Occupy american distributism with foreign writers

I just did a search at the Distributist Review for Huey Long and for Fr. Charles E. Coughlin and received "No results".

And so just for the interest of it, I tried instead Chesterton or Belloc and recieved pages ad infinitum.

Why is that?

Obese carbon footprints

I recently read : “There is not a single state in the union in which less than twenty percent of adults are obese. O for fifty.”

Which got me thinking about my own State, which by the way is #50, as in the least fat of the bunch of fatties, and of another quote I read years back "Only in America are the poor fat".

Which certainly holds true here if daily exercise at the local park, and money spent on slick kayaks and expensive road bikes and similar fare are any indication.

On the carbon footprint scale it’s an inverse ratio, the less body fat the fatter the carbon footprint from conspicuous consumption.

I have never heard a homily against contraception at a novus ordo parish Sunday Mass

But I did in a marriage prep. class hear a deacon explain why contraception could be used.

It used to bug me that most novus ordo homilies were as incomprehensible as a Pope John Paul II encyclical, (and is there anything less comprehensible than Theology of the Body?), but perhaps we're better off for it. After all, the Faithful can't be scandalized by what they can't understand in the first place.

Catholic use of contraception is well known to be as close to 100% as it statistically can get so it's not as if the problem is hidden. When virtually every family at the novus ordo Sunday Mass only has 2 or, 3 children at most, it's a pretty sure sign contraception is being used.



Similarly to to my never having heard a homily against contraception at a novus ordo parish Sunday Mass :

Why does the world get it right, but Catholics can't?

The latest issue of First Things, (Jan. 2011), has an article Miraculous Box praising an inexcusable travesty masquerading as ecclesiastical architecture where my first thought when reading the article is : no one can actually experience the architecture in the manner the writer and architect describes, and further and more importantly, there is zilch cultural memory by which to know and understand the architecture as he describes it. The structure is freeform concrete virtually devoid of all signs Catholic, and the inside of the Church is even worse.

It is one thing for the socialist atheist Le Corbusier to design sickeningly vile architecture, it's quite another for a magazine published by Catholics to praise it.

Not that any of this is unusual, by any stretch of the imagination. It's almost as if Catholics are blind to seeing the signs of the Church.

The Annulment Scandal

I am completely certain I am married.

I am equally completely certain that if push came to shove the local visible Church would rule that I am not married.

Never mind arranged marriages and so forth were all seen as true valid marriages down through the ages. Marriages which no one questioned, just as I don't question mine because I trust God to have created a world sufficient for us to live in where that sufficiency would likewise include our capacity to actually contract marriage.

Executing Criminals

You know the story, the Church teaches capital punishment can be used, and then every ecclesiastic authority under the sun argues against its use in preference for life in prison..

But both of these given alternatives should be done away with, and instead men should be banished to some island.

We see the world by variations in shades of light

It is by shadows that we see the world. Which in turn is to see the world by contrasts of this from that. Contrasts which can be clearly defined, but which often are not. But what matters is that we do see the world about us with sufficient clarity to live in the world.

And sometimes that lack of clarity is desirable for the same reason that paintings are beautiful in part because they are abstract, because they don't have the precision of photographs. Paintings, like history, are not a blow by blow account of every known detail, but a picking and choosing of the important or pertinent. But more important paintings are beautiful or in turn ghastly depending on what the artist chooses to accentuate.

An artist can degrade or praise a women by how he portrays her. A praise nicely expressed in Paul Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women With Mango Blossoms because while the painting directs our eyes to the breasts Gauguin does so while treating the figure of the women with dignity and grace and loveliness according to her nature.

Mental reservation is deception. and some lies are not only good, but a duty

Ten or so years from now when the persecution begins

and it's your turn to stand in front of the incinerator door. And you are asked “Do you renounce your Faith” And you answer “Yes”

With the mental reservation that you are not renouncing your Catholic Faith but are instead renouncing your faith in the government of this accursed land. And they throw you into the incinerator anyway after your renunciation. Will you go to heaven, because up until that renunciation you were in a state of grace? Or will you go to hell?

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder

Why is it that different cultures have a different sense of the beautiful, where the difference is somehow culturally informed.

A question I first wondered about when seeing the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy where the Aborigine gags at the sight of the winsome blond foreigner.

Hunting down and eating five years old children

Keep it Safe, Legal, but Rare.

Because for some leftists, some vices are just too tasty to resist.

I can understand how a Catholic would say that outlawing baby killing is not enough, because a serious right to lifer wants to outlaw baby killing for the simple reason of he doesn't want babies to be killed. And so, not only do we outlaw baby killing, but we also do everything we can to provide help for mothers in need to help make sure illegal baby killings likewise don’t occur.

A proof I came up with for the existence of God

I’ve never come across anywhere.

Which may simply be because it’s nonsense, but I don’t see any flaws in it. Do you?

As with all else, I prefer simplicity and immediate observation, and this proof is simple and immediate.

It’s grounded in two principles we observe to invariably occur when we have immediate knowledge of any given event.

Right to life movement is evil

A few years back the right to life movement started being attacked in Catholic blogs using the same arguments the secular feminists have been using since the early 80s? Such as we don't really care about women. And we don't even care about babies. We simply want to suppress women and so forth. In other words, we're just plain 'mean'.

About a year or so ago, and in the same manner as with the right to life movement, I started running across on Catholic blogs a rather constant flow of attacks against traditionalist Catholics. Where the arguments once again come down to we're just plain 'mean'.

And recently, beginning these past few weeks I've started to run across attacks on Catholic bloggers who discuss moral issues such as homosexuality and similar as being also just plain 'mean'.

A pattern perhaps? And if so, what is the bellwether leading it?

Marry a hot Catholic babe with a 2-year long marriage contract,

and receive a guaranteed annulment because of "lack of due discretion" when the contract runs out. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . And then, do it all over again with a different hot Catholic babe.
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Government issued temporary, (2-year long), marriage licenses are one more step down the slippery slope to pagan dystopia.

They also happen to be both a reasonable, as well as practical, civil law response to the Catholic marriage annulment scandal.