Truth, Trump and the MSM

The mainstream media is in a feeding frenzy over the announcement that Donald Trump has rocked his campaign team by bringing in the chief of breitbart.com to run his campaign.

via GIPHY

While Donald Trump continues to speak the truth about the current state of this country, the MSM gives the presumptive heir to the Obama legacy a free pass in spite of history looking it in the face: the media pretends that the liberal ruling class wears clothes.

via GIPHY

Pundits, reporters and iconoclasts are left wondering what is going on. The words he speaks are not popular in today's day and age. The liberal elites and the complicit media that is trying to swing this election to Clinton cannot seem to grasp what his going on.

via GIPHY

These people cannot grasp that his message resonates with typical, salt of the earth Americans. The crowds don't lie. The cheers tell a story that the MSM wants to ignore and that the liberal elite want to bury. America under liberalism is dying and Donald Trump is not afraid to say that. He is not afraid to speak the sad truths of liberal policies that have eviscerated the economy and torn the fabric of our culture. And people are hearing him loud and clear.

via GIPHY

Against a hollow economy owned by the Chinese and deflated by unchecked immigration; against a culture that values unchecked freedom and mistakes license for liberty; against an economy that places profits above people and workers get sacrificed on the altar of globalization, Donald Trump is saying "No." And it is a message people want.

The MSM can't handle that and liberals do not it. It is an unadulterated truth that shakes this slumbering political class at its foundations. And come this November, it will remake America.

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

Make Catholicism Great Again

Against the Evil Stand for Truth Against the Idols of Wall Street

Simple folks working Money staining the world Independent Man

A savior Merely a mortal Holding up hope

Standing in front Stating unpleasant facts Truth Against Falsehood

The people Not the individual Not beholden to radicals Strength in Tradition

False beliefs Selling shoddy goods Speak the Truth

Condemn Error Speak out against error Do not succumb to error

via GIPHY

A Poem Against Modernity

Oh the World! Drunk, despaired, deranged Babies killed everyday Life? Only one life matters A life never of regrets Just decisions Factories of license that is what we become Babies are products not people People can the thrown out Whether they are defective from the start Or breakdown near the end.

Alternative lifestyles celebrated Not man or woman anymore Be what you want, who cares! the cost is never too high Be all that you can be But do not be a slave to the binary world Escape from the shackles Free yourself!

There are no communities No boundaries People come and go You don't matter Community is lost Just let people run Let people romp Let people run you over

Buzz buzz buzz! Jabber jabber jabber! the music and talk and games the virtual world always on No talk, just text No walk, just run from one entertoonment to the next the orgy of the individual

Death we stare at! Values no longer matter Love is a convenience commitment only to you Let no one get in your way You live by your own rules

Docile creatures God is dead We are God now Shattered and fractured Our eyes sunk back glossy and glassy we forget we are mad

We must resist! we must get back get back go back to the staleness to the chains to the Truth To God

via GIPHY

A Poem Against Modernity

Oh the World! Drunk, despaired, deranged Babies killed everyday Life? Only one life matters A life never of regrets Just decisions Factories of license that is what we become Babies are products not people People can the thrown out Whether they are defective from the start Or breakdown near the end.

Alternative lifestyles celebrated Not man or woman anymore Be what you want, who cares! the cost is never too high Be all that you can be But do not be a slave to the binary world Escape from the shackles Free yourself!

There are no communities No boundaries People come and go You don't matter Community is lost Just let people run Let people romp Let people run you over

Buzz buzz buzz! Jabber jabber jabber! the music and talk and games the virtual world always on No talk, just text No walk, just run from one entertoonment to the next the orgy of the individual

Death we stare at! Values no longer matter Love is a convenience commitment only to you Let no one get in your way You live by your own rules

Docile creatures God is dead We are God now Shattered and fractured Our eyes sunk back glossy and glassy we forget we are mad

We must resist! we must get back get back go back to the staleness to the chains to the Truth To God

Christ Stops Time: The Christian Origins of a True Politics (Or, Apparently I sound like a German guy I read in school)

I have been mulling over the relationship between the intervention of God on Earth and the effect it has on us human beings. For the sake of this conversation, I'm going to posit that we owe true politics to God. To put it another way, the origins of true political order are to be found in Christianity.

Now a person reading this may be thinking something like, "Wait a minute! Weren't there societies (like the Greeks and Romans) that existed before Christ? And didn't guys like Aristotle and Plato say a lot about politics?" Yes, to both of those. However, the experience was not as full (open to the truth) as it is for those who experience reality after Christ.

