Sun-Times make non-endorse decision in nick of time
Sun-Times endorsements no more: With this in mind, the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board will approach election coverage in a new way. We will provide clear and accurate information about who the candidates are and where they stand on the issues most important to our city, our state and our country. We will post candidate questionnaires online. We will interview candidates in person and post the videos online. We will present side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ views on the key issues. We …
Strunk & White for preachers
Apologies all around for blanket assertions at Chicago Catholic News 8/22 about preaching, in which I forgot the importance of loving the sinner while hating the sin.
NOT that we have sin here, NOR people trying to deceive for ulterior motives. ON THE CONTRARY, we have generous souls seeking to elevate listeners to new understanding and commitment. It’s not the people I condemn but the sermonizing THAT COULD BE BETTER.
So how about a few ideas, like:
What about (self-imposed) TIME LIMITS FOR SERMONS, say ten minutes for Sunday, three or four for week days? This calls for TIGHT WRITING, a heavy dose of Strunk & White’s OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS.
That’s onetime Cornell U. English prof William Strunk Jr. and his onetime student, the essayist E.B. White, in their book The Elements of Style, which would make good (spiritual) reading for any preacher.
A few other of the S&W rules, adapted to preaching:
* PLACE YOURSELF IN THE BACKGROUND: It’s the message not the messenger. Not “I was reading a book the other day, and it said . . . ” but “Life is short, says So & So, who died at a young age,” etc. Recital of one’s personal experiences puts focus on the preacher, which is not where it’s supposed to be.
* WRITE IN A WAY THAT COMES NATURALLY: Not forced, but reflecting one’s own reading and listening, one’s own self. Try hard but not too hard. In any case, beware the pedantic, the bombastic, the harsh, the sentimental. Wear yourself lightly in the pulpit.
* REVISE AND REWRITE: Tom Fitzpatrick won a Pulitzer with copy he sent off in a sitting, one page at a time to the city desk. He had just come off the street with “days of rage” protesters in Lincoln Park, cops in pursuit. But he had also come off a dozen years of writing on deadline. Most of us — “even the best,” say S&W — have to take more time.
* DO NOT OVERWRITE: Beware the “sickly sweet word, the overblown phrase,” say S&W. Less is sometimes more. If you lean that way and can’t help yourself, then write something as good as Solomon’s Song of Songs, say S&W. Can you do that?
* DO NOT OVERSTATE: It takes only one “carefree superlative” to trigger a turning off of the rapt attention the preacher craves.
* DO NOT AFFECT A BREEZY MANNER: Ouch, ouch, and double ouch. It’s what we find “across vast expanses of journalistic prose,” say S&W. (In columns, for instance.) It’s not what the worshiper is looking for, we think. We hope not, anyhow.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE THOUGHT FACTORY: Is there room for a little fatalism in the Catholic psyche, otherwise known as trust in providence? A little not thinking you can make a difference but should relax a little and just let things happen? Time for more of the old praying as if all depends on God in addition (naturally) to acting as if it depends on you.
We could do with less self-flagellation in this respect — worrying about the world, the church, our parish, our income, our families, even our immortal souls. “Deus providebit” (God will provide) may have been overdone, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it.
For whom the writer writes
Where [his essays] fail to reach the reader’s heart, it is not so much because they are fundamentally disjointed, as if made up of sentences jostled together like so many mutually repellent particles [he wrote from his journals]; as because from the manner of his composition Emerson often missed what is the essence of good rhetoric, that is to say the consciousness of his hearer’s mind as well as of his own.
We hear him as it were talking to himself, with no attempt to convince by argument or to enlighten by analysis. If our dormant intuition answers to his, we are profoundly kindled and confirmed; otherwise his sentences may rattle ineffectually about our ears. [Italics added]
Sorry about all those italics, but how wise More’s critique. You either resonate with E. or you don’t. His is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, no offense intended, etc.
Yes, the writer for publication keeps his readers in mind. They dictate style, argument, even content. Whom he writes for is important.
Of course, Ezra Pound rejects this. No writing on demand for him, and he largely got away with it. But most of us can’t and don’t.
New church
St. Luke’s, River Forest, 6:30 mass Mon-Sat. Darkened main church, lit-up back-of-altar chapel, where priest performs at small table altar, Pews set up for dozens, most of them filled today. Entered after mass had started to sound of male (!) singing gustily up front, took place halfway up. Beautiful. Can worship there in virtual cocoon in beautiful gothic building. Singing so good, you’d think they were monks. Homily easily ignored, ditto priest and whatever mannerisms he manifests. Will go there again. Easy drive, I could even walk it.
