Devin and I have various friends who have various adventures that make us feel very nearly envious.  Okay, that actually do make me envious, in a Christian sort of way.

Our friends, the Coopers, are spending the year living in Cambridge, where Kody is studying the Summa of St. Thomas.  In Latin.  Because he’s just dedicated like that.

And, Devin’s friend, Gerardo, enjoyed very rustic elk hunting in the Rockies last week and got to savor lovely things that I only dream of now that I live in Austin, things like snow and mountains and yellow aspen trees.  So jealous.

Thanks, Garcias and Coopers, for reminding us that there is a very big world beyond our front door.  I can’t wait until Devin’s company transfers him to the branch in Germany.  Or India.  Or Romania.  Ideally, someplace that gets snow.  Okay, I guess India’s out.

Absolutely love this video.

Sounds like young Mr. Einstein is employing a little St. Augustine, hmm? Evil as the absence of good.

Oh, he is such a copycat.

I found the website of Irene Vilar today via Feminine Genius.  I feel like my head is swimming when I try to wrap my mind around what Ms. Vilar appears to be saying.  Much of it is confusing ethnocentric-experiential-post-modern mumbo jumbo, but the stark reality of what she has done is like an exclamation point at the end of a very long and confusing paragraph.  This dear woman.  This dear confused wounded sinful woman.

This statement of hers especially struck me: “As speaker of testimony, I wish to stand as representative of women who have remained silent about the power struggles of their reproductive bodies, especially of those whose bodies have acted out the emotional life and dramas of their families and countries. I wish to distance myself from the at times hyper individualistic mode of memoir writing, though I will inevitably remain forever such a writer. The story begins with a double bind: I’m fated to be misunderstood and my body will never forget the life interrupted that shall die with it.”

Power struggles with their reproductive bodies?  Marxism applied to motherhood.  Marxism in which the oppressed class is the woman and the oppressor is her fertility and the product of that fertility–her children.  A tiny baby the size of a “.” as her oppressor.  And, so, to continue reliving the class struggle and finding her freedom, she conceives again and again and has abortion after abortion. An “abortion addict” she calls herself.

It is the ultimate irony, the ultimate warping of the feminine.  Woman, who is designed by God to be particularly sensitive to nascent human life and particularly suited to its fulfillment and flowering, seeks her own fulfillment through the destruction of that nascent life.  It is so twisted that I have a hard time grasping it.

Dear sad empty sick Ms. Vilar.  I just ache for her, even as I feel perplexed revulsion.  Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for her.

What are the oldest complete or nearly complete Bible manuscripts that we have? When were they written?

Surely we have one from the 1st or 2nd centuries? No, we do not.
How about the 3rd century? Unfortunately we do not have one from even this century.
The first manuscripts we have are the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century.

Prior to this time, we have only have small fragments of parts of the Bible.

The Old Testament of the Codex Sinaiticus is in the Greek Septuagint version and contains deuterocanonical books which Protestants rejected in the 16th century as well as books in the New Testament which the Church determined to be non-inspired later in the 4th century:

The Greek Septuagint in the Codex includes books not found in the Hebrew Bible and regarded in the Protestant tradition as apocryphal, such as 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach. Appended to the New Testament are the Epistle of Barnabas and ‘The Shepherd’ of Hermas.

The Codex Vaticanus also includes the deuterocanonical books, but several books from the New Testament are missing, possibly due to them deteriorating over the centuries or possibly because they were not included.  It also seems possible that it contained non-canonical writings like 1st Clement.

Here again we have evidence of the canon of Scripture still being determined as late as the mid-300s. John Calvin claimed that the canon of Scripture was obvious to anyone with the Holy Spirit, as easily as discerning “black from white, sweet from bitter,” yet the historical reality demonstrates that it was not “self-evident” to any Christian; rather, the very human-looking process by which the canon was discerned took a long time, and in those centuries, many differing canonical lists were proposed.  Most Protestants today mimic Calvin by saying that the canon is self-evident (my Evangelical friend John is one of them).

Some Protestants also claim that the Catholic Church manipulated and altered historical writings to make them seem to support the Church’s positions on doctrinal issues. But if that were true, how could we rely on the Bibles we have, given that the earliest extant manuscripts are these two codices that date from the 4th century? They are copies of copies of copies of the original 1st century writings, none of which we have today. Anytime in those hundreds of years, an apostate Church could have maliciously altered the Bible to say what it wanted it to say, but the fact is that the Church reverenced the Scriptures then as she does now, and they were amazingly faithfully preserved as they had been handed on. For 1500 years, Catholic monks devoted their lives to painstakingly copying the Bible by hand. The canard that the Catholic Church systemically manipulated historical writings to fit her own evil agenda is shown to be a specious falsehood.

What is cool is that earlier this month, a scholar found another fragment belonging to the Codex Sinaiticus in the book binding in a monastery–the portion of the first part of Joshua where he is talking about them entering the Promised Land.

A paean is a hymn of praise–one of my SAT words I think which I never use.

You’ve probably by now seen the video of the school children singing Obama’s praises.  I can hardly get upset about it as it is what should be expected given the widespread Obama-love from all the people who view him as their secular messiah.

There was another kerfuffle recently over the National Endowment for the Arts being directed to produce Obama-supporting propaganda.

Then there was Obama’s address to all children in their schools a few weeks ago which fortunately was changed from promoting projects where children would think about ways they could help Obama and his goals to more of a “read to succeed” message of how children can reach their educational goals.

