Commitment, Continuity, and Conversation

The particular spirituality of the Appalachian Riders For Our Lady is based on our three foundational principles of commitment, continuity and conversation in addition to the general Catholic evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, obedience and stability adapted to a lay context. The Riders strive to promote a conversational culture, proclaiming Christ crucified, authentically Christian and Catholic, in the midst of a world largely lacking culture of any sort.  Our vows of commitment, continuity, and conversation do not necessarily mean that we have any natural inclination or talent in these areas. I’m a member of St George Melkite Greek Catholic parish in Sacramento. My booklist, which is in a way deep in history (each Rider, during their novitiate, settles on 24 books of primary importance), is:

• Bible, unabridged Revised Standard Version
• Horologion; Melkite Greek Catholic liturgy
• Vergil’s Aeneid; Sarah Ruden translation
• Songs for Pascha; St Ephrem the Syrian
• The Confessions; Saint Augustine
• Dante’s Divine Comedy; Anthony Esolen
• Comedies and Tragedies; Shakespeare
• Complete English Poems; John Donne
• Complete Poetry & Prose; Robert Frost
• The Translations of Seamus Heaney
• Mansfield Park & Emma; Jane Austen
• The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton
• The Brothers Karamazov; Dostoevsky
• Novels 1926-1954; William Faulkner
• History and Eschatology; N.T. Wright
• Hannah’s Children; Catherine Ruth Pakaluk
• Gospel According to John; St. Theophylact
• Catechism of the Ukrainian Catholic Church
• Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews; FF Bruce
• Catholic Theology; Thomas Joseph White
• Orthodox Christianity, v4; Hilarion Alfeyev 
• In the Beginning (John 1:1-18); A. Esolen
• For the Life of the World; A. Schmemann
• The Liturgy of the Hours; unabridged

The Appalachian Riders For Our Lady have a particular interest in the season of Ascensiontide, which we consider nearly as important as Advent and Lent.  My particular interest is: That ecclesial bodies with very different Ecclesiology seem to have very similar Christology. 

Christian Perspectives

The foundation of everything is Christ Jesus, and him crucified. However, beyond the personal aspects of that (reading, listening, prayer), what are the implications for our social relationships?

I want to commend the Catholic perspective to you. Of course, that raises several questions:

• Is it reasonable to speak of THE Catholic perspective?
• Is my characterization of this perspective warranted?
• Can one also speak of THE Protestant perspective, especially given the range of protestant ecclesial bodies?

I propose that the protestant perspective is that the Christian life is best lived and considered from the primary viewpoint of the individual or, at most, the congregation. On the other hand, I commend the Catholic perspective: the Christian life is best lived and considered from the primary viewpoint of the universal Church, the Bride of Christ, extended in spacetime and militantly subsisting in the Catholic Church whose chief steward is the bishop of Rome (for better or worse). Besides addressing those preliminary questions, I intend to commend the Catholic perspective in three aspects:

• better able to cope with adversity
• more resources for spiritual formation
• closer alignment with the scriptural canon

All these points are controversial; however, I intend not to argue for them but rather to chew on them.  The difference between a primarily individual perspective and a primarily ecclesial perspective also has a significant political component since the State desires no competitor to its hegemony (see, for example, Alan Jacobs biography of The Book of Common Prayer which documents how this worked out in England) and hence is inclined to favor an individual perspective which it can divide and conquer.

I’m also assuming that the more alive an entity, the more applicable the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In addition, whenever possible I’d like to phrase matters sociologically. A major advantage of a perspective more social than individual is that one can “check one’s answers”– the boredom of, for example, discussion about end-time scenarios or sectarian doctrine being that one can not check one’s theory in one’s day to day life and interactions with others as one can, on the other hand, regarding ethics and how to live in community. Somewhat related to this, I prefer to get my history indirectly, via literature.

On a personal level, I think the core of the Protestant error centers on the attempt to place faith above love (see Luther’s commentary on Galatians) contra Saint Paul and the Catholic tradition.

The noted Evangelical scholar Mark Noll, in the book ‘Is the Reformation Over’, argues that Catholic and Protestant disagreements really come down to different understandings of the nature of the Church.  I don’t disagree; however, I very much disagree with the view that “well, maybe so but that’s not important to me..it’s my personal relationship with God that is important.”  The nature of the Church is essentially intertwined with the work of the Holy Spirit, as is reflected in the Nicene creed.  God is able to sustain what was initially established (..I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it) and it is wrong-headed to try to start over on one’s own.

Technology is very important and clearly the most important technology is language. The people who know the most about language are not the philosophers but the poets, broadly defined.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” (Richard Feynman)

“The Catholic Church is the Church we mean when we say The church.” (Lenny Bruce)

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” (John von Neumann)

“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (William Faulkner)

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

The Strategy of Teaching

I aim to convey by my Little Library that I’m an orthodox Catholic of the Byzantine Thomist persuasion, who works as an English teacher and who likes to travel. As Northrop Frye says in the section on The Rhetoric of Non-Literary Prose in his book Anatomy of Criticism:

“…A good deal of the strategy of teaching is rhetorical strategy, choosing words and images with great care in order to evoke the response: ‘I never thought of it that way before,’ or ‘Now that you put it that way, I can see it.’ What distinguishes, not simply the epigram, but profundity itself from platitude is very frequently rhetorical wit. In fact it may be doubted whether we ever really call an idea profound unless we are pleased with the wit of its expression. Teaching, like persuasion, employs a dissociative rhetoric aimed at breaking down habitual response: the maddening prolixity of Oriental sutras results from this, and there are passages in the New Testament almost as dissociative as Gertrude Stein:

 ’That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life, (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us). That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.’