Wodehouse for all, a catholic treatment
Latin Mass Mag also goes small-c catholic:
If you haven’t read P.G. Wodehouse, you have no business saying you have lived and you really should remove such claims from your business card.
That’s Susie Lloyd’s opener for her “The Pointless Peerless P.G. Wodehouse” — “Notes from the Real World” feature for the Spring 2010 issue. Available online soon, they say, for $1 here.
It’s followed by an essay on how “Religion” adapted to the world of today, subtracting “sacrifice” from mass and life, by a Spanish priest, founder of a congregation with priests in Spain, U.S., Ecuador, and Chile, Rev. Alfonso Galvez, who has not only an appreciation of what’s been happening in RC-ism for 50 or so years but (wonder of worders) a literary feel for how to tell it.
More to come about Latin Mass.
Introducing Latin Mass Magazine
Reading my Latin Mass Magazine, I find a review by Walter M. Hudson of Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (Harper Collins, 2007). Tends to exonerate Pius XII, says reviewer, who is an interesting type, a U.S. Army “active duty Lt. Colonel” writing his Ph.D. dissertation in military history.
More later on this magazine, subtitled “the journal of Catholic culture and tradition.” It’s a quarterly with a bi-coastal identity — Ramsey, NJ for subscriptions, Santa Paula, CA for editorial submissions.
Its extended mission statement:
To make known the treasures of Catholicism within the context of a Western culture that is in the process of rejecting the Faith responsible for its greatness.
The Latin Mass magazine is one of the fastest growing Catholic periodicals in the country.To offer an antidote to the universal phenomenon of an accelerating secularism that is hostile to the One True Church and the salvific charge given to it by our Lord.
To disseminate through a variety of disciplines the fullness of Catholic culture and fight against the corrupting influence of the compartmentalization of knowledge.
Some Key Means of Accomplishing the Mission:
Develop The Latin Mass journal into the intellectual arm of Catholics working for the return of the Church to tradition and authentic organic development.
Identify, develop and publish writers committed to Catholic liturgical, spiritual, theological and cultural traditions.Organize educational conferences that will offer priests and faithful (often isolated because of their views and dispositions) a sense of hope and rekindle enthusiasm for grassroots propagation of the Faith.
Establish a study center(s) of well-formed priests who will live and work together on various research and publication projects that will assist the articulation of Catholic tradition. These same priests would:
• Host Catholic writers and journalists from around the world at the center(s).
• Develop the intellectual requirements for the journal and conferences.
• Welcome brother priests from around the world and provide them a
place to gain perspective through healthy priestly camaraderie.
More than a mouthful, but each issue (of two that I have in hand) has two or more arresting essays that command attention. More later . . .
Fish hooks and loud music
Hit the light fantastic last night on Milwaukee Ave., where a bar called Cole’s had art pieces hung about, including two out-sized, stylized fish hooks by Jim Bowman Jr. — his first metal-sculpting in two years. Nice stuff, stylized and stylish, I say, in which judgment I am a fairly reliable source, in habit of preserving at least scraps of integrity in the midst of pride in what-comes-from-offspring.
Cole’s is what I’d call a somewhat grungy place. Grungy goes too far. How’s “unadorned,” except for the objets d’art on the wall. So not unadorned. Not grungy except slightly, and I said somewhat, so let’s forget about it, OK?
And pay attention to this about Cole’s:
Current Draft [on tap]
Lagunitas IPA
Bell’s Oberon
North Coast Old # 38 Stout (Nitro tap)
Flying Dog Gonzo Porter
Two Bros Domaine Dupaige French Country Ale
Scrimshaw Pilsner
However, I will not backtrack from LOUD. The front room — it’s a long, narrow place, with bar in front, plus pool table just inside the entrance off Milwaukee — was loud, from the crowd talking but also from the electronically amplified music, first cousin to Musak, which came from the rear, the venue room.
I entered 9 p.m. or so in search of #1 Son and friend and maybe to find also #2 Son and/or ## 1 and 3 Daughters, none of whom were to be found. First I shouldered my way through the front (bar) room, quickly seeing that I was three times the age of almost all and probably double the age of all. No child of mine in sight.
Kept going to back (venue) room, where I saw men and women in their 20s shoulder to shoulder ENJOYING THE MUSIC which I found PAINFUL. Not the sound itself, that is, the lurching and pounding and blaring by the half dozen or so performers on the small stage, but THE VOLUME!
