Did Christianity create slavery?

Did Christianity create slavery? No.

Might it have been used to condone slavery in the American south? No doubt. 

How are we to think about it?


1) Slavery was universal in the ancient world and not racially based. Typically slaves were the spoils of war. The first nations in the world to outlaw slavery were Christian nations including Catholic Spain as the movement gathered steam through the Catholic middle ages. Much of the slavery of Africans was by Africans who sold conquered members of other African tribes to Moslem slave traders who then sold them into the international slave trade. Moslem nations were among the very last to abolish slavery. That Christian nations participated in that slave trade was more the evidence to the power of sin rather than to the triumph of Christianity. And it was Christian nations that abolished the slave trade.

2) Britain used its power and influence to eliminate the slave trade worldwide in the first half of the nineteenth century led by Christian principles rather than political or economic interests (British slavers made as much money as other slavers and they were opposed to the reforms that threatened their profits.)

3) Presentations of Christianity as the ideology used to hold slaves down strike me as propaganda. If Christianity was used by some in the south, consciously or unconsciously, to subject Black slaves, it also pricked the consciences of others to treat slaves as children of God. The reason we in the West believe "that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" is because Christianity taught us in the west that we are made in the image and likeness of God and what we do to the least of our brethren, we do to Me (Christ.) Christianity converted both the barbarians and the cultured Greeks and Romans, neither of whom believe in such an idea, through stories, by the courageous evangelization by monks and priests, and by martyrs. Belief in such a counter-intuitive view was only spread to Black Africa with the spread of Christianity where it is now the fastest growing region of the Christian faith in the world and is producing new martyrs every day.

4) Christian churches have done much to build Black communities and support the Back family. The government and the ideologues have done much to destroy the Black family finishing the job slavery started. Rebel against them not the Church.

5) The temptation is to blame something outside us not ourselves. I know this from my own shameful experience. That is sin talking not the Holy Spirit. The easy way out is blaming the Other rather than rallying yourself and pulling yourself up by your efforts and your friends' help. That is the culture talking whether Trump to the Hillbillies or the ideologues to Blacks. They are not our friends. They make money by shilling sin to our weakness.

6) I just got finished reading (actually listening to) J.D. Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy. Read it. It is not just the Black family the culture is destroying. I come from neither a Black nor a hillbilly family and yet I found much to identify with and shed more than one tear. Don't give in to the easy path that the culture portrays, the excuses it gives you or the enemies it lets you wallow in. Rather  take charge of yourself and triumph!

Sarah Connor: Muttersprache - TV total

Sarah Connor: Muttersprache - TV total Sarah Connor will international durchstarten - TV total

When in Buenas Airies, Even Our President Tangos

¡Unos fenómenos! Los Obama bailaron tango en la cena de honor

Mora Godoy y José Lugones invitaron al presidente y a la primera dama de los Estados Unidos a la pista.

Miércoles 23 de Marzo de 2016
And on CBS:



He looked like he was tried to start an American Tango: shame, shame. 

She then backled him all the way, but she couldn't backlead him into a dip!


Por Una Cabeza: perfect comment on his tenure in el Casa Blanco.

 

Paul Scalia's homily for his father, Justice Antonin Scalia

Those of us who have lived in the Diocese of Arlington are familiar with the eloquence of Paul Scalia's homilies.  What a difficult task it must have been to give the homily for his own father and before such audiences.  

This homily is not sentimental, but it is moving and full of power.  It is worth the sixteen minutes.  Rhetoric is a dying art and the word "rhetoric" has become a synonym for sophistry, but this is worthy of a Demosthenes or a Cicero. 







I will not analyze the homily in detail.  Michael Pakaluk provides an excellent analysis in Crisis.

Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Paul Scalia reconciled back into the church, was a lector doing a reading from Romans.  Senator Cruz, a Southern Baptist, interrupted his campaign to attend the funeral.  You can read an account of the funeral in the New York Times.

