Looks are Deceptive (I hope)

How it sometimes looks without the rose coloured glasses, if you know what I mean. [h/t: Amy Welborn]

Making all their nowhere plans

Fouad Ajama, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, writing in the Wall Street Journal, paints a lucid portrait of Islam's Nowhere Men.

Mr. Ajama does not write the WSJ article to chide, deride, or sneer. One might as well write a similar article about the bar-hoppers of Dupont Circle or Clarendon. What he does so well is bring into high relief the Scimitar Nowhere Men's malaise with the secularity of the modern world and their thirst for transcendence.

Since they are not in the sphere of the influence of the Gospel, they must settle for that of the false transcendence of the Scimitar. And that is not only sad. It is tragic.

A Study in Contrasts

For the record: from The Iconoclast's Jerry Gordon, The Scimitar Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry.

For any who are interested in René Girard's mimetic theory, what you read in Gordon's must-read article is the difference between the Gospel influenced Western culture (tainted though it is with pagan remnants and/or recrudescence) and a conventional culture - the Scimitar - with little or no Gospel influence. That is, the latter is a near-pristine cultural expression of Girard's "primitive sacred."

Stealing Beauty

Learning from the Masters at the National Gallery of Art.

Tea Parties, Mimetic Rivals, and Hope

From a mimetic theory point of view, it was predictable that the tea party phenomenon occur. With the election to the presidency of the United States of the most leftist, progressivist, pro-abortion, socialist-like, and oligarchical candidate imaginable, there was an inevitability to the rise of the tea party movement.

Some, wrongly, want to accuse the tea party folk of having surreptitious racist motives. This is nearly as Procrustean an accusation as, say, the New Atheists' accusation that anyone who does not view reality like them solely through the empirical method criteria are "dim".

Mimetic theory posits the "problem of the doubles" in all conventional cultural structures. One might assume that a Democrat president in the Oval Office would find his "model/rival" across the aisle in Congress in the form of Republicans. The problem with this assumption is that there is an increasing awareness that in actuality there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Hence, the inevitability of the tea party phenomenon: a structurally authentic "double" had to arise in the mimetic swirl, and it has.

Is this a good sign? Not really. I place no hopes in the tea party uprisings, at least no hope for it to help bring about a renewed and vital Christendom. At best, it may like Pentheus in Euripides' play The Bacchae, put the clamps on the skid into the sacrificial vortex for a while. The neo-pagan resurgence coupled with the Scimitar's demographic victory in the West seem all too preponderant in force and scope for the largely middle to older-aged tea party folk.

That does not mean, however, there is no hope. Rather, it means that unless you want to have your hopes dashed once again, you had best place hope - and faith and charity - on sources of true transcendence still availing us, even in these darkening ages.

Catholic Paradoxes

Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, California, explains why sick and dying pilgrims to Lourdes, even if they are not physically healed, are not disappointed.

Friday Follies

Daniel's Answer to the King (1890) - Briton Rivière

Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post warns that it is Time to Plan for War.

Chuck Colson quotes Soren Kierkegaard: “Suppose,” Kierkegaard wrote, “someone invented…a convenient little talking tube which could be heard over the whole land. I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged.” I would argue it is past the national stage; it is now global derangement.

I applaud Franklin Graham and James Dobson who see the danger of those who are using institutional authority to expunge the Christian faith from the public forum.

Andrew Breitbart: 'The Left is, in essence, the Media.'

Peters and Pipes - Ducking the evidence

Appeasement doesn't work with the Scimitar. And so long as the MSM, the DHS, and the Last Self-Help Administration do not begin with the assumption of jihad, we will be caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption as unwieldy as it is incapable of providing legitimate defense. [h/t re: Pipes article - Gil Bailie]

Of course, they do, in actuality. But they won't say this to the unwashed masses. The oligarchy presumes that the redneck, Uncle Tom clientele will unleash untold violence upon the dearly protected of Saudi petro interests, not knowing the secret, inner workings of the Gospel that always precludes a Christian form of the Scimitar jihadista falderall that increasingly dots the news. If only we remembered, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, there is indeed legitimate defense.

