In the previous post on welfare and motherhood, Karen I. writes:

I thought of a few more things the poor children of single moms get, including free lunch and often breakfast at school, free coats from the local newspaper charity, free filled backpacks from my church at the start of school, free rides to and from doctors appointments if they need them with the state insurance, fee waivers to attend summer camp free or cheap at the YMCA and free transportation to and from that camp. Add that to what I already listed and try to convince some single young tramp with a baby on the way she ought to marry her baby’s Daddy and get a job. Morals are not going to convince her because she does not have any or she would not be in that situation to begin with. She has no education to use at a job, so that argument is out the window, too. So, she has to choose between working at a low paying, miserable job and sitting home “poor” with all the State is just dying to hand her the minute the baby arrives. No wonder 40% of births are to single mothers these days. 

I used to be the first to give to the food pantry, the backpack drive, etc. After seeing who really benefits from these things, I don’t do that anymore. Now, if I want to give something, I hand it right to someone I know who can use it. I have given loads of brand name kid’s clothes to a mom whose husband had his work hours cut back. She appreciates it and I know it is going to someone who really deserves it. I think that everyone who wants to give to charity should do the same. Find someone who really deserves the help and help them yourself. Leave a bag of food, Christmas gifts or warm clothes on their doorstep if you think they will be embarrassed. You don’t need an agency to find needy folks for you. They are everywhere if you just open your eyes and look for them. Often it is the ones who are too proud to seek welfare that need the help the most.

Laura writes:

And yet Oprah makes us weep for single moms.

Karen’s advice for charitable giving is excellent. Not only does it assure the right person is getting your help, it’s more personal. 

Should a family with an educated mother and a father attending graduate school be entitled to welfare payments so that the mother can remain home with the children? A reader says she knows such families and asks for my opinion. My answer: No. The mother should go to work temporarily or the family should live with relatives. Here is our exchange.

Intensely Curious writes:

I, like you, believe that families need their mothers to stay home and be the prime homemaker, making the family home a place of solitude, serenity and a warm environment in which everyone in the family can thrive. When voicing this opinion, which is not the smartest thing to do, I often hear things like, “Children need to know the value of the dollar,” and “Children need to see a good role model,” etc. Those responses are usually given in regards to situations similar to the one I’m about to share with you. Read More »

The post “Terrible is This Place,” on the architectural revolution in one Catholic parish, mentioned the importance of verticality in sacred buildings. The same can be said of domestic architecture and secular public buildings, often geometric boxes that resemble cages today. Verticality, which is not the same as mere height, is one essential aspect of a livable environment, whether in the form of steep-pitched roofs or windows and gables that draw the eye upward. It is no accident that verticality is noticeably missing from our built environment.

We live in a world of deadly horizontality. It exists even in the highest skyscrapers. Modern architecture is an enemy of intimacy, beauty and enthusiasm.

Commenting in that post, Fitzgerald writes:

It is essential traditional architecture be revived both in our sacred structures as well as our homes. Note how the homes the wealthy and powerful today inhabit are barren and cold, empty of life and progeny. The bohemian radicals that transformed architecture have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They ripped architecture from its traditional moorings and erected soul-crushing living machines to foist their radically selfish and self-serving lifestyles, lived in opposition to the family and the traditions designed to nourish and support it, upon the unwitting and unfortunate inhabitants of the very structures they produced.

 I recommend the remainder of Fitzgerald’s comments.

Modern kitchen technology is wonderful, especially at this time of year. I was reminded of this yesterday when reading this very tragic story on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer of Dec. 26, 1909:

Miss Bessie Ziv, aged 17 years, had already spent several hours with her mother in the kitchen of their home at 2553 East Clearfiled Street in preparing the Christmas dinner, when she opened the oven door to baste a turkey that was slowly turning a tempting nut brown.

