July 2012
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The best swimmer cannot rescue the drowning man unless he is in the water with him. He may be pulled under, he is taking a risk, but he must be there. –Maisie Ward, from her biography of Caryll Houselander
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Weekend Music I thought I had posted this earlier this evening. Apparently there is a way to abandon a post in TypePad without a draft having been saved. As I was saying earlier: a good song is one that's good no matter who's singing it. By that standard, an awful lot of rock groups…
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Thanks to Janet Cupo for pointing out this post to me. I don’t agree with everything she says, and obviously working “for a better world,” as the saying goes, is a good thing to do, indeed an obligatory thing to do for Christians, but nowadays that tends to be defined as political activism and debate.…
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The New Testament speaks terrible things about something translated as "the world." Again and again we hear of it as a society of liars and killers, of brainwashed and arrogant men who parrot the gibberish and lurch into the snares set for them by demonic powers. The resulting picture is of a great, roaring machine…
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A Beautiful Mass A couple of weekends ago I attended Mass at a parish which I will refrain from naming, in a city on the other side of the continent. I know I’ve mentioned more than once here that after a long period of struggle I eventually became reconciled to the normal American Catholic liturgy.…
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When praying for someone else, I often find it hard to know exactly what to pray for. I pray for the other's salvation, of course, and that whatever is going on in his or her life will bring him closer to God. And surely it's okay to leave it at that. But sometimes I want…
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Weekend Music If the lead voice sounds like something you've heard here recently, that's because it's Ben E. King ("Stand By Me," "Don't Play That Song"). According to Wikipedia, this is "the first commercial rock-and-roll recording to include a string orchestra."
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Harsh words, I know, but on the basis of this piece by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, they seem justified. I've seen references in other places to most of the ugly stuff related here, and no one seems to have denied very convincingly that it's true. I have always been completely immune to the fascination the…
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Apparently she really didn't want to give Mick Jagger a knighthood. (Daily Mail link, so full of pictures of girls in bikinis.) I'd like to think she also objected to Elton John's.
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What do you do when you see an alligator? You try to catch it, of course. And if you succeed, and the alligator is not too big, what do you do? You take it home and try to put it in a swimming pool, of course. But sometimes these rural idylls don’t work out as…
Light On Dark Water 