Pro-Lifers and Politics – “We don’t fit in either major party. And that’s a good thing.” Pro-life Voters Are Politically Homeless (The Atlantic)
Jew-Bashers – “Candace Owens, a Catholic convert and former pundit at the Daily Wire, has come under fire for anti-Semitic rhetoric, including promoting the ‘blood libel’ charge and linking Judaism to pedophilia.” Candace Owens Doesn’t Speak for Catholics (First Things)
Runaway Public Debt – “America is awash in debt. It is now normal to see a trillion-dollar increase in America’s public debt in 100-day intervals.” David Hume and America’s Debt Disaster (Law & Liberty)
Constellation of Ideas – “Poetry, the oldest and most universal of arts, is increasingly underappreciated. These four poets hope to reverse that.” The Word within the World (Plough)
The Antiself – “’On the Role of Literature in Formation’ is perhaps Pope Francis’s best document of his pontificate. Short, sweet, and full of good lines quoted and written. And yet he remains a “second friend” to many of his flock because they see their own world in some fundamentally different ways than he does.” Reading With a Second Friend: Pope Francis on Literature (The Imaginative Conservative)
A Damning Report – “Coverage was heavily biased against Israel, report into corporation’s output finds.” BBC ‘breached guidelines 1,500 times’ over Israel-Hamas war (The Telegraph)
Catholic Literary Imagination – “In 2013, the poet Dana Gioia published an article in the journal First Things chronicling a decline in the visibility of Catholic artists, particularly writers, in contemporary culture.” How attending the first MFA program centered on the Catholic literary tradition changed my writing (America)
Find One, Lose One – “We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.” Doom scrolling (Works in Progress)
Slanted Alexa – “Multiple owners of Amazon Echo smart speakers uploaded videos to social media this week showing the device’s built-in virtual assistant Alexa appearing to give answers to questions about the 2024 presidential election that favor Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and provide extensive criticism of former President Donald Trump.” Users report Amazon’s Alexa gives praise for Harris and criticizes Trump (CatholicVote)
The Garden State – “I believe New Jersey could be a leader in smaller, local farm production, focused not on feeding the world, but the immediate community. And this example is one to be replicated wherever there is healthy soil, sun, water, and a hungry population for food with taste and health value.” The Future of Farming in New Jersey: Trends, Challenges and Innovations (New Jersey Monthly)
The Continued Power of True Myth – “Cultural Christianity, which used to be the last stop on the way out of the Faith may now be the first step back in. The numbers, so far, are small, but it says something that they exist at all.” The Curious Career of Cultural Christianity (The Catholic Thing)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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“America is awash in debt. It is now normal to see a trillion-dollar increase in America’s public debt in 100-day intervals.”
“We dont need a revolution” – words, I think, from a Beatles song. No, our federal government with it social welfare system and incessant love of war will insure the government’s collapse and the the demise of the USA. The government is destroying the middle class very effectively. Soon the government will be nationalizing individual assets in order to finance uncontrolled spending and financing the debt. Our government has effectively reintroduced slavery as we have become chattel to our new slave-masters – the Federal government/Deep State.
As your resident crusader against anti-Semitism, I’m happy to see that First Things essay linked, especially since Crisis just ran an admiring profile of Candace Owens. Catholics have a long history of hostility toward Jews. We don’t need any new recruits adding to that shameful record.
The word “Jew” has many meanings: biological, religious, cultural, spiritual, etc.
If one is using the word “Jew” to mean an adult who gives assent to the Christ-denying religion founded by the Pharisees, or the ideology and culture that followed upon that religion, then to criticize “Jews” and hinder their work makes perfect sense.
This is the meaning of “Jews” that St. Peter and St. Paul had in mind when they rebuked them. “They please not God and are contrary to all men.” (1 Thessalonians)
People who hate Jews hate their blood, regardless of whether they practice their religion or have even become Christians. It didn’t matter to the Nazis that St. Edith Stein was a Catholic nun. Or for a more recent example of that attitude, consult that Catholic masterpiece of malevolence, The Plot Against the Church by “Maurice Pinay.”
No one should hate any person or group of persons, whether because of their blood or because of any acts which they have committed, or because of any false beliefs which they hold.
