Our pro-life president

http://www.lifenews.com/nat4757.html


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090121/pl_nm/us_obama_regulations

http://lifenews.com/nat4893.html

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11856742

W.H. Auden and the Imago Dei

"With Auden's turn to Christianity after his emigration to the United States in 1939, his poetic theory took on a vocabulary drawn less from psychology and more from theology. But he consistently described poetry in ways that suggest he saw it as modelling a non-coercive love only theoretically possible in social bonds or actual personal relationships. 'In a successful poem,' he wrote in 'The Virgin and the Dynamo,' 'society and community are one order and the system may love itself because the feelings which it embodies are all members of the same community, loving each other and it.' (DH, p69). Behind this proposition would seem to be the notion that poetic form can exemplify a reconciliation of human sameness and difference through its negotiation of the semantic multiplicity of language itself and the emotional multiplicity of the poet. Were such patterned arrangements carried out in society, Auden acknowledges, the result would be totalitarianism, but precisely because art is gratuitous - pointless, unnecessary - it provides what he calls an 'analogy' to 'paradise' or 'the forgiveness of sins.' Poetry, in other words, is an emblem of what Auden liked to term 'the City' in Augustine's sense - the City of God. Such verbal and emotional orders, however, are radically at odds with modernity, which the later Auden habitually attacks for the destructive sameness compelled by totalitarian systems and capitalist mass culture. Poetry's voice may amount to no more than that of a 'suburb of dissent,' but it marginality makes possible an intimacy that modern mass society would not otherwise tolerate. Ultimately, for Auden, Eros and Agape seem to merge in his views of poetry. In Secondary Worlds (1968), he defined poetic meaning as 'the outcome of a dialogue between the words o the poem and the response of whoever is listening to them,' a deeply interpersonal process yielding 'the kind of knowledge implied by the biblical phrase "Then Adam knew Eve his Wife": knowing is inseparable from being known' (SW, p.114). From this angle, all poetry can be read as love poetry, for all poems bear the potential for intimate self-revelation, by both poet and reader.'

- Richard R. Bozorth, "Auden: Love Sexuality and Desire." From the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden


I recently had a fruitful exchange with the Ochlophobist on the topic of Auden's poetry, and after reading this essay, I am even more convinced that the Ochlophobist's insights on Auden are correct. Bozorth's thesis is itself not particularly interesting - he spends most of the essay exploring Auden's career through the lens of gay/lesbian studies, and ends up expressing deep confusion over the tension between Auden's semi-public homosexuality and his persistent attitude that "homosexuality was psychologically or morally suspect." But I find it interesting that even through such distorted lenses, Bozorth seems to glimpse the deeper aesthetic that drive's Auden's work, particularly in his concept of poetry's gratuitousness and its capacity for revelation. Pace Bozorth, however, I would argue that for Auden, poetry is gratuitous, not because it is pointless or useless, but because the Latin root of 'gratuitous' points us towards an object which can help us ascend to a higher plane than the visible and material, perhaps even to that Augustinian City which Bozorth invokes. Similarly, I would argue that for Auden, poetry succeeds not because it is a revelation of the Self, but because it reveals the human person. I am fascinated by Auden because I think he sees in the human person a glimpse of the imago dei, and the entire story of Creation contained therein. Thus Auden sees clearly the modern distortions the imago as well as the possibility of its redemption, via the ascent of eros into agape that Bozorth describes. In his poetry and apparently in his life also, Auden captures the tension between the reality of that distortion and the possibility of that redemption which characterizes human existence this side of the Eschaton. It is this tension that Bozorth cannot see, and which causes him such critical confusion. It is also what makes Auden a deeply Christian poet and worthy of regular reading.

Ross Douthat on RJN

"Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things. I don't know exactly when my family began subscribing, but I know it was before we became Catholics - and I know that long before I could quite figure out exactly what, say, Rene Girard meant when he talked about mimesis and the crucifixion, I was reading Neuhaus' sprawling "Public Square" column every month. I would call it a proto-blog, that feature, with its mix of long and short material, and its cover-the-waterfront feel, but that does it an injustice: The very best bloggers strain and fail to achieve the mix of range and rigor that seemed effortless for Neuhaus, and the ease with which he moved between esoteric theological disputes and the latest culture-war fracas. Richard Dawkins likes to say that Charles Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Month after month, issue after issue, Richard John Neuhaus - through his writing, and also through the writers he cultivated - demonstrated to my adolescent and early-twentysomething self that it was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian."


My sentiments exactly.

Richard John Neuhaus 1936 - 2009

There simply are not enough words, and if there were, I could not put them in the right order, to fully express the intellectual and spiritual debt which I owe to Fr. Neuhaus. It sounds strange to say such a thing about a man I never met, but it is nonetheless true. Looking back, I can see that it was my regular encounter with his work in First Things that started to prepare me for my intellectual and spiritual journey into the Church. It seems ridiculous to think that reading a public policy journal could lead one into the greatest spiritual adventure of one's life, but there it is. I do not see how I would have been reconciled to the Church had Father Neuhaus not been such a faithful servant in the tasks of public life to which he was given. Earlier tonight I put my three sons to bed and it gave me pause to wonder at how different it all could have been had I not absorbed the joyful sense of spiritual and intellectual adventure that permeated Fr Neuhaus' writing. It was from Fr Neuhaus that I first glimpsed the deep beauty of the Catholic teaching on the married state, and of the joy that comes from faithfully living one's vocation in life. It was from Fr Neuhaus that I learned to appreciate the simple and humble blessedness that comes from spiritual fidelity to one's state in life, be it great or small. And as a man given to deeply-held prejudices and hasty judgments in intellectual discourse, I learned from Fr Neuhaus the virtue of the old Thomistic saw - "Seldom affirm, never deny, always distinguish." Requiescat, RJN.

Mother of God

For the most part, I think the various critiques of the Ordinary Form of the mass made by traditionalists are silly and overblown. But every once in a while, I encounter liturgical errors that are downright preposterous, and I start to wonder if there isn't something more to their argument. Today's solemnity supplies a good example:

From the concluding prayer at today's mass, the 1973 ICEL translation is as follows:

Father,
as we proclaim the Virgin Mary
to be the mother of Christ and the mother of the Church,
may our communion with her Son
bring us to salvation.


Now the entire purpose of today's mass was to celebrate the title "Mother of God," a theological formula explicitly affirmed in contradiction to the Nestorian title "Mother of Christ." Ending a mass dedicated to a specific orthodox theological formula by invoking the precise opposite of that formula is very, very bad liturgical form, to say the least. One's sympathies for the SSPX begin to warm ever so slightly....