Remembrances for May

 

Dear friends, if you have time, please pray for these members of the Southern family on the day they reposed.  Many thanks.

But one may ask:  ‘What good does it do to pray for the departed?’  An answer is offered here:  https://orthochristian.com/130608.html

Along with prayers and hymns for the departed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6je5axPodI

May 1^st

Harry Hosier and George Liele. (The exact dates of their deaths are not recorded, so the approximation of 1 May is used instead.  Thanks to Mr William Federer for mentioning them in one of his history posts.)

Harry Hosier was a slave, born in North Carolina, folks reckon, and after gaining his freedom he became a very talented preacher who rode with Bishop Francis Asbury on his circuits.

http://gcah.org/history/harry-hosier

George Liele was a slave from Georgia who became a fruitful missionary in Jamaica upon gaining his freedom.

https://nlj.gov.jm/project/george-lisle-liele-1750-1826/

May 2^nd

William Dawson

The head of the School of Music at the Tuskegee Institute.  A noted composer and conductor of choral/orchestral music.

https://www.tuskegee.edu/student-life/join-a-student-organization/choir/william-l-dawson-tribute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPhDb3XnXHs

May 4^th

William Henry Trescot

‘Writer, diplomat, historian.’  A native of South Carolina who wrote an important short essay titled ‘The Position and Course of the South’.

https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/trescot-william-henry/

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT5714

May 6^th

Judah P. Benjamin

A Louisiana lawyer and senator, and later Secretary of State for the Confederacy.  He went through hard times with the grace characteristic of the South. 

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-neo-confederate-scotus-justice/

He may have had a hand in planting States’ Rights ideas into the Canadian constitution from his time as a lawyer in England.

https://cbr.cba.org/index.php/cbr/article/download/2641/2641

May 10^th

Gen Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

One of the South’s finest men.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/thomas-j-stonewall-jackson/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/stonewall-jackson/

May 10^th

John Gould Fletcher

A Pulitzer Prize winning writer.  A craftsman of both poetry and prose.

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/john-gould-fletcher-1646/

May 11^th

Roger Busbice (2019)

A man from our own time, but a man nevertheless dedicated to Dixie’s well-being.  He was a kind mentor to those who asked him for help in learning about Southern ways.

https://attakapasgazette.org/attakapas-gazette-volume-1-2014/leonidas-polk-fighting-bishop-louisiana/

http://www.youngsanders.org/guerrilla.html

May 12^th

Gen J. E. B. Stuart

One of the South’s best cavalry commanders.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/j-e-b-stuart

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/986/james-ewell_brown-stuart

May 25^th

Sarah Breedlove (Madam C. J. Walker).  ‘This child of sharecroppers transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into one of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made women entrepreneurs.’

https://madamcjwalker.com/about/

https://www.biography.com/inventor/madam-cj-walker

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/madame-c-j-walker

May 25^th

Rev Benjamin Morgan Palmer

An influential pastor in New Orleans both behind and away from the pulpit.

https://banneroftruth.org/us/about/banner-authors/b-m-palmer/

http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/palmer-benjamin-morgan/

May 25^th

George Garrett

Virginia’s Poet Laureate from 2004-6, amongst many other literary achievements.

https://evblog.virginiahumanities.org/2008/05/george-garrett-1929-2008/

https://www.poetrysocietyofvirginia.org/content/poets-laureate-virginia

May 26^th

Eliza Lucas Pinckney

An enterprising matron in the worlds of business and art.

https://www.nps.gov/chpi/learn/historyculture/eliza-lucas-pinckney.htm

https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/1997/3186.html

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/peoples/text5/elizapinckney.pdf

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of May from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow this link on over:

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/06/happy-feast-for-saints-of-may.html

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Confederate Memorial Days

 

Where Confederate heroes are still publicly remembered and celebrated each year and on what days:

https://www.al.com/news/2021/04/monday-is-a-state-holiday-in-alabama-confederate-memorial-day-is-april-26.html

(Thank you to the unnamed person for sharing this link with us.)

