The Anchoress

Unfortunately, one of those recurrent ear infections has come on like gangbusters and is laying me out. Blogging will be lightish- to - none. Best to all.

Regular readers know I am not one of those easily offended types who get a case of the vapors at every salvo blasted at Christianity or the Christ or his Blessed Mother.

I figure Christianity - if it is true, and it is - can stand up to the slings and arrows of the world, Mary has her own way of dealing with anyone stupid enough to disrespect her (hint - she hounds you with love until you give in) and Jesus has the big shoulders that are required to carry the cross or move the world, so he can deal with sneers and snivelers.

The reason I am not easily offended is because so much of what gets Christians up-in-arms is as the grass that withers and fades. The Da Vinci Code was so much a product of the world that it is already as forgotten as most of yesterday’s news.

Perpetually adolescent Madonna’s lifelong and recurrent cruci-fixations made me chortle at her. Oh, look, Madge is on her cross again and is that a red shirt she’s wearing? Oh, how freakin’ brilliant! A red shirt to symbolize blood - who woulda thoughta that? She’s just a freakin’ genius, that Madonna, ain’t she? No wonder the world loves her!

When some Catholics were huffing over a beautifully wrought chocolate sculpture of Christ on the Cross - mostly, I suspect, due to his nudity, I was thinking - hey, I love well-done sculpture, I love chocolate and I love Jesus - what’s not to like! The truth is, Jesus probably did hang naked on the cross, and there are plenty of Christians out there who ordered chocolate crosses for their kids last week! And besides a chocolate sculpture is a delicate and melty thing - more grass that fades.

So, it takes a lot to offend my Christian sensibilities. I admit, I was mildly put off by the adolescent hunky Jesus contest in San Francisco - mostly because, you know, it is HOLY WEEK fellas - why not show a little of your vaunted sensitivity, hey? But mostly I just felt sorry for these people who seem like they’re trying to convince themselves of something, and failing.

I did finally find something to offend me, though (although truthfully, I am less offended as a Christian than as a tail-end baby boomer) thanks to Deacon Greg, who never fails to find the interesting nugget, and this one is especially interesting: the tale of the “progressive” “Christian” church that does not want to talk about Christ, salvation, resurrection - you know, any of that stuff that requires faith in something other than ourselves:

…at West Hill on the faith’s holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity’s central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.
[…]
There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill’s minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity’s teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus’s death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

Do you know why these “progressive” Christians want to “progress” right through the tenets of Christianity into the grim world of neither-faith-nor-reason but self-actualizing instinct and “hopeful” feelings? Why they want Jesus with no Christ, God with a small g and all that? Can you take a guess?

If you said “it is the logical culmination of baby-boomer narcissism and that generations’ tireless effort to deconstruct the universe and put itself at the center of all things” then ding, ding, ding! You win the daily double!

Ms. Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus – her words – of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.

She says there’s been virtually a consensus among scholars for the past 30 years that the Bible is not some divine emanation – or in Ms. Vosper acronym, TAWOGFAT, The Authoritative Word of God For All Time – but a human project filled with contradictions and the conflicting worldviews and political perspectives of its authors.

And yet, she says, the liberal Christian churches, including her own, won’t acknowledge that it is a human project, that it’s wrong in parts and that, in the 21st century, it’s no more useful as a spiritual and religious guide than a number of other books.

She says now that the work of biblical scholars has become publicly accessible, the churches and their clergy are caught living a lie that few people will buy much longer. “I just don’t think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn’t keep people away.”

Aw, aren’t they just adorable, though, these baby boomers? The woman is frustrated because these damn Christians she is trying to enlighten won’t admit that all wonders and mysteries boil down to a “human project” of staggering opportunism. Thank small-g-not really-relevant-god that she and her generation have come along to enlighten us, over these last 30-40 years, and to tell us - for the eleventy-billionth time that everything that came before them is all wrong.

