Christmas bigotry

I am troubled by the growing trend among retailers to secularize the Christmas season by marginalizing or refusing to use the word "Christmas" in marketing and promotional materials. Christmas is fundamentally a Christian holiday, and efforts to secularize Christmas are offensive.

I am joining Focus on the Family Action’s "I Stand for Christmas" campaign to call on retailers to stop purging "Christmas." I stand for Christmas, and I urge you to stand for Christmas as well by highlighting "Christmas" in your stores, catalogs and Web sites. Further, I plan to consult Focus on the Family Action's Shopping Guide, which categorizes retailers by their treatment of "Christmas," while making my Christmas purchases this year.

Stop this religious genocide!! Salon War Room has more about this holy defense of Christmas. Never give up, keep up the good fight!

Palabra de Jesuita, palabra de Dios

"Las élites son necesarias. Un mundo sin líderes, sin gente que pueda estudiar los problemas con cierta profundidad, no es practicable. Nos llevaría al caos, y a un caos sin horizontes. Hay que reconocer con humildad que no podemos cambiar las cosas sin un equipo de líderes. Y los jesuitas deben contribuir, como muchos otros, a la formación de esos líderes. Al mismo tiempo, hay que abrir la puerta a una educación más elaborada a los que no pueden costeársela. Es algo que se ha hecho siempre. Yo mismo estudié en el colegio de La Salle de Barcelona con una beca. Es una manera de conseguir que las élites no vengan condicionadas por los recursos económicos, una manera de poner al servicio de la sociedad todo el talento del que disponemos. De lo que se trata es de educar a unas élites para que se pongan al servicio del pueblo, y educar al pueblo para que entienda que hacen falta distintas funciones, que no haya una proletarización ideológica que al final lleve a errores".

Más.

1 Thimothy 2:11

Y, claro, van y lo amenazan con meterle una pedazo de excomunión.

Mientras, en otra galaxia, se descubre que los británicos se corren poco en un contenedor de plástico y exigen que las cosas cambien. Resulta que los genes escandinavos no les gustan. Estos ingleses...

Straight from Maria de Zayas

Dice doña María: "Anda, boba, que tú te engañaste; que a los hombres no se les ha de creer sino es cuando dicen: Domine, no sum dignus".

Lo que uno no entiende es por qué la derecha italiana ha puesto el grito en el Cielo por esta campaña. No es que esten precisamente usando a Cristo para vender lencería. Aunque seguramente el problema no es qué usan, sino para qué lo usan. Que si él la mató, algo habría hecho ella...

by Ruth Smythers, beloved wife of The Reverend L.D. Smythers

INSTRUCTION AND ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG BRIDE

To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

At this point, dear reader, let me concede one shocking truth. Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.

On the other hand, the bride's terror need not be extreme. While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it.

Leyendo a Ms. Smythers y comparándola con las ninfómanas cristianas, se puede decir, con los Beatles, it's getting better...

Fuck giving Larry Summers the job, hire the Virgin Mary instead

El cardenal arzobispo de Madrid, Antonio María Rouco Varela, y el alcalde de la capital, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, han pedido hoy a la Virgen de la Almudena, patrona de Madrid, ayuda para todos aquellos que sufren dificultades debido a la crisis económica.

Durante la homilía de la misa celebrada en la plaza Mayor con motivo de la festividad de la patrona, que ha reunido a miles de madrileños alrededor de su imagen, Rouco Varela ha señalado que la "maternidad de la virgen" se necesita "con nueva urgencia" ya que Madrid "también sufre las consecuencias de la crisis de la economía".

Más.

For Unto Us a Child Is Born

The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and Asians as particular kinds of people.

David Levering Lewis's rich and engaging God's Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God's Crucible offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.

Nada menos que mi tocayo Appiah escribe sobre God's Crucible: How Muslims made Europe de David Leveris Lewis en el New York Review of Books. Cosita güena.

To be played to the beat of The Temptations' "Get Ready"

If Obama is really The One, he deserves to be in the company of the Master and the Slave, Moses, The Diving Nun and, of course, our beloved Baby Jesus.

Jesuits for Obama

"The pontiff's book is a profession of faith in the good Jesus. Cardinal Martini puts us in front of Jesus from another perspective. Jesus is the friend of the publican and the sinner. He listens to the questions of young people. He stirs things up. He fights with us against injustice."

This is a Jesus that reaches across the aisle, this is a Jesus that is over with some old fights, this is a Jesus that promotes a change we can believe in, this is a Jesus that is going to fight for the middle class... In sum, Jesuits for Obama.

[On a completely different note, who could deny the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading is pure 19th-century-styled realism?]