Tim Jones, here. My niece, Allison, about whom I posted recently, has just headed into surgery to receive a heart transplant.
Your prayers are coveted by her family.
This news will not be reflected on her web page for some time, probably, but here it is for those who might like to find out a little more about her.
Humble thanks to all in advance.
One big clue to the pope’s thinking came in his 1997 book, titled “Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977” and written when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in which he sharply criticized the drastic manner in which Pope Paul VI reformed the Mass in 1969.
…
But the picture is not so clear-cut. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he said he considered the new missal a “real improvement” in many respects, and that the introduction of local languages made sense.
In one revealing speech to Catholic traditionalists in 1998, he said bluntly that the old “low Mass,” with its whispered prayers at the altar and its silent congregation, “was not what liturgy should be, which is why it was not painful for many people” when it disappeared.
The most important thing, he said at that time, was to make sure that the liturgy does not divide the Catholic community.
With that in mind, knowledgeable Vatican sources say the pope’s new document will no doubt aim to lessen pastoral tension between the Tridentine rite and the new Mass, rather than hand out a victory to traditionalists.
CNS on the Motu Proprio: a link and commentary
What came to my mind here was there is also a need for those who have rejected our tradition and traditional forms to likewise demonstrate their own good will and a hermeneutic of continuity. Let’s be clear and fair, there has been a hermeneutic of rupture which has banished most anything deemed “pre-conciliar” and this is as problematic as the sort of traditionalist who has rejected anything and everything “post-conciliar.”
Further, not all “traditionalists” take on this approach of rupture. If they are simply attached to the treasures of the classical liturgy, desirous of true liturgical reform in the light of both the Council and our tradition of organic development, all the while never questioning the validity of the modern Roman rite, but calling for a reform of the reform with regard to it, then it seems to me that they have nothing to justify and join the ranks of our Holy Father as a Cardinal in this set of ideas. In that regard, I would propose they form a part of the true liturgical centre and mainstream —- just as do those who focus upon the reform of the reform, but who are supportive of the availability of the classical liturgy, provided we do not take an immobiliistic and triumphalistic approach to it, or one which rejects the Council — not as popular opinion may go of course, but as the mind of the Church may go, as seen in the light of the Conciliar documents and our tradition.
As for the extremes, the road to a change of heart and mind is not a one way street as this article might make one think; it is rather and precisely a two-way street.
Catholic News Service reports.
CWNews reports. (Warning! Subscriber access requirement!)
I was delighted yesterday to receive the following e-mail from blogger extraordinare Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost:
Hey Jimmy,
Since I don’t have any Catholic readers of my own I thought I’d share this with you. ; )
What’s found at the link is a post Joe wrote in which, though he doesn’t feel able to cross the Tiber, expresses sincere and thoughtful appreciation for Catholics. Specifically, he appreciates their emphasis on the sanctity of life, ecumenism, and Mary.
And be sure to leave him comments in the same spirit of thoughtful respect and appreciation.
Hey, Tim Jones, here. I have said before that our family has a thing for aviation, but this post isn’t about that kind of flying. This post concerns the flying squirrel, at left.
A little background; We have animals. As of this past Christmas, we have a domestic mammal to human ratio of exactly 1:1. Living with, and sponging off the four of us, we have 2 cats and 2 dogs. The dogs don’t really come into this story.
Our latest arrival is my daughter’s prim, slender and graceful grey tabby. Being new, she has been kept mostly inside. Our other cat, Ozzie (named for the character Ozymandias, of the Tripods trilogy) is an outdoor veteran, and comes and goes as he pleases. He’s also huge. This Maine Coon cat has actually been mistaken for a real racoon on more than one occasion. One thing I like about him is that he doesn’t seem to need us, but hangs around, anyway. I figure he must like us.
He likes us so much, in fact, that he sometimes brings us "presents". He most often leaves these presents on the front doorstep, and they are most often dead.
Most often.
Occasionally, they are "only mostly dead", and rarely (when he wants something to play with, I guess) Ozzie brings us an animal that is apparently not even injured. Not even a little. This has led to a few memorable episodes, one of which involved a huge field rat, a pair of weenie tongs, and a Big Gulp cup.
This last week, Ozzie brought us, at 5:00 in the morning, the above pictured living, healthy flying squirrel, in full vigor. He promptly let it loose. Now, flying squirrels are really cute, as well as fast, and they are jumpy. I’m just here to say, that unless your whole family have chased a flying squirrel aound the house in your pajamas, you have just never had any fun. We were all nearly in tears of laughter by the time the little dickens was succesfully captured (first we had to hustle our domestic furries into various bedrooms, in order to prevent them tearing Francis to bits… that’s what we named it – a fine unisex name, could be "Francis" or "Frances", and, you know, invoking a saint in these situations can never hurt).
