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March 26, 2007
Potpourri
Cleaning out the emailbox...
Nice piece from Mercartor.net on finding echoes of Flannery O'Connor in Jerusalem
John McMullen is a theology teacher at Mater Dei High School in Evansville who has now published two books of historical fiction, inspired by events that occurred in these parts:
and now The Last Blackrobe of Indiana and the Potawatomi Trail of Death:
...a true story of a French attorney-turned missionary priest, Benjamin Petit, and his mission to the Diocese of Vincennes, Indiana. Under the urging of Bishop Simon Brute, Petit joined the northern Indiana Potawatomi tribes in 1837, a year before their forced removal west. McMullen retells the story of Petit, who traveled with the Potawatomi and became part of their story.
New blogs:
Apostle to Suburbia is also a columnist, and would like to hear from other Seattle-area bloggers!
Real Clear Religion has a new look.
Reader Julia sends along this link to an article in the NYReview of Books and says:
I was browsing the New York Review of Books and happened upon this interesting bit on King Lear, the torture of Guy Fawkes and the danger of being kind to traitors (recusants?) I've read the recent books on Shakespeare and his Catholicism and thought you might find this recognition by a non-Catholic scholar to be of interest.
The piece is mainly about the uses of power in Shakespeare and ends with the kindnesses to the tortured Glouster that have no political motive and are very dangerous to the kind-hearted persons
Chris Johnson would like us to know:
Episcopalians may have a lot of problems these days but they do one thing better than anyone else. Church desecration.
Posted by Amy Welborn | Permalink
Comments
The older I get the more disgusted I get with celebrities. Chris Johnson's report on Sir Elton's birthday bashes just disgusts me. It's interesting that so many celebrities publicly disdain religion yet love to preach their version of excessive consumerism and narcissim. I'm sure all those stars are very conscious of global warming and have attended several gazillion dollar a plate dinners that serve whatever poor people's cause yet they still throw massively expensive parties that they jet into from all over the world; the cost of one outfit alone could probably feed a third world country family of 4 for months, and still people idolize them!!! I don't get it. Okay venting done, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Posted by: thomps at Mar 26, 2007 3:52:27 PM
Great tip on NYT Review, thanks! Ties into things I've been reading recently on the moral life and by which authority we act. Benedict's major theme, the dictatorship of relativism, echoes Lear's "..which is the justice, which is the thief?". It called to mind for me Alasdair MacIntyre's embrace of Thomism (he entitled one of his books "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?"). Decades ago his realistic appraisal of our morally untethered culture prompted him to imagine waiting not for Godot but a new St. Benedict! Be careful what you pray for eh? The Marxist gets the Rottweiler!
Seriously tho,' the Catholic imagination is the salt the wound needs to heal (Shakespeare's flax and eggs provide a bundle more sacramental symbolism too, as we move into Easter, Isaiah's 'bruised reed' 'n all...and some still deny he was a Catholic phuey!).
MacIntyre's point of departure isn't original tho', he owes a great deal to G.E.M. Anscombe's 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy that resurrected Aristotle's virtue ethic (and debunked 400 years of our Western philosophy of ethics).
As Benedict's life work consistently shows, the modern world suffers a kind of iconoclasm of the spirit, as D.C. Schindler's recent perceptive essay demonstrates, by taking us back in history, (not as Anscombe does to lay blame at the Reformers feet when their "activist judges" reinterpreted God's constitution to mean the Founder made us humans feckless - too dumb to recognize his will or act on it) but to Galileo. No really, folks, while he was right about the sun, he got nearly everything else wrong:
"According to Galileo, “that and no other is in the proper sense to be called cause, at whose presence the effect always follows, and at whose removal the effect disappears.” The difference between cause as defined here and in the classical view is striking. Cause for Galileo is not what accounts for an effect, but what produces an effect, and indeed does so wholly through direct, material contact."
The essay pulls out Shakespeare's same recognition of cause and effect. Whenever the cause is human hubris, the effect is brutality. When the cause is the divine image, the effect is loving compassion.
Neat! And thanks again.
P.S. The Bard's eye-ball gouging has a long Byzantine tradition, perhaps most pertinently Constantine V's blinding of the usurper Artasbasdos for restoring the veneration of images. An illustration in the Chludov Psalter likens the spotting of Christ on the cross with the hyssop branch soaked in vinegar to the despoiling of the icons with sponges soaked in whitewash. Perhaps Benedict had such an image in mind when he penned his message for Lent: “They shall look on Him whom they have pierced” thus the MP would be an act of restoration perhaps (undoing a kind of iconoclasm)? Makes sense to me, even if I'm not likely to ask for it for my own parish.
Posted by: Clare Krishan at Mar 26, 2007 5:37:24 PM
The Bertelson article on the "Jerusalem Syndrome" and O'Connor is nicely echoed in a small film starring Ian Holm and a host of our best character actors, The Emperor’s New Clothes.
One to watch with a spouse when all the kids are asleep. Not because it's racy; but because it's a story told well at, well, adult tempo. (No reason to put up with, "It's boring!") Great score by Natalie Portman, as usual.
Posted by: Athos at Mar 26, 2007 6:19:49 PM
Gerard's book as a priest in Elizabethan England has just been re-published by Family Publications in Oxford, England.
See www.familypublications.co.uk
Posted by: Peter Cosgrove at Mar 26, 2007 7:26:03 PM
