My copy of Aidan Nichols, OP, The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger arrived in the post today, and I am pleased.
But my copy of Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity has not yet arrived, despite having been ordered ten days ago. I shall make enquiries on Monday.
I’m delighted to report that a copy of Aidan Nichols The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger: an Introductory Study is on its way to me: I’ve managed to snaffle the last copy on sale through abebooks.com, which - happily - was sitting in a shop in Hay-on-Wye. Now I’ll just have to hope his theology hasn’t changed too much in the 17 years since the book was written…
I’d never heard of this book until a few hours ago, when I read this 1988 piece [pdf] of Andrew Sullivan’s from The New Republic, which he’s just posted at his blog. As I remarked over at B&T, it’s a reminder of how much better a writer the pre-blog Sullivan was, once upon a time, and what he says about Nichols’ book makes me want to read it:
The great merit of Aidan Nichols’s dense, scholarly study of Ratzinger’s theology is that it places Ratzinger in the context and language of this abiding, Germanic Augustinianism. It is an emphasis that manages to cut through the usual, unhelpful categories of left and right, progressive and reactionary, to focus on the arguments of the Church rather than the preoccupations fo the world.
Well, I’m always a sucker for a bit of hardcore Augustinianism.(And if anyone else has got some good Ratzinger bibliography, do please pass it along. This is going to be interesting.)
Hmm. I can’t get the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club page to open right now. Is the server overloaded, or have they taken it down immediately for an update? Or perhaps its now moved to www.benedictxvifanclub.com already?
It’s Ratzinger!!
Or Pope Benedict XVI, as we must now call him.
The flow of Pope posts will dry up before too long, but here’s a good one: Pope on a Rope Soap [via].
And, while I’m on the subject, there’s Papal blogging from the conclave (well, from outside the conclave. Well actually I’m not sure where the author is) over here.
Here’s the Guardian’s latest comment on the Papal election:
After breaking for lunch, the cardinals will reconvene at 4pm (1500 BST) for two afternoon rounds of voting, with a new plume of smoke expected by 7pm.
Three ballots down, no Pope yet.
I’m sure you’ve all studied it carefully by now, but, just in case you haven’t, the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club Page is quite a useful resource.
If you’re bored of manipulating British democracy through postal voting scams, you might want to try to rig the Papal vote next week. In which case, read this first. [via Nick]
The Vatican website is generally excellent, and they’ve already assembled a complete retrospective of his Papacy packed with useful documentation.
I’ve decided to take this Papal selection business seriously, and have already eqipped myself with a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Popes and Greg Tobin’s Selecting the Pope, both in good bookshops everywhere.
I haven’t explored it properly yet, but this site looks like being essential reading over the next 2-3 weeks. [via]
My friend and favourite vicar-in-training William Whyte has an op-ed in today’s Guardian.
He would appear to think that the truths of Christianity don’t lend themselves unproblematically to conventional authoritarian rightist politics.
I’m not usually one to comment on teenage girls’ fashion matters, but having greatly enjoyed yesterday’s Daily Mail (”legal aid… lottery money… lawyers high on the hog… judges bereft of common sense… driven a coach and horses through school uniform rules… Cherie Blair… human rights… political correctness gone mad…” et cetera ad nauseam), it seems to me that this is a great victory for stylish dressing: Ms Begum’s outfit in the photos yesterday was quite fine, and the approved Islamic girls’ uniform at Denbigh High School was grim.
I’m not sure that the relevant photos are online. If any regular reader of the Virtual Stoa does, however, spend their days trawling the web for images of girls in school uniforms and finds the right pics, though, do let me know.
UPDATE [6.40pm]: Here’s one of them.
Over here. Three weeks old, I agree, but it hasn’t had much play in what the loony bloggers are persuading me to call the MSM.
Class Worrier Raj is back from Northern Zululand and is posting again on the travails of the South African universities. Go and read what he has to say.
