As I’m working on Péchés d’âge moyen, my collection of short piano miniatures, I’d be remiss if I didn’t recognize the influence of Telegram user Goth Kilts. She has been a huge source of encouragement as I begin dabbling in composing again, and a friendly sounding board for some of my musical ideas.
Kilts is herself quite a prolific commentator through her excellent Telegram page, The Sandwhich Press (and, yes, it’s spelled with the extra “h,” although the URL for her page spells “sandwich” the normal way). It boasts over 500 subscribers, all of them richly deserved.
As such, I wanted to dedicate today’s edition of Supporting Friends Friday to The Sandwhich Press, and the insightful, humorous, and Goth-inflected TradCath [she’s actually Coptic Christian—oops!] commentary of Goth Kilts.
It’s another school year, which means another year going through the history of Western music in Pre-AP Music Appreciation. This week we’re diving into Renaissance music, after spending last week covering the music of the Middle Ages.
Contrary to popular belief, the Middle Ages were not a period of depressing darkness, but rather a lively age. I certainly wouldn’t want to be a peasant pushing an ox cart full of dung, but that peasant knew his place in the universe, in the sense that he knew he was part of an ordered cosmos with God at both its head and its center.
More on that another time, but I mention it to note that the Renaissance would not have been possible without that long age of faith in the Middle Ages. Still, the Renaissance Period—variably dated, but starting roughly sometime in the fifteenth century, and extending to the seventeenth century—was a period of increased interest in the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, especially the human realism depicted in the art of those great civilizations, both a continuation of and a departure from the Middle Ages.
It also saw the declining influence of the Catholic Church in Europe, especially in the wake of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. As Protestantism and other social forces broke the Church’s monopoly on education and its dominance over art and music, Catholicism mounted a Counter-Reformation, aimed at both reducing the influence of Protestantism and reforming real abuses within the Roman Church.
That effort, naturally, involved revisions to music. Catholic priests denounced the increasingly theatrical nature of church music, decrying it as distracting from the simple message of the Gospel and the sacred Latin text, instead serving as gaudy entertainment for Mass goers. Much like the megachurch arena rock concerts of today, services had become garish and maudlin, a reflection of the corruption within the Church.
It was in this context that Giovanni Pieluigi da Palestrina composed his greatest works. According to Roger Kamien in Music: An Appreciation (the eighth brief edition, which I use with my students), Palestrina composed some 104 masses and 450 other sacred works, and his music became, essentially, the gold standard of church music until modern times (“masses” in the musical context are works built around five sung prayers, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei, not to be confused with the Catholic service).
South Carolina has a reputation for orneriness—we were the first State to secede from the Union in 1860, after all, and threatened to do it nearly thirty years earlier, during the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33—and it seems our Catholic priests are particularly prone to use their pulpits to prescribe some red-pills. Priest Jeffrey Kirby delivered a fiery homily warning that with Biden’s election, the Church faces real persecution in the days ahead, and scolded parishioners who cast their votes for Biden as betraying their Catholic faith:
Priests and preachers usually shy away from overtly political sermons, but we’re overdue for some Truth. We’re not discussing Democrats versus Republicans anymore; we’re talking about electing Evil—those that flaunt their desire to slay the unborn—and even the recently born!—and celebrate every opportunity they can force us to accept another progressive indignity. Trannies reading storybooks to four-year olds isn’t a “blessing of liberty,” per wincing, politically-correct, noodle-wristed, mainstream Evangelical David French—it’s an assault on our values and our culture. If they can make us accept something so ridiculous and patently unnatural—wicked!—then it puts that wedge in the door to pry it open to all manner of government-sanctioned evil.
Father Kirby’s bold sermon reminded me of another great warrior for Christ—and for Life: Father Robert “Bob” Morey. Father Bob is less bombastic in his denunciation of evil, but he is nonetheless a true warrior for his Faith. In October 2019, Father Bob declined to give Joe Biden Holy Communion due to Biden’s pro-abortion—pro-infanticide, I should write—stance.
As such, I thought it would be a good time to look at Father Bob’s bold stance for life in this week’s TBT. Here is October 2019’s “Warrior for Life“:
2019 is winding down, and with this being the last Sunday of the year, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to look back at the most popular posts of 2019.
These posts aren’t necessarily the best posts—although that’s an entirely subjective measure—just the ones that received the most hits.
