Having avoided just using this blog for brief bulleted points on personal and mainstream news for the majority of its brief tenure I find that I am doing exactly that again after doing a “round-up, jambalaya and potpourri” only a few days ago. So here are a mix of personal news tidbits, my own views on some mainstream news stories and other miscellaneous tidbits of fact and information. Numbered items in no real order other than numerical are:
1. The Pope and Bishop of Rome has opened the door to the Catholic Church to those catholic Christians of the Anglican Communion. He has stopped short of creating an Anglican rite of the Catholic Church but he has stated that he will allow congregations to exist to be structured under their own discipline and use largely their existing liturgies. He has stated that although most ancient communions do not allow married men to become bishops and therefore they may not be able to practice their existing or hoped for episcopacy he will recognize the exercise of discipline by senior prelates. I did not get all this from the official Vatican website but if it is all true it is almost exactly what I would consider the very best possible pastoral decision. I was never a fan of Cardinal Jozef Ratzinger but Pope Benedict the XVI is making another extraordinarily good decision which shows that he really is capable of greatness and is in fact great in his own way. God Bless him. There are a few less obvious points to make:
GOOD
i. In America and other places where there are few Eastern Orthodox and Uniate Churches it will educate people a great deal about Church structure to see this in action if it can occur.
ii. It cannot help to make people in the Anglican Communion feel that Roman Catholics value their faith experience and faith communion.
PROBLEMATIC
i. The Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury and a number of others may feel that the Vatican is “sheep stealing” and this could become an obstacle to further unity and reconciliation.
ii. This will have the possible effect of obscuring the royalist aspect of Christian Tradition which (while I believe it is wrongly distorted and in one way overdrawn) is best preserved in Anglican tradition and is not so secure in Roman Catholicism but is very much one of two parts most at the heart of the historical Christ experience and phenomena on which all Churches and THE CHURCH must rest and abide.
Nonetheless, despite those who must be hurt and despite the imperfections of all real actions to do anything — This is a great day. If this is effected it will open the doors to futures which are being horribly cut-off from the Christian people. I wish everyone involved the best.
2. I went back to the University of Louisiana and bought a ticket and a spirit shirt as well as picking up a copy of my brother John Paul’s graduation year yearbook. I am a little excited about the Homecoming Game Saturday and will be hoping for an easy trip there and back, a good game and a fitting celebration.
3. My brother Joseph killed the first buck of his life here at Big Woods two days ago. He has killed a legal doe on a hunt before but not a buck. He killed and slaughtered it and his fiancee Brooke supervised the cooking and we all had delicious healthy tenderloin for lunch on Monday. There was of course a lot of meat left and that will feed various family members healthy, lean and tasty meat for a while (and probably some of his friends as well).
4. On the Lords of the Blog I was involved in dialog with New Zealanders that both brings back old memories and is leading to unusual places.
http://lordsoftheblog.net/2009/10/18/another-parliamentary-blog/
http://lordsoftheblog.net/2009/10/21/welcome-to-our-new-zealand-readers/
I have not had much to do with New Zealand since I lived there at seventeen.
5. The Phillies have achieved one of those really great sports achievements. They are truly defending World Series Champions in the way that term is seldom merited.
6. The movie Amelia has come out and though I have not seen it myself I am eager to see it. Amelia Earhart is one of those figures who really does a great deal to define American culture in the twentieth century. She did it not by leading a movement but by being influential although not typical or ordinary.
7. I have found out that despite winning the first prize for market viability, the people’s choice award and building one of few or no other hurricane resistant homes in the solar decathlon the UL Team BeauSoleil finished near the bottom in the standings overall. I am clearly biased but cannot help but feel that this just one of billions of pieces of evidences that our world is careening out of control and is focused on glorifying the truly useless in such a way that it affects even good efforts like the Solar Decathlon.
Franksummers3ba's Blog 