ZIPPY CATHOLIC, a blogger who was tragically killed in a car accident last fall, left behind an impressive work on the subject of interest-bearing loans.

In Usury FAQ, or, Money on the Pill, he explained what is, and what is not, immoral in the realm of lending. It is a thoughtful piece, followed by interesting discussion in the comments section. He explains, for instance, why credit card debt is wrong (for the lender, not the borrower), but a home mortgage is not necessarily.

Understanding usury requires an understanding of how the nature of some contracts differs, fundamentally and categorically, from the nature of others. Usury is not a matter of the same kind of contract differing only by ‘excessive interest’. Usurious contracts constitute a kind of contract which is intrinsically immoral by its very nature.  This FAQ is intended to help people understand what usury is – and is not – and answer many of the questions which naturally arise.

Read More »

CHUCK BALDWIN sums up on the second anniversary of Trump’s presidency:

Sadly, a host of Trump’s supporters continue to be bamboozled by the elaborate psyops misinformation (translated: propaganda) entity known as QAnon, which keeps reassuring the Trump faithful that he is covertly waging war against the globalist insiders and that any day now the curtain is going to collapse on the swamp creatures. It’s all a hoax to give Trump cover—and more time.

If the nomination of William Barr as America’s next “Top Cop” doesn’t awaken the “Always Trumpers,” there is absolutely no hope for them. Even worse is the fact that the longer Christians and conservatives continue to make excuses for Trump’s lies and deceptions, there is less and less hope for America.

I AM QUOTING AGAIN from Oliver Heydorn’s excellent analysis of modern democracies as seen through the works of the British thinker Clifford Hugh Douglas:

    Let us take as an axiom that whenever and insofar as policy is being imposed on people, whether it be through naked force or deception, we cannot speak of democracy in any meaningful sense. Insofar as the populations living under conventional ‘democracies’ have been subjected to anti-social political polices sponsored by the credit monopoly, it must be admitted that conventional ‘democracies’ are actually, to a greater or lesser extent, de facto if not de jure financial dictatorships, i.e., plutocratic tyrannies. On this view, conventional ‘democracy’ is a not merely faulty, it is also a swindle; the regimes under which we live in the West are best described as financially based plutocracies camouflaged as liberal democracies, or ‘pluto-democracies’:

    “… the aims of national Governments are by no means the same things as the aims of the majority of individuals in the countries they are supposed to represent. … these Governments are far more responsive to influence from financial sources than they are to popular influence. We might even go so far as to say that modern Government is quite insensible to popular influence, and that no serious change in policy is effected by a change from one party to another. This is certainly true where the subject in which such influence might desire to be exercised conflicts with the interests of Finance. …      It therefore becomes a matter of the first importance to find out what would be the interests of Finance in relation to the apparently conflicting interests of various national Governments, because if we can get any clear idea in regard to this, and we admit (as I have suggested we are obliged to admit) that Finance can make itself effective through any Government, and is common to all Governments, then we should be able to obtain some insight into the probable trends of international politics.”[7]

    “At the present time we live in a false and completely ineffective so-called democracy, really an oligarchy of the worst possible kind. Not only is an open and genuine dictatorship preferable to an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy, but it is a sure and certain outcome of it. I do not believe that the people of these islands will tolerate an open dictatorship, but, unless you take action, an open dictatorship will be tried.”[8]

    While ‘an open and genuine dictatorship [is] preferable to an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy’, Douglas is not arguing in this excerpt that dictatorship would automatically solve the problem. Any kind of conventional political system which is forced to operate under the aegis of a credit monopoly will be co-opted to a greater or lesser degree by the financial powers: “… all visible Governments are mere executives of a dictated policy …”[9]

     We must also be careful not to allow the failure of conventional ‘democracies’ under present circumstances to discredit the ideal of political democracy:

    “It can be demonstrated that real democracy is possible; but it must be conceded that a visible dictatorship is preferable to an anonymous tyranny or a manipulated electorate.”[10]

