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Post by hibernicus on Jun 3, 2019 19:45:38 GMT
Seamus Mallon's new memoir, A SHARED HOME PLACE. It gives a very powerful - indeed chilling - account of living as a high profile nationalist politician in a Catholic minority area with major loyalist activity, including security force collusion, during the Troubles. The fact that Mallon made a point of attending the funerals of ALL victims of paramilitary violence, sometimes at personal risk, gives added moral force. He includes an interesting reflection on his faith (he says if he were to start again he'd still be a Catholic) accompanied with a tinge of anti-clericalism (he describes at some length how his father, as a schoolteacher, permanently resented the arbitrary authority wielded by clerical school managers in the old days, which included the power of arbitrary dismissal without reason given; this is something we should remember when tempted to idealise the past uncritically). He also makes explicit in at least two places his opposition to abortion which he sees as part of his general opposition to the taking of human life (though sadly he welcomes same-sex "marriage"). His account of how his wife financially supported him for much of his political career, and how when she later developed dementia he left politics to care for her is very moving. Really good in helping to understand the scars which still pain Northern Ireland, by someone who definitely has his own viewpoint but makes an effort to understand both sides.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 18, 2019 22:45:10 GMT
Frank Turner's study of John Henry Newman's Anglican period, subtitled THE STRUGGLE AGAINST EVANGELICAL RELIGION. I started out with a determination to be fair to this book as it is widely denounced by Newman scholars and some people have argued that this reflects unfair resentment at Turner's approaching his subject from a secular viewpoint, and it does have some useful analysis of the roles of rationalism and sentiment in C19 evangelicalism (and it also has some useful discussion of individual issues such as why Tract 90 - Newman's argument that the 39 Articles could be interpreted in a sense compatible with Catholicism - produced such an outcry, and the fact that Newman accused Hampden of heresy on the basis of the logical implication of H's doctrines even though he admitted Hampden might be unaware of them but objected strongly when accused of being a crypto-Catholic on precisely the same basis -, but in general it is every bit as flawed as it has been accused of being. Some points: (1) Historians criticise philosophers and political scientists for isolating ideas from their contemporary context, but this is an example of the opposite historicist fault - making the context everything and the issue nothing. For example, Turner dismisses the accusation of Socinianism against evangelicals and liberals as high church scaremongering - which it often was - but assumes it must therefore have had no validity at all, even though the tendency of Calvinists to turn Unitarian within a few generations is quite well-attested. (2) The APOLOGIA is not a full autobiography but a history of its author's opinions (and therefore leaves out much of the ecclesiastical politicking of 1830s Oxford) and any memoir must be read with a critical eye and not treated as self-evident, but Turner treats the APOLOGIA as having no evidential value at all about Newman's thoughts and motives, while at the same time he engages in fanciful psychological analysis of Newman and claims to understand his motives better than Newman himself did. Similarly, Newman's writings are treated as responses to particular events and having no deeper importance, even though it is clear to anyone who studies Newman that he had a series of recurring preoccupations which span his whole career. I suspect that Turner had the experience, which I have seen in some other biographers such as Shannon's 2-volume study of Gladstone, of reacting strongly against a subject who produced vast amounts of evidence and spent much of his time engaging in self-justification, and who is widely hero-worshipped, by coming to resent him - but Turner on Newman is much worse than Shannon on Gladstone. (3) Some of the quotes from Newman are read in unbelievably perverse ways - for example, he maintains that Newman at Littlemore was running something like a separate sect and only decided to go over to Rome at the last minute. Thus, when Newman shocks some of his correspondents in 1843 by saying that in his heart he believes Rome is the true church and he will probably end up there, Turner declares it is difficult to say what he meant by Rome! Again, he claims the Catholic Newman was not interested in making converts to Catholicism, but while this was an accusation made against him by some Catholic critics, anyone who has read the Newman correspondence or Fr Stanley Jaki's book on Newman and converts knows that he