Christianity, Culture, Vocation

Our Patrick Henry Chorale did a Christmas program, a “Lessons & Carols” service, which consists of Bible readings interspersed with Christmas songs, held at the local Episcopal church. They did splendidly. One of their numbers was from Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, a musical version of Robert Southwell’s “This Little Babe.” Southwell was a 17th century metaphysical poet of the sort I specialize in, but I had forgotten this poem:

This little Babe so few days old is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise the gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field, his naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries, his arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need and feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall, his bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystacks his stakes; of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound, the angels’ trump alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight, stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward, this little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

This has inspired me to post some more Christmas literature over the next weeks of Advent, so watch for those.

The finalists for the Heisman trophy for the year’s best collegiate football player are these three quarterbacks:

Sam Bradford (Oklahoma)
Colt McCoy (Texas)
Tim Tebow (Florida)

Who would you vote for? (On Saturday, after the winner is announced, you can also use this space to discuss the results.)

UPDATE: My fellow Okie Bradford won it! Woo-hoo!

From Abortionist faces nine years in prison (OneNewsNow.com):

California abortionist Bertha Bugarin is going to prison.
 
For at least five years, Operation Rescue has been working to shut down 11 abortion clinics owned by 48-year-old Bertha Bugarin in Los Angeles and San Diego. According to an Operation Rescue press release, Bugarin preyed on the Hispanic community and endangered women’s lives by posing as a doctor.
 
She was finally indicted and has pled guilty to nine felony counts of performing abortions without a medical license. Troy Newman who heads Operation Rescue, says eight of her staff abortionists have been impounded as well.
 
“Every single one of these abortionists has lost their [sic] medical licenses. A couple of them are in jail,” he contends. “And the abortion clinic owner, because she was forced to go out and try to find another abortionist and couldn’t find one, she was actually doing abortions herself even though she didn’t have a medical license.”
 
Bugarin faces up to nine years in prison for her convictions.

And yet, I find it twisted that a medical license has become a license to kill. The calling of a physician, which the state confirms by bestowing that license, is to heal their patients, not kill them. Abortion, among its evils, is a sin against vocation.

Why and how did the good people of Illinois, a staunch midwestern state, elect Rod Blagojevich to be their governor? Seeing him, he comes across as a young punk mafiosi. Indeed, he seems to have governed his state like a Mafia don. How could someone like him rise to such a high office?

Victor Davis Hanson has some good words on the governor who got wiretapped trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder:

Here in the 21st-century are we back to the 1860s of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, or the cesspool Chicago of Mayor Big Bill Thompson in the 1920s? All our moral claims about cleaning up government, all our postmodern sophisticated ethics, our vaunted notions of ‘transparency’ are reduced to a two-bit thug in the governorship of a large state like Illinois? For all our high-tech gadgetry, or our angst about situational morality, or self-help pop therapy, we revert to a foul-mouthed, profanity-spouting wretch, trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat the way a corrupt 4th-century AD emperor auctioned off proconsulships in the twilight of the Empire? . . . .

And then there is the Mafioso braggadocio of pure, unadulterated crudity: four-letter words, pomposity, no inhibition about admitting lust for money, gratuitous slurs about everything and everybody, constant threats, an entire family to dine at the table of greed. Blagojevich is something out of Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell, a modern-day Malacoda in the 5th bolgia. One must resort either to Al Capone’s Chicago or the villains of classical literature to match these transcripts.

The automobile industry bailout died in the Senate, as unions once again preferred unemployment to wage cuts:

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit’s beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011. . . .

Hourly wages for UAW workers at GM factories are about equal to those paid by Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) at its older U.S. factories, according to the companies. GM says the average UAW laborer makes $29.78 per hour, while Toyota says it pays about $30 per hour. But the unionized factories have far higher benefit costs.

GM says its total hourly labor costs are now $69, including wages, pensions and health care for active workers, plus the pension and health care costs of more than 432,000 retirees and spouses. Toyota says its total costs are around $48. The Japanese automaker has far fewer retirees and its pension and health care benefits are not as rich as those paid to UAW workers.

If you missed your daily Cranach fix, I apologize. I’m on the road and I just could not get on the internet at either my hotel or where the meeting was. Tonight I’m at my daughter’s and online. I’ll post for both Wednesday and Thursday. (My other daughter called, worried that I might be grievously ill, such is my usual blogging dependability. And Bror was so alarmed that he started praying for my welfare, which I really appreciate. But I’m OK. Really.)

Gideon Rachman of the “Financial Times,” no less, thinks the time, the conditions, the need, and the possibilities are all right for a world government:

A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.

So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.

First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a “global war on terror”.

Second, it could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: “For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible.” Mr Blainey foresees an attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average newspaper column.

But – the third point – a change in the political atmosphere suggests that “global governance” could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.

To have a single government over all the world isn’t a new idea. That was the benevolent, progressive goal of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and all of those misunderstood comic book villains who wanted to take over the world.

So the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, gets ARRESTED by the FBI for trying to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat for the biggest BRIBE. That flabbergasts me. Most corrupt politicians are far more subtle than that. It will be interesting to see what else comes out of this. It’s a crime to solicit a bribe, but it’s also a crime to do the bribing. I wonder who the bidders turn out to be.