“Without trying to suggest that only good writers can be good philosophers, we may still observe that much of the difficulty in a philosophical style is rhetorical in origin, resulting from a feeling that it is necessary to detach and isolate the intellect from the emotions.”

Speaking of being a schoolteacher, here are another twenty four books: a second shelf to my little library, so to speak, with a focus on comparative literature.

• Bible: unabridged English Standard Version
• Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes
• Ivanhoe & other stories; Walter Scott
• Lord Jim & Nostromo; Joseph Conrad
• Collected Plays 1944-1961; Arthur Miller
• Various Novels 1881-1901; Henry James
• Later Novels 1923-1940; Willa Cather
• Collected Novels; Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Moby Dick, or The Whale; Herman Melville
• The Complete Dialogues; Plato
• Mimesis: Literature; Erich Auerbach
• Secondhand Time; Svetlana Alexievich
• Classical English Metaphor; Farnsworth
• The Normal Christian Life; Watchmen Nee
• What’s Wrong with the World; Chesterton
• Benjamin Harrison; two biographies
• Ancient Roman History; Tacitus & Livy
• Eastern Theology; Solovyov & Palamas
• Solzhenitsyn Reader: Writings 1947-2005
• Life & Letters of Father Pierre-Jean de Smet
• The Hundred Years War; Jonathan Sumption
• Mathematical Methods of Mechanics; Arnold
• Relativity & Cosmology; Christian Böhmer 
• Summa Theologica; St Thomas Aquinas

In my opinion, the best writers have the sort of objectivity which Edmund Wilson attributed to Shakespeare and Henry James:

“One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not, like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.”

Seven Favorite Books

“I want to learn more about Christianity, what seven books would you recommend?”

• Exodus
• Psalms
• Wisdom
• Luke
• John
• Corinthians
• Hebrews

Combined Booklist

• Sacred Scripture
  Bible, unabridged Revised Standard Version
  Horologion; Melkite Greek Catholic liturgy
  Liturgy of the Hours; unabridged
  Bible, unabridged English Standard Version
• Poetry and Plays
  Vergil’s Aeneid; Sarah Ruden translation
  Songs for Pascha; St Ephrem the Syrian
  Dante’s Divine Comedy; Anthony Esolen
  Plays and Poetry; William Shakespeare
  Complete English Poems; John Donne
  Collected Poetry & Prose; Robert Frost
  Collected Plays 1944-1961; Arthur Miller
  Collected Translations of Seamus Heaney
• Method
  Relativity & Cosmology; Christian Böhmer 
  Mathematical Methods of Mechanics; Arnold
  Ancient Roman History; Tacitus & Livy
  Benjamin Harrison; two biographies
  History & Eschatology; N. T. Wright
  Life & Letters of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet
  The Hundred Years War; Jonathan Sumption
  For the Life of the World; A. Schmemann
  Orthodox Christianity, v4; Hilarion Alfeyev
  Mimesis: Literature; Erich Auerbach
  Classical English Metaphor; Farnsworth
• Exegesis
  Gospel According to John; St Theophylact
  Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews; FF Bruce
  The Normal Christian Life; Watchman Nee
  In the Beginning (John 1:1-18); A. Esolen
• Doctrine
  Catechism of the Ukrainian Catholic Church
  Summa Theologica; St Thomas Aquinas
  Catholic Theology; Thomas Joseph White
  Eastern Theology; Solovyov and Palamas
• Prose
  The Complete Dialogues; Plato
  The Confessions; Saint Augustine
  Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes
  Ivanhoe & other stories; Walter Scott
  Mansfield Park & Emma; Jane Austen
  Collected Novels; Nathaniel Hawthorne
  The Brothers Karamazov; Dostoevsky
  Moby Dick, or The Whale; H. Melville
  Various Novels 1881-1901; Henry James
  Lord Jim & Nostromo; Joseph Conrad
  The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton
  Later Novels 1923-1940; Willa Cather
  Novels 1926-1954; William Faulkner
  Secondhand Time; Svetlana Alexievich
  What’s Wrong with the World; Chesterton
  Solzhenitsyn Reader: Writings 1947-2005

The reading program of the Appalachian Riders for Our Lady is based on three fundamental principles:

• I’m ignorant and have much to learn.
• Reading one book helps in reading and enjoying another book.
• The cross-fertilization will occur naturally, no need to push it.

We all have Bibles and the Liturgy of the Hours in our individual booklists. Other than that, there is a good bit of variety but also a fair amount of overlap. I myself find it useful to group my books into six categories.

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

The Glen at Maude’s Tavern

The hills of Appalachia are wrinkled deep in time. Some places there, as the saying goes, you can’t get to from here. At least, if the here were televised America. And if not ….

There are three large structures in the Glen at Maude’s Tavern: the chapel, the abbey, and of course, the tavern. As to which is oldest, well, that has been the heart of many a heated argument by the bar at Maude’s Tavern – especially since nobody around here puts much value in being new. The tavern looks the newest, what with Joe Turner coming down from Northern Virginia back in the 70s to renovate it; however, his taking Sue Wesley as his wife, ‘as part of the renovation’ he’s fond of joking since she grew up at the tavern, and her roots being Cherokee ‘as are the mountains! Sue says’ give grounds for the tavern being oldest.

Certainly, none of the groups have been very particular about keeping written records and much is hard to make out in the fog of time. The chapel folks, the people of the Mt Zion Freewill Sanctified Baptist Chapel, going back to Scots settlers (refugees from the losing side of the 1650 Battle of Dunbar in the 3rd English Civil War), are what most folks associate with old-time Appalachian mountain culture. And then the abbey Riders, the Abbey of the Appalachian Riders for Our Lady, with their immediate roots in what some think a humorous convolution of Francis Asbury inspired Methodist circuit-riding with Francis Assisi inspired devotion to renewal of the Catholic Church, trace their roots all the way back to the first century after Our Lord’s rising from the dead. So, depending on one’s view of what counts as evidence and as connection, the abbey and the chapel and the tavern each have grounds for claiming to be the true foundation of the Glen.

