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RESURRECTION BODY
The resurrection body in a garden of Jerusalem
Speaks an intangible "Touch me not,"
To the startled woman, but on the road
To Emmaus it spoke, and later supped
On broiled fish and honeycomb.
Manifestly, it could eat.
It came and went.
The earth it trod softly like a tomb,
Some saw shadow, some light,
"Here are my hands, my feet" ~
Questions falling, great bewilderment,
Crowding round a great event.
Soon enough, crowds vanish into history
That hangs, one way or another,
On a matter of improbability.
The body was nailed to the crossroads, gravity,
Where a radiant figure descends, awaits me at the corner,
~ On a road I am about to discover.
C.J. [2004,2006]
April 8, 2006
First Communion
Next Saturday at the Easter Vigil (7 PM) at St. Colman's Church (11 Simpson Road, Ardmore, PA) I will be formally
received into the Roman Catholic Church and take my First Communion.
Sometimes I think this event is the culmination of a long journey, and at other times I think it has been a very short
trip. The decision, once made, seemed irrevocable. I am not at all a pious person, and religiosity, in and of itself, has
not been a great part of my life. It is perhaps true that piety and religiosity are part of the Catholic experience, or of
the experience of many Catholics, but they are not what inspired me to want to become Catholic.
The experience of Catholicism was, and is, for me a coming-into-being of an original experience of "Yes!" --
an experience that seems to me impossible to achieve in a Protestant context, given that Protestantism is inherently postulated
on the "No," on not-being-Catholic. This original being has to do with the integrality of spirit and flesh
in human nature - or rather, because these cannot be viewed as perfectly integrated, at least spirit and flesh can be
seen to exist in a dynamic mutual relation. This dynamic mutuality seems to me the real "engine," to put it in those terms,
of the Catholic faith. This is what allows for the experience of devotion, the 'flow' of feeling. It just is --
and all 'piety' or 'religiosity' are mere intellectualizations of emotion.
Today I had the insight that, where the life-world -- the plants, for example, and also the human intellect in a sense
-- where these things seek light, and as it were, 'strive upwards,' the spirit actually seeks the ground. Spirit seeks to
become grounded where thought seeks to become 'light,' or 'enlightened.' Again, the principle of dynamic mutuality can
be seen in the oppositional and mutually interactive roles of spirit and matter. It is the form of the "8," the spiral
or lemniscate -- embodied in the form of the galactic spiral as well as the DNA molecule. And yet for 'thought' to become
'spirit' takes an act of humility or courage, for mere intellectualism striving to become 'light' cannot, of itself, become
spirit. It must submit. It must perceive that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be comprehended in the juvenile
immediacy of intellectual consciousness. One must learn how to wait. The Catholic Church seems to understand this, for it
has disposed its teaching and priestly functions in such a way as to preserve the dynamic field. The spirit cannot act
where the intellect refuses to submit. This simple truth has, no doubt, at times been distorted by Catholicism as a structure.
But to modern man it is a perpetual sting, a reproach, a standing complaint - the last, and the first, refusal.
This is the hurdle we face now, when intellectualism has loosed all of its bonds and society has become in a sense the open
victim, the field for play and rewards, of limitless intellectual "manipulationism." The Catholic Church is the
last real bastion against this sort of ideology of limitlessness. Look for an increasing crescendo of attacks on "Jesus"
-- from the Da Vinci Code to the "Gospel of Judas," touted yesterday in that sewer of anti-Christianity, the Philadelphia
Inquirer. It's happening. It's happening all over. All Christians, and even non-Christians who are aware of the
nature of the battle, need to gird their loins for the battle.
Speaking of which..... my essay, "Plastinating Philadelphia," has been published in the April, 2006, issue of Culture
Wars (published through Fidelity Press, South Bend, Indiana). The article deals with the "Body Worlds" exhibit at Philadelphia's
Franklin Institute, with my reflections on what this turning a science museum into a blockbuster corpse show can mean to our
cultural and moral life. It's me at my sarcastic, contentious, confrontational and philosophical best! Don't miss it!
