What these texts, taken together, demonstrate is that Nazism involved far more than a gang of thugs taking over state power. National Socialism was an entire Weltanschauung that penetrated every aspect of German life, including art, industry, technology, medicine, nutrition, health, and psychology. It was a culture of death par excellence ....

The distinguished and perceptive scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain on several recent historical and analytical studies in her review article The Nazi Seduction, writing in the current issue of Books & Culture, a publication of Christianity Today.

It's been two years since I entered the first posts here. Other interests and demands have often asserted their priority during those months, but the venture has given me opportunity for reflection and exchange that wouldn't otherwise have come my way.

The first post here, on the feast of Saint Rita, was the motto of the Venerable John Henry Newman: Cor ad cor loquitur. And so it's been, heart speaking to heart. I'm grateful to those, many of them listed among the blogs on the right, whose words have inspired and comforted, and whose witness to the Way, the Truth and the Life that is our Lord Jesus has been an edification.

How comfortable is the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. How good it is to remember the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. And speaks to us of Him who saves.

More about Jesus would I know
More of His grace to others show;
More of His saving fullness see,
More of His love Who died for me.

More about Jesus let me learn,
More of His holy will discern;
Spirit of God, my teacher be,
Showing the things of Christ to me.

Ulysses was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1842. A fair number of the lines passed into common allusion, and it wasn't so many years ago that it was one of those poems that, because of its quality and its theme, was frequently memorized and declaimed. There aren't as many Tennysonians around as once there were, of course, but Kelsey Grammer is one of them and it was deeply pleasing to the others in his audience that the television series Frasier ended with his reciting some of this very fine and evocative poem.


It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

She'd be a strong contender in a contest for most annoying television personality, and her standard of integrity would be at home on a used car lot. Miss Couric adds to her irritating qualities an apparent belief that her publicity flaks are correct and that everyone likes her. She's been a large part of the orgy of self-celebration that NBC has made of the end of the television series Friends and Frasier and I saw a bit of her show last night. I expected that she'd be both obvious and cheap. But there was no excuse for her snide allusion to John 1. Some things should be safe from the pawing of her grubby little hands.

There's almost certainly an element of laziness in the coverage which, considering the importance of the question, is itself deplorable. But there also seems something more than misleading shorthand at work. Many of the country's newspapers and pundit talking heads appear to be using their coverage of questions of Church membership and discipline as an opportunity to encourage religious strife. The Roman Catholic Church is said to oppose stem-cell research. Office holders and politicians are said to be counseled by their bishops to oppose stem-cell research.

Research on stem cells is not, has not been claimed to be, morally objectionable. It is the deliberate killing of the donor that is morally wrong. That is not a distinction without a difference.

Review in First Things (March 1999) of a book by Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., the newly-elected president of the University of Notre Dame. The news and the link come courtesy of The Shrine of the Holy Whapping.

Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. By John I. Jenkins, CSC. Cambridge University Press. 267 pp. $59.95.

Father Jenkins of Notre Dame’s philosophy and theology departments has written a truly revolutionary book. Most who encounter the Summa Theologiae see a maze of questions, articles, objections, responses, and replies; hence the temptation to turn Aquinas into a textbook on philosophy, theology, morals, and even science. He is accused of creating a "system" of philosophy, which can be opposed to other systems of philosophy and found superior (or, by his critics, quite deficient). Jenkins shows that the Summa is not a system that provides categories of thought, but an attempt to ground all our thoughts about God and his creation in our participation in God’s mind. According to Aristotle, for mere knowledge to be called episteme (roughly, "understanding") requires that we understand the causes of things better than we understand their effects. Jenkins argues persuasively from substantial textual evidence that Aquinas was after episteme: he wanted to understand God, the Cause of all things, better than he understood creation. What’s more, he wanted to view creation through his understanding of God. Along the way to proving his thesis, Jenkins rewrites the book on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (his reading, and his devastating criticisms of Oxford’s influential Jonathan Barnes, set the standard for such scholarship) and he shows how even the most decorated of contemporary "philosophers of religion" (Plantinga, Stump, Penelhaum, et al.) grossly misread Aquinas. Through careful scholarship and tightly argued readings, Jenkins does that rarest of things—he says something truly new about what we thought we long ago understood.

On Sunday, May 2, two days after the election of Father Jenkins, Father Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., who served as executive vice president of the University of Notre Dame during the 35 years of the presidency of Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, died at Holy Cross House on campus. Father Hesburgh administered the last rites of the Church on Saturday evening. Father Ned Joyce was 87.

It's usually more by good luck than good management, but I almost always have good seats for the plays and concerts that I want to see. But ordering tickets the other night was even more successful than usual. Michael W. Smith will be coming to the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Fairmount Park in August, in concert with Mercy Me. Many of the folk who attend will be lounging on blankets on the grassy hillside that still commands a good view of the stage and performers, and those tickets will be distributed without charge, as is true of all concerts held at the Mann each summer. That's where I was most of the time, when I was in school and college, but now I pay the freight and get to sit indoors. And most of the seats are quite good. But this. I had a choice between aisle seats in the fifth row of the orchestra and the best seats in the premier balcony box.

The Mann Center is a couple of miles from Memorial Hall, site of the great exhibition celebrating the Centennial of American Independence, and is named for Fredric R. Mann, one of Philadelphia's eminent philanthropists and civic figures during the second half of the last century. And an important figure not only in the cultural life of Philadelphia. Mann Auditorium, the home of The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv, is also named for him.

I last saw Michael W. Smith in concert when he was touring after the release of his great CD Worship. The CD was released on September 11, 2001 and the concert in Philadelphia was only a couple of weeks later. It was a wonderful night of praise and fellowship, made even richer in the shadow of the terrible events of that month, and I'd be looking forward to the concert at the Mann even were the seats not as good as they are.