“IF ONE WISHES to do full justice to reality – regardless of the topic that is being investigated – it is of the gravest importance to neither underestimate nor overestimate the phenomenon in question. Accordingly, whenever this particular question of ‘conspiracy’ becomes the subject of reflection, the thoughtful individual will seek to follow a sensible middle-path in accordance with the available evidence and in full knowledge of his cognitive limitations. This will allow him to scrupulously avoid the error of those who become irrationally suspicious, i.e., paranoid, while, at the same time, avoiding the mistake of those who, by preferring to be complacently sceptical, refuse to call a spade a spade. To deny the reality and indeed even the possibility of conspiracy as an explanatory factor behind much of our socially-induced discontent is just as irrational, therefore, as to think that every negative thing that occurs in the world must be due to a conspiracy.”

— Oliver Heydorn

FROM Silas Walter Adams’s 1958 book The Legalized Crime of Banking and a Constitutional Remedy:

Stop and find your place in our present economic system – that is, are you a beneficiary; or, are you a victim? Are you a gainer; or, are you a loser? If you work for a living, with hands and/or head, or both; or, work for others for pay, you are a loser, the heaviest of all losers! You toil to provide man all his material wants, or to serve him, and you are paid with a cheap, inflated 25-cent dollar, which we persistently call a 100-cent dollar — a private dollar created by a private corporation. If you have earned your money either by producing something, working for yourself or as an employee, or in serving others, and through thrift and economy you have stored it away for the rainy day; or, if an honest man and would not take anything from another that you did not give in return an equal value of goods and/or service, you are doubly a loser; for the bankers’ constant stream of created new dollars pouring into circulation cheapens your dollar, and lowers its buying power. You get only a pound of coffee today for the same money you could buy four pounds of coffee in the thirties.

If you are on a pension, or living on your life’s saving, even on the coupons you have been clipping from World War II U.S. Bonds, you are a helpless loser, because bankers in the last 20 years have reduced the buying power of your dollar to one-fourth its 1935 buying power.

But, if you are a gambler, and live by your wits play the stock markets and otherwise take usury, take from others without producing or serving others, take that which you have not earned, you are a gainer; aye, more, an enemy of all honest, producing, serving, toiling people. You are the burden that is crushing to the earth the masses, the 99 and 9 of us.

[Adams, Silas Walter. The Legalized Crime of Banking: & a Constitutional Remedy (p. 20). Omnia Veritas Ltd. Kindle Edition.]

This book was available free in its entirety on the Internet Archive — until last week.

PETER STEINFELS, former religion writer for The New York Times, calls Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s highly-publicized grand jury report of last August on sex abuse in the Catholic Church “grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust.”

He objects to the report’s charge that the Church had ignored abuse cases. “This ugly, indiscriminate, and inflammatory charge, unsubstantiated by the report’s own evidence, to say nothing of the evidence the report ignores, is truly unworthy of a judicial body responsible for impartial justice.”

See more at The Media Report.

Lawrence Auster

TODAY is the 70th birthday of  the writer Lawrence Auster, who died in 2013 of pancreatic cancer and whose writings on modern America are still avidly followed. This blog would not have been possible without his encouragement. Here is an excerpt from his entry, “The Breakdown of Western Form:”

In today’s New York City … you will walk into a retail store or a hair-cutting salon, and not only will there be loud black funk music blasting from speakers in the ceiling from morn till night, with its interminable, melody-less, rhythmless, lyric-less (and identical in every song), “oh ooo ohh, ooh, hoh baby, woohoo, uhh, uhh, Woohoo WoohuahAHahAAA, yeah-huh, baby oh yeah”, but the radio reception is so bad it’s all static. I’m talking about loud static, filling the establishment from powerful speakers. When you ask the employees to adjust the tuning of the radio station or to turn the volume down, they will do so, but there seems to be absolutely no consciousness on their part that there was anything inappropriate about this horrible noise. There is a shocking insensibility in young people today, a complete acceptance of noise and disorder in one’s environment.

