"The deepest poverty is the inability of joy"

A thought to end out 2011:

The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory.  This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries.  The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice -- all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Dec. 12, 2000 address to catechists and teachers, quoted in Stephen Mansfield, Pope Benedict XVI:  His Life and Mission (Penguin 2005), pg. 170.

A great short Christmas Eve sci-fi story

"The Gift" by Ray Bradbury, posted over at The Imaginative Conservative. Well worth a read if you have a moment -- and it won't take more than a moment.

One tyranny of which Christopher Hitchens approved

This PBS interview, discussed by Rod Dreher in this post over at his blog at The American Conservative, sheds troubling new light on the disturbing views that Christopher Hitchens had about Soviet totalitarianism's attempt to exterminate faith.  Read the entire interview -- Hitchens' youthful embrace of Marxism comes back to him with full vigor, as he defends aspects of one of the most inhumane and barbaric systems of government ever devised by the human mind.  Hitchens' admiration of Soviet savagery waxes most eloquent when he is describing the communist attempt to exterminate the Russian Orthodox Church.  As Dreher quotes Hitchens:

One of Lenin’s great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.

One should keep in mind that Lenin's campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church was not a campaign against an "it," it was a campaign against people.  The Soviets slaughtered countless thousands of priests, nuns, monks and ordinary laypeople who sought nothing more than to worship God in the freedom of their own consciences.  That Hitchens, who was extraordinarily astute in condemning atrocities by right-wing regimes, both depersonalizes the persecution of the Russian Orthodox and then praises such murderous persecution tells you everything you need to know about his commitment to the human liberty.  He was no man of conscience in this regard.

Of course, one could say much the same thing about those who continue to defend the Spanish Republican regime during the Spanish Civil War, a regime that deliberately sought to exterminate the Catholic Church and which slaughtered thousands of priests, nuns, monks and ordinary laypeople as well.

Trailer for the Hobbit is released

And here it is!  Only a year until the movie is released!

Rhetoric as a necessary component of liberal education

"Oh, that's just rhetoric," is a refrain that sadly is heard far too often in regard to politics or any kind of civic engagement.  But as this article by Sean Lewis over at The Imaginative Conservative rightly points out, the study of rhetoric -- the presentation of ideas and concepts -- is critical for liberal education.  The study of rhetoric is one of the pillars of classical education, and the recovery of the integrity of rhetoric is essential to forming a disciplined mind.

One good place to start one's own study of rhetoric is with George Orwell's magnificent treatise on writing & rhetoric:  Politics and the English Language.

Thomas Jefferson's version of the Nativity story

Taken from his redaction of the Gospels, commonly known as the Jefferson Bible:

And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. 
(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 
And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house and lineage of David,)
To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger:  because there was no room them in the inn. 
And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS.

As with his usual approach in his Gospel redaction, Jefferson has eliminated any trace of the miraculous in regard to Jesus' birth.  No angels harkening, no shepherds in the field by night, no miraculous conception -- yet at the same time the power of the story of Jesus' birth comes through:  the dictates of an occupying power greedy for taxes, the sojourn of the Holy Family to Bethlehem, the culmination of Providence in the timing of the birth, the holy Infant swaddled in a manger because there were not lodgings for the family at the inn.  What a powerful story, even without the miracles.  A story of a birth that, even when told without the trumpets and angels, was no ordinary birth.

The difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of us

Explained quite nicely with a delightful story over at Instapundit.  The ability to see avenues of both profit and service is the key...

Vaclav Havel, RIP

Former president of Czechoslovakia, later president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel has died today.  His obituary at the New York Times may be read here.  Havel was a crucial figure in the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the Eastern Bloc, and his voice of conscience & dissent served as a moral rallying point against the brutality of communism.  While Havel himself was not a religious believer, he understood the dangers to civilization inherent in an atheistic worldview, denouncing the hallow materialism that leads to pride and a sense of human self-sufficiency.  As Havel so clearly put it:

I am certain that our civilisation is heading for catastrophe unless present-day humankind comes to its senses. And it can only come to its senses if it grapples with its short-sightedness, its stupid conviction of its omniscience and its swollen pride, which have been so deeply anchored in its thinking and actions.

A hero for freedom and liberty has passed from the stage of this life. The Cato Institute has a reflection on this lion for liberty over at their website.  And Reason magazine online posted this piece on Havel back in 2003 which bears reading: Velvet President: Why Vaclav Havel is our Era's George Orwell and more. (Hat tip to Legal Insurrection.)

Update:  National Review Online has posted a collection of reflections on Havel and his significance as a leader. Well worth a read.

Robert Taft on the purpose of American foreign policy

From the always interesting Imaginative Conservative comes this quote from the American senator and one-time conservative lion, Robert Taft of Ohio:

I do not believe it is a selfish goal for us to insist that the overriding purpose of all American foreign policy should be the maintenance of the liberty and peace of our people in the United States, so that they may achieve that intellectual and material improvement which is their genius and in which they can set an example for all peoples. By that example we do an even greater service to mankind that we can do by billions of material assistance--and more than we can ever do by war.

Amen to that, Senator Taft.  Amen to that.

Christopher Hitchens and Mother Teresa

The similarities between the two are explored in this interesting post over at From Burke to Kirk and Beyond: Christopher Hitchens is dying... Like Tertium Quid, I have long been a fan of Hitchens, although I am much more in agreement with Christopher's younger and wiser brother Peter.

The power of the new English translation of the Mass

"What is happening with the new translation is that our imagination is being engaged, and not just as as individuals, but all of us a part of a Catholic culture. The imagination is that part of our mind that connects with beauty. Beauty is the language of worship, and it is the imagination which perceives and processes beauty in our mind." So explains Fr. Dwight Longenecker over at Crisis magazine online: Einstein, Imagination and the New Translation.  Well worth a read.

John Adams on Christianity and revelation

From a great conservative mind and one of the indispensable statesmen of the American Revolution and the early Republic:

The Christian religion, as I understand it, is the brightness of the glory and the express portrait of the character of the eternal, self-existent, independent, benevolent, all powerful and all merciful creator, preserver, and father of the universe, the first good, first perfect, and first fair. It will last as long as the world.  Neither savage nor civilized man, without a revelation, could ever have discovered or invented it.  Ask me not, then, whether I am a Catholic or Protestant, Calvinist or Arminian.  As far as they are Christians, I wish to be a fellow-disciple with them all.

- Letter to Benjamin Rush, January 21, 1810, printed in In God We Trust:  the Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers, edited by Norman Cousins (Harper & Bros.: 1958), pg. 101.

[Cross-posted at American Creation.]

Would the Founding Fathers have affirmed our national motto "In God We Trust"?

Thomas Kidd, of Baylor University, argues they would have in this op-ed published by USA Today:  Founders would agree that "In God We Trust."  Kidd has published on Patrick Henry, so much of his argument pertains to the early Republican/Jeffersonian tradition, but the Federalists (like Hamilton and Adams) were equally insistent that Providence governs the affairs of men and that our rights and duties flow from divine wellsprings, rather than the arbitrary diktat of the State.  Even the most religiously skeptical among the founding generation -- Franklin and Paine come to mind -- affirmed the existence of Providence and God's superintending care over human life. While the Founders may have had a broad diversity of religious opinion regarding orthodox Christian belief, God as the providential source of human rights was key to the principles of our Revolution and the formation of the early Republic.

[Cross-posted over at American Creation.]