spent a great deal of time corresponding with potential converts, and the contemporary Anglican literary critic RH Hutton says in his study of Newman that it is a sign of his greatness that so many Anglicans should revere a man who has caused thousands of Anglicans to convert to Catholicism. He also omits points on certain issues which tell in Newman's favour (for example, while the evangelicals had a point in complaining that Tract 90 made the 39 Articles meaningless and he quotes their critiques, he does not mention that as WG Ward and others pointed out, theological liberals were allowed to sign the Articles while interpreting them in a manner equally contrary to their framers' intentions). I once read a book called THE GREAT DISSENT which struck me as a far more plausible critique of Newman from a liberal/secular viewpoint; the author agreed that the liberalism attacked by Newman was a real phenomenon and some of Newman's criticisms of it had force, but declared that he nevertheless disagreed with Newman and subscribed to that liberalism himself. That view can be taken seriously - Turner's book, whatever its incidental virtues, cannot.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 23, 2019 1:20:19 GMT
To clarify a bit - Turner's approach to Newman seems to a great extent on the intellectual level of an account of Karl Marx which treats his ideas as no more than the product of his having boils on his rump - even though we know that Marx did have boils, whereas much of Turner's psychoanalysis of Newman is at the level of unprovable hypothesis.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 21, 2019 0:15:52 GMT
The CONFESSIONS of St Augustine, which I've meant to read for a long time but never got through before. This is a difficult book to approach because so many of its set pieces are familiar to many who have not read it. Some scattered observations: (1) I was surprised at the extent to which much of it is a collage of biblical quotations, though this is characteristic of patristic writers. I can certainly see the resemblance to St Patrick's CONFESSIONS. (2) Many of the philosophical objections to Christianity which the young Augustine held or was influenced by are startlingly "modern" - e.g. the origin of evil, the question of how spirit and matter can interact, the temptation of absolute scepticism, the problems caused by literal reading of Genesis and other Biblical passages (Augustine specifically states that St Ambrose's explanations of these in terms of typology was of the greatest help in his own acceptance of faith; this should be a warning of the danger of excessive literalism.) (3) The later books which discuss the nature of human knowledge and understanding, which are often seen as eccentric add-ons, are in fact rebuttals of the objections Augustine himself formerly held, and an inquiry into the relation of faith and reason. The resemblance to Newman is startling (in other points also, such as the example of contemporary ascetic saints such as, in Augustine's case, St Anthony of Egypt). It is really startling how much Newman illuminates Augustine.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 27, 2019 10:19:46 GMT
(2) Many of the philosophical objections to Christianity which the young Augustine held or was influenced by are startlingly "modern" - e.g. the origin of evil, the question of how spirit and matter can interact, the temptation of absolute scepticism, the problems caused by literal reading of Genesis and other Biblical passages (Augustine specifically states that St Ambrose's explanations of these in terms of typology was of the greatest help in his own acceptance of faith; this should be a warning of the danger of excessive literalism.) It's also a good rebuttal to the claim that allegorical readings of Scripture are simply a modern, ad hoc response to advances in scientific knowledge.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 27, 2019 21:06:19 GMT
Exactly. It really illustrates the claim that there are only a limited number of basic philosophical positions, all of which have been advocated for millennia. The description of how the Manichees based their credibility on highlighting perceived weaknesses in Christianity while themselves believing all sorts of dubious statements both physical (the nature of the heavenly bodies) and philosophical (the nature and relationship of good and evil) which even their most learned members could not state coherently (Augustine respects Faustus the Manichee for being honest enough to admit he didn't understand his own doctrines rather than covering up his ignorance with mystification) reminds me of certain present-day celebrity non-believers (defining the term as widely as possible). I won't name names but I'm sure you can think of some.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 30, 2019 20:34:22 GMT
