June 11, 2009
St. Gilbert of Beaconsfield?
(Tim Jones)
Hey! Tim Jones here.
Saint Gilbert?
Bereft of any terribly original or helpful thoughts of my own, I would like to draw your attention to recent posts by Sean Dailey at the Blue Boar, and Eric Scheske at The Daily Eudemon, as well as this news story at Catholic Online, all highlighting a small but solid and growing movement for the sainthood of G.K. Chesterton.
It seems clear to me, and to many of Chesterton's readers, that of course he was a saint, but it is not clear to all. Old stereotypes die hard, and for some the picture of a rotund, hearty, jocular, wine-bibbing Englsih journalist does not fit their idea of sainthood - never mind the luminous spirituality underlying his prose and poetry, and the many people (like C.S. Lewis) he inspired to see afresh the truths of the ancient creed.
He was not a missionary or a cloistered religious. He was not a priest, a theologian or a martyr. He was enthusiastic about books, beer and bacon. He was no slayer of infidels, but a slayer of heresies... he slew them with his pen. We hardly need to look around for definitive arguments against the modern heresies that most plague the people of the West... G.K.C. dealt them the death blow a century ago, though many of them continue to walk around like zombies. For the most part, in all seriousness, we need not invent new arguments against these varied insanities, we need only to blow the dust off of Chesterton's eloquent defense of reason and common sense.
I remember well the moment at last year's Chesterton conference when the audience was rather stunned to hear from speaker William Oddie that not only was there no "cause" being championed for G.K.C.'s sainthood in his home country, but that the idea was pretty well dismissed with a kind of condescending chuckle by church officials in his home diocese. It seems they, too, were influenced by stereotypes, or perhaps were too close to Chesterton's roots to consider the idea... "Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor.".
For my part, I find myself more often, now, calling on G.K.C. for prayer and intercession, along with other favorite patron saints (Fra Angelico, Catherine of Bologna, Luke the Evangelist, Augustine...). I think I might also add J.R.R. Tolkien to that list, if I am going to teach. I am pretty confident that he, too, is in a position to hear and to help.
(Cross-posted on Tim Jones' blog Old World Swine, for double your blogging pleasure)
Posted by Tim Jones in Religion, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (33)
October 10, 2008
Why Worship? Why Praise?
(Tim Jones)
(Courtesy NASA.gov)
Last week in the combox discussion related to SDG's post, I wrote the following in response to an unbeliever who held that the praise and worship of God - especially in heaven for all eternity - strikes even most Christians as a bore and a drudgery, but they do it anyway because it's what God commands;
I have always been an artist. I have always understood that the world is a work of art, that it means something, and if it means something, then there must be someone to mean it.
(I know I'm paraphrasing Chesterton here and there)
The worship of God - due praise to the artist - is not only something I don't find AT ALL to be a dreary duty, but is something that can hardly be helped. It wants to leap out on its own, like a laugh or the "Oooohs and Aaahhhs" you hear at a fireworks show. They won't be able to shut me up in heaven.
I believe I did get the point across that the praise and worship of God is a very natural response, and this statement is alright as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough and could leave the false impression that we worship God mainly for what he does, rather than who he is.
God does deserve endless praise just for his work, his artfulness in creating the universe, but that is only the beginning of the story. The universe is as achingly beautiful and subtle and powerful and fascinating as it is because it reflects in many ways the character - the attributes - of the artist who made it. If the world is an artwork and does have meaning as I maintained above, then it all points back to the one who made it and what he is like. Not that a person would be able to really understand everything about God from nature alone (the pagans demonstrate that), but as St. Paul said in Romans 1:20, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.".
As we pray in the Gloria, "We praise you for your glory.". God's glory is this revelation of himself, this radiant presence that comes to us through all of his creation. His glory consists in the very fact that the Triune God, infinitely perfect and complete, does not keep himself to himself. He continually shares his divine life with all creation, holding every atom in existence by his will from moment to moment. God shares with us the attributes of existence and free will in a completely unnecessary and ongoing act of love.
We praise God for who he is, and we only know who he is because he has revealed it to us in this radiant penumbra of glory called Creation. We often think of Creation as a noun, like it's only a thing. Creation is also a verb, the ongoing act of God.