“Is not the turkey cooking nicely?” she remarked to her mother as she poured the drippings in the pan over the big bird with a spoon. She leaned too near the open coal fire in the range and her apron caught fire. From an open window a gust of wind fanned the first sparks into flames that quickly enveloped her.

The story goes on to say that Miss Ziv’s injuries were probably fatal; those of her mother, who used her hands to put out the flames, were serious. It reports a similar case of a woman badly burned the same day elsewhere in the city when cooking her turkey to “a requisite degree of brownness.”

Rita writes:

I’m dying to know what you think of this photo. Do you think this couple is in love or….?

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Fitzgerald writes:

Your broadsides against feminism, in all it’s many forms, have been both gratifying and enlightening. As a white, male professional, I must be careful at all times within professional arenas to mind what I say to avoid the backlash of the feminist apparatchiks that haunt the corridors of companies today, especially in Human Resource departments where they reside like jack-booted secret police always probing and searching for pockets of resistance in the white male population. Should it be discovered or exposed I may harbor any facets of a decidedly un-PC perspective on these topics I could incur immediate and swift censure. The peasants must be quelled.

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The Rev. James Jackson writes:

I’ve many favorite poems about manhood, but I particularly like the attached. Robert Hayden was a student of Auden (he sounds like Auden), though he has his own style. The discussion on your blog touches many things which Hayden expresses well, so I thought you might want to share it with your readers. 

I like it for the priesthood too. The thought of being on my knees and praying for the parishioners before most of them are up (I usually start the Office of Matins at 4:45 AM) appeals to me. It’s just right.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden, 1913-1980

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The state of ecclesiastical architecture is abysmal and is not likely to become non-abysmal anytime soon. The most beautiful churches in America and Europe were created in places and times where entire communities were united behind a single building project, a collective monument to the sacred. Neither the cathedral at Chartres or the more austere white steepled churches of New England were the efforts of cafeteria-style Christians who had a choice where to devote their tithings.

Today church buildings do show some variety, including “strip mall classical” and “Disneyland Gothic,” but many overtly scorn the divine, a concerted rejection of historic European Christianity. There are soaring rafters suited to ski lodges; over-sized crucifixes bearing angular, non-human Christs; blank walls without statuary, stained glass or other iconography;  and altars-in-the-round lit by skylights and surrounded by potted ferns and pews with padded kneelers. These churches are accommodating, but so are convention halls and firehouses. For Catholics, Vatican II brought in an era when secular modernism was embraced and churches were redefined as meeting places. Many threw out treasured artifacts.

Architecture isn’t everything. But it isn’t nothing either.

Fortunately, there is hope in a small but growing movement for traditional architecture. Here and there congregations resist the trend. They either tirelessly preserve old buildings or attempt to bring to new life the highest principles of sacred architecture. One exemplar of this is Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Littleton, Colorado, a church attempting its own architectural revolution, hoping to convert its current building, above, into the structure below. 

I don’t mean to be unkind and truthfully I’ve never seen it in person, but the structure above looks like the check-in building for a middlebrow ski resort, a place where you sip hot chocolate and coffee before retiring to your room. Architecture isn’t everything and a congregation can conjure flying buttresses, gargoyles and rose windows. I’m sure Our Lady of Mount Carmel has seen the heights, but human beings are weak and it’s hard to conceive of the transcendent in an ersatz chalet.

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I was away from my computer yesterday. I have received interesting comments and will be posting them later this morning.

Fitzgerald writes:

I’m watching one of my all time favorites movies, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and even though I’ve seen it easily 20 times I still find it compelling and most importantly, inspiring.

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The Democrats in Congress are committing “party-cide” by going ahead with the hugely unpopular transformation of American health care. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, at Newsmax, write to Congress:

Civil rights, Social Security, women’s suffrage — all of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s metaphors — were popular and had broad approving majorities. This bill has the opposite: a nation paralyzed with fear for what you are about to do to its health care.

