Getting Close, 2022

Image credit: Detail from the Census at Bethlehem by Pieter Bruegel, brightened by someone.

 

Some nice pre-Christmas reads: 

There's no Mary problem in It's a Wonderful Life. 

Not really a Christmas read, or nice either, but maybe will give you a little bit of peace, or at least clarity, about the Frank Pavone story as we head into Christmas. Important details for me were: yes, there's a big discrepancy between how his and other cases were handled -- blame it on the other dicastery; and, apparently the single biggest deciding factor in these cases is how the accused responds to correction. 

This isn't Christmasy either, but enlightening and a good weekend read. An interview with Pierre Manent. Pretty sure he's right about the US. 

Another not-Christmasy read, but important: Glenn Ellmers puts the FBI decidedly on the naughty list, and this prior to the recent Twitter revelations. 

Two worthy sets of year-end book recommendations.  Catholic World Report and Claremont Review of Books. 

Rachel Lu on hope for the US after all: Make Spirits Bright.

Mary Eberstadt reflects on her book Why The West Lost God at its 10 year mark: Secularization Revisited: There's Hope for Faith 

Christmas 2021, Day 2, Feast of the Holy Family

Nativity Mosaic, by Malaysian artist Hanna-Cheriyan Varghese

Shamelessly pinched from Global Christian Worship

 

If it weren't a Sunday, this would be the feast of St. Stephen, so perhaps an apt day to post this. 

 

Zemmour is a French politician who's only just come to my attention. The press denounces him as Far Right, and I don't know enough about him to say he's been fully vetted (if he later turns out to be a weirdo I'll be sorry), but I like what I see so far. He offers a full-throated defense of Western Civilization and particularly its Christian roots -- and he talks about the massive Christian martyrdom taking place largely unremarked.  I can't think of a Church leader in the West who is as confident in saying these necessary things.  (You can get the gist in a very rough translation if you turn on auto-translate in settings at the bottom of the screen.) 

Happy Christmas 2019, Day 2

N.C. Wyeth, illustration for "The Stable at the Inn" 

for Scribner's, December 1912

Shamelessly pinched from Plum Leaves 

Anthony Esolen writes: 

...if we say, “We remember that Christmas is about Christ, unlike these late-stage pagans, hunters and hunted, harried from shop to shop,” we too have missed the holiness of the night. Christ did not come among us because we were good. He did not search for the automobile with the most sincere bumper stickers. 

He came among us because we were bad: benighted, lost, ever wandering yet not advancing one step toward the light. Says the poet Herbert, in “Christmas”:

O thou, whose glorious yet contracted light,

Wrapped in night’s mantle, stole into a manger,

Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,

To man of all beasts be thou not a stranger: 

Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have

A better lodging than a rack, or grave.

RTWT 

The Smell of Victory

Another miraculous cure for adult cells. Embryonic stem cells?

A man paralyzed after a knife attack is walking (assisted) again after a transplant using cells in his nose.

Within three months, the treatment was reaping rewards. Fidyka — paralyzed from the chest down — regained feeling in his lower extremities; his left leg developed muscle mass; and bladder, bowel and sexual functions even returned, the BBC reports. Most importantly, he can now walk once again with the assistance of a frame. Researchers published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell Transplantation. ....
Professor Geoffrey Raisman, whose team at University College London performed the technique, hopes to similarly treat three more people in Poland over the next few years if funding for medical trials can be obtained. He told the Guardian:
“We believe that this procedure is the breakthrough which, as it is further developed, will result in a historic change in the currently hopeless outlook for people disabled by spinal cord injury.”