Visit Tim's blog Old World Swine)
Posted by Tim Jones in Religion, Theology | Permalink | Comments (20)
February 20, 2008
The Tripods are Coming
(Tim Jones)
Kewl! The Tripods,
the science fiction trilogy by John Christopher (real name Samuel
Youd), is one of the stories well known and oft quoted in our
household. My son even named his cat Ozzy, after the character
Ozymandias. We read the books and watched the BBC TV series until the
venerable VHS tape finally gave up the ghost a few years ago. We hadn't
given it much thought for a while, until my son found some video clips
on YouTube. It was fun rediscovering the series and covering old,
familiar ground. I'll have to look around and see if the series may be
found on DVD.
It occurred to me, after reading some comments on YouTube (always an intellectual treat) that the themes of the book could be interpreted as a slam at religion. I'd considered the idea before, but dismissed it, however... that was before Hitchens, Dawkins and Pullman labored to make the world safe for anti-religious bigotry, dragged it out of the closet and onto the New York Times Bestseller list.
For those unfamiliar with the story, the world has been conquered completely by aliens who travel around in gigantic tripods (okay, not terribly original, but consider it flattery to H.G. Wells) and the population are kept in line through the use of an electronic wire mesh "cap" that is stamped onto their cranium around the age of 16 (when young folk typically begin having serious rebellious thoughts) and that makes them content, docile and obedient to the tripods. The cap keeps them from thinking in certain ways, eliminates violent and deceitful thoughts, but also wonder and inventiveness. Human kind is restricted to about an 18th century level of technology. The heroes run away as their "capping day" draws near, in search of a secret enclave of human resistance, based on nothing but a rumor and a map picked up from a "vagrant" (a human whose capping has gone wrong, they are considered insane).
I never interpreted the story as anti-religious, and in fact saw the cap in much broader terms as the common tendency for the Spirit of the Age (any age) to become tyrannical and oppressive, or the readiness of people to give up thinking for themselves in exchange for the promise of peace and safety. These are human themes into which religion of one kind or another might figure... or not.
If the story was meant as a veiled anti-religious screed, it's odd that an unabashed religionist like myself would find so much in the story to relate to and delight in. To me, the Map could just as well represent Holy Scripture, the Resistance the Church, and the Cap atheistic materialism. I always assumed that once a person was capped, religious impulses would be the first thing to go.
I Googled around a bit and couldn't find any blatantly anti-religious sentiments attributable to to Mr. Youd (aka John Christopher), but I'd be interested to hear from someone who may know more.
Visit Tim Jones' blog, "Old World Swine"
Posted by Tim Jones in Books, Film and TV, Religion | Permalink | Comments (41)
June 05, 2007
God Debate On Hugh Hewitt Today
(Jimmy Akin)
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Religion | Permalink | Comments (17)
July 11, 2006
Quote Of The Day
(Michelle Arnold)
Seems about time to delve into the Great Quotes file again:
"God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days." --Samuel Johnson
Who was Samuel Johnson?
If you like this quote and are eager for more Johnsonian wisdom, check out The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page.
Browsing through the site, I found another gem of Johnson's:
"A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself."
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Religion | Permalink | Comments (6)
June 21, 2006
Feel The Solstice!
(Michelle Arnold)
St. Augustine of Canterbury, as distinguished from his more famous predecessor, may have supposed that however bad the state of religion had become in England that at least the Brits were no longer pagan.
If so, he'd be wrong.
St. Augustine of Canterbury, pray for them:
"Cloudy skies, dense fog and spurts of rain did not seem to dampen the energy of smiling revelers who bobbed and swayed to cheerful beats with arms outstretched and shouts of 'Feel the solstice!'
"About 19,000 New Agers, present-day druids and partygoers gathered inside and around the ancient circle of towering stones [of Stonehenge] to greet the longest day in the northern hemisphere as the sun struggled to peek out against a smoky gray sky at 4:58 a.m. ...
"'This is the nearest thing I've got to religion,' said Ray Meadows, 34, of Bristol, England. The solstice 'is a way of giving thanks to the earth and the universe.'
"Meadows, wearing a wreath of pink carnations over long pink hair-wrapped braids, identified herself as a fairy of the Tribe of Frog."
"A fairy of the Tribe of Frog"? Just how exactly does one become a Fairy of the Tribe of Frog? Is one born a frog and become a fairy? Is one adopted by a tribe of fairy frogs? Inquiring minds want to know.
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Religion | Permalink | Comments (17)
June 07, 2006
Into The Lion's Den...
(Michelle Arnold)
An agnostic has learned the hard way that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God (Matt. 4:5-7).
"A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.
"'The man shouted "God will save me, if he exists," lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,' the official said.
"'A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.'"
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Now....
Anyone know how I can nominate this guy for a Darwin Award?
