Many of my fellow Virginians, including more than a couple of family members, are having a tough time getting over UVA's loss last night to Syracuse, particularly after blowing a 16 point lead. A number 1 seed getting beat, in an incredible way, by a number 10 seed.
C'mon Wahoos... what the heck happened?
We'll likely never know but what is clear is that March Madness is yet again living up to its moniker.
Which brings us to a piece over at Aleteia I found rather fascinating, more particularly, the video that's featured, starring (if you will) Fr. Rob Ketcham. I think it's excellent... take a peek and let us know what you think:
Fr. Ketcham's got many more insightful, educational and inspiring videos at PetersBoat.net.
You're seriously missing out if you're not keeping up with the guy.
David Brooks will be vilified by many for his column yesterday in the New York Times:
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.
This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.
“His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?” he asks.
In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure.
And so it is with Trump.
History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”
And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”
The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.
The Republicans who coalesce around Trump are making a political error. They are selling their integrity for a candidate who will probably lose. About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of him, and that number has been steady since he began his campaign.
There is much more and all of it worthy.
I'm completely aware that Mr. Brooks has in the past disappointed conservatives and for that reason alone, some will dismiss this piece. Others of course will dismiss it because they're Trump supporters and there stands no one in the world today more dismissive of truth than a Trump supporter. Nevertheless, truth should be widely disseminated when it's being trumpeted (no pun intended) and so I hope you'll do your part to viralize Mr. Brooks' column.
His father caught sight of him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.—Luke 15:20
For years the image I kept in my head from the Parable of the Prodigal Son was of this benevolent, rich father, wearing a beard and fancy robe, embracing a son who looked something like a fraternity boy after a weekend of hard partying.
That image got upended some five years ago by a tattooed teenaged girl I encountered at the Gastonia city transit terminal. It was a hot October afternoon, and I had arrived early to meet our son’s caregiver, hoping to pray and watch the sunset. I had just opened the Divine Office app on my iPhone when I spotted her at the end of a bench.
The tattoos or eyeliner or “goth” haircut didn’t seem as unusual as the trenchcoat. She had it buttoned-up despite the 80-degree heat. Seriously tough girl, I thought, as I counted the piercings on her face. Seriously scared girl, I realized, after I saw her eyes.
“Can I use your cell phone?” she asked.
She explained she’d spent 17 hours on buses from Ohio. She was making a short-notice visit to grandparents who’d moved back to town to start a business. It hadn’t gone well, and they were broke.
“And you’re coming here why?” I wanted to ask. A plastic trash bag at her side — filled with all her belongings — told me she had nowhere else to go.
I was three months from ordination. I wanted to do something. Get her a meal. Tell her how much God loves her, proclaim the Gospel. I bowed to the stronger impulse to shut up. The girl and her trash bag made their way to the parking lot. I started Google-searching for homeless shelters.
Five minutes later a gray Delta 88 sputtered up Main Avenue, going just five mph. Good thing because Grandma didn’t wait for the car to stop before exiting and running to embrace the girl.
“I’m sorry” — “No, I’m sorry” filled the air. I glanced over to see the girl whispering in Grandma’s ear and Grandma, stepping back, bug-eyed, as the girl slowly unbuttoned the trenchcoat.
Out came a baby bump. The look on Grandma’s face made me think she was going to turn and run. I thought I’d have to give the girl a ride to a shelter or obstetrician. Maybe I’d proclaim the Gospel.
Grandma didn’t run. Grandma knelt, wrapped her arms around that belly and kissed it.
Back in 2008, in a piece analyzing Barack Obama's role as community organizer, Bryan York wrote:
Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that “direct action.”
Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising. At first, the organizer tackled small stuff, like demanding the repair of streetlights in a city park; later, when the group gained confidence, the organizer could take on bigger targets. But at all times, the organizer’s goal was not to lead his people anywhere, but to encourage them to take action on their own behalf.
Is it not interesting to read those words, understand what they meant then, and apply them to that which is happening now?
“This is a sad day,” Cruz told reporters. “Political discourse should occur in this country without a threat of violence, without anger and rage and hatred directed at each other. We need to learn to have disagreements without being disagreeable. To have disagreements while respecting human beings on the other side.”
Cruz said that “the responsibility” belonged to the “protesters who took violence in their own hands.” But he also suggested Trump wasn’t innocent either.
