Anglicanless Christmas

Last updated on: December 26, 2014 at 10:37 pm By David Mills

Anglicans have written some of the greatest Christmas hymns, the ones Catholics sing at Christmas Masses, like “Hark, the herald angels sing” (John Wesley), “O little town of Bethlehem” (Philips Brooks), “In the bleak midwinter” (Christina Rossetti), and “Good Christian Men, rejoice” (John Mason Neale, who also wrote “O come, O come, Emmanuel” for Advent and “Good King Wenseslas” for Boxing Day). “What would Christmas be like without Anglicans?” asks an Episcopal minster, Timothy Matkin, in A Christmas Without Anglicans?. I take... Read more

To Be Queen Elizabeth at Home

Last updated on: December 29, 2014 at 6:03 pm By David Mills

“For those of us who weren’t brought up cooking and sewing, modern conveniences make any attempt to learn those skills seem like an exercise in futility,” writes Calah Alexander in Those Pathetic Millennial Moms. Why learn to sew when the first few years will be filled with disproportional dresses that we don’t let our daughters wear because the seams look like they were stitched while we were schnockered? Why learn to cook when we’ll spend the first few years burning... Read more

The Ethical Use of Vaccines

Last updated on: December 26, 2014 at 2:58 pm By David Mills

A friend asks about the moral use of vaccines that were developed with or use tissue, called “descendant cells,” from aborted children. Here are some resources from the ever useful National Catholic Bioethics Center: FAQ on the Use of Vaccines The Morality of Vaccinating Our Children, by Father Tad Pacholczyk, the Center’s director of education. The Use of Human “Biological Material” of Illicit Origin, a commentary On Dignitas Personae by Dr. John Haas, president of the Center, and Dr. Edward Furton, its director... Read more

Who Will Love This Boy For Me?

Last updated on: December 26, 2014 at 2:58 pm By David Mills

From Elizabeth Scalia’s latest, this mother’s insight into praying for other mothers with sons: Having promised to remember several friends before the Christmas crèche at our altar after late-evening Mass, I stood pondering the scene. My attention was drawn to Mary and the Infant, and I felt powerfully compelled to pray in particular for some “mothers-and-sons” of my acquaintance: mothers of sons who are police officers and firefighters, and who wonder each day if they will see their little boys on... Read more

Love Is Not Love

Last updated on: December 21, 2014 at 10:41 pm By David Mills

Another item from the past year I’d like to post again. By which, “love is not love,” the writer, William Luse, means “love” is not love. Writing in Christendom Review, which he edits, he tells of responding to a student who asked him to define love and then having gotten his definition, said “love is love.” No, it’s not, said Bill. The assertion that ‘love is love,’ I went on, is the thing that is “just a perception.” In fact, it’s probably... Read more

Catholicism & Individualism

Last updated on: December 24, 2014 at 5:40 pm By David Mills

Individualism, according to the old Catholic Encyclopedia, is “The tendency to magnify individual liberty, as against external authority, and individual activity, as against associated activity.” In its entry on the subject, published a few years before World War I, the encyclopedia explains the relevance of this to the Catholic understanding of the state: Moderate political individualists would, as noted above, reduce the functions of the State to the minimum that is consistent with social order and peace. As they view the matter, there is always a presumption against any intervention by the... Read more

Chesterton on Santa Claus

Last updated on: December 25, 2014 at 5:25 pm By David Mills

From Commonweal in 1935: G. K. Chesterton’s Santa Claus and Science. One point he makes: [D]o our contemporaries really know even the little that there is to know about the roots, or possible origins, of such romances of popular religion?I myself know very little; but a really complete monograph on Santa Claus might raise some very interesting questions. For instance, Saint Nicholas of Bari is represented in a well known Italian picture of the later Middle Ages, not only as performing the duty of a gift-bringer, but ,s... Read more

A Practical Way to Say “Merry Christmas”

Last updated on: December 24, 2014 at 1:47 pm By David Mills

“Merry Christmas, I mean if you celebrate it,” said a women to whom I’d given up my table at the coffee shop. I appreciated the mention of Christmas, even qualified, which I hardly hear any more. Nearly everyone says some version of “Happy Holidays,” if they say anything at all. Though an advocate of saying “Merry Christmas,” I think we might make the feeling much more practical and expressed throughout the year. By being kinder to people who serve you,... Read more

Miss Rand Celebrates Christmas

Last updated on: December 24, 2014 at 1:35 pm By David Mills

More on Miss Rand, covered earlier in Ayn Rand As Some People Have (Alas) Never Seen Her, this supplied by the leftist site AlterNet: David Akadjian supplies Ayn Rand’s Christmas cards. She apparently actually sent out Christmas cards but no examples survive, so Akadjian supplies a few suggestions. The most effective is one showing Joseph talking to the inn keeper, pointing to his wife sitting on a donkey, with the words “What I am fighting is the idea that charity is... Read more

Watch Out for Nice People

Last updated on: December 21, 2014 at 10:15 pm By David Mills

Another repeat, this one offered for its relevance for this season in which it is the season to be jolly and many people make some effort to be nicer than they usually are, while extraverts use it as an excuse to be even more intrusive than they already are. Bah, as they say, humbug. Apparent good news for writers and others on the cranky end of the personality scale: “Those who are described as ‘agreeable, conscientious personalities’ are,” according to... Read more