Mark Shea gets it exactly right

Because Obama really is an enemy of the Church and has no compunction about surrounding himself with people who are quite nakedly contemptuous of Her. What is required is a cool-headed response to a very cool cucumber who is coolly implacable in his will to defeat the Church's teaching on a number of crucial points (albeit not all).

Read all of Why It's Important to Silence the Nutjobs.

It is de rigueur to keep smiling while in the spotlight of fame and prestige; it throws off suspicion of the masses ("If s/he's smiling, s/he can't feel guilty and/or have evil intent."). Secondly, one never dirties one's own hands in an executive position; let the henchmen do it for you. And thirdly, follow a plan of patient deconstruction of what you want eventually to destroy. It may take decades, but we can and will bring the Catholic Church to an ignominy it so richly deserves. And keep smiling. Waving. Smiling. Waving.

Time to batten down the hatches, Christians. The storm of human pride is upon us.

But not for me

Dymphna posts a video by a tax lawyer who sings a parody regarding an "honest mistake" of not paying taxes for five, count ‘em – five years ...

Seiyo - Two Buglers

At the risk of being labeled one who is painting "them" evil so as to be able to "hate" them, I give you one of the clearest-eyed extant cultural analysts, the Brussels Journal's Takuan Seiyo:

The symptom, in the West, is as old as the Goths and the Huns. But the disease is as old as the end of the Roman Empire, and before that, the Babylonian one. Flowering followed by decadence, followed by a partial population replacement with imported barbarians, followed by chaos, internal war, and wilting.

Addressing the solipsistic degeneracy of the American Empire and the despairing self-asphyxiation of post-national Europe are a precondition for disposing of the symptom. Fighting the symptom as if it were disembodied cannot bring cure, since the body’s maimed autoimmune system recognizes Islam and Muslims as its own, and its own – the anti-Islamization dissident – as the invading disease.

It should be none of our business whether Muhammad was a pedophile, nor should we be digging for damning quotes in the Koran or making damning movies about Islam. That we do so is the normal and spontaneous reaction of the scant remains of Western society’s nearly atrophied autoimmune system. It’s the autoimmune rejection of a foreign and deeply incompatible substance, forcibly injected into the West’s body as though phenol into a vein by the West’s insane ruling shamans.

Islam is everything bad its critics say it is. But one who has visited extensively in Muslim countries – and I have – returns home from some of them wishing he’d been able to import some of their features. Consider this:

- Which Muslim country is sick enough to encourage immigration by Christians, let alone welfare-consuming Christians, subsidize Christian churches, cower before Christian dissidents who despise their host society and its religion?

- Which Muslim head of state or potentate is so gelded as to state that if enough of his state’s subjects want to institute Christian (or just Western) jurisprudence instead of the law of the land, he sees no reason to object?

- Which Muslim country is lunatic enough to adopt on a wide scale the prima facie madness of denying the most obvious truths about racial, gender and cultural differences – and spending trillions (in euros, dollars, anything) to build a sham palace of cards in public education, employment and immigration based on those mad presuppositions?

- Which Muslim society is stupid enough to fail to understand how profoundly it differs from the West and from the West’s “infidel?” Which is ravaged by the Western virus to such an extent it fails to understand that its identity, its soul, depends on a vigilant rejection of the West’s culture and values, while recognizing that its economic wellbeing depends on playing a game of cooperation?

- Find a single Muslim head of state who goes out of his way to explain that Christianity is the religion of peace, and that Crusader really means someone who likes to cruise...

Read all of Tale of Two Buglers.

This Low Tavern of Life

My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you.

My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

My God and I are horsemen galloping in the burning sun or under drizzling rain. Pale, starving, but unsubdued, we ride and converse.

"Leader!" I cry. He turns his face toward me, and I shudder to confront his anguish.

Our love for each other is rough and ready, we sit at the same table, we drink the same wine in this low tavern of life.

- N. Kazantzakis

Dreams of an altar of muddling through

Tom Holland at The New Statesman recognizes the inchoate outlines of the primitive sacred at the heart of the Scimitar. Hear me on this, please: NOT so that we can 'put blame on "THEM" (so as to) justify our hatred of "THEM" and satisfy our pent up desire to vent.' Rather, to see with vision unclouded by the vacuous secularist claim that all religions are "the same." They are not, as any student of René Girard's mimetic theory knows full well.