March 31, 2006
A Few Old Quotes
Browsing in some old journals, I came across some old passages of interest. A quote from Russell Kirk's The Conservative
Mind, from Henry Adams to his brother:"The Lives of our contemporaries now fill our bookshelves, and not one of them
offers a thought. Since the Civil War, I think we have produced not one figure that will be remembered a life time... What
is more curious, I think the figures have not existed. The men have not been born. If they had existed I should have attached
myself to them, for I needed them bad. As life has turned out, I am dying alone, without a twig to fall from..."
W.H. Matlock on the positivists: "Upon this Empire, as upon that of Rome, calamity has fallen. A host of intellectual
barbarians has burst in upon it, and has occupied by force the length and breadth of it. The result has been astounding. Had
the invaders been barbarians only, they might have been repelled easily; but they were barbarians armed with the most powerful
weapons of civilization. They were a phenomenon new to history; they showed us real knowledge in the hands of real ignorance;
and the work of continuation thus far has been ruin, not reorganization." From Is Life Worth Living? (1880) William
James also wrote an essay with the same title in 1896, mentioning Matlock; but in an 1881 essay, "Reflex Action and Theism,"
he takes up the theme of mental barbarization in this way: "the appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or
what the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,' -- which is nothing but the passion for conceiving the universe in the most
labor-saving way -- will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the development of the intellect quite as
much as the feelings of the will..." For earlier he remarked, "Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant
excess of his subjective propensities -- his pre-eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and
unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, esthetic, and intellectual -- Had his whole life not been a quest
for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary."
An entry of mine on Jan. 1, 1998: "The closest thing to civilizational theory we've had has been in the writings of men
like Russell Kirk. But the identification was made with conservatism rather than civilization. This identification has strangled
conservatism at its birth: for when you have lost civilization, what is there left to conserve?"
Another entry, April 30, 1997: "The ideological character can present an outward flexibility, complaisance, openness
to change, which disguises his inner rigidity and inability to be open to persuasion by argument and evidence. The morally
principled person may come across as strong, if not unyielding, fixed in his or her thoughts, unbending -- all of which is
but the outer shell of a mind continually in the process of becoming."
March 26, 2006
Business As Usual
There have been several interesting developments this week but one would never guess it from reading today’s
(Sunday, March 26) Philadelphia Inquirer, which, with a few exceptions, remains obsessed with celebrity, superficiality
and sales.
The buzz of the Internet this week was the publication of the essay on the Israel Lobby, noted in my website
posting last week. This essay was published March 10 in the London Review of Books under the auspices of the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It is a shortened version of the original 83-page essay that originally
appeared with the Harvard logo in their Faculty Research Working Paper Series – that is, until the Jews objected, and
Harvard (ever to be counted on for reflexive cowardice) removed the logo from the published paper.
All Americans who care about foreign policy, media and culture should read this paper. A close perusal of
Sunday’s Inquirer brought forth no mention of it. Instead, the first page of the editorial section ("Currents")
was plastered with a long article, "The evolution of stardom," by one Paula Marantz Cohen, a "distinguished professor of English
at Drexel University," beginning with the astounding phrase – What has happened to movie stars?
Miss Cohen might have been advised to look no further than to CNN’s "Showbiz Tonight" of March 25,
featuring an interview with actor Charlie Sheen, whose had made allegations of a government cover-up regarding the events
of 9/11. The research into the real facts regarding 9/11 is a vigorous enterprise in internet circles, but so far seems not
to have penetrated the mainstream media. David Ray Griffin, Ph.D., has written probably the best overview of "The Destruction
of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True," available through the Scholars for 9/11 Truth website
(http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html
Briefly, Griffin and other reputable scholars argue that the government’s version of the events of
9/11 contradicts the laws of physics. According to the government report, "The structural damage sustained by each tower from
the impact, combined with the ensuing fires, resulted in the total collapse of each building" (FEMA, 2002). Griffin writes
that: "…The official theory is rendered implausible by two major problems. The first is the simple fact that fire has
never---prior to or after 9/11---caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse. Defenders of the official story seldom
if ever mention this simple fact. Indeed, the supposedly definitive report put out by NIST---the National Institute for Standards
and Technology (2005)---even implies that fire-induced collapses of large steel-frame buildings are normal events (Hoffman,
2005).[4] Far from being normal, however, such collapses have never occurred, except for the alleged cases of 9/11…
"…To see how ludicrous is the claim that the short-lived fires in the towers could have induced structural
collapse, we can compare them with some other fires. In 1988, a fire in the First Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles
raged for 3.5 hours and gutted 5 of this building’s 62 floors, but there was no significant structural damage (FEMA,
1988). In 1991, a huge fire in Philadelphia’s One Meridian Plaza lasted for 18 hours and gutted 8 of the building’s
38 floors, but, said the FEMA report, although "[b]eams and girders sagged and twisted . . . under severe fire exposures.
