“O LORD MY GOD, make me submissive without protest, poor without discouragement, chaste without regret, patient without complaint, humble without posturing, cheerful without frivolity, mature without gloom, and quick-witted without flippancy.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

PROTESTANT columnist Chuck Baldwin writes:

[J]erry Falwell Jr., Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, et al. have been gushing over Trump like he’s another John the Baptist who’s paving the way for the Messiah. These “Christian leaders” have the ear of millions of evangelicals. If these “great men of God” say it, it must be true.

But, again, that’s the superficial reason why evangelicals love Donald Trump. The real reason lies much deeper. Are you ready for this? The real reason evangelicals love Donald Trump is because they are just like him.

Thankfully, there are wonderful exceptions to what I am saying. Over my 44 years of Gospel ministry, I have come to know some of the sweetest, kindest, most loving, humble, godly, giving, honest and honorable Christian evangelists, pastors and people in the world: wonderful, precious souls. But without reservation or hesitation I can say that these terrific people are a small percentage of the whole. In word and deed, most evangelicals have a track record of being little more than miniature reflections of Donald Trump. Evangelicals love Donald Trump because in character and conduct he is truly one of them.

Liberal blogger Kevin Drum nailed it:

If you want to think of evangelicals as hypocrites, that’s fine. But don’t think of them that way because of Donald Trump. He is practically the apotheosis of conservative Christianity in America, not some weird, blustering outlier. No one should be either surprised or shocked that they love him.

However, there are four specific things about Donald Trump that make him achieve this almost god-like status with evangelicals.

No, it’s not his pro-life verbiage. Like Trump, most evangelicals only provide lip service to the pro-life cause. Evangelicals will look you in the eye and tell you that the GOP is a pro-life party. Read More »

BROTHER NATHANAEL reports on mandatory universal enlightenment.

Watch it now ’cause it’s gonna disappear!

Jan Sluijters, Landscape with Full Moon, 1910

FOR MUCH of history, human beings gazed at the moon and saw the grandeur of God. Who but an Artist infinitely superior to any Michelangelo or Titian, could have created such an ornament for the sky, a jewel of changing complexity that sheds its cool-blue light on all?

Now human beings look at the moon and see the sublimity of Man.

A writer for The New York Times feels religious awe (you know, the sort of awe he would never feel for religion) on the anniversary of Apollo 11:

But as a commemoration of the moon landing, that kind of emphasis on our own era’s greater enlightenment falls flat — because what Apollo represents is not goodness but greatness, not moral progress but magnificence, a sublime example of human daring that our civilization hasn’t matched since.

More and more people believe the moon landing was a staged production. I don’t really know, but I wouldn’t put it past the stage managers. Leaving that issue aside, I would like to suggest that Apollo 11 really wasn’t that big of a deal. It has not done anything positive for human nature.

When it comes to the moon, I’ll take poets over astronauts. They understand that the wonder inspired by the moon is very different from technological progress. As Robert Frost said in his “Freedom of the Moon:”

I’ve tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I’ve tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I’ve pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.

Yes, all sorts of wonder come from the moon.

I’m not putting down scientific investigation, only suggesting it has serious limits (especially when it is faked). Science describes matter, it doesn’t explain. It can’t explain why the mysterious glow of the moon often seems the shadow of an outstretched, loving hand. Moonlight, shining through the window like a spotlight meant for you, suggests the supernatural. And we don’t need astronauts to appreciate its mysterious depths and comprehend it.

JOHN PURDY writes:

That is a fine article you posted [about women’s suffrage.] I can’t help chuckling, thinking about how Nancy Pelosi would respond. The elephant in the room that set the stage for Women’s Suffrage was the extension of the franchise to all male citizens. One can’t help wondering how things might have turned out if it had remained restricted to male property owners. Read More »

FROM John Schindler at The Observer:

What then can we conclude at this point? It appears that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in intelligence work, of some kind, for someone—and it probably wasn’t American intelligence either. The U.S. Intelligence Community is lenient about the private habits of high-value agents or informants, but they won’t countenance running sex trafficking rings for minors on American soil, for years. While it’s plausible that Epstein was sharing some information with the FBI—many criminals do so to buy themselves some insurance—it’s implausible that he was mainly working for the Americans. Read More »

OLIVER HEYDORN continues to explain the social credit monetary system (social credit, despite the name, is not socialism):

[W]e need not live under a 100% debt-money system; that all money must be issued as a debt or as a debt-equivalent is a human convention and can be changed. There is an alternative. Some portion of the money supply, the right proportion, could and should be created and issued as ‘debt-free’ credit.

It was C.H. Douglas who proposed that the ‘more money’ that the economy needs in the form of consumer purchasing power in order to balance the price system should be injected periodically as a ‘debt-free’ input. Instead of governments, consumers, and businesses spending more than they receive as a means of bridging the gap and borrowing the difference from the banking system (thus unbalancing their budgets), the increase in the volume of consumer buying power that the economy requires for equilibrium could be created by a National Credit Authority and issued to or on behalf of consumers as a kind of ‘gift’. The direct payment would come in the form of a National Dividend and would be distributed independently of employment status. This would allow people to enjoy more and more leisure time; a reality that the physical economy can no doubt afford as we no longer require the work of every able-bodied adult to make the economic machine function adequately enough so as to vanquish scarcity. The indirect payment would come in the form of a compensated price discount at the retail counter.

