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  • Holy Week Wishes, and Some Announcements for This Site

    It’s been some time since I’ve had an original post, and posting may be sparse for a while longer. There are some important changes afoot for this site:

    • Two of the features of this site: the Palm Beach Experience and The Island Chronicles–are moving to Chet Aero Marine. The reasoning for this is complicated and is explained in the introduction to that site. They follow the migration of The Bossuet Project a little while back.
    • I am rewriting the central part of those Island Chronicles, will keep you posted (you can see what’s going on better at Chet Aero Marine.)
    • For the first time I will be doing a holy week “devotion” on a site other than this one, namely vulcanhammer.net. There are several of these from the past for both Good Friday and Easter; you can use the search box to find them.
    • There will be other changes in this site to insure its long-term continuity.

    In the meanwhile I would like to wish everyone a blessed Holy Week and a joyful Easter.

  • Death Is Not the End — The North American Anglican

    Sometime in the early 1980s, just about the time Bob Dylan was recording Infidels, a little girl in Shreveport got a plush toy as a gift from her dad. It was vaguely Easter themed—a plump oval, the bottom half a colorful sateen eggshell, the top half a fat, fuzzy chick. It was adorable, just the…

    Death Is Not the End — The North American Anglican

  • Why Russians hated the Nineties — UnHerd

    The Nineties were a time of American hegemony and British cockiness. The internet was a utopian idea as opposed to a collective psychological disorder. Climate change, terrorism, autocracy and gross inequality were either not-on-the-radar or assumed to be moving in the right direction. 1,750 more words

    Why Russians hated the Nineties — UnHerd

  • The Preaching of St. John the Baptist — The Bossuet Project

    These elevations are about St. John the Baptist’s preaching, discussing the time before Our Lord came to him for his own baptism. Bossuet also discusses John’s place in Old Testament prophecy. The elevations are as follows: The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist. 1, The word of God is addressed to him. The Preaching of Saint […]

    The Preaching of St. John the Baptist — The Bossuet Project
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  • Anglican Tidbit: Bulletin for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

    The last in our series of bulletins from Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church is this one, from 1966.

    Bethesda Bulletin for the Fourth Sunday in Lent 1966

    As usual, notes are in order:

    • The Rev. Joseph N. Barnett was an elderly Episcopal minister who assisted at service. One time he observed that “Sitting is the privilege of the young and the old,” and now that I’ve been on both ends, I know it’s true.
    • Healy Willan’s Communion is featured at the 9:00 service. Morning Prayer took place at 11:00. As noted before, Bethesda observed the “once a month Communion” for each of these services.
    • A recital was announced for the following Sunday, given by Mr. and Mrs. C. Robert Burns. Bobby Burns was my mother’s divorce lawyer. Bea Burns was a close friend of my mother who ended up “swimming the Tiber” (in her case a return swim.) Bobby passed away in 1987; their son Peter died of AIDS in 1991.
    • The bulletin was saved because it listed the confirmation of my mother and brother into the Episcopal Church. His coming in was in due course; hers was delayed. She had been going to the Episcopal Church for a long time, but I think she was conflicted by her Baptist background from taking the plunge.
    • James L. Duncan, the confirming bishop, became the first Bishop of Southeast Florida in 1969.
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  • Wonder Where Evil Comes From? Try the Mirror

    Giles Fraser says something that all too often gets overlooked:

    But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

    Observing this is why, from childhood onward, I could never be a humanist. It’s also the reason why I could never join the “blame God” crowd. If people are so wonderful, how are all of these problems in the world possible? It’s why I never got into the theodicy trap that so many Evangelicals find themselves in, as I discuss in my piece If I Started the way @BartCampolo Did, I Wouldn’t Believe in God Either:

    For me personally, it’s an entirely different ball game.  If I had ever asked the question at home  (and I can’t recall I ever did) “Why do bad things happen to good people,” the answer I probably would have gotten was, “So what? You just have to tough it out, and if you can’t, it’s too bad.”  And, as I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog, the home I grew up in was anything but an “ideal” Christian home.  The difference between the two is significant.  While Campolo’s concept on the existence of evil focused on God, the one I was presented with focused on me…

    But hurdle I did, first because God came to me, and second because I never saw in the Scriptures the idea that this world was going to be perfect, and that eternity was the most important goal and would overshadow the pains of this life.  Eternal life was one the one thing that God could give me that the world could not.  But perhaps that all was because I looked at the Scriptures informed by the secular framework I was raised in.  The theodicy issue, such an obsession with so many, was never a big deal for me.  If these humanists were such great people, why didn’t they solve the problem of evil in the world?

    The Russians have an expression for someone whose plan hasn’t worked out very well by saying “It was their idea…” I’m sure there are many in Russia who are thinking this about Putin and the Ukraine war now that it hasn’t gone according to plan. But the humanists’ blame-shifting game needs the same characterisation: “It was their idea…”

  • The Hippie Dreamers’ “Last Stand” in San Francisco

    Well, we can hope so:

    After three members of San Francisco’s Board of Education lost a special election in a landslide vote, many of the city’s residents were hesitant to predict the same fate for district attorney Chesa Boudin, who faces a recall referendum in June. Boudin has backers with broad influence and deep pockets—but a new poll suggests even those pockets might not be deep enough. On March 16, EMC Research, a Democratic firm retained by backers of the recall campaign, released the results of a survey conducted in mid-February showing that 74 percent of likely voters have an unfavorable opinion of Boudin, and 68 percent plan on voting him out of office.