. . , the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage" (FEMA, 1991). In Caracas in 2004, a fire in a 50-story
building raged for 17 hours, completely gutting the building’s top 20 floors, and yet it did not collapse (Nieto, 2004).
And yet we are supposed to believe that a 56-minute fire caused the south tower to collapse."
However, the most compelling part of Dr. Griffin’s paper is his summary of the "Multiple evidence of
controlled demolition" – in which he says: "There is a reverse truth to the fact that, aside from the alleged cases
of 9/11, fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse. This reverse truth is that every previous total collapse
has been caused by the procedure known as "controlled demolition," in which explosives capable of cutting steel have been
placed in crucial places throughout the building and then set off in a particular order. Just from knowing that the towers
collapsed, therefore, the natural assumption would be that they were brought down by explosives.
"…This a priori assumption is, moreover, supported by an empirical examination of the particular nature
of the collapses. Here we come to the second major problem with the official theory, namely, that the collapses had at least
eleven features that would be expected if, and only if, explosives were used. I will briefly describe these eleven features…"
According to a report just received this morning, I have learned that a doctoral student at Clemson University
in South Carolina was shot and killed by a "mugger" while visiting his sister in Minnesota. He and his mother and sister were
returning from dinner when accosted by two muggers, who demanded that his mother hand over her purse. She complied, and one
of the muggers shot Michael Zebuhr in the head. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that Michael, in addition to being a
promising engineering student, was also a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
In the meantime our heroic Philadelphia Inquirer, a.k.a. "mainstream media," ever spinning in the
whirlpool of the dumbing-down of American public life -- but about to be sold -- has solicited public opinion regarding "If
I were in charge…" Readers were invited to comment about what they would do if they owned the Inquirer. One reader
suggested putting a picture of "a hot girl on the cover." Another suggested posting his own picture on the cover every day.
A reader from Jenkintown said that "If any editor or reporter would write pieces unfairly biased to favor the liberal point
of view or were pro-Hamas, he or she would be fired directly!" (Never mind that Hamas is the legitimately elected party of
Palestine! When the Jews and Americans elect war criminals, it’s called democracy. But when the Arabs elect parties
to defend their interests, it’s called terrorism.)
Of the fifteen reported comments, only one person actually suggested that the Inquirer focus on reporting
the news: "It is called a newspaper, not a sex-column-paper, not a lifestyle paper, not a profile or fluff- or true-love paper
– a newspaper.) (Thanks to Bill Dingfelder of Bala Cynwyd for his comment.) Using this sample as a rough index
to the existence of rational processes in the adult population of the USA, one of out of 15 adults may possess some awareness
of the correspondence of words to realities (i.e. given the definition of a newspaper, what it is should correspond in some
fashion to what it does) and, by implication, some sense of accountability consequent upon this awareness.
The main editorial column’s in today’s Inquirer was a double feature: neocon Charles Krauthammer
"Internal strife nothing new to Iraq" squaring off against the Inquirer’s own Chris Satullo, "War rhetoric serves
selfish ends." There was actually something decent in Satullo’s piece, which asked if an army were to illegally and
immorally invade the USA, creating havoc, destruction and turmoil, would our leaders still be telling us "don’t worry,
be happy"? There was a touch of something we used to call empathy or the shoe on the other foot in Satullo’s
editorial. It is a quality that sometimes used to sound in the old, old America – back when the phrase "America as a
Christian nation" used to mean something other than a whore for Zionism.
