ALAN writes:

In 2010, Laura Wood wrote that “elaborate toys are a mistake for children.”

 Elaborate toys, especially mechanical toys, deaden the imagination…

In 1895, Agnes Repplier wrote similar thoughts:

We are doing our best to stunt the imaginations of children by overloading them with illustrated story-books and elaborate playthings.

She continued:

Little John Ruskin, whose sole earthly possessions were a cart, a ball, and two boxes of wooden bricks, was infinitely better off than the small boy of today whose real engine drags a train of real cars over a miniature elevated railway, almost as ghastly as reality, and whose well-dressed soldiers cannot fight until they are wound up with a key. ‘The law was that I should find my own amusement,’ says Ruskin; and he found it readily enough in the untrammeled use of his observation, his intelligence, and his fancy.  I have known children to whom a dozen spools had a dozen distinct individualities; soldiers, priests, nuns, and prisoners of war; and to whom every chair in the nursery was a well-tried steed, familiar alike with the race-course and the Holy Land, having its own name, and requiring to be carefully stabled at night after the heroic exertions of the day.  The romances and dramas of infancy need no more setting than a Chinese play, and in that limitless dreamland the transformations are as easy as they are brilliant.  But no child can successfully ‘make believe’ when he is encumbered on every side by mechanical toys so odiously complete that they leave nothing for the imagination to supply.

                     [Agnes Repplier, In the Dozy Hours, Houghton Mifflin, 1895, pp. 52-54 ]

Both women were right.  The difference is that between 1895 and 2010, it got much worse.

Agnes Repplier was a prolific essayist, born in Philadelphia in 1855, but largely forgotten today.  She was not fond of do-gooders.  Consider what she would think if she were here now and could see the situation of American children today:  “Encumbered on every side” not only by mechanical toys, but by electronic toys, gadgets, playthings, pictures on big screens, pictures on little screens, cartoons, DVDs, movies-to-go, music videos, book CDs, video games, TV in their home, TV in their bedroom, TV in motor vehicles, TV in restaurants, TV in medical offices, and computers for kiddies. (more…)

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalen, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought sweet spices, that coming, they might anoint Jesus. And very early in the morning, the first day of the week, they come to the sepulchre, the sun being now risen. And they said one to another: Who shall roll us back the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And looking, they saw the stone rolled back. For it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed with a white robe: and they were astonished. Who saith to them: Be not affrighted; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he is risen, he is not here, behold the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee; there you shall see him, as he told you. But they going out, fled from the sepulchre. For a trembling and fear had seized them: and they said nothing to any man; for they were afraid.  Mark 16 1-8

FROM J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion:

 Nr. 74: Rezitative (Bass)

Am Abend, da es kühle war,
Ward Adams Fallen offenbar;
Am Abend drücket ihn der Heiland nieder.
Am Abend kam die Taube wieder
Und trug ein Ölblatt in dem Munde.
O schöne Zeit! O Abendstunde!
Der Friedensschluß ist nun mit Gott gemacht,
Denn Jesus hat sein Kreuz vollbracht.
Sein Leichnam kommt zur Ruh,
Ach, liebe Seele, bitte du,
Geh, lasse dir den toten Jesum schenken,
O heilsammes, o köstlichs Angedenken!

At evening, hour of calm and peace,
Was Adams fall made manifest;
At evening, too, the Lords redeeming love.
At evening homeward turned the dove
And bore the olive-leaves as token.
O beauteous time! O evening hour!
Our lasting peace is now with God made sure,
For Jesus hath His Cross endured.
His body sinks to rest.
Go, loving servant, ask thou it,
Go, be it thine, the lifeless Saviour’s body.
O, wondrous Gift! O precious, holy burden. (more…)

    CALIGAVERUNT, third responsory of the third nocturne of Tenebrae for Good Friday. Sung by the Benedictine Monks of Solesmes.

  THE APOSTLE Peter denied Jesus Christ three times after Our Lord was arrested, as was foretold by Christ at the Last Supper: And Peter answering, said to him: Although all shall be scandalized in thee, I will never be scandalized. Jesus said to him: Amen I say to thee, that in this night before the cock crow, thou wilt deny me thrice. Matt 26:33-34 "In the Judaic Imperium's inverted Holy Week Passion play, the Apostle Spicer is crucified for denying the Suffering Supremacists 3 times." (Maurice Pinay) Peter was forgiven. Spicer is done.

In the midst of life we are in death
of whom may we seek for succour,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins
art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy,
O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Saviour,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. (more…)

HOW STRANGE that God became a man. But is it any stranger than that man is man? Is it stranger than that each of us will die? Or that we can conceive of sin or justice or sacrifice? Or that we can conceive of such a God?  Mortal and immortal. Powerless and powerful. Creature and Creator. Loved and despised. Human and superhuman. Man and God. Now we understand what we never understood. But, as it is written: That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him. Corinthians 2:9

  IT IS no accident that international events heated up on the brink of Holy Week. Satan will do anything and everything to distract people and draw them away from focusing on the most important event in human history. But nothing that is happening in the world is more important than what transpired in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago. Nothing is more important than your own participation in that event. Thomas Droleskey writes at Christ or Chaos: He willingly embraced His Cross so as to pay back in His Sacred Humanity the debt that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God, to re-open the Gates of Heaven that had been closed by Adam’s sin and to stretch out His arms on the horizontal beam of the Cross so as to embrace all men for all time to lift them up on the vertical beam to the Father in Heaven in Spirit and in Truth. Whether any one human being cooperates with the graces won for his immortal soul on the wood of the Holy Cross is up to the free will of that person. We do know, however, that God wants us to cooperate with the graces, made possible for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, and to be conscious of the fact…

IT'S not a solution, but it helps. From Life Site News: The proposed budget allocates $20 million for the state's "Alternatives to Abortion" program, a network of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, maternity homes and adoption agencies that provide care for mothers and their babies, in and out of the womb. The Alternatives to Abortion program gave free assistance to more than 131,000 pregnant women between 2006 and 2015 with a confidential pregnancy hotline, a pregnancy care network website, maternity and baby clothing, car seats, diapers, formula, food, furniture, temporary shelter, and referrals to community agencies and medical resources.

BOTH are founded on the same premises.

  EGYPT mourns this week the 44 Coptic Christians killed in the attacks on Palm Sunday. ISIS has declared war on the nation's Christians.

"Shortly before 6 PM, I was fetched by an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-the-way elevator into the Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with students for dinner before my talk, was empty—the mob, by then numbering close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large plate-glass windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows. The administration had decided that I would live-stream my speech in the vacant room in order to preserve some semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to the agitators outside. I prefaced my speech by observing that I had heard chants for the last two hours that “black lives matter.” I therefore hoped that the protesters were equally fervent in expressing their outrage when five-year-old Aaron Shannon, Jr., was killed on Halloween 2010 in South-Central Los Angeles, while proudly showing off his Spiderman costume. A 26-year-old member of Watts’s Kitchen Crips sent a single bullet through Aaron’s head, and also shot Aaron’s uncle and grandfather. I said that I hoped the protesters also objected when nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee was lured into an alley in Chicago with the promise of candy in November 2015 and assassinated by…

  GREAT comments by U.S. Marine veteran Ken O'Keefe in this discussion about the allegations in 2013 -- later proven to be false -- that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people. Notice how the word "regime" is always used to describe a targeted country, even if the leaders were democratically elected.  

TWEETS from James Perloff:

LEAVING ASIDE the issue of human casualties -- a far more serious concern -- how much did it cost America to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria? Estimated cost: $60 million. That could have done a lot for the Rust Belt that Trump so often referred to in his campaign.

  Jesu! From out thine opened Side Thou hast the thirsty world supplied With endless streams of love; Come ye who would your sickness heal, Draw freely from that sacred well, Its heavenly virtues prove. Hail, Jesu! pray for us. From the Rosary of Fr. Frederick William Faber

A LECTURE by Heather Mac Donald on anti-police propaganda at Claremont McKenna College was cut short due to protests.

From Breitbart:

“During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking,” Mac Donald said. “An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them.”

In her short lecture, Mac Donald argued that there is no institution more dedicated to protecting black lives than cops. (more…)