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Religion | Permalink | Comments (23)
May 12, 2006
Mother Oprah
(Michelle Arnold)
Some time ago, an apologist in This Rock mused about the secular world's penchant for tossing out Catholicism and adopting paler images of what had been tossed:
"G. K. Chesterton famously observed that when you stop believing in God, you don't believe in nothing; you believe in anything. Similarly, in the absence of the Catholic Church, you get (before Christ) things that anticipate it or (after Christ) things that are a cheap imitation of it. For instance, Ebay is the modern world's unwitting testament to the Catholic theology of relics. People who laugh over 'primitive' medievals and their interest in the true cross will lay down big bucks to own a pair of John Lennon’s shoelaces. Likewise, what is Oprah but a sort of video testament of the need of the human soul for a mother?"
GET THE STORY. (Scroll to Item 6.)
Lest you think the apologist was exaggerating, take a look at this: In an article titled "The Divine Miss Winfrey?" La Oprah is hailed as "a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation."
"She's no longer just a successful talk-show host worth $1.4 billion, according to Forbes' most recent estimate. Over the past year, Winfrey, 52, has emerged as a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation.
"With her television pulpit and the sheer power of her persona, she has encouraged and steered audiences (mostly women) in all matters, from genocide in Rwanda to suburban spouse swapping to finding the absolute best T-shirt and oatmeal cookie.
"'She's a really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa,' says Kathryn Lofton, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who has written two papers analyzing the religious aspects of Winfrey. 'Oprah has emerged as a symbolic figurehead of spirituality.'"
Catholics have the Blessed Virgin Mother; hip materialists have Mother Oprah. The comparison by Professor Lofton between Mother Teresa and Mother Oprah was especially interesting. Mother Teresa once said "I do not pray for success. I ask for faithfulness." For what do the disciples of Mother Oprah pray?
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Religion | Permalink | Comments (29)
January 24, 2006
Catholic Bumper Stickers
(Michelle Arnold)
Have you ever seen cars with Christian outreach bumper stickers that say things like "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven"? (Here's one site that sells such stickers.) I've often thought I should keep some copies of Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth handy in my car to tuck under the windshield wiper of cars that sport such stickers. I've also thought there'd be a good market among Catholics for Catholic riffs on the standard Christian evangelism stickers. If anyone decides to print some up, here are my contributions to get them started:
- "No Mary, no peace. Know Mary, know peace!"
- "Christians aren't perfect. Yet."
- "If you died today, would you be in purgatory tomorrow?"
- "Real men love Mary."
- "'Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?' --Luke 1:43"
- "Your life may be the only church your friends ever attend."
Please add your contributions to the combox.
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Religion | Permalink | Comments (99) | TrackBack
January 13, 2006
Christians Stay Home!
(Michelle Arnold)
There is a fine line between the expectation of respect for the sensitivities of religious people and a none-too-subtle attempt to stifle religious expression.
When I went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the group visited the Western Wall, believed to be the remnant of ancient Israel's Temple and Judaism's holiest site. While there I had no problem with the suggestion by the priest leading the group to remove our crosses, crucifixes, and other Christian emblems before visiting the Wall. I tucked mine under my shirt and the priest, who was wearing a baseball cap with a Jerusalem cross, opted not to go down to the Wall.
That is the kind of accommodation for the sensitivity of others that is reasonable. What I find unreasonable is the report that follows:
"A British airline banned its staff from taking Bibles and wearing crucifixes or St. Christopher medals on flights to Saudi Arabia to avoid offending the country's Muslims.
"British Midland International also has told female flight attendants they must walk two paces behind male colleagues and cover themselves from head to foot in a headscarf and robe known as an abaya, the Mirror newspaper of London reported. [...]
"Airline officials, who have sparked outrage, the paper says, explain the Islamic kingdom's strict laws -- enforced by religious police -- prohibit public practice of Christianity....
"BMI spokesman Phil Shepherd said: 'In providing air services people want, demand and use, we have an obligation to respect the customs of the destination country.'
"An airline employee who asked not to be named told the Mirror: 'It's outrageous that we must respect their beliefs but they're not prepared to respect ours.'"
Forcing employees to abandon their own religion's emblems and spiritual comforts while traveling on business for the company is bad enough and outrageous in and of itself. But going beyond that to force employees to take on the customs of another religion (e.g., the abaya), one which they do not profess, is even worse.
In past centuries, the jihadists within Islam attempted to conquer the world through armed conquest. To the extent they succeed in this day and age, it will likely be through the collaboration of the PC Police.
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Religion | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBack
