TOO freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.
I repost this essay every once in a while because, as a housewife, dust is my vocation. I wish more people were interested in the subject.
DUST is pervasive. Wherever you are, dust is silently gathering, a fleck of everything, fragments of nothing, the particulate manifestation of the truth that all things are disintegrating.
Ordinary household dust is rarely considered a subject worthy of consideration. We live in a superficial world. Perhaps we’re secretly dumbfounded by some of the most commonplace things. We just don’t know what to make of them. We’re holding out for explanations that never appear.
One of the most interesting things about dust is its imperviousness to scientific progress. The scientist in his lab may have the illusion of progress. The duster knows that nature only progresses so much. The world is never cured of dust and no human habitat is without it.
The earliest materialist philosophers may have been sent on their first chain of speculations by the visible clouds of tiny particles they observed while sitting in a room. From there, they may have leapt with intuitive brilliance – before there were any microscopes to confirm their suspicions – to the conclusion that all things are particulate.
The Temptation (detail), Masolino da Panicale; 1426-27
“THERE is but one evil, and that is sin. This evil has many different paths by which it approaches us. These paths are called temptations. It is true that of themselves temptations can not injure us. On the contrary, Holy Writ says: ‘Blessed is the man that endureth, for when he hath been proved he shall receive the crown of life, which God hath promised to them that love Him.’ All depends upon our withstanding them, and to be able to do this we must heed the admonition of Christ, we must watch and especially guard ourselves against those temptations through which Satan most frequently approaches man.”
“IF THE Lord should give you the power to raise the dead, He would be giving you much less than He does when He bestows suffering. By miracles you would make yourself a debtor to Him, while by suffering He may become debtor to you. And even if sufferings had no other reward than being able to bear something for that God who loves you, is not this a great reward and sufficient remuneration? Whoever loves understands what I say.”
Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall abide it. For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness: and because of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord. My soul hath waited on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is mercy: and with Him plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
NICK FUENTES roots for the United States to lose in Iran. Calling on your own country to lose in a war is the definition of treason.
I’ve seen other commentators on the right say the same thing.
Iran’s every bit as much part of the club. I don’t know what is going on there, but I don’t hate my country or government so much as to wish that it would see defeat.
“FORSAKE the love of transitory things and seek things that are everlasting. What are all temporal things but deceptive? And what help can any creature be to you if your Lord Jesus forsake you? Therefore, foresaking and leaving all creatures and all worldly things, do what lies in you to make yourself pleasing in His sight, so that you may after this life come to everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven.”
A new documentary (watch for free here) explores the topic of Jewish ritual murder. Using sometimes sensational and bloody computer-generated imagery, it gives an overview of prominent cases through history.
“Is Jewish ritual murder libel, or legitimate? Myth, or murder? Are these accusations the work of imagination fueled by antisemitic hatred, or the dark rites of a race consumed by eternal vengeance.”
This topic is important today because, for one, the accusation of “blood libel” — in other words, that these reports of criminal acts are false — has been used to guilt-trip Western society. Jewish organizations, with immense networks of propaganda, do not present both sides of the story.
FEW things so damage the rights of God in the world than bad religious art.
Images of Jesus that are sentimental and portray Him with as much sublimity as a fitness instructor or rock star are extremely offensive. They are outright lies. Better no image of Jesus than an image that is profane or too-human.
Protestantist groups have long specialized in tawdry representations of this kind. But then the ‘Catholic Church that hates the Catholic Church’ now reigning from Rome does the same. The fact that many Protestants are guilty of vulgar sentimentality is nothing new, but that an institution claiming to be the Catholic Church, which has inspired so much beauty and transcendence in art, should produce an almost daily landslide of imagery inspired by the ethics of advertising and secular humanitarianism rather than supernatural grace is a fact so astonishing as to be difficult to absorb.
Sentimentality in religion is a serious fault. (So is superficiality — and the two are related.) The sentimental person forgets or is incapable of understanding that many people don’t share this gushiness or love of the sweet and cute. A person focused on his own good feelings is a person estranged from the truth of the human condition.
“TO serve God because you are afraid of going to hell, and wish to go to heaven, is a great blessing, and a supernatural work; but it is very difficult. Whereas to serve God because you love Him is so easy that it is hard to account for so many men in the world neglecting to do it. Stupid souls! So miraculously blind.”
