Get a bat!

[I am reminded of the story of a kid harassing the pitcher, telling him how slow he was, how washed up, etc. The pitcher responded: "Okay, kid. Get a bat!"]

Poetry and philosophy

As a student wrote in a paper I read recently, “I love poetry—it’s like philosophy with its clothes on.”

Finance

Peter Kodwow Appaih Cardinal Turkson, an impressive man with a doctorate from the Biblicum in Sacred Scripture. His advice on world banking is as welcome as the views of the Chairman of Credit Suisse on the authorship of Deutero-Isaiah.

Abp Weakland

In 1986, the same bishops issued another pastoral letter, “Economic Justice for All,” which was dissected by competent lay economists and expectorated by the encyclical “Centesimus Annus.” Of all the bishops, the one selected to chair the writing of that paper on financial accountability was Rembert Weakland, whose perception of the market place had the perspicacity and dispassion of a debutante at a bullfight.

Eminent domain

As it happened, getting rid of Susette Kelo’s house—ultimately, New London moved it from its waterfront site rather than demolish it—produced no gain to anyone. In the wake of a merger, Pfizer moved its research facility elsewhere; the redevelopment agency couldn’t raise the necessary financing for the rest of the project, which Pfizer’s withdrawal rendered problematic; and the land sits vacant, generating not a nickel of tax revenue.

Tertullian

"Our teeming population is the strongest evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us from its natural elements. Our wants grow more and more keen and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while nature fails in affording us our usual sustenance. In every deed, pestilence and famine and wars have to be regarded as a remedy for nations as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Paul Ehrlich in 1968? Al Gore last year? Nope. It was Tertullian, a Carthaginian priest in 210 AD

Fordham

Poe spent many of his days in the Bronx (then considered a part of Westchester County) wandering through the woods and by the river. St. John’s College, now Fordham University, had opened just a few years before his arrival, and he frequently visited the first generation of Jesuits there, writing that they “enjoyed smoking, drinking and playing cards, and they never discussed religion.”

Hawkins and the universe

Stephen Hawking has noted that "if the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size."

In charge

Most of the people who want to be in charge probably shouldn’t be.

Bishops

Bishops: a feckless group of powerless bureaucrats

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa of Calcutta said about being called not to be "successful but to be faithful."

B Franklin

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." ~ Benjamin Franklin

What the Lord hates

"Six things the LORD hates, seven which are an abomination to him:

haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and a man who sows discord among brothers. (Prov 6:16-19)"

Salvation

Man's ultimate purpose is to let God save him.

Editing

Adlai Stevenson's definition of an editor: "One who separates the wheat from the chaff and keeps the chaff."

Gay marriage

Gay marriage? It’s like Grape Nuts: neither grape nor nuts.

Unintended consequences

Responding to peace activists, some Montgomery County Council members sponsored a resolution to instruct Congress to slash defense spending. The idea died when Virginia began inviting the county's second-largest private-sector employer, Lockheed Martin, to move across the Potomac.

Breakaway Churches

Jesuit-educated Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe reminded the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Church of England is “a breakaway group from the Roman Catholic Church” during an awkward meeting in Harare yesterday.

The sparrow

This is how the present life of man on Earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time. The fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging – and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment. What follows or, indeed, what went before, we know not at all. - Saint Paulinus of York, speaking in Northumbria

Euthanasia in the movies

Film A is about a loving husband whose young wife contracts a painful, incurable disease. He helps her kill herself and is tried for homicide, but is acquitted because the court recognizes the rightness of his deed.
Film A is I Accuse, produced in Germany in 1941 as propaganda for the Nazi euthanasia campaign.

California

California is like a middle-aged wastrel who finally has run through his trust fund and has to get a real job.

Sex scandals

Would the sex-abuse nightmare have occurred at all, if the average Australian or American Catholic had bothered to realize all this? St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Galatians, is absolutely emphatic. "When the faith is endangered," Aquinas writes, "a subject ought to rebuke his prelate, even publicly."

Flannery

Flannery O'Connor, who once observed: "The Catholic Church has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning how to write."

Shaw

A passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")

Being stoic

Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic...but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."

Rosewater Catholics

They seem to enjoy all the benefits of Catholic life, and none of the inconveniences.

The chenical brain

Every materialist argument about thoughts and beliefs being reducible to chemistry would itself be reducible to chemistry. There would no longer be truth as we understand it, just chemistry.

The Minute Men

A British lieutenant-general who fought the Minutemen observed, "Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken."

Atheists

Atheists are such a bore; they are always talking about God.

Mr. Obama - shape shifter

His habit of spiritual shape-shifting.

Slaves in America

Here is another piece of history that might shock Garofalo: In 1654, black slave John Casor sought freedom from Anthony Johnson, a black slave owner—the first official slave owner in America. Uh-oh…the dirty little secret revealed.

The Gaurdian

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.

Bishops and laity

The role of Bl. Clemens von Galen and other bishops is well-known, but they received their influence from their flock, ordinary German Catholics who were shocked to their core by this Social Darwinist experiment.

German bishops

(Fearful of what would happen, the senior bishops had overruled both Von Preysing and Cologne’s Archbishop, Josef Frings).

Auden & Aquinas

W.H. Auden's Letter to Lord Byron: I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas

Hard science

If it is true that all truths are discoverable by hard science, then it is discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. But it is not discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science.

The barbarians

W. H. Auden, in The Age of Anxiety wrote:

But the new barbarian is no uncouth
Desert-dweller; he does not emerge
From fir forests; factories bred him;
Corporate companies, college towns
Mothered his mind, and many journals
Backed his beliefs.