UPDATE: Prof. Barry Rubin fleshes out the ramifications of such enforced blindness here.

Charles Taylor - Future of the Secular

For those who have time, listening to Charles Taylor speak on "The Future of the Secular - the U. S. Case" is enlightening. Whether or not you agree with all of his points, one senses a mind that can grasp our secularist times far better, far more deeply than the ostensible movers and shakers. Here.

Blinders Firmly in Place - MSM

Spencer states what is too obvious for the mainstream media to see right in front of their faces here.

Graham - Scimitar 'gets a pass'

Franklin Graham isn't afraid to return stiff-arms with the White House, or to call a Scimitar a scimitar:

Evangelical leader Rev. Franklin Graham issued his toughest remarks yet Monday on the administration's role in revoking his invitation to speak at the Pentagon's National Day of Prayer event, charging that President Obama is "giving Islam a pass" rather than speaking openly about the "horrific" treatment women and minorities receive in many Muslim countries.

In an exclusive telephone interview with Newsmax.TV, Graham called revoking his invitation to the prayer service "a slap at all evangelical Christians."

And he clearly placed the blame on the Obama administration, telling Newsmax that the Pentagon would never revoke such an invitation without first consulting with the White House.

"I'm being restricted from my religious rights, and from what I believe," Graham warned, as he complained of a growing “secularization” in the government.

He also warned Christian of “coming” persecution for believing in Jesus Christ .. More>>

Dogma, Doctrines, and Clichés, O My

David G. Bonagura, Jr. at The Catholic Thing reminds us that, as opposed to the Kristoffian approach to Catholicism that would peal away the mumbo-jumbo elements of the Church and leave the pristine humanism that the NYT and all progressivists yearn for, the Catholic Church answers most completely the deepest religious needs of a fallen race of human beings here.

By the way, what is it about reductionism that is so attractive to well-schooled, well-fed, well-spoken persons? I don't see the appeal to trying to see reality solely in the Procrustean bed of the empirical method; particularly when it comes to anthropology, epistemology, ontology, and soteriology.

Agli Inferi

When I arrived home after a retreat weekend, I caught Benedict XVI on EWTN as he spoke about the Shroud of Turin (just behind him where he sat), Holy Saturday, and our Savior's entering our deepest mortal fears. Via ZENIT:

"[The Shroud] witnesses precisely to the unique and unrepeatable interval in the history of humanity and the universe, in which God, in Jesus Christ, shared not only our dying, but also our remaining in death. The most radical solidarity."

A voice in the dark

Benedict XVI reflected how in "that 'time-beyond-time' Jesus Christ 'descended into hell' -- 'agli inferi.'"

What does this mean, he asked? "It means that God, made man, went to the point of entering into the extreme and absolute solitude of man, where no ray of love enters, where there is total abandonment without any word of comfort: 'hell' ('gli inferi'). Jesus Christ, remaining in death, has gone beyond the gates of this ultimate solitude to lead us too to go beyond it with him."

The Pope compared this solitude to the childhood experience of fear of the dark, when only the presence of a loved one could bring comfort.

"So, it is exactly this that happened in Holy Saturday," he said. "In the kingdom of death there resounded the voice of God. The unthinkable happened: that Love penetrated 'into hell -- 'negli inferi' -- that in the most extreme darkness of the most absolute human solitude we can hear a voice that calls us and find a hand that takes us and leads us out.

"The human being lives by the fact that he is loved and can love; and if love even has penetrated into the realm of death, then life has also arrived there. In the hour of extreme solitude we will never be alone."

Read more here.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

- William Shakespeare

Wherever Money is Exchanged

And this should close the book on the perfectly timed blizzard of clergy abuse stories featured so prominently in the New York Times during the final days of Lent and leading to Easter. As always, follow the money...