Barclay is on line

Bookmarked for later reading

Barclay's bible study is on line (new testament).

One of the few studies that I can read without becoming an atheist and wanting to throw the book across the room.

The Pope speaks (continued)

The Anchoressblog has more on what the Pope said.

The point is that the Pope was stressing God's mercy and a personal relationship to Jesus.

The Holy Father continues to speak with a sharp sense of urgency:

“Yes, you have to come to know Jesus in the Catechism – but it is not enough to know Him with the mind: it is a step. However, it is necessary to get to know Jesus in dialogue with Him, talking with Him in prayer, kneeling. If you do not pray, if you do not talk with Jesus, you do not know Him. You know things about Jesus, but you do not go with that knowledge, which He gives your heart in prayer. Know Jesus with the mind – the study of the Catechism: know Jesus with the heart – in prayer, in dialogue with Him. This helps us a good bit, but it is not enough. There is a third way to know Jesus: it is by following Him. Go with Him, walk with Him.”

heh.

Yesterday, in prayer (and believe me, as an ADHD person, my "quiet" time with the Lord tends to be ten seconds) I asked the Lord, and he "spoke" back to me in my heart. (No, I don't hear voices. God works through our minds and consciences)... Much of my prayer distractions are memories of things I did: when I was awkward socially, or patient decisions that went wrong (usually not because I did anything wrong but because sometimes medicines etc don't work in time and we confront the fact that as healers sometimes we can't heal).

And the Lord  "showed" me he was there with me during those times, and loved me in these incidents.
 

Boing!

The incident lasted ten seconds.

However, I "pushed" the conversation, and after that the "answer" was my own thoughts only.

now, our own thoughts aren't necessarily bad, and sometimes God speaks in the voice of our conscience: The best example of this is in the Don Camillo book series, where the priest "talks" to Christ on the cross, and the author explains it is the voice of his conscience in the silence of prayer.

But the conscience said the obvious things, so it was different.

Sigh.

Yesterday, I also posted two nasty comments on "new age" type youtube films. The comments were full of "isn't this wonderful" and "this change in attitude cured my cancer" etc.

I can't stand this for two reasons:

One: it is magical thinking. Nah, the doctors, chemotherapy and radiation didn't help, it was your guru who cured you. Right. The problem is often these types stop the therapy that is really helping their disease.

Two: The new age types preach "sweetness and light" and "compassion" and aim at the bored yuppies who are aging and trying to confront their own morality, with the message that they are wonderful and that when everyone in the world changes to this "new consciousness" they too will be wonderful and we will live in utopia.

One is remindeded of the sardonic Walker Percy's observation that "compassion leads to the gas chamber".

The doctor who snipped the necks of live babies now claims he was doing a good thing and curing poverty by doing so, and it's an open secret that a lot of the green types will cure poverty via population control, with it's fruits: abortion and later euthanasia of the elderly who cost the gov't money to care for them because the family ties were destroyed, along with their children, by the abortion/hatred of children of the baby boomer types.

Sigh.

When the new age types start living in the slums maybe I'll listen to them. right now, the Evangelicals are teaching practical rules of living in the slums of Manila and because it preaches hard work and running a business is serving the deity, it is the religion of choice for the growing middle class. (the Catholics teach compassion and giving charity, but only a few dare to name names to point out which good catholic politician is stealing the money supposed to go to the poor). So the middle class tend to be Chinese (Confucian ethics) and/or Protestant.

And the new age types in Manila tend to be the elites, so the newspapers in English push this mindset to the same elites who want their fancy cellphones and fashion. Sigh.

Yes, I go to the malls, but it is a blasphemy knowing that the slums often mysteriously "burn down" to clear the people so they can build new neighborhoods or stores. Sigh.

Never mind. I will sit here in my rich house (built with my husband's savings) and give fifty cents to the beggars when they come, at least until I run out of my own money. (My step son and wife don't believe in giving money: It only encourages them not to work...but what about when they need money for medicine?). Sigh.

What the Pope said

Archbishop Chaput's take here.

Culture change

ProfessorPodles has an article about a book by an Anglo who grew up on the Navajo reservation. Go and read it.

