Remembrances for June - 2022

 

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

June 4^th

Governor Esteban Miro

Spanish Governor of Louisiana (1785-1791).  He gave the colony good Christian laws and oversaw the rebuilding of New Orleans after the 1788 Good Friday fire.  He left Louisiana to become a general in the Spanish Army ‘to the great regret of its whole community’.

http://www.storyvilledistrictnola.com/governors.html#namespanish

June 5^th

Kate Cumming

‘Best known for her dedicated service to sick and wounded Confederate soldiers. She spent much of the latter half of the Civil War (1861-65) as a nurse in hospitals throughout Georgia.’

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/kate-cumming-ca-1830-1909

https://library.uab.edu/locations/reynolds/collections/civil-war/medical-figures/kate-cumming

https://greatappalachianorthodox.wordpress.com/2021/06/10/the-bookshelf-part-1/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10538942/kate-cumming/photo

June 6^th

Patrick Henry

The famed Virginia orator (‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’), he served as Virginia’s first post-British governor, but later in life turned down many offers of powerful political office in favor of private life.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/472/patrick-henry

June 6^th

General Turner Ashby

One of Dixie’s best cavalry leaders during the War, though not without his weaknesses (he was a bit undisciplined).

https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Ashby_Turner

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8336/turner-ashby

June 8^th

President Andrew Jackson

A bit of a mixed bag as President, although he did fight manfully against the national banking cartel.

https://thehermitage.com/andrew-jackson-and-the-bank-war/

June 11^th

Louis de St Denis

An early French explorer of Louisiana who helped found the city of Natchitoches, the oldest settlement in Louisiana.  He also had some adventures and romance in the Spanish territories to the west and south, where he married Manuela, the granddaughter of the Spanish Commandant.

http://www.offms.org/ancestors/louis_st_denis.html

June 11^th

William Gilmore Simms

A key figure in the development of a specifically Southern literary culture.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/william-gilmore-simms/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/william-gilmore-simmss-place-in-american-literature-by-sean-busick/

https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/William_Gilmore_Simms#Publications

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5041827/william-gilmore-simms

June 13^th

Douglas Southall Freeman

An excellent historian and journalist.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Douglas-Southall-Freeman

June 16^th

DuBose Heyward

A key part of the Southern Literary Renaissance in the early 20^th century in Charleston, most remembered for ‘Porgy and Bess’.

https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/heyward-dubose/

June 21^st

Captain John Smith

A military adventurer early in life, he was also a key figure in the settlement of Virginia.

https://historicjamestowne.org/history/pocahontas/john-smith/

June 23^rd

Reverend John Girardeau

A fine pastor who labored much in the vineyard of the South’s slave population.

http://www.pcahistory.org/HCLibrary/periodicals/spr/bios/girardeau.html

June 30^th

James Oglethorpe

The founder of Georgia.  His original altruistic vision for the colony didn’t quite work out, but he is nonetheless a man of talent, vision, and good character.

http://www.ourgeorgiahistory.com/people/oglethorpe.html

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of June from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow this link on over if you’d like:

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/06/happy-feast-for-saints-of-june.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!

Offsite Post: ‘Without Christianity, We Are Doomed to Senseless Violence’

 

The mass shootings, whether in blue cities like Chicago or red States like Texas, are appalling, and both sides of the firearms debate are bandying about their usual ideological slogans:  ‘More guns, less crime’; ‘if it saves just one life, isn’t it worth it to ban xyz?’

We happen to think that the evidence favors a populace that is fairly unrestricted in its ownership of guns, but that is to miss the more important point underlying the senseless gun murders:  the erosion of Christianity.  Since the Enlightenment especially, we have rejected God’s sovereignty over man, and made man himself – his wishes and desires – the measure of all things, with horrible effects.  Father Zechariah Lynch writes,

 

The humanism of the modern world is . . . negative. In fact, it is not an understatement to say that it is a de-humanism, or as Alexander Solzhenitsyn puts it, “despiritualized humanism.” . . . 

 

Since roughly the French Revolution on, humanists have been endlessly claiming that they will establish a semi-paradisiacal (if not outright) state on earth. I mention the French Revolution because it is one of the first radical applications of humanism. A basic study shows it was a bloodbath: totalitarian brutality and oppression that masqueraded as “Republic and freedom.” (A brief study of the slaughter at Vendee, with roughly 300,000 peasants brutally murdered, shows the true face of modern humanism). Even the American Revelation was motivated by the prevalent and growing humanist currents of the 1700’s. True, it was not as radical in nature as the French, but it nonetheless was a governmental experiment based on humanist philosophy (although it was willing to retain a stronger “Christian” influence, as opposed to the French Revolution).