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘In the Earth’: Return to Pantheism (Modern Day Religions, Part VII)

 

It is clearly the message of the new horror film In the Earth that nature is alive, very powerful, and in some sense divine and that man is just a plaything in its grasp.  Here are some quotes from a review by Nick Schager (via The Drudge Report) in that vein:

Perched on the razor-thin boundary between lucidity and madness, it gnaws at the nerves and bludgeons the senses until submission—to humanity’s helplessness in the face of the ancient world’s elemental power—is the only recourse.

 . . .

Before embarking on their two-day hike to Olivia, Martin spies a painting (and related kids’ drawings) of a fabled pagan spirit of the woods known as Parnag Fegg that captured locals’ imaginations in the 1970s after some children went missing in the area. It’s no great leap to assume that this myth is somehow related to the film’s opening sight of a towering stone slab with a hole in it (think a more earthen variation of 2001’s alien monolith).

The monolith (and the circle within it) is important, too, because, as in 2001, it is symbol of perfection, a means by which mankind ascends to higher states of being.  But because of man’s ‘sins’ against nature, in this film it seems to portend his destruction.

Back to the quotes:

Referring to Parnag Fegg, Alma states, “I think the forest is like something that you can sense, so it makes sense that they should give that fear a face.” Later, she tells Martin she believes people will soon forget about their pandemic ordeal and go back to their prior ways, implying that mankind is incapable of truly respecting, or coming to grips with, nature’s awesome and terrifying might. In this hostile environment, amateur shutterbug Zach opines that “photography is like magic, really. But then, so is all technology when you don’t know how it works.” The supernatural quality of the unknown is everywhere in In the Earth, and Wheatley uses canted compositions in which his characters are dwarfed by their lush, misty surroundings to conjure an atmosphere of the mysterious, primal world devouring these interlopers, consuming and reintegrating them back into its fertile soil.

The director’s dreamy aesthetics are amplified by a soundscape of menacing electronic noises, heavy breathing, and unnatural bird calls, creating the impression that this milieu is not simply alive but sentient. The interconnectedness of everything soon becomes a pressing concern for Martin and Alma, including with regards to Zach—whom they must escape, because he’s up to some wild stuff—and Olivia, who’s trying to commune with the primeval stone slab that she believes is the embodiment of Parnag Fegg, and the hub of the country’s ecological bio-network. To do this, she employs methods that are at once technological and ritualistic—a marriage of the rational and irrational that soon defines In the Earth, . . . .

 . . . What is clear, however, is that man holds little sway over nature (and its old gods), and any attempt by the former to comprehend the latter is an endeavor destined to confound, if not drive one out of their ever-loving mind.

 . . . Tapping into our ongoing COVID anxieties of corruption and ruin, it’s a sinister vision of nature protecting itself through biologically and psychologically viral defense mechanisms—and of the futility of trying to change, fight, reason with or even fathom such unstoppable forces.

As Christianity recedes in the West, it is likely that this notion of a world with a soul and a consciousness and ready to visit wrath upon man for his trespasses against her will become stronger, especially now that so many scientists (‘Follow the science!’) are embracing it:

When scientific pantheists say WE REVERE THE UNIVERSE we are not talking about a supernatural being. We are talking about the way our senses and our emotions force us to respond to the overwhelming mystery and power that surrounds us. We are part of the universe. Our earth was created from the universe and will one day be reabsorbed into the universe. We are made of the same matter and energy as the universe. We are not in exile here: we are at home. It is only here that we will ever get the chance to see paradise face to face. If we believe our real home is not here but in a land that lies beyond death – if we believe that the numinous is found only in old books, or old buildings, or inside our head, or outside this reality – then we will see this real, vibrant, luminous world as if through a glass darkly. The universe creates us, preserves us, destroys us. It is deep and old beyond our ability to reach with our senses. It is beautiful beyond our ability to describe in words. It is complex beyond our ability to fully grasp in science. We must relate to the universe with humility, awe, reverence, celebration and the search for deeper understanding – in many of the ways that believers relate to their God, minus the grovelling worship or the expectation that there is some being out there who can answer our prayers.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!