(The) sense of dislocation is hardly unique to our own times. The pagans of classical antiquity, who would cheerfully adopt the gods of alien pantheons and mix and match them with their own, were invariably brought to experience this sense of dislocation whenever they confronted Christianity’s one true God. Christians in turn might sometimes feel a similar uneasiness when obliged to contemplate the deity of Islam.

For instance, it is said that shortly after Muhammad’s death in 632AD the followers of the Prophet sent an embassy to Heraclius, the Christian emperor in Constantinople, demanding the surrender of his dominions and his conversion to Islam, on pain of invasion. “These people,” the emperor is said to have responded in some bemusement, “are like the twilight, caught between day and nightfall, neither sunlit nor dark – for although they are not illumined by the light of Christ, neither are they steeped in the darkness of idolatry.”

Not even Tony Blair at his most histrionic has ever put it quite like that – and, self-evidently, 7th-century Byzantium, with its murderous power struggles, its delusions of grandeur, and its imploding economy, was far removed from the Britain of New Labour. Nevertheless, Heraclius’s simile does pose in peculiarly acute form a question with which Christians have always had to wrestle: are the similarities between their own faith and Islam more profound than the differences?

Blair himself – impeccably ecumenical, even while following in the footsteps of Heraclius by launching an invasion of Mesopotamia – has been as gung-ho as anyone in emphasising the former. “Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham,” he informed a somewhat startled Labour Party a fortnight after the destruction of the twin towers. “This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together in understanding of our common values and heritage – a source of unity and strength.”

Who could possibly argue with that? Only the most bigoted and bone-headed kind of crusader, it might be thought. And yet, and yet, there is a danger that too emphatic an insistence on what unites Christians and Muslims will prove as damaging in the long run as casting them as doomed to eternal conflict. The Crusaders themselves, ironically enough, rarely regarded Islam as something irredeemably alien; rather, when they bothered to think about their adversaries’ beliefs at all, they tended to regard them as merely a clumsily plagiarised heresy, a deficient and not particularly stimulating misunderstanding of their own religion.

Read all …

Coming Home

This might account for this.

O Gnostic Messiah

Grant Havers at Taki's speculates regarding I Won's apparent interest in medieval heretic, Joachim de Fiore, in Obama the Gnostic.

Close, Mr. Havers. I will see you the Gnostic flavoring, and raise you: I Won is the froth on the post-modernist cauldron of a failed nihilistic paganism; a progressivist, messianic remnant of a discarded Christian hope.

Shroud of Mystery

In the Too Cool category, the Timesonline says the Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, a Vatican source reveals.

Notre Dame Prayer Rally - Today

Francis Beckwith posts portions of Notre Dame Professor Fred Fredosso's comments at a Palm Sunday Prayer Rally on campus. Professor Freddoso is Professor of Philosophy and Oesterle Professor of Thomistic Studies.

I stand here today as a representative of that small group of faculty that supports NDResponse and stands behind the exemplary students who have organized it in reaction to the university administration’s announcement that it will honor President Obama at the graduation ceremony in May. Their faithful witness is an inspiration and a shining example even if it is not clear what good, if any, will come of it. For as the Holy Week liturgies reminds us, Christian witness is not about power or tangible results. It’s about the life-giving truth of the Gospel and about the Father who passionately loves each individual human being.

I also stand here as the parent of four Notre Dame graduates, including a 2009 graduate, a parent who cannot in good conscience—or, in my particular case, without giving scandal—attend my own son’s graduation ceremony.

Make no mistake. This protest has to do with President Obama’s actions and with his intentions regarding future actions, and not merely with his beliefs ...

Read more here.

Belloc - Wells's Fallacies

Biographer Robert Speaight (Life of Hilaire Belloc, 1957) relates Hilaire Belloc's criticism of H. G. Well's History of the World. As a mental experiment, try inserting a few of our contemporary writers where I place parentheses:

(Wells's) ephemeral fallacies - religion without dogma; the Catholic Church invading Europe like an alien and holding it down; Wycliffe flaunting his vernacular; a priesthood of conspiring conjurers and a laity of servile dupes - these were the mental stock-in-trade of a whole mass of the English middle-classes who imagined they were in the vanguard of progress. (Wells) was their prophet; sharing their shallow antinomianism and their bumptious hopes; a typical product of the Protestant underworld ... (Wells) declared that 'Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn'.