Blessed José Please Pray for Media Talking Heads Whose Attacks on Ted Cruz Display Their Ignorance

Blessed José Sánchez del Río is well on his way to being recognized as a saint and martyr by the Catholic Church, maybe as soon as Pope Francis' visit to Mexico next month.  He was the young man depicted in the movie For Greater Glory: The True Story of the Christiada and who, in some ways, stole the show.




Blessed José took his religion seriously. I wonder about the people whom Kathleen Parker says she knows who take their religion seriously.  Were he still alive, would he have been among those whom Kathleen Parker would likely have known?  “I don’t know anyone who takes their religion seriously who would think that Jesus should rise from the grave and resurrect himself to serve Ted Cruz,  I know so many people who are offended by that comment.” This bit of sociology of religion came in response to Senator Ted Cruz who said "If we waken and energize the body of Christ, we will win and turn the country around."

If we awaken and energize the body of Christ,”

If we awaken and energize the body of Christ,”

If we awaken and energize the body of Christ,”

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz continues his appeal to religious conservatives. “If we awaken and energize the body of Christ,” he recently said, “we will win and we will turn the country around.” - See more at: http://aleteia.org/blogs/deacon-greg-kandra/great-moments-in-journalism-stupid-pulitzer-prize-winner-edition/#sthash.a3py2AWq.dpuf

Quick review of Christianity 101: 

1) Do Christians believe Christ is still in a gave in Palestine awaiting His resurrection?

2) Do Christians refer to His church as the body of Christ?

If you answer "no" to 1) and "yes" to 2), you are not Pulitzer Prize material and probably not a member of the new post Protestant WASP elite who seem to run the country.  R.R. Reno analyzes them with great insight in the February First Things.  The sociologists do not study them explicitly.  Reno figures those who self identify in public opinion polls as 'none' for religious affiliation are a good approximation. He concludes, "Under the leadership of the post-Protestant WASPs who run almost all our establishment institutions, the Nones are the most dynamic force in our cultural and electoral politics. They now drive the culture wars. They’re the twenty-first-century values voters who are altering the political landscape."

Maybe we are seeing the revolt of the lowly of the world against those dressed in virtual purple.

 

Young Nippers on the Wane?

Life guards at public beaches are generally paid by the local government here in the U.S.  In Australian, through surf life saving clubs Aussie "surf life savers provide the community with voluntary service rescuing swimmers in distress at surf beaches."  Young nippers form "the junior stage of surf life saving, open to children from the age of 5 through to 13 years old."  As befits Aussie's love of sport and the public display of community spirit, the young nippers' training involves long traditions and pageantry.

 WSJ's Geoffrey Rogow reports from Manly Beach (north Sydney) that these being eroded:

Michael Novak on Joe Paterno

In National Review Online, Michael Novak decries the shoddy "Injustice Done to Joe Paterno."


Read and weep.

The Centrality of Faith to our Founding and Our Human Rights

Much commentary is being written about the last debate of the Florida Republican primary.

Rick Santorum was asked last night what role faith would play in his decisions as president.  Commentary's Peter Wehner is right when he calls former senator Santorum's reply,"[t]he best answer of the night in terms of political philosophy":


"Faith is a very, very important part of my life, but it’s a very, very important part of this country. The foundational documents of our country — everybody talks about the Constitution, very, very important. But the Constitution is the “how” of America. It’s the operator’s manual. The “why” of America, who we are as a people, is in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Constitution is there to do one thing: protect God-given rights. That’s what makes America different than every other country in the world. No other country in the world has its rights — rights based in God-given rights, not government-given rights. And so when you say, well, faith has nothing to do with it, faith has everything to do with it. If rights come… (applause) if our president believes that rights come to us from the state, everything government gives you, it can take away. The role of the government is to protect rights that cannot be taken away. And so the answer to that question is, I believe in faith and reason and approaching the problems of this country but understand where those rights come from, who we are as Americans and the foundational principles by which we have changed the world."

