Google is honoring Marlene Dietrich's 116th birthday today, for some reason. Immediately reminded me of the Peter Murphy tune. Of course.
Well, you either love him or hate him.
Also loved her in Touch of Evil. Great character.
Hey boys and girls, do you know what "Cyber Monday" is great for? Unsubscribing from all those spam or semi-spam emails you're getting.
One of the ways I keep up on what's going on with Rod Dreher is by reading a Topix forum dedicated to him by the residents of St. Francisville. Here's one of the latest entries, suggesting that Dreher flew to Hawaii to bring back a parting gift in the form of a pineapple for his priest who's leaving his backyard church.
The real story will be forgotten, though, while the memory of that picture lives on forever....
The natives were so grateful for his missionary work they gave him a pineapple.
You just can't get a pineapple worth eating around here, you know.
I love some of the stuff that lands in my inbox. It makes me feel so special, like this latest invitation:
Registry of Distinguished Women - Confirm your Free Membership
NAPW [info@happypene.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:08 AM
To: pauli@mugglematters.com
Pauli Congratulations, You've qualified To Join the National Association of Professional Women!
Very Few are selected each year to be included into NAPW.
Please Confirm your Invitation.
http://west21.happypene.com/O0bEW67Iq7iaVnmabrnVKwmr8MIZxcoQ0ir5Pch5HYu62qPPheC58vsKsMkl6wBkqYrZEVS4zDInmidVLbbSLWBaqZz65crB/3OgcE3zjtTOqIUvdxregcTggPPoosPSKF9pSCXC3wAlsP0fMKYrKe/g==
There is only so much time in the day, and yet there are so many people weighing in on the so-called Benedict Option, that there is only one thing we can do. Yes, you guessed it. It's time for... (drum roll) ...Around the Internets Volume 4!!!
For you newer readers, this is a feature I started over a year ago, at which time I described it as "A quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought 'Gee I ought to blog that', etc. over the last 4 or 5 months."
This time I'm not going back months, but only several days. It seems like all kinds of people have felt the urge to weigh in on the so-called Benedict Option despite Tyrell Northcutt's recent recommendation that this topic be discussed only by "friends around a common table". First we hear from Cleveland's own Tom Piatak who coincidentally showed up in AtI, v2. It's fairly short; here are some pertinent excerpts:
It is a little hard to tell exactly what “The Benedict Option” is, but it does seem to involve at least some withdrawal from public life by conservative Christians.
...
....One of the reasons the Republicans find the abortion status quo convenient is because abortion remains a live issue. They know that millions of people vote for Republican candidates because of their pro-life convictions, and they also know that many of these people would stop voting Republican if the party officially became pro-abortion or authoritatively conceded that the battle to give legal protection to the unborn was over. No matter how cynically politicians treat abortion, it is hard to say that any position has become dominant in America when a major political party claims to take the opposite position, its presidents and presidential candidates profess to support the opposite position, and at least some of the justices on the Supreme Court continue to dissent from the decision that is the focus of the opposition. Indeed, no one who pays any attention at all to American life can fail to notice that a substantial portion of the population does not accept the morality of abortion.
If “The Benedict Option” means a withdrawal from public life, that is where I fear it will l lead: with the issue addressed by Obergefell treated as a dead one, both politically and morally. That is not where we are today, whatever the New York Times and the Washington Post may want us to believe. Advocates of “The Benedict Option” may want to consider this before heading for the hills.
Rod Dreher's hobbyhorse snapped under him today. His horse is the "Benedict Option." It is his pathetic attempt to have something to say after he gave up on Christians retaking their own societies. The Benedict option is a call for Christians to withdraw from the public square just as he withdrew to rural Louisiana. It's a cold cruel post Christian world out there so let's just keep a low profile and tend our little common spiritual garden. I don't know if he really believes this, but he has to write something to stay in business.
Today, oblivious to the obvious, he came out with a call for the US to save the remaining Christians of the Middle East. The headline: THE GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS
Can Dreher really be so un-selfaware as to miss the message here?
Clearly, if any group of Christians followed the so called Benedict Option, it is these very victims on the point of extinction. They kept a low profile. They kept to themselves. They cultivated their Christian tradition. They were kind to others. They are the perfect exemplar of the Dreher's mealy-mouth mentality and now they face extinction.
Dreher doesn't seem to know who St. Benedict was in any detail. The founder of Western Monasticism is a poor model for a whole Christian society's withdrawal from an evil society. By definition Monks are not the basis of a reproducing population. Becoming a Monk is rather the point of Monasticism. It depends on a Christian culture to feed it with more recruits.
A further and more important point here is that St. Benedict did not withdraw from a pagan society. He operated in a largely Christian one that became more, not less Christian as time went by. There was no organized opposition to the monastic movement until the reformation.
It isn’t clear what effect the Benedict Option would have on American political life. Even if one envisions the Benedict Option as “strategic attentiveness” to the cultivation of virtue, rather than “strategic retreat,” as Alan Jacobs, another prominent Christian writer has advocated, the Benedict Option implies a reduced engagement in the messy business of politics. At a time when religious freedom is viewed by many as expendable, and appears in scare quotes or their equivalent in major U.S. newspapers for the first time in American history, the practical consequences of reduced engagement could be considerable.
Yet even those of us who are skeptical of the Benedict Option can acknowledge the benefits of cultivating virtue, engaging more fully in our local communities and perhaps turning off the TV more often. Given the sometimes judgmental tendencies of theologically conservative Christians during the culture wars of the recent past, traditional Christians also might do well to focus a little more on showing what Christian morality looks like, and less on how others conduct their lives.
Something happened to lay spirituality around the time of the rise of monasteries. As important as their work in maintaining Catholic culture, they also tended to create a clericalism that is with us even today. For centuries it came to be known that spiritual perfection was only for the vowed or ordained. Such perfection was not for the laymen. His perfection came almost as scraps from the table of the monks and priests. With the exception of St. Frances de Sales’s “Introduction to the Devout Life,” most of the great classics in spirituality were written not for laymen but for the vowed and ordained.
So little were the laity considered by the hierarchical Church that prior to the Second Vatican Council the laity were defined by what they weren’t, not ordained or vowed, and with no recognized unique vocation.
And even today you see this clericalism whenever an obviously devout young man is told he ought to be a priest.
The ancient Church would not have shared this view. And neither did St. Josemaria. His vision was that laymen were called to the same heights of spiritual perfection as the vowed and ordained and that such a unique lay vocation was on par with the others.
Escriva taught something the earliest Church knew quite well, the universal call to holiness, something that became, under his influence, a key teaching in the Second Vatican Council. At least a part of the Protestant Reformation was related to a rejection of this spiritual elitism.
Escriva said laymen need not remove themselves to monasteries to achieve perfection and that the places they would find Christ were precisely in the home and in the workplace. And it was there they would bring others to the Gospel.
The seeming revolutionary nature of this proposal is recognized by the reception St. Josemaria received when he first took it to Rome. They said he was 100 years too early.
You want to be a martyr. I will place a martyrdom within your reach: to be an apostle and not to call yourself an apostle, to be a missionary — with a mission — and not to call yourself a missionary, to be a man of God and to seem a man of the world: to pass unnoticed!
Hat tip goes to Diane who posted this on Facebook.
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Look what advertisement the robots of the internets decided to plop down on Rod Dreher's latest advertisement post for his book How Dante Can Save Your Life.
Well, readers, the overachieving Topix post titled Rod Dreher is on the cover of the latest Greater B. R. Business Report has just flipped to page 17 where we find Sistah Raccoon being hunted by wild-eyed villagers angry at her "dumb-ass lexicon". This jab from someone named amazingly runoverracoons must have really scared the crap out of our dear sister.
YOU are the one making a fool of yourself. If I saw you in the middle of the road, I would speed up, Raccoon. You think you are funny. But I think you are a disgrace to your community.
In the spirit of Keith's last post, I give to you... ANIMAL PHOTOBOMBS!!
Warning: contains public animal intercourse. Or, as I like to refer to it, the "doings of beings".
A quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought "Gee I ought to blog that", etc. over the last 4 or 5 months. Maybe I'll make this a regular feature.... Please don't hold your breath.
There's an interesting albeit rambling post on the Ochlophobist blog in which our friend Diane really shines in the comments. I like reading Owen's stuff; he's a lot more "picky" than I — for lack of a better word — that is why it's sort of interesting that he became Catholic, left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy for 10 years, and has now sort of come back to here comes everybody, but admits he still might receive communion at a Greek church. Which I don't really get, but I'm me and Owen is more fascinating that way. And plus I get the feeling that he is a genuinely good person who knows what he is doing even if I don't get him.
In the hilarity department we have this from Kathy Shaidle, her rather deprecatory take on our favorite (snort) book, The Little way of Ruthie Leming. Here's an excerpt from the aptly-titled "Why not just accept that your family are jerks and tell them to drop dead?":
“When I was younger, I left my hick family in their hick town and went to the big city where no one would laugh or yell at me for wanting to make something of myself.
“A family tragedy forced me to go back home, where my family and I were reconciled — which is what I thought I wanted cuz I read it in a book somewhere.
“Better yet, I got a book of my own out of it that sold a ton of copies.
“But now I’m miserable again because it turns out that my family is still a bunch of assholes.”
