The Annunciation, Zanobi Strozzi

Ave Maria Gratia Plena
By Oscar Wilde

Was this His coming! I had hoped to see
A scene of wondrous glory, as was told
Of some great God who in a rain of gold
Broke open bars and fell on Danaë ,
Or a dread vision as when Semele,
Sickening for love and unappeased desire,
Prayed to see God’s clear body, and the fire
Caught her brown limbs and slew her utterly.
With such glad dreams I sought this holy place
And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand
Before this supreme mystery of Love:
Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face,
An angel with a lily in his hand
And over both the white wings of a dove.

READ more on Lady Day here.

Read More »

HOW MANY of the yellow vest protestors in France have studied the Social Credit system, or even heard of it? Probably very few.

This is sad because Social Credit offers a solution to the economic woes motivating the yellow vest uprising. Find out more about Social Credit here.

Oliver Heydorn sums it up:

Social Credit refers to the philosophical, economic, political, and historical ideas of the brilliant Anglo-Scottish engineer, Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952).

As far as the sphere of economics is concerned, Douglas identified what is wrong with the industrial economy and also explained what needs to be done in order to fix it.

The core problem is that there is never enough money to buy what we produce. There is a gap between the prices of consumer goods and services and people’s incomes.

This gap is caused by many factors. Profits, including profits derived from interest payments, is only one of them. Savings and the re-investment of savings are two others. The most important cause, however, has to do with how real capital (i.e., machines and equipment) builds up costs at a faster rate than it distributes incomes to workers.

The economy must compensate for this recurring gap between prices and incomes. Since most of the money supply is created out of nothing by the banks, the present financial system fills the gap by relying on governments, firms, and consumers to borrow additional money into existence so that the level of consumer buying power can be increased. Read More »

Drying canning jars in the Ozarks/ Library of Congress

ALAN writes:

People who lived in the Missouri Ozarks 85 years ago were poor in material possessions, but they were not poor otherwise. They had a wealth of moral fiber, common sense, imagination, self-discipline, sense of responsibility, respect for neighbors, and gratitude for simple pleasures.

Imogene Snider was one of them.  She was the youngest of eight sisters. More than fifty years afterward, she wrote about growing up on their family farm deep in the Ozarks in the 1930s.  Reading the memories of such people helps to keep things in perspective. They are an antidote to the unspeakable excess of the modern world.

Awash in that excess, modern Americans take for granted such things as water, electricity, supermarkets, insulated homes, push-button heating and cooling, instant entertainment, and dozens of flavors of ice cream available on a moment’s whim.

Keep all of that in mind as you read these few portions of her lengthy reminiscences:

            “The parlor was a special room…used when we had family gatherings and on holidays…  We kept our best pieces of furniture in the parlor…  There was also a piano…  We entertained our friends by playing the piano.  Music was a great part of life at our house….  Seven of the eight girls in our family learned to play the piano…  I spent many lonely hours at the piano for it was a great source of recreation and entertainment for me in the days when we had so little diversion or entertainment…

            “The winter nights were long and very lonely, and we had little for entertainment.  We strained our eyes reading by the yellow glow of the smoky kerosene lamp, and our reading material was very limited. We were not allowed to play cards, so sometimes we played dominoes…

            “Sometimes we borrowed a lawn mower, and I pushed it by hand a mile or so down the road, mowed the lawn, then pushed it back down the road home…

On decoration days in May and June, they would go to local cemeteries to decorate graves: Read More »

WHAT Trumpers are experiencing right now is the “Tell-Tale Heart” “groan moment.” In Poe’s story, this occurs when the incipient victim is forced to face his dire reality. It’s the moment when he has to come to terms with his worst fear:

Presently I heard a slight groan…. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself—“It is nothing but the wind in the chimney—it is only a mouse crossing the floor,” or “It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.” Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain.

For two years now, Trump loyalists have been trying to convince themselves that every lost opportunity, every defeat, has been part of some grand plan. “We’re not losing; Trump is merely luring his foes into a trap.”

The dude’s got less than two years to spring that trap. Maybe it’s finally time, no?