The media loves Obama.  The stars have aligned.  It will be a full-court press for the next three years (or seven) spinning even his worst mistakes and gaffes positively. And promotions like the ones we have seen in the past few weeks are just the tip of the iceberg.

In these years, I plan to do what I can to serve my country, love my family, and grow in virtue by God’s grace. But I don’t expect the hymns to Obama to die down anytime soon.

InsideCatholic.com – More Proof the Catholic Campaign for Human Development Should Be Eliminated.

“New, stunning, evidence has just been reported by LifeSiteNews.com that the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) is funding groups that advocate abortion and prostitution.”

More fodder for the cannon to explode the CCHD.

Autumn is my favorite season.  I awakens in me a longing for pumpkin pies and warm fires and popcorn and happy gatherings.  In central Texas, saying it’s the fall means the following:

1. Temperatures that are only in the 80s and, maybe, 70s
2. Everything is green again, after the oven-baking that was our summer

These are not exactly the sorts of things one pictures when one usually thinks of autumn, but it is a blissful change for me.  I imagine that I am living in New England and make up my own autumn, complete with mums blooming by the front door, pumpkin arrangements, cinnamon streusel muffins, and stew.

Where Devin and I hope to live one day; all it needs to be the perfect place is a view of the Rockies on the horizon and an open field for the viewing of sunsets and sunrises.

Another lovely aspect of fall around here is that our garden can grow again.  Devin generously planted our fall garden this weekend, with tomatoes, squash, and herbs.  We will begin sprouting our winter garden soon, with such lovely things as broccoli, khorabi, and cabbage; then, we will direct-seed carrots, onions, and so forth in early November.  Our chickens are now laying again, after the oven-baked summer that put them on hiatus, and our bees are flying busily, giving us high hopes for a fall honey flow.

Happy fall to you!

I’m a fan of the Internet Monk’s blog.  He’s a Baptist pastor with pizzazz.  I wanted to comment on this post he made about his attempt to find the “symbolic-only” belief about the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper in the history of the Church before Zwingli in the 1500s.

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to get a single question answered:What are the actual historical evidences, before Zwingli, for the Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper?

I’ve asked this question high, low, in-between and everywhere I could get a hearing.

Long story short: No answer. If there are evidences, then someone needs to write a book, asap. It’s long overdue.

Ulrich Zwingli was one of the magisterial Reformers and began (along with Luther) what became the Protestant Reformation.  He lived in what is now Switzerland and began his efforts to first reform the Church from within and not schism from her, but ultimately his actions led to schism, as did Luther’s.

Two Points for Honesty

Luther lived in Germany of course but in the 1520s after both of them began to promulgate their new ideas, these two men butted heads theologically: Luther rejected the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation for a slightly less “real presence” belief called sacramental union or consubstantiation.  Zwingli rejected any kind of “presence” of Jesus in the Eucharist for a symbolic/memorial view (very similar to the Baptist belief today).  They couldn’t agree on who had the right interpretation, and the pattern of Protestantism was set: No authority could decide between two competing interpreters of the Bible.

Interestingly, Luther said that if Jesus’ words: “This is my body” did not mean “This is my body” in some “real” way, then the Bible could not be accurately interpreted.  Zwingli disagreed: It seemed obvious to him that Jesus meant “This is symbolic of my body.”

So what’s the point?

The Internet Monk has asked and searched for years to try to find out whether Zwingli’s view on the symbolic-only Eucharist was an innovation of the 16th century or whether it was believed prior to that time by someone or some group in the Church.  The result: Nada, zip, zilch, no evidence.

Now perhaps there is evidence, and it is just really hard to find.  Perhaps, as my Baptist friend maintains, the Catholic Church destroyed all of the writings of the people who believed in such things, though it is unlikely since we have reams of writings by men and groups deemed heretics by the Church over the centuries.  More likely is the simple answer that the Church never believed that the Eucharist was only symbolic and that this teaching was a novelty of the 16th century, a heretical doctrine counter to the truth.

So is the Internet Monk going to become Catholic?  Not anytime soon:

The Baptist position requires that the early church go decisively wrong in a critical matter following the second century, with not only no dissenting majority, but no dissenting minority. Until Zwingli, the historical evidence for the Baptist position is restricted to interpretation of the New Testament and the Didache.

I am not opposed to seeing the church as mistaken when the evidence is persuasive. I believe the early church did go off track in some significant ways in the later second century.

Ulrich Zwingli

I love his honesty.  He is owning up to what his Baptist beliefs force him to conclude: The early Church went off the rails and into error in significant, critical ways…when? as early as the later second century! That means sometime around 180 or 190 AD.

Why are so many Baptists and other Protestants becoming Catholic?  Because they hold similar beliefs to the Internet Monk but then realize when they delve into, say, the canon of Scripture: “If the Church went off the rails on baptism, the Eucharist, the Mass, Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, and the priesthood by the third century, why do I believe that this same Church got the canon of the New Testament right over one hundred years later in the late 4th century?”

And the answer is: There is no principled reason to believe that the Church that made such “critical errors” on so many things did not also make a critical error in discerning which books were inspired by God and which were not.

All of a sudden the belief in sola Scriptura, the Bible alone, makes no sense because we cannot be certain that our Bible contains the exact books that God inspired and no others.

If Protestantism had an answer for this question, converts like me would have remained Protestant, and the droves of Christians converting every year would stop.

Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. “Now it’s time to buy some food,” she told several hundred people who came to watch. “Let’s shop!”

via The Yeoman Farmer: Organic Tuscan Kale.

Now that’s what I call “down to earth.”