She sounds frustrated, doesn’t she? “Look at us! No, not over there, look at us! STOP LOOKING AT GOD - look at us! At US!”

This actually sounds like a church Obama could love: WE ARE THE GOD-LINGS WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!

Now that these baby boomers are all so educated - so advanced beyond inferior preceding generations and minds - they can simply tear it all down and start from scratch, and they will make unto us a new church, one that embraces the secularist mentality and finds the sacred in whatever one chooses to find sacred. “Madonna on the cross in a red shirt? Hunky Jesus? Hey - that’s profoundly sacred if you need it to be!”

This appears to be an effort to create a church that the state can endorse and live with - an amorphous blob of “quasi-churchiness” unto which almost anything at all may be assigned and found “holy.” I’m almost certain that the only non-negotiable, non-optional ritual will be liturgical dancing with pantomime.

Progressivism can’t help itself. As Mother Mary Francis, PCC wrote in The Right to be Merry

The children of light walk heedless of the source of their light. The children of darkness know better. And when the hour of darkness is at hand in any country, the first act of the powers of evil is invariably to throw the switch…They turn the contemplatives out of their monasteries with loud speeches about the good of the state and about contributing to the social need. […]
By a strange paradox, the persecutors of religion are always far more spiritual-minded than the common run of humanity. It is a perversion of spirituality, but it is a kind of spiritual vision, nonetheless…Those who hold power in communist-dominated countries have a very comprehensive grasp of it. They understand its significance quite perfectly. If they sometimes draw red herrings of “national churches” across their atheistic paths, they dare not deal even in half-measures with cloisters. We shall grow old and die waiting for Russia or (Communist) China to set up “national cloisters.”

I read this and think of Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin Mei, who spent 30 years in Chinese prisons for refusing to abandon the Roman Catholic Church for the state-approved Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which pretends to be what it is not. You probably have never heard of him, even though he is at least as heroic as Nelson Mandela - but if “progressive Christianity” has its way, he may become our patron - patron of The Remnant that will always, resolutely, keep on, no matter how torn and frayed.

Meanwhile - don’t let this freak you out. Don’t be afraid of children-of-all-ages playing dress-up, or the pranks and guffaws of those who are taking the wide road and pretending it’s a martyrdom. We live in an interesting age, where the meaning of things - even of martyrdom - is being muddied up. Nothing to fret about - it’s only what Jesus promised us, after all.

UPDATE: Someone reminds me of Siggy’s excellent comments from a while back:

I suspect those who are so comfortable redefining what God ‘really means,’ would not take to kindly to someone else reinterpreting and unpending their words with the same certainty.

Bingo.

Ace has a ten point plan for the new church.

Prof. Bainbridge wants to know, Seriously, how do you flip from Romney to Obama?:

Conservative legal scholar Doug Kmiec has gotten a lot of notoriety for his endorsement of Barach Obama. In a Beliefnet interview, Kmiec explains…
[…]
The trouble with this explanation is that just a few months ago Kmiec was part of Mitt Romney’s campaign. I don’t recall Mitt talking about Dorothy Day very much. Why was Romney acceptable on these issues but John McCain is not?
[…]
Finally, in the same NRO column, Kmiec explained why he favored Romney over Giuliani by noting that “we cannot afford a president who is only faking his attachment to conservative legal principle.” But Obama has no such attachment, real or faked!

Something very, very odd is going on here. The explanations simply do not explain.

As I responded to the Professor, It doesn’t seem so strange to me. He’s has responded to Obama positively because he’s been attracted by a rhetoric that appeals to most Catholic’s built-in desires for unity and oneness, social equality - all of the enlarging positions that made Catholics, for generations, largely Democrat in political persuasion, before Roe v Wade.

On paper, Obama’s speeches appeal to all of our better natures, and to our intellects, as well. As Peggy Noonan writes on Obama’s recent speech on race:

The speech assumed the audience was intelligent. This was a compliment, and I suspect was received as a gift. It also assumed many in the audience were educated. I was grateful for this, as the educated are not much addressed in American politics.