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As mentioned by Gail Aggen in the previous post, the industrial-grade pizza you find in your local supplier is a bastardization of the real thing. Italian bread, whether it be rustic pane Toscano, foccaccia, pizza, casatiello, ciabatta, or coccodrillo, carries a long and exalted tradition. It is the greatest bread, if not the greatest edible, in the history of the world.

The Romans learned to bake bread from the Greeks, who brought their immense dynamism to the art and worshipped bread through Demeter, the goddess of grain and abundance. In the Roman Empire, bread baking reached its zenith in the time of Augustus. In 25 B.C., there were 329 public bakeries in the city of Rome alone, according to Carol Field, a genius when it comes to Italian carbohydrates.

Field, in her wonderful book The Italian Baker, writes:

The big central bread market in Rome boasted round breads; breads notched into eight sections, which were easy to break off into individual pieces; breads shaped like keys, cubes, or braids; breads that looked like mushrooms; and breads that looked like wreaths. There was a bread for each social class – senators’ bread, knights’ bread, citizens’, people’s, and peasants’ bread. White bread was already a status symbol, even though some writers knew that darker, coarser loaves were healthier and gave sustenance to hard-working peasants and farmers. The rich ate siligo,the finest wheat flour, which was so white that the women of Rome powdered their faces with it. Pliny noted that “in some places bread is named after the dishes eaten with it, such as oyster bread, in others from its special delicacy, as cake bread, in others from the short time spent making it, as hasty bread, and also from the method of baking, as oven bread, or tin loaf, or baking pan bread.”

It is surprisingly easy to reenact the ancient traditions of Italian bread making in one’s own home. One doesn’t need a wood-fired oven or a fancy commercial mixer. One doesn’t need enormous wooden boards or the arm muscles of a 16th century peasant. One needs, at bare minimum, flour, salt, yeast and olive oil. I have made enormous loaves of peasant Italian bread that would look at home in a bakery on a side street in Tuscany, a place I have never visited beyond the confines of my own kitchen. They were a cinch. I used no fancy equipment to knead the dough beyond that with which God endowed me. I am very fond of kneading dough. It is a great form of release and if I were a psychotherapist I would write my clients’ prescriptions for bread recipes. I like throwing a wet Italian dough against the table. It does not mind in the least.

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Is pizza technically a foodstuff? I’m not referring to the artisanal pizza baked in wood-fired ovens and sold for $15 a bite. And, I don’t mean homemade pizza, which is easy to make and satisfying.

I mean the ubiquitous stomach-stuffers sold in pizza shops across America. In the town were I live, there are as many pizzerias as gas stations and pizza is the gastronomic equivalent of Regular Unleaded. These outlets sell the exact same product, which arrives on the table with pools of grease shimmering on the surface like petroleum residue on the road. It’s the Fix-a-Flat of the gastro-intestinal system, akin to cotton wadding or foam insulation blown into crawl spaces.

This material is too lifeless, too uniformly made, too commercially engineered to be anything but anti-food. Sad to say, it also invites anti-social behavior. Each diner grabs a slice from the table and then walks away. This isn’t just a post-food era. It’s post-meal.

Pizza has contributed to the quasi-destruction of the American body, to making us the fattest nation in the history of the world. Carbs kill, as a reader eloquently wrote in a previous post. Some people mistakenly believe pizza is relatively healthy because it’s not as fatty as meat. Pizza shops should team up with cardiologists and other medical specialists to offer package deals. Eat so many pizzas and get discount treatment in exchange.

There’s only three possible justifications for the existence of this nutritional simulacra. It’s cheap. It’s easy. And it’s fast.  It all ends forlornly with a large greasy box that doesn’t fit in the trash. We don’t have to do anything to produce it. We don’t even have to cut it. We just have to pay for it and get rid of the box. Our passivity is complete. Pizza is enslaving.

