The Greatest Argument For A Trump Presidency EVER!

Pope Francis said WHAT St. Francis? Referencing whom?

I think this from # 66 of Laudato si says a lot about Pope Francis:

Saint Bonaventure held that, through universal reconciliation with every creature, Saint Francis in some way returned to the state of original innocence.[40]

In some way, eh? State of original innocence? That would be before Adam and Eve got the heave-ho from paradise. So maybe, in some way, the pope's patron was cured of original sin, placing him second only to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was conceived without it! Why haven't we heard about this before Laudato si?

Because we have not been reading our St. Bonaventure, who floats this arresting speculation in The Major Legend of Saint Francis, VIII, 1, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2, New York-London-Manila, 2000, 586 -- which I know from reading Laudato si footnote 40 (of Francis's 172).

The next sentence says more:

This is a far cry from our situation today, where sin is manifest in all its destructive power in wars, the various forms of violence and abuse, the abandonment of the most vulnerable, and attacks on nature.

Pope Francis is on firm, well-traveled ground here, except that what it's a far cry from is the state of innocence granted to St. Francis because of his universal reconciliation with every creature, which we know because the early Franciscan Bonaventure mentioned it in his Life of the saint..

So Pope Francis bolsters his argument for saving the earth with a throwaway line from a 13th-century philosopher-theologian writing a book about the revered founder of his own religious order.

One foot in the 21st century as a prophet against man-made global warming, the other in the 13th as off-the-wall homilist. That's our pope.

Mainstream media ignoring Planned P. videos

Camille Paglia: “Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” - gives "recent example" of their "persisting insularity":

When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was released. 

But the videos were being run nonstop all over conservative talk shows on radio and television.  It was a huge and disturbing story, but there was total silence in the liberal media.  That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional.  The liberal major media were trying to bury the story by ignoring it. 

She used to belong to Planned and supports "unconstrained reproductive rights," but was 

horrified and disgusted by those videos and immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the conduct of Planned Parenthood officials.  But here’s my point:  it is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day.  You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.

Planned un-parenthood on the cutting block

Senate GOP Fast-Tracks Bill To Defund Planned Parenthood

WASHINGTON -- After a group of GOP senators huddled Tuesday afternoon to discuss the recently released undercover "sting" videos of Planned Parenthood, Republicans unveiled legislation to strip the family planning provider of its federal funding.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fast-tracked the legislation Tuesday night using Rule 14 of Senate procedure, setting up a procedural cloture vote to move the bill to the floor as early as Monday. That all but assures the bill will get a final vote before Senators depart for August recess.

Take back some of the mean things some of us rightists have been saying about the old dog Mitch.

On too much reading

Sardonic Ex Curia: A.G. Sertillanges - On Intellectual Work: We want to develop breadth of mind, to practice comparative study, to keep the horizon before us ; these things cannot be done without mu...

Shame and Redemption by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2014

Shame and Redemption by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2014


This Dalrymple one smart fellow:

Scandal delights us because it lends
respectability to our prurience and allows us to indulge in the most
pleasurable of all emotions: righteous indignation. Scandal also reveals
important or successful people to have feet of clay and thereby soothes
our resentment at not being important or successful ourselves. It is
therefore not surprising that we in Britain are good at it.

We in Britain? We in lots of countries.

Chicago Area Project received money despite series of problems, paper trail - Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Area Project received money despite series of problems, paper trail - Chicago Sun-Times