G.K. Chesterton

HERE is a lengthy excerpt from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics. I have chosen it because it is relevant to recent entries here about neighborhood and the ongoing theme of family life.

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. Read More »

ALAN writes:

KARL D. writes:

I want to share something extraordinary with you that happened to me the other night.

First, a little on my religious background. My father is an atheist Jew who was raised by observant Jewish parents, while my mother who was raised Catholic became an Episcopalian. Yet in recent years she has been moving back towards her Catholic faith due to her disillusionment with the now very liberal Protestant church. I however was not raised with religion in my life at all. We celebrated Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter in strictly secular ways. It was all Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with some Christian information entering my young brain through my mother and the media.

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Heath Rada

THE General Assembly of the Presybterian Church (U.S.A.) endorsed same-sex “marriage” this week, voting to allow ministers to perform “any such marriage they believe the Holy Spirit calls them to perform.” The June 19th letter by Ruling Elder Heath Rada announcing the decision is a study in passive-aggressive rhetoric and arrogant, modernist blasphemy. According to Rada, a former Red Cross executive with a “a twinkle in the eye,” Christ died to make Presbyterians “reconcilers.”

“Please know that the same triune God in whom we place our hope, faith and trust in is still in control, and that the Assembly’s action today is the result of deep discernment to hear God’s voice and discern God’s will.”

The Presbyterians have a creepy cult of niceness. The spiritual life is dead within them. Niceness is an agreeable substitute. Super Nice people don’t say no to anyone who wants a wedding. In truth, this is not niceness, but self-love and cruelty. Liberals are cruel people with sugary-sweet smiles. In their niceness, they are masters of spiritual genocide.

Here is the letter in full: Read More »

WITH the further extension of federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples today, Obama extends his breathtaking revolution. Though only 19 states permit same-sex “marriage,” it is essentially available everywhere now. The ramifications and costs — in Social Security, immigration, federal health benefits — are incalculable at this time. So is the enormous conflict that will ensue.

Sexual freedom is another name for tyranny.

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Corpus Christi Procession
from Missal
French (possibly Angers), ca. 1427
New York, Morgan Library
MS M146, fol. 141 (detail)

THE institution of the Holy Eucharist was the greatest act of love in human history. The Eucharist is a never-ending well-spring of love. Jesus made it plain that he was not speaking metaphorically when he referred to the bread as his flesh and the wine as his blood:

The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. {John 6:52-53}

It is through the Blessed Sacrament, the source and summit of the other sacraments, that Christ reigns in the souls of men so that they can in turn make this world reflect some of the glory of its Creator. We are called to form one Mystical Body with this sacred mystery at its center.

Today, the Feast of Corpus Christi, a day which was once filled with processions, is devoted to this ongoing miracle.  Here are some words on the subject from St. Alphonsus de Liguori, from his work The Holy Eucharist:

Our holy faith teaches us, and we are bound to believe, that in the consecrated Host Jesus Christ is really present under the species of bread. But we must also understand that He is thus present on our altars as on a throne of love and mercy, to dispense graces and there to show us the love which He bears us, by being pleased to dwell night and day hidden in the midst of us.

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HERE is a wonderful painting, Vegetable Market in Amsterdam (c. 1661-1662) by the Dutch painter Gabrielle Metsu. It reminds me of a passage in Virginia Woolf’s feminist lecture series, A Room of One’s Own. While describing her meal in the dining hall of a women’s college, a meal which is greatly inferior to the glorious repast at a nearby men’s college, Woolf writes:

Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes — a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning.

Notice that to Woolf, marketing is “cheapening.” This painting suggests that marketing, even at its lowest, can be elevating. The women to the left in the canvas do seem to be cheapened by the experience of bargaining, assuming that is what they are engaged in at the moment. But the woman to the right possesses a calm and tranquility that transcends her surroundings. She seems untouched by the argument and the disorder. And that is because of her inner qualities, the artist suggests. Furthermore, the rooster and the cabbage leaves and the overarching tree make this excursion to buy food an encounter with nature in the middle of the city. It is a merging of country and city so that one imagines the woman returning to her city dwelling with the earth and the fields and the open skies clinging to her cabbage and onions. In comparison, the rummaging among words that must have filled the days of an intellectual like Woolf seems cheapening.

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PAUL T. writes:

From the Toronto-based National Post, regarding a decision of the Vancouver [British Columbia] school board:

“…the school board forged ahead, even deciding to adopt new pronouns for those who would rather pick no gender at all. A last-minute amendment mandated that “xe, xem and xyr” may be used in place of “he/she” or “him/her.” These are “sex-neutral third-person” terms used to repair the failure of the English language to allow for 21st century gender sensitivities…In addition to new pronouns, the Vancouver board also goes to considerable length to protect “privacy,” including, it would seem, keeping the student’s chosen new gender a secret from his/her or xyr parents.”

The right to self-definition being, as we know, sacred, it seems to me that a student should also be allowed to choose ‘all of the above’ and thereby be all-gendered, and that the use of the terms “thlee, thlem and thlyr” should therefore be insisted upon. Other possibilities may be thought of and proposed, in hopes that the system will collapse through its own unworkability and absurdity.

