NEHEMIAH ADAMS (1806-1878) was a graduate of Harvard University and pastor of Union Congregational Church in Boston, Massachusetts for more than 40 years. He was also a staunch abolitionist.

In 1834, he visited the South for the first time with the idea of confirming his notions of the institution of slavery as practiced in that part of the world.

In the book he subsequently wrote,  A South-Side View of Slavery, he recalled his trip and his first impressions of “Negro slaves:”

The steam tug reached the landing, and the slaves were all about us. One thing immediately surprised me; they were all in good humor, and some of them in a broad laugh. The delivery of every trunk from the tug to the wharf was the occasion of some hit, or repartee, and every burden was borne with a jolly word, grimace, or motion. The lifting of one leg in laughing seemed as natural as a Frenchman’s shrug. I asked one of them to place a trunk with a lot of baggage; it was done; up went the hand to the hat: “Anything more, please sir?” What a contrast, I involuntarily said to myself, to that troop at the Albany landing on our Western Railroad and on those piles of boards, and on the roofs of the sheds, and at the piers, in New York! I began to like these slaves. I began to laugh with them. It was irresistible. Who could have convinced me, an hour before, that slaves could have any other effect upon me than to make me feel sad? One fellow, in all the hurry and bustle of landing us, could not help relating how, in jumping on board, his boot was caught between two planks, and ‘pulled clean off;” and how “‘dis ole feller went clean over into de watter” with a shout, as though it was a merry adventure.

One thing seemed clear; they were not so much cowed down as I expected. Perhaps, however, they were a fortunate set. I rode away, expecting soon to have some of my disagreeable anticipations verified. Read More »

Hendrick Goltzius, Adam; 1613

ADAM — I mean, the Adam — was not the ideal father.

He messed things up for his children. Big time.

He was maybe what is called in today’s parlance a “toxic narcissist.” He chose what suited him, rather than what suited others.

He disrespected his own father in the one thing he had requested. In that moment, he said, “You don’t matter. I do.”

It was the ultimate expression of self-will — and ever since the world has suffered imperfect fathers and unhappy children.

Only God, the perfect father, would have thought up the right response to this sad reality: God told us we can’t throw fathers away however much they make their children unhappy, displeased or annoyed.

He didn’t say, “Honor your father and mother if they are perfect” or “Honor your father and mother if you like them” or “Honor your father and mother if it’s convenient and easy.”

He said, “Honor your father and mother.” Period.

Human beings wouldn’t have thought that up. They would have hedged and modified. They would have come up with contractual contingencies.

One of the saddest things today is that so many people discard imperfect parents when they are old and their imperfections are more apparent than they were in their children’s childhoods. Psychologists are there to help. They cheer on alienation and estrangement. “You deserve to be with people who lift you up,” they say, “not people who make you down.” They applaud and encourage open rejection of a divine command.

The common use of the word “toxic” to describe human beings, suggesting that the mere physical presence of these persons is poisonous, is extremely unkind and cruel. I believe its popularity has originated in the commercial interests of psychologists. How convenient and easy it is to be assured you can cut off people you find difficult! Who wouldn’t pay for that advice?

“Narcissist,” while expressing the sad fact that there are more disturbed and selfish people than ever, is so over-used it has become meaningless. Besides, isn’t it narcissistic to discard narcissists?

God issued his command to honor out of duty and gratitude. Even the most worthless father has given life. God himself never gave up on Adam. He didn’t throw him away. He didn’t call him “toxic.” For our Father, the bonds of true love are eternal. Be merciful, as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:36) In that, He showed us that filial love encompasses and transcends every imperfection.

Dad’s Coming! Winslow Homer (1873)

THIS 2010 piece, “Are Fathers Necessary?,” published just around Father’s Day in The Atlantic almost 15 years ago, sadly could have been written yesterday:

The quality of parenting … is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school. 

Got it, Dad? We don’t need you.

The most important institution — fatherhood — is the least celebrated. The deference and respect due to fathers is so often attacked most people don’t notice it. The government even conspires to keep fathers out of their homes.

Can you imagine what it’s like to know your father spent 15 minutes conceiving you in a loveless act and then handed over his contribution to a medical technician? It hurts. Losing a father through death hurts, but losing a father through cold deliberation and medical innovation must hurt even more.

