Shakey Graves - Word of Mouth / Bully's Lament

Down There By the Plane

Left: Heather King
Right:  Me, in sheer delight

King Krule - Out Getting Ribs

Friday Link Roundup - 9/6/13

Starting a new feature around here called the Friday Link Roundup, to be a sampler of my daily bread for the week.

Let's begin.

1. Excorcist Amorth: "Those who want war in Syria are instruments of the devil." (Spanish)

Rough translation excerpt:

'The Lord is a God of peace, wants peace, wants love between men, desires solidarity and support, so the rich help the poor. And Satan is the one who wants death and war,' he said.

In relation to the day of fasting, prayer and vigil called by Pope Francis for peace in Syria and the world on Saturday, September 7, the exorcist said without a doubt, 'annoy the devil, and not only him.' 'I prefer not to name names,' he added.

My family will be participating in the day of prayer and fasting for peace in Syria, called by the Pope for the whole Church, that he refers to. If you're interested in participating too, Artur Rosman at Cosmos The In Lost has the quick & dirty on the Pope's call and prayer for peace in Syria, and Catholic rules of fasting.

Sidenote: ACI Prensa is run by the spiritual family belonging to the Sodalits, an order of consecrated laymen that several of my friends from college joined.


2. Those who have ears: one of my brother's bands, Low Times, just released an album of demos. Check 'em out, they're a rip-roaring good time.

This is actually the second album featuring the same demos, remixed and with some interludes and a few new songs, so I'm not sure if they're technically still kosher demos. Doesn't matter - they're worth as many hears as your ears can take.

3. Miley Cyrus, eh. But this is worth reading:

What everyone saw Miley doing on Sunday night was what I did almost every night from the age of 18 to 33. I added the Grey Goose when I was 28 and that was like a match to gasoline. ...

You wanna help Miley Cyrus? Go down to the closest Jr. High to you and start mentoring the students there. Chances are that they don’t have role models that aren’t on TV and their parents would appreciate the help.

 
4. On a related note:

There is no one who simply reacts, without also making choices.  There is no one who simply makes choices, without reacting to other people.  It’s almost as if we’re all in this together.

5. MS3TK meets Dark Dungeons

Heh! Who doesn't love a good Jack Chick joke?

Mike: Crimony! Doesn’t this girl have a home?
Crow: [In a girl's voice] I can’t mom, I’m trying to role-play all by myself.
Tract: … I’m fighting the Zombie …
Mike: Because it’s the only one.
Tom: Dibs on the zombie

6. Heather King: PEACE IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES

Peace in our relationships within ourselves, with our family, friends and neighbors, is the start of peace in the world.

It's in large part because I got sober that I have such great hope--more than hope, personal knowledge--that people can change. Because my own heart changed. And make no mistake about it, when your heart starts to change you have to do a whole unbelievable ton of ongoing work to help the change along. You have to make your life's work helping the change along. You have to ask a whole lot of people for help when you don't want to ask at all. You have to be willing to be humbled again and again, to feel awkward, to risk, to fail, to stretch, to suffer, to walk in darkness. To pray ceaselessly. To come face-to-face with your terrible wounds, your terrible selfishness, your terrible fear, your endless, absurd limitations. It is precisely because I am so damaged, so weak, so unbelievably easily triggered and prone to violence myself that I need the Sacraments.

I could never get along with some abstract ideal of peace. I need Christ, nailed to the Cross, to know that goodness, truth, beauty and peace have a price. I need his Body and Blood to even think of being willing to pay it.

7. GK Chesterton, "A Word"

The breaking of the girths of gold, the needs that creep and swell.
The strengthening hope, the dazing light, the deafening evangel,
Through kingdoms dead and empires damned, through changes without cease,
With earthquake, chaos, born and fed, rose,--and the word was "Peace."

_________

That's all folks!