And, as people who know me will know, I’m generally secular and occasionally quite anti-clerical. But there are four different religious impulses that I experience from time to time — let’s call them the Quaker, the Shaker, the Anglican and the Jansenist — and all six of us think that Stephen Green of Christian Voice is a complete shit. That’s rare unanimity of opinion. [For details, see here and here.]
You’ve sung the Internationale in Esperanto (alternative Esperanto version here). Now you need to find the time to read the Bible in Polari…
(Machine-generated, I’m afraid, but it’ll have to do until someone does a proper translation-job.)
[via WW]
Nick Barlow’s found some ignorant bigots.
From the people over at Media Watch UK, the organisation that seems to be devoted to (i) the memory of Mary Whitehouse and to (ii) keeping Jerry Springer The Opera off our screens. Here’s how their letter to the BBC ends:
Bearing in mind that there is already mounting public concern and an absence of any assurance regarding compliance, we believe that the decision to show ‘Jerry Springer The Opera’ should be urgently reconsidered at the highest level within the BBC. There must be other West End productions that would be more enjoyable and appreciated by a far greater number of licence-fee payers? Why not, for example, screen a seasonal pantomime, with well-known and liked television and radio personalities, currently showing at provincial theatres across the country?
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have stayed up for a BBC2 pantomime last night. It would also (I observe) have been less suitable as the climax of an evening given over to Jerry Springer-themed programmes.
I woke up this morning expecting to find news reports of BBC Television Centre having been burned down by Christians and Mail-readers, what with the unprecendented levels of outrage, etc. That would have been dramatic, but it was not to be.
And wasn’t JS:tO fun? (Not to be confused with JSTOR, which is useful but not much fun.) I saw it last Summer in the West End, and thought it transferred very well onto the small screen with two exceptions, one minor, one major.
The minor problem was that it seemed to me that Jerry’s inner Valkyrie didn’t work so well on TV. The inner Valkyrie is great — everyone should have one — but she makes a far greater impact in the theatre.
The major problem was that the real stars of the show are Satan’s shoes, and they were barely visible in the TV broadcast. Satan has a splendid pair of red shoes that create a fine devillish-hooves effect, and which deserved several lingering close-ups, which they didn’t get. Instead, often the shots of Satan either cut him off at the knees or had his shoes in shadow. You could see them a few times during the show, but not nearly enough. And that, for me, was a problem.
(I also can’t find a photo of a shod Satan to link to on the intrawebmesh in order to prove my point, which shows that the conspiracy to deny the viewing public their rights runs deep, alternatively that I’m not terribly efficient with Google Images.)
I hear that the Birmingham Rep has a slot to fill now that they’ve pulled one of their productions. Perhaps JS:tO could play there for a bit?
As Immanuel Kant had done before him, though not on a blog, Norm’s been worrying about what earthquakes (of which more later) and theology might have to do with one another (see here, here and here), and he’s just posted a few remarks on Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opium of the poeple. Now a part of the point of these remarks is to draw attention to the context in which Marx says this about religion, at the start of the (marvellously named) Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but Norm doesn’t draw attention to the most puzzling aspect of that context, which is Marx’s claim a little further on down the same page that “If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs…”
Winterval Christmas Greetings from the Virtual Stoa; image taken from The excellent, excellent Brick Testament; sensible quotations over at SIAW and JAFA.
Good to see Terry Eagleton in this week’s New Statesman make a point which isn’t made often enough: there really aren’t many (so-called) family (so-called) values on display in the New Testament, and it’s bewildering that the people who think of themselves as most concerned with what the Bible actually says should tend to be the ones who seem to think that it’s all gung-ho about the delights of domesticity and being nice to your relatives.
(For the title quote, try Matthew 8:18-22 or, better, Luke 9:57-62.)
I’m very pleased to learn over at SIAW that “Britney Spears” is an anagram of “Presbyterians”.
I don’t really know why, but I am.
