Friday Links
October 25, 2024
Neri di Bicci: St Raphael and Tobias
‘And You a Catholic!’ Phil Klay on Faith beyond the culture wars
Home Libraries Will Save Civilization
Gregory Hillis: A Burial at Gethsemani
Money and the Roots of Moral Evil
Catholic Culture Podcast with A.M. Juster
The Trouble with Levitation and Bilocation
“Here the Autumn Is Just Like in Kyiv”: Sergei Bongart Pays His Respects at Forest Lawn
‘And You a Catholic!’ Phil Klay on Faith beyond the culture wars
Wherever you fall in the culture wars, this essay from Phil Klay is well-worth reading. The jumping off point is Evelyn Waugh’s quip that “without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being” in response to getting called out on his nasty behavior. Klay raises some good questions that those of us on the left and the right should think about. It seems to me that when you get to know most people you find out there’s more to them than their memes and quips and tweets. Certainly, in an age of social media, we need to be very careful about judging others based on their online personalities, but we should probably be even more careful about our own online personalities, especially if/when they are different than our actual personalities.
. . . Waugh, who, toward the end of his life, declared, “I now cling to the faith doggedly, without joy. Church-going is a pure duty parade. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me.” From my perspective as a partisan of a more liberal theology, I can look at Waugh here with a winner’s smugness. But this ignores the way in which I find myself like him, adrift in cultural currents I dislike and allowing that to enervate the one thing I need when I genuinely face despair. “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics,” Charles Péguy observed, and the bitterness of the political struggle has a way of leeching the faith that grew during its mystical beginnings.
Home Libraries Will Save Civilization
Nadya Williams on the wonder and beauties of home libraries:
When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.
Gregory Hillis: A Burial at Gethsemani
It was a surprise to enter the Abbey of Gethsemani’s church and see a body lying on a bier. Br. Harold was dressed in a white cowl and his face bore no signs of being made up by a mortician. He did not look like he was sleeping. He looked like what he was: dead.
Money and the Roots of Moral Evil
The first distinction that has to be made here is between a purely instrumental function of money, as a means to procure for ourselves certain goods, and the attraction that money possesses for man in itself, being wealthy, the position that wealth implies, the independence, might, security, the Lebensgefühl that riches provide. Money or wealth possesses undoubtedly an attractive power as such, in its potentiality to procure for us various goods, before any direct concern with certain concrete goods to which someone may aspire. Interest in money, the desire to possess it, the aspiration for wealth is as such a normal human tendency. Wealth belongs to the sphere of the legitimate subjectively satisfying. To prefer to be rich rather than to be poor is not necessarily a fruit of concupiscence. We shall briefly analyze the different approaches to this sphere, starting again with the one that is morally most perfect, that is to say, with the approach of the saint.
Catholic Culture Podcast with A.M. Juster
A.M. Juster joins Thomas Mirius to talk ancient Christian poets, lawyering and poeting, St. Aldhelm’s riddles. Take a listen, you won’t be disappointed.
The Trouble with Levitation and Bilocation
Carlos Eire on the strange case of bilocation and levitation:
They are also among the oddest of wonders, everywhere, not just because they seem to happen infrequently but also because by suggesting the presence and power of an unseen force that can toy with nature, they tend not to serve any practical purpose other than confirming the special status of the person who levitates or bilocates. In a religious context—and most accounts of levitations and bilocations have religious origins—the unseen force is usually ascribed to some higher being, but it can also be ascribed to the levitators and bilocators themselves, who are so obviously unlike most of their fellow human beings for whom the tug of gravity within a single location is inescapable. In Christianity, that higher being could be God or the devil, and levitators could be viewed as either holy or diabolical, or, in some cases, as clever frauds. As awesome displays of raw unnatural power, the phenomena of levitation and bilocation have few equals, and this fact alone makes them inherently ambiguous and powerful all at once.
“Here the Autumn Is Just Like in Kyiv”: Sergei Bongart Pays His Respects at Forest Lawn
Boris Dralyuk on the Kyiv-born painter and poet Sergei Bongart.
Verse also allowed Bongart to show off what he excluded from his paintings: a healthy sense of humor. His finest poem, it seems to me, depicts Forest Lawn, the impeccably manicured cemetery in Glendale that was mercilessly satirized by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One (1948).