 The father of our constitution, James Madison, advised that the only real guarantee of our liberty is that there is a Higher Authority than the state.

Fidelity

Quote of the Day: the "central issue of our culture is fidelity, not adultery or sex abuse."  -Alfred McBride.

A Bohemian Beer Garden In Queens!

The Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria Queens serves Pilsner Urquell, Czechvar (i.e., the real Budweiser), and Spatten Oktoberfest on a great beer menu.

Jim Farber and Gina Salamone report in the Daily News that it is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year. Eric Krajkovic, 31, of Long Island City, told them, "You can come here when it's packed by yourself and sit there at a table and get into a conversation with 30 other people." He "has been coming to Bohemian Hall since he went as a baby with his family."

Ahoy!

There is a New Biography of Ayn Rand–in Fact, Two!

Jennifer Burns has written a new biography of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.  And it has gotten a good deal of attention and Kendra Marr writes in Politco.com that Ayn Rand is having a mainstream moment."

On National Review Online, Peter Wehner hopes it will pass because "Objectively, Ayn Rand Was a Nut." He reminds us that "Whittaker Chambers...in 1957, reviewed Atlas Shrugged in National Review and read her out of the conservative movement." You can find that review online.   Rand's system seems as rational and inhuman as that of the socialists, yet her books have great appeal to libertarians and others.  They sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies.  Michael Berliner critiques Chambers' review in Capitalism Magazine.  Read both and judge for your self.

there is also a second new biography out: Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday, 2009.)

The Ideology of Terror or the Peace of Islam?

Is Islamic terrorism better understood as a return to Islam at its core or as an ideological version of Islam, a culture politicized? I would contend that ideology is a rationalistic distortion of reality and the product of literacy and Western thought.

Yale University Press has published a new book by Ali Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Judging from the reviews, Awawi the political route followed by the Islamofacists is untrue to Islam and Islam must reach into its own resources to deal wit the challenge of modernity.

The Economist writes: "Mr Allawi calls his new book an 'attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam'. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

"The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an 'Islamic alternative', they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb."

Mr. Allawi is an experience politician in the post-Sadam government and worldwide bestselling author.

Say it Ain't So, John

Baseball is not everybody's sport these days: the national pastime is less national than it once was. The sport's power flowed from that special glow radiating from youngsters' eyes as they saw the big stadium and the luxurious green field in an urban industrial world. For anyone who has felt baseball as the emotional personification of American culture, the words, "Say it ain't so" hit you in the gut.

This is, of course an allusion to the Black Sox scandal: the crisis of our identity a hundred years ago. The image of the little boy looking up in disbelief and hopeless hope to Shoeless Joe Jackson is more than most can bear as he calls out the legendary, "Say it ain't so."

The stories leaking out of that city by the Potomac are such as to make us cry, "Say it ain't so."

Georgetown is the oldest Catholic university in the United Sates. John Carroll, later to become the first bishop in the United States, founded the university. I cried when I read the account of how he learned the Jesuits were dissolved. This evil news caught up with him in Britain in a letter from his brother received on his way back to the U.S. from Europe.

President Obama spoke at Georgetown, Tuesday April 14th. (Read the story at Catholic News.) His handlers requested that the symbols behind him be covered. I suppose they figure they have an infinite right to control the setting. But it doesn't mean that his hosts had to comply. Over the place where the President was to speak were the initials IHS in the usual stylized manner the Jesuits use to indicate the name of Jesus. The image above gives you the idea. This picture is from the Church of the Gesu, the Jesuit church in Rome.

What is amazing and disheartening is that Georgetown complied. They covered the name of Jesus to bask in the President's reflected glory. Jesus told us not to hide our light under a basket. The Jesuits hid Him under a basket, or more precisely a piece of plywood.

