Larry's Whereabouts

My heart went out to Larry as I scented adventure, and I wished him with me; but speculations as to Larry’s whereabouts were always profitless, and quite likely he was in jail somewhere.

Meredith Nicholson, The House of a Thousand Candles

This is a mystery but it has a lot of funny little bits like this.

All the Things I Never Knew About Uncle Tom's Cabin

This is the original review from when I first read Uncle Tom's Cabin, way back in 2006. Since then I've read it several more times, even going so far as to narrate it with commentary on my Forgotten Classics podcast.

I'm a little more than halfway through yet another time and have been struck anew by how many psychological types Stowe worked into this exciting cliffhanger. It is also my current inspirational reading as you are never going to get more discussion of Christianity in a novel than in this one.

As always, I want to share something that's brought me so much pleasure, so I'm rerunning my original review below.

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

I never knew that it was such a page turner! About halfway through the pace picked up so that I was avidly reading whenever I had a chance to see if George and Eliza would shake off their trackers, Uncle Tom would make it back to his family, what it would take to make Topsy reform and much more. How about that crazy Cassy, hmm? And poor Emmaline ... would someone save her before Simon Legree got his filthy hands on her? Wow!

I never knew that Uncle Tom actually was a Christ-figure, a living saint. No wonder he is misunderstood by so many. They are not getting the whole picture.

I never knew that so many sorts of people were represented throughout the book. The language can be rather stilted due to the style of the times but Stowe did a good job showing many different attitudes toward slavery and how people excused themselves under the flimsiest of excuses. One expects the broadly painted very good and very evil owners but not the more shaded in-between characters.

It was fascinating toward the end of the book to see where many of the slaves wound up. One could discern what Stowe's ideas of a solution for the slavery problem were and, indeed, it was even more interesting to read her afterward where she discusses it specifically.

I thought that Stowe included herself in the book as the maiden aunt from New England who thought she understood the problem until she came up against Topsy who demanded that she put her whole heart and soul into realizing that the slaves were real people. Rose saw her as Mrs. Shelby, the kindly wife of Uncle Tom's original owner, who as soon as she got a chance absolutely did the right thing.

I am quite grateful that Rose read this book and pushed it on me. Highly recommended.

The House of a Thousand Candles - in German

I knew that The House of a Thousand Candles was a best seller back in the day but I had no idea that it was a big seller outside the United States. The proof is in the book cover, however!

Social adventure with nothing to equal it

“Morgan, you are an infernal blackguard. You have tried twice to kill me—”

“We’ll call it that, if you like,”—and he grinned. “But you’d better cut off one for this.”

He lifted the gray fedora hat from his head, and poked his finger through a hole in the top.

“You’re a pretty fair shot, Mr. Glenarm. The fact about me is,”—and he winked,—”the honest truth is, I’m all out of practice. Why, sir, when I saw you paddling out on the lake this afternoon I sighted you from the casino half a dozen times with my gun, but I was afraid to risk it.” He seemed to be shaken with inner mirth. “If I’d missed, I wasn’t sure you’d be scared to death!”

For a novel diversion I heartily recommend a meeting with the assassin who has, only a few days or hours before, tried to murder you. I know of nothing in the way of social adventure that is quite equal to it.

Meredith Nicholson, The House of a Thousand Candles

Laity are "Essential," Must Lead Any Investigation

In reference to former Cardinal McCarrick and his abuses which apparently were an open secret among his fellow bishops, Cardinal Weurl proposed having a national panel of bishops investigate complaints against bishops. Talk about tone deaf.

Jeff Miller at The Curt Jester does a nice summing up of where we are at this moment. And I give all tribute to Bishop Scharfenberger who does understand the problem and what must happen for reform. It is the way I myself feel. As Jeff says, "May his tribe increase."

Statement by Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger
of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany

August 6, 2018

While I am heartened by my brother bishops proposing ways for our Church to take action in light of recent revelations – and I agree that a national panel should be commissioned, duly approved by the Holy See – I think we have reached a point where bishops alone investigating bishops is not the answer. To have credibility, a panel would have to be separated from any source of power whose trustworthiness might potentially be compromised.

