My Gram Parsons project, part V

Gram Parsons, R.I.P.

Nine days late but enjoy!

Theology, Liturgy, Human Relations- All in a day's learning

Hello from the campus of St. Mary's University in lovely, and I mean that most sincerely, Winona, Minnesota. While I knew before arriving that these two weeks would be intensive, I had no idea just how intensive. This is literally the only time I have had to sit down and type a quick post. Three topics above are what I do day and night here. Three hours of Theology, three hours of liturgical theology, and two hours of human relations.

Anyway, I'll give a glimpse of my internal workings, this will do nothing but further reveal the abstract nature of my thinking. Nonetheless blogging, like preaching, grounds me and helps to make connections, especially given my conviction that theology is practical; the inherent relation between orthodoxy and orthopraxis. During my Foundations in Theology course, while discussing Christology and the Credo, I started to ponder what implications translating the Greek homoousios into the Latin consubstantial had for a subsequent metaphysics. This Western metaphysics of substance, with its roots in Aristotle was brought under intense philosophical and theological scrutiny in the last century, with the philosophers leading the way. I was especially thinking of Hiedegger's critique of what was lost in translation when Greek terms were translated into Latin. At its most basic, ousios means being, which is something different from substances. The Heidegger put the retrieval of the question of Being (Sein) at the center of his critique. Heidegger was formed in Husserl's phenomenological school, as was Edith Stein, as was Dietrich von Hildebrand, as was Max Scheler. It was Scheler who was a tremendous influence on Karol Wojtyla (a.k.a. John Paul II). Beyond that the logical positivists, who were heavily influenced by the dear Wittgenstein. How these philosophical critiques have been brought to theology by Schillebeeckx, Macquarrie, Rahner, Haight, etc. Now this isn't exactly what the lecture was on, but it is what the lecture made me think about. Anyway, back to the question at hand, I don't know, but I suspect the implications of the translation were huge. The implication was huge because a translation from Greek to Latin also requires transliteration. So, for what it is worth . . .

Beginning with this evening's Vigil Mass, it is the Solemnity of the St. John the Baptist.

A (Pastoral Ministries) Program Note

I am preparing to depart this weekend for the first of three two week periods in Minnesota, at St. Mary's University, the other two being the next two summers, in pursuit of a master's degree in Pastoral Ministries. Anyway, after a lot of hard work and reading I am ready for the challenge. I look forward to learning and forming new friendships.

This is my last post prior to leaving. My next post will be from lovely eastern Minnesota. I plan to blog while away, but nothing close to daily. I am sure my two weeks will give me plenty to ponder and write about when I return. Given the intensity of my blogging activity over these past six months, I am ready for a bit of a break.

Morality and religion

I readily admit that this post is a bit of a reaction, but I just have to write that true religion is not first and foremost about morality and it is never moralistic. I cannot adequately convey how vexing I find it when religion is reduced to mere morality. Is that to write that faith has no moral component? No! I tried to flesh the role of obedience out in my post A perspective. A bizarre form of hyper-Calvinism flows from such an reduction of faith and religion. It takes the form, God blesses you when you are good and punishes you when you are bad. How puerile! I think we should all strive not to be one of Job's friends. If you don't know to what it is I am referring, please read the Book of Job. I also take issue with what many Christians think constitutes "being good". In other words, many are mistaken about what is moral and what is not. Chesterton scoffed at American puritanism, which tends to prevail, sadly, even among Catholics in this country. So, in honor of Gilbert Keith, pour yourself a drink smoke a cigar and contemplate the mystery of the pine tree in your backyard! I don't recommend getting drunk and carrying on an extended conversation with said pine tree, however. In my experience, the pine tree usually gets the better of the exchange (kidding!- I win sometimes).

"America is sometimes offered to us, even by Americans (who ought to know better), as a moral example. There are indeed very real American virtues; but this virtuous attitude is hardly one of them. And if anyone wants to know what a welter of weakness and inconsequence the moral mind of America can sometimes be, he may be advised to look, not so much to the Crime Wave or the Charleston, as to the serious idealistic essays by highbrows and cultural critics, such as one by Miss Avis D. Carlson on "Wanted: A Substitute for Righteousness." By righteousness she means, of course, the narrow New England taboos; but she does not know it. For the inference she draws is that we should recognize frankly that 'the standard abstract right and wrong is moribund.' This statement will seem less insane if we consider, somewhat curiously, what the standard abstract right and wrong seems to mean--at least in her section of the States. It is a glimpse of an incredible world.

"She takes the case of a young man brought up 'in a home where there was an attempt to make dogmatic cleavage of right and wrong.' And what was the dogmatic cleavage? Ah, what indeed! His elders told him that some things were right and some wrong; and for some time he accepted this strange assertion. But when he leaves home he finds that, 'apparently perfectly nice people do the things he has been taught to think evil.' Then follows a revelation. 'The flowerlike girl he envelops in a mist of romantic idealization smokes like an imp from the lower regions and pets like a movie vamp. The chum his heart yearns towards cultivates a hip-flask, etc.' And this is what the writer calls a dogmatic cleavage between right and wrong!

"The standard of abstract right and wrong apparently is this. That a girl by smoking a cigarette makes herself one of the company of the fiends of hell. That such an action is much the same as that of a sexual vampire. That a young man who continues to drink fermented liquor must necessarily be 'evil' and must deny the very existence of any difference between right and wrong. That is the 'standard of abstract right and wrong' that is apparently taught in the American home. And it is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that it is not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all. That is exactly what it is not. That is the very last thing any clear-headed person would call it. It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials. To have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to make certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute. We need not be very surprised if the young man repudiates these meaningless vetoes as soon as he can; but if he thinks he is repudiating morality, he must be almost as muddle-headed as his father. And yet the writer in question calmly proposes that we should abolish all ideas of right and wrong, and abandon the whole human conception of a standard of abstract justice, because a boy in Boston cannot be induced to think that a nice girl is a devil when she smokes a cigarette." (G.K. Chesterton, On American Morals

Weird Friday thing

This is not a meme:

Grab the book that is closest to you.
Open it to page 161.
Find the fifth full sentence.
Post the text of the sentence.
Don't search around for the coolest or most impressive book you have: use the one that really is closest to you.

"Peasants, and those being transported at the start of the mass deportations from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, had a rougher time of it."

Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum. The bookshelf is right behind my desk; history shelf eye level while sitting.

My Gram Parsons project, Part IV

The real deal.

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Adventures in blogging: An interesting update

In an earlier post, entitled Pope Benedict XVI on Archbishop Oscar Romero, I used an unattributed quote from the PAPA RATZINGER FORUM that proved to be of some interest. I was contacted by Eugene, a journalist currently working in El Salvador, about my source for the quote. After a misfire, trying to appease him by sending him a link to the official Vatican transcript of the news conference that took place on board the airplane taking the Holy Father to Brazil last month, I was forced to find the actual source I used as, after reading the Vatican transcript, he informed me that the part of quote in which he was interested was not contained in this "official" transcript. So, being conscientious when prodded, I probed my memory and my internet history to come up with the original source I used for my post, this led me to the aforementioned PAPA RATZINGER FORUM. Specifically, a post by Teresa Benedetta, dated 9 May 2007. This post is a translation of the transcript produced jointly by the Italian news agencies ANSA and APCOM, in which the Holy Father is quoted as saying of Archbishop Romero's cause for canonization: "I have no doubt he will be beatified".

This is how readers hold me accountable. I am usually quite conscientious in attributing because I don't want to be just another blogger trading in gossip and innuendo. So, a very special thanks to Eugene for bringing this to my attention and forcing me to track down the original source of my quote.