Christ's intervention into our world gave us something that we lacked prior to his coming. It gives us an anchor for our existence. It is the revelation of the Truth of Christ which provides our life with its meaning and purpose. Furthermore, it is this awareness of this meaning in the Truth of Christ which provides the possibility of an authentic politics.

Contrast the experiential openness to Truth and the subsequent anchor (or foundation) that is a result of the Incarnation with the closed or less aware experience of the Truth which was the experience of the pre-Christ(ian) communities and in this bifurcation of epochs or the rupture that was the experience of the Truth of Christ in the Incarnation, you are presented with a fullness of Being which permits a political community to emerge that is an expression of Truth. The Western Judeo-Christian tradition, then, is the humanly knowable interpretation of the ontological reality that is the Truth in Christ. Political communities and eras are inescapably manifestations of a fundamental religious Truth. We cannot escape that. Without the Incarnation, there is no full experience of politics. The communities prior to Christ are pre-political.

Evidently (according to one person I know), this kind of understanding and interpretation of the human world is similar to the approach of Eric Voegelin. That's cool.

(Old) New French Thinkers and American Catholics

I have begun to read an edited collection titled New French Thought: Political Philosophy, edited by Mark Lilla. Published in 1994, it is a diverse collection of translated essays which introduces to an Anglo-American audience a conversation in French intellectual life that, up to that point in time, had been from the American engagement with the continental traditions. Up to that time, the French imports which dominated American philosophical discourse were thinkers critical of liberal modernity and proponents of a antihumanist and historicist philosophical project. Unfortunately for the American landscape, by the time of the publication of this volume, those thinkers and philosophical projects which preoccupied the American academe had been overtaken by a group of thinkers who rejected the antihumanism and historicism (some in part others completely) and were more less critical of liberalism than the more famous and influential prior generation.

In his introduction, Lilla lightly traces the contours of the history of French philosophy. It is a story in which liberal modernity plays a prominent role, alongside history and "modernity" in the form of the residue of the French Revolution. The French encounter with liberalism differs markedly from the British and American experiences. Whereas the British and American encounters with liberalism have been endogenous or immanent, the French have experienced liberalism at a distance; theirs has been a critical and often repudiatory encounter with this sociopolitical system. This has produced a rich and variegated corpus, constituted by a diversity of approaches represented by numerous thinkers which may strike the American reader as overwhelming in its quantity, diversity and, perhaps most fundamentally, its generally critical stance toward liberalism. Whereas the American experience has been being both of and in liberal modernity, the French experience has often sat outside of a similar milieu.

The generation of philosophers introduced in the Lilla volume share a formative set of experiences in the France after the May 1968 events. These events brought about a social and political culture which was much more malleable to a liberal order. The thinkers collected in the volume are more comfortable with exploring and accepting the legitimacy liberalism than were the members of the previous generation (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault), who were more familiar to an American philosophical audience.

I think that the Catholic can appreciate this generation of French philosophers' response to liberalism. The Catholic engagement with liberalism has been similarly contested. As it has been noted on this blog, there has been an ongoing debate by Catholics in America over the relationship between Catholicism and liberal modernity. While one group of Catholics has taken a view of the relationship between Catholicism and liberal modernity which has been positive, the other group has held a critical view of the relationship between Catholicism and modern liberal democracy.

This is not old news, however I think that the volume can act as a vehicle by which to understand the American Catholic experience. American Catholics have a closer relationship to liberalism than do these French thinkers -- not only were they born into a liberal culture but the "foundations" of their government are modern liberal. But, the American Catholic critics share with these thinkers a critical distance to liberal modernity. The Catholic critic of American liberalism can find an ally in the French thinkers for the simple reason that they both hold the modern sociopolitical order at an arm's-length.

I think that the American Catholic critic of liberalism fails because s/he is perhaps too critical of the liberal order. To the extent that the liberal order is an organic or internally-traceable historicosocial development of a political space, then I don't think that the Catholic critic has much to stand on by way of sustainable critique. Yes, he can point to the Church and the Truth that the Church protects; the critique would have to be intelligible to an American who hears it. I don't see that happening; the critical reactions seem to be too philosophically dense, and frankly too "impractical" for the American ethos.

I suspect many Catholics have read the work(s) of Pierre Manent, and other figures. The American Catholic can perform a service fr himself by being more sympathetic or open to the liberal tradition which constitues who it is that he is.

Modern Family and the Eucharist

No, not this "Modern Family"...