The University and the President's office both claim the shrouding was the unintentional consequence of their attempt to set a proper background for the U.S. flags. Image is everything, right? I guess you can't expect a bunch of flacks to understand the symbolism of covering the name of Jesus in a Catholic university.

When President Obama spoke, he used Jesus' parable of the two men one who built his house on sand and the other who built it on rock. Some might wonder just what Georgetown's Catholicism is built on.

What Is the Difference Between a Bikini Top and Underwear? The Right to Shop.

Casuarina Square is the largest shopping center in Australia's Northern Territory. Australia is a country in which the temperature can get hot and clothes can get scarce. This apparently led to a bit of a misunderstanding.

Barbara Rilatt, a nurse, and her husband Neil, both 28, went shopping. She was wearing a bikini top (see Exhibit A to the right), he a tank top. A lady security guard asked if they had a T-shirt to cover up Ms. Rilatt's upper body otherwise she should leave.

It's not that bikini tops are banned in Casuarina Square, but the security guard thought Ms. Rilatt was in her bra. The shopping center manager, a Mr. Ben Gill, explains, "If someone was wearing underwear, then we would ask them to cover up...If she was wearing a bikini, we have made an error."
I guess you have to draw a line somewhere.

Ms. Rilatt was upset. "How could you offend someone by being comfortable?" she said. "It is fine to wear your jeans down your crack, but not to wear a bikini top?"

The lady has a point there.

Still I am sympathy for the security guard. With styles' demolishing the distinction between underwear and outerwear, decorum is becoming a tricky concept. Decollage is in (or should I say out?) Pop starlets wear outfits they are mostly out of and even the TV newscasters and the lady with the recipes on cable wear necklines plunging toward their belly buttons.

I would hate to be the one charged with writing the rule leaving bikini tops in and bras out. And what do I do about those tops that look like negligees?

Now if Mr. Rilatt had shown up in the kind of spandex swimming trunks I see men wearing on Aussie beaches, I might have asked him to cover them up with some boxing shorts!

The second picture is of the stalwarts of the Bondi Life Saving Club. I choose these young men to model the style over some other pictures unsuitable for a respectable web site.

What Is Gregorian Chant And What Role Does It Play In The Liturgy?

What Is Gregorian Chant And What Role Does It Play In The Liturgy?

“Chant” or “plain chant” is a way to sing prayers. The human voices are not accompanied by musical instruments and all the singers sing the same notes. This was the normal method for praying the mass through most of the first fifteen centuries. Nowadays we hear a melody like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” jazzed up with instrumentation and embellishments, but the bare melody is a ninth century chant. The chant used in the Catholic Church is typically called “Gregorian chant,” because, according to tradition, church music was reformed or at least compiled by Pope St. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604 A.D.) Gregory held that the music of the mass hearkens back to the church’s Jewish roots. Although scholars today contest that it grew out of the synagogue chants of Jesus’ day, one recent study ties the Roman Rite to the ancient Jewish temple rites. Thus chant reunites us with Hebrew praying going back three thousand or more years: the prayers of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the prayers of Annas, Hillel, and Jesus. The first five books of the Acts of the Apostles describe the apostles as constantly praying in temple at Jerusalem. This temple worship came to an abrupt end when, forty years after Jesus rose from the dead, Titus sacked Jerusalem, killed or enslaved the inhabitants, destroyed the temple, and built a pagan city on Zion. Thus as the chants of the priests and Levites were silenced on God’s sacred mountain, the church founded by Peter on the seven hills of Rome was chanting the Christian liturgy first in Greek and, after another hundred years, in Latin. (The Greek Kyrie Eleison is a throwback to the first century mass sung in Greek.)

