:) www.commonwealmagazine.org/carpenter-an...

Merry Christmas!

Post-liberal Catholics keep protesting that they’re not all fascists. But they say very little about the present admin’s cruel policies and overreach *and* they can’t stand even the concept of queer people. Fine, hate liberal democracy. But it sure looks like standing by and doing nothing.

Grateful that at least for now the Christmas crush has prevented people from getting mad at me about my essay. Others have responded with a cheerful “Surely not I, Lord? I like Hans Urs von Balthasar,” which is amazing in its own right. People have been positive and I’m sincerely appreciative.

“In becoming man, Jesus took upon himself our fragility.” www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

Merry Christmas, friends!

Good news: Pope Agrees: bsky.app/profile/josh...

a lot of people don't realize that Christmas carols and traditions are actually folk memories of suppressed pre-Christian events, namely the end of the Third Age and the Fall of Sauron.

“Why should not the Word be given to us as a child? The Child-Word in his powerlessness can be so easily and by a thousand means rejected and got rid of, almost without believers noticing… The Child-Word clings to us and seeks warmth and protection from [our] weak human flesh.” HUvB

“King of kings, yet born of Mary, as of old on earth He stood … Rank on rank the host of heaven spreads its vanguard on the way, as the Light of light descendeth from the realms of endless day, that the pow'rs of hell may vanish as the darkness clears away.”

“Anxiety is one of the authorities, powers, and dominions over which the Lord triumphed… Insofar as he possesses the life of faith, the Christian can no longer fear. His bad conscience, which makes him tremble, has been … girded up by the ‘peace of God, which passes all understanding’” HUvB

It’s so good:

It’s definitely mostly the title. The essay for the most part seems on the side of educators. Selfishly it was helpful to see strategies my peers are using. I might try an oral / written exam combo like one did. And I agree that paper writing is basically pointless right now. Which is concerning!

One big Holocaust education issue in the US is that people don't know the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp (though the two were often linked), so they assume that people referring to a "concentration camp" are being unfairly hyperbolic in a case like this.

me: “I will resist the cuteness of Jeff this time.” also me: “I will love and protect this Land Shark. You have my sword.”

What I find radical and even beautiful about Catholic claims of infallibility and defectibility (the Holy Spirit will not abandon us) is that it's explicitly understood to be *about* the empirical, mediocre Church filled with a bunch of sinners. It's not secretly a select group / aspect.

Nobody is too mad at me over on X, for which I’m extremely grateful. People seem to like it. And the important people mentioned are ignoring me or blissfully unaware! Deo gratias! I did find this though. Somebody should totally write a book about tradition and sin.

Jon Heaps and I tinkered with this paragraph together. Friendship!! It was nice to find relatively plain language to describe something I worry about a great deal: making culture too important and ironically ruining its contribution to Christian life. (And misunderstanding what culture “is.”)

2) The poignant spiritual diagnosis that crippling fear in the face of the cross tempts us, me and you and all of us, to run away, to collapse this distinction and grab ahold of power and all its empty promises rather than risk staying with Christ and embodying his self-emptying love.

1) The consoling awe of holistic coherence brought forth from a sublative revelation / culture distinction with its hinge in concrete persons. (I believe Balthasar tells the life of Mary, mother of God, in the frame of this consoling coherence in *The Threefold Garland*)

#EtatsUnis "La droite catholique est spirituellement malade. La fuite de la vulnérabilité est l'un des symptômes de ce mal. Elle craint ce à quoi une telle vulnérabilité expose le chrétien : le mystère d'autrui, sa vie intérieure secrète où Dieu est inéluctablement à l'œuvre, sa liberté."

«For Balthasar, Jesus’ willingness to experience the vicissitudes of human life tells us something about who God is in eternity. The all-powerful God shows himself to us through the medium of vulnerability.» Excellent essay, rigorous, charitably feisty.

Relatedly, there’s a passage @catholickungfu.bsky.social quotes where he’s clearly taking a shot at Heidegger on metaphysics

For „Volkskirche“, one can see the article in the German Wikipedia de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkski... - meanings have changed a lot.

