In the Shadow of the Prodigy by Frank van Dun

Reviewed by Thomas F. Bertonneau

I happened to have been reading Frank van Dun’s novel In the Shadow of the Prodigy (2015) during the week of the United States Supreme Court’s latest trespass into the constitutional domain of law-making, formerly reserved to the legislative branch. The same week saw several new instances of Islamic savagery – in France and Algeria – and the collapse of the Greek economy. It is difficult to say whether these events colored my assessment of van Dun’s prose or the other way around. I have been carrying a knot in my stomach for days; my brow has been creased. One way or another, In the Shadow of the Prodigy is a book for our time, breaking up the white dazzle of overlapping crises that constitutes the contemporary scene into the refracted strands of its elementary colors. Van Dun’s story is a mystery, so I will be calling attention to it in such a way as not to divulge too many of its plot-points.

In the Shadow of the Prodigy narrates the collision of naivety with evil. The novel’s various manifestations of evil appear banal but are no less wicked for their appearances. Indeed, as van Dun sees things, contemporary shoddiness and a fixation on low stakes belong to the prevailing corruption. The vileness that drives men and women to wanton deeds is as paltry in its objects as the evil is banal. Van Dun sets his action twenty-one years ago, in 1994, on the verge of that epochal event, the Internet, which serves the author for one of his chief symbols – a creeping multi-tentacular but invisible monstrosity that ensnares the multitudes of the unwary. (more…)

FROM a letter by St. Louis Grignion de Monfort to the inhabitants of Montbernage, France on the occasion of his banishment: “I stand in face of many enemies. All those who love and esteem transitory and perishable things of this world treat me with contempt, mock and persecute me, and the powers of evil have conspired together to incite against me everywhere all those powerful ones in authority. Surrounded by all this I am very weak, even weakness itself. I am ignorant, even ignorance itself, and even worse that I do not dare to speak of. Being so alone and poor, I would certainly perish were I not supported by Our Lady and the prayers of good people, especially your own. These are obtaining for me from God the gift of speech or Divine Wisdom, which will be the remedy for all my ills and a powerful weapon against all my enemies. “With Mary everything is easy. I place all my confidence in her, despite the snarls of the world and thunders of hell. I say with St. Bernard: ‘In her I have placed unbounded confidence; she is the whole reason for my hope.’ …. Through Mary I will seek and find Jesus; I will crush the serpent’s head and overcome all my enemies as well as myself for the greater glory of God. “Farewell then but not goodbye, for if God spares me, I will pass this way again."

SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes: I recommend that you spare some space on your busy blog to this piece of propagandistic "history," which nonetheless contains the following very important observation: "The [New York Times] seems to have always had a pro-pizza bias. In a 1947 full-page Times spread, food writer Jane Nickerson insisted that 'pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew more about it.' "This pizza ignorance became legal record when an upstate jury had to have pizza explained to them during a 1950 New York Supreme Court appellate hearing." The speed with which the forces of Progress have transformed this country is a terrible marvel.  The article notes that within 12 years of the proceedings described above, pizza had reached almost hot-dog levels of popularity in America. Still, it is encouraging to note that not so long ago, things were very different.  This suggests that they could be so once more.

FROM Novus Ordo Watch:

This past Friday, June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS) handed down its decision in the case Obergefell v. Hodges, in which five of the nine judges “decided” that states do not have the right to refuse to issue marriage licenses to “couples” of the same sex. In other words, this Supreme Court decision “legalized” and imposed the unnatural aberration known as “gay marriage” in all 50 states.

This latest attack on society, the common good, the natural law, and all that is right and just is simply the latest milestone in the gradual dismantling of what was at one point Christian Western society. This monstrous and absurd decision did not, however, come unexpected. To the contrary, it is simply the logical conclusion of the idea that the sexual act can be divorced from procreation, or the latter can be subordinated to some other purpose. If sexuality is essentially or most importantly about pleasure or affection or some other such non-procreative end, then logically any sort of “arrangement” must be allowed that furthers such an end between consenting adults. And this also means that it’s going to get worse from here.

