The Ark and The Dove

St. Thomas Aquinas

Ok, so I let his feast day go by without posting anything on him.  But in my defense, I couldn't think of a really good one.  What to write?  Link to some of his writing, which is hard for unprepared readers to understand?  Write a long essay on how he changed my life?  Well, okay, I'll do a little bit of those.

What St. Thomas has done for me:

• Taught me in a very comprehensive manner about the Faith and how it makes sense

• Introduced me to about ten thousand of the best objections to Catholic teachings and how they don't hold up

• Taught me about the proper relationship of faith and reason

• Saved me from the danger of becoming a positivist (positivism inevitably being the philosophy of people who think philosophy isn't worth bothering with) and gave me instead a good intellectual framework in which to think about ideas and philosophical systems I encounter

• Helped me break down the barriers between theory and practice in the Christian life

• Prayed for me to God, I am sure, even though I don't really deserve his attention.

I use the past tense, but these are not necessarily one-time events completed in the past.  There's probably even a little more that I'm not consciously thinking about right now.  And any one of these would be sufficient cause for a lifetime of gratitude.

For reading, perhaps a compromise - G.K. Chesterton's excellent short biography of him, or for something shorter, an excerpt, "The Runaway Abbot."

Hooper rallies, perhaps?

I don't care what it's about; a blog called "The Age of Hooper" gets a click from me.

Conservative PC rhetoric

Daily Kos speculates on the correlation between left vs. right and Apple vs. PC.

Totally neutral observation here, but the dinosaur analogy is particularly apt - I seem to remember from my natural history reading that mammals existed at the same time as proto-dinosaurs, but mammals were outcompeted and reduced to niche species for 140 million years.  That is, until conditions somehow changed so that all the dinosaurs died out, except very small ones with feathers.

Insensitive sensitivity training

It wasn't this bad at Maryland.  At least not how I remember it.

More march digestion

At the risk of sounding like I'm having a case of march envy, what do we have to do to get noticed?

Perhaps if we had more has-been celebrities, stepped up our efforts in the giant puppet department, and tried to spray-paint anarchy symbols on the capitol.

On second thought, no.  Although M.C. Hammer is welcome to come to any pro-life march as far as I am concerned.

More on Ashley's Treatment

From a Slate piece:

That's why they want to make Ashley easier to bear. "The only additional care givers entrusted to Ashley's care are her two Grandmothers, who find Ashley's weight even more difficult to manage," the parents plead. But once you start changing people's bodies to make them easier to bear, it's that much easier to look at their caregivers the same way. So the bearers became burdens, and we lightened them. And they lived happily ever after.

Which reminds me of something Cardinal O'Malley recently said:

As the populations of the Western world age, we will see that the generation of parents that aborted their own children, will be euthanized by the children who survived.

Thanks to alert reader Therese for the Slate link.

Mass for Life homily

Here is the homily, given by the University of Maryland Catholic Student Center's own Fr. Bill Byrne.  Thanks for the link, Therese.

Secular liturgy

One of my first posts on this blog (well, on Catholicae Testudines), was on the concept of liturgy and ritual, how people have a deep-seated need for it.  So much so that if they don't have it, they'll make ad hoc rituals, and if they don't have religious liturgy they'll make up replacements to fill the void.

A lot of the time people don't think consciously about this process, but sometimes they do.  In Catalonia in Spain, the government has just issued a book of rites for secular liturgy intended to replace the ceremonies of the Catholic Church.  That way, people can have the ritual and ceremony they crave but without the bother of the Catholic Church.  All the parts they like, but not the parts they don't. 

Really, this isn't too different from what some people try to do with the Church's actual liturgy, except these people are being honest about what they're doing.  Not that that makes it good.

Worth Meditating On

It was suggested in in the homily I heard today that that anything said about love in the second reading ought to be able to be said by us.
I am patient, I am kind.
I am not jealous, I am not pompus,
I am not inflated, not rude,
I do not seek my own interests,
I am not quick tempered, nor do I brood over injury,
I do not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoice with the truth.
I bear all things, believe all things,
hope all things, endure all things.

I can't say that this meditation really makes me feel good about myself, but I suppose that's the point.

Parish music directors, congregations on different page when it comes to singing

As if we didn't know before, but here is a study confirming it.

People not involved in parish music ministry (or whatever you want to call it) consistently said that the things that make it easy to sing in church are music that is familiar and music that is simple.  People who are involved in said ministry consistently put these at the bottom of the ranking, and "leadership of organ or instruments" at the top, along with other things most people don't really care about that much, such as whether the song is thematically linked to the liturgy of the day or season.  Normal people were also more likely to value "traditional" music than music directors, although music directors dismiss this, chalking it up to a familiarity issue.  Let's hope they take some hints.

Perhaps I will elaborate on why I think these results are the way they are - for instance, why most people do not find that a "meaningful text" helps them to sing the music, but why musicians would think it would.  I think I am in a good position to comment because although I am a huge geek who geeks out on everything he's interested in, including music (and liturgy), and have had the privilege to study and perform in settings appropriate to those headed for a career in music, I am not a professional-level trained musician and thus remember what it's like to be a "normal" person about music (in no small part because I have not freed myself entirely from the limitations associated thereto).  Nor am a liturgist, meaning that I reside closer to real life than to la-la land (my apologies to all the good liturgists out there).