The John Jay Institute’s symposium on home is online now. Go read it, lots of great stuff in there.
The State Dept won’t let an Iraqi nun in to testify about the persecution of Christians in her country
To Bill Kristol, it’s always Munich 1938
Micronations representatives convened in an Anaheim library for a historic diplomatic summit:
There was even a conference earlier this month, the first in the actual U.S. of A., held amid chalkboards and school chairs in a public rec room of Anaheim, Calif.’s Central Library. Baugh brought together 40 of the world’s most preeminent dignitaries of countries you’ve never heard of to tend to matters of state as avidly as Disney’s Imagineers tend to Mickey down the road.
Leaders dressed up in their military best and browsed table displays of royal regalia. The highlight, attendees agreed, was a choreographed battle performed by the Lamia Knights, a nonprofit team of amateur medieval sword fighters, in the name of the Kingdom of Shiloh. (It’s exactly what you think: grown men in chain mail LARP-ing in the middle of a public library.)
By all reports, it was a hoot.
“We wanted to come together, share our issues and successes, and get to know each other—just like the United Nations,” said His Royal Highness Travis McHenry, Grand Duke of Westarctica.
Rod Dreher responds to Bruce Frohnen
Kirkpatrick Sale wonders where the gay lobby came from
Reuters: one in five people consider themselves libertarian
Minnesota Anglican priest joins the Ordinariate
“Without social conservatism, it is merely two drunks arguing over a bar tab (on the Titanic)”
Lee Chapel moved to Richmond
Fr. Hunwicke on Ovid, and praising the Scottish bishops for opposing Trident
Rep. John Duncan in TAC:
Some people and companies that make money off an interventionist foreign policy always very quickly fall back on the slur of isolationism. But I and probably almost all readers of The American Conservative believe in trade and tourism and cultural and educational exchange with other countries, and in helping out during humanitarian crises. We just don’t believe in endless war. We are told that if we don’t support an interventionist foreign policy, that this means we don’t believe in American exceptionalism. But this nation did not become exceptional because we got involved in every little war around the globe. It became exceptional because of our great system of free enterprise and because we gave our people more individual freedom than any other country.
The asshole factory
The British condition has not gone unnoticed in Washington, where even the most Anglophilic voices have expressed disquiet about recent developments. Yet even that disquiet, however well intentioned, usually rests on a rather shallow and hence unstable basis of understanding. It thus risks causing anxiety over the wrong things. The “special relationship” may or may not be in jeopardy, but one needs to take a step back from this debate to see the bigger picture. Of greater significance are shifts in the underlying worldviews that have bound Anglo-Saxon political cultures together for a very long time indeed. If you’re in a fretting mood, here is a subject truly worthy of your energy. Indeed, if you’re concerned about “world order”, you have to remember that this very notion is an inherently Anglo-American one.
A recent sermon by Pater Edmund:
As Ratzinger notes[1], the passover continued to be celebrated in the home, even after the establishment of the temple. The lambs were slaughtered in the temple, but then taken home, and the houses were marked with their blood. The restoration of creation each year began with the little world of the home, marked off from the darkness, and the chaos. The restoration next moved to the level of the whole city of Jerusalem: no-one was allowed to leave the city during the passover night, so that the city became a house sealed off from the dark.
Our Lord to celebrated the passover in a house within the holy city, but then He got up and “went with his disciples out beyond the brook Cedron,” that is, beyond the borders of the city into the outer darkness and chaos. He is later brought back into the city, but then taken out again, and He dies outside the city. And by that death He conquers death and chaos. He rises to new life, as the beginning of the definitive new creation—full of light and beauty.
When Mary Magdalene meets the Risen one she thinks He is the gardener. Superficially this is an error, but in a deeper sense she is quite right; He is indeed the gardener of creation who is remaking the whole world, healing all chaos, disorder, and death. But His restoration begins small with the seed of His body that will slowly grow into a tree that can shelter all of creation. The Church is the garden in which His new creation begins. It is shielded on all sides from the powers of evil by the blood of the lamb, but open for Him.
And a Carmelite convent is a little Church— a space closed off from the chaos of the world, a garden in which you can meet the Risen Lord and be remade by Him. Each of you must seal your own heart off from evil, and allow the heavenly gardener to root out all the weeds of you soul, so that in you that new creation can begin, which will be completed when the He comes again in glory, and celebrates His final triumph over all evil.
Review of what looks to be a great new book on internet shame-mobs
For May Day, read JJ Ladouceur’s piece on his visit to Llano Del Rio, the utopian socialist colony Frank Black wrote a song about once:
Eighty-eight miles down the road to Sin City lies the rubble of a project the goal of which was to abolish sin itself. And every weekend, thousands of casino-bound travelers pass it by with the same attention they might give to an overheated vehicle on the side of the long and desolate highway. A sand-covered enigma with a history known only to the select few who choose to seek it out, the Llano del Rio colony is a testament to the “old, weird America,” as it has been dubbed—the America of messiahs and schmoozers, of apocalyptic pamphlets and fiery stump orations colored at once by both a starry-eyed realism and a pragmatic utopianism. If time is taken to plumb its depths, it is also a fascinating point of study for all those interested in the concept of political exit, and a sobering reminder of the need for any such exit to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology that views man as a fallen creature, bounded by the restrictions of his nature and limited in his pursuits on earth.
Over at the Mitrailleuse, an essay on responsibility and the moral imagination, secession links, a defense of charter cities, now that Paul Romer has disowned them, and a new poem. Lastly, I’ll be guest hosting the Mike Church Show on Sirius XM Patriot 125 on Thursday morning from 6-9. Tune in! Update: Turns out Mike is not going to be out after all, but you should still listen!
Weekend listening
[…] Weekly links over on the porch […]
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