Sifting and winnowing the ruins of Sterling Hall

If Madison was indeed the Athens of the Midwest, as we claimed at the time, the bombing brought down not only one of its buildings, but its Periclean Age. --Heinz Stucki (PhD’71)

Kermode to Chaucer

On authors in my recommended reading.

His publisher, Alan Samson, at Weidenfeld & Nicolson said Kermode would probably be most remembered for The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, as well as for Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats. --Alison Flood (via Arts & Letters Daily)

[Adam] Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “turned the tables” on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that society enslaved man to vanity and ambition. Smith argued, instead, that society taught man to be good. This tuition started from man’s capacity for “sympathy”: his ability to feel what another man feels. ...
     Smith’s greatest work, The Wealth of Nations, was a “very violent attack” on Britain’s commercial policies, which misdirected the nation’s energies, weakened its colonies and plunged it into deep rivalries with its neighbours, all in the mistaken belief that a nation’s wealth lay in the gold and silver it hoarded. ... --The Economist

in a paper in the journal [Early Science and Medicine], [Michael H.] Shank suggests that Copernicus’s monumental On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres may have been a response to commentaries then circulating in late-medieval European universities. In particular, Shank cites the work of Francesco Capuano, a Padua teacher of astronomy and the mathematical sciences, and a contemporary of Copernicus. --Terry Devitt

Evidently, they didn't have spell check in Chaucer's day! --Ziggy's parrot

Paul McCartney, May 24, 2003

Opening the concert

and closing it.

Hardball, backhanded

Rush Limbaugh has an IQ probably as high as anybody‘s around. --Chris Matthews

Anti-Missal defense

Terry Mattingly at Get Religion examines this basic Associated Press story on the upcoming revised liturgical translation and declares it AP’s tour de force on the Roman Missal.

What would you expect in such a story?

* A quote from the omnipresent Father Thomas Reese of Georgetown University, the patron saint of mainstream journalists in need of a quick quote that is, roughly 90 percent of the time, critical of the Vatican.

Check. In fact, Reese is granted the first direct quote in the story.

* Defenders of Rome are allowed only bland, vague, dull paraphrased quotations in defense of their actions.

Check. The story does not contain a single direct quote from a Catholic expert who defends the new Roman Missal.

* Material produced by an outspoken bishop who was on the losing side of the ecclesiastical wrestling match that produced the new texts. If possible, he should be cited in a way that identifies him as an expert on the topic, yet without clearly identifying his partisan role in the debate.

Check. Check.

That bishop being, of course, Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa.

Lack of thought crime

Sunday's New York Times editorializes on the U.S. Justice Department's decision to not bring any charges against former Congressman Tom Delay.

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been “found innocent.” But many of Mr. DeLay’s actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

Wrong Pew, Wright church

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane is surprised.

According to the Pew Research Center and its affiliated Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, nearly one in five people said they think [President Barack] Obama is a Muslim, even though he has claimed Christianity as his religion for most of his adult life.

He seems to think those folks were not paying close attention.

Obama was a member of [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright's Baptist church for more than 20 years before being forced to repudiate Wright in the midst of his campaign for president.

I'll be surprised if Rev. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ is actually Baptist.

Adler to Mill

On authors in my recommended reading:

I remember the prophetic words of the great Dr. Mortimer Adler, well-known philosopher and educator, who remarked in a discussion symposium in the 1980s that unless we get our immigration policy under control, we will risk dividing the country and even severely damaging our economy and cultural way of life. He was not taking sides; he was merely stating his observation. --Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki

Lucretia didn’t want to encourage her precocious daughter by giving her paper to write on, so Wharton would take the plain brown paper off parcels that came to the house, spread the giant sheets out on the floor and write on them in long columns. She wrote her first novel this way, at 11. --Katie Roiphe

Few got so much as a glimpse of her [Emily Dickinson's] white dress—as an adult she only wore white—and only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, hundreds of others were discovered in a wooden chest, and a new legend grew up, sweet with pathos, of a woman too delicate for this world, disappointed in love. --The Economist

it is clear that he [John Stuart Mill] wanted freedom both from certain laws (coercive powers of government) and from certain societal and moral restraints (noncoercive forms of social opinion) of which he happened personally to disapprove. With strategic intent he continued to conflate the two, and in so doing he pushed the ideal of freedom too far. --William D. Gairdner

ICELation

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article linked in this earlier post, our pastor mentions that he sent a letter to parishioners on the pending changes in the English translation of the Mass. Here is his letter.

Those changes and what lead up to them are also the subject of this Adoremus Bulletin article.

They differ on almost every point, even on history. Father Jurkus portrays a change in approach sprung in 1999 by "Pope John Paul II and, reportedly, a smaller group of Vatican experts...". The Adoremus article notes that "Pope John Paul had called for review and reform of the post-conciliar liturgy in his 1988 apostolic letter Vicesimus Quintus Annus."

Guatemalan Flight's Data-Recording Parrot Holds Clues To Crash

Video at The Onion [Warning: L (language), S (stereotyping)]

A Hitch in materialism

Peter Popham writes in The Independent on Christopher Hitchens facing death.

Death is a problem for our age as it was not for ages past, precisely because (speaking of the non-religious majority) we behave as if it were a problem we had already solved. Church-goers are confronted week in week out with images of agonising death, talk of the "mystery" of death, exhortations to prepare for it, prayers for those approaching it. What Larkin called the "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade" of religion serves to soften us up, week after week, to its odiousness and inevitability, the wormwood and the gall.

