{"id":19906,"date":"2015-08-22T17:53:53","date_gmt":"2015-08-22T22:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/?p=19906"},"modified":"2015-08-22T17:53:53","modified_gmt":"2015-08-22T22:53:53","slug":"the-desert-beast-and-the-coming-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2015\/08\/the-desert-beast-and-the-coming-chaos.html","title":{"rendered":"The Desert Beast and the Coming Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"desert<\/a>My article<\/a> for Imaginative Conservative website this week is a reflection on W.B.Yeats\u2019 famous poem,\u00a0The Second Coming.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

While the world spins forward in what seems an ever-widening spiral of chaos, what conservative cannot lament the loss of all that once seemed stable, certain and secure? W.B. Yeats\u2019 poem\u00a0<\/span>The Second Coming,\u00a0<\/em>like T.S. Eliot\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The Waste Land<\/em>,\u00a0seems a stark warning not only about the horrors that were to come in the last\u00a0century, but the horrors we face in the first years of the present century.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeats was writing just after the First World War, but the same whirling out of control afflicts our age. Wild acts of violence and mindless decadence seem about to take over. In the midst of this Yeats\u2019 vision of an anti Christ figure rising from the Middle Easter is especially terrifying.<\/p>\n

\n

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out<\/p>\n

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi<\/p>\n

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert<\/p>\n

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,<\/p>\n

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How ominous therefore to find that ISIS chief executioner, Shakir Wahiyib, is called \u201cthe Desert Lion,\u201d that the murderous squads of ISIS call themselves \u201cthe Lions of Islam,\u201d and the boys they train to kill \u201cthe cubs of Islam\u201d? Is not their \u201cgaze as blank and pitiless as the sun\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Read the whole post here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My article for Imaginative Conservative website this week is a reflection on W.B.Yeats\u2019 famous poem,\u00a0The Second Coming.\u00a0 While the world spins forward in what seems an ever-widening spiral of chaos, what conservative cannot lament the loss of all that once seemed stable, certain and secure? W.B. Yeats\u2019 poem\u00a0The Second Coming,\u00a0like T.S. Eliot\u2019s\u00a0The Waste Land,\u00a0seems a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":19907,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Desert Beast and the Coming Chaos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My article for Imaginative Conservative website this week is a reflection on W.B.Yeats' famous poem,\u00a0The Second Coming.\u00a0 While the world spins forward in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2015\/08\/the-desert-beast-and-the-coming-chaos.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Desert Beast and the Coming Chaos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My article for Imaginative Conservative website this week is a reflection on W.B.Yeats' famous poem,\u00a0The Second Coming.\u00a0 While the world spins forward in\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2015\/08\/the-desert-beast-and-the-coming-chaos.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Fr. 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