Bishop Jeffords-Schori: Demonic Posession Is A Spiritual Gift

In case you missed it, the woman America's Episcopalians elected their primate went down to Venezuela and preached an interesting sermon -- one in which she rebukes St. Paul for his masculine presumption in stealing a possessed girl's "spiritual awareness" from her.

Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness.  Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.  It gets him thrown in prison.  That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!

Just to be clear, the passage from Acts 16 describes Paul casting a demon out of a slave girl whose masters are using her possession to make moolah. The possessed girl is holier than St. Paul, according to the chief bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

I wonder if she is also holier than Jesus, who was known to cast out a few demons himself? Is he too guilty of not being able to recognize "beauty" which is "different"?

As Simcha Fisher says, please, Episcopalians,

get out now.  Your church is bonkers.
I'm not even kidding.  If you read your bishop's sermon and a cold horror came creeping over your mind, please remember:  the Catholic Church is here.  We will always be here.  We will always be waiting.  We have a couple of insane bishops, too, but they hardly ever get interviewed by the New York Times, and many of them are actually decent scholars, and faithful and courageous guys.

Indeed. This is what Benedict XVI made the Anglican Ordinariate for. 

Calling Him Out

Not sure Richard Dawkins actually merits the attention, but John Zmirak smites him nonetheless, pointing out the great "scientist" uses nothing like the scientific method to back up his theories -- such as that raising kids in religion is a form of abuse. The conclusion: 

Dawkins reads an anecdote in a letter from a stranger, and from that incident alone concocts a universal theory, and proposes a social policy that would violate the rights of billions of parents across the globe, exactly as the racist scientists of Germany and America used their head calipers and biased IQ tests to justify strapping down helpless patients and mutilating them, for the greater good. So now you know: Richard Dawkins practices Nazi science without the accent.

Nothing Can Be Done

By Ramirez, shamelessly pinched from here.

The country appears to be imploding. 

• The IRS has had to apologize for targeting Conservative groups for auditing (though it's not being forthcoming about how high-level the policy was).
• David Stockman predicts doom and while many of his specific policy recommendations are somewhat rubbish, there's this: 

These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
....
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.

That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

•  Even Harry Reid has figured out that Obamacare is "a train wreck." Meanwhile, the HHS Secretary who brought us Obamacare's death panels doesn't understand how they work . Update: Sen. Baucus retiring because of Obamacare.
• Kermit Gosnell, a particularly gruesome abortionist, is on trial for murdering babies born alive and criminal neglect of a woman that led to her death. In testimony that is too gruesome to read, his staffers have testified that he or they "snipped" (meaning, killed with scissors after they were born alive) hundreds of babies over the years. He also didn't sterilize instruments and thus spread STDs to patients, refused anesthesia to minority clients, and forced women with second thoughts into abortions. ABC's Terry Moran called him (in a tweet) the "most successful mass murderer in American history," but the press can't be bothered to tell the story.  Well....now they are, a little, after pro-lifers campaigned relentlessly. But the story is yucky, and everyone knows the reason the press doesn't cover it is because it's a little too much like every other abortion clinic. As Senator Boxer recently admitted, scoring against her own goal. 
• Pro-immigration Republicans are joining in the Left's crucifixion of an honest researcher. 
• And the press has finally discovered Benghazi (when you lose ABC.....)  -- a shameful episode in which through utter incompetence the State Dept. allowed a fine public servant and his security team to die needlessly and then callously lied about it and tried to discredit the chief whistle blower. Even the Washington Post now outright says the White House explanation is a lie. In a free and functioning America, that would be impeachment bait, but no one is going to impeach the first black president, especially not when he has "President Joe Biden" as an ace in the hole. 

Nothing can be done. Which leads me to The Official Cartoonist's latest, w/ apologies to Lew, Stept & Tobias. Here's a taste, and then click over to sing the whole thing to yourself.

Come Solyndra, I can guarantee a loan
Comes the Beltway, I can criticize the tone
Come Benghazi? Nothing could be done.
Come vacation, Michelle. can take a separate plane
Come Joe Biden, I can leave him on the train
Come Benghazi, Nothing could be done.

Stand down Brother.
What difference does it make?
I’ll blame u-tube
While I campaign at your wake.

