We Honor Reconciliation

 From Crisis:

War as fratricide is the most terrible of wars. The aftermath of the Civil War had the states that had seceded from the Union practically governed as conquered territory. Reconciliation was what was necessary, and it was a kind of cultural experiment. The South had lost, but was allowed to venerate its dead and its leaders. The romantic myth of the Lost Cause was no doubt part of the effort to remember and record, but it might not have been the principal element. The historic memory of the tremendous pain and destruction caused by the Civil War required something more than bitter recrimination or amnesia. The communities could remember their leaders as symbols of their identity with the past. The hero-worship was at times excessive, as most political movements are, but figures from history speak of continuity and not condemnation. Setting up statues or writing novels about the past was much better than pitched battles where brother sometimes met brother on the blood-soaked soil.

The attachment some feel for the Confederate symbols does not always equal racism. It inspires those who don’t always love a winner. Matthew Arnold famously criticized his alma mater Oxford by calling the university, “Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties.” There is a definite appeal to the imagination in sympathizing with the losing side. Look at Euripides’ The Trojan Women. (Read more.)

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The Biden Platform: What Catholics Should Know

 Biden sold his soul long ago. From the Catholic News Agency:

The DNC platform also calls for the U.S. to appoint “senior leaders” to drive LGBTQ advocacy in foreign policy; the Obama administration appointed the first Special Envoy for LGBTQ issues at the State Department, but the position is not yet required by law to be filled by each administration and has not been filled during Trump’s presidency.

The current 2020 DNC platform also supports the HHS contraceptive mandate, which business owners and religious non-profits have fought in court over its requirement that employers cover contraceptives in employee health plans.

While the Trump administration granted religious and moral exemptions to the mandate, including for the Little Sisters of the Poor, states challenged the exemptions in court. In July, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the exemptions for the sisters and others.

However, Biden—who in an Aug. 9 campaign video credited the “generosity” of Catholic nuns with inspiring him in his run for president—has said that he would undo the religious and moral exemptions to the mandate, potentially opening the Little Sisters of the Poor up to further litigation for opposing the mandate.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, Biden said he would restore the Obama administration’s “accommodation” for objecting non-profits, which the sisters had challenged in court by saying it did not sufficiently protect their rights of conscience.

Under that “accommodation,” objecting non-profits would notify the government of their objection, which in turn would instruct their insurer or third-party plan administrator to ensure the provision of contraceptive coverage. The sisters said that by notifying the government of their objection, they were still essentially giving a “permission slip” for the provision of morally-objectionable coverage in their health plan.

The platform does include a commitment to oppose capital punishment, and pledges the party to “continue to support abolishing the death penalty.”

The DNC draft platform also opposes private school vouchers as part of “policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system.” In some states, like Wisconsin, Catholic schools have been some of the beneficiaries of the state’s expansion of private school vouchers.

On marriage, Biden supported the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s, but in 2012 said he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage; his comments as vice president in an election year prodded President Obama to announce his support for same-sex marriage days later. As Vice President, Biden himself officiated at a same-sex wedding ceremony for two White House staffers in 2016.

Regarding abortion, the 2020 DNC platform builds upon the 2016 platform that one former Obama campaign staffer characterized was “extreme.” In 2016, Michael Wear, director of faith outreach for Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, told CNA that the party’s abortion stance was “morally reprehensible. (Read more.)

From LifeSite:

Let’s take a look at Biden’s record on life and family — the two top issues for Catholics in political life, as was explained by Pope Benedict XVI while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger under Pope St. John Paul II. Biden has been upfront about his agenda to ensure the so-called “right” to what he calls women’s reproductive health, by which he means permission to kill babies in the womb. In his Agenda for Women, released in July, Biden promised to restore domestic and overseas funding to the abortion industry cut by Trump. Biden said he “will work to codify Roe v. Wade, and his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade.”

The largest abortion operation in the USA, Planned Parenthood, has naturally endorsed Biden. In its statement, PP touted the former vice president’s support for expanding access to contraception, increasing legal protections for access to abortion, promoting “comprehensive sex education,” and reversing the Trump administration’s rule prohibiting Title X taxpayer funds from being given to organizations that refer for abortions. Prior to the announcement being made, Alexis McGill Johnson, acting president of Planned Parenthood, told NPR that November’s presidential contest “is literally a life and death election.”