March 18, 2006 : Israel Lobby
In opening to my internet home page, Arts & Letters Daily, I was surprised to find a link to an article published
in the London Review of Books, "The Israel Lobby," by writers John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I say I was surprised
because Arts & Letters Daily, although a good compendium of literary and news articles, rarely strays from its neoconservative
bent - which I always find exasperating. Nevertheless, this long article (24 printed pages) was linked. I also found an e-mail
from Bill Regnery, who runs some sort of conservative website, urging all recipients of his extensive e-mail list to read
this article. Regnery wrote in his e-mail: "No more collegial conversations at the faculty clubs and no more establishment
perks for professors Mearsheimer and Walt. They have not only touched but fallen on the 'third rail' of political discourse."
The article can be accessed at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html Regnery also provided an expanded and fully documented version of the article at: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011
Readers should not need to be reminded that historian David Irving has been given a three-year prison term for questioning
aspects of the "Holocaust" narrative, and other dissenters from the cult of Judeocaustinaity are finding themselves facing
the reprisal and censorship at every step of the way. Some things are just not discussed, and what is not discussed is
the fact that politicized Zionism has taken Judaism, emptied out its remaining authentic spirituality, and filled it with
a counterfeit Christianity, an imitation. This politicized narrative imitates the suffering of Christ but substitutes
worldly triumph for supernatural victory. It substitutes the "people" for the single individual, Christ, the Son of God, and
idolizes this "people," which, however, it subtly disengages from all historical responsibility. The suffering of this "people"
is blind, unreasoning, uncaused, irrational - the "people" had nothing to do with it, the "people" were totally "innocent."
Where the sufferings of Christ can be understood at least somewhat in a historical context - among other things, he challenged
the Pharisees, who were trying to maintain accomodation to the Romans - the new narrative of suffering is ahistorical. Obviously,
the only thing that "explains" it is the long history of Western anti-semitism. But this explanation also raises problems,
for why would an "innocent people" have been for so long the target of such vicious hatred? The first solution would be to
blame Christianity for it, but to a great extent this ploy has already been played out. Christianity is all but dead in Europe,
so that blaming it for antisemitism is beginning to seem like beating a dead horse. What happens when Christianity is dead
and the Jews have no one else to blame for the afflictions of their history? To look at the reasons for such hatred, or rather
to acknowledge that such hatred might spring from reasons, would obviously be too uncomfortable and would lead into many under-explored
regions of Jewish history. The operative mode in this case is not to look at history at all, but make "anti-semitism"
into a general metaphysical malaise -- a kind of all-purpose mask that forever enables the Jews to disguise themselves. I
think things are somewhat in this condition now - only the mask has taken on a look of nebulous fear and uncertainty, and
that is why the "Israel Lobby" -- which is really a very small minority of Jews and Judaizers -- is reaching desperately for
anything and everything to quash independent thought.
But that this article on the "Israel Lobby" appeared in the London Review of Books may be a small portent
of things to come. Perhaps there really are a few American patriots left. I don't know. The Jewish mask has Jewish intransigeance
-- with its vast intellectuality -- at its disposal. American intransigeance seems to be comprised mainly of stupidity,
naivete, arrogance, and quite a bit of luck.I think a few of those American patriots are discovering that the Israel
Lobby is a viper that America has been nourishing at its bosom. But we will see what comes of their effort to warn the rest
of America. By the time the rest of the country wakes up, it may be too late. It is possible that by the time most Americans
realize the nature of the game, the country may well have disintegrated.
As for the Zionists, they will run to China - as they have already started to do, sensing American blood in the water
and smelling the smell of the new world ruler. As for the decent majority of Jews, I think when all the dust is cleared from
this apocalyptic age, I believe they will find it necessary to confess and believe in Jesus Christ. They will accept
this humbling confession as the glory and vindication of their true history -- not the garish and deceptive falsehood hammered
out by Zionists neocons and their despicable "Christian" apologists.
March 10, 2006
The Long Road through Lent
The last time I added a Thought Diary posting to this site was a month ago. I am aware of a certain feeling of leaden
tiredness and of not having anything new to say. Like Stephen Hand, author of the wonderful "Traditional Catholic Reflections,"
who wrote on his site yesterday that he needs a rest and will not be posting anything new, I too feel a certain need to pause,
take stock, and go into the silence.
