-
The Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas Has Finally Won
One of the more hilarious sites on the Web relating to Roman Catholicism is the Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas, or SMMMHDH for short. When it started, the Society made the following claim:
The Society is awaiting pontifical approval from the Holy See as a pious sodality.
It looks like the Society will get its wish after all, because the Pope is preparing to to purge the Vatican of modern music.
To be honest, I didn’t expect an occupant of the Holy See to make such a move to undo a centrepiece of the last 45 years of Roman Catholicism, any more than I expected one to be as proactive as he is looking to be in assimilating Anglo-Catholics, laity and clergy alike. But, to steal another quote from Jethro Tull, “It was a new day yesterday/but it’s an old day now.”
Personally, although I have been away of having to listen to modern Catholic music for a long time, I think it’s unfair to characterise all post-Vatican II Catholic music as awful. For a long time I have promoted one album of it which I think is anything but, namely Roger Smith’s Who Shall Spread the Good News. There is a lot of great early post-Vatican II Catholic music at The Ancient Star Song; for those who have never heard it, you can decide for yourself.
A good deal of the problem, though, has been Gresham’s Law at work in Catholic churches regarding music. The Smith album, for example, never got traction at the parish level. Oregon Catholic Press has been a major culprit in this, aided and abetted by the dearth of good musicians at the parish level. The result is that a lot of the good music was driven out, replaced by the kind of music the Society gags on. (Some of the same process took place in Contemporary Christian music, which is why the music blogs for CCM generally stop in the early 1980’s.)
Update (March 2016): This piece still gets visited after all of these years. The “sodality” has disappeared from the web, and I’ve cleaned up the other links as well. Since this was posted I’ve put up a great deal more “Old Folk Mass” music, which you can find here.
-
A Special Thanksgiving Verse
Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine. (Proverbs 3:9, 10)
The special opening sentence for Thanksgiving from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.
-
Next Time, Try SSH of an ISO
Chances are, most of you have no idea what the title of this posting means. But a few people in the United Kingdom (may not be united for much longer) need to learn that meaning quickly when moving their CD-ROM’s around, as now they have lost two of them with the confidential data of half the families living in the country.
CD’s are so commonplace that it’s really arresting to think about the magnitude of a disaster that involves losing two of them. The production of these two CD’s themselves, including the labour taken to burn them, couldn’t be more than a few quid. (That’s pounds sterling, for those on this side of the Atlantic.) The technology itself, although a wonder, is a quarter of a century old, and has long been surpassed by DVD (single and dual layer,) Blu-Ray and the like.
More specific to the current discussion, however, is the method of transfer. Most of our computers (especially if you’re using Windows) have all kinds of anti-virus, anti-spam, firewalls and the like for virtual security. The one thing that many people overlook is the physical security of the equipment and data. We worry about hackers all the time, but when so much data can be put on such antiquated media and tossed about, we need to take a look at that too. (Just think of the damage that could have been done with a 4 GB flash drive…)
One way to do the fateful transfer that is now roiling the Brown government would be to have condensed the data onto one or more .iso disk image files, encrypting and protecting them all this while, then uploading them using SSH (secure shell) to either the destination target or to a common data transfer location. At least the loss would have had some kind of trace.
None of this is very exotic, and there’s doubtless proprietary solutions that would do better. (On the other hand, maybe not…) But then we run into the next problem: the computer literacy of the bureaucrats, which may not be the highest either. Compounding this problem is the fact that Windows, unlike Unix based systems (Mac OS X, Linux, Free BSD, etc.,) doesn’t have a straightforward method of mounting and viewing disk image files.
In a world where so much data can be transferred with such ease–physical and virtual–it pays to stay vigilant.
-
Some Things Look Great on Paper. And Then…
Zack has an interesting response to my posting More on the Fairness of God, both on this blog and on his own Mutantcheez. Let me respond in turn to a couple of his comments.
Paul goes on to talk in the letter about how Abraham is considered righteous based on his faith in God, and this was said of Abraham before he received the covenant of circumcision, before he received the law, and before the gospel message. And though he is unaware of the gospel message, he is still called righteous by scripture. It seems to me that the Bible is pretty clear that the qualifications for righteousness, and therefore salvation, is faith in God. I’m not entirely sure, but it seems to me that from your blog, you would disagree (please let me know if this is true or not) because Jesus declares that there is no way to Father but through him.
I really don’t disagree with this point. Paul specifically tells us that Abraham was justified by his faith. Abraham obeyed God and responded according to the Covenant God offered him. Jesus Christ had not come into the world at that point. Or, to put it another way, Abraham became God’s friend under the dispensation in force at the time.
One of the things that bothers me about current Christian thinking is that Christians are having a harder and harder time understanding that God’s revelation to the Jews was a progressive one. We are so obsessed with the absolute truth content of the Bible and the Jewish roots of our faith that we have lost sight of the fact that the entire process the Jews went through was a) educational and b) a stepwise progression to the final revelation in Jesus Christ.
Then he gets things to the present day:
I tend to believe that Scripture seems to affirm that a person can have a faith like Abraham’s and still be credited with righteousness even though he/she lives chronologically after the coming of Christ. I imagine this faith would be infinitely harder, as that person would have virtually no special revelation of who God is (not to mention i couldn’t even fathom how to explain to you what this faith would look like), yet as Abraham demonstrates, it is possible. Jesus himself says to Thomas, blessed are they who have not seen and still believe, and this seems to me to be more evidence that a saving faith in God is still possible without being specifically aware of the gospel message.
Christians of all types have attempted to come up with a solution to this problem, and many of these solutions have theoretical beauty. But they hit a few roadblocks on the way to reality.