Robert Speaight's 1958 selection of Hilaire Belloc's letters. A few points come to mind: (1) Belloc's sensibility is shown to be very different from Chesterton's - he repeats that he is naturally gloomy and sceptical and finds faith a struggle. (2) He is very much a classicist (he seriously tried for an Oxford fellowship, and his letters are sprinkled with Latin and Greek quotations). He also very strongly sees the classical gods of Greece and Rome as beneficent forerunners of Christianity, and a degree of veneration for them as appropriate. (He certainly downplays their demonic side.) (3) His FAITH IS EUROPE etc leads him to the view that the Americans are fundamentally alien and may be expected to take less and less interest in Europe as time goes on - though he takes pride in the growth of Catholicism in such an exotic setting. (4) His attitude to the Jews is quite as bad as one thinks. He was naive enough to ask the advice of a Jewish acquaintance on his book about the Jews (which basically maintains that Jews are fundamentally alien to Europe and should be made live in ghettoes and dress as Orientals) and when this acquaintance reported that the book was highly offensive to Jews and they would have nothing to do with it, Belloc predicted that if they wouldn't listen to honest advice something worse would happen to them. His initial response to nazism is that Hitler is simply a frontman for "the clever yid Rosenberg" (the Nazi ideologist, who was not a Jew). (5) He expects that once the Prussian State is dissolved the Germans will simply dissolve into anarchic barbarism which he sees as native to them (in implied contrast to Franco-Italian Romanitas). He has nothing but contempt for German Idealist philosophy, partly because he sees (quite accurately) the element of self-worship in it. (In contrast, part of his attraction to Catholicism is that the traditional forms are highly objective - they are simply THERE). (6) Belloc had very bad handwriting so his books were dictated to a secretary. It now strikes me that part of their charm - and they do have a charm - is that of the speaking or declaiming voice, making challenging throwaway remarks, and that they, and the letters, are very close to Belloc's conversational voice and give a sense of his social manner. (7) HE takes old age very badly, partly because of the loss of the physical vigour which underlay his long walks and sailing. He sees his youthful walks as the best thing he ever did because they gave him a store of experience to draw on. It is noteworthy that he often travels off to hotels in some exotic place to dictate his latest book. He is also perpetually fretting about money and a penurious old age - partly because he has the responsibilities of a paterfamilias and later a grandfather to live up to. More later...
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 4, 2019 21:56:42 GMT
Some more impressions of Hilaire BElloc's published letters: (A) He makes it quite clear that he has dificulties with chastity (and that he may not have been chaste before his marriage). He seems to have had several intense (though chaste) friendships with younger married women (usually aristocratic) as a way of coping with this. (B) He is abidingly bitter about not getting an Oxford Fellowship because of his Catholicism, partly because this has deprived him of the financial stability needed to write at leisure. He is quite remarkably dismissive of a lot of his published work as hackwork - it is his serious verse that he really labours over and cares about. (C) A lot of his nastier mannerisms such as his affectations of omniscience (his comments on Roger Casement - whom he predicted would be let off as part of the Establishment) seem to reflect insecurity. (d) He complains that British Catholics are not really Catholic in civilisational terms, being either immigrants or converts and in both cases trying to be more British than thou, instead of seeing Latin Catholicism as the mainstream of civilisation. He sees James II as the last chance for the survival of an unselfconsciously English (albeit minority) Catholicism. (E) Similarly he sees the British with their parliamentarianism and their elaborate customs and conventions as living in a fools' paradise caused by a century of peace - this is how he explains those sections of British opinion who wanted to conciliate the Kaiserreich in the yeas before WWI. In the 1930s he regularly proclaims that Britain ought to raise a Continental-style mass army "but the bankers won't let us". (F) He hopes interwar French parliamentarianism will end with "a young general" taking over. (I wonder what he would have thought of de Gaulle)? He also expresses the hope in the 1920s that a new generation of European military rulers will establish dynasties - so he was quite correct in saying that though an old Jacobin he now favoured monarchy, though on the Bonapartist rather than the Louis XIV model. (He took Louis as his model monarch, I suspect, because he died on his throne whereas Napoleon's fate was uncomfortably reminiscent of what tends to happen to autocrats in the long run).