In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the protagonist is a young boy born without a father. The trajectory of his life is established from the beginning by his fatherlessness. It mattered that his father was gone:

I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or ‘there by’, as they say in Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish associations with his white gravestone in the churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were—almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it.

Dickens goes on to portray many types of fathers: the cruel stepfather, the indebted and reckless father, the overly protective father, the devoted father. Finally, David Copperfield, fatherless boy, becomes a father himself. Could Dickens have imagined a world with “two Dads?” He might not have been able to imagine it, but he could understand it. The human scene, he knew, was constantly producing new deviations. This tendency to spiritualize the sexes, to make sex a product of mind and emotion only, is based on an ancient hatred of the body and the composite nature of the human being.

What about those children with “two Dads” or “two Moms?”

They will someday tell the world they only have one of each. Greeting cards and corporate retailers can’t change nature or suppress their pain.

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers, both good and bad, both appreciated and under-appreciated. You are essential, whatever the world says.

IT WAS the last day of school at St. Athanasius. The hulking buses had just pulled away, their passengers whooping and pummeling each other with joy.

Fr. Shudda walked up to the third floor. He was conducting a final tour of inspection. The hushed hallways resonated with emptiness. Even the teachers had left instantly.

Things were unusually orderly. It was as if it was the first day of school and not the last — the last day for good. St. Athanasius was bringing its educational enterprise to a close. On Monday, June 28th, after the odds and ends were removed, Scaramucci Bros. would start demolition.

He walked into Mrs. Binzer’s science class. She had already left. A chart depicting Neanderthal man morphing into a human being still hung on the wall. Mrs. Binzer was a nice woman. She was a Lutheran who really knew her stuff when it came to science.

Fr. Shudda was so old he remembered the time when the Mrs. Binzers were industrious virgins with starched wimples and hidden, mysterious necks. He remembered — from his own distant childhood of course — when the classrooms were cram-packed, the desks lined up in tight rows like infantrymen on a battlefield, each one occupied by a victim of Original Sin.

He walked over to the metallic windows. These banks of cheap glass had let in frigid breezes in January and waves of heat on tropical days in September. Would he miss it all?

Fr. Shudda had long ago embraced change.

He looked toward the rectory and remembered that day when an especially distraught parishioner had visited him. He didn’t want to be like her at this moment. There had been other inquiries from diehards.

“Father,” she said respectfully, her eyes appearing to hold back a fountain of tears, “I don’t understand. I feel, I feel desolate …. as if I am offending Him.”

“Desolate.” It was melodrama like this that really bugged him.

She was complaining about the liturgical renewal. The marble altar had been trucked to a local quarry. She refused it as “renewal.”

“It’s not really different,” Father said. “We still say the Our Father, don’t we?”

After a while, he couldn’t help it. He began to despise hold-outs. It was as if they expected him to do something when he had no power at all and when he had vowed obedience no matter what. They were malcontents and he was glad when they finally drifted away, replaced by the kind of people he preferred — those who were loyal instead of questioning and excessively pious. He preferred these good and decent people — the sort who seem to have never faced a serious temptation to sin in their entire lives and dutifully confronted the tedium of parish life with untold hours of voluntary labor.

They were loyal and decent — and so was he. Read More »

Slave ship Le Saphir, 1741

“THOUGH Southerner George Mason tried, unsuccessfully, to prohibit the U.S. slave commerce as early as 1787 — referring to it as a ‘wicked, cruel and unnatural trade’ — and though Southern President Thomas Jefferson finally permanently banned it in 1808, the law (as even Lincoln observed) was routinely ignored by Northerners (mainly from New England and New York), who vigorously  continued to illegally traffic in human chattel, even during and after the Civil War. Not a single slaving captain or trader was punished by the U.S. until Nathaniel Gordon in 1862, and for good reason: the federal government was completely controlled by slave interests right through to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, as just mentioned, this is how “Honest Abe” funded his war: chiefly with profits from Northern slavery and the Yankee slave trade.

“Yankee abolitionist, individualist, and natural rights advocate Lysander Spooner saw right through Lincoln’s duplicitous treachery, correctly referring to the president’s ‘Wall Street Boys’ — that is, New York City’s business establishment (bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and stockjobbers) — as the ‘lenders of blood money.’ Wrote Spooner:

“… these lenders of blood money had, for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been accomplices for a purely  pecuniary consideration, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slave-holders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the [Civil] War) And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood money were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slave-holders in the future for the same pecuniary considerations. But the slaveholders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future — that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South — that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the [Civil] war, in order to secure themselves the same, or even greater, monopolies in the future. These — and not any love of liberty or justice — were the motives on which the money for the [Civil] war was lent by the North.”

