Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Remembrances for April

 

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

April 1st

Ellis Marsalis, Jr

One of New Orleans’s great jazz musicians.

https://selu.libguides.com/BlackHistorySELA/marsalis

April 3rd

Richard Weaver

Perhaps the greatest defender of Southern ways to be born in Dixie.

https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/weaver-richard-malcolm-jr

April 6th

Gen Albert Sidney Johnston

One of Dixie’s leaders during the War, killed at the Battle of Shiloh.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/albert-sidney-johnston

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/4334/albert-sidney-johnston

April 7th

Judge Jackson

He helped the Southern folk-art of shape-note singing to blossom.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-colored-sacred-harp/

April 9th

Appomattox Day

If you have time, please pray for the South on April 9th, Appomattox Day, the beginning of our sojourn in captivity.  Do some fasting as well if you can:  The Holy Fathers tell us and show us over and over again that humility attracts the Grace of God.

April 11th

Caroline Gordon

One of the South’s best writers of novels and short stories.

https://www.visitclarksvilletn.com/plan/clarksville-connections/literature-and-journalism/caroline-gordon/

April 12th

Gen Richard Taylor

He lived and fought in Louisiana before and during the turbulent War years and was buried there after he died.

http://www.la-cemeteries.com/Notables/Civil%20War/Taylor,%20Richard/Taylor,Richard.shtml

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fta31

April 25th

Donald Davidson

Another outstanding 20th century defender of the South and an excellent writer of poems, non-fiction prose, and ballads.

https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/donald-davidson/

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/06/philosopher-poet-donald-davidson-agrarian-south.html

April 26th

Don Andrés Almonaster

A wealthy Spanish civil servant who lived in New Orleans during Spanish rule of Louisiana.  He gave very generously to rebuild the city after the Great Fire of 1788.  Two of his notable benefactions are what would become Charity Hospital and the St Louis Cathedral in which he is buried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Almonaster_y_Rojas

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

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/05/happy-feast-for-saints-of-april.html

--

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

Anathema to the Union!

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

A Religion of the Future – Cannibalism?

 

This story has been getting a fair amount of attention:

https://www.13newsnow.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/meat-company-wants-you-to-have-a-celebrity-for-dinner-literally-eco-eats/77-8c333b91-2250-4ace-87b0-183798d38883

It is consistent with the spirit of the age, which is further illustrated in the proposed curriculum of California’s public schools:


 . . . The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”


This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”


--Christopher Rufo, https://www.city-journal.org/calif-ethnic-studies-curriculum-accuses-christianity-of-theocide, via https://gizadeathstar.com/2021/03/nuttyfornias-return-to-the-aztec-god-of-human-sacrifice/

Dr Joseph Farrell’s comments are worth a look:


 . . . I suspect there's an agenda here, and I'm  going to crawl right to the end of the twig and off of it, and state clearly what I think it is: I think these leftist Marxist nuts fully intend to reintroduce human sacrifice, and that their goal is to tie it to "social activism" in order to cloak it. They fully intend to sacrifice people - like they have everywhere else they've obtained power - to the great "god" of Marxist dialectic, and that sacrifice is no longer to be tied simply to babies in the womb. Everyone is on the cannibalistic menu. And somehow, in their twisted "logic", the implication is that putting an end to the thousands and thousands of Aztec human sacrifices was "dehumanizing." The Spanish committed atrocities in the New World. So did the French, the Portuguese, the British, and later, the Americans (think of Wounded Knee, for example).  But the record of some of those "indigenous peoples" is not spotless and no less - if not more - dehumanizing.


In my book The Grid of the Gods, I  noted the following:


We now come to confront the issue of human sacrifice in Aztec culture, as it is recounted in the Codex Chimalpopoca, directly. In one place, the account states that in the year 1487, or the year 8 Reed as the Aztecs called it, some 80,400 prisoners were sacrificed on the step of the pyramid at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. Indeed, the numbers are so staggering that one begins to wonder if the whole vast program of Aztec conquest was really driven by a perceived "need" to a constant supply of sacrificial victims.


However, that same Codex makes it very clear that the god who was considered by the Aztecs themselves to have founded their civilization, Quetzlcoatl, forbade it. (Joseph P. Farrell, Grid of the Gods, pp. 207-208, boldface emphases added)


The mind, and the heart, boggles, not the least because, in its rush to invoke an Aztec god of sacrifice, that this significant point of Aztec culture and belief was completely ignored, perhaps because in Aztec tradition, Quetzlcoatl was himself a red-haired, blue-eyed, "white" god, and perhaps also because those same Aztec sources indicate that human sacrifice was instituted by "devils":


The Toltecs were engaged (in battle) at a place called Netlapan. And when they had taken captives, human sacrifice also got started, as Toltecs sacrificed their prisoners. Among them and in their midst the devil Yaotl folllowed along. Right on the spot he kept inciting them to make  human sacrifices....