There is no denying that Obama is a powerful rhetorician and an exceptional orator. A smart Catholic, hearing a man speaking about justice, morality, equality and HOPE - and mentioning Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day in the bargain, can hear such a speech and think: Oh, thank God - rhetoric to admire in an uninspired age!

I believe that is why we have seen more than few “conservative” Catholics have their head turned by Obama, even if the turn was only brief. We have the inspiring and often spontaneous speeches of JFK and RFK still alive in our memories - who can forget Robert Kennedy’s eloquence upon news of the death of King?

What we forget - often - is that for all of Bobby Kennedy’s smarts and good intentions, for all that his small-c catholic generosity and his Capital-C Catholic world view pined for heaven-on-earth, when faced with bare-bones reality, the rhetoric sometimes failed.

Perhaps Kmiec is simply buying the speeches because he wants what they contain; particularly in this stagnated and balkanized era, he wants to believe that the perfect world of intellectual honesty, open debate and genuine progress toward utopia is possible.

Obama has the perfect speeches, and for some the reasoning follows: if he has the perfect speeches, he must be the perfect canddiate.

It’s analogous to someone who reads the rubrics of the perfect mass and believes since the rubrics are excellent, then all masses must be excellent. The rubrics are excellent, as is Obama’s rhetoric. But masses are often dreadfully done; they often fall woefully short of the rubrics, just as Obama, by talking unity while hanging with divisive and apparently bigoted characters, falls short of his own speeches.

I’m sure Hillary Clinton had no expectation that her statement yesterday, that she “misspoke” on her adventures in Bosnia (and that’s she’s only human would have put an end to this embarrassing story.

By yesterday Hillary sounded like she was getting brittle on the subject:

I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and I said well, I, I can’t, I can’t rush by her, I’ve got to at least greet her — so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left, Now that’s my memory of it.

Her team went into absolute controller mode - a move which only Clintons are allowed to use, and which has always worked for them, in the past:

“We’ve said all we’re going to say on that,” said Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer on a Tuesday morning conference call with reporters.

Generally when Clintons say “we’re just not going to talk about that any more” the press obediently quiets down and moves on to another subject. That is not yet happening. Hillary may have to cry again, to make the press stop asking her about Bosnia (I thought she might cry yesterday when asked about her “habit of embellishment,” but she resisted.)

Today, Clinton is being derided as “Bunker Hill” and now the military is having its say:

Clinton came under fire after saying she “misspoke” about what happened during the trip and claimed it was the first time she erred in describing her visit - an assertion Barack Obama’s campaign quickly disproved by finding at least three prior occasions over the last few months where she’s claimed there was sniper fire.

Stewart, who was assigned to the Army’s European headquarters at the time of Clinton’s visit in 1996, called her statements “really astonishing.”

“Believe me, heads would have rolled all over” if the military put the then-first lady at “unacceptable risk,” added Stewart, who is supporting Barack Obama.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson, a John McCain supporter who ran the air attack in the first Gulf War, said, “It bothers me any time anyone running for the highest office in the land fabricates a story.

“That should bother any American, whether you’re military or nonmilitary.”

Another source, a former Army analyst who was stationed abroad when dignitaries visited, said, “You know, we have soldiers overseas now who are getting shot at by real bullets from real enemies who really want to kill them.

“Getting shot at by snipers is not something you forget - or make light of,” he added.

Investor’s Business Daily is keeping tabs:

this particular fib is not likely to be explained away as easily as, say, her claim that she was named after Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary — more than five years before the New Zealander achieved his feat.

Jake Tapper is wondering if Hillary will resort to kneecapping to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama, who is being advised, elsewhere:

Obama needs to ignore her and focus on McCain, because she’s more done than a two-hour steak at 500 degrees.

Seems to me Obama has fires in his own camp that need putting out.