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 3, 2019 11:26:30 GMT
I found this on YouTube: youtu.be/vdDDOFXPEqM This is a Czech film, in Czech and German with English subtitles, about a Lebensborn home. This was one of many such institutions in the Third Reich where the elite of the SS were allowed to shire children by specially selected young women. It brings out the neo paganism in Nazism and specifically in the SS very well. This is contracted with the Catholicism of the Catholicism of the main protagonist, a Sudeten Czech. I would warn viewers that this should carry an 18 cert and is not fit for children or teenagers, but it is a good film and interesting as it comes from the highly secularised Czech Republic.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 14, 2019 22:27:21 GMT
While on the subject of the third Reich, Terrence Mallick's new film on Bl. Franz Jagerstatter will be released in UK cinemas on January 20, which probably means it will be released in Ireland at the same time. Here are a few useful links: www.decentfilms.com/reviews/hiddenlifewww.catholicworldreport.com/2019/12/09/terrence-malicks-a-hidden-life-is-filled-with-deep-and-challenging-treasures/www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/a-hidden-life-terrence-malick-franz-jagerstatter/Dreher makes some penetrating points, including the fact that the film does not employ the conventional visual language of film and the difficulty of understanding the film for people who are ignorant of the Christian story and message. (This does not of course mean that the representatives of the Church come out of it well - although Greydanus in DECENT FILMS does note that the film makes clear that they were trying to cope with actual and potential persecution.) Another review, whose location I unfortunately forget, points out that the film contrasts with Scorsese's SILENCE in which martyrdom is presented simply as meaningless suffering. (And let's not be too quick to criticise this view, given that as Greydanus points out we shouldn't be too sure that under such circumstances we would have been on the right side. When reading about the English Reformation martyrs in recent years, I have been uncomfortably made conscious of what it must have been to be carved up alive like a side of beef.) One last point, and it is a slightly sensitive one. When I was a teenager I acquired a copy of the autobiography (1950s) of the Catholic convert and later Catholic traditionalist Hugh Ross Williamson. He had some dodgy right-wing views (I was not then fully aware of the depth of their dodginess) and in the book he describes how, although he was exempt from military service as an Anglican clergyman, he sought to be registered as a conscientious objector because he thought the war was unjust, since in his opinion not everything that could be done had been done to reach agreement between Nazi Germany and Poland in 1939. I was quite curious about these and even tried out a few of the arguments in classroom discussions, which makes me shudder when I think of it now. It so happens that Bl. Franz Jagerstatter's refusal to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the German army was also based on his view that the particular war was unjust (he was not an all-round pacifist, as is often said). The contrast between his fate and that of Hugh Ross Williamson is painfully indicative of the difference between the two regimes. Blessed Franz, pray for our blindness.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2020 20:47:14 GMT
I got the dates wrong - the Mallick/Jagerstatter film, A HIDDEN LIFE, is showing at the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar, Dublin from Thursday January 17 to Friday 23 January (link to the relevant page below): ifi.ie/film/a-hidden-life/Potential viewers should bear in mind not only that the narrative technique is unconventional, but that the film is almost 3 hours long! Rod Dreher can't praise it too highly after seeing it, and discusses why some reviewers don't get the Christological overtones or the possibility that suffering might not be meaningless. (One failure in his choice of words - when Dreher says one critic seems to think of it as "a Nazi film" this means "a film about Nazis", not "a film made by Nazis".) www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-miracle-of-a-hidden-life/www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/on-not-getting-malick-movie-a-hidden-life/
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 18, 2020 22:12:58 GMT
Saw A HIDDEN LIFE last night - a few casual observations: (1) The film is as much about Jagerstater's wife Francisca and what Franz's decision means for her and their family. The "Hidden Life" of the title might well be hers. (2) The village community is certainly not idealised, and the Nazi material included in the film include a couple of shots (a group of women in peasant dress participating in the Nuremberg Rally from TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, Hitler's home movies showing him and his cronies at his Alpine retreat) are reminders of how the rural and sublime ethos can be perverted for evil ends. (The scenery strikes me as sublime rather than pretty-pretty, and the sublime carries a hint of danger, a reminder that mountains are inhospitable and that fast-flowing rivers can be dangerous and destructive. There are a few glimpses of a deserter living in the forest to evade conscription, and it is clear that his life is utterly immiserated and that Franciska's desperate suggestion that