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Deborah Kerr’s portrayal of the English widow Anna Leonowens in the 1951 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, The King and I, is a great depiction of an interesting woman and the play is an enduring examination of the mysterious and ambiguous attraction between a man and a woman of divergent cultures and races.  Anna is a widow with a young son who comes to the magnificent Siamese court, where she has been hired as a tutor to the king’s many wives and children. She arrives in  hoop skirts, dignified and yet not aloof, with a combination of  British refinement and maternal affection for her new students. The King, immortalized by Yul Brynner, is a charming tyrant.

With the death of her husband, Anna’s life has taken a difficult turn.  She exudes no bitterness. She is the antithesis of many contemporary female roles, such as the character April Wheeler in the vile 2007 movie Revolutionary Road. April has everything – beauty, two young children, an attentive husband, a roomy house in the suburbs – and yet she kills herself because her husband declines to move to Paris.

Anna and her son are essentially alone in a foreign land and yet in one scene, she gazes at a young couple and, in them, is heartened to find the counterpart of her past:

When I think of Tom.
I think of a night,
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
The soft mist of England
Was sleeping on a hill.

I remember this,
And I always will…
There are new lovers now
On the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea.
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all —
And they’re all a part of Tom and me.

Hello young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight,
I’ve been in love like you.

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N.W. writes:

I have been following the conversation on cultural relations at your site with great interest. It is heartening to see people discussing the matter in an honest straight-forward fashion. Perhaps we will prove Mr. Holder wrong after all.

I believe part of the problem in coming to terms with this issue is the common tendency to skip over the concrete particulars and instead firmly ground oneself in the cloudy abstracts. I may be tilting at windmills, granted, but nonetheless I shall begin my campaign against that stalwart bastion of the Enlightenment “the imperative to love all of humanity.” Now, this is a tall and dark fortress with innumerable passages, corridors and gates from which sally forth many a foolish knave, crying their challenge, “Halt foe, dost not thou love all and equally so?” to which I reply with a quixotic “How? How are we to love all of humanity?”

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Amanda writes:

I write as a child of an interracial marriage. My mother is white and my father is black. I know that my father and mother’s marriage is based upon love, not conquest. Both of them faced personal challenges and family relations were strained when they wed in the mid 1970s. Despite these difficulties, my parents pursued their love and have lived a life together that I both respect and admire.

Is their marriage functional? In a word, yes. My parents have been wed for thirty-three years. They have faced personal joys, tragedies and all of the bumps of the road of life. Despite all of this, they have remained faithfully married, no mean feat in today’s society. I look around in my circle of friends and acquaintances and I cannot point to more than a handful of unmixed couples who can claim the same. Is their marriage perfect? Of course not. We are all sinners. However, they seemed to have weathered the past thirty plus years better than a good number of their unmixed counterparts.

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In this entry on marriage, race, and civilization, Kimberly, the preternaturally wise young mother, offers this advice to a man who says the war for traditionalism is lost:

Like St. Augustine, I think he believes that the truth must be quite complex, beyond the reach of the common mind, and so he feels alone, and that would terrify anyone! But the truth is not complex. It is so simple, one must be very humble to understand it. His pride is blinding him, and in anxiety, he’s banging on your door…

Do you know who the army is? I’ll bet you do. It’s us. St. Louis de Montfort revealed this to me, I believe, but I’m no authority, so don’t bet your soul on it. It’s just my opinion. The way he describes the army that the Lord is building, it would make any housewife feel strong! The army is the heel of the Woman who is the Arc of the Covenant, the heel that “crushes the head of the serpent.” This heel is unnoticed, unappreciated, and trodden upon.

Please see Kimberly’s remarks in the entry, The Feminization of Race. I have urged housewives to read Robinson Crusoe, one of the greatest books of all time and a profound meditation on the metaphysical and practical tasks of home. Kimberly, a young mother, has followed my advice and, with truly brilliant insight, relates Crusoe to the issue of race. She also describes her own struggle to understand her husband’s approach to racial matters.

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