Gregorian Chant and Vatican II

Perhaps you could begin with: “Gregorian chant makes one think of ancient Catholic worship, or perhaps monks in dark cowls, solemnly singing the prayers of the Mass. While this is at least partly true, the Second Vatican Council specifically requested greater inclusion of chant into the modern liturgy. Our own Latin Rite grew in feasts and song gradually. The biblical building blocks of the mass and the diversity of the liturgical calendar are reflected in Gregorian chant, which is the special musical language of the mass. The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed this musical aptness: “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman Liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium: the Council’s constitution on the liturgy, ¶116. ) Having the right music for the liturgy is important if it is to achieve its end: “the purpose of sacred music … is the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, ¶112) One of the reasons the Council Fathers wanted to reform the church’s music is to restore the simple style of chanting that enables the congregation to sing its own parts of the mass. In a real and special way, the Council determined that the congregation has an important part to play in public liturgy, and they should actively sing the Ordinary of the Mass: the Kyrie (Lord have mercy), Gloria, Credo (I believe), Sanctus (Holy, holy, holy) and the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God). In a similar manner, the landmark principle of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy called for the actual or active participation (in the Latin of the document: “actuosa participatio”) of the congregation: “To promote [actual/active] participation, the people should be encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes. And at the proper times all should observe a reverent silence.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, ¶30) This principle grew out of papal support of the liturgical movement. Pope Pius X mandated the reintroduction of Gregorian chant in 1903 and encouraged congregations to sing the Ordinary (the Kyrie, the Gloria, etc.) using Gregorian chant. He used a peculiar phrase in Latin: “actuosa participatio”, a phrase that never appears in classical or Medieval Latin. A careful analysis of its history shows that this, the very phrase the Council used, only occurs before 1963 in certain church documents dealing with Gregorian chant. Thus the phrase is a phrase with a history, a history that ties the Council’s core principle to the century long movement to restore chant to liturgy.

But Why Latin?

Chants exist in English as well as Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and virtually any language human beings have used to adore God. Many people are “enchanted” with plainsong, the chants of the English Book of Common Prayer. Yet Gregorian chant itself is intricately tied to the Latin language, the tongue of prayer for the West these past two thousand years. There is a symbiotic relationship between the language and the music. This relationship grew from the melodies’ slow development interacting with the scriptures of the liturgical calendar over fifteen centuries. Orally, Latin is specially suited for sacred music. The purity and frequency of the vowels are especially apt for musical expression. Composers, mostly anonymous, over centuries marshaled Latin’s sounds and cadences to bring out the beauty of the scriptures and rites of the liturgy. The simplicity and purity of the sounds lend a special solemnity to the liturgy that is difficult to reproduce in English or many other languages.

Why No Instruments?

Today, when we a popular song on the radio or a CD, it is the industrial product of a small army of technicians and instrumentalists. Chant is produced by the unaided human voice. It is preindustrial music.

Chant helps us gain a new perspective on what the mass is. Some liturgists focus on the mass as a supper and a communal get together. Another meaning of the liturgy is suggested by the word’s etymology. “Liturgy” is based on a Greek word that meant a “public work.” In a very real sense the mass is a type of work, the hard work of worshiping the King of Glory.

Work has changed so much we have forgotten how human beings worked together before the age of machinery. We have forgotten the existential reality of millennia of sweat and exertion. Work is highly industrialized in our world. We either do our specialized tasks to the clang of a machine or we work in silence in paper factories. Admittedly some of our paper factories produce only "virtual paper" as the work is done in the silent isolation of a cubicle.

The norm in our more human past was to sing as we worked. Work was physical and power was muscle power. This dependence on people rather than machines puts a premium on teamwork. Getting team members to literally pull together requires physical coordination: power in line was more than one person pulling together.

Why sing? The melody made men move together. True folk songs are predominantly work songs. In times past, songs unified men in work. This is how gangs of men build the rhythm needed to work in unison. Think of sea shanties. When crewmen were hoisting a topsail, they might sing “Blow the Man Down.” The song coordinated their work. When they sang, “Way, hey, Blow the man down!” each crewmember pulled on the beats, “Way” and “ Hey.”