It is time for us, I believe, to call forth the talents and charisms of our lay faithful, by virtue of their baptismal priesthood. Our lay people are not only willing to take on this much-needed role, but they are eager to help us make lasting reforms that will restore a level of trust that has been shattered yet again. In speaking with them, we all hear their passion for our universal Church, their devotion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and their hunger for the truth. They are essential to the solution we seek.

What is needed now is an independent commission led by well-respected, faithful lay leaders who are beyond reproach, people whose role on such a panel will not serve to benefit them financially, politically, or personally. These will be people with a deep understanding of the Catholic faith, but without an axe to grind or an agenda to push. It will not be easy, but it will be worth every ounce of effort, energy, and candor we can muster.

We bishops want to rise to this challenge, which may well be our last opportunity considering all that has happened. We must get this right. I am confident we can find a way to look outside ourselves, to put this in the hands of the Holy Spirit, and to entrust our very capable lay people, who have stood with us through very difficult times, to help us do the right thing. We need an investigation — the scope of which is not yet defined but must be defined — and it must be timely, transparent and credible.

Extra tidbit: I've been in a couple of recent conversations about this with other faithful, distressed Catholics and Simcha Fisher echoes many of our conclusions about how this state of affairs happened.

McCarrick and the Deafening Silence

Former Cardinal McCarrick forced his attentions on seminarians for years. Though complaints were made as long as two decades ago, they were turned away until recently when it was admitted that the evidence was credible. I explain this because if I hadn't mentioned it to my husband he'd never have heard about it. He doesn't seek out Catholic news and the newspaper and TV news we frequent hadn't mentioned it.

First I was horrified and furious that the complaints were shoved under the carpet even after we'd been assured the sex scandals were a thing of the past, that victims were being heard, that new policies were in place to prevent reoccurrence — even as one of the biggest movers and shakers (McCarrick) was an offender whose sins were apparently an open secret among his fellow bishops. And that is the most horrifying of all. Some of the bishops who'd received information are those who I respect and trust the most. And their silence has been deafening. Those whited sepulchers.

I've had nothing to say on the topic that others haven't but these are pieces that say particularly well what is in my heart.

If an excerpt catches your eye, be sure to go read the whole piece (links are in the subheads). There's no way I can really capture them with these snippets.

DarwinCatholic: A Moral Crisis
A good summing up, well reasoned, calm and to the point.

Any leader in the church, lay or clerical, who thinks that it is in any way advantageous to the church to keep quiet and allow a bishop to cover up a life of grave sin is a leader that we do not need.

We are all sinners, some may say. Who are we to judge? How can we say that we won't tolerate a sinner as a bishop?

All bishops are sinners. All of us are sinners. But if someone is to be a leader in the church, he should be prepared to admit his sins, repent of them, and resolve not to commit them again.

Elizabeth Scalia: How to Restore a Church in Scandal? Begin With a Collective Confession.
Scalia has already been pointing out that it is now the laity's work to insist on our bishops doing the right thing and holding leadership to a real accounting. She continues with thoughts on just how that works.

Making an address to the Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus in June of 1972, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said something most relevant to our times:

Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and your religious act like religious.

[...]

There is a great deal of work to be done, and as I have written elsewhere, the laity must necessarily be part of that work. As we discern how to proceed, we can immediately do two things:

• Pray for our priests, by name when we can, every day and at every Mass.
• Do penance for the sins of our Church, and be willing to suffer a bit for the sake of its restoration to spiritual health.

Ross Douthat: The Truth About Cardinal McCarrick

One of the best things that the bishops of the American Catholic Church did during the great wave of sex abuse revelations 16 years ago — and yes, there’s a low bar for “best” — was to establish a National Review Board, staffed by prominent layman, with the authority to commission an independent report on what exactly had happened in the church.

The result was a careful analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice that detailed the patterns of priestly sex abuse in American Catholicism between 1950 and 2002 ...

Now, unfortunately, it needs to happen again. But what needs to be commissioned this time, by Pope Francis himself if the American bishops can’t or won’t, isn’t a synthetic overview of a systemic problem. Rather, the church needs an inquest, a special prosecutor — you can even call it an inquisition if you want — into the very specific question of who knew what and when about the crimes of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and why exactly they were silent.

Get Religion: Why didn't journalists investigate McCarrick earlier? Because they thought conservatives were out to get him
It turns out that bishops aren't the only ones keeping silent. Journalists saw plenty of smoke, but ignored the fire.

