A Church Shooting in White Settlement, Texas

Attacks on religious celebrations continue to be in the news.  After yesterday's stabbing spree at an Orthodox Jewish Hanukkah celebration (during a week in NYC that featured near-daily attacks on Orthodox Jews), today the attack was on a Church of Christ celebration.

A witness told CBS 11 News the gunman walked up to a server during communion with a shotgun and then opened fire. According to the witness, another church member shot the suspect....

During the incident, two men died from their injuries and another man was critically injured. Authorities believe the gunman is among the three but it’s unknown if he was killed or is injured.

It is better, all the way around, for a religious community to be able to defend itself from these attacks. The attacks may not stop; hatred for the religion or simply for the religious may be too broad and too deep in our culture today. This is not new. Raymond Lull wrote about it in the Middle Ages.

Then if a knight use not his office, he is contrary to his order and to the beginning of chivalry. *** The office of a knight is to maintain and defend the holy catholic faith by which God the Father sent his Son into the world to take human flesh in the glorious Virgin, our Lady Saint Mary; and for to honor and multiply the faith, suffered in this world many travails, despites, and anguishous death. Then in like wise as our Lord God hath chosen the clerks for to maintain the holy catholic faith with scripture and reasons against the miscreaunts and unbelievers, in like wise God of glory hath chosen knights because that by force of arms they vanquish the miscreaunts, which daily labor for to destroy holy church, and such knights God holdeth them for his friends honored in the world and in that other when they keep and maintain the faith by the which we intend to be saved....

There are some for whom such service is the most meaningful and proper way of expressing their faith. To deny them the right to do it is to deny them the expression of faith for which they are best fit, and which their soul finds its deepest and most worthy calling. Both the first and the second amendments should apply to the defenders of the faith, then; no government should stand between them and their sacred duty.

UPDATE: Some analysis and advice for those who would do likewise.

The Feast of Thomas a’ Beckett

The dispute over which he was killed makes King Henry seem like the good guy, especially given our own experience with the Church protecting violators in the clergy. Assassination was the wrong remedy, but the king was on the right side.

Pronouncing Written Irish

A rough guide.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

The Good Lord sent Sam Colt, after which none of us should ever have to fear our communities being threatened in this wise.  Except for the government of the state of New York, and California, and soon Virginia, which seek to undo the blessings laid upon us.

Well, we don't have to do what we are told, do we? After all, who are they to strive against the one who sent Col. Colt?

The Feast of Holy Innocents

A somber feast amid the celebrations.

Feasting in the Great Hall on Christmas Day

Some history as the Twelve Days continue.

A Dilemma

Not really, though.

Flateyarbók

A new history of medieval Norway, via Iceland and 600 missing years.

The historical writing in Flateyarbók spans the period from when Harald Fairhair was Norway's first king in the early 900s and almost until the Black Death struck Norway around the year 1350.

But 17-year-old King Olav IV Haakonsson never received the book. The boy died in what many believed to be a mysterious manner.

Now the entire book has finally been translated and published in Norwegian by a small publishing house in Stavanger.

Flateyjarbók (its Icelandic name) is three times as extensive as Snorre Sturlason's collection of sagas about Swedish and Norwegian kings, Heimskringla.

The English translation is just getting underway, I gather.

Stalinism in Canada

Cutting Donald Trump out of holiday film “Home Alone 2,” presumably to avoid causing trauma by even having to see him. (“Stalinism” is per the link.)

Did they cut Reagan out of his old movies? Or just stop playing those movies forever? I’ve seen a lot of old movies, now that I think of it, but only one I can recall featuring Reagan.

That one I’d understand the networks not playing in any recent cultural moment. It was “Santa Fe Trail,” in which Reagan plays George Armstrong Custer — still treated as a good guy by Hollywood — against Errol Flynn’s J.E.B. Stuart, who is also treated as a good guy. Somehow the dispute over John Brown’s raid is treated as fittingly symbolized by the two officer’s competition for the hand of a lovely young Kit Carson Holliday (played by Olivia de Havilland). John Brown is even kind of the bad guy, as his anti-slavery campaign is depicted as behind the violence in Kansas the officers are sent to stop. The whole plot is at this point going to be radically offensive to many viewers, and nearly all will be bothered by at least some aspects of it.