    Chesa Boudin is the stepson (sort of) of Bill Ayers, probably the most famous sixties’ radical to survive the era. It is still my opinion that the upheavals from the left that torment our culture have their origins with the “hippie dreamers” of the 1960’s, even though the left’s enforcers these days are a) more totalitarian in nature and b) more focused on getting on the government’s gravy train. (It is about funding; keep in mind that one of the battle cries of these people is “Defund the Police,” which begs the question where the money goes after that.) Boudin has done his best to implement the old agenda in what is probably the ideal place to do so: San Francisco, birthplace of so much of the Sixties’ ethos.

    But leftists are pretty bourgeois these days, and don’t take kindly to their stuff being stolen, their persons assaulted or their property values depressed. They’ve already booted three San Francisco school board members who focused on renaming schools when they should have concentrated on getting the educational system–students, parents, teachers, you name it–through COVID in one piece. I think there’s a good possibility that Boudin will end up on Ayers’ front doorstep again, even from San Francisco.

    The left is a movement of slow learners, but if they can bring themselves to boot Boudin–and they’re in the drivers seat in San Francisco–there may be a glimmer of hope for everyone. Who knows, their next move may be to keep Diablo Canyon open…

  • Have we reached peak trans? — UnHerd

    Is it really too much to ask those who struggle to define the word “woman” to refrain from running for public office? Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe’s Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was asked to provide the dreaded definition during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. “No I can’t,” she replied. “I’m not a biologist.” Jackson…

    Have we reached peak trans? — UnHerd

  • Our Obsession with Credentials

    Growing up with an obsessively patriotic father, one of the advantages he gave of our society over the one we separated ourselves form (and I mean the United Kingdom) was that, while the UK elevated people based on their credentials, ours did so based on what they actually accomplished. Whether his characterisation of the UK was fair or not is one thing, although it seemed in the 1960’s and 1970’s they were having trouble with their leadership. With ours, it’s safe to say that, while our system in the past is subject to review, there’s no doubt that these days we’ve opted for a credentialistic system of advancement.

    Cruising about on Twitter, one sees people tack on “PhD” or whatever degree they have with every post. That’s especially true in the evangelical world, where a group of academics are currently at war with large parts of the evangelical establishment (such as it is.) They obviously want to get a leg up on their dreadfully uneducated opponents and, in like fashion to the way Tertullian used the Roman legal principle of prescription, seek to block their opponents from speaking to issues they have much more authority to address.

    It’s the same in our secular society. The Republicans took a break from Ivy League credentialism to nominate and confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The Democrats retaliated in their desperation to nominate and have elected Joe Biden to the White House, the first non-Ivy League President since Ronald Reagan. Now we’re back to SOP with the current nominee, who is an Ivy Leaguer. She feels she must defer to the biologists on the question of what is a woman, not realising that current orthodoxy states that gender, like race, is a social construct. How is it possible for a biologist to determine a social construct? And how can she be fairly characterised as the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court when she doesn’t know what a woman is?

    But I digress…in my profession (Civil and Mechanical Engineering, and especially Civil) it’s really pretentious to parade your credentials in the industry. And it’s potentially hazardous too; the success or failure of what you do depends on the quality of work you obtain from people with far less education and expertise than you might have, it pays to be nice to them. Moreover people who have experience should be listened to; you might avoid problems if you can process the information they give you and use it well.

    I don’t think these United States are going to be the better for shifting to a credentialistic method of advancement. We’ll just trade one form of ignorance for another. There’s no sign that our current elites are any more cosmopolitan or have a better understanding of the world around them than those who got us through World War II and the Cold War. Perhaps the reason why they’re so keen on social constructs is that they themselves are trapped in one of their own making, and sad to say we’ll all be the worse for it.

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  • With Swimming the Tiber, Timing is Everything

    The stampede of bishops from the Church of England continues:

    In little more than a year, four former Church of England bishops have come into full communion with the Catholic Church, either through the ordinary Roman Catholic diocese or through the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, a Catholic diocese with Anglican traditions for the United Kingdom established under Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus. 

    If there’s one thing I’ve come to realise, it’s that Anglicans–or just about anyone else–don’t understand how Roman Catholicism really works. To join the one true church, with its continuity of institution, history and doctrine is one thing. To meaningfully live out the Christian life in its deficient pastoral system and some of the internal conflicts that beset it is another matter altogether. Or, as one Scottish Baptist pastor put it, “To live in love with the saints above, that would be glory/To live and grow with the saints below, that’s another story.”

    With two of these esteemed swimmers (Gavin Ashenden and Michael Nazir-Ali) the timing issue is critical. Given the erratic performance of the current Occupant of the See of Peter, this doesn’t strike me as a good time to become Roman Catholic in any capacity. The church is struggling with many core issues–its celibate priesthood, the homosexual ring(s) that have emerged in that priesthood, the siren call of worldly acceptance (which has always been a problem for the RCC) and so on. It’s really hard to know how things are to come out. I’m not even sure that the Ordinariate is going to endure once the Vatican figures out people are using it as a substitute for either TLM Catholicism, #straightouttairondale Catholicism, or both.

    I think the best strategy is for Continuing Anglicanism to get its act together (something that it shows signs of doing,) get rid of “egos inflatable to any size,” and present itself as sort of a “Catholicism in exile” until things look clearer one way or another at Rome.

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