Catholic Stuff
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Some years back there was, in the comments here, an exchange about the tendency of political and other opinions to harden in older people. If I remember correctly, one person suggested that this was essentially a sort of ossification, with certain opinions becoming so much a mental habit as to become an unchangeable part of
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Much of the current issue (Lent 2023) of The Lamp is devoted to Benedict XVI, to "the life and legacy of Joseph Ratzinger," which is to say that it looks not only at the pope but at the theologian and cardinal. Most of it is only available online to subscribers, but if you don't subscribe
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(The title is for you, Stu) For various logistical reasons we didn't go to the Easter Vigil at the cathedral this year, or even to our regular parish, but rather to a very small parish in a very small town a bit further away than our own. Well, why not be specific? It was St.
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A few things I meant to say about The Dry Wood: I'm not sure exactly what the title means. It's an allusion to Luke 23:31: For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry? That's the Douay-Rheims translation, which is the one Houselander uses, not surprisingly. I admit
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I thought I was reasonably familiar with Houselander’s work, but it came as a surprise to me to learn that she had written a novel: only this one, published in 1947. So when I saw an ad for an online seminar on the book, a joint effort from Dappled Things and the Collegium Institute, I
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I was working on a post earlier today but didn’t have time to finish it, and may not tomorrow, so, briefly: A remark from a priest seen on Facebook on Thursday: “I thought I was having an epiphany this morning but it was transferred to Sunday.” This evening my wife and I were shamefully late
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So Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI has left us. It's an odd and not really very relevant association, but seeing his obituaries in the press makes me think of a remark by a non-Catholic friend of mine early in the pontificate of Pope Francis. His view was based on the appearance of the two
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This year I have to a great extent managed to stay clear of the un-Christmas, the festivity now generally referred to in public as Holiday, or "the Holidays." That was partly because of various circumstances that kept me even more at home than usual. And it was partly the silver lining in Alabama having lost
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Continuing the discussion of the success or failure of Vatican II, from this post: Ross Douthat (as quoted by Rod Dreher, because I can't view Douthat's entire New York Times column) asserts that the council was and is a failure on its own terms. The measures intended to invite and draw "modern man" to the
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…have seen the end of war." A quick search finds that sunny observation attributed to Plato and to Santayana, which is an awfully wide chronological range. I did not learn it from any such noble source, but rather as the name of an album by an Iraqi heavy metal group, Acrassicauda ("a black desert scorpion").
Light On Dark Water 