Our Church has had the singular good-fortune of having its Prayer-Book composed and its Bible translated at exactly the right time, i.e., late enough for the language to be intelligible to any English-speaking person in this century (any child of six can be told what “the quick and the dead” means) and early enough, i.e., when people still had an instinctive feeling for the formal and the ceremonious which is essential in liturgical language. . .

I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick to Cranmer and King James.

Though I walk by St. Mark’s regularly, I’ve never ventured in for liturgy; according to one recent visitor, “It’s like RENT meets church.” I wonder what Auden would say today.

Just a little trivia that keeps popping into my head when I hear supporters of the HHS mandate continue to ask, Where are the women who oppose the mandate? Helen Alvaré, of George Mason University, and Kim Daniels of the Thomas More Law Center have managed to find some 20,000 of them to sign an open letter to President Obama, Secretary Sebelius, and members of congress opposing the HHS mandate and making clear that the administration doesn’t represent the interests of all women:

Those currently invoking “women’s health” in an attempt to shout down anyone who disagrees with forcing religious institutions or individuals to violate deeply held beliefs are more than a little mistaken, and more than a little dishonest. Even setting aside their simplistic equation of “costless” birth control with “equality,” note that they have never responded to the large body of scholarly research indicating that many forms of contraception have serious side effects, or that some forms act at some times to destroy embryos, or that government contraceptive programs inevitably change the sex, dating and marriage markets in ways that lead to more empty sex, more non-marital births and more abortions. It is women who suffer disproportionately when these things happen.

No one speaks for all women on these issues. Those who purport to do so are simply attempting to deflect attention from the serious religious liberty issues currently at stake. Each of us, Catholic or not, is proud to stand with the Catholic Church and its rich, life-affirming teachings on sex, marriage and family life. We call on President Obama and our Representatives in Congress to allow religious institutions and individuals to continue to witness to their faiths in all their fullness.

You can read the rest of the letter here.

Dickens’ anniversary will, I’m sure, be marked in a thousand ways, and his continued timeliness has probably been noted a thousand times already, but Theodore Dalrymple did a particularly good job of it in his essay for the American Conservative on the lessons of Hard Times:

Dickens is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook. He veers crazily between the ferociously reactionary and the mushily liberal. He lampoons the disinterested philanthropy of Mrs. Jellyby (in Bleak House) with the same gusto or ferocity as he excoriates the egotism of Mr. Veneering (in Our Mutual Friend). He suggests that businessmen are heartless swine (Bounderby in Hard Times) or disinterestedly charitable (the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby). He satirizes temperance (in The Pickwick Papers) as much as he derides drunkenness (in Martin Chuzzlewit). The evil Jew (in Oliver Twist) is matched by the saintly Jew (in Our Mutual Friend). As Stephen Blackpool, the working-class hero of Hard Times says, “it’s aw a muddle.”

George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens, saw in this philosophical and moral muddle not a weakness but a strength, a generosity of spirit, an openness to the irreducible complexity of mankind’s moral situation, an immunity to what he called “the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.” And indeed, the principal target of Hard Times is such an orthodoxy, namely a hard-nosed utilitarianism combined with an unbending liberalism. (Liberal in the economic, not cultural, sense.)

Dickens’ “openness to the irreducible complexity of mankind’s moral situation,” not to mention the irreducible complexity of his plots, may as Dalrymple hopes, discourage our “inherent tendency to seek the key to all questions,” but it discourages in such an encouraging way. The realization that the world is too complicated to be ruled by formulas is not cause for despair but delight and, more often than not, a good laugh.

This is why, I think, Dickens often makes me think of Augustine. With every unnecessary detail, which Orwell observed is the “outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing,” he shows us what Augustine observed in book 7 of the Confessions: Whatsoever thing exist are good. While it is good that we know David Copperfield (and Dickens) were born on a Friday at midnight, it’s better to know that the clock and baby began striking and crying simultaneously. It would be enough to know that Mrs. Jarley is the proprietress of a wax works show in The Old Curiosity Shoppe and takes Nell into her employment, but it is better to know that among the wax figures is Jasper Packlemerton “who courted and married fourteen wives, and destroyed them all by tickling the soles of their feet when they were sleeping” and an old lady  ”who died of dancing at a hundred and thirty-two.”