Myself, Tom White, I’m a lapsed Unitarian, coming from a family of lapsed Unitarians. My mom lapsed from Unitarianism into Methodism and I continued the lapse all the way back into the Catholic Church (and into the Riders, in spite of or perhaps, because of their limiting brothers to two dozen books).

And, though I keep forgetting, since this might be read by someone outside the Glen, I really need to start with that, since it holds them all – the tavern, the abbey and the chapel. What with its geography, which kept it free from the reach of television’s invasion and of thoroughfares from elsewhere in the United States, it is in many ways a world of its own, a sociological laboratory of sorts, one might say. Any reader will, I trust, appreciate my reticence regarding the specific location and features of the Glen, in order to preserve its privacy. The crucial fact, both geographical and geological, is that it is fairly well isolated from the rest of the country. In fact, my descriptions of land and environment will often be of similar, though larger, regions far to the west: the Uinta Basin in Utah, the Flathead and Pend d’Oreille regions in Montana and Idaho, and the lower montane and Shenandoah Valley of the Sierra.

The first white men to set eyes on the Uinta Basin and Uinta Mountains were members of the small Spanish expedition from Santa Fe headed by Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez. The expedition crossed into Utah and the Uinta Basin several miles northeast of present day Jensen [see the chapter ‘Las Llagas – San Andres’ in The Dominguez-Escalante Journal, University of Utah Press]. These explorers opened the Uinta Basin and the eastern portion of the Great Basin to Spanish, and later Mexican, American, and British fur-trappers and traders.

The Uinta Basin drew little interest during the initial phase of settlement of the Great Basin. Early in the 1860s Brigham Young did order a small expedition to the Uinta Basin to determine the suitability for locating settlements there. Upon the expedition’s return, the Deseret News reported that the expedition had found little there and that the basin was a “vast contiguity of waste…valueless excepting for nomadic purposes, hunting grounds for Indians and to hold the world together.”

To hold the world together – that is the purpose of the less traveled places of which I speak.

At least two Paleo-Indian cultural sites (12,000-8,500 BC) have been located in the Uinta Basin. These people were primarily hunters of the mammoth, bison, and other big game. During the Archaic period (8,500-2,500 BC), the basin was occupied by Plateau Archaic People who were gatherers as well as hunters. More recently, people identified with the Fremont Culture have occupied the Uinta Basin. The Fremont Culture parallels in time and development the better known Anasazi Culture. People of the Fremont Culture lived in semi-subterranean shelters (kivas) and were dependent primarily upon corn agriculture and hunting of smaller game and fishing.

During the ethno-historical period (A.D. 1300 to present), the Uinta Basin has been occupied by a band of Utes. The basin was also occasionally visited by the Northern and Northwestern Shoshones (hence the picture of Chief Sitting Bull).

And then, there’s Father Pierre Jean De Smet and the tribes of what’s now Washington, Idaho,  and Montana; however, that will have to wait for another posting. I just wanted to introduce all the main characters and set the stage before getting back to Maude’s Tavern.

Combined Booklist

• Sacred Scripture
  Bible, unabridged Revised Standard Version
  Horologion; Melkite Greek Catholic liturgy
  Liturgy of the Hours; unabridged
  Bible, unabridged English Standard Version
• Poetry and Plays
  Vergil’s Aeneid; Sarah Ruden translation
  Songs for Pascha; St Ephrem the Syrian
  Dante’s Divine Comedy; Anthony Esolen
  Plays and Poetry; William Shakespeare
  Complete English Poems; John Donne
  Collected Poetry & Prose; Robert Frost
  Collected Plays 1944-1961; Arthur Miller
  Collected Translations of Seamus Heaney
• Method
  Relativity & Cosmology; Christian Böhmer 
  Mathematical Methods of Mechanics; Arnold
  Ancient Roman History; Tacitus & Livy
  Benjamin Harrison; two biographies
  History & Eschatology; N. T. Wright
  Life & Letters of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet
  The Hundred Years War; Jonathan Sumption
  For the Life of the World; A. Schmemann
  Orthodox Christianity, v4; Hilarion Alfeyev
  Mimesis: Literature; Erich Auerbach
  Classical English Metaphor; Farnsworth
• Exegesis
  Gospel According to John; St Theophylact
  Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews; FF Bruce
  The Normal Christian Life; Watchman Nee
  In the Beginning (John 1:1-18); A. Esolen
• Doctrine
  Catechism of the Ukrainian Catholic Church
  Summa Theologica; St Thomas Aquinas
  Catholic Theology; Thomas Joseph White
  Eastern Theology; Solovyov and Palamas
• Prose
  The Complete Dialogues; Plato
  The Confessions; Saint Augustine
  Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes
  Ivanhoe & other stories; Walter Scott
  Mansfield Park & Emma; Jane Austen
  Collected Novels; Nathaniel Hawthorne
  The Brothers Karamazov; Dostoevsky
  Moby Dick, or The Whale; H. Melville
  Various Novels 1881-1901; Henry James
  Lord Jim & Nostromo; Joseph Conrad
  The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton
  Later Novels 1923-1940; Willa Cather
  Novels 1926-1954; William Faulkner
  Secondhand Time; Svetlana Alexievich
  What’s Wrong with the World; Chesterton
  Solzhenitsyn Reader: Writings 1947-2005

The reading program of the Appalachian Riders for Our Lady is based on three fundamental principles:

• I’m ignorant and have much to learn.
• Reading one book helps in reading and enjoying another book.
• The cross-fertilization will occur naturally, no need to push it.