Well, the Brewers’ rent-a-super-pitcher C. C. Sabathia was snapped up by the New York Yankees with a
$161 million, seven-year contract. One of my students at Concordia in Mequon wrote an essay complaining about how baseball players make millions of dollars, while teachers make so little. I made the useful comment that very few teachers can either hit or throw a curveball so why would anyone pay them millions of dollars?

Paul McCain posted that old chestnut I wrote for World about St. Nicholas, so I might as well do the same. Here is Slappy Holiday: Why not take the Santa Claus tradition a little further?:

Known for his generosity and his love of children, Nicholas is said to have saved a poor family’s daughters from slavery by tossing into their window enough gold for a rich dowry, a present that landed in some shoes or, in some accounts, stockings that were hung up to dry. Thus arose the custom of hanging up stockings for St. Nicholas to fill. And somehow he transmogrified into Santa Claus, who has become for many people the secular Christmas alternative to Jesus Christ.

But there is more to the story of Nicholas of Myra. He was also a delegate to the Council of Nicea in a.d. 325, which battled the heretics who denied the deity of Christ. He was thus one of the authors of the Nicene Creed, which affirms that Jesus Christ is both true God and true man. And unlike his later manifestation, Nicholas was particularly zealous in standing up for Christ. During the Council of Nicea, jolly old St. Nicholas got so fed up with Arius, who taught that Jesus was just a man, that he walked up and slapped him! That unbishoplike behavior got him in trouble. The council almost stripped him of his office, but Nicholas said he was sorry, so he was forgiven.

The point is, the original Santa Claus was someone who flew off the handle when he heard someone minimizing Christ. Perhaps we can battle our culture’s increasingly Christ-less Christmas by enlisting Santa in his original cause. The poor girls’ stockings have become part of our Christmas imagery. So should the St. Nicholas slap. Not a violent hit of the kind that got the good bishop in trouble, just a gentle, admonitory tap on the cheek. This should be reserved not for out-and-out nonbelievers, but for heretics (that is, people in the church who deny its teachings), Christians who forget about Jesus, and people who try to take Christ out of Christmas. This will take a little tweaking of the mythology. Santa and his elves live at the North Pole where they compile a list of who is naughty, who is nice, and who is Nicean.

On Christmas Eve, flying reindeer pull his sleigh full of gifts. And after he comes down the chimney, he will steal into the rooms of people dreaming of sugarplums who think they can do without Christ and slap them awake. And we’ll need new songs and TV specials (”Santa Claus Is Coming to Slap,” “Deck the Apollinarian with Bats of Holly,” “Frosty the Gnostic,” “How the Arian Stole Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red Knows Jesus”). Department store Santas should ask the children on their laps if they have been good, what they want for Christmas, and whether they understand the Two Natures of Christ. The Santas should also roam the shopping aisles, and if they hear any clerks wish their customers a mere “Happy Holiday,” give them a slap. This addition to his job description will keep Santa busy. Teachers who forbid the singing of religious Christmas carols—SLAP! Office managers who erect Holiday Trees—SLAP! Judges who outlaw manger displays—SLAP! People who give The Da Vinci Code as a Christmas present—SLAP! Ministers who cancel Sunday church services that fall on Christmas day—SLAP! SLAP! Perhaps Santa Claus in his original role as a theological enforcer may not go over very well in our contemporary culture. People may then try to take both Christ and Santa Claus out of Christmas. And with that economic heresy, the retailers would start to do the slapping.

Source: WORLD Magazine December 24, 2005, Vol. 20, No. 50

The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, and other properties, has filed for bankruptcy protection. Meanwhile, the New York Times has mortgaged its building to raise much-needed cash.

Before we gloat about the end of print journalism, with its liberal bias, and hail its replacement with the internet, consider. . . . When you read news on the internet, notice that it is nearly always linked to a newspaper. What newspapers do is pay people in your town and around the world to dig up news and then write it up. The internet is free, but that means that the internet is not paying anyone to perform that service. That we can now get news free does wreck the newspapers’ business model, but until people pay for internet news–enabling a true migration from print-on-paper to online news organizations–we will not have anything to replace what newspapers, for all of their current faults, do.

As part of their bailout plan for the U.S. auto industry, Congress was going to set up a board of its members and other federal officials to tell the companies what they can and cannot do. That was bad enough. Now Congress is planning to appoint a single individual to oversee the auto industry, a so-called “car czar.” From the Washington Post:

Democratic leaders continued working on details of their proposal this morning, and they made at least one change at the administration’s request. Instead of establishing a board from among six federal agencies to oversee an auto industry restructuring, Democrats agreed to the appointment by President Bush of a single “car czar,” according to a senior Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the measure is not yet final.

Under the proposal, which Democrats hope to bring to a vote this week, the loans would go out on Dec. 15, and the car czar would then develop broad restructuring goals for the auto industry, the aide said. On Feb. 15, after the Bush appointee had been replaced by President-elect Barack Obama, the czar would assess the companies’ progress and could pull back the loans. Long-term restructuring goals would be due from the car companies by March 31.

Friends, is it right for the state to issue fiats to privately-owned companies? Is it good economic policy to run a company according to government commands rather than the private market? I know, this is the price of a government bailout. But this cannot be worth it. This is not just socialism; it’s national socialism.