Makes me wonder what church he's not going to.

(via Althouse)

Eliot to Scott

On authors in my recommended reading:

Among his many other achievements, Eliot was one of the mid-twentieth century’s most important conservative voices, not just in his criticism but also, of course, in his poetry, not least the Four Quartets. If Eliot is further connected with anti-Semitic utterances, it will require care beyond most critics’ capability to ensure that his other qualities, including his conservatism, are not simultaneously muddied. --Douglas Murray

Like Lenin said, look for the person who will benefit. And you will, uh, you know, you'll, uh, you know what I'm trying to say... --Jeffrey 'The Dude' Lebowski

When Marx talks about private property, he means that's short for private ownership of the means of production, the private ownership of capital, and only that. --Mortimer J. Adler

In truth, Scott’s influence went well beyond a few now-unfashionable Victorians. Some modern critics are struck above all by his adventurousness and the way in which the “Waverley” series as a whole opened up all sorts of possibilities for Victorian and later novelists. --The Economist

Flight or fight

Fran Golden reports on a fight that broke out on Lufthansa Flight LH687. (via Hitha on the Go)

What if they'd just said 'Wait a second'

Our pastor's July 11, 2010 bulletin column announced,

The Priests’ Alliance will be sponsoring a workshop about how best to begin to implement the new translations for the Mass prayers which Rome has mandated to be implemented in Advent 2011.

Any longtime readers might recall Father David Cooper's remarks at a March 22, 2004 Voice Of The Faithful meeting at my parish. Among other things he said were that the Milwaukee Archdiocese Priests Alliance (MAPA) had as part of its mission to be a "voice for the voiceless" in the Church, and among the voiceless were the pro-choice. I had looked back at MAPA's minutes from early 2004, and there was no indication that any leader or member raised any concern about the proposal that the organization be a voice for pro-choice Catholics.

By contrast, I have the impression many MAPA priests still mourn the aborted 1998 Mass translation.

Oates to the King James Version

On authors in my recommended reading:

The temptation in reading criticism by an author better known for her novels and stories is to inspect it for clues to her own work. And you’ll find them here, in Oates’s attention to the claustrophobia of small towns and families, the warping influences of class and sex, the power and powerlessness of women, the persistent distrust of organized religion and of American mythologizing. --Louisa Thomas

That Harry Angstrom, he’s my favorite character in contemporary fiction. --Bugs Bunny

Article I, section 10 [of the Constitution], for instance, unambiguously forbids the states from passing any “Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” How do we get from there to state moratoria on mortgage payments during an economic downturn? Thanks, as usual, to the hocus-pocus of the Supreme Court. --Andrew C. McCarthy

Nor is it the case that the King James Version’s power is merely a product of florid language. Indeed its translators generally preferred simpler vocabulary and straightforward diction ... .
     And, in any case ... it sounded archaic when it first appeared in 1611. --Barton Swaim

Closing the Mass with a choke

There is a two day training session that starts today on the upcoming implementation of a revised English translation of the Mass. The workshop is the subject of this report by Annysa Johnson in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Our pastor was among the local priests quoted.

Some pastors have already begun preparing their parishioners for the changes, which will ultimately require an investment in new missals and hymnals.

"Much of the music that has come up over the last 30 years will no longer be useable," said Father Alan Jurkus of St. Alphonsus Parish in Greendale, who sent out a letter this month notifying members of the coming changes.

Jurkus is encouraging parishioners to accept the revision as an opportunity to grow in their faith. But he harbors his own concerns.

"The bottom line for me is why. Why, with everything else that's going on in the church, do we have to rub salt in the wounds?"

When I consider what he says on liturgy, I also consider what he posted April 24, 2004 on the local Priests Alliance website's discussion board. His post was in a thread on the Vatican Instruction On certain matters to be observed or to be avoided regarding the Most Holy Eucharist.

This is a decree which reminds me of John XXIII's instruction in 1958 or '59 demanding that LATIN be used in all seminary instruction. I remember it as the last gasp of the era before Vatican II. I hope this is the last gasp of the era before Vatican III.

Update: In the Comments, Dad29 says, inter alia, that the decree Father Jurkus refers to is Veterum Sapietia. It is available in English at Adoremus Bulletin.


Update 2: Speaking of "everything else that's going on in the church", I am reminded of the Decree Quoque Plures Dulcis Panis.

A legend in its own mind

Helen Hull Hitchcock reviews 'Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, edited by Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering' in Adoremus Bulletin, May 2010

Will the Second Vatican Council be known in the future as a reform council? Or will history judge its vision a failure?

Or a reform council without a vision of how to produce the desired change.

Golding to The Koran

On authors in my recommended reading:

With the exception of 'Lord of the Flies', Golding’s strange, haunting, difficult novels have few readers these days, and his post­humous reputation is neglected and in decline. --William Boyd

Since Herbert Butterfield vivisected Macaulay’s 'History of England' in the 1930s, it has been derided as a canonical example of “Whig history”—that venerable sectarian mythology designed to champion liberalism and Protestantism as the twin engines of human progress. --Jeffrey Collins

Jane Austen's Fight Club, TwoTurntablesNMic, at You Tube (via InstaPundit)

In contrast to Lewis [Bernard Lewis in 'Faith and Power'], who depicts Islam as aggressive from the start, Donner [Fred M. Donner in 'Muhammed and the Believers'] shows that contemporary followers of other religions initially, and perhaps even for several generations, regarded Islam as an open-minded and not specially threatening movement with universalist aspirations. --Max Rodenbeck