A few odds and ends run into on the web:
- This rather amazing article about St. Paul’s School suggests another side of the problems Episcopalians face (and often embrace). Soft religion and soft education do away with things like standards that help people resist temptation. That’s likely to mean institutional corruption of the crudest kind.
- A quotation from the objectionable Mary Robinson, former UN human rights commissioner and whatnot, that I imagine reflects the attitude in such circles: “the chief advantage of [subsidiarity] seems to be its capacity to mean all things to all interested parties—simultaneously.” (Cited in a paper called Subsidiarity: Sop or Substance.)
- On the other hand, Jeff Mirus at CatholicCulture.org suggests why subsidiarity is necessary—people who dominate big impersonal organizations that dominate everything else get there because they like that sort of thing.
- Some “growing pains” of multiculturalism etc. at Columbia University: complaints by Jewish students about personal abuse from anti-Zionist professors. Columbia is the most Jewish of major American universities, and it was the academic home of Edward Said of “orientalism” fame. It seems that’s not the happiest of combinations—by importing the world without insisting on any overriding loyalty the school has imported the world’s conflicts.
- Nat Hentoff on the Swiftboat vets. There aren’t many leftists like him.
- For a trip down memory lane, here’s Stalin’s obituary from The New York Times. I wonder what they said in the “MISSING TEXT” section?
- Is Society Controllable, an essay from the EWTN library. It’s not a great essay, but the author does go through some of the basic ways in which society is not in fact controllable and why that should matter to Catholics thinking about the social implications of their faith. In brief, the post-50s tendency to emphasize structural transformation over personal conversion doesn’t make sense, even from the standpoint of social concern, because personal conversion produces reliably good results that diffuse elsewhere while attempts at structural transformation don’t.
Look at this. Look what this senior Anglican is saying.
Incredible, shocking comments by a highly-placed Anglican in the U.K. are discussed here and here:
“I see a time of great persecution coming, which will drive Christianity all but underground in the West. I believe this will primarily take the form of social and economic persecution, where Christians will be ridiculed for their faith and pressurised into making it a purely private matter. Meanwhile the established Church will continue to implode and self destruct.”
They know it’s coming. They know it’s coming and still they can’t stop it.
What in the world—what in the WORLD!—does that mean?
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Yet more odds & ends: Can Belgium allow referendums? Can we?
“Thus the people of this nether land [i.e., Belgium] will not get the chance to decide their future because their masters are frightened of the choice they might make.” (—blogger Gawain)
Of course Brussels could simply do what D.C. does—allow them, then immediately strike them down.
The other side are about imposing their views and plans by main force whether or not people like them (the people are the enemy, you see—or white Christian ones are, at any rate) and therefore they don’t like referendums. That September referendum in Louisiana against “homosexual marriage” which passed 80-20 was stricken down on a technicality in a matter of days by a leftist court—it seems the wording in it had included both “homosexual marriage” and “homosexual civil unions,” and the judge agreed with the leftist challenge—prepared months in advance, of course, just in case it passed—which contended that a referendum couldn’t be about more than one subject at a time. And of course Arizona’s proposition 200, which said very reasonably that illegal aliens couldn’t vote in U.S. elections or be eligible for certain welfare benefits meant for U.S. citizens, and which passed overwhelmingly (even getting 47% of the Hispanic vote in that state), was stricken down by the courts—again within days of passing—on yet more laughable technicalities. Today we learn from this newspaper article how the judge (a Bush appointee who is obviously doing the boss’s and Rove’s bidding where immigration is concerned) is telling the Governor and the Attorney General which provisions of the referendum they can enforce and which they can’t. (Three guesses which ones they can’t …) I received this link by e-mail from someone who was excited over the state A.G.’s seeming to be standing up the the federal judge. But on reading the whole article it couldn’t be more obvious who’s in charge in the state of Arizona on this matter, and who’s crawling prostrate on the ground before him, begging and groveling.
This is the mailed fist. This is the iron boot-heel on your prostrate neck.
Rise up. Throw it off. If we act together it’s not that hard to do.
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.