Where is the evidence that Candace Owens hates all members of the Jewish race or the Jewish religion?
What she has done is expose the poor track record of many unconverted Jews–religiously inclined or otherwise–in refraining from committing unjust acts, often against Christians.
Therefore, she is alerting Christians as to the misdeeds of people like Genrikh Yagoda, Lazar Kaganovich, Shmuley Boteach, and the current rulers of the state of Israel.
God Bless Candace Owens!
@ Runaway Public Debt
The cumulative U.S. National Debt is $34 Trillion or about $100,000 for every man, woman and child. Private debt is roughly the same.
The annual federal budget is a little over $4 Trillion, of which $1.7 Trillion is deficit financed, adding each year to the National Debt. (Annual interest payments on the debt are a big chunk of the total ($0.87 Trillion). A looming and growing overhang. We are living beyond our means.
The warning flare of Laudato Si, with more somewhat conflicted science and modeling, is that ecologically we likely are also eating next year’s seed corn in one way or another or many. While the generous God is infinite, created nature is not.The cultural question might look something like Icarus.
Is the cultural and economic trajectory of the Industrial Revolution out of whack–competitive mass production and mass consumption? Amplified by competitive identity politics at all levels?
The Common Good, what’s that? And, what might a least-wrenching transition into a lower gear actually look like? Or, is technocracy a cornucopia?
And, how does the Church continue to affirm and uphold the personal interior life, the universal and inborn natural law and moral absolutes, and the fact that the incarnate LOGOS (faith and reason) entered real and universal human history at a particular time and place? Now as if the apostolic, sacramental, and Eucharist Church is both “listening-in” and yet always more than an alleged clericalist artifact waiting to be poured into an inverted pyramid.
@ The Antiself
The popesplainer militia torments us with ridiculous accusations from one side, we get from another side the insistence that Francis is a kind of omnimalevolent actor (Deavel). David Deavel finds a “second friend” in Pope Francis’ wonderful similarity in tastes, here literature, the second, because of the everpresent nuance of discord. Although in his honest assessment of the inevitable taint of the good in Francis that defies the “otherside’s” judgments he in effect seems to agree with them.
At least however Deavel finds some good in His Holiness. In fact there are frequently examples of his untainted, reverent, theologically pristine comments, even commentaries. In doing so Francis appears a real, first friend candidate. It is in this dimension that he flabbergasts the multitude. Perhaps Deavel may consider inventing another category of friend.
@ The Continued Power of True
Robert Royal takes us on a ride through living faith to shadows that are the remains of our faith. A curious mystery, a quasi myth now becomes the vestige for a hopeful return. Tolkien’s myth that may be reality is an entree, as it was for CS Lewis for intellectual rediscovery.
What is of interest is why former practicing Christians, the remnants of the fiery faith of the early Fathers who no longer think intellectually and ponder the mysteries of life. Baptism would seem to be a reason, an indelible sacrament like ordination. Would the soul retain that vestige in a conscience darkened by error given to the sensual? If there’s any real hope for the return of the king to rule in his disheveled kingdom other than the second coming, that remaining spark must blaze, not by ideas rather by compassionate suffering of the cross.
@ Find One, Lose One
Granted Justin Germain is a philologist scholar and I can’t match his expertise. Although I can respond correctly to the suggestion Germain has in Find One, Lose One, that there may be texts somewhere out there [we already have the Dead Sea scrolls and the Gnostic gospels found in Egypt] that might replace the current Gospel, or a Gospel.
Although the presumption that there may be more authentic texts to be found that would replace other than sacred scripture is correct. The rationale for that is that they are sacred scripture, and as such sanctioned by the Church as the authentic accounts of Christ by the Apostles and Evangelists. We can accept as faithful belief that the Holy Spirit, who does not falsify or err guided the early Church to approve the texts [the early communities were already in communion living the Gospels, the letters and the acts of the Apostles], as well as rejecting others. Otherwise Justin Germain has much to share regarding his expertise.
@ Slanted Alexa
Two inquisitive persons demonstrated that Alexa is really Jeff Bezos’ Mini me.
@ Slanted Alexa
Two inquisitive persons discover Alexa is really Jeff Bezos’ Mini- Mi.