However, there is no reason to be discouraged or despair. On the contrary. Judging from the viewpoint of Divine Revelation and prophecy, we could say that “everything is going according to plan” — so to speak.

Read more here. (more…)

  THOMAS DROLESKEY writes at Christ or Chaos: Although I have scoured the website of the Occupy Vatican Movement for any sign of some kind of reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges from the Uber Apostate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, there is, of course, none to be found. “Pope Francis” has maintained the same kind of silence now on the “moral issues” as he has done so many times in the past two years, four hundred fifty-seven days. If one may recall, the marauding Argentine kept his ever-moving mouth shut when the lower house of the French national legislature, the National Assembly, approved “gay marriage” on April 22, 2013, and he said not a word to the renegade former Marxist guerilla fighter named Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil, about a then pending bill in the Brazilian Congress that would provide a “back door” means to surgical baby-killing on demand when he was in Brazil for the hootenanny known as “World Youth Day” between July 21, 2013, and July 28, 2013. That bill was approved on August 1, 2013, just three days after Jorge had returned to Rome to place that beach ball and sports jersey on Our Lady’s altar in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major. [...] Bergoglio, who is taking conciliarism’s mockery of the papacy to its ultimate conclusion in the same manner that Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America have taken advantage…

THE Protestant preacher James Manning reacts to Friday's Supreme Court decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges. Mr. Manning is not very nice. He is one black leader who will never be invited to the White House or the Democratic National Convention.

IT’S OKAY for a Jewish organization to celebrate and point out Jewish hostility to Christian morality and to brag of Jewish funding for the systematic deconstruction of American laws protecting the family.

But, I guarantee you, it’s anti-Semitic for a non-Jew to point it out.

A non-Jew who points it out is a Nazi.

A non-Jew who points it out secretly wants to drag every single Jew, even the Jews he has sincerely loved and treated well for decades, to a concentration camp.

A non-Jew who points it out is evil and filthy.

A non-Jew who points it out is … not nice. He belongs in a concentration camp. Oh, wait, he is in a concentration camp. It’s called the New World Order. It’s the anti-Christian concentration camp of Luciferian America, brought to you in part by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League. (more…)

A MALE READER writes:

I just read your post about “Not Coming Out” and I wanted to send along my sympathies to the reader Jacqueline and applaud her sense of self control in the matter.

To Jacqueline:

Currently I work in a job that is closely related to the music theatre business and I do not think I am being a bigot by stating that there are a lot of homosexuals present at my workplace. Along with you, I could have been considered an ally to them once but no more. The things I have seen, the politics along with how I have been treated, have drastically changed my mind. (more…)

IN THIS previous entry, a reader asked why those who are not engaged in the vice of homosexuality have been so aggressively in favor of homosexual “marriage.”

Another reader, Ignatius A. Chesterton, writes in response:

J.D. writes, “What is it that they want?”

It’s shockingly simple: They want to be thought of as NICE. By everyone.

Niceness is their highest value… the coin of the realm. Nice people are nice. Not nice people are mean. And they don’t want mean people to think they’re not nice, either, so it’s a double-bind worldview. They’re trapped in the social empire of nice, and there is no escape.

However, there is a prize: everyone thinks the nice person is nice. Not much more, but certainly nice. No one can say anything bad about the nice person, which isn’t a fully human, fully-alive experience, but it is nice. (more…)

FROM Casti Connubii, the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage, December, 31, 1930:

… [L]et it be repeated as an immutable and inviolable fundamental doctrine that matrimony was not instituted or restored by man but by God; not by man were the laws made to strengthen and confirm and elevate it but by God, the Author of nature, and by Christ Our Lord by Whom nature was redeemed, and hence these laws cannot be subject to any human decrees or to any contrary pact even of the spouses themselves. This is the doctrine of Holy Scripture;[2] this is the constant tradition of the Universal Church; this the solemn definition of the sacred Council of Trent, which declares and establishes from the words of Holy Writ itself that God is the Author of the perpetual stability of the marriage bond, its unity and its firmness.[3] (more…)

A READER writes: The vertiginous quality of the prevailing socio-political environment requires the likes of a Kafka to describe it adequately.  It is as though we all woke up one morning and seven out of ten of our acquaintances had undergone the metamorphosis into a giant cockroach.