— Everything You Were Taught About American Slavery is Wrong, Ask a Southerner! Lochlain Seabrook (Sea Raven Press, 2014); pp 223-224

“UNTIL people wake up & realize that the con/cons in media and academia preaching ‘limited govt’ and ‘protecting your rights’ are CONTROLLED opposition working to grow the state’s power, the people have NO chance to be free.”

More observations on the news from Legalman.

THE woman who allegedly murdered a three-year-old boy in a supermarket parking lot in Ohio smirks as the charges against her are read in court.

Blacks have faced years of anti-white propaganda. It’s not surprising some are happy to kill.

Warning: Any highly-publicized crime may be a government-sponsored hoax to stir up division and fear. So far, I have not seen signs of that in this case, but it is possible.

                                                                    The Oxbow, Thomas Cole; 1836

“IT would … be a grievous error to conceive the love of God as anything which essentially involves sense-emotion or feeling. The love of God lies in the grace-aided will; it presupposes the intellect insofar as the will needs its cooperation to love, for the will is a blind faculty; but in practice one need only attend to the will. A very high degree of love of God is quite compatible with an absence of any feeling of emotion, and even with the presence of a feeling of distaste for the service of God. We have only to remember our Lord’s prayer in the Agony at Gethsemani to realize that. In fact, if one is going to achieve the heights of the spiritual life, it is necessary to pass through a stage where one’s apparent spiritual activity is reduced to a dry act of willingness to conform one’s self to God’s Will, in the darkness of a sheer decision to believe in God without light of any sort. This does not mean that the emotions have not their part to play in the spiritual life. On the contrary, they can be a most effective aid to the real agent, which is the will working by faith.”

— Fr. M. Eugene Boylan, This Tremendous Lover

Read More »

THIS 1937 interview with the 88-year-old former slave William Ballard was one of many slave narratives conducted by the Federal New Deal writers project under the Works Progress Administration. The narratives are collected in A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Interviews with Former Slaves. The full collection is available at the Library of Congress.

As with many of these interviews, Ballard describes a condition of servitude that was far different from the harsh slavery Africans experienced for centuries in Africa, where the bones of dead slaves littered the trails to the slave markets on the coast. The conditions in the South and North enabled the original population of African-born slaves, numbering about 500,000, to grow to 3.5 million by 1860.

“I was born near Winnsboro, S. C., Fairfield County. I was twelve years old the year the Confederate war started. My father was John Ballard and my mother was Sallie Ballard. I had several brothers and sisters. We belonged to Jim Aiken, a large landowner at Winnsboro. He owned land on which the town was built. He had seven plantations. He was good to us and give us plenty to eat, and good quarters to live in. His mistress was good, too; but one of his sons, Dr. Aiken, whipped some of de niggers, lots. One time he whipped a slave for stealing. Some of his land was around four churches in Winnsboro. We was allowed three pounds o’ meat, one quart o’ molasses, grits and other things each week—plenty for us to eat.

“When freedom come, he told us we was free, and if we wanted to stay on with him, he would do the best he could for us. Most of us stayed, and after a few months, he paid wages. After eight months, some went to other places to work.

“The master’s wife died and he married a daughter of Robert Gillam and moved to Greenville, S. C. Read More »

James Peale, The Artist and his Family

“AFTER creating man, God created woman and determined her mission, namely, that of being man’s companion, helpmeet and consolation … It is a mistake, therefore, to maintain that woman’s rights are the same as man’s. Women in war or parliament are outside their proper sphere and their position. There would be the desperation and ruin of society. Woman, created as man’s companion, must so remain under the power of love and affection, but always under his power. How mistaken, therefore, is that misguided feminism which seeks to correct God’s work. It is like a mechanic trying to correct the signs and movements of the universe. Scripture, and especially the three epistles of St. Paul, emphasizes woman’s dependence on man, her love and assistance, but not her slavery to him.”

