Friday, June 27, 2025

Remembrances for July – 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

July 3rd

John Crowe Ransom, one of the leaders of the Vanderbilt Agrarians and a leading 20th century writer and teacher.

https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/john-crowe-ransom/

July 4th

Thomas Jefferson, undoubtedly the South’s most recognizable Enlightenment philosopher, but his most important intellectual contribution is rather the opposite of all that:  his agrarianism and insistence on local customs and governance (i.e., the preservation of old English traditions).

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/?s=Thomas+Jefferson

July 6th

Paul Hamilton Hayne, one of the South’s best poets.

https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/hayne-paul-hamilton/

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/hayne/hayne.html

July 9th

Sir William Berkeley, a colonial governor of Virginia whose influence is felt within Southern culture to this day.

https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Berkeley_Sir_William_1605-1677

July 9th

Pierre d’Iberville, Canadian soldier and explorer, the founder of the first permanent French settlement in Louisiana.

https://64parishes.org/entry/pierre-le-moyne-diberville-2

July 9th

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, one of the great figures of Southern literature for his comic work Georgia Scenes, but also an active preacher and a leader of four universities.

https://georgiawritershalloffame.org/honorees/augustus-baldwin-longstreet

July 10th

Gen Henry Benning, from the Georgia Supreme Court to a successful general in the War and back to practicing law afterwards.

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/henry-l-benning-1814-1875/

July 10th

Paul Charles Morphy, a chess prodigy from Louisiana who died young in 1884.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-southern-gentleman-who-dominated-chess/

July 17th

John Coltrane, the famous jazz composer and performer.

https://southernorthodox.org/john-coltranes-jazz-the-african-diasporas-search-for-a-religious-home/

July 17th

Gen James Johnston Pettigrew, a good example of a Southern gentleman.

https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/pettigrew-james-johnston

July 23rd

Eudora Welty, one of the South’s best writers.

https://eudorawelty.org/biography/

July 25th

Wilmer Mills, a gifted Louisiana poet who died young.

https://www.timesfreepress.com/obits/2011/jul/28/wilmer-mills/16401/

https://kirkcenter.org/essays/wilmer-mills-the-poet-as-maker/

July 26th

Sam Houston, one of the most influential men in Texas history, but the arc of his life also touched other States and tribes.

https://www.dissidentmama.net/when-men-were-giants/

https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/sam-houston

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/510/sam-houston

July 29th

John Slidell, an important diplomat during the War.

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/chron/civilwarnotes/slidell.html

July 30th

George Fitzhugh, a helpful critic of the pure capitalist economic system.

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughcan/bio.html

July 30th

Gen George Pickett, a soldier for most of his life, he is best known perhaps for his part in the Battle of Gettysburg.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/george-e-pickett

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/812/george-edward-pickett

July 31st

Randolph Shotwell, a gifted writer, and a microcosm of the suffering South as she went through the War and Reconstruction.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/randolph-shotwell-in-war-and-prison/

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of July from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow these links:

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

http://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/08/happy-feast-for-saints-of-july.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, June 24, 2025

‘Legal Immigration Is an Underestimated Problem’

 

A religious controversy is roiling Texas.  A giant statue of a Hindu deity, the half monkey-half man Hanuman, standing at 90-feet tall (making it the third largest statue in the US), has been erected at a Hindu temple in Houston.  The date of its emplacement is significant and highly symbolic:  August 15th.  This is no ordinary day.  In the Church this is the day on which Christians celebrate one of the 12 Great Feasts of the year, the Falling Asleep of the Ever-Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.  What we are witnessing, therefore, is the very real replacement of Christianity with a false, pagan religion, and in one of the most conservative States at that.

How did this happen?  Legal immigration.