  From Reuters: "A total of 379 businesses and groups representing employers across various sectors signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief backing gay marriage. In the healthcare case, trade groups representing hospitals and health insurance companies filed court papers backing the Obama administration over the healthcare law. In the marriage case, some of the nation's biggest companies, including Procter & Gamble Co , American Airlines Group Inc and Johnson & Johnson, joined the brief urging the court to rule in favor of gay marriage. Wall Street's biggest names, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley , also signed on. [...]  Thomson Reuters Corp , which owns Reuters news, also signed on to the brief."

JACQUELINE writes:

This was written by the liberal online site Gawker on the landmark ruling:

“I can’t help but be happiest, though, about the defeat of the anti-marriage equality crusaders. The defeat of people who signed up to lose, who wasted their time and ours on a platform of animus and contempt. The defeat of people who put principle over the practical, who fought to preserve their limited understanding of an already imperfect institution over the actual human lives that would benefit from it. The defeat of people who did what bigots do: discriminate, vilify, fear-monger, argue irrationally and without respect to human dignity, and then bristle when they’re called out for what they are (bigots). (more…)

KARL D. writes:

If one didn’t know better, you would think that the Supreme Court decision struck down “gay marriage,” judging from the way the homosexual “community” and their supporters are acting! First, you have the White House itself being lit up with the “gay pride” rainbow flag. That in itself shows you how far we have moved in just the last ten years! Looking at that photograph I found it hard to believe that that house once held men and represented a nation so serious, that we won the Second World War and held off the Soviet Union for close to fifty years. It has now been reduced to a juvenile version of its former self. Putin and the Chinese must be shaking in their boots! Forget about the Muslims. (more…)

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HOW DID we get here from there? It happened, in part, through psychological warfare. In his article, “Selling Homosexuality to America,” Paul Rondeau called it “psychological terrorism.” Once again, we see that the most powerful institution in American life is the media, including the entertainment industry and related advertisers. Rondeau wrote: (more…)

THE following video may incite lust for the day when men were men, women were women, and marriage was marriage. I offer it as a little relief on this disturbing day, which I thought was just going to be an ordinary Friday. It may arouse lust for small town life, domestic servants, stone walls, country fairs, and human interaction.

WARNING: DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO IN FRONT OF IMPRESSIONABLE CHILDREN. THEY MAY THINK THESE THINGS ARE NORMAL.

(more…)

SHORTLY after I posted my previous entry, I learned that the nine exalted nincompoops have indeed ruled, 5-4, to approve same-sex “marriage.” Are you surprised? Of course not.

The Supreme Court justices might as well have ruled that the earth is now flat and that everyone will be required to act as if it is flat. No judge anywhere has the authority to change marriage, which was made by God. No judge anywhere has the authority to legalize divorce, the killing of the unborn, “assisted suicide,” or pornography. Authority comes from above, not below.

Anger should not be directed to the confused individuals who are drawn into this way of life. They too live in a time of moral chaos, a time of spiritual barrenness when the Divine Life of Grace has been drained from the world. Anger should be entirely reserved for our cultural revolutionaries at the top, most of whom will never “marry” someone of the same sex. Homosexual “marriage” is political exploitation and a brilliant means of social control, fostering endless cultural division — division that has only just begun — and psychological bondage. It is libido dominandi at its finest. Better yet, don’t feel anger at all. Pray for your children and for your country, from which you will now be forced to detach yourself. Have confidence in God as we head toward more, previously unimaginable chaos. Everything, our entire system of family law, will be redefined. The past is now for all intents and purposes illegal. But marriage has not changed at all. No interpretation of our Constitution, no judge, no individual can change it. (more…)