When, several semesters ago, my department chair asked me to teach the local version of the nowadays-pervasive “popular culture” course, I consented with some mild misgivings and, as I like to do, took a mostly historical approach to course-content. I have no investment in contemporary popular culture, the wretchedness of it striking me as consummate. My students, for their part, being morbidly, continuously immersed in contemporary popular culture, require no one to acquaint them with it. At least they require no one to tutor them in it directly, since it regrettably is their ubiquitous, hortatory guide, and their authoritative cue-giver, for all facets of life. But one might apprise them about the insipidity of existing mass-entertainment indirectly by putting it in contrast with the popular entertainments of the past, including the classic films that most of them have never seen and, more importantly, would never seek out on their own. One film that I showed to students was the Errol Flynn vehicle The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz. Another one, not so well known as Robin Hood, was the Roger Livesey/Wendy Hiller vehicle I Know Where I’m Going (1945), directed by Michael Powell (1905 – 1990).
“Strange Fire” and What’s Wrong—and What’s Right—with Pentecostalism
Last October, influential Reformed Baptist pastor John MacArthur organized the “Strange Fire” conference, dedicated to opposing the errors of Pentecostalism. The title is an allusion to Leviticus 10:1 which describes Aaron’s sons offering unauthorized worship (“strange fire” in the King James translation) to the Lord.
Pentecostalism has had a short but colorful history since emerging at the turn of the Twentieth Century as a movement built around the belief that God is initiating a new movement featuring a renewed ministry of the Holy Spirit: speaking in tongues, miraculous healing, new prophecy. Since the belief of a new movement cannot be drawn from Scripture, Pentecostalism has been troubled by extrabiblical tomfoolery since its inception. Continue reading
“Gay Danish couples win right to marry in church”
But remember, same-sex “marriage” doesn’t concern you!
Of Possible Interest
The second part of my essay on S. T. Coleridge appears at Angel Millar’s People of Shambhala website under the title “The Poet as Rebel: Inside Coleridge’s Pleasure Dome.” The link is here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/the-poet-as-rebel-inside-coleridges-pleasure-dome/
I offer the concluding paragraph as a sample:
Traditionalists think of Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) and Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821) as the great counter-revolutionary philosophers. Coleridge belongs with them. Coleridge, like de Maistre, saw that the political upheavals of his time maintained an intimate relation with the diminution of consciousness implied by the doctrines of materialism and naturalism. Coleridge did not possess the word scientism, no more than did de Maistre, but he knew that which it signifies. He could see, moreover, that the diminution of consciousness under specious doctrines was a trend, and that, unchecked, it would be disastrously upward-trending. As an expression of “the brute passions and physical force of the multitude” acting under the sanction of “abstract reason,” the scientistic attitude, that monstrum hybridum of the age, would thrash like a Leviathan, leaving the wreckage of humanity in its path.
Straight Orthodoxy
Orthodox Street in Philadelphia runs only one way. It passes Saint Mary’s Malankara Syrian Orthodox Cathedral and skirts the Roman Catholic church of Saint John Cantius.
“Street” is “straight.” It is also “strait,” of course. But, Orthodox Street is not particularly narrow.
Of Possible Interest
I have an article at the website of the Pope Center for Higher Education on the difficulty of teaching a course on literary criticism in the prevailing post-literate condition. The link is here: http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3019. I have another article, or rather the first part of a two-part article, on S. T. Coleridge as a Traditionalist, at Angel Millar’s People of Shambhala website. The link is here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/a-vision-in-a-dream-s-t-coleridge-on-imagination-and-politics/. My review of James Kalb’s Against Inclusiveness, for The University Bookman, is here: http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/todays-totalitarians/.
PS. The Pope Center article is a version of an item that I first posted here at The Orthosphere a couple of months ago.
Liberty: the demon that succeeded
This might have been a more appropriate name for Christopher Ferrara’s important 2012 book Liberty: the God that Failed.
A message for nice guys
I
Meet the late Elliot Rodger, 22-year-old serial murderer and self-proclaimed “supreme gentleman,” who blamed his killing spree on his inability to attract a lover.
There’s a lot that can be said about Mr. Rodger from a sociological perspective — from whence his narcissism, his self-entitlement, his will-to-power? — but regular readers of the Orthosphere could likely anticipate such an analysis or produce a better one on their own, so I don’t feel the need to write one. Instead, this post is aimed at those in a similar situation as his (on the off-chance that any might read it), those who have ever asked themselves, “I’m a nice guy; why can’t I get a girlfriend?”
