Day Bidet #62

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet
One of these things is not like the others

Thou, Lord, hast holpen me, and comforted me:

  1. “Exodus 34.6-7 appears over and over in the Bible.” (Related.)
  2. “[T]here are no more experts.” So: “You either trust formal institutional processes and credentials, or you trust autists with pattern-recognition abilities, wellness mommies operating off of intuition, and bodybuilders using broscience.” (Related.)
  3. “The fact that young people are so focused on the issues they’re most focused on is itself a strong line of evidence that they’ve been misled and should be questioning the sources who have taken them so far astray.”
  4. “Psychological health benefits included improvements in mood and cognition, including a reduction in anxiety, depression, and tiredness; increased happiness and joy, confidence, self-esteem, mental clarity, memory function, sleep quality, and productivity at work.” (Related: “[Carnivory’s] impact on the evolution of human socio-reproductive behaviors, physiology and anatomy is undeniable.” Related.)
  5. “[S]even layers of meaning in Genesis 1.”
  6. “Both envy … and self-interest … had significant effects on support for coercive redistribution…. [C]ompassion was unrelated to coercive redistribution.”
  7. “Attention is the economy of love.” (Related: “There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”)

More:

Anonymous: “Have you guys been to rural Japan? Or rural Italy by that token. It’s miserable. You have no idea how dark and sad a country’s culture becomes when you have more old geezers than toddlers. … [T]he effects on the culture at large and the national psychology are there for everyone to see. Despair, detachment, sadness and ennui.” (Related.)

“Baptism is an act of citizenship.”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. (But, as always, a beautiful, amusing, and, uh, ineffable world nevertheless.)

Eleonore Stump: “[Job] had demanded goodness. What he gets is something of what caused the sons of God not just to find God good but to rejoice in him and in his relations to his creatures. But what exactly is this? … The question is a request that what is presented as a second‐person account be translated into a third‐person account, and … this could not be done without losing what is most important about the second‐person account.”

Peak Spirituality

by WFTD, posted in faith
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. - Imgflip

Socrates: “It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.”

A lot of people (including me!) have thought long and hard about how to achieve peak physical performance. Everyone’s optimizing for something, and whatever it is—strength, health, beauty, talent, knowledge, GPA, income, status, fame—there’s an app for that, and lots of freely available advice on the Internet (some of which is even good!).

When we try to optimize for things like wealth, health, and beauty, we structure our lives in specific ways that are usually very easy to recognize. Everyone pretty much knows what it looks like to optimize for wealth, health, or beauty; everyone knows lots of people who optimize for those things.

What about spirituality? What would it look like to achieve peak spiritual performance? And lest that question seem too performance-based: What would it look like to achieve optimal closeness to God?

Could we even recognize a life that optimized for such a thing? Could we even know what such a life would look like? And if we could, would we—would I—be genuinely willing to pursue it?

White Flight’s Success

by WFTD, posted in History, politics

Jews displaced by street crime in New York City were many Holocaust survivors and refugees. One Canarsie grandmother made a comparison that rattled the sociologist who heard it: “I am locked up like in the ghettos of Europe. I am afraid of people knocking down my door. I still am not free.”

How could this calamity be memory holed so thoroughly that, to the extent anyone remembers it today, we talk as if the Holocaust survivors were the villains of the story? It is because the boomers themselves were too young to remember it. Most people born in the decade after 1945 would have been in their twenties when Judge Garrity’s busing decision came down, too old to be in school and too young to have children of their own.

Preserving the boomers’ liberalism on race was, in many cases, precisely why their parents had fled to the suburbs. Bernie and Roz Ebstein of Chicago had marched with Martin Luther King and were committed to staying in Merrionette Manor even as the neighborhood flipped, until their school-age sons started expressing racial resentments. “You believe this stuff about integration,” their eldest told them, “but we’re living it.” The Ebsteins quickly moved to Hyde Park, where little David and Steven would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them. Having high-status views on race was part of the middle-class life they wanted to pass on to their children, no less than material comforts and a college education.

It is therefore a mark of white flight’s success that so many boomers are willing to believe Ta-Nehisi Coates’s lies about it. 

Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

Day Bidet #61

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

It were a well-spent journey, though sev’n deaths lay between:

  1. “I should be glad of another death.”
  2. Diversity is not our strength, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. (Related—language warning. Related. Related. Related. And, of course, related. A story we’re hearing very little about, despite the many names the “activists” could demand we say. Who knew SUV’s could be so hateful? But then again “maybe the acceleration pedal got stuck.” Related—another story we haven’t heard much about. At this point, I don’t see how anyone can argue with this.)
  3. Thread.
  4. Heroic. Powerful. Poetic. Accurate (language warning). Unsurprising. Also unsurprising.
  5. “Outline of 2 Corinthians”
  6. “[T]he mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.” (Perhaps one reason vaccinated people under 60 are dying twice as much. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related: Demon World. Related: Abolish the FDA. Related. This thread and this thread summarize things well.)
  7. “Shame and kindness meet.”

More:

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World (and not because the clowns are funny—language warning). Clown World. Demon World. Demon World.

God hates divorce.

I believe! (Related. Related!)

John Tillotson: “The true ground of most men’s prejudice against the Christian doctrine is, because they have no mind to obey it.” (Or as Chesterton put the point: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Narrow are the mansion of our souls; enlarge Thou them, that Thou mayest enter in!)

P.S. A Happy Belated Thanksgiving to you all. (Especially the parents!)

