From Devman the Moderator: For those joining us from Democrat blogs or forums, welcome!

A woman who is registered at our parish is running for State Representative on the Democrat ticket.  She appears to be very misinformed about Church teaching on the primacy of defending innocent life and marriage, despite the best efforts of our pastor to meet with her.  Because of her apparent failure to respond to his pastoral efforts to form her Church teaching, our pastor wrote the following letter to every family in the parish.  Awesome!

Imagine if Joe Biden’s pastor wrote such a letter?  Nancy Pelosi’s?  Le’ts keep praying for our pastors and bishops.

This recipe is fabulous.  It even turned my coarse wheat flour into moist bread with a wonderfully crusty crust.

The recipe.  My bread seriously looked like that.

And, here’s the video.

Aah, the joy of the Dutch oven.

I am loving my birthday gift, a Wonder Mill grain grinder.  Because of the need to soak grains and flour in order to neutralize their phytic acid, I have done little baking in recent years.  It was just too much work to soak flour in yoghurt when I wanted to bake bread or pancakes.  I began experimenting with buckwheat flour last spring and was encouraged.  Buckwheat is low in phytic acid, so there is less need to soak the stuff.  That meant that I could make short breads–pancakes, muffins, etc–without all the soaking headache.  However, buckwheat flour has a very distinct and bitter taste, which put a damper on certain baked goods, so I still hoped for a better option.

And, now, I have the grain mill.  And, it’s fabulous.  I can buy whole grain and soak it for 8 hours, thereby neutralizing all nefarious phytic acid, then dry my soaked grains, then mill them. 

I always imagined that wheat flour products were necessarily heavy and heavy.  Not so.  My whole wheat pancakes are super-light and have a wonderful nutty flavor.  And, the buckwheat flour that I mill is not bitter, but light and, pardon the redundancy, somewhat nutty. 

I have also just purchased whole oats (not the rolled or steel cut kind) and am trying to figure out what to make with oat flour; oats are very high in phytic acid, so I had actually stopped making granola, but, now that I can soak my oats, I’m going to try again.  (Why didn’t I just soak my rolled oats, you ask?  Try soaking rolled oats and see the gloopy mess that results).

One glitch I’ve encountered is making whole-wheat bread.  The flour that my Wonder Mill grinds seems to be a bit more coarse than commercial flour, which is great for making fluffy pancakes.  But, my bread dough has the consistency of cookie dough and turns out very dense.  I tried setting my mill on the “pastry flour” setting today and will see how this next batch of wheat bread turns out.  Any ideas, you flour-milling readers?

Wrong.

The National Catholic Register recently interviewed a young Hispanic woman who is attending a Catholic college and asked her about how she was thinking of voting.

“I like to be holistic in my approach to life issues….Crisis pregnancy centers and giving women the emotional support and resources needed to make the decisions are more important to me than the legal bickering, and Democrats tend to provide more funding for these types of social programs.”

Is that true?

No.  Sen. Obama does not support funding for crisis pregnancy centers:

Does Sen. Obama support continuing federal funding for crisis pregnancy centers? Why or why not?

No.

For whatever, reason, Sen. Obama and his staff don’t answer the second part of the question: Why don’t they support crisis-pregnancy centers?

In truth, Planned Parenthood and other abortion mills don’t provide emotional support for women who procure abortions.  That difficult job is instead done by faithful, caring people, like those at Project Rachel and at Rachel’s Vineyard retreats.  Why? Because Planned Parenthood can never admit that abortion hurts women and that it is something for which they need healing from.

If Sen. Obama truly supports women and their well-being, as well as choice, why doesn’t he support the choices and support offered, almost always by unpaid volunteers, by crisis pregnancy centers around the country?

Bear with me as I, a layman, attempt to synthesize threads of thought from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (TBK) and from Cardinal Ratzinger and apply them to our modern culture (in the United States in particular).