In my opinion, the best writers have the sort of objectivity which Edmund Wilson attributed to Shakespeare and Henry James:

“One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not, like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama—either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.”

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

2024 Politics

I rarely post on politics anymore, being more interested in religion. Nevertheless, here’s a link to a post by Sasha Stone:
https://sashastone.substack.com/p/why-trump-is-polling-ahead-of-biden

Discernment & Transcendentals

From Thomas Joseph White’s The Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 2, page 44:

Where ought one to begin when making discernments about ultimate truth, or what ought we to presuppose as we start out? Arguably we should not leap immediately to the question of ultimate reality, but we should start instead with the topic of ordinary reality as we perceive it all the time. What is indisputably real? Interestingly, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers in the high Middle Ages who were inspired by Aristotle started their philosophical investigations typically not with reflections on God but with reflections on what they called “common being,” the kinds of things we experience all around us, and moved from these to the consideration of God. How then can we think non-controversially about the multiplicity of realities that we typically experience? What properties do they all have in common? To address thes question, medieval philosophers developed the concept of the transcendentals: being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. These are basic notions of reality that we inevitably make use of when we think about ordinary reality as we encounter it every day. They emerge in us naturally and inevitably as we begin to think about realities around us, in their natures and properties. Since these notions are very basic, they are something all persons inevitably employ, including those who hold to any of the distinctive worldviews we noted above (and any others for that matter). Such notions stem from considerations in ordinary experience of what exists and does not exist, the multiplicity and unity of beings, their truth and falsehood, their goodness and the reality of evil, and the beauty in things and their potential ugliness. Everyone inevitably thinks about these things, no matter how basic their reflections may be. Transcendental notions are so general that everyone makes use of them in some way, even if they never reflect on this usage self-consciously. We should consider each of them briefly, then, as it concerns our investigations. Why? If we can identify a general form of metaphysical realism that is natural to all human beings in virtue of their intellectual activity, we can in turn identify the foundations in reality from which these notions derive. Subsequently we can consider how those foundations (structures of being themselves) provide an indication to us of what is ultimately real. This will allow us progressively to think in a constructive and focused way about the controverted question of the truth of Christianity.

On the Rational Credibility of Christianity

The below is from pp 42-44 in Thomas Joseph White’s 2024 book, The Principles of Catholic Theology Book 2: On the Rational Credibility of Christianity (in Chapter 1 Why Not Be an Atheist? The Enigma of Human Existence and the Question of Reasonable Religious Belief)

Of course, other traditions are purely monotheistic. One may naturally think of Judaism and Christianity, as well as their famous rival Islam. But there are less widespread monotheistic tradions, which are also quite significant, such as Hindu Vaishnavism, Sikhism, and Persian Zoroastrianism. These traditions and their diversity raise several significant questions. Should any one religious tradition really be allowed to tell us something final and conclusive about God, or should we rely uniquely or primarily upon philosophy in order to think about such questions? Perhaps philosophical reason can be used to protect us from the “myths of the poets” and the religious delusions of men, even while steering us toward God. This was the claim of several prominent modern Enlightenment philosophers (Locke and Kant).

At the same time, we should ask whether philosophy alone suffices to give us conclusive knowledge of who God is and, if not, whether we should trust appeals to revelation? If we do open ourselves up rationally to the possibility of divine revelation, under what circumstances or conditions should we do so? Likewise, if we do appeal to divine revelation to think about God, must we then abandon the philosoiphical attempt to attain knowledge of God? De we have to choose between divine revelation and human philosophy? And should we be forced into a situation where we are obliged to choose “the one true religion” against all other forms of religiosity distinct from it? Can one believe in an absolute revelation and still learn from other religious traditions? In other words, how should we navigate claims of the different religious traditions, their truth foundations and absence thereof, and the questions of their compatibility with one another and with philosophical reason?

These topics can seem vast and even overwhelming or at least seriously challenging. Presumably, if there is a true “revealed religion,” the we need that religious tradition itself to help us resolve these thorny issues. If we were to find such intellectual competence in Christianity, for example, that would be precisely one sign of its unique truthfulness, and it could in turn help us come to term with these legitimate questions. Furthermore, on this view, shouldn’t the revealed religion in question also provide us with a living tradition of philosophical resources by which we can think through these complicated issues? For if a “revealed religion” presents us with a theological form of thinking about God we are meant to take seriously, it must also make competent use of natural human reason in the service of and in harmon with its religious teachings. This is an issue we will return to below.

[That last paragraph really grabbed my attention and prompted my posting this excerpt since I appreciate both Byzantine liturgy and Thomist philosophy.]

Scripture Study

Bible Study resources from my little library:

A) Preliminary
1) From the Ukrainian Catholic Catechism: Revelation of the Most Holy Trinity (pp 15-32)
2) Providentissimus Deus (On the study of Holy Scripture), encyclical of Pope Leo XIII

B) Commentaries and Meditations
1) On Genesis 1: Books 11-13 of Saint Augustine’s Confessions
2) On John 1:1-18: In the Beginning was the Word by Anthony Esolen
3) On Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians: by FF Bruce
4) On the Gospel According to John; Saint Theophylact

Long Form East Asian Drama

For thousands of years performance art has revolved around a two hour performance criteria, plus or minus some time. Movies have not really changed that; however, long form tv drama is doing new things.

The long form tv dramas of east Asia have no real equivalent in the west.