It reminds me of India, where villagers love to have all-night festivals with electronic speakers turned up to the max, where people in cities are surrounded by unbelievable, all-encompassing noise and disorder and are not disturbed by it at all. In one sense, this is an impressive quality, expressing the spiritual dimension of the Eastern civilization and the idea of the soul unaffected by matter. But it also means that people—calmly accepting a disordered unpleasant environment—will not do anything to improve their environment. I was once shopping in a small department store in Ahmednagar, a medium- size city in western India a couple of hundred miles east of Bombay. The city consisted of one crowded, dusty street after another, with not a single pleasant prospect or anything uplifting to the senses and the mind. As a young salesman was helping me I said: “Where are the nice places in Ahmednagar?” He answered matter-of-factly: “There are no nice places in Ahmednagar.”

That’s the sort of environment that the Third-World acceptance of disorder leads to. And Americans, even short of a total, literal Third-World takeover of America, have already become Third-Worldized in their own souls, and thus will present no resistance to further Third-Worldization.

Of course, the comparison is imperfect and unfair—to Third Worlders. The disorder of today’s America is a distinctly Western or post-Western pop phenomenon betokening total social and moral breakdown and the release of the self from any larger cultural and moral wholes. It is thus far more destructive than the traditional Third-World cultures, though many of them are also moving in the direction of moral and cultural breakdown.

Nevertheless, there is an underlying similarity: It is the absence of the idea of a transcendent truth higher than self and tribe, the absence of the idea of the individual as a separate entity, the absence of the love of form, the absence of the expectation that the infrastructure of our social existence—buildings, streets, sound systems—will be made well and attractively. It is the passive, nonjudgmental acceptance of nature, or of one’s environment. The West first arose in ancient Israel and Greece in a conscious resistance to the surrounding cultures based on the acceptance of the mere cycles of nature. Western man imposed on nature a form and transcendent meaning above the cosmos and its gods. And Western man now seems to be rapidly losing those very qualities that made him what he was.

Rest in peace, Lawrence Auster!

 

SURE on This Shining Night, performed here by the Minnesota Choral Artists, is a choral work by Morten Lauridsen based on the 1938 poem by James Agee:

Sure on This Shining Night
James Agee

Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.

Sure on this shining night
I weep for wonder
Wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.

WHILE I can’t recommend everything Michael Hoffman writes, this commentary on the Covington Catholic incident is good. (I have mainly stayed away from the media storm about this incident. Don’t let the “Masters of Discourse” tell you how to spend your time.):

The Cryptocracy manipulates people of color to serve as golem in the United States, disseminating a view of American history that portrays the majority of whites as whip-wielding tormentors of colored people in bondage, when the truth is that the vast majority of whites in early America were, as Congressman David Wilmot termed them, “the sons of toil.” Many arrived in this country in chattel bondage, not dainty “indentured servitude.”

The clandestine objective of crowding whites into ever more narrow psychological categories of self-abnegation and erasure, is to inflame them into lashing out desperately with inchoate violence that can be exploited to further justify ever greater encroachment by the government on our immemorial rights, and the escalation of increasingly intense negative caricatures of conservative white people issuing from the salons of Hollywood and New York.  Read More »

Village Street, Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot; 1654

FROM the book Sins of the Tongue by Fr. Belet, (Kindle version here) of the Diocese of Basle; Translated from the French, 1870 ed.:

In 1617 someone published a volume entitled, The Horseman’s Book: The Art of Riding, treating the use of bridles, whips, guides, and so on. Such a title is of a nature to give rise to sad thoughts. We have learned how to make bits, bridles, halters and pincers, and how to adapt them to a horse’s head or mouth; we have learned the art of directing these animals at will by means of a small bit. But we possess a tongue so ill-tempered that no bridle can curb it: this raging beast resists bits, halters and pincers alike, knocking down every obstacle in its path. It wants to be as free as a horse in the wild. Let us see what Saint James has to say on the subject: “We put bits into horses’ mouths that they may obey us, and we control their whole body also. But no man can tame the tongue.” (1) Jas. 3:3-8]

Without a doubt, the most poisonous tongue of all is the backbiter’s. It spits its deadly venom to the four winds. It is an evil known throughout the earth. One can never stigmatize and deplore it enough.