During the coronavirus crisis — where all sorts of medical procedures were suspended due to the pandemic — Biden wanted to ensure the continuation of abortion. “We need to ensure that women have access to all health services during this crisis,” the Democratic presidential candidate said, adding that “abortion is an essential health care service.”

Historically, Biden had a slight qualm with forcing Americans to pay for aborting children abroad, but during the campaign, he flip-flopped on the Hyde Amendment. “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code,” Biden declared. “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without the access to care they need, and the ability to exercise their constitutionally protected right.” (Read more.) 

From EWTN:

Conscience is NOT the same as your opinions or feelings. Conscience cannot be identical with your feelings because conscience is the activity of your intellect in judging the rightness or wrongness of your actions or omissions, past, present, or future, while your feelings come from another part of your soul and should be governed by your intellect and will. Conscience is not identical with your opinions because your intellect bases its judgment upon the natural moral law, which is inherent in your human nature and is identical with the Ten Commandments. Unlike the civil laws made by legislators, or the opinions that you hold, the natural moral law is not anything that you invent, but rather discover within yourself and is the governing norm of your conscience. In short, Conscience is the voice of truth within you, and your opinions need to be in harmony with that truth. As a Catholic, you have the benefit of the Church’s teaching authority or Magisterium endowed upon her by Christ. The Magisterium assists you and all people of good will in understanding the natural moral law as it relates to specific issues. As a Catholic, you have the obligation to be correctly informed and normed by the teaching of the Church’s Magisterium. As for your feelings, they need to be educated by virtue so as to be in harmony with conscience’s voice of truth. In this way, you will have a sound conscience, according to which we you will feel guilty when you are guilty, and feel morally upright when you are morally upright. We should strive to avoid the two opposite extremes of a lax conscience and a scrupulous conscience. Meeting the obligation of continually attending to this formation of conscience will increase the likelihood that, in the actual operation or activity of conscience, you will act with a certain conscience, which clearly perceives that a given concrete action is a good action that was rightly done or should be done. Being correctly informed and certain in the actual operation of conscience is the goal of the continuing formation of conscience. Otherwise put, you should strive to avoid being incorrectly informed and doubtful in the actual judgment of conscience about a particular action or omission. You should never act on a doubtful conscience. (Read more.) 

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Navan Fort

From Live Science:

The remains of "monumental temples" dating to the Iron Age and medieval buildings may be hidden underground at Navan Fort, an archaeological site in Northern Ireland, a new study finds. 

Exactly what's left of these ruins, however, remains to be seen. Archaeologists discovered the buried structures by using remote-sensing techniques that allowed them to map the hidden landscape and detect anomalies, such as architectural features made by humans. 

These Iron Age and medieval buildings suggest that Navan Fort was "an incredibly important religious center and a place of paramount sacral and cultural authority in later prehistory," study co-researcher Patrick Gleeson, a senior lecturer of archaeology at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told Live Science. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette and Fashion, #BlogTalkRadio

Court dress, 1785

Listen to my broadcast on Marie-Antoinette and fashion, in which we discuss Marie-Antoinette's reputation of being a fashion plate, and how modern scholars have determined that her use of fashion was not mere frivolity but a political tool.

Chemise à la reine

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The Nonconformist

 From The City-Journal:

Measured by his contributions to economics, political theory, and intellectual history, Thomas Sowell ranks among the towering intellects of our time. Yet, rare among such thinkers, Sowell manages never to provoke, in the reader, the feeling of being towered over. As Kevin Williamson observed, Sowell is “that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken.” From 1991 until 2016, his nationally syndicated column set the bar for clear writing, though the topics he covered were often complex. “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.” If academics birth needlessly complex prose, editors too often midwife it. An editor, Sowell once quipped, would probably have changed Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question” to something awful, like “The issue is one of existence versus non-existence.”

Consider Sowell’s clear, brief explanation of the economic idea of “scarcity.” “What does ‘scarce’ mean?” he asks in his layman’s textbook, Basic Economics. “It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is.” Not only is pointless complexity absent from Sowell’s prose; so is the first-person perspective. The words “I” or “me” scarcely show up in his 30-odd books, but for his memoir, A Personal Odyssey.

