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  • Totalitarian Moments IV: “Guilt Was Hereditary” — Stand Firm

    Ever had a book that you bought, maybe read a few pages, then put on the shelf to collect dust – only to take it down years later and really read and be amazed by what you were missing? Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng has become such a book for me. Li in words…

    via Totalitarian Moments IV: “Guilt Was Hereditary” — Stand Firm

  • Anne Applebaum and the Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal

    “Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians?” she wonders. “Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades?” The book is an admirable quest for answers and goes a long way toward providing them. But it would have benefited from considering whether the questions Applebaum has posed are the right ones to begin with.

    via Anne Applebaum and the Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal

  • Jim Wallis Gets Cancelled for Good

    Sure looks that way:

    Jim Wallis, age 72, is a venerable Religious Left patriarch, having founded what became Sojourners magazine, originally called The Post-American, in 1971. Now Wallis has stepped down as Sojourners editor after he tried to delete an article accusing Roman Catholicism of rampant racism. His attempt prompted two other editors publicly to resign. The now restored article is called “The Catholic Church Has a Visible White Power Faction.”

    This has been coming for some time; it’s really an event waiting for an excuse to happen.  I’m surprised it didn’t happen when he pulled Sojourner’s punches on the Believe Out Loud campaign.  At the time he gave the following explanation:

    But these debates (over LGBT issues) have not been at the core of our calling, which is much more focused on matters of poverty, racial justice, stewardship of the creation, and the defence of life and peace. These have been our core mission concerns, and we try to unite diverse Christian constituencies around them, while encouraging deep dialogue on other matters which often divide. Essential to our mission is the calling together of broad groups of Christians, who might disagree on issues of sexuality, to still work together on how to reduce poverty, end wars, and mobilize around other issues of social justice.

    What Wallis finally succumbed to was the American left’s obsession with leaving class differences out of their agenda.  Like their counterparts on the aspirational right, who won’t discuss it out of shame-honor considerations, the left will divide society on anything–race, sexual orientation or reorientation, gender, you name it–rather than socio-economic differentiation.  It’s the same with the critical race theory types, who have simply taken white supremacists’ governing assumptions and flipped them to their own use.  You can accuse the left of many things, but originality isn’t one of them.

    Wallis has found out that it’s easy to get left behind, as I predicted he would on LGBT issues:

    His stance on same sex civil marriage–that we need same sex civil unions–may sound good to him but will not cut it with his LGBT friends, or at least their leadership. One thing he will find out the hard way–as many North American Anglicans have–is that the message of the LGBT community to the nation and the church is the same as Ulysses Grant’s to Simon Bolivar Buckner: no terms except unconditional surrender. I expect that, sooner or later, he will sell the pass on the Christian sexual ethic, as his Main Line counterparts have done, but that is something he will have to deal with.

    And it’s the same now with race…

    For those on the left, a question: when will they cancel you?  As Leon Trotsky, Lin Biao or even Mao Dun found out, it’s not a matter of if but when.

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  • In the New Cold War, Deindustrialization Means Disarmament

    In 2011, then-President Barack Obama attended an intimate dinner in Silicon Valley. At one point, he turned to the man on his left. What would it take, Obama asked Steve Jobs, for Apple to manufacture its iPhones in the United States instead of China? Jobs was unequivocal: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” Jobs’s prognostication has become almost an article of faith among policymakers and corporate leaders throughout the United States. Yet China’s recent weaponization of supply chains and information networks exposes the grave dangers of the American deindustrialization that Jobs accepted as inevitable.

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/12/china-industry-manufacturing-cold-war/

  • Azusa Street Participant George Studd: Seven Characteristics of Early Pentecostals — Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center

    This Week in AG History — August 11, 1945 By Ruthie Edgerly ObergOriginally published on AG News, 13 August 2020 When the Pentecostal movement began to take root at the Azusa Street Mission in 1906 under the leadership of William J. Seymour, there were other missions springing up in Los Angeles that joined with what […]

    via Azusa Street Participant George Studd: Seven Characteristics of Early Pentecostals — Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center

  • Who will salute Trump’s man in Berlin? — UnHerd

    Two centuries ago, the British statesman John Bright warned against “following visionary phantoms in all parts of the world while your own country is becoming rotten within”. It is symptomatic of how diseased American strategic thinking has become over the past 30 years that so few Americans in a position to influence the direction of…

    via Who will salute Trump’s man in Berlin? — UnHerd

  • The end of secularism is nigh — UnHerd

    Last week, on 5 August, the Prime Minister of India laid a foundation stone and helped bury a distinctive period in global history. Narendra Modi had travelled to Ayodhya, a city long identified by Hindus with one of their most beloved gods. Lord Rama — avatar of Vishnu and hero of the Sanskrit epic, the…

    via The end of secularism is nigh — UnHerd

  • The Joys of Bitter Lemon — Chet Aero Marine

    I grew up in a family of serious drinkers, which goes back a long way, as my grandfather’s involvement in this should attest. That meant that we had a stocked bar in the house (it wasn’t a “wet bar” in the sense that it had a sink, but it was stocked all the same.) At […]

    via The Joys of Bitter Lemon — Chet Aero Marine

  • Epoch/NALR Family Album Vol. 1

    Epoch Universal Publications/NALR 33420/FAI-78 (1978)

