Young Sam Houston was a lively, high-spirited lad, who caused his widowed mother more trouble than her other eight children combined. Sam had just turned twenty when he was aroused by the War of 1812. When a recruiting demonstration took place in his small Tennessee town, Sam stepped up and took a silver dollar from the drumhead. He was in the regular army by that token, but, since he was under age, he needed permission from his mother.She handed him a gun, saying, “My son, take this musket and never disgrace it: for remember, I had rather all my sons should fill one grave than that one of them should turn his back to save his life.”
Then she slipped a plain gold ring on his finger. Inside this ring was engraved a single word. That ring was his talisman for fifty years. The one word in contact with his flesh guided him through a lifetime of danger and leadership where others faltered....
It was not until his death that any man knew the command of that talisman he had used for half a century. Then his wife slipped the ring from his lifeless finger and held it to the light so that his children, too, could see the word that had led Samuel Houston steadfastly through trials to victories.
The word was “Honor.”
All We Know
The Penitent Thief and Ecumenical Christianity
My grandparents were Christians in one of those "three bare walls and a cross" Protestant churches out in a rural town. They were wonderful people and some of the happiest, best people I have ever known.
But by my late teenage years I knew better and got away from all that church nonsense. I spent the next two decades slowly making myself ever more miserable. One day I decided I need to sort out some piece of happiness in life or get off the ride. I thought, who's been successful at this happiness thing? And of course my grandparents were the first in my mind. And church seemed to have a part in it, so I went to church. But it made no sense. What was all this strange stuff they asked me to believe?
I was about to give up on Christianity again when an acquaintance suggested C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I read it and it made sense to me. That is, I understood that Christianity might actually make sense, and so I started reading more. Since Lewis was Anglican, I started attending an Anglican church. It was my first experience of liturgical worship, which I found beautiful, and the people were kind in a dark time and helped me make some basic sense of many things.
Meanwhile, I'd kept reading, and I'd discovered the local Catholic radio channel. If I was driving, I was listening to Catholic news or apologetics or the great Dr Ray's show. Building on what I'd learned, they took me much deeper and I could see not only how profound Christianity was but how global it was.
My reading of church history took me to a small Eastern Orthodox parish, and I spent a couple of years attending services and asking questions and reading. It was beautiful, I could see happiness all around me there, and it became home. I was brought to plead, "Remember me in your kingdom, Lord."
That was only a few years ago, and I guess being new to Orthodoxy I'm enthused to share it here, or defend it if I feel it's mischaracterized. But I wouldn't even have a chance of salvation if a couple of wonderful Protestant witnesses hadn't shown me the way, if Lewis and the Anglicans hadn't taught me it could be reasonable, if the Catholic scholars hadn't explained many of the mysterious beliefs in detail and shown me the world. Who knows where I'd be without all of them, but it probably wouldn't be anywhere good.
Good Disruption
Impossible Traditionalism
Bruce Charlton raises an important objection to professedly Traditionalist Christianity in the contemporary world, “Traditionalist” here meaning a faith accepted on the authority of Tradition and its ecclesial representatives rather than accepted as the outcome of individual discernment. The objection is not that such a faith is undesirable but that it is impossible. People in the world today are exposed to multiple live religious options, and even when one picks a particular Church, one finds that it is divided into factions and that its leaders have more-or-less assimilated to the global liberal order and made authoritative proclamations which more-or-less directly contradict their historical teachings. One must choose which Church, which faction and clergy within that Church, which of conflicting Magisterial statements one should credit, and this can only be done by individual discernment.
Paper Beats Rescuers
Public Schools Trump First Amendment?
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, a President George H. W. Bush appointee, ruled that the district acted reasonably in its decision to prevent parents from protesting.McAuliffe said the parents’ "narrow, plausibly inoffensive" intentions were not as important as the wider context, and that adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment-protected right to convey messages that demean, harass or harm students."While plaintiffs may very well have never intended to communicate a demeaning or harassing message directed at Parker Tirrell or any other transgender students, the symbols and posters they displayed were fully capable of conveying such a message," he wrote. "And, that broader messaging is what the school authorities reasonably understood and appropriately tried to prevent."
Public schools are frankly on the same order as prisons in their deleterious effects on America's culture of liberty. They train the young to submit their freedoms to the dictates of authority, and here extend the command of this intelligentsia to control of their parents as well. Even if you didn't mean to engage in wrongthink, comrade, someone might have understood you to be -- so your speech must be prevented before it can occur.
UPDATE: Over in the UK, a ruling that transwomen are not, legally speaking, women.
Prisons are Not the Way
Why Is This Funny?
I don't know why this is funny, but it is. I must have reached the delirious stage of Lent.
The Kamala Harris one ...
Holy Monday
A Joke for Palm Sunday
Fairness and Heritability
The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life. The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids. (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation. The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair. The children of the rich do better. But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.” Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair. The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.”
I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.
What, if anything, should be done about that?
Our solar,/lunar/hebdomadalian holiday
The mystery turns on the Western Christian Church's ancient practice of calculating the vernal equinox according to a formula that doesn't quite line up with the astronomically observed full moon or equinox. This year the archaic formula, which requires us to divide the year by 19 and look up the remainder in a chart, yields a liturgical Paschal Full Moon on April 13, which is Sunday (tomorrow). When the post-equinox full moon lands on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday.
The accepted view seems to be that the seven-day week, which depends on neither the solar nor the lunar cycle, has its roots in Genesis: the seven days of creation. Romans used an 8-day week for many centuries B.C. and A.D., but switched to the Jewish 7-day week with Constantine's converstion to Christianity. Later Europeans continued the Roman custom of naming the days of the week after the five classically visible planets plus the sun and the moon (though the Romans had added an eighth day with a name that had something to do with markets). In English, the modern names of the seven days of the week are rooted in the Norse gods for Tuesday through Friday, to the Roman god Saturn for Saturday, and to the Teutonic words for sun and moon for Sunday and Monday. In Romance languages, the days of the week are rooted in the Latin names for "Lord" for Sunday, moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and sabbath for Saturday.
Lazarus Saturday
One more week until Pascha, Holy Week.
I'll include the whole passage from John below the fold, but Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a prelude to the Passover, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and it is this miracle that prompts some Jews to decide to kill Jesus. An odd juxtaposition: A resurrection causes some to decide to kill Jesus, which leads to both His resurrection and ours. God indeed causes all things to work together for good.
It is in this passage that we get the shortest verse, "Jesus wept," as he mourns for his friend, and also the passage where Jesus declares "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." And then he asks, "Do you believe this?"
Isn't it strange that Jesus should weep for the death of a friend when he knows he will raise that friend from the dead? I think human death is always a tragedy; it is the result of the disease of sin and it is something to mourn. We are so allergic to any negative emotions in America that we now have "celebrations of life" at funerals. There is nothing wrong with that; I have friends and family who have had those and I always participate appropriately. That is what they wanted. But, sometimes it is good to weep and to weep openly in public as Jesus did. It is good to acknowledge the tragedy. It is no denial of the resurrection to grieve the death of the beloved.