The American Conservative has a reader survey up at the moment. Have they finally noticed their own pointlessness? Once an dreadnought of Paleoconservatism, they degenerated into a ship of fools in search of a heading. It's telling that a magazine founded by people with adamantine convictions should now be reduced to asking the readership what it wants to hear.
I encourage all readers to rush to the TAC site and put in your two cents. I did. Of course, I asked them to get rid of the most egregious barnacles (Dreher, McConnell) and stowaways, (Millman). I also added that they can do without the children they recruited (Coppage, Olmstead). Of course, I also suggested that they might return to the Paleoconservative roots from which they sprung. Finally I suggested that they try breaking some news rather than merely mooning over events as they do now. Phil Geraldi is the only one at TAC who tells readers things they don't already know.
It is important to recognize this survey for what it is. TAC realizes that having purged actual conservatives in order to forge some sort of new conservatism, they have created an amorphous symposium of nothing in articular. The point of conservatism is to preserve the best, even if unpopular. Nothing speaks more of TAC's lack of Conservatism than its flailing about for direction in this way.
UPDATE: Thanks, Keith! Yes; it is a Leaf Blower for sure.
Looks like your standard paint roller with two rolls of generic TP and a blow-dryer. Or maybe a vacuum on reverse? Hard to tell.
I was appalled at the clownish females dressed in pink parading down Center Ridge about a month or two ago, tying up traffic and causing me to feel embarrassment for the ridiculous-looking participants. It was some type of breast cancer walk, I guess, You know to raise awareness about breast cancer, yada, yada, yada. (Wow, I had no idea women could actually get cancer in their breasts, did you? Why aren't the Republicans and the people who own Wal-mart doing something about that?!) There was a huge bread truck with some type of risque boobie theme on the side. I forget the exact innuendo; unmemorable at this point in my life. There were SAVE THE TA-TAS signs everywhere, etc. I only had one son with me and we were going to get his new glasses, so that was probably a small blessing. He did ask me what everyone was doing and I told him the official line: "They are making sure everyone knows about breast cancer." What I wanted to say is "These women are making absolute clowns of themselves in public because they've been brainwashed to think they are doing something helpful."
This is why Destiny's rant is welcome on the even worse phenomenon of Boob-sta-gram, a risque cleavage-picture-rating site which brazenly claims to be about promoting cancer awareness. Her title is true and carries the apropros amount of bluntness:
This Just In: Letting Dudes Jerk Off To Your Rack Will Not Cure Breast Cancer.
It might give a giggle (among other things) to the men... if you even want to call them that... who thought up this stupid gimmick, but contrary to popular belief "No Bra Day" is just another dumb ploy to turn young women into pieces of porn. The idea behind the campaign is to raise awareness by going braless on the 13th and then posting pics or your chi-chi's on the internet. Hate to break it to ya, but this will NOT raise breast cancer awareness, ladies. Unless of course "breast cancer awareness" is your gross little codename for trouser tents.
As a matter of fact, a friend of a friend had a wonderful idea just in case the sleazeballs behind this "campaign" really did want to raise awareness...
"If you want to use pictures... show women who have lost their breasts to a mastectomy! Now THAT might scare women into being aware and getting those all important mammograms... but of course MEN won't want to see that."
Of course not. But that's not the point here anyway, is it?
I noticed that this Amazon review of tLWoRL has knocked my awesome review into third place. So please do me a favor and go over there and down-ding it. Well, unless you think it's a better review. If you think the book is a "wonderful depiction of the numinous aspects of reality" or that experiences are presented in an "epistemically humble way" then vote it up, by all means. None of the other reviews use words like epistemic or numinous.
I was over at the Wikipedia page for the famous public person, Rod Dreher, and I noted that the article was woefully behind the times. Since it is a locked article, I could not edit it myself, so I did the next best thing and left a helpful criticism on the "Talk page". It reads as follows:
Incomplete / out-of-date
The article states that the subject is a past contributor to the American Conservative, but he is now a full time blogger at that web publication.
The manner and order in which this article is written makes it seem like the most significant thing the subject has done is to leave the Roman Catholic church and criticize that church for abuse of children by homosexual clergy members. I am not sure the subject would agree with this characterization.
The article doesn't mention the subject's newest book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, either. This was written about the author's dead sister. Instead it mentions a proposed book titled The Benedict option which has not been written yet.
Some people have gotten an intermittent warning about malware when accessing this blog. This is because Catholic Culture's website was hacked awhile back, and the goofballs put some bad stuff there. They've fixed it since, but just to be safe I removed any reference to their site for now. The only thing was the little liturgical calendar reminder. But I don't think this was really any type of threat.
FREAKING IDIOTS!
