From Dr. William Mahrt: MUSIC OF THE SPANISH RENAISSANCE
The Stanford Early Music Singers will present a free concert of music by Spanish composers of the sixteenth century: it will include Victoria's Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Saturday, Morales' setting of the Marian hymn Ave Maris stella, favorite motets of Victoria, and songs of Encina, Vasquez, and Guerrero.
Wednesday, December 2, 8:00 p.m.,
Stanford Memorial Church.

Jason Peters, Long Live the Luddites

NLM: Compendium of the Reforms of the Roman Breviary, 1568-1961: Part 7.1 - The Breviary Reforms of St. Pius X. (See also Cardinal Cañizares on the Supreme Importance of the Liturgy.)

If: "The time tested gold standard of real estate price is take the monthly rent and multiply by 100, and that is what you should pay. So if you can rent it for 1,000.00 a month, it is worth no more than $100,000.00."

Then: Should rooms in the Bay Area still be renting for more than $400 a month? (Even if this is what one side of the market dictates, while the other side is willing to pay?) How do the demands of justice alter pricing? (More on this in subsequent posts.)

A piece on recycling human wastes. (Archived at EB.)

Judith D. Schwartz, What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy
Late urban champion's notions about decline and imports newly resonant during this recession.
(via EB)

Teaching Christian Humanism by Virgil Nemoianu (archived at leaderu)

Louis Bouyer, himself one of the great Christian humanists of our own age, wrote in 1959 a book about Erasmus and his times that remains as good an introduction to later Christian humanism as any I know; another good introduction is the book by Henri de Lubac about the times of Pico della Mirandola. The figures examined in these two studies may well represent the peak of Christian humanism. They include Nicholas of Cusa and Thomas More, the Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, Pius II, and Paul III, Cardinals Pole, Contarini, Barberini, Bessarion, and many others. Protestants, particularly in seventeenth-century England, developed their own tradition, informed by John Donne, George Herbert, and Izaak Walton. When historians use the term in a narrow sense, “Christian humanism” refers exclusively to the Renaissance—often presented as a departure from Christianity, or even anti-Christian. The actual histories of the Renaissance thinkers, however, suggest exactly the opposite. Thomas More was ready to die for his beliefs, Pico went so far as to approach Savonarola toward the end of his short life, and Erasmus stubbornly and ingeniously pursued a course between personal independence and a refusal to abandon tradition. In the Renaissance we witness a new attempt at the Cappadocian gambit: an appropriation of the cultural achievements of the Ancient world, of Platonism in particular, as well as a dramatically heightened presence of the Church in the world of culture. The humanism of the Renaissance was in many ways limited to the elite, and thus differs from the more popular sweep of Medieval efforts. But Renaissance humanism strongly affirmed Christianity's capacity to be inclusive and to reclaim areas in which its universality could shine forth again.

At this point in the course, I would want my students to grasp what was just beginning to become clear to the Renaissance humanists themselves: that there are fundamental commonalities between humanistic culture and Christianity that bring them together objectively, irrespective of the wishes and plans of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Christianity's concept of the Trinity posited from the beginning a tremendous abundance of activities inside God's nature and a great variety of relations with the created world. On a closer look, “cultural production” was in its turn trying to do the same: stake out a territory of freedom, openness, and creativity. Or, even better, it was trying to imitate on a finite scale the infinite creative and gratuitous freedom of God. A humanity created in God's “image and likeness” was following the God of Genesis: incessantly creating new possibilities for the universe in architecture, music, verse, and philosophy. The humanity of Christian humanism was trying to supplement in its modest way the majestic gestures of original Creation.

No less suggestive is Holy Tradition, the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. Briefly put, there is in the Church's life a special connection between stability and expansion, growth and continuity. This, of course, as much as anything else, could serve as a model for the pursuit and the shaping of the beautiful and of intellectual speculation in the secular world on the basis of common outlines. Other commonalities can be easily enumerated. Suffice it to say that they were all wrapped up in two large realities. The first is that all human societies contain a kind of opening toward transcendence; the relationship between the human person and God is constitutive and unavoidable. The second is the equally incontestable fact that culture is derived from and connected to religion: architecture to temples of worship, drama to religious ritual, universities to acquiring sacred knowledge, music, sculpture and painting to the praise of the divine, indeed science and political economy themselves to categories generated by divine stories.

By the end of the eighteenth century, knowledge of these commonalities was widespread and accepted by nearly everyone, even the emerging skeptics, agnostics, and lukewarm believers. It was thus around this date that Christian humanism took on its current form—due in large measure to Chateaubriand, who invented a modern idiom in which the great harmonies of the world could be spoken. In his Genius of Christianity (1803), the beautiful emerges as an indispensable key to any grasp of the true and the good. The amazing appeal of Chateaubriand derives from his ability to turn the privileging of nature (the great innovation at the end of the eighteenth century) into an argument for sacrality, and to legitimize the spheres of the emotional and the aesthetic as valid replacements for those of the rational and the social. Chateaubriand was, of course, not alone. Many German and some English Romantics, especially Coleridge, worked through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward forging this alliance between the beautiful and the world of religion. The Swiss Alois Gugler, today virtually forgotten, argued that biblical writing was the prototype of any sublime expression. The Catalan Jaime Balmes engaged directly the philosophies of history of his time, and his contemporary Donoso Cortes argued that politics derives from theology. The Oxford Tractarians altered the religious landscape of England for almost a century. Schleiermacher reinvented hermeneutic analysis starting from religious principles. Lamennais and Gorres demonstrated how crucial religious concepts could operate in the context of social and national preoccupations.

Hunter Baker, A Not So Pro-life Patriarch . . .
"Here is a direct quotation from a July 20, 1990, article, “SF Shows Off Its Ecumenical Spirit,” in the San Francisco Chronicle. Metropolitan Bartholomais of Chalcedon is the current Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew..."

Pentagon Dirty Bombers, By DAVE LINDORFF

(See also Kelley Vlahos, Vets Score One Against DoD on Burn Pits.)

Mike Whitney, Black Tuesday and How We Got Out of It

Rod Dreher: US official quits to protest Afghan war

Fr. Z: Wherein Bp. Trautman runs down new translation and Fr. Z responds

Winter Magic -- Hayley Westenra (ヘイリー) (海莉)


She has a Christmas album coming out; it will be released in the U.S. next month.

Hayley Westenra 'What did you do today?'

GMTV helps launch the Poppy Appeal 2009

I was surprised to see some religion in the latest episode of Stargate: Universe. Some of the humans onboard Destiny are praying the Our Father before the ship collides with a red star. I didn't think the creators would bring any religion into the episode at all, even though the crew members are facing imminent doom. Of course, what a modern show on SyFy be without two of the characters coupling and then talking afterwards.

If aliens who have no conception of God or a redeemer did exist, would that count as evidence against the existence of God? No. It might not even be evidence against Christianity. (Marie George has an article about extra-terrestrials.) But it wouldn't surprise me if some people's faith were shaken... and you might even think that sci-fi writers would use this more as an argument against theistic religion.

Resource nationalism: The last stand for the oil optimists
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
The price of oil has more than doubled from its nadir of $30 a barrel earlier this year. To explain the resilience of oil prices in the face of a severe economic slump, the oil optimists have turned to an old standby argument: resource nationalism.

Rod Dreher: Benedict taking the Benedict Option?

(See also his SWPL: Multiculturalism & selling out their countrymen.)

NLM: News from the Monastery of Norcia

Mike Whitney, Will the Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency in Five Years? and Martha Rosenberg, Gagging Michael Pollan

William Lind, Familia Values

In effect, it appears La Familia has replaced the Mexican state in Michoacan. The gang provides an export-based economy where locals actually receive the profits. It tries to protect the local population from the negative environmental effects of its industry, i.e., addiction. It offers a range of social services.

Importantly, it deploys one of the most powerful claims to legitimacy, religion. The fact that the Mexican state is rigidly secular makes the Christian identity La Familia seeks all the more effective. Very few peasants are agnostics.

La Familia’s brutal violence may work against or for its quest for legitimacy. If it uses violence carelessly so that the local population must fear being random victims, it will undermine its own legitimacy and push people back toward the state as a source of order. However, if its violence is carefully targeted so as to promote local order and enforce what may be perceived as justice, then even brutality may work in its favor.

Other gangs will undoubtedly figure out what La Familia seems to have grasped, namely that money spent to benefit the surrounding population can buy the best kind of protection, protection by the local people. What has always been true for guerrillas fighting for political goals is true for 4GW entities as well: once the government has to face a population united in support of its enemies, it has already lost.

This model - an illegal but widely profitable local economy + social services + religion - will, I think, spread widely. To succeed, it needs a weak state, one that takes from the local population but provides little or nothing in return. That kind of state is already common in much of the world and will become more so.

The Washington Times ran a header above this story that said “Second Front.” In fact, gangs such as La Familia are the first front. What is coming over our southern border is far more important to America’s future security that any of our wars in sandboxes half a world away. The story quotes Attorney General Eric Holder as saying, “Indeed, while this cartel may operate from Mexico, the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly every state within our own country.”

Real national security is security in our homes, neighborhoods, and cities. Unfortunately, the Washington Establishment continues to define “national security” as attaining world dominion. So long as it does so, it will continue to prop open the door for La Familia and other gangs, both imported and home-grown, which understand that what is real is local.

Lord Monckton

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

APS Physics | FPS | Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered
Lord Monckton's speech — The Climate Scam
Glenn Beck: Global warming, global government?
Lord Monckton on the Copenhagen Treaty

Change Player Size Watch this video in a new windowIs Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty?


More on Richard Lindzen.

Daily Express: MOBILE USE IS LINKED TO BRAIN TUMOURS (via Drudge)

TJF, Athens and Jerusalem II: A Religion for Sissies?

I should take some notes on what he says about vengeance.

PhD's In Distress and the Unsustainable Cost of Education

Michael Shedlock, PhD's In Distress and the Unsustainable Cost of Education

How much worse is it for non-science PhD's and M.A.s?