The New Beginning

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

A 4-week cycle? The series just started:
Strength & Conditioning - Erwan Le Corre: Week 1, Day 1
Strength & Conditioning - Erwan Le Corre: Week 1, Day 2
Strength & Conditioning - Erwan Le Corre: Week 1, Day 3
I'm waiting for a MovNat book/DVD, but I'll definitely take a look at these. Future installments should be easily found through the author link.

Because he wears a cassock!

No, not really, but wearing it does signify something.

Fr. Michel-Marie, a Cassock in Deep Marseille by Sandro Magister
The life, works, and miracles of a priest in a city of France. Who has made the faith blossom again where it had withered

As a young man he sang in the nightclubs in Paris, but then over the years there emerged the vocation to the priesthood he had had since his childhood. His guides were Fr. Joseph-Marie Perrin, who was Simone Weil's spiritual director, and Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, founder of the congregation of Saint John. He studied in Rome at the Angelicum, the theological faculty of the Dominicans. He was ordained a priest in 2004 by Cardinal Bernard Panafieu, the archbishop of Marseille at the time. He writes books, the latest of which is entitled "Au diable la tiédeur," to the devil with lukewarmness, and is dedicated to priests. He is pastor at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.

From the article by Marina Corradi:

Why the cassock? "For me" – he smiles – "It is a work uniform. It is intended to be a sign for those who meet me, and above all for those who do not believe. In this way I am recognizable as a priest, always. In this way on the streets I take advantage of every opportunity to make friends. Father, someone asks me, where is the post office? Come on, I'll go with you, I reply, and meanwhile we talk, and I discover that the children of that man are not baptized. Bring them to me, I say in the end; and I often baptize them later. I seek in every way to show with my face a good humanity. Just the other day" – he laughs – "in a cafe an old man asked me which horses he should bet on. I gave him the horses. I asked the Blessed Mother for forgiveness: but you know, I said to her, it is to befriend this man. As a priest who was one of my teachers used to tell those who asked him how to convert the Marxists: 'One has to become their friend,' he would reply."

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

A Reform in Sacred Music

Requires the [enthusiastic] participation of the laity: For God’s Sake, Make Music by John Jalsevac

Related:
Georgians revive tradition of sacred chanting

Some videos - representative of the tradition?

Things Are Worse in the UK

Vox Day: And the Scouts of Britain fall

Do any traditional institutions remain in the UK?

Peter Hitchens Debates Alex Gabriel.

Another Debate on Religion - is Society Less Civilised Without God? (mp3)

Punch Brothers on Conan

Some bluegrass videos:

First Footage from S4 of Justified

via BroadwayWorld

Updating Byzantine Iconography

Is it possible? Icon painters seek to revamp ancient practice

Does the Pope Really Have That Kind of Time?

The Pope reaches over half a million Twitter followers in 24 hours

I doubt it. Another attempt by the pope to "Christianize" mass media, specifically social networking tools. To make the pope more accessible? Does that not give the impression that the Church has "centralized" rule? What happened to moving the Church away from that model and self-understanding?

Some Quebe Sisters Band Videos

More on Zero Dark Thirty

'Zero Dark Thirty' Focuses on CIA & Military Heroes' Role in Osama bin Laden Hunt (VIDEO)
'Zero Dark Thirty': Hunting Down Osama Bin Laden All Over Again
EW

official

What's Their Motivation?

We shouldn't be surprised that the loss of a physical structure to community (the compartamentalization of life that finds its culmination in the suburbs) results in the loss of formal structure as well.

James Howard Kunstler's latest, Homeless:

In fact, the heart of our economic predicament is that the American economy came to be based on the construction of ever more suburban stuff, the financing of which, especially the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic swindles that has left our banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting fraud. In short, we built even more stuff with no future, and ruined our society in the process. How tragic is that?

The behavioral habits, practices, and consequences of being stuck in that living arrangement may end up being at least as problematic as the physical residue of it. It has left the people in a network of alienation, anxiety, and misery that defeats exactly the mentality needed to break free of it. For the truth is we're faced with a massive necessary re-ordering of daily life in this country, and there is no vision or will to get on with job.

Among the tribulations of this living arrangement is the utter loss of connection between place and purpose often expressed in the phrase "loss of community," which is a little too abstract to me and fails to convey the tragedy of individuals living with no sense of purpose -- and by that I mean duties, obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings.

Obviously, the whole idea of a single-family house by definition dictates a certain disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and social relations of a household composed of multiple generations plus non-family members, helpers, employees, servants. And it should also be obvious that the single-generation, single-family house is a product of mid-20th century industrial dynamism that made even factory worker wage slaves rich by historical standards - Tom Wolfe pointed out years ago that the average GM assembly line drone enjoyed more sheer physical luxury at home than Louis XIV.

Tom Storck has an essay looking at Adam Smith on self-interest: The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

Was Smith merely reporting (or writing down his own perceptions) the behavior of others in his place and time, and then generalizing and ascribing this motivation as being basic to human behavior? Can we expect economic actors to be motivated by something other than self-interest? Charity, civic friendship (or civic fraternity) and social, or legal, justice (or solidarity)? Let us not forge the destruction of the bonds of a local community and of other associations like the guilds. When one has been raised without being trained to love others, what should one expect, other than the pursuit of self-interest? Natural affections can only encompass so many people, but even love of the group can only cover so many. If the group is too big, then it is only natural and reasonable that people will start making distinctions within that group in the order of love in accordance to proximity, affinity, shared history, reciprocity, and so on.

Tom Wolfe's Latest

Back to Blood. Reviews have been mixed. (Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Observer, New Yorker, NYT, WSJ, WT, WP, LAT, The Miami Herald, Ocean Drive)

Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood (2012) UPDATED OFFICIAL TRAILER

Steve Sailer, Tom Wolfe’s BACK TO BLOOD—A Confederate Looks At Miami’s Cubans
Alternative Right

NYT profile

More:
His website.
His Jefferson lecture.
An interview with TIME from 4 years ago.

Related:
Something at Alt Right on Bloc Identitaire.
The Myth of Northern Innocence

I was thinking about a priest I knew in the 90s. The last time I saw him was in Rome, back in 2000? It may have been before 200, when the FSSP was having an important meeting in Rome. Where is he now? From a while back: Donnelly College welcomes Augustinian priest to campus. He is biritual, the other rite being the Ruthenian rite, iirc. Apparently he is still associated with the FSSP, even though he remained an Augustinian: Bishop Paprocki Comes to St. Rose in Quincy; Blesses Altars with Confirmations & Procession.