A coherent story, with beginning middle and end like western movies; however lasting from 15 hours to over 30 hours. In episodes of course, all done within one year. A modern, creative use of tv technology and it is interesting how the various technical aesthetic problems of this extended format are dealt with. The views of foreign cultures are also interesting.  I just have watched romantic comedies, so to speak, maybe better labeled comedy of manners, taking Jane Austen’s novels (Novel in the sense defined in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism) as my literary benchmark. I will be interested how this particular form of performance art develops, it’s still very new.

     In Korea, protagonists tend to be in early 30s, in China early 20s. I’ve come to prefer the 16 session, 1 hour format favored in Korea: more aesthetic coherence there. Also, South Korea being smaller, the dramas can be more culturally comprehensive and not as urban focused as the Chinese dramas. On the other hand, the Chinese dramas have broader cultural interest even with the explicit governmental oversight. In both cases, I’m very interested in the virtue ethics influence going back to ancient Confucian culture (see, for example “Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy by Byran W. Van Norden).

Korea 

See the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_drama for the following three quotes

“A single director usually leads Korean dramas, which are often written by a single screenwriter. This often leads to each drama having distinct directing and dialogue styles.”

“The main themes of Korean television dramas are friendship, family values, and love, blending traditional Confucian with Western materialism and individualism.”

“In contrast to practices elsewhere, the first four episodes of Korean series are usually shot in advance, but the rest are shot continuously as the series is being aired. Scripts are not finished in advance, and may change according to viewer feedback and viewership ratings, where popular characters receive increased screen time and plotlines are changed to match audience expectations.^[9] These changes may occur a few hours before daily shooting, and the crew might receive only a few ready pages. The production usually works with three camera crews, who work in a rotating manner to speed up filming. Because of unregulated script changes and tight shooting schedules, actors are almost continuously on standby, and have no time to leave the set or sleep properly. The Korean media have a separate word to describe irregular, short sleeps that actors resort to, in often uncomfortable positions, or within the set: jjok-jam (쪽잠), or “side-sleeping”. Dramas usually air on two days every week, with following episodes having to be shot within the intervening five days. Some Korean actors have admitted to receiving IV therapy during filming, due to extreme schedules and exhaustion. Nonetheless, the live-shoot model remains widely used since the production team can react to real time audience feedback.”

For me, the archtype for this type of comedy of manners is the interactions of two large extended families with the ‘extended’ including friends and coworkers. The two families also have their own group differences, eg rural and urban, and there are also one or more sources of trauma. Sometimes the trauma is due to evil or psychotic people; however, my preference is for the trauma to be more from the general human condition. This artform is new and there is much room for development.

Queen of Tears 2024 Favorite/Archtype
Crash Landing on You 2020
Extraordinary Attorney Woo 2022
Oh, My Baby 2020
Backstreet Rookie 2020
Welcome to Samdal-Ri 2023
King the Land 2023
Hometown Cha Cha Cha 2021

These in the standard 16 1hour episode format, more or less. Often in a “four act” structure: comic intro – tearjerks – development – resolution. The comic, which often revolves around playing with stereotypes, serves well for introducing characters and themes.

China

And here are four Chinese tv dramas for comparison:

 Amidst a Snowstorm of Love 2024
Meteor Garden 2018
The Rational Life 2021
When I Fly Toward You 2023

_____________________________________________________

In contrast, in the USA collegiate hookup ‘culture’ (see, e.g., Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons) is drifting down to the high school level. For example see the recent Netflix series My Life with the Walter Boys. 

Transcendentals and Church Services

The main Christian Sunday service has two predominant styles, albeit with various mixtures, the Rhetorical and the Liturgical.

    The rhetorical style is dominant among protestants and is characterized by the congregation sitting and listening to a learned sermon lasting about an hour.  A significant advantage of this style is its low performance/startup costs: all that is needed is one skilled public speaker with political savvy. The congregation, ideally literate, is also accustomed to this style from school and college. This style has its origins with Luther, Wesley, and other college professors. 

    I will represent the liturgical style, being less familiar to most, by the Byzantine rite of many Eastern Orthodox and Easter Catholics. This style goes back to the 5th century liturgy of Saints Chrysostom and Basil, which itself has roots all the way back to second temple Judaism. A significant advantage of this style is that the congregation need not be literate.  However more theatrical skill is required of the leadership.   If you are unfamiliar with this style here’s a link to such in the Portland Oregon area:  https://www.stgeorgepdx.org/

     The modern Roman Catholic and Anglican services attempt to use a combination of these two styles. Both rather unsatisfactorily in my opinion (with the  older Latin rite Roman Catholic Mass, now deprecated by the Vatican, being more liturgical than the modern novus ordu), and of very little interest to me. 

     Of course all of these styles have auxiliary support needs; however, I’m just focusing on the essentials (“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein).

    The rhetorical style focuses on truth, the liturgical style focuses on beauty, while both are essentially supported by goodness, which is largely expressed outside the regular church services of the sanctuary.

While I take the three transcendentals to be equally important, the Internet can better support resources related to Truth than to Beauty, in my opinion (see, for example, https://instituteofcatholicculture.org/events ). Therefore, nowadays the main church service should give particular attention to Beauty. This has lots of consequences.

The Winter Pascha

The below is from Thomas Hopko’s 40 day devotional book ‘The Winter Pascha’, from the second meditation, on ‘come and see’:

The story (John 1:43-51) is typical of St John’s gospel. The people first encounter the man “Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” The meet Him as a man, the one “of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.” then they go further. What they come to see is that this man is not merely the promised prophet and teacher; He is the Anointed, the Christ, the Messiah, the King of Israel. He is the Son of God. Indeed He is God Himself in human form.

The pattern in St John’s gospel is always the same. We see it in the narratives of the paralytic at the pool, the Samaritan woman at the well, the boy born blind, the encounter of Martha and Mary with Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. The sequence of events is identical. It is a necessary sequence, not only historically, but spiritually and mystically.