If you have ever uttered these words, you are almost certainly a beta male.
The Year Civilization Collapsed
At The Brussels Journal, I review Eric H. Cline’s new book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Cline’s topic is the “Catastrophe” that afflicted the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age. Cline’s service is to have correlated the large monographic literature on the “Catastrophe” and to have organized it in complementary narrative and analysis. The review is here: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/5134
I offer an excerpt:
Just before reading The Year Civilization Collapsed I read Gregory R. Copley’s Un-Civilization: Urban Geo-Politics in a Time of Chaos (2013). Copley sees the existing global economy as a distorted, unstable system already embarked down the slope of collapse. The malaise of the contemporary system in Copley’s analysis stems from many of the distortions that Cline cites as contributing to the end of the Bronze Age: Centralized bureaucratization of the societies; overspecialization within the total mercantile network such that a disruption anywhere must spread its effects like ripples everywhere else; vulnerable infrastructure, such as, in the modern instance, the electrical grid; unregulated, massive migrations of peoples; and the development of enmitous social factions within societies, in some cases massively immigration-driven. Copley predicts a crisis, one effect of which will be plummeting depopulation leading to the desertification of the distended World Cities.
The parallelisms between Copley’s assessment of the contemporary situation and Cline’s hypothesis about the causes and character of the Catastrophe are quite obvious and quite disconcerting. Copley differs from Cline in his willingness to include moral failures as playing a role in the impending (as he sees it) debacle. Cline explicitly disavows any gesture of “laying blame,” as when he criticizes invoking the “Sea Peoples” as agents of a general destruction in the concluding phase of the Catastrophe. Nevertheless, The Year Civilization Collapsed is extremely valuable. The Catastrophe is little-known – unlike the specious “Fall of Rome,” so often celebrated in novels and cinema. It ought to be better-known, as it would serve as a useful reference in getting people to understand the terrible fragility of the civilized accomplishment. One ingredient of total social calamity at which Cline hints but which he nowhere fully develops is the complacency of the people, their dumb belief that nothing can change in the way of life. The psychological inertia of complacency plays a large role in the stultification of the existing “global order,” which more and more resembles ambient disorder.
The nature of solidarity: Donoso Cortes vs. the socialists
The nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary Juan Donoso Cortes occupies an intriguing place
in the history of Reaction. His critique of liberalism is distinctly theological; he grounds all his social principles in Christian doctrine: the nature of the Trinity, its manifestations in creation, mankind’s collective Fall, and its collective redemption. In some ways, he anticipates the Christian communitarians and Radical Orthodoxy schools of our own time. Unlike them, he was tied to an actual, living traditional society, and he defends kings, hereditary aristocracies, Catholic establishment, and many other things that would cause today’s communitarians to faint from fear.
Throne & Altar reader William McEnaney has kindly sent me a copy of Dononso’s main work, his Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism. Bill works with Preserving Christian Publications, a small business that sells out-of-print pre-conciliar Catholic books. I would be pleased for such ventures to flourish and so am happy to offer this bit of free advertising. What follows will be an exploration of one key theme in Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.
Writing in 1851, Donoso saw the great issue of his age as an ultimately theological battle between Catholicism and socialism. Catholicism had dignified both authority and obedience by locating the former’s source in God. Even the legitimate authority of fathers (as opposed to their mere primacy of age and power) is explicable primarily through the Trinitarian relation it reflects. Alongside the family and state, Catholicism fosters a vast network of associations, each embodying it its own way the fundamental law of unity-in-diversity rooted in the Trinitarian heart of Being. Socialism would destroy all of this, reducing the order of mankind to a vast and unitary yet illegitimate statist tyranny.
In the twentieth century, all of this would be explained in terms of the supposed Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. As you’ve often heard the story, the Left basically owns solidarity, and Catholics criticize Leftists only for neglecting the second principle of subsidiarity, a vague council to–all other things being equal–favor small and local agency. This is inadequate for a number of reasons. Donoso gets to the real heart of the matter. What’s wrong with socialism is not that it is solidarity unchecked; socialism is solidarity denied, misunderstood, reduced to a shadow of its true self. The socialist believes in solidarity too little, rather than too much.