Therefore, we shall now study the nature of this evil, its various species, and the gravity of the evils it breeds. Read More »

A 19th-century doll’s dress

IN THE 19th-century, women did not especially denigrate femininity. They did not seek masculinity in all things or think modesty embarrassing. They were not, till the latter years of the century, infected with feminist-style self-loathing. Though Victorian society was not perfect at all, nor even the ideal, women were not plagued by envy of men.

The rich tradition of doll-playing of that era illustrates these historic attitudes. The doll was highly valued as a plaything for the young girl. Godey’s Lady’s Book of 1869, quoting Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, wrote of this approval, overstating a bit the case for the doll: “A doll is one of the most imperious wants, and at the same time one of the most delicious instincts, of feminine childhood… The first child is a continuation of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is nearly as unhappy and quite as impossible as a wife without children.”

After the Civil War, many well-to-do American homes spared no expense in providing daughters with dolls that came with elaborate wardrobes, including not just ornate dresses, but tiny gloves, lorgnettes, purses, earrings, bracelets, petticoats and even toothbrushes. These were the American Girl dolls of the day.  A current exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum titled “Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal,” running until March 3, displays samples of the best dolls from that era. Standing in plexiglass cases surrounded by their miniature accessories and adorned in highly-ornate and colorful silks, linens, furs, and wools, they are captivating objects.

It was interesting to note in the textual commentary of the exhibit and in remarks by visitors and the curator, the cognitive dissonance such an exhibit, with what one reviewer called its “darker implications,” causes in women today. No one could deny the beauty of these clothes, with such rich colors and ornamentation, or the very high level of craftsmanship.

But they represent oppressive patriarchy. They represent “indoctrination.” How then can they be enjoyed, even on a purely aesthetic level?

The answer is to take in the aesthetic experience while shaking your head, snickering and condescendingly reminding yourself that things are much better today. Read More »

JOSEPH H. writes:

I came across two tweets this morning that deserve mention. First, an old standard:

12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Ephesians 6:12 King James Version (KJV)

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than the titanic age-old struggle of Good vs. Evil and until and unless one recognizes this one does not possess the cognitive tools to begin to apprehend the nature of our current travails.  Read More »

PLANNED PARENTHOOD aborted 332,757 children last year and received $564 million from taxpayers. On this, the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, some important history of what led to the decriminalization of murder from Dr. Thomas Droleskey at Christ or Chaos:

Roe v. Wade did not “start” the genocide of the preborn in this country that has taken over fifty million innocent human lives since 1965. The move for the decriminalization of surgical baby-killing began at the state level (so much for demigod of states’ rights) as pro-abortion leaders such as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of the National Repeal of Abortion Laws (now called NARAL-Pro Choice), and Lawrence Lader and William Baird, among others used the existence of various “exceptions” in abortion legislation then on the books as the means of “liberalizing” “access” to baby-killing for all women in all circumstances. The move for decriminalized baby-killing under cover of law started at the state level, moving into the Federal court system only when pro-death advocates believed that it was propitious for them to challenge the laws of those states which prohibited or restricted “access” to baby-killing.

It is useful to review some of the history of decriminalizing surgical baby-killing under cover of civil law prior to Roe v. Wade. Those who contend that the “people” in the various states have the “right” to determine whether to permit or prohibit surgical baby-killing would have no problem with the pre-Roe legislation, nor would they be bothered by the fact that many states have “trigger laws” in effect to “protect” baby-killing in the event that Roe v. Wade is reversed at some point by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Read More »

Perseus with head of Medusa (detail) Benvenuto Cellini

NO ONE believes in the Greek gods anymore. Gaia, the earth mother who gave birth to Uranus, the sky deity with whom she later conceived the Titans and a whole pantheon of passionately warring and amorous divinities — any adult today who accepted this as true history or theology would not be taken seriously. Can you imagine a student at Princeton, say, seriously maintaining that Zeus is real? Agreement is universal: these gods do not govern our world. According to Hesiod, the famous ancient poet and chronicler of the gods:

[Gaia] lay with Heaven and bore deep swirling Oceanus, Coeus, and Crius and Hyperion and Ipateus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos (Cronus) the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.