Certain reporters could not lay aside their biases against church conservatives to investigate whether there was a fire behind all the smoke.

Journalism rule #1: Never, never assume that someone is crying wolf.

Journalism rule #2: Never assume the folks – whose viewpoints you disagree with – have nothing of value to say.

I agree a lot of bishops are to blame for not bringing this mess to light a lot earlier. But so are the journalists who heard about this years ago and chose to do nothing.

The tiny thorns of life

All our life is sown with tiny thorns that produce in our hearts a thousand involuntary movements of hatred, envy, fear, impatience, a thousand little fleeting disappointments, a thousand slight worries, a thousand disturbances that momentarily alter our peace of soul. For example, a word escapes that should not have been spoken. Or someone utters another that offends us. A child inconveniences you. A bore stops you. You don’t like the weather. Your work is not going according to plan. A piece of furniture is broken. A dress is torn.

I know that these are not occasions for practicing very heroic virtue. But they would definitely be enough to acquire it if we really wished to.

St. Claude la Colombiére

Christ is the point.

We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the Cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. Christ is the point. I, myself, admire the present pope, but even if I criticised him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I find the church, as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing that a pope (or a priest) could do or say would make me wish to leave the church, although I might well wish that they would leave.

Frank Sheed, Christ in Eclipse, 1978

Farm-to-table and flatbed trucks

She laughed out loud when she first heard the term "farm-to-table." They had it in her day, too; they called it a flatbed truck. She knows her food is not the healthiest, yet her people live long, long lives, those not killed by gunfire, moonshine or machines. She has never tasted ceviche or pate, but can do more with field-dressed quail, fresh-caught perch, or a humble pullet than anyone I know. With a morsel of pork no bigger than a matchbox, salt, a pod of pepper, and a sprinkle of cane sugar, she can turn collards, turnips, cabbage, green beans, and more into something finer than the mere ingredients should allow. With bacon grease and two tablespoons of mayonnaise, she turns simple cornmeal into something more like cake. I watched two magazine photographers eat it up standing in her kitchen, with slabs of butter. I do not believe they were merely being polite. "They even eat the crumbs," she said. "They were nice boys."

Rick Bragg, The Best Cook in the World

That study is certainly unlawful ...

If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

Since we've got the Lord Byron, Lake Geneva, Frankenstein thing going today.

Lake Geneva

Lake Geneva, By Schnäggli - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron spent a memorable weekend with his doctor, John Polidori, and friends Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Mary's stepsister and a special friend of Byron's — and that's all that we'll say about that.) A vampire novel and Frankenstein were the result to the lasting benefit for all of us who enjoy horror stories.

Made me laugh: I was first struck by his normality ...

I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Lord Byron in Albanian Dress

Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, Thomas Phillips

Today's quote made me go looking for portraits of Lord Byron. He must have been one of those really charismatic people whose attraction doesn't come out in portraits. Except for this one. Wowie! Albanian dress would do wonders for a lot of us today.

Wish I Was There: Primary Parasols

Primary Parasols, Belinda DelPesco

I have left behind illusion ...

"I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses.

I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

SFFaudio and Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Jesse, Maissa, and I discussed Rudyard Kipling's classic Kim. Get it here!

What I'm Reading: Grave Peril, Brideshead Revisited, Why Evil Exists, This is Murder, Best Cook in the World

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

Our next book club selection — and one I've tried to read several times in the past. Because it is "assigned" I've been forced to get past the first two chapters that always turned me off before. Now, about halfway through the book, I'm enjoying it more as I go along. Partly that is because I have been listening to the Close Reads podcast episodes* on it, which helped open up themes. Partly it is because I recently realized how very much I do not care about Sebastian (who was the main focus for a lot of the beginning.) I won't go so far as yet, since I'm not finished, to say I dislike Sebastian, but it is the way I'm leaning. Anyway, I'm just so happy not to dread picking this book up every day — that in itself is a win.

*(Close Reads is also on iTunes. Their Brideshead Revisited episodes aired during the summer of 2017.)

Wizard and private detective Harry Dresden has squared off against a multitude of supernatural bad guys. You might think nothing could spook him. You would be wrong.

Something is stirring up angry apparitions all over town. Something that can break all the laws of supernatural physics. Something that doesnt like Harry. His closest friends are being targeted. The net is closing in. Harry must find a solution soon or find this is one Nightmare from which he will never waken.