When looking through the most popular posts, there were a few surprises. One thing I’ve learned from blogging is that posts I pour my heart and soul into may walk away with five views (and, oftentimes, only one!). Then other posts that I dash off in a hurry to make my self-imposed daily goal take off like Rossini rockets, garnering dozens of hits.
Some of that is timing and promotion. I find that the posts I have ready to launch at 6:30 AM do better on average. But some generous linkbacks from WhatFinger.com really created some surprises here at the end of the year, surpassing even the exposure I received from Milo Yiannopoulos. Writing posts about hot, current news items, the dropping links about said items in the comment sections of prominent news sites, also helps drive traffic, but I often lack the time required to do such “planting” (and it is a practice that can come across as spammy if not done with finesse).
Some posts take on a life of their own; I see consistent daily traffic from one of the posts on this list, “Tom Steyer’s Belt.” Apparently, a bunch of people are as mystified as I am with Steyer’s goofy, virtue-signalling belt.
Well, it’s certainly been an adventure. And while it may be premature—there are still two days left in the year!—here are the Top Five Posts of 2019:
Next to Halloween and Christmas, today is the most wonderful of the year—it’s the day that the clock falls back an hour! Sure, that means I’ll never see the sun for the next few months, as I’ll spend the dwindling daylight hours inside a classroom, but at least I got an extra hour of sleep this morning.
This week saw a good bit of reflecting on what is important in life (like ghost stories), so I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on “The Desperate Search for Meaning” series of posts. It will also help to aggregate those posts into one place.
“The Desperate Search for Meaning” – The post that started this impromptu series (and the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday featurette), this essay was about a New Age healer, Audrey Kitching, who exploited vulnerable women into working in slave-like conditions. Kitching bamboozled these women with her gauzy, neo-spiritualist babble; her thin sense of meaning of belonging roped them in, as they desperately attempted to fill a void in their lives—and that doesn’t even include all the women who bought Kitching’s fraudulent products. It’s a sad story, one I think is indicative of our times.
“The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part II” – This piece was about a crazy old lady who believes that cancer can be extruded from the body through a series of energy-channeling motions—at least on the surface. The real focus was that, while this old loon was going through her bizarre ritual, she espoused a cult of death: having babies is bad because of overpopulation. It’s the religion of environmentalism, one of the several cults of modern progressivism. It is a deadly ideology that is, essentially, anti-human.
“The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part III: Progressive Power Crystal” – This post looked at an LA Times piece on New Age spirituality, and how it was replacing traditional Christianity as the “faith” of young Americans. That’s all tied up with progressivism’s imperial and totalitarian ambitions—all off these anti-Christian, anti-American movements are of a piece, serving similar ends. As I write at the end of the post:
“Even if our elites aren’t specifically Satanists, they’re certainly not Christians. Their religion is progressivism, an jumble of ideologies that, at bottoms, rejects Christianity and its view of human nature. Their gods are power and envy—just like Lucifer.”
“The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity” – This piece pulled from a sermon my pastor gave on Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible. Ecclesiastes is a work of philosophy, in which King Solomon examines his life and finds that all of his pursuits are, ultimately, meaningless: he will die, and everything he experienced and built will eventually disappear. Therefore, his only true meaning comes through God. It’s the earliest form of Christian existentialism ever written (with apologies to Søren Kierkegaard). It’s also a powerful reminder that this world, in which we are so involved, is fleeting.
That’s it for this Sunday. Going back through this posts really makes my soul ache for the people that fall for New Age nonsense and neo-paganism. Good thing I’ve found the One True Faith—the Southern branch of the Free Will Baptist denomination. 😀
Per yesterday’s post, my intent was to share a spooky ghost story with readers today. However, some major news broke locally that has important national and spiritual implications.
Father Robert E. Morey, the priest at Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church in Florence, South Carolina, denied former Vice President Joe Biden Communion at the 9 AM Sunday Mass. Father Morey wrote that “Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that. Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching.”
I recently started playing piano for Wednesday night and some Sunday services at my little Free Will Baptist Church. My church has about thirty or forty attendees on a good Sunday morning, so it’s slim pickings for pianists.
The little old lady who had been playing is very feeble, and she managed to miss more accidentals than a seventh-grade clarinet player due to her failing hearing and eyesight. As such, she was eager to pass off the monkey’s paw of church piano playing to someone else.
As such, I’ve gradually improved my sightreading. More importantly, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to reacquaint myself with some wonderful old hymns—and to learn some for the first time.