To his critics, Sowell’s writing style is severe. But to his fan base—which includes figures as different as Steven Pinker and Kanye West—it’s a refreshing break from the self-absorbed drivel that frequently passes for cultural commentary nowadays. Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and leading public intellectual, named Sowell the most underrated writer in history. West, for his part, tweeted out a handful of Sowell quotes to millions of followers in 2018.

Sowell’s first piece of writing was published in 1950—a letter to the now-defunct Washington Star, urging the desegregation of the city’s public schools. The only hint during this period that he would someday be an economist was a budding interest in Karl Marx. For Sowell, Marx’s ideas “seemed to explain so much,” including his own “grim experience.” At the time, Sowell was a 20-year-old high school dropout, working as a clerk by day and taking classes by night—a situation that actually marked an improvement over his being unemployed and, for a time, homeless in his late teens. (Read more.)

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China's Pompeii

 From National Geographic:

The most grisly discovery came underneath the city’s eastern wall: 80 human skulls clustered in six pits—with no skeletons attached. (The two pits closest to the East Gate, the city’s principal entrance, contained exactly 24 skulls each.) The skulls’ number and placement suggest a ritual beheading during the laying of the wall’s foundation—the earliest known example of human sacrifice in Chinese history. Forensic scientists determined that almost all of the victims were young girls, most likely prisoners who belonged to a rival group.

“The scale of ritual violence observed at Shimao was unprecedented in early China,” says Li Min, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has visited and written extensively about Shimao. The skulls at Shimao foreshadowed the massive human sacrifice that became what Li calls “a defining attribute of Shang civilization” many centuries later (from around 1600 to 1046 B.C.) before succeeding dynasties put an end to the practice.

The skulls are just one indication that the East Gate marked the entrance to a different world. Anyone walking across the threshold—above the buried sacrificial pits—would have been awed by more immediately visible signs. Several stone blocks in the high terrace walls were carved with lozenge designs, making them appear like enormous eyes gazing down at the East Gate. Wedged into the stone walls at regular intervals were thousands of pieces of black and dark green jade, shimmering ornaments that served both to ward off evil and to project the power and wealth of Shimao elites. The abundance of jade artifacts suggests that Shimao, with no source of its own, imported large quantities from distant trading partners. (Read more.)

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In Prayer

The daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in prayer. Share

Demonizing Trump Supporters

 From David Limbaugh at The Daily Wire:

How many people do you know who would be afraid to put a Joe Biden bumper sticker on their car or a Biden sign in their yard? Ask around and you’ll find tons of people afraid to publicly support Trump.

But this is about more than destroying people’s careers for refusing to own the latest leftist cultural fad or identity politics command. This is not simply the targeting of a public figure for, say, denying that there are 70 genders. It’s about the wholesale demonization of half of America’s population — the half that supports President Trump.

Observe how glibly the writer just assumes that it is a given Trump supporters are tainted by their support. Notice how he doesn’t even question the moral legitimacy of the backlash Favre received. Instead, he affirms it. He doesn’t just say Favre’s sin was playing golf with Trump but “what he did by playing golf with … Trump,” as if to double emphasize the innocuous act. Can these people not hear themselves?

The takeaway from this story has little to do with Favre, who serves merely as a convenient prop — as representative of all Trump supporters.

Conservatives are not allowed to express their opinions in America’s dominant media culture. They are not allowed to like President Trump. Their entire character will be called into question if they do.

The irony is that the Left created Trump politically. It is the very type of intolerance the Left now displays toward Trump supporters that birthed the environment in which Trump emerged. Most Trump supporters see him as the last best hope to save America from the nihilistic, unforgiving, despotic and violent Left. (Read more.)

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Women of the Third Reich

From Medium:

The women in Hitler’s closest circle came from different backgrounds, held different positions, and played different roles in his life and that of the Reich. Generally married to prominent figures of the Third Reich, they were ardent admirers of it and shared the days of glory or trial with him.

This image could be presented as a kind of chivalrous epic regarding Carin, Goering’s first wife. The two represented the classic couple in love from the Nazi period, as opposed to the “ideal family”, represented by the couple Magda and Joseph Goebbels. The love story between the Nordic goddess and the hero of German aviation was idealized and especially much publicized, even after the premature death of Carin, in 1931, she is the heroine of the beginnings of National Socialism. Carin’s devotion to Hitler had been almost fanatical. She considered Hitler a kind of Messiah, who would lead Germany to a bright future. (Read more.)

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