All I know is this interminable election season is still not finished. It has been too long; the length has managed to so over-expose the candidates (and their weaknesses) that people are already sick of them and looking for “real change” from the fake change that has overstayed its welcome and gone rancid.

We really do deserve better choices than this. But on the other hand…other choices might not be half as entertaining, and America loves being entertained, above all else.

Slightly o/t - but only slightly, because it’s still about Hillary - Jules Crittenden has a must read about what to expect for the next three months. Gruesome!

Hugh Hewitt writes:

They are both going to have a message for the superdelegates: “He can’t win” v. “You can’t steal this.”

That’s the next Obama video we need to see - a parody of MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” to “Can’t Steal This”.

and now so have you

The 80’s fashions were absurd, and the boy always looked supremely uncomfortable before the camera, but damn, that’s a fine voice.

He seems to have fun with that discomfort here

Arghghgh!

Here in New York, people get married, you give them money - it’s a simple thing. If you can be very generous, you are generous; if you can’t afford much, you give what you can and stuff the card with lottery tickets. If you don’t know the people well, you try to at least “cover the cost” of your reception plate and add a bit extra - maybe the cost of one extra plate.

This can get pricey, but hey - it’s a wedding. It only happens once, you hope.

It may sound crass, but money is a very good wedding gift for a couple starting out and it has the extra advantage of not making you nuts as you try to pick an appropriate gift.

Elopements, that’s a different story. One wants to give a gift, and one is actually kind of grateful that the elopement makes moot all the rules about how generous or ungenerous to be. It’s rather freeing, actually, especially when you know the elopees aren’t even looking for any gifts. They’re just happy to be married and getting on with things, so the gift is simply fun for them and for the giver.

It’s fun until you have to make a decision on the gift. Then - if you are indecisive, as I am, it’s ugh.

A young (okay late 20’s) couple we know who are not terribly concerned with material things went off and eloped - they’re figuring to marry again in Israel at some point. We are very happy for them; they’re lovely people and they seem like each other’s very best friend, so this is all good.

But I can’t decide which Seder plate I want to give them! I like both of these! I’ve already picked out a nice tablecloth and napkin set (white-on-white with very pretty striping), but I wanted to give a Seder plate, too.

Okay, ladies…your opinions, please?

I’m leading toward the second one, but I know that I’m a sucker for those colors, so I don’t trust myself. My husband, of course, does not care. Any thoughts?

I didn’t know Andrew Sullivan shared my passion for Miss Ella Fitzgerald.

Simply splendid. What an artist!

Lyrics

Hillary & Chelsea, under sniper fire, no welcome ceremony, 1996 WaPo Fact-checker blog

I know, I know, to some my headline will seem strange. It is not news that Hillary is not averse to fibbing about cattle futures, fund raisers, or who who or what she can remember at any given moment. But even William Safire who, in 1996 called Hillary a congenital liar, had to have gasped at just how breathtakingly bold she can be in her tall tales:

Does Hillary not realize that a thing called the internet has come along? Does she not realize that if she stands at a podium and tells a dramatic tale of “flying in under evasive action” someone is going to look for the news stories about it?

Wait, wait! It’s all a mistake - Hillary just “misspoke!:

“It is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke in regard to the exit from the plane, but there is no question if you look at contemporaneous accounts that she was going to a potential combat zone, that she was on the front lines.”

Okay…giving her the benefit of a doubt…she took her daughter to this very dangerous “combat zone,” (where neither of them wore protective headgear) fine. What kind of judgment that shows is debatable, but fine. But as to the “misspeak” - well, heck, I misspeak every day; everyone does. To “misspeak” is to say “she’s a typical white person” when you mean to say “she is typical of some white people of that generation…”

When you’re saying “we ducked and ran and had to cancel the welcoming ceremony,” that’s much more than a misspeak.

Gateway Pundit sounds flabbergasted:

…There was not one bit of truth to what Hillary said…is frightening how easy she lies- rightening! Is there anything she will not do to steal her way into the White House?