Or maybe there never was a trap, and what we’re seeing now is a necessary split between the people who believed in the man because they supported the agenda, and those who believed in the man because they were looking to follow a “god emperor.”

— David Cole

[Source] Read More »

FELLOWSHIP OF THE MINDS analyzes the video of the New Zealand mosque shootings and finds it to be fake. (The article is also available here.)

Dr. Eowyn gives four reasons for concluding it was made with computer-generated imagery and a green screen.

In our time of movies, TV and video games saturated with over-the-top violence, why would the New Zealand government take such extreme measures to prevent its citizens from seeing the video?

The answer perhaps is that if the people of New Zealand actually saw the video, they would realize the mosque shootings were a gigantic false-flag hoax perpetrated on them in order to advance gun control. (The video can still be viewed on BitChute, the file-sharing video hosting service, and also here.)

The fact that the video is a fake does not necessarily mean no one was hurt or killed.

Tower of Babel in the Bedford Book of Hours, 1423-30

“MOST liberal Christians today affirm that creating culturally diverse societies is the moral, godly, and just thing to do—the more diverse, the more just and godly. But if it is our purpose to discern God’s purpose, doesn’t it seem far more likely that God would oppose the creation of multicultural, majority-less societies? He would oppose them first because they rob human beings of the stable cultural environments and the concrete networks of belonging that are essential conditions of personal and social flourishing; second, he would oppose them because they lead to unresolvable conflict and disorder. In opening America’s borders to the world, our political leaders are not following any divine scheme but are indulging an all too human conceit: “We can create a totally just society” they tell themselves. “We can stamp out cultural particularities and commonalities that have taken centuries or millennia to develop. We can erect a new form of society based on nothing but an idea. We can ignore racial and cultural differences and the propensity to inter-group conflict that has ruled all of human history. We can create an earthly utopia, a universal nation.”

—- Lawrence Auster, Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism (forthcoming)

A  CORRESPONDENT writes:

[At last week’s hearing in the House of Representatives on the Violence Against Women Act,] Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) offered an amendment that would have allowed biological women in [battered women] shelters to not have to sleep in the same room as biological men who were transgendered.

The Democrats voted down her proposal, since there was no clear “proof” that this was a problem.

Great political theater.

HOW CAN ANYONE believe what goes on in Catholic churches today is Catholic? This Ash Wednesday service in Cologne, Germany is an extreme example, but the ugliness and irreverence are not rare. The entire spirit of the Vatican II revolution is one of openness to everything modern no matter where it may lead. The idea is that if Catholics become cool, tolerant, people-centered and, all in all, very non-Catholic, they will convert other people. The opposite has happened. They have repelled.

This jarring, screeching performance is hideous — I feel sorry for her neighbors if she practiced at home — and yet no one walks out. The church is filled with zombies — or leftovers from the Sixties who possibly find it hip and would walk out if confronted with silence or sacred music. Notice there are few young people in attendance. They realize that anything as irreverent and secular as the One World Religion of Vatican II can’t possibly be important. Watching this video clip, says Novus Ordo Watch, is for the rest of us an act of Lenten penance.

A commenter at NOW writes:

The Enemy has succeeded in taking the spine out of men, perverting them to the point that some men actually think this garbage is art.

We are becoming a demonic society. What was good is now evil, and what was evil is now good. What was sin is now virtue, and what was virtue is now sin. What was heterodox is now orthodox, and what was orthodox is now heterodox. What was ugly is now beautiful, and what was beautiful is now ugly. What should be condemned is now applauded, and what should be applauded is now condemned. May God help us all.

MORE interesting commentary from Ole Dammegard on the Christchurch mosque shootings and the leftist “eco-fascist” who was allegedly involved. Again, no disturbing imagery here. (After the first hour, this interview becomes derailed for a while.)

THE mysteries of the life of St. Joseph have inspired folk music and hymns for many centuries. Here in honor of the feast of this great saint are two versions of The Cherry Tree Carol, performed by Paul Clayton and Artus Moser.

For a whole different experience, a beautiful medieval carol, Marvel not, Joseph, can be heard at The Clerk of Oxford.
 

