The Tridentine Tradition a Threat?

It is an odd twist in the Church's Hierarchy which sees the Tridentine tradition as a threat whereas the bishops and priests in Germany that push the licentious lure of the current culture are not only left unreprimanded, but even congratulated and encouraged. This would be quite discouraging if Our Lord had not already forecast that there would come a time when the days would be shortened for the sake of the remaining Faithful. There was also that thing he said about wolves in sheep's clothing. May our true shepherds have Christ's courage to use their crooks to ward off the wolves and safeguard the few remaining remnants of the flock.

Global Warming?

I must say that I've been hoping for Global Warming to really kick in and it seems to be leaving New England alone. I don't remember July having overcoat weather. All I can say is I'm glad I haven't put my snorkel jacket in the attic. It has come in handy along with Shetland wool sweaters, long johns, and overcoats. I don't believe the temperature has invaded even the 70's during this July. 67 degrees Fahrenheit seems to be the average thus far. Not exactly heat exhaustion weather. And the monsoons are certainly not encouraging sun bathing either. Instead people are huddling under umbrellas and popping vita pills to keep vitamin d deficiency away. The burdened cloud bladders emptying will be the real cause, I suspect, of the rising ocean rather than the melting of ice caps. And I have to wonder why those high profile politicians that bought real estate right on the water at Martha's Vineyard still don't seem concerned enough to put their mansions on the market. You would think they couldn't unload their oceanfront property quick enough. I would think the current meterology of monsoon would at least have them planting rice and bamboo (if there can be found Siberian varieties resistant to cold). Nonetheless I am having my doubts now about the global fever where in New England at least it isn't the symptom of warming we are exhibiting but the symptoms associated with acute hypothermia.

Propaganda

Propaganda. The power of propaganda is that people don't realize it when under its spell. We seem today to have all kinds of it being politically promoted as truth in our places of 'learning' all the way from day care to the doctoral programs in university. How can we be sure we are not twisted by such 'truth' and under the enchantment of euphemisms? The socialist regimes were (and are) very successful at engineering the ethics and thought of the masses. Might one way to break the spell be to compare it to what past generations had thought? What the ancients have thought? What your great Uncle Percy had held in his strict Presbyterianism or your great grandmother believed in her Polish Catholicism? Yes, our ancestors weren't infallible. But shouldn't the voices of the dead be reckoned in our own minds? And shouldn't the antidote of faith be applied to the virus of fashion lest our consciences be formed to the insanity of the propandized present?

Orwellian Trajectory

Have we actually come this far on the Orwellian trajectory to totalitarian thought? Check out this story of an NYU professor who is being prosecuted for his course seeking to intellectually arm his students against propaganda. Have we suddenly exchanged places with the Soviet Union? Has the CIA become the KGB?

The Beauty of White Granite

Across the street from me they are putting in a granite stone front to their house. The beauty of the white stone as it is being set side by side in level rows is something that impressed me with the thankful thought that we have such beauty, even in white rock. Not only is there beauty in this world but there is the fact that we can recognize this beauty. Isn't that something to be thankful for? And who can we thank in a world where the Artist has been exiled? Shall we not invite him back?

Comment on C.S.Lewis Quote on Reality

"We have to take reality as it comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like." C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity This seems to say it so well (leave it to Lewis) particularly in the context of today's culture. It does seem like reality is taking a backseat to anarchic ideologies. May we one day have the collective courage to be the boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes" who is brave enough to proclaim contra to the popular opinion of the settled science of the day that indeed the emperor has been fooled and his entire kingdom has been bullied into the deception by the deceiving taylors.

The House on the Right of Way

There is a house on the right-of way called the Alley Steps and it is a house that is unpainted, there's a hole in the roof where a raccoon lives, and if you were a kid when kids actually read Edgar Allen Poe and believed in ghosts this would be the house they would believe was haunted. It is the kind of house that if you were Scout Finch you would expect Boo Radley to be peering out of the curtainless bedroom window at you, it would be the house that you would expect to be full of voodoo and sceances and you might expect bats to be hanging upside down in the haunted hallway. But the yard is another matter. The yard is aburst with scilla blue, a carpet of color that astonishes, that seems as though the artist spilled all his cobalt blue paints on the ground. Dandelions also bless the yard with their yellow. The person that lives in this House of Usher might just have their priorities right I expect. It certainly makes one mindful of an artist that spends his extravagant pallette upon even the most humble, albeit haunted place. Perhaps it is indeed a ghost that lives there; and if a ghost, I suspect it might be a ghost who was the teacher of the impressionistic truth in a Claude Monet.