As Ed Morrissey says the tape tells the tale:

Take another look at this video. Does anyone seem worried about sniper fire or any other attacks here?

No one is moving quickly. The media follows dutifully behind, and her bodyguards look smilingly down on the little girl reading the poem to Hillary.

Now, if she really felt like she was in danger, why would she leave her daughter out in the open on the tarmac, let alone that little girl? That’s the question Wolfson can’t answer, and why he’s probably buying Rolaids by the case this week.

Yes. You know this has to be a big bold bit of mendacity for CBS News to be covering it.

Ace has more. I’m betting that the press will allow Hillary to get by with the “misspeak” claim and will not press her further. They’ll do that partly out of habit, but also because it’s more fun for them, news-wise, with Hillary in the race than out of it.

My goodness, this is one uninspiring election season. I want all new candidates, please. These have been around so long they are, like fish, raising too great a stench.

:::UPDATE::: Well, Hillary is herself correcting the record. She didn’t mean to make it sound like she was under fire. But she was in a hurry because of what she’d been told by advisors and security guys. But she had to meet this 8 year old girl, listen to her poem and chat with her, or - as Hillary puts it - so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left…. Sigh. It still doesn’t quite jibe with the tape - where things seem pretty unhurried, does it? But what are you going to do? Actually this is getting kind of fascinating.:::END UPDATE:::

Jimmie at Sundries Shack is so stunned by Hillary’s breathtaking art that he’s lapsed into a cockney accent!

Betsy Newmark notes that Hillary and Obama are both filling out their thin resumes.

Fausta is appalled. And hates her coat, too.

Ann Althouse says, what, are you going to say she lied?

Powerline has subtle snark

:::SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATE:::

So, a few days before Easter, Osama bin Laden - who may or may not be dead - claimed a conspiracy against Islam being headed up by an 81 year old feller who likes cats and plays Mozart.

At the Vigil for Easter, the old feller, who also wields a crozier, writes tirelessly and uses the soft answer to turn away wrath, made his gentle response. He baptized with his own hands, and publicly, one Magdi Allam, who chose the baptismal name “Christian”.

Magdi Christian Allam — or Christian Allam, however this very brave man wishes to style it — told reporters, after receiving baptism, confirmation and his first Holy Communion, “this is the happiest day of my life,” and he also had a few words to say about the current state of Islam.

Christian Allam knows that he is now a target, that in some extremist quarters his conversion is seen as justification for his death.

But Christian Allam is now justified by Christ.

I am sure the timing of this baptism was no accident. And I have read more than a few comments suggesting Christian Allam go into hiding, somewhere. But I doubt he will. He seems made of tough stuff.

Christian Allam now feeds on the Body and Blood of Christ - through his veins the blood runs both royal and supernatural. If Christian Allam is now killed for his faith he knows his place in eternity; he knows, too, that anyone stupid enough to murder him for his faith will speed Christian Allam’s way to heaven wearing a martyr’s crown - and a true martyr eats not the golden raisin nor plunders the numerous virgins; he becomes a saint in heaven, and an inspiration. He also becomes an intercessor-in-prayer for the rest of us.

So, Benedict and Chrstian Allam have made a response to Osama bin Laden and the response is: you love death; we love life. You deal in death, which is a conquered trade, for the One we follow has overcome death. Death, your idol, has no power over us, because we are alive in Christ, who was slain and who rose, and is Alpha and Omega and with us even now. We eat his Flesh and drink his Blood; he remains in us and we in him.

That’s one powerful message. I hope bin Laden, or whoever is running the increasingly unpopular deatheater glee clubs can manage to take the message in, and find a healthier hobby.

God bless Magdi Christian Allam. God bless the pope who baptized him.