 

AFTER I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved, so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same. I even remained in the woods and on the mountain, and I would rise to pray before dawn in snow and ice and rain. I never felt the worse for it, and I never felt lazy – as I realise now, the spirit was burning in me at that time.

It was there one night in my sleep that I heard a voice saying to me: “You have fasted well. Very soon you will return to your native country.” Again after a short while, I heard a someone saying to me: “Look – your ship is ready.” It was not nearby, but a good two hundred miles away. I had never been to the place, nor did I know anyone there. So I ran away then, and left the man with whom I had been for six years. It was in the strength of God that I went – God who turned the direction of my life to good; I feared nothing while I was on the journey to that ship.

— St. Patrick Read More »

WHAT exactly happened in Christchurch, New Zealand?

Ole Dammegard looks at the event and the way it is being orchestrated. “Was it a crazy lone individual or professionals carrying this out?” Is the reported death toll true or false?

(This is an audio interview. No disturbing images!)

Source: James Perloff

WAY BACK in 2010, which was eons ago, a commenter at View from the Right wrote about the television show “The Brady Bunch:”

Everything you need to know about feminism can be found in one episode of the 1970s situation comedy, “The Brady Bunch.”

Notice that it’s not called the Brady Family or simply the Bradys. The reason is that it’s about a single father, with three sons, and a single mother, with three daughters, who fall in love and get married. Or, actually, they decide to move in with each other so they can split the rent and have sex while they raise their unrelated children. They do not conceive a child together and thus never form a true union.

[Note: That’s an interesting point about “bunch,” but the Bradys were married. The fact that they did not have children, assuming they did nothing to prevent it, does not mean they did not have a “true union.” Couples are still married in all senses if they cannot conceive. The Bradys’ previous spouses had died. Still, the show was preparing the viewing public for the mixed-up family of television future. In that way, it was cunning.]

It’s the new family! The new husband, the new wife, the man, the new woman, the new son, the new daughter, the new boy, the new girl. They’re not bound by the outdated modes of tradition. They’re hip, modern, and oh so liberal.

There was one episode in Marsha, the oldest daughter, wakes up one day and decides she wants to be a Boy Scout. She goes down to the troop, and the leader asks her, “Why do you want to be a Boy Scout? Why don’t you want to be a Girl Scout?”

Marsha immediately becomes horribly offended. “This is discrimination!” And she goes on a tear. She organizes marches in the streets, with signs, placards, billboards, and bullhorns. Television cameras. She brings the entire town to its knees. Julian of Norwich had nothing on this girl. Read More »

The Sense of Touch, Jan Miense Molenaer (1637)

[Reposted entry that first appeared here on June 20, 2011]

IN THIS ARTICLE in Commentary on recent scandals involving male politicians, Kay Hymowitz writes:

Before the 18th century and outside of Western Europe, marriage was a social and economic as well as sexual arrangement; it had little to do with love and companionship, and no one much cared about whether women were fulfilled or not.

Is that so? Where would Shakespeare have come from – how would we have Juliet, Miranda, Katherina, Bianca, Desdemona, Portia, Ophelia, Gertrude, to name a few – if there had been no concept of love in marriage for women well before the 18th century?

How would Dido and Aeneas have come to be? How could Virgil have conceived such a pair? How about Penelope, Odysseus’s loving wife who refused to marry any number of suitors? These figures were imagined outside Western Europe before the birth of Christ.

I offer this other bit of proof that Ms. Hymowitz’s historical facts are a bit sketchy. Consider the above painting by the 17th century Dutch painter Jan Miense Molenaer. It is part of his series on the five senses and is aptly called “The Sense of Touch.” The great Dutch painters created an enormous body of work portraying marriage and domesticity in the 1600s. This is but one example. I think it suggests that women’s needs were at the very least taken into consideration before the 18th century – through the sense of touch if necessary.

The man receiving a beating above with a slipper may not be this woman’s autocratic husband. It is unclear. But do you think this woman, and the culture she came from, would have stood by while her romantic needs were neglected? I think not. Here is another Dutch painting, this one from 1622 by Frans Hals, titled “Couple in a Landscape.”