Friday, May 30, 2025

Remembrances for June - 2025

 

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 3rd

Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee Confederate Memorial Day

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/confederate-memorials-speaking-to-posterity/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/leave-confederate-statues-alone/

June 4th

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 5th

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 6th

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 6th

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 8th

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 8th

Rev Frank Stringfellow

One of the most daring and successful spies for the Confederate States during the war; afterwards he married and became an Episcopal priest.

https://mymartinsville.com/frank-stringfellow.php

https://www.alexandriava.gov/historic-alexandria/basic-page/emma-green-and-frank-stringfellow-alexandrias-civil-war-sweethearts

June 9th

The Synaxis of Banned Confederates

A celebration of the 11 Confederates whose names were unceremoniously removed from bases, etc., of the uS armed forces.  The names of these 11 are given here:

https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/the-synaxis-of-banned-confederates

June 11th

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 11th

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 13th

Douglas Southall Freeman

An excellent historian and journalist.

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

June 13th

Cormac McCarthy

One of the most recent of Dixie’s famed novelists.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cormac-McCarthy

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/americas-prophet/

June 14th

General Leonidas Polk

The ‘Fighting Bishop’ of Louisiana in the War.

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2012/04/general-leonidas-polk-fighting-bishop.html

June 16th

DuBose Heyward

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

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

June 21st

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 23rd

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

24 June

Laura Talbot Galt Hyatt

As a school girl, she was reprimanded for refusing to sing in honor of the Yankees and their barbaric actions during the War.  May her spirit live in all Southern hearts.

https://identitydixie.com/2025/01/10/in-memoriam-laura-talbot-galt/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/81825738/laura-talbot-hyatt

June 30th

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 these links:

https://southernorthodox.org/orthodox-saints-for-dixie-june/

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!

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

‘Americanism Continues to Prepare the Way for Antichrist’

 

Archbishop Elpidophoros has followed up his awful July 4th encyclical [of 2024] with an equally atrocious prayer at the Republican National Convention.  In this part he embraces the spurious claim that the political institutions of the United States are the ‘world’s best hope’ for human freedom:


That they may embrace the needs of all Americans, and shine the light of good government upon the venerable institutions of the “world’s best hope” for every person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

More perceptive Orthodox leaders have never been quite so sanguine about the Enlightenment political ideals that lay at the foundation of Americanism.  St Theophan the Recluse, to name one:


“When royal authority falls,” Theophan had said, “and the people everywhere institute self-government (republics, democracies), then there will be room for the Antichrist to act.  It will not be hard for Satan to prepare voices in favor of renouncing Christ, as experience showed during the French Revolution.  There will be no one to pronounce the authoritative veto.  And so when such regimes, suitable for disclosing the Antichrist’s aspirations, are instituted everywhere, then the Antichrist will appear.”

The Elder Athanasios Mitilinaios pulls the curtains back further on the anti-Christian nature of the US government and others.  Speaking of the battle of Armageddon in Revelation 19, he says (via Fr Peter Heers’s presentation):


These ungodly powers will consist of the atheist communism with its stronghold in the East, the atheist materialism of the West [i.e., the US, Western Europe, and their allies—W.G.], and the atheist Zionism of the Jews. Although these are different ideologies they share one common interest, which is to do away with Christ and His Church.  . . .  They set aside their differences in order to accomplish the goal.

So much for the US as protectors of all those vaunted freedoms, particularly the priceless pearl of MAGA Evangelical Protestantism, ‘religious freedom’.  How many times have Orthodox Christians watched in horror as the US military brutally attacked their brothers and sisters, in Serbia and Syria, in Gaza, the Ukraine, and Russia?  And yet here is Abp Elpidophoros solemnly invoking God’s (which God, we wonder?) protection on the US military at the RNC:


Finally, preserve, protect, and defend the Service men and women who daily safeguard our freedoms, so that in prosperity and tranquility we can worship You, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the Universe, and be the blesséd People whose God is the Lord.

Does his Eminence follow the news at all?  If he did, he might have been somewhat reluctant to say those lines.  There are other dreadful stories about the US military apart from those we have mentioned regarding the Orthodox:

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/americanism-continues-to-prepare-the-way-for-antichrist/.

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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!

Friday, May 23, 2025

‘The Post-Christian American Experiment’

 

Noah Webster of Connecticut, with not atypical New England Yankee arrogance, proclaimed in the preface to his spelling textbook (published in 1783), ‘Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny—in that country laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature debased.  . . . American glory begins to dawn at a favourable period, and under flattering circumstances.  . . . a durable and stately edifice can never be erected upon the mouldering pillars of antiquity’ (Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781-1789, Northeastern University Press, Boston, Mass., 1981, p. 105).  From the outset, the United States have had an inclination away from reverence for the past and tradition and toward innovation (the South being an interesting outlier as a defender of tradition, particularly before the tragic War of 1861-5; but that discussion is best left for another time).

This is obvious in the attitude of US leaders towards Christianity.  For them, redemption of the world from the Fall was not to be achieved by uniting man and the creation with the Holy Trinity once again via the Church, but primarily through the work of political theories and systems.  Three authors uncovered some striking material in this regard, from amongst which is this crucial paragraph:

‘This transference of religious fervor to national ideals became the heart of American civil religion.  Christians began to suggest, as the Congregationalist John Mellen did in 1797, “that the expansion of republican forms of government will accompany that spreading of the gospel . . . which the scripture prophecies represent as constituting the glory of the latter days.”  This shift greatly strengthened the American republic, endowing it with a new sense of lofty purpose.  The nation rather than the church easily emerged as the primary agent of God’s activity in history’ (Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, The Search for Christian America, Expanded Edition, Helmers & Howard, Colorado Springs, Col., 1989, p. 114; bolding added).

Despite their Christian exterior, United States citizens interiorly are remarkably post-Christian.  The Church has been debased, and the union of States, particularly its political system, exalted.  God is no longer a Person with Whom they seek communion, healing from the brokenness of the Fall, and so forth; he is more of an impersonal deity who interests them only insofar as he/it will ‘bless’ their enterprises:  ‘God Bless America,’ as the old song goes, though it resembles more a magical incantation (i.e., a command directed at God) than a traditional Christian song or hymn.  Such a god has a very strong resemblance to the pagan, philosophical Greek conception of the divine:  ‘Ancient Greek philosophy developed a highly systematic theology governed by logic.  Logic defined God’s existence as necessary, but his existence remained a theoretical hypothesis.  God is empirically inaccessible, but must exist because logic demands a first cause.  We conceive of this first cause as an abstract essence, as the sum of the attributes which the first cause must have to be truly divine’ (Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, Chamberas and Russell, trans., Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Brookline, Mass., 2006, p. 25).

Logic likewise makes some sort of deity necessary for the post-Christian American Experiment, and like the ancient Greeks, they have imbued it with the attributes they think it needs to have in order to be of use to them, attributes which have shifted over the years, from a cold, distant creator and governor found in the Declaration of Independence, to the pantheistic god of Thoreau and Emerson and the other Transcendentalists, to the god of retribution and judgment of Lincoln and Julia Ward Howe, to the indulgent god of Oprah and George W. Bush.

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/the-post-christian-american-experiment.

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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!