In the liturgy, the role of chant is to join us in the rhythm of prayer: the common work of praising the transcendent God. The Holy Father chose the name of Benedict of Nursia whose motto was "Pray and Work" (Ora et Labora.) When St. Benedict’s monks sung the mass and the office, they were working just as much as when they tilled the fields with a song in their lungs and hoes in their hands. The divine work in the oratory produced fruit no less than the human work in the fields.

When we chant, the chanting unites the priest, the congregation, and the heavenly martyrs, angels, and saints as they do this divine work, a work that bears eternal fruit.

Are the Suburbs the Archetype of All That is Wrong in America

Lee Siegel dissects the American cultural elite's hatred of thee suburbs in today's Wall Street Journal: "Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? America's long artistic tradition of claiming spiritual death by station wagon." I have long believed that the suburbs are a bad place to raise children. My dislike of the suburbs was confirmed by my eleven year exile in Washington's suburbs.

Still if my enemy hates them, perhaps I should think twice. My favorite sentence is this gem that Siegel ends the piece with: "But, then, Hollywood is the most illusion-soaked, soul-hardened and materialistic suburb in the world."

James Bond Flix: Immoral Trash or High Camp?

The Times of London has a marvey timeline of James Bond. Great fun!

Are the movies simply high camp or immoral trash?

Some members would vote for the latter. That casts aspersions on their parents' probity. Personally I am ambivalent: it is hard to take these babes and gadgets formula films seriously. Maybe I am just a big hypocrite.

Now, when is the next one out?

Brideshead Revisited: Forget the Movie!

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is one of those overwhelming novels that has a point but does not hit you over the head with it. We are indeed sinners and yet God's grace can pierce our armor and cature our falty will.

It is a powerful novel and the language is beautiful. The BBC's miniseris adaptation of it for "the telley" drew widespread praise. Two of my favorite reviewers condemned the new movie version.

Barbara Nicolosi makes it sound like the San Francisco version of the book:

"How dare they.

"No, I mean really, how DARE they?! Imagine if someone did a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and it ended up savagely racist? That's what they've done here. A profoundly Catholic novel, in this'adaptation', Brideshead Revisited is viciously anti-Catholic. They turned a movie about God and the soul, into a lurid love triangle between a homosexual, his sister and a hapless hunk. It's lame. It's bad."


Steven D. Greydanus writes a long and thoughtful review (originally for the National Catholic Register.) He ends his analysis: "Waugh wrote that Brideshead 'deals with what is theologically termed "the operation of Grace", that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.' Grace may not be totally missing from the film version — the ending isn’t wholly betrayed — but however real it may be for the characters, there’s no sense that it feels real to the filmmakers, or the audience. It’s as if Waugh’s story has been filtered through the spiritual blindness of young Charles. The movie sees, but it doesn’t understand."

Solzhenitsyn, Resquiat In Pacem 1918-2008

You can Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address on the web in what may be a slightly more readable form than mine below. It is supplied by the Augustine Club at Columbia. Nathaniel Peters reflects on Solzhenitsyn's indictment of Western legalism on the First Things blog. I am indebted to Mr. Peters for a link to Chuck Colson's comparison of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address to Jeremiah's prophesies to the Judeans.

Solzhenitsyn was prophetic, an unwitting instrument of God's voice, and gave us foresight into the future by observing the current truth in its bitter reality. He taught us with his poetic concreteness, his Slavic irony, and the vivid reality of his reporting. He was Tom Wolf without the sight gags. I Am Charlotte Simmonds proves the bitterness of Solzhenitsyn's truth by showing us how far we have slid in the three decades since his Russian words were heard by that sweating host in Harvard Yard.

Amanda Shaw gives us an insight into Solzhenitsyn's use of words as windows to truth, also on the First Things blog.

Solzhenitsyn's Death