The whole point, of course, was to capture Francis without injury. In the end, I managed to pop a Tupperware tub over him, and shortly we all gathered outside in the dark to watch him scamper off. I couldn’t help but think that it was a lot like an alien abduction story, and wondered if he had a family to whom he would have to explain the whole episode. I expect that coming in with the strong scent of cat on your fur would be a little unusual in squirrel society.
Anyway, the operation was successful. We rescued from a grisly end a creature of a species we were not even aware lived in the neighborhood. I always thought flying squirrels were kind of exotic. It turns out they are pretty common, but rarely seen, because they are nocturnal. Nocturnal animals are cool.
Yesterday I mentioned an International Friendship Dance that I attended, so CHT to SDG for bringing to mind the International Friendship Song . . .
The Holy See’s web site has really improvedin recent years. They still need to get rid of that text-obscuring background, and it’s still poorly organized and hard to navigate, but at least they’re starting to get a lot of useful resources on the site.
Take, for example,
THESE EXCELLENT RESOURCES FOR LENT.
I wish I’d known about these at the beginning of Lent, ’cause I would have advertised them then, but they’re still really cool and could add a bunch to your celebration of Lent.
One thing I’d especially like to compliment is their inclusion of a whole series of mp3 files of Lenten music that you can listen to online or–via a simple right-click–download and listen to on your computer or mp3 player. Even if they are all in Italian, music can touch the heart across the langauge barrier.
THEY ALSO HAVE MP3S IN LATIN HERE.
(It’s after writing sentences like that that I find myself contemplating explaining to a medieval ecclesiastic the concept of downloading a Latin mp3 from the Vatican web site. They’d never have guessed that the Holy See would be doing this one day.)
Enjoy!
Well, the Discovery Channel, seems to be waking up to the blunder it made in getting behind James Cameron’s titanic fiasco about Jesus’ family tomb.
EXCERPTS:
Discovery Channel’s controversial James Cameron-produced documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew the largest audience for the network in more than a year on Sunday night, but the network has taken several recent steps to downplay the project.
Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn’t tout its big
ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that
harshly criticized its own documentary, and has yanked a planned repeat
of "Tomb.""This is not one where you necessarily beat the
drum, from a business perspective," said David Leavy, executive VP of
corporate communications at Discovery. "It’s not necessarily about
making money, or making ratings, or shouting from the highest office
building. Sometimes having some maturity and perspective is more
important than getting picked up in all the ratings highlights."Although Mr. Leavy said the network stands by the documentary "100
percent," the company took several unusual steps in the wake of the
controversy that could be seen as distancing itself from the content.Last
week, Discovery abruptly scheduled a panel debate to air after the
documentary, moderated by Discovery newsman Ted Koppel. Discovery’s
announcement of the panel emphasized that Mr. Koppel "has no connection
to the production of ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’" and that "the panel will
explore the filmmakers’ profound assertions and challenge their
assumptions and suggested conclusions."When the panel discussion aired, guests criticized the documentary as "archaeo-porn" that played fast and loose with the facts.
The
day after the March 4 airing, Discovery yanked a planned repeat of
"Tomb" from its more hard-news-branded Discovery Times Channel.When
the Nielsen ratings revealed that "Tomb" averaged 4.1 million viewers –
Discovery’s largest audience since September 2005 – the network
declined to put out a press release touting the numbers, as would be
standard practice for a highly successful premiere. The second-season
premiere of Discovery Channel’s "Future Weapons," for instance, earned
a media announcement for its audience of 2.5 million. A network
representative, however, insisted Discovery was not trying to bury
"Tomb."
The Discovery official issues a lot of spin trying to save face for the network, and they still haven’t done all they need to to distance themselves from this stinkburger, but the overall message is clear: They screwed up and they know it. Now they’re trying to avoid getting more egg on their collective face.
OH, AND I WONDER IF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.
They just got a new CEO two months ago, and the Jesus tomb thing was certainly in motion before then. If his new broom is sweeping clean, some of the execs who signed off on Cameron’s nonsense may want not to be swept away along with it.
This man definitely deserves his props for trying to top Chris Bliss!
Jason Garfield’s performance is very impressive! So much so that it raised in my mind the question of which of the two was better, and I thought I’d throw the question open to y’all for debate.
