Zenit: Bartholomew I Foresees Orthodox Unity With Kirill

And then there's this... Liam Neeson Records Way of the Cross CD.

Going down to SLO... be back tomorrow!

Twitch: Kwon Sang-woo for TV drama version of ‘TaeGukGi’?

Bach, J.S. - BWV 0787 - Sinfonia - 01 - Janine Jansen


Janine Jansen: The Bach Album


alt

Mozart Violin Concerto (Part 1 of 5)

Ed Peters: The Maciel meltdown and the future of the Legion
American Papist: Legionary reaction to Maciel revelations adequate?
Patrick Madrid: This Is No Time for Happy-Face Stickers

(links via Fumare)

Surviving Peak Oil

Duty is often contrasted with affection, as one can act out of duty without feeling affection for the person whose well-being is the object of that duty. But is it possible to act out of duty (or, out of justice), without benevolence? It seems that this is possible as well--a "motivating" or general virtue, whether it be general justice or charity or benevolence, is not necessary for someone to act justly out of the virtue of justice.

Is it necessarily Kantian to speak of duty? No. But it seems undeniable that a Thomistic understanding of duty (and its relation to virtue) is different from the account of duty given by Kant.

Just a thought... the prize for this season of Hell's Kitchen is the position of head chef at the Borgata in Atlantic City. I believe the casino industry in both Las Vegas and Alantic City has not been doing well, because of the economic crisis. Now the casino/hotels may not go out of business in the next couple of months, but what will happen after 12 months, if things get worse? (What will happen to Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant in L.A.?)

Several students have told me that they are moving away from San Jose, because their parents cannot afford housing there. One is moving to Modesto. Another student's father lost his job recently, and her mother is now making and selling piñatas.

Edit. After the Red Team lost, Chef Ji volunteered herself for elimination, as she had sprained her ankle, and did not think she could do her part for the rest of the team. (Even though in that episode she was much better than the two who were put up for elimination.) Will she make a return to Hell's Kitchen someday? I doubt it; though it would be 'nice' if she could get a position at a restaurant with her strong performance and Chef Ramsay's recommendation. She was one of the stronger contenders, and it is unfortunate that she had to leave. I hope her father is impressed by what she showed on television. She has her own website.

NorthJersey.com: Local chef on "Hell's Kitchen" tonight
Hell's Kitchen: Chef Ji's Sparkling Scarlet Sangria
Hell's Kitchen Chef Serves Up Some New Year's Evil

Patrick Deneen, Culture, Not Morality?

The power of community, by Graham Strouts, Zone 5

Community” is often dismissed as a romantic notion, “harking back a golden age
that never existed”. Traditional rural communities tended to be held together by
the absence of choice: you were your mother’s daughter or your father’s son, and
the range of possible futures – opportunities for travel, education, and
employment- were limited.

(original)

Opportunity knocks when it comes to a local food economy
Olga Bonfiglio, Energy Bulletin
Community-based agriculture has the potential for creating jobs, developing small business entrepreneurship and keeping precious dollars in the community.

Slow food: Have we lost our appetite? (Carolo Pertini interview)Leo Hickman, GuardianWith purse strings tightening and sales of organic food falling, can the world afford the luxury of 'slow food'? Leo Hickman meets its founder, Carlo Petrini, who believes that his vision of farmers' markets in every neighbourhood, community vegetable allotments and network of small local producers could help to shape a global re-evaluation of food and farming

(via EB)

More on the Slow Food movement. I wonder if Slow Food SF has any jobs available...

Sandro Magister, Double Disaster at the Vatican: Of Governance, and of Communication

Since Paul VI on, the secretariat of state has been the apex and the engine of the curia machine. It has direct access to the pope, and governs the implementation of every one of his decisions. It entrusts this to the competent offices, and coordinates their work.

So then, throughout the entire affair of the lifting of the excommunications for the Lefebvrist bishops, the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, despite his highly active and outspoken nature, distinguished himself by his absence.

His first public comment on the question came on January 28, during a conference in Rome at which he was speaking.

But more than words, what were lacking from him were actions equal to the gravity of the situation. Before, during, and after the issuing of the decree.

Benedict XVI was left practically alone, and the curia was abandoned to disorder.

The fact that Benedict XVI has given up on reforming the curia is now before the eyes of all. But it is conjectured that he compensated for this non-decision by entrusting the leadership of the offices to a tough, dynamic secretary of state, Bertone.