We must first come to see Jesus the man. We must come to know Him as a concrete human being, a Jew, as rabbi, a prophet. We must meet Him as Mary’s child, the carpenter’s son, the Nazarene. Then, in this encounter, when our eyes are open and our hearts are pure, we can come to see “greater things.” We can come to know Him not simply as a teacher, but the Teacher, not simply as a prophet, but the Prophet. We can come to know Him not merely as a son of man, but as the Son of man foretold by the prophet Daniel (Dan. 7:13-14). We can come to see Him not simply as a son of God, but as the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages. We can come to recognize Him as God’s Word in human flesh as God’s Image in human form (Heb. 1; Jn 1:17-18). And finally, we can come to see Him as God Himself, not the Father, but the Father’s Son, divine with the Father’s own divinity, sent into the world for its salvation.

The first step on the way of the Winter Pascha is the encounter with the man Jesus. We are invited with Philip and the disciples to “come and see.” . . .

Schmemann texts

My little library has one line:
Eastern Orthodoxy; Alexander Schmemann

For me, that consists of three books:

• The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy; Alexander Schmemann
• For the Life of the World; Alexander Schmemann
• The Winter Pasha; Thomas Hopko

Orthros Gospel, Resurrection Prayer, Psalm 50

In the Byzantine rite for Orthros (morning prayer/Matins) on Sunday, after the reading of the Resurrection gospel (see below), we say:

Now that we have seen the resurrection of Christ, let us adore the all-holy Lord Jesus, the only Sinless One. We bow in worship before Your Cross, O Christ, and we praise and glorify Your Resurrection, for you are our God, and we have no other, and we magnify Your name. All you faithful, come: let us adore the holy Resurrection of Christ; for behold, through the Cross joy has come to the world. Let us always bless the Lord, let us sing His Resurrection, for by enduring for us the pain of the Cross, He has crushed death by His death.

Psalm 50

O God, have mercy on me
in the greatness of Your love;
-In the abundance of Your tender mercies,
wipe out my offense.

-Wash me thoroughly from malice
and cleanse me from sin,
-For I am well aware of my malice
and my sin is before me always.

-It is You alone I have offended,
I have done what is evil in Your sight,
-Wherefore You are just in Your deeds
and triumphant in Your judgment.

-Behold I was born in iniquities
and in sins my mother conceived me.
-But You are the lover of truth:
You have shown me the depths and secrets of Your wisdom.

-Wash me with hyssop and I shall be pure,
cleanse me and I shall be whiter than snow.
-Let me hear sounds of joy and feasting;
the bones that were afflicted shall rejoice.

-Turn Your face away from my offenses
and wipe off all my sins.
-A spotless heart create in me, O god;
renew a steadfast spirit in my breast.
-Cast me not afar from Your face,
take not Your blessed Spirit out of me.
-Restore to me the joy of Your salvation
and let Your guiding Spirit dwell in me.

-I will teach Your ways to the sinners
and the wicked shall return to You.
-Deliver me from blood-guilt, O God, my saving God,
and my tongue will joyfully sing Your justice.

-O Lord, Your shall open my lips,
and my mouth will declare Your praise.
-Had You desired sacrifice, I would have offered it,
but You will not be satisfied with whole-burnt
offerings.

-Sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit:
a crushed and humbled heart God will not spurn.
-In Your kindness, O Lord, be bountiful to Sion;
may the walls of Jerusalem be restored.

-Then will You delight in just oblation,
in sacrifice and whole-burnt offerings.
-Then shall they offer calves upon Your altar.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to
the Holy Spirit.

Orthros Gospel Readings

1. MT 28:16-20
2. MK 16:1-8
3. MK 16:9-20
4. LK 24:1-12
5. LK 24:12-35
6. LK 12:36-53
7. JN 20:1-10
8. JN 20:11-18
9. JN 20:19-31
10. JN 21:1-14
11. JN 21:14-25

Palm Sunday: MT 21:1-11; 15-17
Pentecost: JN 20:19-23
Transfiguration: LK 9:28-36

Social Solidarity

Before addressing solidarity, I want to categorize social structures in general as:

• Family structures – structures where the bond is blood. This includes both extended families, clans, and Judeo-Christian religious structures.
• Civic structures – structures with voluntary membership or, in some sense, friendship or shared interest.
• State structures – structures that are held together by coercion, either actual or potential.

Any actual social structure will, of course, have some overlap. I’m primarily interested in Family and Civic structures; furthermore, I consider large businesses to be best considered as State structures. Cohesion within any type of social structure is not automatic and the development of solidarity and long term health tends to have different styles depending on the structural type.

Long term growth in solidarity depends on various factors; however, having time together and overcoming obstacles to doing that is essential.

Exodus Themes 01

In the first few verses of Exodus there is a shift in perspective, from the tribal (the 71 offspring of Jacob, v 1.5) to the people, the Israelites (v 1.7 and cf Genesis 32.29) filling the land of Egypt. This is a massive shift. Stop and think about it. [1 Peter 2:10 Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy.]

Egypt was the most advanced civilization in the world at that time (roughly 1500-1200BC). Nevertheless, the Israelites became so numerous that Egypt oppressed them more and more, enslaving them and imposing genocidal policies to kill the male Israelite infants. An Israelite, of the tribe of Levi, bore a son Moses and tricked Pharoah’s daughter into adopting him. This historical event, in its various aspects, has been the basis of much reflection over the years. Let’s talk about that and also consider that Moses grew up with access to all the knowledge of the Egyptians while retaining some connection to his people, Israel. [side note: Egypt not ‘all bad’, after all the Holy Family went there to get away from Herod’s tyranny in Israel]

The account of Moses’ killing an Egyptian, being mocked by Israelites and then fleeing to Midian (v 2.11-23) is referenced in the New Testament in Acts 7.23-29,35 and Hebrews 11.24-28.

