BarbariansAtBay

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Currently Reading Thomas More: A Portrait in Courage

I'm not that deep into it yet, but I am already quite impressed with Thomas More: A Portrait of Courage by Gerard B. Wegemer. I mean no slight to the considerable talents of the author when I say that subject alone is quite impressive.

More, patron of attorneys and statesmen, is a paragon and somewhat unique in that he is a model for laymen, particularly family men. Elesha Coffman in a Christianity Today article, judging the man by today's standards and citing to his prosecution of Protestants prior to his own prosecution, asserts that "More is not quite a model for all seasons". I could not disagree more. Curiously, despite reservations of the sort expressed by Ms. Coffman, More was added to the Anglican calendar of Saints in 1980 - a fact I learned from my book mark rather than the book.

BLOGGGER SUUCXXXCCKKSSSSS

I recently read Ugly Chart (a stock trading blog I enjoy reading) bemoaning the sorry state of the Blogger system on which a long post will sometimes just disappear while a work in progress. Ugly chart recently moved to Moveable type (Farewell Blogger, we hardly knew ye).

Well, I just had the pleasure of the disappearing post experience right now, and not for the first - or second - time. I may have to move as well.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Much Loved John Paul II Dies: "What Is Indestructible Remains".

In his own verse:

The End is as invisible as the Beginning. The universe emerged from the Word, and returns to the Word.Right at the heart of the Sistine Chapel, the artist shows this invisible End in the visible drama of the Judgment - And this invisible End became visible as the highpoint of clarity: ominia nuda et aperta ante oculos Eius.* The words recorded by Matthew, here become the painter's vision: "Come, you who are blessed... depart from me, you accursed..."And so the generations pass - naked they come into the world and naked they return to the earth from which they were formed. "From dust you came, and to dust you shall return"; all that had shape into shapelessness. What was alive is now dead; all that was beautiful is now the ugliness of devastation. And yet I do not altogether die, what is indestructible in me remains!

*From the Latin:
Everything is disclosed and revealed before his eyes.

***

Those to whom the care of the legacy of the keys has been entrusted gather here, allowing themselves to be enfolded by the Sistine’s colours, by the vision left to us by Michelangelo — so it was in August, and then in October, of the memorable year of the two Conclaves, and so it will be again, when the need arises after my death.