Winter Scenes

Winter is captured on the canvases of the great masters. Share

Frenchman Street

Southern Living invites you to meet the musicians in the heart of New Orleans.

Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans is a pulse, a holdover, an invitation, a gumbo, a front line, a late night, a memory, a wish, a tonic. It is Creole town houses, packed together and toeing property lines. It is peels of paint and wrought iron dust and the scents of oyster factory, confectionery, and laundromat, all wafting down the arrow-straight street. It is bartender, mailman, sax player, concierge, barista, priest, lowlife, wanderer, tenor, and shopkeeper.

The thin asphalt lane locals used to call Little Canal Street begins on a bend of the Mississippi River where the eastern French Quarter ends and passes between Seventh Ward, Treme, and Bywater, then runs north toward Lake Pontchartrain. Under the shimmery asphalt lays a parish gravel; and beneath that, a cobbled row laid atop a silty bed of fine antebellum earth washed up from hundreds of years gone by. And beneath it all, it is a melody.

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Catholics and Socialism

Here are some politically incorrect quotes from various popes. In the words of St. Pius X:

“But stranger still, alarming and saddening at the same time, are the audacity and frivolity of men who call themselves Catholics and dream of re-shaping society under such conditions, and of establishing on earth, over and beyond the pale of the Catholic Church, ‘the reign of love and justice’ ... What are they going to produce? ... A mere verbal and chimerical construction in which we shall see, glowing in a jumble, and in seductive confusion, the words Liberty, Justice, Fraternity, Love, Equality, and human exultation, all resting upon an ill-understood human dignity. It will be a tumultuous agitation, sterile for the end proposed, but which will benefit the less Utopian exploiters of the people. Yes, we can truly say that the Sillon, its eyes fixed on a chimera, brings Socialism in its train.”
(Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique ["Our Apostolic Mandate"] to the French Bishops, August 15, 1910, condemning the movement Le Sillon)

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Faux Fur

"A sense of humor is as valuable (stylistically at least) as a flagrant display of wealth." Share

Christian Anthropology vs. the Sexual Revolution

Sex is not a substitute for God. (Via A Conservative Blog for Peace.) In the words of Peter Kreeft:

The moral revolution is confined to sex. We are not allowed to steal another man's money without being put into jail, but we can steal another man's wife. You cannot betray your lawyer without being severely penalized, but you can betray your wife, and SHE is severely penalized. You cannot kill bald eagles or blue whales without being a criminal but you can kill your own children as long as you do it a second before the two blades of the scissors meet in the middle of the umbilical cord rather than a second after, or a second before the body emerges from the birth canal rather than a second after. What kind of logic is this?

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The Cure for Bullying

People who try to help. To quote health care professional Nick Jacobs:

The Today Show story that I saw featured the Massachusetts school where, due to cyber-bullying, a young girl committed suicide last year.  Apparently, another girl is now having the same experience at the same school. With the help of programs like this comprehensive anti-bullying program, the former Secretary of Education from PA, Jerry Zahorchak, (now Superintendent of the Allentown PA school system), embraced the effort to quell and discourage this type of destructive behavior.  And the program, under the direction of Dr. Matt Masiello has successfully been introduced across the  entire State of PA. (Matt had started the Allegheny County’s Goods for Guns program in 1994, when he was the head of pediatric intensive care at Allegheny General Hospital. To date, this program is responsible for collecting more than 11,000 illegal guns from the streets of Pittsburgh.) Matt has had the same success with this anti-bullying program. Now, both Massachusetts and Maryland are looking into embracing this effort.

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Links Page

I just wanted to make certain that everyone knows that I have a links page, with a link to it on the right sidebar. There are so many sites I want to link to that I found some time ago that having a separate page was necessary. If anyone has a site which they would like to recommend just let me know in the combox and I will add it to the page. Share

Margaret Beaufort and Margaret Pole

Two ladies of royal blood.To quote from Once I Was A Clever Boy:

Both were devout women - examples of the aristocratic piety of the age, which included Cicely Duchess of York, grandmother of Countess Margaret, and later on Queen Catherine of Aragon and Queen Mary I. Both were patrons of the Church and learning. In John Fisher, as Lady Margaret's confessor and counsellor, and Reginald Pole, Countess Margaret's son, they had contact with two of the leading English churchmen of the age, both of whom were to become Cardinals.

As women of high birth they were seen as authoritative on precedence and ceremony in the case of Margaret Beaufort, whilst Margaret Pole was not only a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, but chosen as governess to the Princess Mary when she was seen as heiress apparent in the 1520s.

Margaret Pole was beatified as a martyr in 1886, and it is perhaps surprising that no-one appears to have sought the beatification of Lady Margaret - being Henry VIII's grandmother should not be held against her. I strongly suspect that she would disapprove very strongly of his actions, and given the opportunity in the afterlife to tell him so would not hesitate so to do.

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Lastingness

The creative art of growing old.

In 1928, when poet William Butler Yeats was in his 60s, he wrote "Sailing to Byzantium," in which he laments, An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick. Despite his harsh characterization of old age, Yeats himself continued to write late into his life.

Yeats' older years as a writer, and those of many other creative artists, are the subjects of Nicholas Delbanco's latest book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age. Delbanco examines artists who either maintained or advanced their work past the age of 70 — from Claude Monet, to Giuseppe Verdi, to Georgia O'Keeffe.

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