Exodus chapter three, with its account of the burning bush and the revealing of the divine name, bears reading, and rereading, aloud.

___________________

4th/5th grade Sunday School, fall semester focus: getting out of Egypt

First 20 minutes:
Sunday’s Gospel for Children: https://antiochian.org/regulararticle/809
music: https://stgeorgemelkite.org/resources/our-music/
Last 10 minutes:
Exodus (see above)/bible study

Oct 1st, 2023

Gospel section:
Hebrews 9:1-7
Luke 6:21-36
October 1, 2023: Second Sunday of Luke
Luke 6:31-36: handouts (PDF) | audio younger (MP3) | audio older (MP3)

Exodus section:
chapter 1 (esp 1:1-7) and background
homework: chapter 2

Music: Troparian & first part of OT books song

October 8, 2023: Third Sunday of Luke
Luke 7:11-16: handouts (PDF) | audio younger (MP3) | audio older (MP3)

9 But you are ^za chosen race, ^aa royal ^bpriesthood, ^ca holy nation, ^da people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you ^eout of darkness into ^fhis marvelous light. 10 ^gOnce you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (ESV 1 Peter 2:9-10)

Resurrectional Troparia

• Tone 1 “After The Stone”
• Tone 2 “When You Descended”
• Tone 3 “Let All In Heaven”
• Tone 4 “The Women Disciples”
• Tone 5 “Let Us, O Faithful”
• Tone 6 “The Angelic Powers”
• Tone 7 “You Destroyed Death”
• Tone 8 “You Descended From On High”

Exodus Themes

• God making an extended family into a people, a nation
• Getting the people out of Egypt
• Getting Egypt out of the people

This is mainly for background for me to use when teaching, as appropriate for various age levels from 4th grade to adults. It is also a place for me to store reference materials for my 9-10 year old Sunday School class.

Besides the Bible (Revised Standard Version), I will be referring to a few books:

• Bible, unabridged Revised Standard Version
• Exodus; Thomas Joseph White, OP
• Commentary on Exodus; U. Cassuto
• Commentary on Exodus; Brevard Childs
• The Life of Moses; St Gregory of Nyssa
• Origin of the Hebrews; Douglas Petrovich
• Horologion; Melkite Greek Catholic liturgy
• Collected Poetry and Prose; Robert Frost
• Classical English Metaphor; Ward Farnsworth

And some articles and link:

• https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2004/04/exodus-in-romans/
• https://maudestavern.com/2023/06/23/exodus-wisdom-john/
• Psalms 78, 105-106, 135-136

For Sunday School, 9-10 year olds. 30 minute class

First 20 minutes:
Sunday’s Gospel and Troparian
Last 10 minutes:
Exodus or Psalms bible study

Favorite Composers

A placeholder for notes on my six favorite composers

1. Bach
2. Mozart
3. Beethoven
4. Handel
5. Hayden
6. Chopin

Related books:

• Johann Sebastian Bach; Christopher Wolff
• The Classical Style; Charles Rosen
• The Romantic Generation; Charles Rosen
• Bach, Handel, Scarlatti; ed Peter Williams
• Bach; John Eliot Gardiner

I’m not a musician; however, I grew up listening mostly to classical music from the romantic period. In the Navy, I discovered Mozart and Hayden and then, in the 80s, Bach and Handel. This range of music is what I most enjoy.

Gospel Fragments

Having been amongst a ‘trainload of fools trapped in a magnetic field’, Bob Dylan had, so to speak, a changing of the guards when he stripped and kneeled and said ‘Lord, Lord, you know their hearts are as cold as leather’. The period that followed is often called his ‘gospel period’, referring to Dylans tours and the albums: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love.

However, those albums seem to me more like covers compared to the mature Christian reflection in Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind. This article will be looking at the songs of that album via the more extensive January 2023 five CD release: FRAGMENTS – TIME OUT OF MIND SESSIONS (1996-1997): THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 17.

In an interview with Jeff Slate published in The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2022 Bob Dylan said: “I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.”

Songs for Pascha

Love Sick – in the manner of Hosea’s prophecy

Dirt Road Blues – incarnation

Standing in the Doorway – in the womb (cf Dignity alternate verse)

Million Miles – living far from heavenly home

Tryin to Get to Heaven – ministry coming to crisis

Til I Fell in Love with You – being nailed to the Cross

Not Dark Yet – dying just before sunset

Cold Irons Bound – descending into Hell

Make You Feel My Love – the risen Lord proclaiming

Can’t Wait – awaiting the Second coming

Dylan ends the album on a more personal note, with Highlands in contrast to the Lowlands of his Blonde on Blonde album.

Let’s now consider each of the songs in more detail (to be continued)

Classical English Style

Ward Farnsworth, Dean of the University of Texas School of Law, writes on a wide range of topics. His series on Classical English is special in its quantity and range of examples. The series consists of:

• Classical English Rhetoric
• Classical English Metaphor
• Classical English Style
• Classical English Argument (forthcoming)

From Preface of his Classical English Style:

Abraham Lincoln wrote more beautifully and memorably than anyone in public life does now. So did Winston Churchill; so did Edmund Burke, so did many others, none of whom sound quite alike but all of whom achieved an eloquence that seems foreign to our times. What did they know that we don’t? It might seem strange to seek instruction form writers who lived so long ago. It certainly would sound odd to imitate their styles directly. But writers of lasting stature still make the best teachers. They understood principles of style that are powerful and enduring, even if the principles have to be adapted to our era, or to any other, before they become useful. That is the premise of this book, at any rate. It is a set of lessons on style drawn from writers whose words have stood the test of time.