The benefits of such an adjustment to our financial infrastructure are countless. Business and government could – apart from any expansion required by independent consumer demand – finally run balanced budgets, and consumers, considered as an aggregate, would never be put into the position of having to spend more money than they had received.

IT’S not easy analyzing the mind-bending statements of the pretend-pope Francis. His points veer so sharply here and there, with the help of peculiarly weird slogans, which are the inevitable fruits of theological absurdity. Thus we get statements like:

But it’s necessary to give an objective sexual education, without ideological colonization. If you begin to give a sexual education full of ideological colonization, you destroy the person.

In a new post, Novus Ordo Watch does an excellent job with these and other remarks Francis made on what’s known as “sex education.” He warmly approved of it, of course, but only after hitting the right bells.

“THE GREATEST menace of Bolshevism is its creation of a herd-like mentality in the people, which thinks in terms of the lowest intellectual levels, which destroys all initiative in the individual and kills all differentiation of taste and personality. There are no Russian people left but Russian masses only, and in thirty years’ time the same statement will apply to all the other enslaved States behind the Iron Curtain. There will be just masses all the way from Vladivostok to Stettin. The colour of their skin may be usually white, sometimes yellow, but their distinguishing characteristic will be the negative one of belonging to the [new] masses. This will be a mass-produced, homogeneous and characterless human pulp that has been churned out on the assembly lines of the camps and in the retorts of Communist education propaganda. This is the youth produced by Communism and trained to have no individual thoughts or ideas of their own. They have ready-made slogans only, coined by propaganda. This is a herd of anthropomorphous beings, shepherded by Jewish commissars armed with tommy-guns. One sees no longer the glittering billions of single water-drops but only muddy and turbid floodwaters.

“So-called civilised man of the Western world is still unaware of the meaning and importance of these anthropomorphous masses which have lost all knowledge of the outside world, of the beauties of life and of the value of personality. The Iron Curtain hermetically sealed them off from living thoughts and ideals. They possess less knowledge of the outside world than had the people of the Middle Ages. They know nothing about history, culture or present-day life in the West. They live in a distorted dream world produced and projected for them by Ilya Ehrenburg and David Zaszlavszky.

“But unfortunately the proud citizens of the West are little better off in this respect. Their knowledge, general outlook and political ideas are similarly mass-produced, controlled and directed by their Jewish entertainment monopolies. The personality of Western man has atrophied and his national heroes have been forgotten. Their place was taken by that most ridiculous figure of Western democracy, the “man in the street“, i.e. by the average half-educated, ignorant human being who is unable to think for himself. Today this person states his opinion in the Press, answers the questions of the Gallup (187) poll and represents public opinion and “world conscience” in the name of which the scandal of Nuremberg was staged and the massacre of Katyn was hushed up. What does this “sharp-witted” individual, this constant reader of picture-comics and detective stories, know about the “Elder Statesmen” performing behind the screen of the political parties, about the plans of the “initiates”, about decisions of the lodges and about the lies of the Press? He simply reiterates everything hammered into his head by journalists and newspaper kings of Galician Jewish origin. And the columnists of democratic and republican organs alike will, of course, only spread such “opinions” as favour the world conquerors.”

— Louis Marschalko, The World Conquerors, 1958

ANTHONY ESOLEN has written a thoughtful article at Chronicles magazine on the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage:

One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote.

For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them.  The question was never whether women were worthy of it.  It was rather what, if anything, the change would mean for men, women, family life, and the common good.

Men and women of letters, male and female reformers and religious leaders, ranged on both sides of the issue. The liberal Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was for suffrage, while Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, first woman architectural critic, was solidly against. A public debate over the matter took place in the pages of the August 1894 issue of The Century Magazine. Arguing against women’s suffrage was Rev. James Monroe Buckley, Methodist minister and editor of the influential weekly newspaper Christian Advocate. For suffrage was Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R-Mass.).

It’s worth looking closer at what these 19th century prophets predicted would result from suffrage, so that we can know them by their fruits, and use their insights to judge the modern results of suffrage. Voting is a mechanism, a tool, and so should be judged by the work it does: the nation and culture it produces. Only a fool continues to use a crooked T square. If the house falls, of what avail was your philosophical commitment?

Read more. Read More »

YOU’VE heard of children being forcibly removed from their parents’ care. The reverse can now happen to the old.

An elderly woman in Alabama has been removed from the care of her daughter, detained in a hospice and placed on anti-psychotic medicine. Her daughter is only permitted to see her twice a month and cannot take her home. See the report at Lifesite News.

Real Pen Work, Prof. J.R. McFarren

HERE’S another American song for Independence Day. This is cowboy Harry Stephens singing “The Night Herding Song” in Dallas in 1942.

Unfortunately, I think this song qualifies as hateful too. Stephens calls cows “doggies,” and, even though that was a common term, it seems to be a slur of some kind. I hope you will once again overlook the prejudices of the past.

Read More »

NAT KING COLE sings another traditional American tune. A commenter at Youtube writes:

Growing up, my parents often had to pay more attention to my autistic brother than to me, so I spent much of my time with my grandfather. This was his favorite song, and when I was sad he would always sing it to me to make me feel better. I watched him die a few years ago, the most horrific experience of my life. I like to go shopping at antique malls and a month ago on the anniversary of his death, I went to one to cheer myself up. I think he was there with me that day because shortly after I walked in, I found a little music box that plays this tune. I immediately bought it and it’s now my most prized possession. Read More »

Boys Tug of War, Fourth of July; Vale, Oregon, 1941

GOD BLESS America!

Here is the Second Marine Aircraft Wing Band, Cherry Point, North Carolina with “America the Beautiful.” There is something beautifully nostalgic about this performance. Go ahead: Indulge in nostalgia today. Nostalgia is not stuck in the past. It is the love of things as they should be.

Read More »

“MRS. [Cora] Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed ‘naturally.’ There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved — the final grouping of the race — the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man’s family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman’s enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.”

— Helen Kendrick Johnson

Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates, 1897

A Peaceful Read, George Goodwin Kilburne; 1869

Today’s cutting-edge libraries function as part of a mopping-up campaign to extinguish whatever small fragments of imagination children might have left after having been bombarded by thousands of colorful flashing pictures on screens throughout their infancy.

ALAN writes:

“Imagination Lives Here” is a pet slogan of the St. Louis Public Library. It can be seen on library trucks. It is part of the aggressive novelty-and-marketing frame of mind by which American libraries are now run.  I think it is good for a laugh.

A hundred years ago, “library” meant a storehouse of books, including the best that had been thought and written.  That was enough to attract grown-ups and children alike. But to the modern anti-mind, enough is never enough.  It is a measure of the American passion for excess that people who run libraries today look upon that idea as old-fashioned—by which they mean: inexpressibly horrible.  Instead, they favor aggressive sales ploys like free concerts, movies, games, coloring books, crayons, comic books, ‘zine making, and prizes for reading books. This fact alone proves that we are living in an alternate universe. And isn’t it so much better?, they say. And isn’t it so much Folderol?, I say.

At this point, someone will object:  But don’t libraries today discharge their traditional function of making books and periodicals available? Of course they do, and they do it very well. But that is part of the revolutionary stratagem of one step back, two steps forward. That is how the Fabians have it rigged. It is as if they said to Americans: You may continue to use libraries qua libraries, but at the same time we will use them to help advance the Permanent Revolution.  And have no doubt that American libraries are now run by feminists and Fabian change agents.   

That is bad enough and should tell us all we need to know about the philosophical-political slant of people who run libraries.

Equally bad is the pandering to the eye, which is very different from an appeal to the moral-philosophical-esthetic-intellectual capacity of mind and thought that was part of the traditional identity of libraries. Pandering to the eye is now excused because entire generations of Americans have grown up staring at screens and are therefore stuck on what can be seen instead of what can be thought.  Books in libraries are now displayed face-out, as in book stores that pander to the lowest common denominator.  Most of them are hip, cute, ironic, shocking, and cutting-edge cool.

I can remember a time in the retail world when stores began giving themselves cutesy names and tacking on the words And More. Since the people who run libraries are no longer standard-bearers but fad followers, how could they not transform their libraries into Books—And More?

I have no objection to amusement parlors, fun houses, and entertainment centers. But I want them to be called by those names, not by the word Library. In other words, I want a library to be what it has always been. The modernist anti-mind cannot understand such naked simplicity. The modernist anti-mind hates limits and boundaries. Its guiding ethos is: And More. Enough is never enough. For a thing to be what it is is never enough. For books to be what they are is never enough. There must always be: And More. Read More »

[Reposted]

SENTIMENTALITY is the over-use of the heart, and heartlessness is its under-use. We live in a world awash in a sentimentality that covers over heartlessness. It is a brilliant seduction, the heartlessness clothed in deceptive talk of love. Thus love is cheapened and misrepresented. Warmth is really coldness and hatred.

But those are human imperfections, in which we all participate. Today, the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (see resources here), is a day to meditate on the perfection of divine love, on the ineffable, mysterious and indulgent qualities of the immense love God has for man.

Behold this heart which has loved men so much that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, to testify to them its love…

These words were spoken to a pious nun in a vision in the 17th century, when Christ opened up this new source of grace in the souls of men, another manifestation of the profound change in the relationship between man and God that occurred with the Incarnation.

Hence it is before the Incarnation of the Word, however great the prodigies God performed in favor of his people, He was always feared more than loved by them; but finally God made Himself perceptible, so to speak, by becoming man, and this Man-God has done things that go beyond anything that we can imagine to induce men to love Him.

[Fr. John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart; TAN Books, p. 71]

He can never be entirely eradicated from the human heart, even from the most unmoved human being. He speaks to us from within, as the great French clergyman, Cardinal Pie, explained in the 19th century: Read More »