And yet, and yet . . . In walking to my new job today it occurred to me that in the normal course of human history, vast
numbers of people worship the God of Power, the Worldpower. Things have not changed very much. It is still true. There is
nationalism, careerism, economism, militarism... all these and in a myriad other ways of asserting one's power, of being on
top, of being in control. The God of Power coexists in a certain way with deterministic philosophy - the God of Evolution.
It is really an interruption to believe in a Crucified God, a powerless God, who nevertheless can act in history in unexpected
and redeeming ways. And all those other things will still be going on, but the sting of finality will be taken from them.
One reserves a tiny space of inner freedom.
Stephen Hand's final essay yesterday was entitled "A Civilization Without the Influence of Jesus Christ," and I highly
recommend it. ( http://tcrnews2.com/ChristNietzscheIslam.html) -- he argues that in a world without Christ, the future will be a clash between Western nihilism and militant Islamism.
Stephen says that only Christ can break the deadlock between retribution and vengeance. "The real fight to the death...may
very well be between a radicalized Islam and an ever encroaching religionless system which seeks to crush it. There
is evidence Islam sees this coming, and that it understands the West's contempt for its own spiritual heritage and tradition
(the media make no attempt to hide it) and thus knows that the ultimate showdown will be against the cancerous philosophical
principles which are responsible for the demise of Christ's moderating influence on culture here and all over the globe..."
I continue on my journey to Catholicism, and today, while on my walk, St. Thomas's phrase kept playing in my mind: Gratia
supponit and perfecit naturam -- Grace presupposes Nature and brings it to perfection. More and more this wondrous phrase
echoes in my mind and heart like a mantra. It is not only that the moderating influence of Christ is waning in culture - it
is Christian philosophy which is disappearing in the mad onrush of the "Technological Future." It seems to me that Protestantism
drove a wedge between Nature and Grace by positing the absolute irreconcialiability of the two realms. But now we have scientists
who are only to eager to manipulate the world of Nature -- and they do it without the moderating influence of Christ. Without
Christ there is only the Worldpower - the law of the Strong -- Might makes right.
Want an example? A copy of Penn Medicine (Feb. 2006) came into the office yesterday-- the bulletin of the University
of Pennsylvania Medical School. There was an article called "Giving Testimony" about embryonic stem cell research. Arthur
L. Caplan, Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics -- an abuse of language, in my opinion --was quoted as saying: What is
an embryo? " 'Some people sincerely believe that an embryo is a person,' he said. On the other hand, he likened it to
an acorn, with the potential to become an oak. Many embryos are 'miswired or misprogrammed' and thus do not fully develop.
Using a more elaborate metaphor, Caplan suggested that if there were a fire at Home Depot, 'we have lost the ingredients'
for houses, not the houses themselves. What Pennsylvanians have to do, he said, is balance the loss of potential with 'real
needs' of 'real persons,' such as those in wheelchairs, those with damaged hearts, those with Parkinson's disease.' "
Make no mistake about it. Destroying unborn life to fund the scientism establishment which justifies this particular
form of high-tech cannibalism as "doing good" is a travesty. It is truly amoral. This is the doctrine of Might Makes Right
- the doctrine of the Worldpower. I trace Caplan's moral (and intellectual) incoherence right back to its origins --
in Protestantism. I think that unless we
preserve the sense of the mutually interpenetrating realms of Nature and Grace, what we will have is some men who will
manipulate Nature at the expense of others. It is a slave morality - a justification, that is, for a new type of enslavement.
A science, or a politics, which has escaped the gravitational sphere of morality will lay waste the world. How
do you "balance" the loss of potential with "real needs"? The idea is totally grotesque, an imposition of economic reductionism
which is totally self-serving. What it does is to establish that there is an elite which does not need to accept mortality,
and it gives them the rationalization to take another life in order to prolong their own. This has always been done -- in
war as in politics. But now it is being done in medicine. Medicine! The science of healing! Such an abuse of what was once
an honorable profession, and such an abuse and perversion of language, is symptomatic of modern Western man's estrangement
from the realm of Nature and Grace. We Westerners are in the process of creating Hell on Earth, and the Arthur Caplans of
this world are standing on the front lines, cheering it on.
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