Elder Zosima is a (fictitious) pious monk of the Russian Orthodox Church in Dostoevsky’s story, and his talks are recorded after his death by Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers.  Zosima says in speaking of materialists (atheists) who deny any spiritual reality:

But the spiritual world, the higher half of man’s being, is altogether rejected, banished with a sort of triumph, even with hatred.  The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide!

For the world says: “You have needs, therefore satisfy them….Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them”–that is the current teaching of the world.  And in this they see freedom.

But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder….We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air.  Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires…
(bolding mine)

Zosima is contrasting this destructive philosophy with that of the Russian monk, which is one of love and virtue in following the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

This destructive philosophy is one with “if it feels good, do it”, “follow your bliss”, and can excuse any immoral action: If you are attracted to a person of the same-sex, act on that desire, for how can it be wrong?  If you want to lust after women, do so, it’s not illegal or even wrong to look at pornography in the privacy of your own home, and how can it be wrong when it is a natural desire?

If you get a girl pregnant, be a man and take her to have the abortion yourself, even pay for it to be responsible, but how can it be wrong to ruin your life with a baby when you don’t even want to marry this girl?  And if you are a parent, take your daughter to get the abortion if the boyfriend won’t be a man: Why should your daughter be punished with a baby?

Follow this thread, especially the bolded part above, with Cardinal Ratzinger’s following words about whether the Christian worldview is “pessimistic” while the post-modern worldview is “optimistic”:

The French Revolution saw the brith of the ideology according to which Christianity, because it believes in the end of the world, judgment, and the like, is by nature pessimistic, whereas modernity, which has discovered progress as the law of history, is by nature optimistic.  We now see that these comparisons are slowly dissolving.

We see the self-confidence of modernity increasingly crumble.  For it is becoming clearer and clearer that progress also involves progress in the powers of destruction, that ethically man is not equal to his own reason, and that his capability can become a capability to destroy.  Christianity in fact does not have such a notion that history necessarily always progresses, that, in other words, essentially things are always getting better for mankind.

When we read the Book of Revelation, we see that humanity actually moves in circles.  Over and over there are horrors that then dissipate, only to be followed by new ones.  Nor is there any prophecy of an inner-historical, man-made state of salvation.

The idea that human affairs necessarily get better and better has no support in the Christian outlook.  What does, on the other hand, belong to the Christian faith is the certainty that God never abandons man and that man therefore can never become a pure failure, even though today many believe it would be better if man had never appeared on the scene.
(bolding mine)

One of my friends, an atheist and materialist himself, has often asserted his belief that humanity, by virtue of evolution and social Darwinism, progresses and moves forward inevitably toward a more utopian harmony, just as Ratzinger and Zosima have described and then countered in the passages above.

I have seen this same un-Christian philosophy asserted by Sen. Obama and his followers:

Oprah Winfrey: “We’re here to evolve to a higher plane . . . he is an evolved leader . . . [he] has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in the Unvarnished Truth”

Gerald Campbell: “Obama has the capacity to summon heroic forces from the spiritual depths of ordinary citizens and to unleash therefrom a symphonic chorus of unique creative acts whose common purpose is to tame the soul and alleviate the great challenges facing mankind.”

Eve Konstantine: “Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings . . . He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence.”

And Obama himself: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Sen. Obama claims to be a Christian yet holds and professes the beliefs of atheistic materialists, secular humanists, and the dictators of relativism in our culture of death.

These philosophies, which deny God and the necessity of Christ for man’s communion and beatification, were foundational in the rise of Communist countries and have no support in the Christian outlook.

I am not the one that I have been waiting for, nor the one that you should be waiting for, and anyone who tells you that is speaking like an anti-Christ. Jesus Christ is the one you have been waiting for and upon him alone can you place all your hopes.

Katie and I are both reading Salt of the Earth, an interview with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict.

He answers questions from his boyhood to being enlisted in the Hitler Youth to becoming a priest, professor, and his role in the second Vatican council.

