Fr. Patrick Reardon: Faith alone or love and faith?

November 28, 2004 Second Sunday of Advent, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

When the Apostle Paul lists faith, hope, and love as the triad of things that “abide,” he takes care to assert, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). This superiority of love within the standard Pauline triad seems noteworthy in two ways.

First, there is the stark fact that Paul accords the supremacy to love, not faith. Let me suggest that if Paul had not made this point explicitly, there is reason to suspect that certain later readers of his epistles might have concluded, “and the greatest of these is faith.” My speculation here is justified by the plain fact that some of Paul’s later readers really did attempt to condense his teaching on justification by coining the expression “faith alone.” Pressed on the point, of course, those same students of Paul explained that real faith, living Christian faith, necessarily includes love. Love, thus, is subsumed into their full definition of faith.
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Tripartite Formulations: The strength of threes

November 21, 2004, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings, by Fr Patrick Henry Reardon

The ancients understood the strength of things arranged in threes, and the thesis that “a threefold cord is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12) expressed a truth that no one in olden times was prone to doubt.

A simple deference to geometry sufficed to settle the question. The triangle, after all, is plain geometry’s only stable figure with straight lines. Geometry–literally, the measuring of the earth–is solidly founded on trigonometric functions, and the surest way to calculate the earth (or the heavens!) is by trigonometrical survey.

When we make such a survey, moreover, we are well advised to steady our instruments on a tripod, for nothing is more stable. Indeed, anyone ever seated on a wobbly chair can testify that chairs themselves seem to prefer three legs to four. Their wobbling is an agitated protest against that extra limb.
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Gettysburg Address

November 19th

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Thus began the Gettysburg Address, delivered this day, November 19, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln on the field where 50,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in a three day battle.

This ten-sentence speech ends with the words: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The American Minute

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“We Kill Babies”

Australia’s bad conscience about abortion has spilled over into contentious public debate. He is one article that brings the discomfort forward.

The abortion debate provokes mixed feelings, but leaving late-term babies to die in dishes or bins is wrong. Silence is no longer an option.

THIS country has a bad conscience about abortion. You can tell this by the frantic attempts to make us shut the hell up about it.

Health Minister Tony Abbott, who mourned the “unambiguous moral tragedy” of up to 100,000 abortions a year, has been warned by rivals in the Liberal Party this “foray into morality politics” has ruined his chance of ever becoming leader.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,11333761%255E25717,00.html

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Religious Left Denounces “Moral Values” Voters

Mark Tooley, November 10, 2004
http://www.ird-renew.org/News/News.cfm?ID=991&c=4

At a press conference organized by the pro-abortion Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), representatives of the Religious Left expressed deep angst about the recent U.S. election results. And they warned the Bush Administration not to heed the agenda of socially conservative voters.

The RCRC officials were clearly disturbed by exit polls showing “moral values” being the number one concern of a plurality of voters, ahead of the economy, terrorism and the war in Iraq. These moral values voters, motivated by issues such as abortion and same-sex “marriage,” strongly favored President Bush’s reelection.

“The leaders of the Religious Coalition are outraged at the underlying message of the election story—that religion and morals are the exclusive property of social conservatives,” exclaimed RCRC president Carlton Veazey. RCRC, founded 30 years ago, is a coalition of mostly mainline church agencies that lobby against all potential restrictions on abortion.
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Rules for writers

I shamelessly lifted this from This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis.

Important Rules for Writing Good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
19. The passive voice is to be avoided.
20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
22. Who needs rhetorical questions?

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Bishop Tikhon of the OCA quotes Noam Chomsky

A readers sends a quote by Bishop Tikhon of the OCA:

One might very well agree with Noam Chomsky that terrorism is nothing new, and that what made 9/11 particularly painful was the realization that for the first time we were the victims, rather than the perpetrators of it. Having terrorized Kossovo and Serbia, before that Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, the Phillipines, etc., etc., one would think that “with-it” Americans would have admitted, “What goes around comes around,” no?
I wonder what the citizens of Falloujah think when it is explained to them that they are now being subjected to an attack against terrorism?
Love,
+B.T.

Let me direct the good Bishop to some articles examining Chomsky’s ideas in a brighter light: What Noam Chomski Really Wants, or the antichomsky website.

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The problem with Democrats is that they’ve become the party of moral absolutism

This ties into a theme I’ve been working on: secular leftists are moral absolutists. I’ve been trying to sharpen this into an essay but haven’t found the nub yet. I mentioned this idea in several comments upstream.

The Weekly Standard

Winning the “I Don’t Know” Crowd

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush have questions about when life really begins and don’t want to support a party that refuses to acknowledge those concerns.

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush wonder just how much involvement between church and state constitutes an infringement on First Amendment proscriptions against state-sponsored religion. Maybe they are troubled by absolutists who want to wipe faith out of every aspect of public life.
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Peggy Noonan. So Much to Savor: A big win for America, and a loss for the mainstream media

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Wall Street Journal

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

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On this day: Washington’s Farewell Address

It’s fitting to remember this on election day.

After defeating the British, General George Washington resigned and returned to farming at Mount Vernon.

On this day, November 2, 1783, he issued his Farewell Orders to his troops. “Before the Comdr in Chief takes his final leave,” he wrote, “he wishes…a slight review of the past…. The singular interpositions of Providence in our feeble condition were such, as could scarcely escape the attention of the most unobserving; while the…perseverance of the Armies of the U. States, through almost every possible suffering…for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle.”

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