:::UPDATE::: Wasting no time, Magdi Christian Allam gets right down to business and asks his fellow Muslim converts to come out of the shadows, even if it means fearing for one’s life:

In his “letter to the editor” published on Sunday by Corriere de la Sera, Allam explains that it was a meeting with the Holy Father which allowed him “to see the light, by divine grace, as the healthy and ripe fruit of a long process.”

Allam also explains that his decision came “as a gradual and deep interior meditation that I could not avoid, considering that, for five years, I have been living a shielded life,” in reference to the police protection.

“Yesterday has been the most beautiful day of my life, when I chose the most simple and explicit name. Since yesterday, my name is Magdi Christian Allam,” he wrote. [emphasis mine - admin]

Explaining the stages of his conversion, Allam said that “at some point I had to take action” after discovering that “the roots of evil are intrinsic to Islam, that [it] is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.”
[…]
But Allam says that the most decisive factor was his meeting with the Pope “whom I have admired and defended as a Muslim for his brilliance in presenting the indissoluble link between faith and reason as the foundation of true religion.”

He praised the Pontiff for agreeing “to personally give me the Sacraments,” thus launching “an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church up to now too prudent regarding the conversion of Muslims.”

Addressing Corriere’s editor in chief Paolo Mieli, Allam writes: “you have asked me if I fear for my life. You are right. I realize what I am going up against, but I will confront my fate with my head high, with my back straight and the interior strength of one who is certain about his faith.”

According to Allam, in Italy “there are thousands of converts to Islam who peacefully live their faith. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts who are constrained to hide their new faith.”

In his open letter, he finally expresses his hope that these former Muslims “from the Pope’s historic gesture and my testimony may be convinced that the time has come to come out from the shadows of the catacombs.”

Whispers in the Loggia: has Allam’s translated article - My Name is Christian

Why do I have the feeling that we are seeing something momentous unfolding before our eyes?
:::End Update:::

Do go see Kate-the-Great’s exclusive: Benedict’s response to Osama Tim Blair has more.

At Inside Catholic, Zoe Romanowsky and Deal Hudson are writing on it. Zoe wonders, with the Vatican’s expressed concerns for the pope’s safety, why the baptism was so public. Hudson says, essentially, Benedict clanks when he walks!

Julie at Happy Catholic has a warning for Christian Allam. Also, please look at her post-Easter Sunday links which are uniformly great!

Prof. Bainbridge says Benedict is not lukewarm.

Margaret Cabaniss emphasizes that Benedict is a mystery to the worldly…and the press!

Opinionated Catholic says Oriana Fallaci must be smiling. Heh. I thought of that, too!

Benedict: Still a mystery after three years

Miss Kelly: I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it

Rick at Brutally Honest notes some offense taken in the usual quarters.

Related: Faith, Reason and Forced Conversions.
Abdul Rahman Thanks Pope Benedict

WELCOME: INSTAPUNDIT readers: While you’re here, please look around. If you feel our national discourse on race relations hasn’[t quite happened yet, you might find this interesting. If you can’t get enough of Hillary’s tall tales, we’re talking about them, too. Also, Freedom never cries. And astonishing Chinese Acro Ballet.

Found via Ace, who got it off John Miller at the Corner, Five For Fighting’s John Ondrasik gives us a chance to decide what kind of world we want and he gives us this video to help us decide. It’s very moving. Apparently the old man in the pawn shop is a medal of honor winner - one of our our everlasting heroes

You’ll want to go watch it, and while you do, remember that - media narratives aside - Iran is at work against Democracy in the Middle East, and oh yeah, it seems Saddam did have ties to terrorism, including friendship with Al Qaeda. You can read the Pentagon report here.

Do read Ed Morrissey, who was reporting on the collected Iraqi documents when everyone else was choosing to ignore them, and read Eli Lake at the New York Sun, who seems to actually have read the report.

Gateway Pundit reminds us wher Saddam was at 10 years ago, if we’ve forgotten, and where America was, too.

Related:
Dr. Sanity
Americans Will Die for Freedom
Re-assessing Just Wars
“I have never learned to fight for my freedom”