September 2011
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Weekend Music A couple of Sundays ago I went to a concert by the Spanish guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas. The first piece was the Prelude No. 1 of Heitor Villa-Lobos. I'm hoping that most people who read this blog are not overly familiar with it. It's so widely played that I suspect classical guitar fans…
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In a letter to his cousin Louis Kergorlay dated June 29, 1831, Tocqueville goes so far as to say that there are no real "beliefs"–ancient mores, settled traditions, deep-rooted memories–in America, except for the belief in the self-evident rightness of republican government and the truth of human perfectibility. –from a review of a collection of Tocqueville's…
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We despise everything that Christ loves, everything marked by His compassion. We love fatness health bursting smiles the radiance of satisfied bodies all properly fed and rested and sated and washed and perfumed and sexually relieved. Everything else is a scandal and a horror to us. That's Merton in a 1960 letter to Dorothy Day,…
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A beautiful gallery of photographs for this week's Hearts of Space program.
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Sunday Night Journal — September 25, 2011 Two Executions If you paid any attention at all to news in (or from, as the case may be) the U.S. for the past week or so, you know that the state of Georgia executed a man named Troy Davis for the 1989 killing of a police officer.…
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Also from his visit to Germany: In order to accomplish her true task adequately, the Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from the 'worldliness' of the world. … One could almost say that history comes to the aid of the Church here through the various periods of secularisation, which have contributed significantly…
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Where God is, there is a future. Indeed, when we allow God's love to influence the whole of our lives, then heaven stands open. … Then the little things of everyday life acquire meaning, and great problems find solutions. –Benedict XVI, speaking in Germany yesterday
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Weekend Music Nobody like him. Never was, never will be. I'm not a hard-core jazz fan, but somehow over the years I've acquired more recordings by him than of any other non-classical artist. Today is his birthday. This is from my favorite period, between the beautiful but more conventional early and the completely unstructured (as…
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This (via someone on Facebook) and this. Sure will be interesting if it turns out to true, though.
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You needn't be. My Ugandan correspondent has notified me that Uncle Benon is back. (Warning: there is a pretty gruesome image near the end, at approximately 1:40.)
Light On Dark Water 