was kind to a wounded, half dog – half snake. (No, that wasn’t a mistake.) We never cared for any of the characters. I kept hearing people say this movie is deep. It isn’t. It is psychologically pedestrian. The only emotion the movie elicited in me was laughs of scorn. The script is problematic in every way in which a script can be problematic. Bad characterizations – no complex personalities, just stereotypes. Unmotivated choices abound. No imagery or story subtext. Huge story problems requiring ark-sized suspension of disbelief. Earnest, oh so earnest, dialogue with every syllable on-the-tedious-nose. Awkward transitions. Completely missing a coherent theme. Embarrassing soap-operaish holds on actors looking tense or worried or just staring ahead trying to convey lostness and doubt. And the fakest, funniest looking, plastic green snake used repeatedly to indicate badness. 

It’s so dumb, I can’t even write a serious review. Seems likely the studio purposely created and then drove all the controversy around the movie because they knew they had a dog. They’re hoping they can have a huge opening weekend because as soon as word gets out that this is a dull, idiotic waste, it’s going to drop like a rock person next weekend.

The problem, of course, is that the spiritually illiterate will think that this is an accurate representation of the Bible.  Or the Torah or Koran, for that matter.

Now Showing At The Cloisters

Once in 835 years qualifies as a rare event, and for the first time since their creation in 1178 six very fine and incredibly beautiful stained glass windows are on display outside of England's Canterbury Cathedral.

Lenten Wave #25

"The world's thy ship and not thy home." - St. Therese of Lisieux

The Feast Of John Keble

It was one of those occasions, routine and familiar in the workings of both the Church of England and the Royal Courts. At the beginning of each annual session, judges, barristers, solicitors, and other court officials would gather for a service in the chapel at the Inns of Court and listen to a sermon on the topic of justice. Generally, this sermon was not at all memorable.

On July 14, 1833, The Rev. John Keble, chair of poetry at Oxford University and the author of a very popular collection of poetry entitled The Christian Year, was invited to give the “Assize Sermon”. While some may have been blithely looking forward to a sermon of some intelligence and even lyricism, a note of its title, “National Apostasy”, may have given them some clue as to what was to follow.

Remarkably, Keble, a clergyman of careful articulation and pastoral bearing, denounced both the nation and the leadership of the Church of England for turning away from God and coming to regard the Church as a mere institution of society, rather than as the prophetic voice of God. The sermon caused a tremendous sensation.

So sensational, that Keble’s fellow ordained Oxford dons, a group that included John Henry Newman, the vicar of the university’s church, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, joined together to continue the address of this serious issue and to aid the return of more devotional elements in theology and the sacrament and boost the intellectual muscularity in common spirituality.  This became known in Anglican history as The Oxford Movement.

The Oxford Movement’s rallying point was what was known as “Branch Theory”, which understands that Anglicanism, along with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, form three branches of one catholic Church. Correspondingly, most of the Movement’s leaders included in their practice traditional liturgy and the non-verbal aspects of worship in absence of which the Church had become rather plain. Thus, there was a return to the so-called “high church” practices that are found in the stronger communities within the Anglican Communion to this day.

This was not a popular notion to the leadership of the Church of England. In true episcopal fashion, Keble, Newman, and Pusey were all subjected to some form of punishment for their efforts. Keble was banished to a parish in Hampshire. Pusey was forbidden from preaching for five years. Newman became so alienated that he "swam the Tiber" and became a Roman Catholic priest, and eventually a cardinal. The students of the dons were largely denied positions in the church, thus forcing them to find ramshackle ministries in either the slums of London or in the less savory portions of the British Empire.

However, the Oxford Movement was not so easily suppressed. The zeal of the dons' students, fueled as it was by their sense of employment injustice and the bureaucratic martyrdom of their favorite professors, was fed into a variety of organizations dedicated to addressing issues of social inequality, especially the seminal Christian Social Union.  They saw to it that the Anglican Church, once again, became prophetic in British society.

Elements of the Oxford Movement may be seen in our own practices, too. The fact that we celebrate the Holy Eucharist as our principle liturgy, that clergy wear vestments, and that men and women are welcome in Holy Orders all grow from the writings and practices of those early academicians.

Keble’s Assize Sermon may be found here.

The Withering Of Higher Education

"Athletes couldn't write a paper," Mary Willingham, a specialist in the school's learning-support system-turned-whistleblower, told ESPN. "They couldn't write a paragraph. They couldn't write a sentence yet." She said that some of the students were reading at a second- or third-grade level, which is considered illiterate for a college-age student. As Willingham notes, in the "AFAM" classes, players were notching As and Bs, but in actual classes such as Biology and Economics were receiving Ds and Fs.

Lenten Wave #24

"This repentance, this faith, this peace, joy, love; this change from glory to glory is what the wisdom of the world has voted to be madness, mere enthusiasm, utter distraction.” - John Wesley

Jake, We Need To Talk

Pet cats infect humans with TB for first time

Sometimes We Live In 400 A.D. Rome, Other Times It's Buck Rogers In The 25th Century

NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time. 

Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal. 

"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. "So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation."