Items of Interest, 19 September 2011

Dr. Fleming: Getting Real Again

Rush is right about the basic point though, and this is a subject I have been meditating on for years. Justice demands that the guilty, not the innocent pay, and the guilty parties to the national debt are the congressmen and officials of both parties who took bribes and pandered to the lobbyists and ward heelers. When elected legislators and bureaucrats go into debt, it is their fault as much as it is the fault of the board of directors and managers of a business. Let the responsible parties be held accountable. If every member of Congress and White House flunkey who got us into this mess were held responsible, we’d have about 500 people to pay back the trillions of debt they–not we–owe.

Thoughts on the British Riots by Mark A. Signorelli ·
He may be blaming Uhmerican culture too much for the riots.

Medievalists.net: Burgundian Costume: Being a study of women’s formal dress of Northern Europe, especially Burgundy and Flanders, in the later half of the 15th century
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and Her Music Drama Ordo virtutum: A critical review of the scholarship and some new suggestions

NLM: Fr. Guy Nicholls on Chant and Mass Propers

Gun seller who helped ATF had doubts about the sting

San Francisco CSA Roundup

Diet:
Jimmy Moore: The LLVLC Show (Episode 499): Jamie Scott Pushing Paleo In New Zealand, Green Deane Is A Modern-Day Low-Carb Forager (mp3)
Chris Masterjohn: An addendum to How to Do a Proper Self-Experiment, and Why Your "N" Doesn't Technically Equal "1"

Barefoot Running and Minimalist Footware:
The Natural Foot: Loosing Faith in Instincts, Movement and Intuitive Sensation - C&NN Connect
Hiking the Smoky Mountains in Toe Shoes
From 2008: That rather famous piece, "You Walk Wrong."


NYT: Wilma Lee Cooper Grand Ole Opry Singer Dies at 90
CMT
Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper






Rebel Records

Musings during the drive yesterday

1. Catholic religious orders, institutions, and organizations are used to a national base for soliciting financial contributions. This is understandable, in so far as with a larger pool of potential donors there is potentially more money available. And it seems likely that fervent Catholics are more likely to contribute than lukewarm Catholics. The potential donor base is probably smaller for orthodox groups, as they are unlikely to appeal to those who are not orthodox in belief. Unfortunately, this also adds to an increase in junk mail, as their campaigns rely heavily on mailings for solicitations.

Orthodox groups must compete with other orthodox groups for support from the same core of orthodox Catholics. Is such a national support base too diffuse for many Catholic groups to be supported financially, especially in bad economic times? Those groups that are tied to service to a local community should see themselves as being part of a local economy and therefore dependent upon it, instead of reaching out for help beyond the community?

Sustainability is a problem that Catholic organizations will have to face -- can they do anything about it? Those monasteries that seek to be somewhat self-sufficient may be better off, though they may have to scale back their plans for construction. What about mendicants and others who rely on surplus wealth?

I do not that we should be praying for God to create more oil to keep us going.

(Do the problems of scale affect the spirituality of the members of these groups, and the observance of the order of charity? Should religious especially be praying for a particular community, being familiar its members? This can be done with the "nation" in the abstract, just as one can pray for all of mankind, but is there something missing with regards to human affections? There is something to be said for a fixed litany or intercessory prayers of the faithful, like in the Byzantine rite.)



2. Someone advanced the claim a while back that there were no charismatics in the Eastern churches because the liturgy provided an outlet that rendered the charismatic movement unnecessary. (I can't remember if this was at Christendom, with the claim being made by one of the theology professors there, or if it happened somewhere else.) The liturgy becomes a channel for the emotions (and can inspire them).

Or, one can look at it with respect to active participation instead of the emotional benefit. There are the gestures used and the litanies present in the Byzantine rite. The texts of the Roman rite are noted as being sober and restrained, but should this be an apt description of the way Latins pray as well? Liturgical worship should engage the senses and Christians should worship not just with the mind and the heart, but with the body as well. Is the Byzantine rite (and its worship culture) better able to satisfy the desire on the part of the laity for greater participation in the liturgy?

BBC: A mass from the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge, marking the introduction this year of the new English translation of the Roman Missal. (available until Sunday)
Some comments on this over at NLM and The Chant Cafe.

I have to say that the improvement in the English translation did not solve the other issues I had with the liturgy. It is a start, but it may not be enough, given how prominent the other issues are to the senses.

Items of Interest, 5 September 2011

A Future for English Chant

Practical tips for living sustainably: an interview with Joel Salatin (part 5 of 5)

Off the Battlefield: The Civilian’s View of Late Roman Soldiers

For Labor Day:
Transition Voice: Wage Slaves Unite! General Strike!
Paul Craig Roberts, Happy Corporations Day!
Labor Day is an anomaly in the anti-labor US
Scott Richert: Celebrate Labor Day With Saint Joseph the Worker

Portland:
Jack Donovan, A Totem Pole for Our Time

Garbage in, garbage out by Tom Murphy (EB)

Fabius Maximus: One of the top questions for our time: how will Peak Oil affect the economy?

Depression in women doubles since the 1970s as they 'try to have it all'




Fan-made COD video

New Oxford Notes: An All-New 'New Liturgical Movement'?

But the Pope isn’t so skeptical. He is determined, it seems, to will into an ecclesial reality the mutual enrichment of the two Masses. If, by a working of the Holy Spirit, his vision of a mutually enriched Roman rite someday comes to fruition, then what? Well, then we might be looking at an altogether new Mass, a third form that blends the best of both the ordinary and extraordinary forms.

This notion isn’t as farfetched as it might seem. This May, at a conference on Summorum Pontificum held in Rome, Kurt Cardinal Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, hinted that the motu proprio is “only the beginning” of a “new liturgical movement.” The Holy Father, he said, “knows well that, in the long term, we cannot stop at a coexistence between the ordinary form and the extraordinary form of the Roman rite.” In the future, says Cardinal Koch, the Church “naturally will once again need a common rite.” This new common rite doesn’t figure to be either of the two extant forms of the Mass. It would instead be the result of a “process of growth and purification” — and a lengthy one at that, if the process is to be organic and not synthetic, as many have characterized the “development” of Pope Paul’s New Mass. The first phase of this process, the cardinal suggests, is the present one, in which “the two [current] forms of the Roman rite can and should enrich each other.” Perhaps now we are getting an inkling of what Pope Benedict has in mind — and it is a vision on a grander scale than any of us had imagined.

Could the two main streams of Benedictine liturgical thought — the “reform of the reform” and the “restoration of tradition” — one day flow together into as-yet uncharted waters? That a third form of the Mass could be drawn from the two current forms sounds fantastical. But really, how improbable is it? After all, who could have imagined half a century ago that in the space of five short years the Church would jettison the pageantry and majesty of a centuries-old Mass in Latin in favor of a stripped-down, folksy, “on-the-spot product” (as Benedict himself once described the New Mass) in the vernacular?

International Symposium: Council and Continuity

Rorate Caeli: "Springtime" or rupture? Arch. of Phoenix may weigh in

The symposium is in October, but I don't think I could make it (or afford to go).


When I saw this post on the 5th anniversary of Fr. Philippe's passing in the feed, I couldn't help but think of this.

Some of his papers.