Fourth Week of Lent Bulletin

That's what you get for lovin' me

That's what you get for lovin' me-eee

Everything you had is gone

As you can see

That's what you get for lovin' me.

Apropros to nothing - just thought I'd put them on. Bob Dylan sounds pretty nasty, doesn't he.

Anyhow, I'm at the tail end of a sickness. It hit me on Sunday, and laid me up in bed until Wednesday. Everyone else was sick too, even H.L. Crawdad, whom you can see above in my bookbag. "Just bury me here, Dom," he said. "NOT IN MY BOOKBAG!" I yelled. "IT'LL STINK UP MY SCHOOLBOOKS AND...oh, sorry, H.L. Shouldn't have been yelling." Anyway, H.L. Crawdad got over it. Here he is on my newly cleaned table.

I'm not actually in the NRA. H.L. is.

We haven't heard, seen, or osmoted anything concerning the Church of Jumbuck for quite a while. As you remember, the last news was that the Sucrose Inquisition was after them. Perhaps they got sick in mid-attack.

Here's some pictures:

The "Hatchet Window" of my parish.

The enclosed bit rather looks like a knife, does it not?

More pictures in another post. It's hard to handle these pictures and text.

Important News! I read The Wealth of Nations! Many the time I feared they would find my bones by the eBook I was reading it from, but I finished it. All five books. I grew to like it, but I'm not reading it again until they make me study classical economics in college. And it's got five stars now. Once I get back on my feet, I'll write a review.

Another Important News! I will be visiting Christendom College in July. When it comes along, you'll hear all about me and Crawdad's adventures in real time, via this blog! You'll hear all about the quaint customs of the locals of Virginia, the incidents and studies at Christendom, and (hopefully) a bit on Washington, D.C., where I hope to visit. Speaking of the locals, aren't they the ones who invented wampum?

Maybe I should stop making fun of Virginians. They started the Civil War, and I've got relatives up there.

I read America: The Last Best Hope by William J. Bennett while I was sick. It's a history, but only the first installment is published. It goes from discovery to World War I. It gets five stars (although the style occasionally is annoying). And it's awful informative.

Well, that's all. Happy belated St. Patrick's Day and Erin Go Bragh!

15 down, 35 to go

I read Rerum Novarum and The Bridge of San Luis Rey over the week. The first gets 5 stars, as does the second.

RN gets the stars because, hey, it's a papal encyclical full of vitaminey, juicy goodness. The BSLR (as I've taken to calling it) is merely a great short novel on five eighteenth-century Peruvians who die when a bridge collapses.

A friar, Brother Juniper, assumes that they died either because they are extremely evil or because they are extremely good. To prove it,he catalogues their known deeds to find out whether their good deeds outweighed their bad. The end result is a huge book of doubtful orthodoxy and negligible value. The narrator goes into greater detail, recounting their lives and the effect their deaths had on those who knew them. Three of the five who die have disordered affections for other people, and they die right after taking some decision to destroy that affection and replace it with charity. The two others were innocent people damaged by their disordered affections, who ironically provoked the others into charity.

The conclusion is that charity - suffering for another's good - is the only affection that justifies life. Not a bad book for Lent.

By the way, I'm almost finished The Wealth of Nations. Smith just showed his colors as an Enlightenment liberal when he announced that SCIENCE! (to use Mark Shea's term) taught to the people would prevent "enthusiam" and "fanaticism," by which he means the attitude of peope before 1688 and after 1789. All in a discourse on religion which, truth to tell, only is justified insofar as religion is connected to politics.

All the same, most of Smith's book is not ideology, but very sensible economics. Put another way: on economics he's right, unique, and blazes new trails; on everything else he's a mirror of the 18th Century, quite as cracked as that century was.