Wonderment and Open Contempt

by WFTD, posted in faith

A Black Friday reflection, perhaps:

The very Nazis look at you with wonderment and an open contempt! For even they are sure that to live for nothing higher than oneself is to lose life; that life, to be called life, can be found only in serving something bigger than one’s personal interests; something that crowds these out of mind and heart, till one forgets about them and lives wholly, and without exception, for that other, worthier thing…. It is long since Aristotle told us that only barbarians have as their ideal the wish to live as they please, and to do what they like. And the New Testament gravely sets us down before the Cross, and bids us gaze, and still gaze, and keep gazing, till the fact has soaked itself into our minds that that, not less than that, is now the standard set us, and that whatever in our lives clashes with that is sin.

AJ Gossip, Experience Worth Hope

None of That Dark Brown Feeling

by WFTD, posted in faith
Fulton Sheen beatification tickets available starting Friday | CIProud.com

Meditation effects far more profound changes in us than resolutions to “do better”; we cannot keep evil thoughts out of our minds unless we put good ones in their place. Supernature, too, abhors a vacuum. In meditation one does not drive sin out of his life; he crowds it out with love of God and neighbor. Our lives do not then depend on the principle of avoiding sin, which is a tiresome job, but on living constantly in the climate of Divine Love. Meditation, in a word, prevents defeat where defeat is final: in the mind. In that silence where God is, false desires steal away. If we meditate before we go to bed, our last thought at night will be our first in the morning. There will be none of that dark brown feeling with which some men face a meaningless day; and in its place will be the joy of beginning another morning of work in Christ’s Name. 

Fulton Sheen

Day Bidet #60

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Say that you’ll call every single day:

  1. “[W]e mustn’t think we have answers to all life’s questions or pretend that things are going to work out as they should, but we should enjoy the life God gives us anyway.”
  2. “What is the most fattening food?” (Good news: You can make mayonnaise without it. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related!)
  3. “In seeking to become ‘authentic’ we absorb the opinions and preferences of others. This age of ‘authenticity’ is actually characterized by a massive amount of social conformity.” (Related.)
  4. “We should also put a lot more thought into how to change our status markers to … promote social health. And to prevent the rise of unhealthy markers.” (How to do that is the most overlooked political problem.)
  5. Correct. (Related. Related.) Correct. (Related. Related. Related.) Correct. Correct.
  6. Worth reading. Also worth reading (or at least skimming). As is this. (Related. Related—preemptive jury intimidation. Pour encourager les autres…)
  7. Phillips Brooks: “Our religion is not a system of ideas about Christ. It is Christ.”

More:

“God made you very carefully.” (Related. Related—American woman, stay away from me!)

“No children, no future. It’s just that simple. Progressive Christianity is the way of death.” (Related. Related, if you’re paying attention. Also related if you think about it.)

“Free speech = N-word.” What a line! (And what a year 2076 will be! Hopefully better than 2021. Related—whoops!)

“The army of us that love him.”

If God So Loved the World…

by WFTD, posted in faith, politics
Kyle Rittenhouse's former lawyer predicted weapons charge dismissal a year ago in politically charged case | Fox News

…then God so loves Kyle Rittenhouse—and Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, Gaige Grosskreutz, Jacob Blake, George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, Biden, Trump, Gandhi, Hitler, Madonna, Prince, the person crossing the street. Anyone. You. Me.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” But when I’m walking around town, pretty much all I see is ordinary people. Nice people, sometimes, but also annoying people. Obese, loud, forgettable people. Rarely extraordinary.

What would it mean to see only extraordinary people? What would it mean to recognize the immortal beauty in every single human being? What would it mean to love the whole world wholly—clean through?

And what does it mean to be so loved? To be so recognized and seen? And to know that we are not alone—that literally everyone else is just as loved, just as recognized, just as seen?

Day Bidet #59

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

God is Love, clean through:

  1. “Galatians is not about ‘how to be saved from sin in order to go to heaven.’ In fact, Paul hardly mentions sin in the letter and salvation is not mentioned at all.” (Related.)
  2. Magical. Miraculous. Heroic. Ineffable. Verbatim quote.
  3. “Many Christian elites … suffer from profound naivety.”
  4. Carnivore success story. Carnivore success stories. 2209 carnivore success stories (!) in a peer-reviewed study. (Related.)
  5. “[A]ncient writers often (typically?) cited texts rather freely, often re-wording them for effect, which seems to have been regarded as both acceptable and even clever of them. Moreover, well after the supposed stabilization of NT writings and the formation of a NT canon, early Christian writers continued to use these texts with striking flexibility and freedom.”
  6. As I’ve said before, “racist” just means “unwilling to submit to the Establishment.”
  7. Bunyan: “Some also have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either Hills or Mountains, to go over; but the way is the way, and there’s an end.”

More:

“Two subordinates of Dr. Anthony Fauci raised concerns in May 2016 that taxpayer dollars may be funding gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses at a Wuhan lab.” Whoops! (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related—diabolically.)

“[O]ther believers in Rome heard that Paul was coming and traveled as far as the Forum of Appius—forty miles away—to escort him the rest of the way to Rome.”

“No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, / Nothing that’s quite your own. / Yet this is you.” (Related? And yet…)

Be not afraid.

Annunciation

by WFTD, posted in Art, faith, Literature
File:Henry Ossawa Tanner - The Annunciation.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Henry Ossawa Tanner, “The Annunciation”

I have come to accept the story of my own

obedience—how I waited not knowing

I was waiting, ear obliging, body

poised. You sent a man I could not

look at fully, or touch, he was a flame

which spoke, and I could not

be afraid—as it’s told,

I rose instinctive as a dove

startled into flight, blue

veil fluttering

floorward and tongue

unglued—May it be done

to me, I said, and it was done

so quickly, I thought to say it

meant I had some say, but

it was preordained—the breath

barely out of my body

before my mind had changed.

Leila Chatti, “Annunciation”