As for (Wells's) 'dawn', Belloc did not think it would last very long, and he did not think it was the precursor of the day. It was 'the shoddy remnant of the Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return to us, not the simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things in the dark.'

Girard @ 4Ms

If you hadn't noticed, my brother-in-arms, Aramis, has posted a few truly good offerings by the great man, René Girard, over at the Four Mass'keteers. Scroll down. Recommended reading.

Scimitar Attack in NY ... Yes or No

Does it disturb you that yesterday's massacre in New York was an retaliatory attack by the Taliban on American soil? Or was it? Is it legitimate to take credit for an act of violence when the actor did not do so as a member of said group that uses sacred violence?

Matthew Archbold includes a few other things that the Taliban has taken credit for.

Walter Hoye - Valor and Truth

How can praise adequately be raised for the likes of the Rev. Walter Hoye? After rejecting a deal from a judge to keep 100 yards from an abortuary - abortion "clinic" - he was sentenced to 30 days jail. From jail, he writes:

"Here my thoughts turn towards my brothers, men of the cloth, men who are called and sanctified by God the Father. Men who are preserved as the bondservants of Jesus Christ. Men who serve as the holy burden bearers of God's word. Men who are the watchmen on the wall. It is now in the spirit of the prophet Ezekiel, I write to my fellow watchmen on the wall."

Noting the statistics on abortion of African Americans, Rev. Hoye writes: "Brothers, in Black America alone every seventy-two seconds a black baby is murdered in the womb of his or her mother. This holocaust is genocidal to the point that today a black child has less than a fifty-percent chance of being born. According to the 2006 U.S. Census, Black Americans are below the replacement level.

"In other words, death in Black America outpaces life. Abortion alone accounts for three times more deaths in our community than HIV/AIDS, Violent Crimes, Accidents, Cancer, and Heart Disease combined. There is no question pre-natal murder, abortion, is the number one issue in not only Black America, but in all of America today."

Encouraging his brother pastors to keep the scourge of abortion prevalent in the minds of their congregations, Rev. Hoye urges them to "speak regularly and boldly from our Sunday morning pulpits, from our mid-week Bible studies and from our small group meetings on the weekend against abortion."

"We must inform, educate and activate God's people to take public stands against the sin of legalized murder in America today..."

Read more here.

Nazareth U.

In case one needs to be disabused of a misperception, the words "Arab" and "Christian" truly do belong together, as in the case of this.

Unborn Baby as Rapist

Why a pregnant woman is victimized by being ‘internally occupied by another creature against her will’: her unborn baby. I give you, gentle reader, the warped legal thinking of Sherry F. Colb - romantic Gnosticism run amok.

Unlike the modern snits who worship their own wills and instincts during the brevity of a self-centered lifetime, there is indeed a bright, shining Alternative which will never be quenched.

StAR Ink Desk

A web blog to accompany one of my essential hard copy periodicals is Ink Desk of the Saint Austin Review – Reclaiming Culture.

Here is a sample offering by editor and author, Joseph Pearce:

Last month I returned "home" to England for a short time and found myself more of an exile than ever. It seems that every time I return to my native land I feel more distant from it, and more at peace with my decision, seven years ago, to move to the United States. On this last visit "home", I was reminded of Chesterton's words that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing but in anything. Here is an account of the shocking ignorance and superstitious nonsense that confronted and affronted me during my mercifully brief stay in London.

Finding myself in a pub in London's East End, I struck up conversation with an aging pop star who seems to have been offended by the crucifix lapel badge that I was wearing. In a bizarre inversion of one of those old Dracula films, he pulled a pentangle pendent from around his neck and waved it in front of me, as though to ward off the power of my Christian presence. He informed me that the pentangle was not a symbol of the occult or of black magic but was a pagan symbol. I did not have the patience to explain to him how true pagans, such as Homer or Aristole, would have been horrified by his bizarre and tacky new age dabblings and diabolings. In any event, he went on to explain to me that he kept three "sacred" books by his bed, each of which contained important aspects of the truth. One was the Bible, the other Zen Buddhism, and the third Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler ...

Read all here.

Youth for Western Civ

I am heartened to see even a handful of a younger generation doing this against cat-calls of "racism" or other multiculturalist slurs.

While "western civilization" may seem to some not worth saving per se, it is only a few short steps into the arms of Mother Church.