What is so awesome about it is how clearly he answers the questions.  Examples:

Interviewer Peter Seewald: “One can probably say that without your involvement, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council would have been unthinkable.”

Cardinal Ratzinger: “I feel that you are quite overestimating my role.”

Seewald: “Another of Hesse’s works, Steppenwolf, is among your favorite books.  The novel is considered one of the most significant documents of cultural pessimism and early existentialism…Does this description also have something to do with you?”

Cardinal Ratzinger:”No.”

Seewald: “In an early encomium, Professor Wolfgang Beinert had this to say about [you]: ‘Your theology was sovereign and masterly and inseparable from your person’…your language had a ‘classical radiance’.  Do you recognize yourself in this description?”

Cardinal Ratzinger: “I think that’s a bit too high-flown, as is usual with encomia.”

—

I am highlighting the particular passages where he bluntly steps aside from praise that he considers excessive–his humility really shines through.

What also shines through is his amazing understanding of world history and how Christ’s Church has moved, influenced, and developed throughout this history, as well as his understanding of Christian theology: He presents the Gospel clearly and without equivocation and elucidates how it is both ever-ancient and ever-new, exactly the solution for man’s problems today, as it has always been.

Salt of the Earth is informative both with regard to our Faith and to Pope Benedict the man.

Europeans call waiting in line “queueing”; I know this because I heard it in a recording of a live U2 concert in Ireland.

After our foster call “false alarm” last week, I called our caseworker and asked her if we were still “next in the queue” as far as getting a call goes.  She didn’t understand exactly, so I rephrased it as “next in line”, and she laughed and said that there is no line!

She reassured me that because our parameters are quite broad (any race, either gender, under age 2), we will very likely get another call sooner rather than later.  The first call came after about a week of being licensed, and now it’s been two weeks, so we’ll see.  The engineer in me wants to make a chart and then figure out the distribution, standard deviation, etc., but fortunately I am too lazy to do that.

So we are still waiting for our lives to be turned upside-down in rapid fashion when we get the call for one or two children.  Thanks for your prayers!

Come on, everybody.  Please pray with us for Our Lady of Victory to obtain a miracle from Jesus in this election.  So much hangs in the balance with this election.  The next president will likely appoint two or three new Supreme Court justices, who will likely hear cases involving Roe v. Wade, marriage (its protection or redefinition), the protection of private property (or a move toward increasing socialism), and so forth.  Your prayers count for so much.

And, definitely remember to vote.

This will take you half an hour, but you know it’s worth it.  Our Lord fasted and prayed for 40 days in the desert.  Let’s join him for nine days as we pray together for the election of the right president for our country.

First, pray the Rosary.  Don’t know how?  Learn here. 

Then, the prayers below. more…

Sen. Obama’s campaign is apparently up in arms over the recent interview Sen. Biden did with a Florida news station, where–shock of all shocks–the news woman actually asked him tough questions.

They’ve ended all interviews with this station, and I suppose are licking their wounds.  What’s interesting is that this is the first interview I have seen where either Sen. Obama or Sen. Biden have been asked tough questions and been pressed on them.

Pastor Rick Warren asked good questions but then of course Sen. Obama gets let off with “when life begins is above my pay grade” flashing that winning smile, and the question is not pressed.

Sen. McCain has faced tough questions since the primaries (even the supposed town-hall ones where many of the questions were made by Democratic plants in the audience); the media has continued to mock and grill Gov. Palin, as have people that I work with.

The latest thing they were insulting her for was that she “went to community colleges”.  I usually don’t take their bait, but this attack by my friends at work was mean and unfair.  I told them I know lots of people who went to community college (including myself).  Do we then denigrate these people?

Anyway, when the Democratic candidates are faced with a rare tough media outlet, they boycott it and flee crying unfair. They’re getting a taste of what Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin face everyday from the media.