Ubi Petrus

Ignorant Redneck asks for our prayers for his daughter:

My youngest daughter was in an auto accident yesterday at about 2:30 PM. She sustained broken bones in her face, facial lacerations, and some brain injury. We have made the first 24 hour hurdle–no significant swellin of the brain, and a stable intercranial pressure. (She has a shunt and some monitoring equipment implanted in her head.) The facial fractures are considered minor–everything is in place and the fractures are clean.

Her updated status:

Meg is still listed in serious condition, but she is showing some signs of improvement. She opened her eyes a bit today. The nurse saw it ans asked her to do it again and she did. she also wiggled her fingers on request, and her toes. The wrong toes, but she did hear and understand, and wiggle them.

My sister was in a car accident as a teenager (she’ll admit, it was her fault) so I have a small idea of what IR is going through. St. Luke, pray for the doctors in whose hands she has been placed!

I was going to blog on the brain-dead article in the Times regarding the Church’s recent statements on bioethics and the environment. But then I saw that Mark Shea beat me to it:

To begin with is the whole “rules based” approach of the author, which is fundamentally tone deaf to the fact that the faith is about relationship, not breaking rules. Off on that wrong footing, the author then makes it sound like the Vatican has added new “mortal sins” to some traditional list in order to keep up with Euro-trendiness. As is often the case, Dante somehow becomes an extension of the Magisterium (and the author even concludes with a list of official looking hellish punishments for the traditional seven deadlies, all derived from the Inferno).

Since he said pretty much everything I was going to, I’ll just leave you to read his post rather than repeating it here.

I recently finished Mike Aquilina‘s book, The Mass of the Early Christians. I’ve been sufficiently busy that I haven’t had a chance to write even this short review until now, much to my chagrin. Suffice it to say, Mike has done it again – the book is fantastic.

If you’re looking for an exhaustive source review of every single patristic source, this slim volume won’t give you what you want. If, however, you want a good, solid overview of the writings of many of the Church Fathers on the Mass – and even some heretical and pagan writings – this is the book for you. Unlike some of Mike’s other books he doesn’t just let the Fathers do the talking in this tome, he also takes up the opportunity to do some instruction of his own. I simply can’t say how necessary that is if in no other area than that surrounding the Discipline of the Secret whereby the early Fathers would be (at best) elliptical in their remarks on what happened during the Mass. Without Mike’s most helpful commentary the reader would feel lost reading the early writers’ statements and could easily conclude that they really didn’t see the Mass in the same fashion we do today, and a horrible mistake that would be.

One other tribute to this book is Mike’s foresight to include not just the Church Fathers but also heretics and pagans. We so often know, or at least have an inkling, what the Church has believed and said, but yet we rarely it seems look to see what others said about the Church. That insularity was hardly a mark of the early Church, even during the persecutions. Since this dialog necessarily had two sides it is critical to know what the “other” side had to say in order to understand the Fathers’ responses. It would be, in a way, like trying to explain the transition from the Apostles’ Creed to the Nicene Creed without mentioning Arianism – possible, but so desperately much more shallow.

I can virtually guarantee I didn’t get the full depths of what I read in this book the first time. That first time, however, will not be the last. If you like patristics or liturgy or history or just the Church herself buy the book. If you don’t like patristics when you start the book, you’re likely to by the time you’re done.

It’s a “thing” for me to always assume I’m missing something when I see someone do something I believe to be wrong. That habit really grew in me when I was still in my conversion process and I was reading Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium vitae – his arguments were so contrary to what I’d thought and yet so well thought out I realized I just might not know everything there was to know on a given subject.