Indeed, every kind of human sacrifice that there used to be got started then.... it was the devils who started them. (Grid of the Gods, p. 208, citing History and Mythology of the Aztecs: the Codex Chimalpopoca, trans. from the Nahuatl by John Bierhorst, p. 118)


I call this a material omission, one step up from bad scholarship from a so-called "curriculum designer". And it's not at all surprising that it's being done in Nuttyfornia, because those omissions betoken that what is really being pressed is an agenda.


And as the Codex Chimalpopoca itself indicates, that agenda is a diabolical one.


 . . .


--https://gizadeathstar.com/2021/03/nuttyfornias-return-to-the-aztec-god-of-human-sacrifice/

For more on the Aztec gods who will be honored in this curriculum:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/aztec-human-sacrifice-the-re-barbarization-of-california/

For an idea of what this ‘counter genocide’ in North America could look like, there is this episode from the heathen reaction to Christianity in Phoenicia in the 4th hundredyear:


The historian Theodoritus relates that during the reign of Saint Constantine the Great, Saint Cyril destroyed many idols and pagan temples in Heliopolis, Phoenicia. He was put to death for this during the reign of Julian the Apostate. Pagans cut open his stomach and, like wild beasts, they ate his liver and intestines, for which the Lord punished them with blindness, boils and other terrible afflictions.  . . .


--https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/03/29/100937-martyr-cyril-the-deacon-of-heliopolis-and-those-with-him-who-suf

If the enemies of Christianity are intent on chanting to the demonic Aztec ‘gods’, Christians should be no less hesitant about singing hymns to the Orthodox Saints of North America, who are true gods, made so by their participation in the Uncreated Grace of the All-Holy Trinity:


As the bountiful harvest of Your sowing of salvation,

The lands of North America offer to You, O Lord, all the saints who have shone in them.

By their prayers keep the Church and our land in abiding peace

Through the Theotokos, O most Merciful One.

 

Today the choir of Saints who were pleasing to God in the lands of North America

Now stands before us in the Church and invisibly prays to God for us.

With them the angels glorify Him,

And all the saints of the Church of Christ keep festival with them;

And together they all pray for us to the Pre-Eternal God.


--https://orthodoxwiki.org/List_of_American_Orthodox_saints#Hymns


--Holy icon of the Orthodox Saints of North America via https://www.oca.org/fs/all-saints-of-north-america

They will be the strong knights to protect California and all of North America, and the tender doctors to heal us - if we will let them.

***

This fits with the overall theme as well and needs to mentioned:

https://www.newswars.com/first-came-invoking-aztec-war-gods-now-its-satan-sneakers-with-human-blood-is-america-ok/

Holy Saints of North America, save us unworthy sinners!

--

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

Anathema to the Union!

Monday, March 29, 2021

Offsite Post: ‘Is Christian Politics Possible?’

 

In a recent article at The Hayride, we were presented with two choices when it comes to Christianity and politics.  The first, from Erick Erickson, is that God will handle most everything; man’s involvement is minimal and inconsequential.  The second, from Scott McKay, is that God has nothing to do with politics; man’s involvement therefore must be deep, maximal, and highly consequential, and he need not bother about Christian ethics when moving within the boundaries of the realm of politics. 

Both approaches suffer from an imbalance that is the result of a misunderstanding of the Incarnation of God the Word, Jesus Christ.  When the Son of God joined Himself forever to our human flesh, as the Church Fathers remind us often in their teachings, this union affected every aspect of human life.  The Lord came to heal and renew the whole man, not simply part of him.  If He had not accomplished that, our salvation would be incomplete and thus non-existent.  But He has accomplished the complete renewal of mankind, and this means that politics, too, has experienced a change since the Incarnation, just as eating, the family, and every other dimension of human life has been altered by it.

But God does not force Himself upon mankind.  His is always a synergistic work:  God and man working together to accomplish the building up of the Kingdom of God in this world.  The recent Feast of the Annunciation (25 March) is an excellent example of this.  In the reading for this Feast is the following passage:

 

 . . . “the word of the creature brought the Creator down into the world.” [St Philaret] explains that salvation is not merely an act of God’s will, but also involves the Virgin’s free will. She could have refused, but she accepted God’s will and chose to cooperate without complaint or further questions.

Therefore, it is an error to simply shrug our shoulders and say ‘God’s got this,’ like Mr Erickson would have us do.  This minimalist approach would leave the Church extremely vulnerable to her enemies and allow the latter to push the broader culture even further in an un-Christian direction.

However, the same thing will happen if we take the path offered by Mr McKay.  Any people that exiles God from its decision-making ends up a nightmare-land, as France, Russia, Cambodia, and others attest - and to which, more and more, Louisiana and the rest of the States are likewise attesting.

But is it possible for Christians to act forcefully and meaningfully in politics without renouncing Christian morality?  Without a doubt it is.  This has been the experience of the Church for 2,000 years:  from England to Constantinople to Serbia, etc., etc. 

Let us look at a couple of examples.  In England during the reign of King Oswald of Northumbria, we have this account from St Bede:  . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2021/03/garlington-is-christian-politics-possible/ .

--

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

Anathema to the Union!