This is how they torture them at Guantanamo, I briefly considered, victimized temporarily by the left-wing mediums’ characterization of that holding place for terrorist suspects. But torture nonetheless. I had to turn and flee to the front room. If my children had been there, I would have had to pull them out, as I would from a blazing fire.
Later, #1 Son and his friend and I sat as near the front door as we could, sometimes in the way of the pool shooters, nursing beers (mine a PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon) and managing a half hour or so of steady, enjoyable conversation. Yet later, we repaired to the sidewalk for fresh air, there to meet Mike and Chris and finally #2 Son. 20 minutes or more of chatting, and I was off (early by some standards) for my ride (in pounding rain) back to Oak Park.
Loved it.
Bush-Carter dream, camaraderie, the press, pills
Wild dream: Chicago is proud of her pregnant colored people, says GW Bush in dream by blogger in which W is doing a Jimmy Carter-type baby-sitter stint, putting eight infants to bed one after the other, with four more to go, talking about it on TV.
German missile makers: “Camaraderie reinforced by secrecy created a culture of indifference to morally reprehensible objectives” among civilian scientists working on rockets for the German govt in late 30s, early 40s, concludes Michael B. Petersen in his Missiles for the Fatherland (Cambridge, 2009), per unsigned short review in TLS, 9/25/09.
Like Jesuits and other priests in the matter of sexual abuse? One for all for one taken to extremes?
Beware newspapers: Junior cipher staffers in British HQ in WW2 were advised not to read newspapers, “lest press speculations muddle them when they worked on real facts.”
Thus reviewer of Richard Holmes’s Churchill’s Bunker (Profile, 2009). (TLS 9/25/09)
Good advice for anyone not well versed in biases and predilections of mass mediums?
A pill in time: Also in WW2, Churchill and foreign secy. Anthony Eden had cyanide pills to be taken in case of capture. Per Antony Beevor in D-Day (Viking, 2009).
Nobel winners, Oak Park socialist
Something literary: William Butler Yeats got a Nobel prize in 1924, and the British literary establishment objected. Ezra Pound said do it again, that is, elect another Irishman, namely the exile James Joyce, whose Ulysses had been stopped in both U.S. — 500 copies “seized and burnt in Washington” — and Britain — “another 500 seized and destroyed in Southampton — in the former without a word of complaint from any writer “of standing.”
Neither a Brit nor an American should get the prize therefore, said Pound, without whose early generous help Joyce may never have come to the world’s attention.
Something else literary: Henry James had to be cajoled into writing a commendation of fellow novelist Wm Dean Howells when H. was being honored in the U.S. What he wrote was not used, being insufficiently laudatory.
Both items from: Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, With Pound’s Critical Essays and Articles About Joyce (New Directions).
Oak Park political: Socialist Bill Barclay at a Fall of ’09 meeting the library: In his speech the night before, Obama “gave us permission to hate insurance companies.” Health insurance, he specified when I asked him later to verify it. It was a regular meeting of Oak Park truth-and-jusice commission, socialists and other radical leftists.
Trip down academic lane: Boccacio vs. Chaucer vs. church
At Dominican U in RF last night, Robert Hanning from Columbia U. on confession in the middle ages. Title led me to expect a socio-cultural explication but he was about close reading of Bocaccio and Chaucer.
I found the former heavy-handed in his slashing attack on church practice, producing cartoon characters — opera boffo? — none of them credible or noteworthy. The latter — dear Geoffrey — produced memorable people and made same points with relative understatement. Subtlety, thy name is not an Italian one.
Considered a q. during post-lecture q&a, where was holy mother church during all this? Besides indexing Bocaccio. But H. was not attuned to that, or seemed not to be, or had simply ruled that out a la monograph-style, not to mention journal-ready text with references and attributions right and left.
Appropriate, in that he was keynoting a joint meeting of the Illinois Medieval Assn. and the Midwest body of medievalists, this in DU’s near spanking-new Parmer Hall on west side of burgeoned if not still burgeoning campus.
From which I exited on Thatcher, by the way, using the easement much disputed by tree-huggers and forest preservers. The trees did not cry out at me as I hung a left and headed south.
A nice evening, for $10 that included a sip of wine and bite of something beforehand, sitting and watching medievalists chatter in clumps. A look at the ivory tower, you might say, without prejudice.
But I had to think about what Ezra Pound would say, he who moved ever in the mainstream of (literary and other) life and preferred jumping to (fascinating, engaging) conclusions. Takes all kinds.