Now this conjecture has also been shown to be lacking. With Bertone, the curia seems even more disorganized than before, perhaps in part because he has never completely dedicated himself to fixing its problems. Bertone does most of his work not inside the walls of the Vatican, but on the outside, in an endless round of conferences, celebrations, inaugurations. His visits abroad are as frequents and as packed with meetings and speeches as those of a John Paul II in vigorous health: he was in Mexico from January 15-19, and is now visiting Spain. As a result, all of the work that the offices of the secretariat of state dedicate to his external activities leaves that much less work available for the pope. Or sometimes, it is a wasted double effort: for example, when Bertone gives a speech on the same topic and to the same audience to which the pope will speak a short time later, with journalists on the lookout for differences between the two.

Bertone's personal devotion to Benedict XVI is beyond all doubt. Not so that of the other curia officials, who continue to have free rein. It is possible that some of them deliberately oppose this pontificate. It is certain that most of them simply do not understand it, do not measure up to it.

I recall an anecdote about who would become elected pope, and someone made the comment that if a Chinese were ever elected, the screws would finally be tightened on the Curia. (I think this may have been in one of Malachi Martin's books.) Do the Chinese really have such a talent for managing bureaucracy? (The reputation of the Chinese Imperial system notwithstanding.) Is the problem that there is too much "government at the center"?

The Crunchy Con links to a piece by Alan Jacobs (cross-posted at The American Scene). Mr. Jacobs writes in respone to David Frum:

1) What Frum shows — what almost all people who make this kind of argument show — is that literature is a minority taste: Look at how many more hits there are for the Sopranos than for Kafka! But literature has always been a minority taste. If you want to argue that that minority is shrinking, you going to have to acquire some comparative data. You’ll need to define literature, and you need to gather as much information as you can about literacy rates, book sales relative to population, library use, and so on. You’ll need to figure out what time frame you’re talking about: the past thirty years? Seventy-five? Two hundred? You’ll need to get as much historical context as possible, and context from other societies, by reading historians of reading like Robert Darnton and Jonathan Rose. Once you’ve done all that work, you will be entitled to draw some tentative conclusions about whether the reading of literature is declining or not, and, if there is a decline, whether it’s from a well-established norm or from a unique high point.

2) Yes, a lot of crap gets taught because of “political correctness.” But a great deal of major literature has been discovered as a result of paying attention to cultures beyond the West. Harold Pinter never wrote a play worthy to be compared with Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. I would give up the complete works of John Updike and Philip Roth for Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, and a handful of the gently brilliant comic novels of R. K. Narayan. And yes, I’m serious.

3) I don’t know what Frum means by “comic books,” but there are graphic novels that are significant works of art, that need to be reckoned with. Books like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth, and David B.’s Epileptic defy condescension — and indeed, I might give up a good chunk of Updike and Roth for them too.

Here is what I wrote over at the Crunchy Con:
1. Are those books being taught in a lower division course or upper? If in an upper division elective, fine. If in a lower division course, then I would ask, "What happened to the notion of a core curriculum that has as one of its purpose the passing on of Western civilization?"

2. We should not be looking only at individual entertainment or satisfaction, but preserving a culture that binds a people together, through the transmission of common stories. There are many things working against that ideal (TV and mass entertainment, the loss of community, and so on), but this purpose should at least be acknowledged, even if impossible to attain. (We need to know what we should be aiming for, in order to know what needs to be improved. If it cannot be improved, then we should realize how bad things are, instead of pretending that any sort of guerilla or holding action we may undertake sets everything aright.)

3. Literature being a minority taste? Perhaps--but even those who are part of the intellectual elite should have texts in common, since it is incumbent upon them to preserve the less accessible works of Western civilization. Perhaps we cannot turn back the loss of an oral culture and its replacement by a written culture in our schools--still we should ask the question of whether higher education is serving the good of the local community, or adding to its fragmentation.

4. Finally, as a part of a liberal education, the study of literature plays an ancillary role, not a primary one.

Here I would add that in a classical education (as it is given by the Jesuit tradition, but probably recommended by Renaissance writers as well), there was much emphasis on memorization and modelling one's rhetoric, both in speech and in writing, upon the great orators [and writers] of the past. (And should the writing of poetry not also be a skill that the truly educated should have to some degree? The Chinese certainly thought so.)

The replacement of poetry, epics, and plays by novels and short stories should be examined, both in society at large and in the university. (Was the introduction of literature courses a contributor to the decline of the Western university? Or just contemporaneous with it? While it is possible to teach a literature course so that the students can grasp eternal truths, still, it is no substitute for a scientific approach [in the Aristotelian sense] to knowledge and wisdom.)

Moreover, while texts from other cultures may address larger moral questions, such as those pertaining to justice, which all of mankind must find answers to, still, when their study is promoted at an institute dedicated to multiculturalism, how can a student not be left with the impression that one's own local particular culture is being denigrated? Is it possible that the study of another society's literature may even promote relativism with respect to 'secondary' customs? While it is true that some customs are not important as others (for example, bowing versus handshakes, as opposed to not killing one's neighbor), we should nonetheless foster a measure of devotion and respect to our customs, instead of a careless atittude about them, as if they were rendered trivial or inconsequential by different customs in other societies.

Literature may provide a springboard for inquiry and reflection, but it also serves a different didactic purpose--the offering of characters with whom we can identify and emulate. Earlier societies, with their oral culture, had a treasury of common stories and heroes, their epic poems and sagas.

It must be said that the medieval scholastics, who developed the university, were not without the study of 'literature,' but perhaps modern academics would not recognize it as such. They were supposed to be familiar with Sacred Scripture above all, and the writings of the Church Fathers and other authorities. How extensive was their knowledge of Greek plays and such? The use of fiction to add to philosophical and theological arguments seems to be minimal, if non-existent.

The university does have some role to play as a bearer of culture, as do other social institutions, most of which are failing miserably in the United States, as people continue to live their lives as 'individuals' without ties to place. Man is ordered not only to the knowledge of truth, but towards living with others well, and a university education is not necessarily concerned with only speculative knowledge. If a university claims that the education it offers has a moral component as well, then we are not concerned solely with what is of benefit to the individual as individual; we must also take the individual as a member of a community also into consideration, and educate him accordingly.

Someone wrote in response to my post over at Crunchy Con:

I actually think television and mass media have done a much better job of creating a widely shared body of common stories, characters and ideas than just about anything else.

A possible counter-argument--commercial television (cable television as well) and movies generally work against against mental discipline and reflection. The problem with replacing our imagination with the images that are presented on screen is over-saturation. Reading or listening to a story is more abstract--the imagination is used as tool to make the words intelligible, but it does not dominate.

Eventually I think we will come to have a lot less respect for mediated experience in general.

I think this is unlikely, unless some calamity that causes us to lose access to our electronic media happens, and reality becomes so harsh that we cannot avoid it. The draw of fantasy is very powerful. (Just look at the popularity of video gaming and pornography among young males.) We'll simply continue to see a shift to other forms of mediated experience, as the amount of reading done by adults continues to go down. (It's not a shift from lower appetites to higher appetites, but the reverse--this is why we believe we are in a state of decline. People are not abandoning mediated experience, for a more simpler way of life, like monks or other ascetics.)

So what should Christians do? Become even more familiar with Sacred Scripture, especially in its original languages? What traditional culture should Christians preserve in their communities? Classical learning? Which stories?

Response begung on 1/2.

2 more from Peter Hitchens: Did the police run away? and Home Schooling and Homosexuality

(Is the first further evidence of anarcho-tyranny in the UK?)

The video:


It does look like a breakdown in leadership--what one might expect on the battlefield, retreat in the face of a numerically superior enemy. So... were the police really just 'leading' the demonstrators somewhere else?

From The American Conservative: Homeland Offense: Washington contemplates deploying the Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement, by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos.

Zenit: Vatican Clarification on Lefebvrites, Holocaust

Recent appearances on the Tonight Show by Kate Winslet, Dakota Fanning, Elizabeth Banks, Marisa Tomei.

(Won't be available on Hulu for too long...)

Food, Finance and Democracy in Crisis
by Raj Patel (edited and introduced by Ethan Genauer), Energy Bulletin

The 2009 29th annual Ecological Farming Conference kicked off on January 21 in beautiful, rainy Pacific Grove, CA with a provocative, pointed, timely, and at-times hilarious keynote address on "Food, Financial Stability and Democracy in Crisis" by Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, a new critically acclaimed book about the causes and consequences of global food inequity.

Links: Raj Patel Website of writer, activist and academic, Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved, Slow Food Nation interview: Raj Patel

Edward/Elinor - Come Home

Welsh Anthem 150th Anniversary


Heyley Westenra shoots a music video


Hayley sings The Heart Worships


Heather Small & Hayley Westenra - Chattanooga Choo-Choo

Chrissy Crowley with Richard Wood


Chrissy Crowley at Red Shoe Pub, Mabou NS


Chrissy Crowley at East Coast Music Awards 2008

Rorate Caeli: NOTE OF THE SECRETARIAT OF STATE

John Allen's report (via Stephen Hand)

An Austrian perspective on the current economic crisis: Guido Hülsmann: The Economic Crisis in Europe and America (dl)

NYTimes: Catholic Order Jolted by Reports That Its Founder Led a Double Life (via Rorate Caeli)

Rod Dreher: Maciel, partisanship and blindness

Edit. More from the Crunchy Con -- Regnum Christi: A view from the inside.