So, with that said, I’m assuming that I’m missing something here. Have I missed somewhere that gives permission to proclaim the Gospel at Mass using an alternation of priest, lay reader and song? It went something like this: Father reads a portion of the Gospel, then the cantor pops in for a refrain, then a lay leader reads some, back to the cantor, to the other reader, then the cantor, back to Father and around again. Now I know on Palm (Passion) Sunday it is allowed that the Passion be read in parts, but I have never seen that allowance made for any other day of the year. Did I miss something? I’ve checked the GIRM, Redemptionis sacramentum and all sorts of sites that Google popped up, but I’ve not found a single source that suggests this is allowed. Someone tell me I’ve missed something and that I did not witness the abuse of invention that I think I did. Put another way, there are times when I hate being right, and this would be one of them.

You Are a Colon

You are very orderly and fact driven. You aren’t concerned much with theories or dreams… only what’s true or untrue. You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched. You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren’t subject to whim or emotions. Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice. (But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!) You excel in: Leadership positions You get along best with: The Semi-Colon

Speaking of my wifely-dearest, I’m sure she’d agree that she’s sick of me being right all the time. Right honey? Ah well. I wonder how long it’ll take before I can lure her into the exquisite joy that is St. Blogs.

It seems I’ve finally guilted my wife into the blogosphere. Okay, I didn’t really intend to do it, but sometimes I’m just more effective than I intend to be I guess. My best guess is she’ll be blogging mostly about cross-stitch and quilting but one never knows – I started this blog with the intention of writing about a mix of high-tech and my hobbies. You can see just how far that idea got. Anyway, do hop over and say “hi” even if you (like me, still) don’t have the first clue about quilting, cross-stitch or anything involving a needle and thread.

You Are Black Pepper

You may be considered ordinary by some, but you’re far from boring. You elevate the mood of any discussion, and people miss you when you’re not around. You are secretly very dominant and powerful. Most can only take you in small doses.

Which is actually quite funny when one takes into account how much black pepper my father uses prior to eating. Anything. The one time in my life I saw him eat fried eggs, they were black – and not because they were burned.

I’m not quite sure where to go with this…

The biblical Israelites may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor.

Writing in the British journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.

And then, as if that wasn’t enough fun, the good professor just has to explain how he knows what these effects are:

Shanon wrote that he was very familiar with the affects of the ayahuasca plant, having “partaken of the … brew about 160 times in various locales and contexts.”

So now we’re asserting that taking hallucinogenic drugs makes someone a subject matter expert. I wonder if he can get SME fees in court for this kind of knowledge.

Of course, leave it to a good Rabbi to have the best last word:

Some biblical scholars were unimpressed. Orthodox rabbi Yuval Sherlow told Israel Radio: “The Bible is trying to convey a very profound event. We have to fear not for the fate of the biblical Moses, but for the fate of science.”

This whole thing just begs for a fisk, but there just isn’t enough meat on the bones to even make it worth boiling them. One does wonder from where the funding for this study came – someone may be looking for a refund. What some people won’t do in an attempt to disprove the Bible…

Fr. Mike Fones, O.P., over at Intentional Disciples asks a heartily dangerous series of “What if?” questions. Between him, Fr. Philip Neri Powell and John da Fiesole at Disputations there are times I feel like I’m surrounded by Dominicans.

I have to admit that Fr. Mike’s question about taking your own mortality seriously hit me perhaps harder than usual today, and for the strangest of reasons. I just finished watching the Babylon 5 series the other day and in the last episode the core character, John Sheridan, realizes that he is dying and the show plays out his last few days. It is an interesting intersection that I should watch that episode at a time when we are called to deepen our reflection on the intensity of the last days of our Lord and how they lead to the incalculable brightness of the forever that is to come. As I told a co-worker today, ever since then I’ve been contemplating death (in the classic, stoic sense of contemplation, of course) and my appreciation for the limits of our time here has deepened considerably. It’s troubling, it’s frightening, it’s scary, it’s … well, it’s a lot of things. But God doesn’t put a limit on our time here out of spite – as the Pope has reminded us, in this fallen state immortality would seem a prison in time. It serves as a very good reminder that we don’t have forever to get around to doing the things that matter. There is, somewhere, that fine line between patience and procrastination; the trick I think is riding as close to that line as possible.