A Blip of Reality

...in the Joseph Bottum controversy, from Calah Alexander:

Our society is obviously not properly ordered. It’s so far from being properly ordered, in fact, that I doubt Aquinas or Aristotle would even believe such a society could exist. Nearly half of us were raised in broken homes. More than half of us, if we get married, will get divorced. A single parent home is as common as a dual-parent home. Sex is everywhere, on magazine covers at the grocery store, on the internet, on TV. Nothing is sacred. Furthermore, nature, insofar as it exists in modern city and suburban life, is manicured and transplanted and sprayed with pesticides. Most of us don’t even know what the created Earth looks like. How can we honestly expect anyone, even Christians raised in Christian homes, to really understand natural law and the way it is ordered toward the good when the only “common” that we’ve ever known is such a warped and manipulated image of creation? I’d argue that our understanding of natural law is primarily through the use of speculative reason now. Nature has become unrecognizable, and so it has been relegated to the realm of theory.

All this is not to say that I think we should all immediately go gay and get married. All this is not to say that I actively support the legalization of gay civil marriage. All this is not to say that I reject the teachings of the Church in any way. There is truth in the Church, and wisdom beyond measure. She has been entrusted to safeguard the teachings of God himself. Even the teachings I don’t understand (of which there are plenty), I still submit to. That’s what it means to be a Catholic.

I just also happen to agree with Joseph Bottum, that the fight over gay civil marriage is not the good fight we should be fighting.

This exactly. And the run-up to this excerpt about Aquinas' understanding of natural law is a welcome correction to a common misreckoning. Catholics have an incarnational faith and we're called to robustly live out the truth we encounter in our experience. Discerning the natural law isn't meant to be a process severed from our own or anyone else's lived experience, but you wouldn't know that from typical anti-gay marriage propaganda.

[W]e try as far as possible to impose the burden of the whole onto each individual, to squeeze as much as possible into the narrow confines of the individual. This cannot be done, and as a result the content becomes abstract and theoretical, no longer touching our lives, let alone shaping them. In practice, all we do is taste and try a little of this and a little of that, at random. This explains the increasing evident flatness, the insipid and forced character of the individual Christian life, the worrying preponderance of programs and requirements. There is no longer any participation at the root level; everything has to be done and intended deliberately, everything has to be justified, discussed and decided upon. No wonder that nowadays the pedagogic element--not in the purest sense, but strongly tending toward propaganda--predominates in religious matters, imitating the successful methods of secular advertising, with its gimmicks, slogans and clichés, its mass-distribution from some central office. The individual's personal significance has become tiny. (Ida Gorres)

At the very least there's room in the Church for discussion and debate. I remember reading something from Pope John XXXIII along the lines that it's healthy for the Church to host disagreement. Wish I could find that quote, but it was something along the lines of clashing iron bars making a spark.

This, keeping in mind that Bottum (heh) isn't saying that gay marriage is really A-OK and Catholic understanding of sexuality is lacking. He's just saying that our priorities have long been out of order in the public sphere. And I would add that to focus 99% of our collective voice in opposition to something that is much more complex, intimate, psychologically and spiritually challenging, than the propaganda used against it admits - that's a folly almost as foolish as not talking about the substance of marriage at all.

Make sure to read the rest of Calah's post here.

THE PANTAGRUEL: On Weiner

Hi folks. I'm back, briefly, with a few thoughts on Weinergate.

He's limping in the polls. The fact that's he's still in the race at all is sort of a miracle, and he's gonna have to clamp down pretty hard if he expects to really go the distance. Probably won't be able to stick it out much longer, but he's been squeezing by somehow. (Sort of a slap in the face to Thompson and de Blasio, if you ask me).

He's got his wife working the damage control shtick, but I bet she's pretty tired and wishes he would just withdraw.

With these Carlos Danger tweets, he's got a whole 'nother mess on his hands. It's gonna take more than a few squares of toilet paper to cle- 

OH FINE, ALRIGHT.

Today In Corn: "Beautiful but false in a deadly way"

What is this I don't even.

"Corn survival guide" from Target's Facebook page
h/t Simcha Fisher