I read this series avidly when the books came out, until Changes (#12) which I didn't care for at all. I'd had enough of Harry and felt I knew the books well enough from rereading, so I gave mine to my daughter in one of my regular bookshelf purges.

Recently I read Melanie Bettinelli's interesting posts on Harry's character development after the point where I quit reading. My interest was piqued, but it took an in-person conversation with a couple of people about how those last books were insightful about faith and religion to make me want to revisit the series.

I thought I could just look over the Wikipedia book summaries but ... my goodness the series got complicated early on! Luckily the library has James Marsters' excellent audio of the book so I've begun my slow way into the series from close to the beginning. And, I can't deny, it is a nice light counterbalance to working my way through Brideshead Revisited.

Award-winning Professor Charles Mathewes of the University of Virginia offers a  dynamic inquiry into Western civilization's greatest thinking and insight on this critical subject, the question of evil.

I loved Charles Mathewes course on Augustine's City of God so much that I picked up his only other course on Audible. I'm not necessarily attracted to the topic, but the reviews were so uniformly good and, as I said, I like the teacher so much that I opted on for the 36 classes ... so it's gonna take a while. In the first four lessons, Mathewes has been riveting and really good at delineating how various ancient cultures viewed evil, as well as relating these points of view to their modern equivalents. I'm really enjoying it.

And now I realize I never told you about that first course, here's a brief review:

Books that Matter: The City of God

This class did what I never thought possible - make me want to read The City of God.

Professor Mathewes is insightful, giving this ancient work an understandable context and connecting it to modern life. He's got an accessible lecturing style and an elegant turn of phrase that helps open up the material. What is more he makes a compelling case for why The City of God is relevant for understanding not only the ancient, but our modern world. Highest recommendation.

Because, you know, when you've been reading Brideshead Revisited and listening to courses about Evil, you want something less taxing for bedtime reading.

Advertising man Sam Moraine wants to tag along when his poker game is broken up by a call for his buddy D.A. Phil Duncan to look into a kidnapping case. Duncan agrees and Sam soon finds himself taking cash to trade for the victim. But all is not what it seems (no surprises there) and Sam soon is conducting his own amateur investigation. And that puts him at odds with both the law and the bad guys. This is a stand-alone and I am really enjoying it. It's just perfect for reading right before lights out.

A delectable, rollicking food memoir, cookbook, and loving tribute to a region, a vanishing history, a family, and, especially, to his mother.

Margaret Bragg measures in "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" and "you know, hon, just some." Her notion of farm-to-table is a flatbed truck. But she can tell you the secrets to perfect mashed potatoes, corn pudding, redeye gravy, pinto beans and hambone, stewed cabbage, short ribs, chicken and dressing, biscuits and butter rolls. The irresistible stories in this audiobook are of long memory -- many of them pre-date the Civil War, handed down skillet by skillet, from one generation of Braggs to the next.

I'm really loving this which is much more memoir than recipe book. There is plenty of personality, old customs, and living through hard times in Rick Bragg's family tree. I am not one who likes stories of dysfunctional families and I appreciate that the dysfunctions are smoothed out or merely hinted at because the emphasis is on how the recipe came into the family or how someone learned to cook. By wrapping the stories around the kitchen we can take the good with the bad, especially when it comes with a helping of Axhead Soup or Chicken and Dressing.

The Birth of Mary and domestic life in Florence

The Birth of Mary, Tornabuoni Chapel (1485-90),
appears to represent a domestic scene from the life of contemporary Florentine nobility.  Domenico Ghirlandaio

Conversion to the baroque

This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

This makes me want to hear it read aloud. I may have to get the audio from the library at some point.

"I wish I liked Catholics more."

"I wish I liked Catholics more."

"They seem just like other people."

"My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not—particularly in this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique—as a matter of fact, they're about four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time—but they've got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It's quite natural, really, that they should."

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

As a point of context, the conversation is begun by Sebastian who is himself Catholic and said to Charles who is, at best, agnostic.

I am reading this for my Catholic women's book club. I've tried several times to get into the book but never liked it. It turns out that I needed to be forced past the first two chapters, after which I'm enjoying it more as I go.

I read this bit to Tom and he listened with a grin growing on his face. "So it was the same back then!" he said triumphantly.