It is Dickens’ villains, to my mind though, who really prove Augustine’s point. Even beings that have suffered corruption, Augustine insists, are nevertheless good. In other words, the bad things, insofar as they are still things, are good things. What better description could there be of Mr. and Mrs. Wackford Squeers of Dotheboys Hall? They are monstrous people who treat the children placed in their care atrociously, but no one in their right mind would want the pages of Nicholas Nickleby purged of their existence. No one would want to lose exchanges like this one:

‘How is my Squeery?’ said this lady in a playful manner, and a very hoarse voice.
‘Quite well, my love,’ replied Squeers. ‘How’s the cows?’
‘All right, every one of’em,’ answered the lady.
‘And the pigs?’ said Squeers.
‘As well as they were when you went away.’
‘Come; that’s a blessing,’ said Squeers, pulling off his great-coat. ‘The boys are all as they were, I suppose?’
‘Oh, yes, they’re well enough,’ replied Mrs Squeers, snappishly. ‘That young Pitcher’s had a fever.’
‘No!’ exclaimed Squeers. ‘Damn that boy, he’s always at something of that sort.’
‘Never was such a boy, I do believe,’ said Mrs Squeers; ‘whatever he has is always catching too. I say it’s obstinacy, and nothing shall ever convince me that it isn’t. I’d beat it out of him; and I told you that, six months ago.’
‘So you did, my love,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We’ll try what can be done.’

The Squeers, Micawber, Mrs. Jellyby, Bounderby, and all the others “are monsters,” Orwell admits, “but at any rate they exist.” And we can’t help but be glad of it.

If you’re in New York City, you can catch a screening of the film this Saturday, presented by Crossroads Cultural Center and the Siena Forum for Faith and Culture or next Monday evening at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer. For our readers in the Phoenix area, Catholic Phoenix will be hosting a screening on October 1. Win Riley will be in attendance to discuss the film and take questions from the audience.

Quotas were supposed to correct certain inequities in heretofore white-male-dominated institutions, like the Democratic Party and American Lutheranism. I don’t know how quotas were to help the Democrats, but they were supposed to make Lutheran churches holy. Neuhaus annoyingly kept saying the holiness of the church is located elsewhere than in quotas. It’s found in fidelity to the call of God to serve—regardless of external factors like sex or race.

Far from being a “religious” person, I think of myself primarily as an ex-atheist. But just as there’s no such thing as an ex-alcoholic—only an always recovering alcoholic—so I am, as a rule a recovering atheist. . . . My faith didn’t begin in religion; it came out of left field.

Al-Jumuah is written for Muslims trying their best to live in America and not become whatever equivalent of mainline Protestantism exists for Islam. It is not easy and sometimes the cultural ties to the old country seem to trump everything. . . . There is nothing at all in my reading suggestive of any appeal to radicalization, but the perspective clearly is live in the West, but do not be conformed to it.

A spiritual life grows as love finds its centre beyond ourselves. Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed. In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.

It is of course very hard to wean ourselves away from self-centredness. And people can dream of doing such a thing but the hope should be fulfilled it is necessary a solemn decision that, whatever the difficulties, we are committed to the way of generous love.

Chartres recognized as well though, that the gift of self is not enough, spouses also need to bring Christ to one another to bring them into fuller life:

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive.

As we move towards our partner in love, following the example of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is quickened within us and can increasingly fill our lives with light.

Alright, that’s it. I’m done talking about the royal wedding. I did think her dress lovely though . . .

Then there are questions bothering me yet about elements that are inadvertently added to the elements. I have reluctantly swallowed a fly (wasn’t much way to avoid it) from the chalice while prayerfully offering it up to the glory of God’s church.

George Calciu was the youngest of eleven children, raised by devout parents as a faithful Orthodox Christian. Romania became communist in 1944, and the government soon began to crack down on the Church. Calciu was a medical student at the time, and his open faith made him suspect. He was imprisoned in 1948, where he was subjected to 1984-style mind control experiments—tortured until he denied Christ, and then forced to torture others toward the same end. “They wanted our souls,” he recalled, “not our bodies.”