HEATHER writes:

SHEILA writes:

Just thought of you and your posts about parenting when reading this at The Daily Mail. Here we have an American-born “British” mother and husband who blithely take their three year-old daughter to sea for the first phase of a planned three-year trip around the world, and they are shocked to discover that the “lack of routine, unpredictability of sailing, and inability to have control over daily events” would leave their daughter angry and defiant (note she doesn’t mention confused or frightened, which the child obviously was).

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DON VINCENZO writes:

IT’S not surprising that the newspaper that promotes sodomy and abortion views motherhood as a form of mental illness. A two-part series (here and here) in The New York Times looks at maternal mental illness and suggests that more women seek professional treatment and that the government screen new or pregnant mothers for “depression.” In New Jersey, screening of mothers for post partum mental illness is already mandatory.

According to Pam Belluck, motherhood is amenable to scientific and political control.

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My father-in-law’s five children

FATHER’S DAY brings to mind a father whom I never knew but who nevertheless had a major influence on my life. My father-in-law, Frank Wood, was dead — and had been dead for ten years — by the time I married my husband 27 years ago.

Though I never met my father-in-law, it’s not as if I don’t know him. I think I know him pretty well and if he walked in the front door today, I would probably recognize him and know exactly what to offer him to eat and drink. However, I don’t think he would walk in the door if he were alive. He was a man bound to his home and his neighborhood for all but two weeks of the year.

I have a vivid image of him, sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening, having spent a weekend of leisure both at home and at the Eagle Club nearby, and announcing to the assembled at dinner, “Well, the ball game’s over now.” He has told his last story and retold his last joke. He has read his last detective story and flipped the pages of his last adventure magazine. He is approaching his final bites of “rope beef.” Those words on Sunday night signaled that his extended time at home was over and the new week, when he would return to the shipyard where he worked as a machinist, had begun.

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Caricature Group by John Hamilton Mortimer; 1768

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I would like to second Alan’s comment concerning taverns and bars. Another word for a tavern or bar is “public house,” which Englishmen shortened to “pub,” probably in the eighteenth century. The un-foreshortened form tells us something important: A tavern or bar is a meeting-place of the local people, mainly the adult men, but it is not a public facility in the same way that a city park is or the public roads are. It is a private affair, run partly for profit, and partly for the pleasure of it, by its “publican”; it admits is customers by discretion and reserves the right not to serve them. It serves them by offering refreshment, but also and perhaps more importantly, by being the forum of informal but serious conversation. The pub brings men together informally in a face-to-face way that fosters friendship, heightens the sense of community, and makes way for frankness by excluding women.  Women might be present in a pub, but it is usually as waitresses. The job of the waitress is to know the customer and to add the charm of femininity to the environment decoratively and without obtruding it.

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Ottoman Sipahis in battle holding the Crescent Banner; Józef Brandt

BARON BODISSEY at The Gates of Vienna reports:

A Muslim imam invited to participate in last weekend’s “prayer for peace” event at the Vatican went off-script and asked Allah to help him gain victory over the unbelievers. To Counterjihad activists this news is no big surprise. Anyone who has delved into Islamic theology and liturgical practice knows that Muslims always insert a call for Allah to defeat the infidel into their prayers. It’s as much a part of praying as “Amen” is to a Christian.

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EDDIE writes:

A very good day to you and greetings from Malaysia. I am seeking your advice on my problems with my wife who is turning cold towards me. I am 59 years of age and my wife is 54.

My problem started two years ago after my hip replacement surgery. Before I went in for the operation I was earning a good income and my contract was not renewed due to my disability now as my left leg is shorter then the right. You see, in Malaysia the disabled are a disadvantaged group. Coming back to my wife, she started to be cold towards me after I lost my job as she has to bear with the household expenses. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Apropos your discussion of city life (here and here), I vote in favor of neighborhood taverns—the old-fashioned kind that Mike Royko wrote about, not the silly, pretentious “sports bars” now favored by trendies.

In the 1940s-‘50s, every neighborhood in St. Louis had a dozen or more corner taverns. My grandfather would testify to that, since he worked in one and was a regular patron at others.

On Friday nights in the 1950s, he, my mother, aunts and uncles and I walked over to the Golden Oak Bar, a typical south St. Louis corner tavern in a red-brick building with a long bar on one side, tables, and a jukebox.  Read More »

IN THIS previous entry, I discussed a few of the ways in which suburban life seems to lack an organic quality and has the feel of a thing artificially created. To expand a bit on this point, below is a long quote from E. Michael Jones’s book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing, in which he discusses the role of the federal government in clearing cheap housing in the cities, in this case Philadelphia, and destroying cohesive residential pockets in which various groups — the Irish, Italians, Poles, blacks — once lived both separate and close to one another. On September 1, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the United States Housing Act, which gave the federal government, acting in concert with local housing authorities, the authority to clear “slums,” which often included dwellings owned, not rented, by their inhabitants, and to provide low-rent housing in its place. The creation of public housing is similar in many ways to the story of Obamacare and so many other instances of the expansion of state power in the name of freeing the people from want. In the end it was decided by an assertion of “raw judicial power.”

The constitutionality of the government’s entry into the housing market was challenged almost immediately, but on June 30, 1938, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania handed down its decision in favor of the PHA [Philadelphia Housing Authority]. Read More »