 

Humanism developed on strictly materialistic terms. Materialism is probably a more accurate term. Humanism has always been more than willing to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of material gain and ideology. In reality, it is not interested in the well-being of humanity.

 

Following John Locke’s liberalism, the several States have tended to treat religion as something that belongs primarily within the individual’s private conscience, that the public, communal aspects of religion are unimportant.  Hence the replication of clauses in the State and federal constitutions guaranteeing the freedom of religious exercise by individuals but the ban on government involvement in religious affairs.  But the pluralism and relativism this engenders is dangerous; it is not strong enough to resist evil.  Fr. Zechariah continues:

 

Liberal humanism, which professes that all ideas are equal and should be given an equal chance and voice, eventually is run over by radical humanism. The “Liberals” of our day are not classical liberals. They have a very narrow ideology to which they conform. Karl Marx, a radical humanist, aptly observed that, “Communism is naturalized humanism.”

 

Solzhenitsyn commenting on this statement says, (It) turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of antireligious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. This is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18^th Century and of Marxism. Not by coincidence all of communism’s meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness.

 

Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism.

We see that if mankind rejects the Incarnate Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, as God, he will have destructive idols/ideologies in His place.  The excellent modern English author Paul Kingsnorth chimes in:

 

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution.

 

Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution. The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. ‘The revolutionary attitude of creative violence’, writes Del Noce, ‘has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world.’ If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had.

‘Creative violence’, sadly, is exactly what we see on display in our social-media-streamed mass murders as revolutionaries act out their broke-brained theories to remake the world. 

And one of the main drivers of this violence is taught year in and year out in our public schools:  atheistic evolution.  Maria Sayevskaya makes some important connections in this regard:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2022/05/garlington-without-christianity-we-are-doomed-to-senseless-violence/.

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘“Elden Ring” Is an Image of Western Corruption’

 

This video game and others like it are the sort of nihilistic cultural rot that make murders like Uvalde possible.—W.G.

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Satan and the demons will oftentimes dress up evil in delightful-looking clothing to lure people to their doom.  On some occasions, however, they will present the worst forms of corruption and abomination to attract souls.  The latter is, with no uncertainty, the case with the new video game Elden Ring.

Nearly everything in this game is contaminated with darkness and wickedness; only a couple of instances stand out as having any redeeming value.  There is open blasphemy, witchcraft, self-immolation, gore, hideous creatures, and more. 

The story itself is yet another incarnation of Gnosticism:  The elden ring (the Monad) has been shattered; shards have been acquired by a few demigods (aeons); Queen Marika is Sophia.  The main goal of the player is to acquire the shards, reassemble the elden ring, and rule the land as a god:  Self-divinization is the final aim of the ancient Gnostic cult.  More on this subject can be read here; we would like to focus on other things besides this, though.

A couple of story elements in particular deserve special attention.  The first is the burning of the Erdtree, a kind of world tree in this game’s universe.  The world tree is an important symbol, representing the vertical axis that unites earth with heaven, with the divine.  By destroying it, man is declaring his independence from God – i.e., he is committing blasphemy.  Such is the kind of thing in store for the player of Elden Ring.

The second noteworthy element is the treatment of the body.  There are fiends who attach human arms, etc., to their own bodies; there is a human who replaces a limb with a Valkyrie’s; and so on.  The elements of the physical body are treated as things interchangeable; a person’s identity is thus something fluid, not fixed, a theme seen in other games like Too Human and Cyberpunk 2077.  The spirit driving the transgender ideology – that men can have uteruses implanted and so forth – the spirit driving that ideology forward is very much present in this game.

It would be one thing for such a game to even be on store shelves and widely available for purchase.  But what makes this so much more disturbing is that it is wildly popular:  It sold 12 million copies worldwide in only 17 days.

Much of the world, as typified by their eager embrace of games like Elden Ring, are hurtling towards disaster.  The West in particular is trying hard to erase her Christian identity. 

All is not gloom and murkiness, withal:  . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2022/04/garlington-elden-ring-is-an-image-of-western-corruption/.

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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!