The stories of the Greek gods contain psychological insights and intuitions about the creation of the universe, the immortality of man and the existence of warring supernatural beings. But no one worships these gods anymore or appeals to them for assistance.

It’s interesting to speculate as to what the Greeks of ancient times would think of us, if they could come back to life. What would they think of our creation story?

In the Greek stories, supernatural beings created man and gave him a soul. In other words, something created something. In the Darwinian account, which is the reigning creation story, nothing created something. The idea that Zeus sent Prometheus to earth to create man out of mud and Athena breathed life into his clay figure, isn’t that far less absurd and hard to swallow — the Greeks might think — than the idea that primordial, living organisms arose out of nothing and through natural changes alone evolved into beings who resembled no other creatures on earth in their capacity to think and speak.

The Greeks would probably be amazed that any society could so throughly fall under the spell of such a fantastic (and boring) myth as has ours. They might find it preposterous that parents spend huge sums to send their children to schools where the idea that the human mind “evolved” from non-conscious mud is seriously promoted. Although they had their own proponents of philosophical materialism, it was not generally accepted or imposed by the ruling classes.

The Greek stories sustained a society of constant warfare. They certainly encouraged battle. Perhaps the wise Greeks might analyze our leading creation story and see that it makes sense in a world ruled by money. For in the Darwinian account, there is no such thing as right or wrong. There is no such thing as truth or justice. Everything is biological. And where there is no objective right or wrong, the powerless have no argument or defense against the powerful.

“Darwinism is a system of control which is effective because it denies the reality of any stable being. If everything is in flux, there is no such thing as justice and no way to object to an unjust social order,” Dr. E. Michael Jones has written.

Though the Greek gods were often capricious, selfish, lustful and violent, they also represented noble qualities — and hinted at the existence of objective good and evil. The goddess Athena stood for war if the cause was just. She came to represent wisdom and an eternal battle between moral opposites.

In the Darwinian pantheon, there is no right or wrong because everything — even the human mind — is an emanation of matter.

Darwinism, Jones states, plays a crucial role in an empire of money and warfare because it allows “scientific” materialism “to rule out of court any moral objection to the economic exploitation that is an intrinsic part of the oligarchic system known as capitalism. Control means, in the first instance, decertifying any and all forms of logos or rationality which restrict the power of the oligarchs.”

The Darwinian universe is crueler than the universe of Zeus. At the end of the day, it’s really about power. Our creation story fits our culture, and the cut-throat materialism that is its guiding ethic.

Nelly amongst the Flowers, Otto Dix; 1924

I WAS recently talking to a woman in her thirties. Bright, talented, pretty and friendly, she has a beautiful, three-year-old son — a little boy with an angelic glow that attracts everyone in the room. She has a husband who makes a good living and adores her. Her successful career she has interrupted but she could resume it at any time.

I asked her if she was hoping to have more children. She said without hesitation that no, she was not. She was done and would be returning to full-time employment this fall. She would have no more children. She had never been enthusiastic about becoming a mother, she said, and only had one child reluctantly. (You would never know this by her affectionate behavior toward her son.) Even when she was a girl, she said, she knew she wasn’t cut out for motherhood. It wasn’t for her.

Now for a college-miseducated woman who lives in a big city today to say she is not cut out for motherhood — that’s almost like a person raised in a tribe in the Amazon rainforest saying he was never cut out to be a software engineer. I was not surprised at her statement.

“You know, you don’t have to like motherhood in order to be a mother,”  I said. “You can even be a good mother and not like it. It’s a job.”

She was taken aback. “Oh, I never heard that before,” she said.