A lot of it sounds accurate: The bullying is common and brutal because AmerIndians don't use physical punishment for bad children. Instead they "tease" them. The child is not supposed to show anger, so it comes out with rage incidents.

So when the police chief's son, abused by an alcoholic father (who later killed himself) and an alcoholic mother (who died in a car accident) later turned on his classmates (even though he was by then home schooled) and shot them in Red Lake, I was not surprised.

And the Chippewa were fishermen, not warriors, but never mind.

It sounds brutal in the book, maybe because he was an "outsider" who confronted different ways of reacting (i.e. an "ain't it awful" book, which nowadays is called realism. It is not, of course.).

So what do you do when you work with a dysfunctional culture? Or a culture that functions in the old days but when confronted with the modern world morphs into a severely dysfunctional culture?

Here is what I wrote as a comment:

Sounds about right, and the irony is that the Navajos are more in touch with their traditions than other tribes (i.e. language–we doctors often need a translator; the death taboos, clothing, way of life).

The “hazing” is because many Indian tribes don’t use physical punishment to correct their children: They “tease” children to control behavior.

But Navajos were never warriors, but sheep-herders, so I think the “repression” of masculinity doesn’t fit them like it would the Blackfoot or Apache or Sioux.

The problem is not limited to Indians, or whites: it is culture shock when one meets a “superior” technological culture. How do you cope/adjust without losing your soul: a struggle that goes back at least to the time of the Macabees or the Roman conquests of Gaul, and is behind today’s jihadi suicide bomber….

Multiculturalism suggests not to encourage change allowing people to live their ancestral life (for example,South African apartheid), others merely insist the child change to the dominant culture (Han Chinese in Tibet, Amerindian boarding schools).

I was told to read Tony Hillerman to understand Navajo culture. The film “Smoke Signals” and the Australian film “Once was warriors” also were recommended to understand tribal culture in transition.

Mary's Assumption

Most of the "jesus seminar" and PC guys are busy deconstructing Jesus (their latest spokeman: a Muslim non biblical scholar who insists Jesus was a jihadi type revolutionary, of course).

But although they often wax lyrically about newfound "gnostic" gospels (think fuzzy new age ideas: if you do x you become a superman spiritually, much better than the rest of them idiots).

But historial Phillip Jenkins is writing a series of blogposts about the other non biblical "gospels" and has been busy pointing out that up to the reformation, they were well known and loved, since often they contained not fuzzy mysticism but charming folk tales of Jesus and his family and friends.

Today's episode is about Mary's Assumption (or in Orthodoxy, her "dormition") which says Jesus permitted her body to be taken up to heaven with her.

At least in official doctrines, those ideas are still, today, firmly held by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches – think of perhaps two-thirds of the world’s Christians. As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that “we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” Catholic and Orthodox alike mark the date of the Assumption, August 15, as a great feast of the church.
Given the later impact of those ideas, we might think that works like the De Transitu would be worth intense study, especially given the fascination with ancient apocryphal and alternative gospels. Oddly, though, they have been badly understudied, even in the standard works on New Testament Apocrypha. (The great exception is the work of Stephen J. Shoemaker, in books like The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, 2002).

the reason the PC anti Jesus types don't study this is that they might see how ordinary Christians believe: Mary emphasizes Jesus as part of a human family, thereby making family life a way to heaven; it also emphasizes the communal aspects of our approach to God (reformers and evangelicals stress a personal relationship to God, and this emphasis ignores how people live, in families etc. the stress on individualism fits the rich yuppies, but with family life going down the tubes, may explain why the PC western religion , and the evangelical religion, nowadays has little  to do with family and sex).

Bookmarked for later reading

via instapundit:

Posted at 7:18 am by Glenn Reynolds  

CULTURE: “I’m looking for early symptoms of acceptance of euthanasia, which I believe will creep in as we Baby Boomers become more and more of a burden.”
Related: Values Conflict At The End Of Life.
Also: A Renewed Push For End-of-Life Discussions.

24

Posted at 7:11 am by Glenn Reynolds   

 

Quotes of the day

Best quote of the day:

VDH:

In terms of repugnance, Miley Cyrus was the anorexic and mobile version of Jabba the Hutt.

