Peony Moss: November 2006 Archives

V. Let us pray for our Sovereign Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI.

R. The Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon the earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.
Our Father....
Hail Mary....

via Dyspeptic Mutterings:

Bob the Ape comments on the Schori interview:

Bishop Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And doesn’t know where to find them,
For, in their pride, when they up and died,
They left no children behind them.

Bishop Bo-Peep holds offspring cheap,
Compared with a good education.
Those with PhDs, or other degrees,
Are too smart to engage in gestation.

Bishop Bo-Peep would gladly sweep
Mankind off the face of the Earth,
For they who aspire to the favor of Gaea
Must oblige her by not giving birth.

Bishop Bo-Peep may someday reap
The harvest of seed never sown,
When she starts an oration to her congregation
And finds that she’s preaching to no one.

Bishop Bo-Peep will start to weep
And utter laments and complaints,
As the Catholics, unheeding, continue their breeding,
And so do the Latter Day Saints.

Bishop Bo-Peep has thoughts so deep,
We hope she will somehow find time
To tell us how men can be born again,
When being born once is a crime.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And what an interesting point about Gaia: back in the day, wasn't earth-goddess-worship all about the fertility?

apologies -- I started messing with the template and realized too late that I shouldn't have. I beg your patience until I can get this back together again.

Katharine Jefferts Schori Ecumenical Mug

-- referring to this fine interview with the Episcopal Presiding Bishop, Her Sensitiveness Katharine Jefferts Schori , which I saw at Amy Welborn's:

How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?

About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.

Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?

No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.

Awesome. And since I'm one of those under-educated selfish Catholic child-producers, make that the LARGE mug.

And then let's get some snacks and sit back and see what Pansy does with this.

via commenter CV at Mark Shea's:

Celling Out: Bioethics and the Culture of Cool

Excerpt (emphasis added)

A buddy of mine from college, one of the few with whom I still maintain regular contact, is convinced that I misplaced my brain somewhere over the course of the last eleven years... I'm religious—a Christian, to be more precise—which automatically makes my perspectives questionable as far as my agnostic friend is concerned. Exacerbating matters is the extent to which my views place me squarely within a "conservative" political framework and thus, in my friend's estimation, a position of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition.... Fortunately for my ego, I eventually came to realize that such intransigence really has very little to do with me personally; rather, it's part of a much larger phenomenon with which those of us attempting to safeguard human life must learn to deal. To state the matter as simply as possible, what I have discovered about my friend is that when it comes to bioethical issues, he's much more concerned with the associations of particular beliefs than the beliefs themselves. For him, embryonic stem-cell research is justifiable—even perhaps praiseworthy—not because logic has led him to this conclusion but in order to align himself with one particular cultural community over and against another. In short, my friend—a devotee of The Daily Show and NPR, a subscriber to The New Yorker, Adbusters, and The Financial Times, and a pretty big fan of both Al Franken and Michael Moore—wants to be thought of as an urbane and intelligent person and so has chosen for himself the political opinions that he believes further this reputation.

YES. For too many people, logic has nothing to do with it. They live in Maureen Dowd's world, a world where grown-up people still live by the rules of the middle-school cafeteria: I think this way because the cool kids think this way.

via Realpsed Catholic: Regeneration:

Of all the damnations I have heaped upon what I call “postmodernism” lately, the one that seems most to surprise my readers is “joylessness”. To be clear, let me begin by explaining what I mean by “postmodern men” (or, “posthuman moderns” as I call them, when my mood is fraying). I mean, the sort of person we see everywhere around us, raised from the 1950s forward, in environments from which all the certainties and decencies of Western civilization had been progressively vacuumed, so that even such concepts as “mom and apple pie” may now be received as alien and controversial....

I think art, broadly, offers many alternative means to the kind of regeneration -- moral, and ethical, as well as aesthetic -- that can help us out of our enclosed spaces. Learning to draw, from nature; to sing, in key; to dance, in pattern; to write, metrically; even to sew, or to master carpenter’s joints -- all such enterprises offer the lost soul an individual direction out of the jungle.

The reason why, is that each is a discipline that restores us to harmony with the natural order of things. Each offers a way of seeing into God’s creation, and puts us in the presence of what is infinitely greater than ourselves.

To be able to draw a single flower, with full attention to all its colours and parts, is to be lifted out of one’s tawdry self into a realm where good, truth, and beauty still prevail. It is to recover joy.