Here are some of the considerations that occurred to me:
1) The addition of more balls or higher energy performing does not automatically make the performance better or more beautiful. Sometimes less is more, as they say.
2) Bliss also deserves credit for the originality of coming up with the idea of using Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End (assuming it was his idea), and Garfield’s performance at times seems to be derivative of Bliss’s (particular in The End).
3) On the other hand, his performance is really impressive and he pulls off some surprising moves that Bliss doesn’t attempt.
It could be that one performance could be judged the better according to one standard and the other the better according to a different standard (e.g, which is the more beautiful, the more original, the more dazzling, the more energetic).
So whadda y’all think? You know what they say: De gustibus disputandum est!
Oh, and once again, we have further proof of the amazing difference between homo sapiens and every other species on earth.
WE’RE #1! . . . WE’RE #1! . . . WE’RE #1!
CHT to the reader who e-mailed (e-mail being yet another human accomplishment).
Recently I did a post about square dance "dangles" and how I had just received my first one.
For those who may not have seen that post, dangles are small items hung from a dancer’s nametag that signify various things, such as offices the person holds or has held, special dances that the person has attended, or just things that the person finds fun. The latter are known as "fun dangles."
Sometimes pins are used for the same purpose, and I recently received a pin (pictured), which now also adorns the vest I wear when I’m dancing.
The occasion on which I received it was a recent International Friendship Dance that was held here in San Diego between local American dancers and a group of dancers from Japan.
Some of the Japanese dancers were giving out pins to commemorate the event, and I was lucky enough to receive one. The pin has two flags on it, one of which says (in Japanese) "Nippon," which is the Japanese word for Japan, and the other of which is the Japanese national flag.
It was a very well attended dance. We had almost fifty squares (a square is eight people) crammed into the auditorium. The room was so packed that squares were jammed right up against each other, and there were even squares dancing in the foyer to relieve a bit of the pressure.
Most of the dancers, of course, were Americans, but at least three squares were visitors from Japan. The local Japanese dancers who live in San Diego (there are several) were also there, and it was nice seeing them serving as a bridge between the two dance communities.
Most of the dancers didn’t speak each others’ languages, but some did, and I got a chance to practice a little of my Japanese (which is very rudimentary), saying "Kon ban wa" ("Good evening") and "Sumimasen" ("Excuse me") and things like that, to the delight of the Japanese folks I was dancing with.
There were three callers at the event, all of them with international reputations: Ken Bower of California, Bob Baier of Texas, and Mac O’Jima of Japan.
Before the dance I was curious to see how well the two groups would be able to dance together. I knew that when Modern Western Square Dancing is done in other countries (and it’s done in quite a number of them!) it’s always called in English, so in theory the two groups should be able to dance together, but one can never be certain.
It turned out that everything worked just fine. The Japanese dancers had no problem following calls from the American callers, and Mr. O’Jima’s English was exceptionally good. He had a little L/R blur in his accent (to be expected since Japanese doesn’t have the distinction, just like English doesn’t distinguish between two P sounds that–say–Hindi does), and I noticed he had a little singular/plural issue since Japanese doesn’t inflect words for this either (thus he’d say "Join all your hand and circle to the left" instead of "Join all your hands and circle to the left"), but his English–including his accent–was really, really good. At times, his accent sounded a bit Scottish to me, and I wondered if his English teacher was from Scotland or somewhere in the British commonwealth.
Mr. O’Jima also complimented my pronunciation of Japanese, FWIW.
All three of three of the callers were outstanding. Ken Bower and Bob Baier related a story about when the two of them had visited Japan for a friendship dance over there, and some confusion had arisen over Ken’s name. At one point (if I have this right), someone said "Kon ban wa" to Bob Baier, who misheard and replied, "Ken Bower? Oh, he’s not here right now." (I got a real kick out of that since I’d been saying kon ban wa to people all evening, and the similarity had never occurred to me.)
BTW, here’s a YouTube with Ken Bower (who is a super nice guy) being interviewed about the dance:
So that’s the story of how I got my second square dance dangle/pin/thingie.
(Incidentally, the hearts you see on the vest were temporary stickers from a recent Valentines Day dance around the same time, where there was a "king of hearts" competition in which the lady dancers awarded them to the male dancers of their choice. I got four. The winner got six, if I’m not mistaken.)
It’s not the number of balls the juggler uses; it’s the way he uses them.
Just goes to show what you can do with three tennis balls and probably the best music the Beatles ever wrote.
It also goes to show the difference between humans and every other life form on earth. Only we could do anything even remotely like this.
CHT to the reader who e-mailed!