From one of my all-time favorites, Razing the Bastions

Knew somebody would come for me about dogs lmao. Look, everyone knows the experience of telling a dog to "sit!" or to "stay!" or whatever. And it's useful to contrast that image with human beings. Dogs are not only real creatures but also symbols in cultures. Consider "dog" to be "dog-symbol."

yeah. ratzinger’s doctoral theses do the same thing. swimming in political language to offer a theological critique and also to ensure people do not forget

My editor asked me to go look at Balthasar's original text. So I got the German, read through it, double-checked with a fluent German-speaker. We use the word "swastika" in English but Germans say "Hakenkreuz" (hooked cross). Balthasar is playing on words and reminding German-speakers of the Nazis.

Lost in the parking garage again: an American memoir

Superb essay and this part is I think broadly relevant to the reinvigorated far right, Catholic and otherwise, in many countries

'As America makes its frightful descent into crude authoritarianism, Balthasar can help us understand why so many American Catholics appear to welcome this descent. He can also help us resist it.'

One monastic author describes religious life as an ancient workshop or laboratory of Christian living because most religious vows entail obedience and spiritual freedom. When one or both are compromised, there are invariably symptoms of abuse, division, paranoia, or breakdown of community life.

Hellboy and Blinky the Christmas tree hanging out.

Maybe the most passive-aggressive and in the weeds part of the essay, if I'm honest. "Oh we wanted nature and grace to be distinguished? Well, watch me do it better."

Also, holy crap this quotation from Balthasar: “(The Church) runs with equal blindness into a cross… that is dislocated and perverse as a result of her own guilt, a cross with hooks (swastika) [ein Hakenkreuz] on which she is entangled and remains hanging.”

Here we go, friends. www.commonwealmagazine.org/carpenter-an...

👀

I think a lot of moral discussion is about feelings. Which isn’t bad! Not totally. But Thomas Aquinas insists that virtue has to relate to reason while passions by themselves don’t. You gotta think about it. You gotta ask what’s happening. Ask what you know about it. So, yeah: the eyes of a child.

Such times we live in.

My favorite historical costume designer is Sandy Powell, and she has an amazing trick that it took me years to realize: Be conservative with color and lean into modern shapes with your hero, and put your villain in the most outrageously period-specific costume you can.

So brave. Failing to protect or mentor the least powerful faculty you’ve got.

Why is watching people flirt in Hallmark movies so much more painful than my regular (enormous) pain while watching anyone flirt whether or not they're on TV?

My favorite little sub-genre of pop song is the "Singing What I'm Doing" song. There's not a lot of metaphors going on. You're narrating. You're saying what you're doing very directly. And it's always hilarious to me. Tove Lo is the master of this genre; it's kind of all she writes.

An updated concept for Frankel's Dual State model for the US where the normal stuff like NATO working group is going on, regular exercises occur, joint planning is reportedly good. And then on top of that you have all this shit on top of it that may or may not interfere with the normal functioning

the Die Hard of it all has become such a meme, that its funnier that a better action film w/ a better message about the power of community/family helping a man on the brink, coasts under the radar

I think at a basic level tomorrow doesn't exist yet and that's hard. But, inasmuch as we're actually talking about "expanding" equality, we're asking for a new integration of a situation by way of a new meaning, and that integration transcends the present one in a strict sense.

I know it's important to be an absolutist and to hate AI in all things, but I'm struggling to understand purists about video games. The industry has huge labor problems that we refuse to solve by paying more and waiting longer. What's it mean to be a purist?

I keep thinking of JD Vance's boast at his speech: 2.5 million people have "left" America (forcibly, cruelly, inhumanely, shattering families, invading cities, wrecking labor sectors, all for an evil desire for ethnic purity described as identical with economic success)

It looks like it's been scrubbed from every official 60 Minutes page now. It's only a 30-second promo but here it is if you didn't get a chance to see it.