— Pope St. Pius X, 1909 address to a delegation of the Union of Italian Catholic Women

“TO put the best possible construction on it, these modern Episcopalians believe that secular experience and the embrace of diversity is the vehicle through which Christ is realized. Even under that more charitable interpretation, however, they still seem to have little or no conception of Christianity as something beyond the human, beyond our little selves and our relationships and all the rest of it. Christian experience doesn’t come out of our particularities. What crap! Christian experience comes from beyond our particularities, it comes from God. It is what shows us the true meaning of our particularities and helps us relate to them in a true, God-centered way. It is the key to right living in this world because it comes from beyond this world.”

— From “Auster vs. the Religion of the Last Man” Read More »

FROM Warburg and the Kalergi Plan by Captain Arthur Rogers (1955):

ALTHOUGH the public of the United Kingdom have no direct political responsibility for the affairs of Her Majesty’ s Dominion of South Africa, they have been subjected to noisy agitation against the policy of “apartheid.”

This agitation has been promoted largely by an organisation, which, although calling itself “Christian Action” (not to be confused with Catholic Action), is remarkable for the manner in which it substitutes leftist “ sentimentality for true morality., It condemns all racial or colour discrimination out of hand, regardless of the reasons, or the consequences, or of common sense.

It observes that persons of European origin in Africa have a tendency not only to consider themselves superior to Africans but also to treat them unjustly, as inferior beings. If this’ is, unfortunately, to some extent true, and perhaps at present almost inevitable, it might well afford a strong argument for, rather than against, “apartheid” in some form, but the agitators will have none of it. They call it persecution.

Generally speaking, those of the European clergy from South Africa who are engaged in this agitation do not seem to realise that the Christianity they profess to preach is a universal religion – that the conversion of Africans does not imply that they must become European or as near European as possible.

Indeed, these clergymen, although they insist that all races are equal in every way, indicate that they really believe that they themselves, as Europeans, are inherently superior and that it would be repressive and unjust to question any unattainable desire that Africans may have of becoming Europeans too.

There are, however, in South Africa many clergy who think quite differently while large bodies of Africans have declared themselves in favour of “apartheid.” The agitation by Christian Action” is essentially political; it is without moral content and it is non-African.

[bold added]

Sentimentality is the over-use of the heart, and heartlessness its under-use. We live in a world awash in a sentimentality that disguises heartlessness. It is a brilliant seduction, the heartlessness clothed in talk of love. Love is cheapened and misrepresented. Warmth can be coldness and animosity when forgetful of the soul.

Only in the Sacred Heart of Jesus can we find love purified.

O Heart of love, I put all my trust in Thee; for I fear all things from my own weakness, but I hope for all things from Thy goodness.

—  St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

FROM Racism, Guilt, Self Hatred, And Self Deceit (2010) by Gedaliah Braun:

In August 1976, when I left America to teach Philosophy at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, I did so somewhat reluctantly. On the subject of blacks and Africa, I was a tabula rasa [a ‘blank slate’]. I grew up in a typical ‘liberal’ environment where one was taught never to use the word ‘nigger’ (the American equivalent of the South African term ‘kaffir’) – and until 1969, in New Orleans, I don’t think I’d ever heard the word actually used. I was not involved in the Civil rights movement but was certainly not opposed to it. My hometown in upstate New York had few blacks, though in the mid-fifties our high school did have a black cheerleader. While I had no black friends as a youth, this was not by design, and when, in 1968, I met a black man (a fireman), I had no difficulty in forming a friendship – a friendship which has remained to this day.

So when I went to Nigeria I was neither anti-black nor an afrophile (a ‘lover’ of things black). Nevertheless, I immediately felt ‘at home’ there and because I went without prejudices, I was able to observe things with an unjaundiced eye; and I made some remarkable discoveries. Read More »

WHEN a black criminal was killed (he wasn’t really) by a white cop in the course of arrest, it was cause for international vilification of whites and weeks of riots.

When an innocent, white child is knifed to death by an angry black woman in a supermarket parking lot, it’s a “random” attack with no larger significance.

This murder is tragically similar, by the way, to that of a 26-year-old mother in a South Carolina supermarket parking lot last year.

One family was left without a mother, another without a child. Whites have often fled integrated neighborhoods for good reason. It can be a matter of life and death. In the most ordinary places, a black may turn violent and attack with sadistic savagery.

Read More »

BRITISH COMPOSER Ralph Vaughan William’s orchestral piece “The Lark Ascending” is based on a poem of the same name by George Meredith (1828-1909). Vaughan Williams included these words from the poem on the flyleaf for the work:

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

The entire poem can be read here. Read More »