    “Best Of”/Compilations weren’t unknown in the “Jesus Music” era but they weren’t common either. This is an interesting one, selected from the extensive offerings the ministry had in the 1970’s. It includes many of their best known artists (and some lesser known ones) as follows:

    • Paul Quinlan, a pioneer in the field (featured elsewhere) now with his wife Nancy;
    • Grayson Warren Brown, one of the few (only?) black artists NALR had;
    • Saint Louis Jesuits, the famous, including Bob Dufford, John Foley, Tim Manion, Roc O’Connor and Dan Schutte;
    • Carey Landry, the “Catholic troubadour of the bayou,” who even serves up some “bon ton” in French on this album;
    • Deanna Edwards, the music therapist, one of whose cuts sounds like something from the soundtrack of an old movie; and
    • Wendy Vickers (also featured elsewhere.)

    I’m not sure whether this album was ever commercially distributed; based on what’s on the album cover, it may have been intended as a promotional effort for parishes to adopt their music (which many did.) It’s not quite like “The Cry of the Poor” but it’s a nice selection from probably the strongest distributor of Catholic music in the NOM/Vatican II era.

    The songs (with their composers):

    • Though the Mountains May Fall (D. Schutte)
    • The Lord is My Shepherd (P. Quinlan)
    • Son-Rise (D. Edwards)
    • How Good is the Lord (C. Landry)
    • Sow a Seed (W. Vickers)
    • Rise Up (P. Quinlan)
    • Jesus Died Upon the Cross (G. Brown)
    • The People That Walk in Darkness (B. Dufford)
    • Live Each Day (D. Edwards)
    • Blest Be the Lord (D. Schutte)
    • In Him We Live (C. Landry)

    For More Music Click Here

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  • Pope Paul VI: An Historic Journey to the Holy Land, January 1964

    Twentieth Century-Fox TFM 3129 (1964)

    It’s something of a departure from our usual offerings, but this is a vinyl phonograph documentary of Pope Paul VI’s visit to the Holy Land at the time of the Epiphany in January 1964.  First, however, some explanation of the medium is in order.

    Until the advent of video disks and ultimately the VCR, there was no convenient way outside of a television studio for people to do “video on demand,” and thus phono documentaries like this one were very common in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  It was the best way that people could relive events like this one.

    Paul’s visit to the Holy Land was described as historic, and in the context of the time it certainly was.  To begin with, none of the occupants of the See of Peter had come back to the homeland of the first one until that time.  (Kind of reminds you of Brother Andrew’s remark that Jesus told his followers to go, he didn’t tell them to come back!)  It was also the first time in 150 years that a Pope had left Italy, the result in part of the Vatican’s sixty year “imprisonment.”  To visit the Holy Land then and now required that the Holy Father visit the State of Israel, something dicey given Roman Catholicism’s penchant for replacement theology.  Last but not least the Pope met with the Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras; a Pope and Patriarch hadn’t met since the two branches of Apostolic Christianity angrily parted company in 1054.

    The centrepiece of the recording at least is the Pope’s Mass in Nazareth.  Although Vatican II had been recently concluded, it wasn’t until 1970 that the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated.  The Mass was thus conducted both in Latin and in what is now called the “Extraordinary Form” but was then the ordinary one.  That should warm the hearts of Trads who usually use this pontiff’s picture as a dart board, but this Mass was not elaborate.  Then as now media types didn’t understand religion very well; the narrator proclaims the conclusion of the Mass only to have the Pope begin his recitation of the Creed.  (I’ve been to Masses like that, but…)

    Outside of the Mass, the Pope addresses the President of Israel, the crowd at Nazareth, and the Patriarch in French.  At the time French was the language of diplomacy; our world has come a long way since then.  He also invited the Patriarch to recite the Lord’s Prayer; good thing he didn’t use the Creed, with the still-ongoing “filioque” controversy, that would have blown things up again for another 910 years.  It wasn’t until he returned to Rome that he addressed the crowd in his native Italian.

    The world has changed a great deal in the nearly seventy years since this visit and recording, but the historic nature of the visit–and the way it was disseminated–are both worth remembering.

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