“Every kind of suffering.” The things men suffer may be understood in two ways. By “kind” we may mean a particular, individual suffering, and in this sense there was no reason why Christ should suffer every kind of suffering, for many kinds of suffering are contrary the one to the other, as for example, to be burnt and to be drowned. We are of course speaking of Our Lord as suffering from causes outside himself, for to suffer the suffering effected by internal causes, such as bodily sickness, would not have become him. But if by “kind” we mean the class, then Our Lord did suffer by every kind of suffering, as we can show in three ways:
“1. By considering the men through whom He suffered. For He suffered something at the hands of Gentiles and of Jews, of men and even of women as the story of the servant girl who accused St. Peter goes to show. He suffered, again, at the hands of rulers, of their ministers, and of the people, as was prophesied, Why have the Gentiles raged; and the people devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together against the Lord and against his Christ (Ps. ii. i, 2). (more…)
Such was the respect, wherewith everything he wrote was treated, that his very Letters were preserved as so many precious treasures. This immense Correspondence shows us, that there was not a country, scarcely even a city, of the Christian world, on which the Pontiff had not his watchful eye steadily fixed; that there was not a question, however local or personal, which, if it interested religion, did not excite his zeal and arbitration, as the Bishop of the universal Church. If certain writers of modern times had but taken the pains to glance at these Letters, written by a Pope of the 6th century, they would never have asserted, as they have done, that the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff are based on documents, fabricated, as they say, two hundred years after the death of Gregory.
Cows in a Marshy Landscape, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
A March Calf
Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites
Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,
A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,
Standing in dunged straw
Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,
Half of him legs,
Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more
But that mother’s milk come back often.
Everything else is in order, just as it is.
Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.
This is just as he wants it.
A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.
James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames) joined @DLoesch to break down what’s driving Woke Reich figures like Tucker, Candace and Steve Bannon & explains how they are being influenced to divide the American Right. #DanaRadio
DANA Loesch and James Lindsay discuss the creepy Russian theorist Alexander Dugin, who is gaining increasing influence on the American right. They give a nice summary of who Dugin is and what he believes.
This is must-listening. Familiarize yourself with Dugin because he and his ideas are a serious threat. In this article at Substack, Bree A. Dail also looks at Dugin’s role and the figures who appear to support him, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
He has been celebrated & interviewed by Alex Jones multiple times, Haz Al Din, Tucker Carlson & Glenn Greenwald.
Benjamin Teitelbaum revealed in his book, “War for Eternity” that Steve Bannon secretly met with Dugin in 2018.
His popular book, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,”, promoted by Jack Posobiec, set out a playbook for dealing with the West that seems by now all too familiar: using disinformation and soft power to “provoke all forms of instability and separatism” within the United States, including by stoking racial and political tensions, while bolstering nationalism and authoritarianism at home.
He recently claimed that Russia has ideological friends in MAGA… “useful” to the Russian Influence Ops Dugin’s running:
“I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again, and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
— President Roosevelt, Campaign Speech, Oct 1940, 14 months prior to entering World War II in Dec 1941.
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
— President Trump, Inaugural Address, Jan 2025, 14 months prior to entering war with Iran in Feb-March 2026.
“CHRIST, in His Passion, delivered us from our sins in a causal way, that is to say, He set up for us a thing which would be a cause of our emancipation, a thing whereby any sin might at any time be remitted, whether committed now, or in times gone by, or in time to come: much as a physician might make a medicine from which all who are sick may be healed, even those sick in the years yet to come.
“But since what gives the Passion of Christ its excellence is the fact that it is the universal cause of the forgiveness of sins, it is necessary that we each of us ourselves make use of it for the forgiveness of our own particular sins. This is done through Baptism, Penance and the other sacraments, whose power derives from the Passion of Christ.”
…[I]t is no rare thing to meet with persons who ridicule the idea of Devils being permitted to be on this earth of ours! They call it a prejudice, a popular superstition, of the Middle-Ages! Of course they deny that it is a dogma of Faith. When we read the History of the Church or the Lives of the Saints, they have their own way of explaining whatever is there related on this subject. To hear them talk, one would suppose that they look upon Satan as a mere abstract idea, to be taken as the personification of evil.
When they would account for the origin of their own or others’ sins, they explain all by the evil inclination of man’s heart, and by the bad use we make of our free-will. They never think of what we are taught by Christian doctrine; namely, that we are also instigated to sin by a wicked being, whose power is as great as is the hatred he bears us.