No other form of daily work is burdened with such unrealistic expectations and exalted assumptions as the work of motherhood, which is so sentimentalized in our feminist culture. The woman who does not enjoy the company of young children or finds the home lonely and unstructured compared to the workplace may be left thinking she is not meant to be a mother.

No one expects a soldier to enjoy battle. No one expects a plumber to enjoy welding pipes in cramped spaces. No one expects a doctor to enjoy prying into noses and — other anatomical regions. These are jobs. They need to be done. A plumber can do pretty well and dislike many of his tasks. I personally couldn’t care less whether he likes it all, just as long as he shows up. Motherhood is a job. It needs to be done. Yes, it is very important and difficult, compared to these other tasks. Yes, an attitude of cheerfulness is especially important for children, but still motherhood is a set of duties and tasks. And cheerfulness can be imitated and acquired even in unpleasant circumstances. It’s interesting how doctors, plumbers and soldiers are never encouraged by the culture at large to think of themselves as unsuited for their work. Oh, but mothers are.

Women’s liberation was not liberating. It placed such a high value on personal fulfillment. It turned the home into a prison with the idea that it should be satisfying on a daily basis. The truth of duties as opposed to happiness — that’s liberation. Let God decide who is, and who is not, meant to be a mother. Our lives should be a continual yes. Let Him do the unpleasant work of saying no.

I noticed one other thing about this lovely woman.

She doted far too much on her son.

She seemed to believe that a mother must respond to her child’s every little dissatisfaction and sit down and play with her young child for long periods of time. No wonder she found the job difficult! Is any adult cut out for this? You see this everywhere today. Parents are even afraid of their own children. The influence of modern psychology, and the fact that many people are alienated from the different ways of children when they become parents later in life, has made it so that many believe that the slightest mishap, the slightest inability to affirm the entire existence of their little one, and a child could be messed up for life. That’s what people actually believe. Many also confuse child-rearing with professional tasks, and think intense focus is good when a diffuse, detached energy is better. The more a mother thinks that her child’s ego must be constantly affirmed and that she must intensely manage, the less likely she will remain for the long haul at home.

Of course, attending to a child’s every desire is a sure way to mess him up. And an even surer way to mess things up is to fail to bring the next generation fully into existence.

Outrageously violating one of the conventions of our time, which says that family life is all about preferences and it’s none of your darn business what someone else does (as opposed to career, in which case advice is totally acceptable), I came right out and told this woman, out of deepest concern for her welfare, “You will regret this decision someday.” How sad that the world around her wasn’t giving her this vital message.

It takes a village to raise a mother.

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, Sugaring Off, 1943

“TODAY’S governments, more than just big, have taken on the overbearing configuration of Behemoth Government, over-bloated, top-heavy, inefficient, unapproachable, unaccountable, inhumane and cruelly unjust. Unaccountable, that is, to the people it governs but not to the hidden powers that secretly control it.

This trend is the product of the prevailing attitude, itself based on the slippery footing of modern principles, which have men automatically turning to the highest and most distant reaches of authority to do for them what they are able and morally obliged to either do for themselves or to commission the smallest and most localized institutions to do for them. The Church looks upon this attitude — and the criminal system it has spawned — with profound disfavor. ‘Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and industry can accomplish, so too it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance or right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.'” [Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno]

 — Hugh Akins

Wilson A. Bentley

WHAT magic is there in the rule of six that compels the snowflake to conform so rigidly to its laws? Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator.

These are the words of Wilson A. Bentley, a self-taught Vermont farmer who from early childhood was fascinated by the crystalline structure of snow and was the first person to photograph the snowflake. Born in 1865 and educated by his mother, he taught himself the craft of microphotography so that he could document the snow crystals that fell outside his home in the rural town of Jericho, which typically received about 120 inches of snowfall a year.

