Stead

Constance Cast Adrift (1901 - Illustrates Chaucer's 'The Lawyer's Tale')
- Frederick Stead

Unholy Grail

For the record: Marita Vargas' Our second (nefarious) Camelot. Ht: Karen Hall

God's Battalions

Even USAToday is beginning to get it, noticing Rodney Starks' book, God’s Battalions on the radar screen. Bravo.

Glimmers of light like the above and this getting through the cracks of the anti-truth barricades give me hope.

Soufflé of Doom or Élan of Hope

As even CNN begins to acknowledge that political correctness in the Army contributed to the 13(/14) deaths at Fort Hood, I recalled that friend and mentor, Gil Bailie, recently cited a New York Post story about terrorists in New York: They were filled with rage and wanted to take it out on what they considered the source of all problems in America - the Jews.

The naïveté of everyone educated in the sacred halls of multiculturalism "knows" that humans are not stained with Original Sin. I heard a PhD in Education bemoan not long ago the way that textbooks betray our ethnic and cultural bias in the way they refer, for example, to Native Americans as "savages". Of course, the sentiment not to victimize is admirable, but to ignore the fact that Native Americans were members of the fallen human race and, therefore, ipso facto, as savage as, say the Meso-American Aztecs and Mayans and Clockwork Orange urban youth of today's Paris and London, is as dangerous as a branch of the military ignoring the warning signs of a Army psychiatrist who emailed jihadists overseas to say he was looking forward to seeing them in Paradise and - by the way - when is it permissible to slaughter innocents?

The time is rapidly approaching when two things will become manifestly apparent: first, that those who become "filled with rage" are the problem. And, secondly, we cannot "pussy-foot" around them in feeble, limp-wristed attempts "not to offend" them, but rather call them accountable for their uncontrolled lack of impulse control and immature bent to violent and inappropriate tantrums.

True political correctness is recognizing where the true problem lies. René Girard's mimetic theory and the wisdom to "think with the Church" - sentire cum ecclesia - in discerning truth, goodness, and beauty, as well as disordered passions, fruits of the flesh, and egregious evil is the pathway to survival for humanity.

Anything less, including and inescapably a soufflé of multiculturalism and elitist naïveté, bode only doom.

Benedict XVI - Way of Beauty

Rood Screen - A. Pugin

Hanson - Soaring Rhetoric, Pigsty Reality

For the record - Victor Davis Hanson: When Reality Catches up to Rhetoric

St Odo of Cluny

Lest we forget, today is the Feast Day of Saint Odo of Cluny. Recall if you will that the Holy Father lifted up Odo as a model worthy of our admiration and imitation here. So, if it is obvious that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, recall St. Odo of Cluny.

After all, it won't be too long before our bones will, if the Father wills it, end up in a place like the above ossuary. If, that is, we are so blessed.

Burne-Jones PRB

The Merciful Knight (1863) - Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Royal - MSM Follies

For the record: Robert Royal at The Catholic Thing on Sowers of Discord and mooncalf reporters.

Holman Hunt - PRB

May Morning on Magdalen Tower (1889-90) - William Holman Hunt

Rubin -Hassan Told Us Why

Prof. Barry Rubin explains the obvious to the obtuse: Why I Murdered 13 American Soldiers at Fort Hood: Nidal Hassan Explains It All to You. Just follow his luciferian logic. It is impeccable.

Sigh

Axelrod Signals Obama Will Try to Strip Abortion Language From Health Care Bill

Timor Mortis Conturbat Me

A central tenet of my book, A Little Guide for Your Last Days, is that popular culture does its level best to distract us from the fact of our mortality.

Daniel Mitsui does a great service to anyone who is paying attention this month, November, the month of the holy souls. He is staring straight at the realities that so many spend so much time and money trying to avoid. Case in point, a phrase that was common in medieval poetry, timor mortis conturbat me, "the fear of death disturbs me."

Unlike that jingle we all learned from our college English professors, "carpe diem," this phrase was much more on the tongues and in the hearts and minds of the medieval person. Birth, aging, and death were daily and unavoidable realities, unlike today in which all three are dutifully (and profitably) hidden from normal sight.

Let us remember the One Who gives us - on loan - being, our ontology, as philosophers call it, and begin the arduous work of living into our mortality. I am, if you will permit, an ersatz apostle to those who say with honesty, "the fear of death disturbs me." Those who have the fortitude not to fear death, God bless thee.

But for those who do, and for those who will but do not yet, be comforted. And pick up a copy of A Little Guide for Your Last Days. It is not a sin to feel fear (think about Our Lord in Gethsemane, after all).

Timor mortis conturbat me.