He then goes on to explain:

She has neither the training nor the discipline to go formal retro. She surely was not going to appear in her vinyl bikini, put on ballet shoes, and do a bit from Swan Lake (now that would be shocking). Nor was she going to offer “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi, waving her huge foam finger in Mitch Miller sing-along fashion. That too these days would be shocking.
So what is a poor multimillionaire celebrity to do in the age of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, when slumming has become passé and the audience has become post-decadent? Just say, “And you idiots are paying for this”?
There are no large cultural stimuli to force Cyrus the Younger to question society’s classical norms. No struggle to win the vote for women and then blacks. No Verdun, with a million dead in the muck. No Great Depression, with rampant starvation.
Instead we live in a psychodramatic age of virtual oppression and feigned want, in which “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is updated with Oprah’s melodramatic account of being denied a closer look at a $38,000 Swiss handbag. Our version of D-Day is the question whether or not to lob a few cruise missiles at Bashar Assad to make Obama’s redlines red. Soup kitchens and five-cent apples have transmogrified into electronic EBT cards and Obamaphones. Where is the elemental inspiration, the existential need to tap popular anguish and turn it into revolutionary artistic expression?

more comment here at CWR:

The poet (and critic, composer, and teacher) Dana Gioia noted the following a few years ago:

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial. ... But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

Cyrus and Company (the many, many people making money off of her twerking ways) are cynical hucksters constantly peddling stuff, stuff, and more stuff. Their lives are essentially a continual informercial and their wares are themselves: enticing, empty creatures whose cynicism is matched by our consumerism. Having little interest in reality (in what really is), ignoring history and real culture, and disdaining thought and reason, they cannot provide anything resembling a "cogent view of the good life."

 

Little Girls proudly chosing to not grow up

via TeaAtTrianon

IR has an essay on the "Girls" who never grow up.

...What’s wrong with these Girls (and their boys) is that they lack character. Their easygoing world of privilege has saved them from any experiences that might build it. Their affluent parents are hardly “role models,” and they’re too flaccid to give their kids the “tough love” they need. Aristotle was right: your skill at soundly using your moral freedom depends a lot on how you were raised.
We also see plenty of evidence that what these girls really want is meaningful work and personal love. But they have not the first clue on how to get them....

Last words of a poet

Seamus Heaney's last words were texted to his wife: Do Not be Afraid.

stuff

A bunch of long, subtle essays which need to be read slowly and pondered on.

-------------------


Via Instapundit: SultanKnishBlog discusses "why we are all Japanese now":

summary:The essay points out that modernism has resulted in a culture made for the value system of unattached, selfish young men....

 To understand where Japan and Europe are, imagine an America decaying with no new ideas, losing its religion and values, losing its economy and finally its sanity, becoming coldly conformist and inhuman, while its families fall apart and its youth retreats into their own makeshift worlds. That reality is closer to home than we might like to think. America is destroying its values on an industrial scale. In a post-industrial nation, the destruction of values has become one of its chief industries.

As a wise old Indian once wrote: Paul VI was right...

------------------------------------------------

Father Z writes that the newage sisters object to the idea of Mary as the equivalent of a "fulla doll", the Muslim version of Barbie, who wears traditional headscarf and modest clothing, but someone noted that was not PC so someone quickly edited it out of the essay (which Father caught on a screen shot, proving that Google is forever).

Yet those of us who actually have worked with pious Muslims think it is a good comparison: what's wrong with the idea of Mary as a pious, modest, and loving mother who cares for her children and family, which in the pre industrial days often meant producing goods for her family and selling some on the side or helping her husband's business? The difference is that family came before career.


Mary was NOT a feminist: She liked men. And women. And children.

The best portrayal of Mary is not in a "religious" movie but in the Nativity story (which alas is boring but unlike "religious" films, doesn't portray Mary as a bloodless icon but as a warm and loving young woman).

So in today's world, one must ask the PC new age sisters:

Who looks more like Mary:

Item one:

 or item two, the most talked about woman of the west?



--------------------------