Bentley would gather snow on a black wooden tray, removing the excess with a feather duster. He then separated the crystals with the filament of a broom. Having attached a microscope, his only serious piece of scientific equipment, to a bellows camera, he glued the snowflakes to microscopic slides and photographed them inside in an unheated room, with light from a window for illumination. He washed his negatives in a nearby brook. He eventually amassed more than 5,000 microphotographs, starting with his first, made in 1885 when he was 20 years old. They appeared along with his explanatory articles in journals and in a book, Snow Crystals, published the year of his death in 1931.

He wrote in his later years:

For something over a quarter of a century I have been studying [the snow crystal] and the work has proved to be wonderfully fascinating, for each favorable snowfall, during all these years has brought things that were new and beautiful to my hand. I have never yet found a time when I could entertain an idea of relinquishing it. During the time that I have carried on the work, I have secured sixteen hundred photo-micrographs of snow crystals alone, and no two are alike. Is there room for enthusiasm here? Doubtless these pictures serve to represent with some fairness almost every type and variety of snow that occurs in nature, but they show scarcely an infinitesimal fraction of the individual variation of form and interior design among the countless myriads of crystals comprising each type.

The issue of whether any two snowflakes are alike always comes up in regard to Bentley. Technically, no two snowflakes could be composed of the same particulate matter and water, but might two have the same crystalline appearance? Bentley did not find any two crystals that were the same. However, the question is of little scientific value and also seems to have little metaphysical importance. If someone were to discover two snowflakes that were alike, would that make snowflakes any less interesting or suggestive?

David Goldstein

BORN TO poor Jewish parents who emigrated from London to New York City and Boston in his childhood, David Goldstein (1870-1958) is a fascinating and little-known figure in American letters whom you will never, for sure, read about in today’s mainstream publications. He described his early life thus:

 Poverty was the lot of my father and mother. This they struggled through with courage, with devoted love for each other and the children. My parents and their four children had to be supported on the meagre earnings my father obtained from long hours of toil at the bench, making cigars. Though born of strictly Orthodox Jewish parents, they like most Jews who attend the synagogue were Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Jews. Thus, my father and mother, during my boyhood days, attended synagogue services on those two leading Jewish holidays, “if only for the children’s sake,” as Jewish fathers and mothers often say. [Wikipedia]

Goldstein became a socialist as a teenager and entered politics. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Boston when he was 27. He lost his political will, however, when he became disenchanted with socialism and Marxism. He realized the degree to which both opposed normal and healthy family life. Socialist “free love” deeply offended someone so conscious of his own indebtedness to family constancy and intimacy. He unsuccessfully sought to get the Massachusetts Socialist convention in 1902 to disavow free love and attacks against religion. He co-authored a book Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children in 1903. He was, of course, entirely correct and prophetic about the implications of socialism for the family. He also grew tired of class enmity:

It took some time to understand — being sympathetic with Socialism — that Socialists succeed in making ‘Socialist minds’ mainly by constantly picturing the misery of the poor and the greed of the rich; by continually condemning all things which meet with dissatisfaction in the minds of toilers, whether the discontent be rational or ridiculous; by increasing disapproval or condemnation of the character, work or proposals of officials in trade unions who have to meet practical issues and the responsibilities of the conflicts of labor organizations. At the same time, Socialists press forward their abstract propositions attract those idealists whose pictures are ephemeral and fall into confusion, like a baby’s house made of blocks, when the common sense touch of the actual world of strife and strain is applied to them; for human nature is what it is and not what Socialist idealists conjure it up to be in their sickly sentimental thoughts.” [Wikipedia]

Not long after his disillusionment with socialism, Goldstein, through the mysterious workings of grace,  converted to Catholicism. He then set about his most important intellectual work — doing battle with prejudices and misconceptions of the Church. For ten years, he wrote a weekly column for the Boston Pilot, a newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese. A sample of his learned and elegant columns, in many cases actual letters to various public individuals — truly remarkable for their literary quality, especially by today’s standards — can be found at catholictradition.org.

Goldstein also traveled around the country as a sidewalk apologist, speaking in streets, squares and parks. He took his duty to propagate the Faith with unabashed seriousness and courage. He explained why he possessed such extraordinary zeal: Read More »