It was a lovely Easter Weekend here in South Carolina, which is, after all, God’s Country. It was a weekend full of church, colorful clothes, a trip to the movies, and TONS of eating. If you’ve never celebrated a major holiday (that is, an Easter- or Christmas-level event) in the South, you’re missing out on good eatin’.
Unfortunately, less than a week after the Notre Dame fire, anti-Christian terrorists persecuted fellow brothers and sisters in Christ in three cities in Sri Lanka, the island nation to the south of India. The death toll is somewhere between 138 and 207, with approximately 450 others injured.
Islamist extremists committed these attacks on hotels and Christian churches, an act all-the-more wicked for its symbolic timing. As Christians flocked to worship the Resurrection of Christ Jesus, Muslim terrorists callously and opportunistically slaughtered them.
Christianity faces twin threats today: the progressive Left and Islamism. The former is a more subtle, but increasingly bold, threat, that seeks to destroy Western Civilization from within. The latter is an external threat that is very upfront about its hatred for non-Muslims, but that also leverages the tolerance of Western societies to its advantage. The Left and Islam are allies of convenience, despite their many incompatibilities.
My prayers go out to all Christians facing persecution, from the small-scale persecution of mockery to the very real persecutions of death and intimidation. Christ promised us that, as Christians, the world would reject us, and persecution would be inevitable. In the United States, especially in the religious South, we’ve been spoiled, and have grown complacent, to threats to our faith. We should never forget the real men and women who gave their lives—and continue to risk them—to keep the faith.
Here’s hoping for some better news as the week progresses. Deus Vult!
There’s a video up on Prager University called “How the Reformation Shaped the World” (PDF transcript for those who prefer to read). Stephen Cornils of the Wartburg Theological Seminary gives an adequate, broad overview of the impact of the Protestant Reformation (albeit with some noise about Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism, which, while accurate, smacks of throwing a sop to politically-correct hand-wringers). You can view the video in full below.
I’ve written about the influence of Christianity (and it was, notably, Protestant Christianity) on the founding of America, and I’ve discussed how shared Protestantism helped create an American identity. Indeed, I would argue that, without Protestantism, there would be no America, as such.
I would also argue—perhaps more controversially—that America’s commitment to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism allowed the nation to avoid the anticlerical upheavals seen in France and other predominantly and officially Catholic countries. While there were official, established churches at the State level into the 19th-century—which I wrote about in “The Influence of Christianity on America’s Founding“—the lack of federal establishment, and the general movement towards greater religious liberty, ensured a proliferation of Protestant denominations in the early Republic.
Catholicism inherently insists upon a top-down hierarchy of control. Luther’s view of man’s relation to God is horizontal, as Bishop James D. Heiser argues in his extended sermon The One True God, the Two Kingdoms, and the Three Estates(one of my Christmas gifts, incidentally, and a good, quick read for just $5). That is, every man is accountable to God directly, and is responsible for accepting Christ and maintaining his relationship with God. That horizontal, rather than vertical, relationship infuses Western Civilization with a sense of individualism, the effects of which have been far-reaching and both positive and negative.
Regardless, the impact of the Protestant Reformation is staggering to consider. The Catholic Church in the 16th century was an increasingly sclerotic and corrupt institution, one that had fallen from its great height as the pacifying influence upon a barbaric, post-Roman Europe (of course, the Counter Reformation reinvigorated and, in part, helped purify the Church). With the advent of the printing press and translations into national languages, conditions were ripe for an explosion of religious reform in the West. The ripple effects of the Reformation still pulse through Western life and culture.
That said, I’m not anti-Catholic, nor is that the intent of this post. In today’s political and theological climate, committed followers of Christ must band together, be they Catholic or Protestant. I don’t “buy” Catholic theology in toto, but I respect the Catholic Church’s longstanding traditions and consistent institutional logic. Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological argument in the Summa Theologicais pretty much what I learned growing up as an Evangelical Protestant. And I’m broadly sympathetic to the traditional Catholic argument that the Reformation busted up the orderly cosmos of medieval European society (see Richard Weaver‘s various essays for further elucidation of this idea). A side effect of the Reformation naturally includes many of the cons of modernity.
Ultimately, too, Christians face the double-threat of modern progressive ideology and radical Islamism. I’ve written about the former in detail, but not so much the latter. For the moment, suffice it to say that the two are temporary, uneasy, but powerful allies against a traditionalist, conservative, Christian worldview, and both are deeply antithetical to Western values and culture.
These are some broad and slapdash thoughts, ones which I will gradually develop in future posts as necessary. Any useful resources or insights are welcome—please share in the comments.
The Portly Politico 