This book is the third in a series. The first, Classical English Rhetoric, showed how rhetorical figures – ancient patterns for the arrangement of words – have been used to great effect in English oratory and prose. The second, Classical English Metaphor, did the same for figurative comparisons. This one takes a similar approach to more basic questions of style: the selection of words, the arrangement of sentences, the creation of a cadence. It shows how masters of the language have made those choices, and how the choices have put life into their writing and their speech;

. . . .

Typical books about style contain a lot of precepts and a few illustrations of how the concepts work. The ratio in this book is reversed, it depends more on illustrations and supplies them generously.

Melkite Diaspora

From Wikipedia:

The Melkite Greek Catholic Church is the largest Catholic community in Syria and Israel, and the second largest in Lebanon. As of 2014 the Melkite Greek Catholic Church was the largest Christian community in Israel, with roughly 60% of Israeli Christians belonging to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

Due to the Christian emigration from the Middle East, São Paulo is now home to the largest Melkite community in the diaspora (estimated around 433,000), followed by Argentina (302,800). Other large Melkite communities can be found in Australia (52,000), Canada (35,000), Venezuela (25,400), the United States (24,000), and other countries. According to figures by the Holy See in 2008, Lebanon is now home to the largest Melkite community in the Middle East (425,000), followed by Syria (234,000). There are more than 80,000 Greek Melkite Catholics in Israel and Palestine, and 27,600 Greek Melkite Catholics in Jordan. The Melkite Greek Catholic Church is by far the largest Catholic church in Israel.

Places to Pray

One can pray anywhere, of course. However, I expect most have favorite places to pray and for me that is in the nave of a parish.

Whether sitting or standing, whether alone or with many, whether in joy or in sorrow, I find the set apart nature of the location is an aid to prayer. Fortunately, being Catholic, many places and times are readily available nearly everywhere and one is not limited to a home parish/congregation.

This widespread availability is, I think, significant theologically. Again, of course one can pray anywhere. However, ….

The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy

Alexander Schmemann, of blessed memory, wrote a concise history of Eastern Orthodoxy that deserves to be more widely read, particularly by Eastern Catholics. Here is the foreword to ‘The Historical Road to Eastern Orthodoxy’:

This book is not a scholarly investigation into the history of the Orthodox Church nor a mere manual. It is a reflection on the long historical pilgrimage of Orthodoxy, an attempt to discern in our past that which is essential and permanent and that which is secondary, mere past. I have always been amazed by the absence within the Orthodox Church of historical reflection aimed at the whole Church, at the Church as a totality. Our historical memory seems to be fragmented into local and national memories, just as — alas — is our Church life itself. Yet without restoration of a common and truly “catholic” memory, without a common understanding of our common past, we shall not recover that catholicity, that universality of Orthodox life and experience which we confess and proclaim to be the very essence of our Tradition.

Written at first in Russian and for Orthodox readers, the book may also serve as a general introduction to the Orthodox Church and her history for Western Christians. The twentieth century has witnessed a rediscovery of the Christian East by the Christian West. Today few people in the West would say, in the words of Harnack, that ‘the Orthodox Church is in her entire structure alien to the Gospel and represents a perversion of the Christian religion, its reduction to the level of pagan antiquity….’ On the contrary, Western Christians are seeking and often find in her spiritual and theological tradition, her religious art and her liturgy, the forgotten elements of their own background–forgotten standards, now recognized as necessary, for the measurement of Christianity. Nevertheless, despite the encounter of these two religious realms and the ever deepening intercourse between them, and in spite of the recognition by all Christians of their common destiny in the contemporary world, knowledge–and therefore also understanding of Orthodoxy–is still far for complete in the West. Our past has not yet been integrated into Western “memory.” To the majority of Western Christians, Orthodoxy is still marginal, exotic, oriental.

It is my sincere hope that in reading this book Western Christians may realize that our past is also their past, or rather our common past, that essential “term of reference” without which no mutual understanding is possible. As the “Eastern” isolation of Orthodoxy is coming to an end, as it becomes more and more implanted in the West, it becomes urgent that its history be known and understood. The present always depends on the degree to which we have “digested” the past, it is my hope that is book may be of some help in this essential process.
Alexander Schmemann, July 1977

Exodus, Wisdom, John

“Both John and Wisdom mention the miracles of the Exodus as a model for the signs operated by wisdom (in Wis) and by Jesus (in John). Both John and Wisdom present these signs in the same order, which is not that of Exodus.

John 2:1-11, the marriage at Cana, recalls the first antithesis of Wis 11:4-44, underlining the theme of thirst. John 4:43-54 and 5:1-9a are centered on the theme of healing which appears in the third diptych of Wis 16:4-14.  The diptych of the manna (Wis 16:15-28) finds its correspondence in John 6 (the bread of life).  Finally, the diptych of the darkness (Wis 17:1-18:4) can be set in relation to John 9 (the man born blind) while John 11, the resurrection of Lazarus, corresponds to Wis 18:5-25, the death of the firstborn and the saving of the Israelites. 

To conclude, in John as in Wisdom, the historical facts become symbolic, signs, that is, of spiritual and eschatological realities.  Thus the darkness of the Egyptians in Wisdom 17:1-18:4 is the sign of the darkness of Hades which will strike the ungodly (Wisdom 17:21). In its turn, the cure of the man born blind is the sign of the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees.  The light which illuminates the world (Wis 17:20) is the light of the law (18:4), just as Jesus himself is the light of the world (John 8:12; 9:39).”

from the commentary “Wisdom” by Luca Mazzinghi, page 41