she, Franz and their children should hide in the mountains is unworkable.) (3) The priest comes across as more sympathetic than I had expected - it is clear that he really wants to save Franz, he reaches out to Franciska and her children after Franz is arrested and tries to dissuade the villagers from ostracising them, he accompanies Francisca to Berlin to see Franz for the last time and his final desperate plea to Franz to save himself by outward conformity when God knows what is in his heart is clearly sincere. The bishop is rather less sympathetic than some commentators suggest (though presumably it is the bishop who is the unseen preacher who tells the cathedral congregation that they must endure as the anvilwears out the hammer). Even the nazi village mayor, though generally racist and obnoxious, seems at one point to be trying to help Franz because "you're one of us" - even though when Franz remains obdurate the mayor ends by snarling "You're worse than THEM [apparently the Jews] because they're the enemy - you're a traitor". (4) There is a noticeable "fish out of water" theme when Francisca goes to Salzburg with her father to try to learn Franz's fate, and again when she and the priest go to Berlin - a sense of country people wearing their best clothes, ill-at-ease in the city and dealing with authority figures. Note how often in the prison and trial scenes and in the office visited by Francisca and her father we see files and folders - the instruments of the administrative state, cataloguing and controlling even such a remote and seemingly self-sufficient place as Sankt Radegund and reducing individual human beings to classifications and numbers. Similarly, the prison design of multi-floor wings radiating out from a central core and under surveillance will be familiar to anyone who has visited a historic prison.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2020 23:07:17 GMT
A few more thoughts - sorry they are so delayed. It is always interesting to wonder whether it is better to know or not to know plot details in advance. For example, near the beginning of the film Franz's unmarried sister-in-law (who is living with them) is sifting wheat from chaff. I had read of this scene in advance (and if I hadn't I might not even have realised what she was doing) but it was so incidental it struck me as anti-climactic, partly because it was so close to the beginning of the film. (On the other hand, a minute or two later there was a glimpse of them separating and burning weeds - now THAT struck me straight away.) Similarly, if I hadn't read that when Franz is leaving Francisca to take the train to his call-up point where he will refuse to take the oath, the background music is Bach's KOMMT IHR TOCHTER, HILF MIR KLAGEN from the St Matthew Passion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yojsqLYTnEg I would never have realised this, both because I am not familiar with the music and because only the introductory music and the first line were used. (Both of these I suspect are meant to sink in on multiple viewings). Incidentally, the film drives home how primitive their agricultural tools are and how hard their work is, partly to emphasise what the loss of her husband will mean for Francisca's daily life. A last point - anyone who thinks like the IRISH TIMES film critic that simply signing on the dotted line for the Nazis is a harmless life-saving gesture should read Christopher Browning's ORDINARY MEN, which describes how when a squad of German police reservists were asked to commit mass murder in Poland and were given the chance to drop out, only a small minority did so, and those who committed the mass murder seem to have been motivated above all by a sense of cameraderie and complicity with their comrades. This is the sort of vortex Franz Jagerstater feared he might be drawn into if he passively accepted his call-up and swore the oath: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Browning
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Post by hibernicus on May 15, 2020 12:29:56 GMT
A very useful analysis of how the celebration of "Pride" and "Queerness" (used with a much wider meaning than you might think) reflects the therapeutic ideal of the liberation of the authentic and unbounded self, which has particular resonance in the US but has spread throughout the world. The discussion of the significance of "Pride Month" etc is particularly apt. I've often meditated in recent years on how Pride seems to have taken over the role as collective celebration of the society's self-definition, which for much of the C20 in Ireland was held by religious/devotional parades (and in the North also by Orange parades) while the former celebrations are reduced to slightly furtive and shameful private indulgences to be kept out of sight as much as possible. www.firstthings.com/article/2020/06/under-the-rainbow-banner
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 16, 2020 9:30:22 GMT
Picked up a book that has been on the shelves in my house for years, Illustrissimi by Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I). He didn't mean it be taken too seriously, but his letters to historical and literary figures gives a good picture of his erudition and his thought. Very much what we expect in a pope - conservative on moral issues, but centre left on economic issues, with a clear sense of the history of the Church in both depth and breadth. And not the picture you get of the man if you go by David Yallop's book "In God's Name".
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