“But in any campaign responsibility starts at the top. Any candidate who is responsible for the culture of the campaign,” the Texas senator said. “And when you have a campaign that disrespects the voters, when you have a campaign that affirmatively encourages violence, when you have a campaign that is facing allegations of physical violence against members of the press, you create an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discourse.”
“I think a campaign bears responsibility for creating an environment,” Cruz added. “When the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence, to punch people in the face. The predicable consequence of that is that it escalates. And today is unlikely to be the last such instance. … That is not how our politics should occur.”
Community organizer may not fit exactly with what Trump is doing... disorganizing may be more apt and appropriate, but is he or is he not agitating?
Within Catholic ultra traditionalist circles a new wave of ugliness has arisen. Numerous traditionalist blogs, websites and publications spew disrespectful hatred towards the Catholic church. They mock the Mass by despising the “Novus Ordo” they denigrate the Holy Father referring to him as “Pope Frank” or “Bergoglio” and refer to their mother the Catholic Church with adolescent disrespect as “FrancisChurch”.
I avoid commenting on the filth because, why wallow in sewage? I’m not going to link to the aggregators and websites in question because if you’re interested all you have to do is snoop around a little and follow a few links. You’ll see how they lie, misrepresent and tear down fellow Catholics, how these self appointed prophets ridicule, gossip and slander their fathers in God, and how these self righteous, pretentious Pharisees vomit their bile on all they meet.
It is pointless to ever argue with these people because they are always right. They have no true repentance in their hearts, but are driven by the worst kind of pride: spiritual pride.
Instead of arguing I would like to point out what is going on. First of all, I think it is unfair to use the term “traditionalist” for these people because it pulls down the many good, sensible and holy Catholics who are traditionalist by nature and by their devotions and worship. These people are my friends and family. I am on their side.
They work hard for the church. They live their faith. They build up their families and their parishes in the faith. These good folks deserve to keep the term “traditionalist” and to honor it with their good, strong, faithful and humble Catholicism.
We should separate the paranoid hate mongers from the rest of the traditionalists. They are not traditionalists. They are Protestant fundamentalists wearing traditionalist Catholic clothes.
I know about Protestant fundamentalism. I was raised and educated among Protestant fundamentalists. Among them were many good and sincere Christian people, but also among them, and driving their religion–was a certain type of religious person whose attitudes mirror exactly the Catholic fundamentalists on the rise today.
Here are ten principles things that connect them...
Read the whole thing... to the end... it's enlightening and true.
Someone should next write a piece about how fundamentalism has infected our politics. I call it Trumpfoonery.
While the country focuses on the size of Presidential candidates' hands and other body parts, the news coming out of Yemen is simply horrific:
Gunmen in southern Yemen on Friday stormed a retirement home run by a charity established by Mother Teresa, killing 16 people, including four Catholic nuns, officials and witnesses said.
The killing spree began with two gunmen who first surrounded the home for the elderly in Aden. Meanwhile, four others entered the building on the pretext they wanted to visit their mothers at the facility, according to the charity, Yemeni security officials and witnesses. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The gunmen then moved from room to room, handcuffing the victims before shooting them in the head. A nun who survived and was rescued by locals said that she hid inside a fridge in a storeroom after hearing a Yemeni guard shouting, "Run, run."
Khaled Haidar told The Associated Press that he counted 16 bodies, including that of his brother, Radwan. All had been shot in the head and were handcuffed. He said that in addition to the four nuns, one Yemeni cook, and Yemeni guards were among those killed.
...
Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the Missionaries of Charity in the Indian city of Kolkata, said the members of the charity were "absolutely stunned" at the killing.
"The Sisters were to come back but they opted to stay on to serve people" in Yemen, she added.
She also said that two of the killed nuns were from Rwanda and the other two were from India and Kenya.
...
There were around 80 residents living at the home, which is run by Missionaries of Charity, an organization established by Mother Teresa. Missionaries of Charity nuns also came under attack in Yemen in 1998, when gunmen killed three nuns in the Red Sea port city of Hodeida.
This should underscore the need for competent, capable and compelling leaders, those capable of dealing with this threat that just won't go away.
None currently seem destined to become President of the United States.
Dear God, be with your beloved martyrs and grant them eternal rest.
Dear God, raise up leaders we need, not leaders we apparently want.
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