In the current case, all that is at stake is the guy offering directions to the lobby.

The Fimbulvinter: A Real Climate Disaster

The Fenris wolf swallows the sun. The climate disaster that began the year 536 was surely the most dramatic cooling of the Earth that humans, animals and plants have experienced in the last two thousand years. It was likely due to two large volcanic explosions, which every few years sent huge amounts of fine dust high into the atmosphere. There was dust for several years. The sun disappeared.... probably half of the populations of Norway and Sweden died.

A lot is known about the event now. It seems to have passed into myth as a cyclical warning of Ragnarok. Volcanoes do pose a real risk of sudden global cooling, and there are other similar risks that are massive. Solar EMPs, asteroid strikes, these things are real problems that will come up sooner or later.

Whee

From Instapundit: The Seattle Times warns us that “a man in a dress doesn’t cut it as a punch line in 2019 — not without serious and necessary conversations.” Which do you think sounds like more fun, a performance of "Mrs. Doubtfire," or a "serious and necessary conversation" with a wøkeskøld?

Religion is the Opiate of the Masses

...so said Marx, anyway. So how do you rewrite the Bible and the Quran to avoid contradicting socialism?

China will rewrite the Bible and Quran to 'reflect socialist values' amid crackdown on the country's religious groups, a report has revealed.

New editions must not contain any content that goes against the beliefs of the Communist Party, according to a top party official. Paragraphs deemed wrong by the censors will be amended or re-translated.

Like every paragraph violates the beliefs of the Communist Party, which belief system is called "scientific atheism." There was a formal school for training people in it at the university we lived at while living in China.

Wren Song

Happy St. Stephen's Day.

The Feast of St. Thomas the Divine

I will direct your attention to this post from 2016.

The High Feast of Christmas

I am pausing for a moment from putting the finishing touches on Christmas dinner. Here to aid your own celebrations are some less-common pieces of appropriate music.





If you liked these, they're selected from this recording. I picked it up at a used record store some years ago, and it's become a favorite.

The Season's Upon Us

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone. I hope you had a worthy Advent and are ready for the holiday.

Virginia's Constitutional Right to Bear Arms

In addition to the Second Amendment at the Federal level, Virginia itself has a constitutional right to bear arms. It is even clearer and more explicit than the Federal Constitution's.

Article I. Bill of Rights
Section 13. Militia; standing armies; military subordinate to civil power
That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

There is quite a bit of scholarship on this particular clause. Even before the adoption of the Virginia constitution, colonial-era laws had mandated that each home keep arms and a stock of ammunition at all times. At the time of the adoption of the Federal constitution, the exact meaning of the term 'militia' was described by George Mason and Federalist 46. Patrick Henry said that "the great object is that every man be armed."

That is not to say that no restrictions on arms were ever considered even in the old days. Before the Civil War, Virginia did prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons -- but also the keeping or carrying of any sort of weapons by slaves. Even after the Civil War, blacks in Virginia could only carry arms with a license from the state, just because they were considered too dangerous to be allowed unfettered access to the right. Cf. George Mason's comments that to disarm a man was the best way to make it easy to enslave him; so too the actual slaveowners, and those who had but late been slaveowners, did their best to keep their slaves and former slaves disarmed.

It will be interesting to observe how much attention is paid to the constitutional limits by the legislature in the next session, or by the governor thereafter. Should the government violate its constitution, I would argue that there is a fundamental duty on the citizenry to disobey such laws, and to refuse to enforce them when called as jurors.

The marriage of love and reason

From a Gutenberg work I'm formatting this morning:

ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES 

To Pollianus and Eurydice with Plutarch's best wishes.

. . . When people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was because the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of persuasion, and not by contention and strife.

Preach on, Doc

A candidate for Congress with a doctorate has thoughts on the Second Amendment.

Do Not Be Fishers of Men

I am beginning to suspect that, in spite of his personal courage, the Pope may be innovative beyond what scripture can support.