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Adam and Eve were created from the dust, the scriptures tell us. We haven’t escaped that lowly origin. Dust is where we come from, dust is who we are, and dust is where we are headed. (more…)

From Chapter Four of Joseph Conrad’s A Personal Record:

This must have been in the year ‘70. But I really believe that I am wrong. That book was not my first introduction to English literature. My first acquaintance was (or were) the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and that in the very MS. of my father’s translation. It was during our exile in Russia, and it must have been less than a year after my mother’s death, because I remember myself in the black blouse with a white border of my heavy mourning. We were living together, quite alone, in a small house on the outskirts of the town of T——. (more…)

Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath and told him to take his bed and walk. That must have been against the Sabbath customs, because the local Pharisees milked the guy to find out who’d told him to walk around carrying a bed, and then went after Jesus when the guy talked. (more…)

His Majesty has been much preoccupied lately.

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Friend of the blog SPDI wrote a post recently that starts with political science and ends with stirring the blood:

The answer is: everything is doomed, but the more interesting question is: “And then what?”  And the surprising answer is, “Well, then they get un-doomed.”   And what’s more: all the work put in before is not for naught:

The one raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness, or good according to his desires of good; and the other to evil according to his desires of evil; for as he has desired to do evil all the day long even so shall he have his reward of evil when the night cometh.

So: it is good that you’ve noticed a downward slide in society.  But that should not make you despair that it’s unrecoverable, or applies to every individual, and nor should it make you despair from seeing the far ending, because you haven’t looked far enough.

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About the man himself, there isn’t much to say that Ross Douthat didn’t already say. I’ll only add that his iconic status should really go beyond the political or the legal. He’s the patron saint of swimming against the tide and doing it magnificently. The tide moves on nonetheless.

As far as the political fallout goes, everyone on the right suddenly has a strong principled opposition to confirming SCOTUS nominations in an election year. Everyone on the left suddenly has a strong principled stance that the president has an absolute right to have his nominees confirmed no matter how much time is left in his term.

This is silly. Everyone knows that if Ruth Ginsburg had died in early 2008, they’d all be arguing the reverse. The Constitution is silent on the matter, so spare me the arguments from abstract principle.

Here is the real argument for blocking Obama’s nominee: The Left’s main path for crushing its enemies has been through the courts. One more leftist on the court gives them free rein. Any Republican who lets in an Obama nominee through the Trojan horse of comity and tradition is a traitor to Christians and everyone else not under the left-wing umbrella, and should be treated accordingly.

I don’t expect much of politicians, and yet they never stop finding ways to disappoint:

“Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie all said or suggested they’d support women being required to enroll in Selective Service and be eligible for the draft, since female service members can now serve in combat roles. Cruz was not asked.

“‘It was striking that three different people on that stage came out in support of drafting women into combat in the military,’ Cruz said. ‘I have to admit, as I was sitting there listening to that conversation, my reaction was: Are you guys nuts?'” (link)

“…and the Alt-Right is Right but Repulsive.”

This is the sort of thing that pops into my head while making a turkey sandwich. I blame the provolone.

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor who writes at Marginal Revolution, lists “a few examples of where I have changed my mind due to economic evidence.”

“7. Mormonism, and other relatively strict religions, can have big anti-poverty effects. I wouldn’t say I ever believed the contrary, but for a long time I simply didn’t give the question much attention. I now think that Mormonism has a better anti-poverty agenda than does the Progressive Left.”

I’ve seen Cowen touch on this before. He is from New Jersey and teaches at George Mason University in Virginia and styles himself as an information omnivore who enjoys taking in lots of cultures at the ground level. I don’t know what specifically he has observed about the poor who embrace Mormonism. A week ago I took a day from work to fill my quorum’s assignment at the bishops’ storehouse near Andrews Air Force Base, a couple dozen miles from the George Mason campus.

We are in a very real sense called to support, sustain, teach, and preach the ideal, even when our lives don’t match it, because that ideal is a way God protects all of His children — especially those who would have no way to find it because their lives are so very not-ideal…sometimes for generations on end.

-thus the Mormon Woman.

That is an inspirational quote.  It has a breadth of vision–the nameless virtue has a breadth of vision–that is truly divine.  The soul that has the nameless virtue addresses itself to whole societies and ages.

Christmas seems to bring out the child in all of us.

So perhaps it should not have surprised me to find His Majesty playing with Tinker toys this morning.

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Each holiday has its own character and its own image.  Our American 4th of July is about sun, noise, grilling, healthy flesh.  The image of Thanksgiving is a good appetite and the stuffed extended family lolling about afterwards, desultorily playing at games.  Christmas is unusual–it has two main images

The first theme is the happy, domestic one.  It’s the family gathered around the  tree.  Lights are dim.  There’s probably a fire and a fireplace.  People are happy and smiling.

The other image is the spiritual feeling of the clear, cold night sky with the remote and beautiful stars.  Christmas spirituality is the spirituality of looking up at the night sky when everything is still.

Our normal image of the birth of Jesus combines the two.  We see the cozy stable, warmly and dimly lit by a lamp, with the small family gathered in around, and the animals gathered in, and the shepherds and such.  Then around them the night and the stars, especially the one bright star.

Easter is a morning holiday.  Christmas is perhaps more about Christmas Eve than Christmas morning. Certainly there are more rituals associated with Christmas Eve then there are our Christmas morning. Christmas Eve is when the candles are lit, when the children act out the nativity, when we dig dirt to fill our paper bags for luminarias, when we set up the stockings and put out milk for Santa.

The other night holiday is spooky.  Christmas Eve isn’t.   But the night, the clear, cold night, still takes the holiday out of the ordinary.

Sunrise and sunset are great for casual glancing enjoyment in passing. But if you really look at them they seem to demand something more. You see that there is a glory about them that approaches the transcendent.  You want to have an appreciation that is worthy of the site. You want to commune. And you can’t.  If you try–when I try–frustration results.

For many people, Christmas is a pretty frustrating holiday.  I love Christmas, personally, but I understand the frustration.  Christmas isn’t only a time to have a shindy.  There is a spiritual element there, a grandeur, and it demands that you reach out for it, and your reaching always never quite succeeds.  You never fully commune.

Today I told my family that I had had a dream.  When they were grown, I said, and I and their mother were gone, I dreamed that on Christmas Eve when all was quiet and still, when the only light was from the tree and the dying fire, I would be permitted to return.  I would be permitted to sit by the tree and remember when they were young.  Perhaps, I told them, if they briefly awoke they might hear the sound of rocking, and know that the old ties were still there.

The truth is that I already spend part of Christmas Eve night that way.  After the children are all gone to bed and I’ve finished wrapping and bustling, I usually sit by the dying fire for awhile.  I contemplate the lights, and think of Christmases that have gone, and the Christmases to come when my children will be grown.  My wife says I puzzle her.  For someone who loves Christmas so much, she says, I can get remarkably melancholic about it.

Remembering old days, my childhood days and my children’s, that will not come again, is part of the melancholy.  Another part is my inability to fully penetrate into the heart of Christmas.  I have never fully gone inside.

But I keep trying.  Because there is a voice that whispers.  It promises that someday I will be at the very manger, and all the old Christmases will be one.

G. tells us his muse is a goober. Mine is a crusty old retired Sith Lord.

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A bull was grazing in a field near a stream. Now in that country there was a flock of escaped parrots who busied themselves in other people’s matters. (more…)