In this case, most other thought systems–religious and otherwise–aren’t "faith based" in their method of "justification." (What justification means depends upon the goal of the religion or system of thought, and that widely varies.) They’re based on works. You pick it–Islam, Masonry, Marxism, humanism, even the new atheism–all of these and other systems insist on their adherents doing good things to justify themselves. They all start with a kernel of faith of some kind (I know the atheists will hate me for saying this, but they hate me anyway) but then the works take over.
And that leads to the next problem–what works are acceptable? As an example, one of the pillars of Islam is the haj, the trip to Mecca. They believe this is good. For the environmentalist, however, all this does is add to global warming. That kind of problem is why works salvation doesn’t cut it.
God, in his sovereignty, may have a plan to include some of those who don’t know Jesus Christ explicitly. But I think that the terms and conditions of this are unknowable in this life. That’s why I avoid speculation on it. That’s why it’s important to put Jesus Christ first.
-
Goats Get Grade Of A-Plus
Too bad the politicians can’t manage the same thing…
The problem here is that the goats are doing what they do best: eating everything that’s in front of them. When the politicians do what they do best, we have corruption, graft, patronage, nepotism, favouritism and the like.
Why are the ratings of the President and Congress so low? Because we’re basing our judgement on what we want out of them, not on what they do best.
-
If They Can’t Speak English, It’s the Employer’s Call
John Fund’s piece on the efforts by some House Democrats to force organisations like the Salvation Army to hire people who can’t speak English (or won’t do so all the time on the job) is a good reason why I have lost faith in the whole "anti-discrimination" portion of our laws.
Having run a business, I think it’s the employer’s prerogative to hire whom they see as the most fit for the job intended. That includes the Salvation Army. On the other hand, I think that employers who make employment choices for reasons other than performance will pay for their decisions.
As an example, in the late 1960’s my father opened a fabrication shop in West Palm Beach. Part of his workforce were two Cubans, one who spoke no English and one who acted as an interpreter. (It was a small shop.) Needless to say, Spanish was spoken on the job, although my father wasn’t known for his progressive views.
But the work got done. The one who spoke no English was a veterinarian in Cuba, but couldn’t pass the State of Florida’s exam to practice his profession. For us he did spray painting and, as painters are wont to do, painted just about everything possible. His work was good.
Above: a sample of his work, painted and ready to be loaded for shipment. Behind the crane is the UPS facility. Unfortunately our painter’s enthusiasm for his work didn’t consider the direction of the wind, so from time to time the cars and vans parked at UPS got an unwelcome paint job.An employer that wants to get the job done will work with situations such as this, and rest assured they do it every day. Even churches are getting in on the act. My church has two greeters whose command of English isn’t the best, but they’re great Christian people, they’re friendly and they look sharp.
It’s time to let employers make their own choices–and suffer the consequences when they hire people unwisely who won’t do the work.
-
Falling off the fence
One of my father’s consistent gripes about the Episcopal Church–a gripe usually made specifically about our Rector at Bethesda–is that its ministers rode the fence too hard, never took a stand on anything, etc. That "strategy" (if it can be dignified by that name) lost TEC many members, but it also won it a few who didn’t like a religion which took too many definite stands (or thought they were above such things.)
Unfortunately the chickens have come home to roost for Rowan Williams, as Andrew Brown tells us in "Falling off the fence." He is in a position where he has a chasm too deep for bridge piers and too wide for a single span. Fence riding was a loser from the start and now alienates more people on both sides than it attracts.
At this point clarity would be his best bet. Unfortunately for reasserters, the only open clarity CoE can have in the immediate future is broad-based reappraising. That’s because the British government, irrespective of how the establishment issue works itself out, will not tolerate a church that does not meet its ideas of inclusion, especially one as large and well propertied as CoE. Evangelicals in CoE can protest all they want but this is the present reality in the UK. (Tolerating mosques with a different idea is, of course, another matter altogether.)
The Global South may want an orthodox Anglican Communion, but it would be simpler if they would put together an Anglican Communion without the CoE and move on.
-
Going Back to the Ones That I Know…
Pope Benedict XVI is certainly shaking things up in his "new" approaches to the Mass, Anglicans and Orthodox. It has more profound implications that many people realise.
To start with, he’s being more proactive to Anglo-Catholicism than many anticipated. In Think Before You Convert, I figured that the Roman Catholic Church would simply pick up those who "swam the Tiber" in the wake of what Damian Thompson referred to as the "car wreck" of the Anglican Communion. (The old British car, I might add!) Obviously His Holiness has a different idea, and it will be interesting to see how this proceeds.
That proactivity may be facilitated by his moves with the liturgy, making it easier to use the Tridentine Mass. Note should be taken how he’s done this. Instead of eliminating the Novus Ordo Missae or establishing a formal system of parishes that use it, he simply took the power to regulate it out of the hands of bishops. With the easier feedback now available, liberal bishops who try to get in the way of "progress" can be ratted on. (Oh, that we would have had this a long time ago…) It’s a decidedly "bottom-up" approach. But it also is a step away from the breezy informality that the Mass is celebrated with in many places, putting Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic practice more in synch with each other.
All of this–including his dialogue with the Orthodox–shows that the current Pontiff is trying to re-establish Roman Catholicism’s traditional view of itself while at the same time do so in a way that makes more progress in the present world. It’s "going back to the ones that I know" (Tull fans will recognise this) in a new way.
But those outside of the circle that Benedict is creating need to take heed: dialogue with Roman Catholicism will become more difficult as the church reverts (in some ways) to a more pre-Vatican II stance. Remember, this is the man that reminded the world that we (outside of this circle) may not be a church after all.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 