In the Catholic Church today among one of the many social ills that the pastors must tend to is the emerging recognition of the status of divorced and remarried Catholics in the Church today. In October, a meeting of Catholic bishops called III Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family occurred. During this meeting these leaders of the Church to discuss the "The pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization". This is a first of multiple meetings on this issue over the next year or so. Many prominent leaders in the Church have publicly addressed this issue in what has emerged as a hotly debated topic. In many ways the challenge of how to respond to civilly divorced and civilly remarried Catholics (as opposed to those who have gone through appropriate channels within the Catholic Church) represents a fundamental challenge to multiple teachings of the Church. These teachings get to the center of the Catholic understanding of marriage, the Catholic understanding of the person (anthropology) and the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist.

Now, the Catholic view of divorce and communion is not as archaic as no doubt some would believe it to be. In fact, the Church makes clear in the Catechism that those who are innocent victims of a civil divorce are able, under normal restrictions that apply to all Catholics, to receive the Eucharist. The dilemma turns on when a Catholic married in the Church and divorced civilly then becomes married in a civil ceremony. That is a non-no for Catholics, for the simple reason that Catholics believe that a marriage cannot be dissolved. A Catholic response to a broken marriage is to observe that the marriage never occurred in the first place, i.e., the marriage annulment. An effect of this would seem to be that at as a matter of theological understanding, it is the case that anthropologically not only did that first marriage not occur, but the Catholic who marries again in the Church (as a matter of observable or experiential fact) is, actually, marrying for the first time. To divorce and remarry civilly is essentially denying this truth of marriage's indissolubility by stating through these acts that a marriage is in fact soluble and more than that it damages the institution of marriage (and potentially introduces more serious sins into the mix). The receipt of communion by divorced and remarried Catholics also is not a matter of conscience, but rather

in fact, both because it is the image of the spousal relationship between Christ and his church as well as the fundamental core and an important factor in the life of civil society, is essentially a public reality.

As a result, those who are divorced and remarried cannot receive communion except in a state of sin (h/t to EWTN which has all sorts of good stuff).

The Catholic then, in the face of this secular phenomenon of civil divorce and remarriage, is staring at a way of life or an experience of reality which seems to have crept up on it. The challenge of the secularization of marriage confronts the Catholic Church with a question of who it is and what it is to be Catholic in ways that other issues probably do not. Whereas, at least in the United States, many of the issues that the Church and its individual members confront have their origins in political matters, e.g., abortion legality or Obamacare contraception coverage, the civil marriage issue does not seem to be as neatly able to be captured within a political frame of reference. When a Catholic thinks about some of these recent controversies over political issues, at the end of the day the Catholic can have some reassurance that, while these are challenging contemporary dilemmas that "naturally" appear in a secular nation-state, the Catholic Church and its adherents can always distance itself from the problem. In fact, there is a method of interacting in order to navigate more difficult and thorny moral conundrums these kinds of political proposals present to a Catholic. There is always the possibility to create distance. But that same option does not exist when you are having to deal with your own. They will follow you, they will come to you, they will be with you.

So, this is not a political issue that is restricted to particular states or cultures or time periods, but rather it is an issue that stands outside of politics and sits in the area of Church doctrine and makes a demand upon the Catholic to answer what it is to be a Catholic? It is a religious matter. It is a complicated issue with divisions within the Church revealed publicly. Though I wonder, is this a uniquely modern or secular issue? This problem would likely be less acute if either the pursuit of secular, civil marriages were low(er) or the option more restricted, which would seem to demand that the Catholic Church and religion exercise a more pronounced role in the contemporary world and place a stronger imprint on the identities of modern Catholics. In effect, the existence of this problem becomes evidence of the de-Christianization of the modern era. If that is the case, then both the Catholic Church and non-Catholic Christian sects are fighting a battle which they are losing.

As a lay Catholic, the most interesting phenomenon to come from this extended public battle over the licitness of (non)reception of the Eucharist by civilly-divorced-but-not-annulled-Catholics is the centrality of the priest-as-pastor. On both side of the divide that marks the public debate, the participants have focused on the efforts to respond to the needs of Catholics who have experienced a broken marriage. The gravitas of the experience and the persons who are involved in it is recognized and respected by those who want to amend the rules as well as those who want to maintain the rules. This appears to be, at its heart, rooted in a concern of how to minister to those who have experienced or are experiencing this darkness. No doubt the secular and Catholic media will continue to publish reports that accentuate these divisions among members of the Church; during those times, it is worth it to recognize the seriousness of the issue that these shepherds engage and the sincerity, mercy and pastorality with which they respond.

The next year will be an exciting time for the Church. I look forward to keeping abreast of the internal debate and I will be grateful when the Church, in Her wisdom and with His guidance, can show the way through this dilemma and continue to show compassion, charity and mercy to those Catholics, whether civilly divorced and remarried or annulled and married again in the Church, experience the pain of a broken marriage.