Brian Terry? There’s privilege to invoke
Eat a canine? I can always make a joke.
Come Benghazi? Nothing could be done.

Heroes & Traitors

 

Steve Pickering as Wallenstein, Shakespeare Theater, Scott Suchman photo 

 

While they're still playing, just wanted to put in a quick plug for Wallenstein & Coriolanus, in rotating rep at the Shakespeare Theater through the end of the month. The theater thinks the two plays are related because each features a great military hero who, betrayed by his country, then turns on it. They're calling it the traitor-hero series. Who's a hero: you be the judge?

They're just well done. Wallenstein is a Schiller play I knew nothing about prior to seeing this production, and I gather it's been rather loosely translated, though very skillfully: the language is elegant and sharp. Directed by Michael Kahn (whom I always maintain is the nation's best director for the stage -- he really knows how to bring the best out of actors), this a solid piece of work all around, very fresh.

Patrick Page as Coriolanus, Scott Suchman Photo

I'm not quite as sold on the partner production, Coriolanus, mostly because the actor who plays Coriolanus' foil, Aufidius, is somewhat weak and that mars things. But Patrick Page is a fabulous Coriolanus -- this is the same fellow who maybe ten years ago now portrayed a Iago so subtly menacing he made the audience hiss: just a tremendous actor.

He has the guts to play Coriolanus as something of an SOB, which I think is called for in the text. The last couple of productions of the play I've seen, Coriolanus seemed entirely noble and his refusal to show his wounds in public humble, such that the people seemed genuinely to have wronged him and he was almost a martyr.  This production doesn't make that mistake --there's a far more interesting question posed about what Coriolanus deserves.

There are also some humorous moments deftly handled here. Diane D'Aquila makes a magnificent Volumnia, and she's wonderful in a scene where she pretends to let her grandson vanquish her as an enemy. And the people are shown to be what we might now call "low information voters" as a little relief from the tension of the main action. Quite well done. 

Just Arrived

Yay! And Mr. W. is generously (he might say, wisely) allowing me to read it first. Trying to read it through and resist the urge to turn right to the chapters on politics.

Tempting Child Protective Services

When my kids were littler and I was a more paranoid mom, I saw this feature which showed that little children have no clear idea what a "stranger" is, with the result that one minute after moms instructed their offspring not to talk to strangers, the kids would do pretty much anything a stranger said. This was caught on camera -- to a little kid, a "stranger" looks scary like a monster or the bogeyman, so if the person looked nice, he was by definition not a stranger.

This terrified me, so I made a point not only of clarifying that a stranger might look nice, but also of testing the kids by driving by as they walked somewhere and role-playing their resisting my efforts to give them candy or have them help me find my missing puppy or whatever.

In retrospect this was a bit over the top on my part, especially for our neighborhood, but cut me some slack. They were my first kids. Now I'm a slacker mom who wouldn't even notice if the younger ones went missing.*

This has evolved into a running gag where if I happen to come home from work or from errands and see my kids coming home from school or the park, I slow down, roll down the window and offer them a lift home in my creepiest Creeper voice, "Hey, Little Boy, you want to get in my car? I'll give you some caaaandy."

(Hahahaha. I also wolf-whistle and cat-call Mr. W and he pretends to blush.)

Today I did this to Youngest Weed and a friend. His friend didn't get the joke and was somewhat put out that I didn't follow through with the candy.

And the Lord only knows what he told his parents.



*Attn CPS: that was a joke.

How I'm Observing Earth Day

...by mocking it.

First there is this headline I've been seeing all day, wrongly assuming it was from the Onion: Earth Day leader killed, composted girlfriend.

I was going to remark at least he was consistent and composted, but when I finally clicked through, I found to my horror:

Inside the closet, police found Maddux's beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers. 

 Styrofoam and air fresheners? Those take much longer to biodegrade than the poor girlfriend.

And treat yourself to 13 Worst Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970, including these gems:

"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation" --Denis Hayes, Earth day organizer

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." — Kenneth Watt

Good Shepherd Sunday

Shanghai artist Yu Jiade, The Good Shepherd,

Shamelessly pinched from here.

Curtsy: Fr. Dennis Brown's facebook page.