Illegal immigration gets most of the headlines because of all the sensational crimes committed by the illegals, but legal immigration is also causing difficulties for the States.  One of the main problems is with wages.  Breitbart has been covering this aspect of the immigration saga, and others, quite well:


The number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. every year since 1980 has not dipped below 525,000. Since 1999, annual legal immigration levels have not dropped below 645,000. And since 2004, the number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. every year has not dipped below 957,000 admissions a year.

 

Every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an American workers’ occupation reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent, researcher Steven Camarotta concludes. This means the average native-born American worker today has their wage reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.

 

Likewise, every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.

 

The Washington, DC-imposed mass legal immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates, as America’s working and middle class have their wealth redistributed to the country’s top earners through wage stagnation.

Furthermore:


Out of those 13 million Americans who are available for U.S. jobs, about 6.5 million are unemployed. Of those unemployed, close to 13 percent are American teenagers who are ready for entry-level U.S. jobs — the exact jobs that low-skilled foreign workers generally tend to take.

 

About 1.6 million Americans are not in the labor force at all, but they want a job, including about 426,000 discouraged American workers who are demoralized by their job prospects. Also, there are 5.1 million Americans who are working part-time jobs but who want full-time jobs. More than 1.4 million of these U.S. part-time workers said they had looked for full-time jobs but could not find any.

 

 . . . The mass importation of legal immigrants — mostly due to President George H.W. Bush’s Immigration Act of 1990, which expanded legal immigration levels — diminishes job opportunities for the roughly four million young American graduates who enter the workforce every year wanting good-paying jobs.

 

In the last decade alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage foreign workers. Meanwhile, if legal immigration continues, there will be 69 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. by 2060. This would represent an unprecedented electoral gain for the Left, as Democrats win about 90 percent of congressional districts where the foreign-born population exceeds the national average.

The economic and political disadvantages of too many legal immigrants are one thing.  The cultural disadvantages are another.  As they rush in, the threat to the Western, Christian culture of the US is profound.  Thomas Jefferson touched on this in a letter he wrote in 1817:


for altho’, as to other foreigners, it is thought better to discorage their settling together, in large masses, wherein, as in our German settlements, they preserve for a long time their own languages, habits and principles of government, & that they should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation, yet English emigrants are without this inconvenience. they differ from us little but in their principles of government; and most of those (merchants excepted) who come here, are sufficiently disposed to adopt ours.

Some idealistic conservative dreamers, following atheistic Enlightenment principles that conceive of man as a malleable blank slate, have no problem with legal immigration to the US of people from every nation under the sun in large numbers.  As long as they honor our laws and system of government, let them come, they say; there will be no problem.  Jefferson rejects this notion.  He was himself something of a philosophe, so his objection is noteworthy.  He draws distinctions between even German and English immigrants to the US, preferring the latter because of their cultural similarities.  How much less would he have approved of welcoming non-Europeans (most of whom are also non-Christians) by the tens of thousands every year, as the States and their federal government are doing!

A contemporary foe of this kind of cultural destruction is the Frenchman Renaud Camus.  In a recent interview, he breathes fury upon those who are undermining borders and traditions with massive numbers of immigrants from completely different cultural backgrounds as their host countries:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2024/09/garlington-legal-immigration-is-an-underestimated-problem/.

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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, June 20, 2025

‘A Soviet Refugee Affirms the Southern Tradition’

 

Could a Russian monk living in the remote woods of central New York State have anything relevant to say about Dixie?

The answer to that question is a definite Yes.

This monk was born Alexander Taushev in Kazan, Russia, in 1906, the Taushevs being amongst the nobility in pre-revolutionary Russia.  After the Soviets gained power the Taushevs were exiled, in 1920.  The young Alexander grew up in Bulgaria and was educated at the University of Sofia under a saint, Seraphim Sobolev, from which he received a degree in Theology.  He was a teacher and administrator in parts of eastern and western Europe and was tonsured a monk in 1931, receiving the new name Averky in honor of St. Averkios of Hieropolis (+167 A. D.), and was also ordained a deacon.  The next year he was ordained as a priest.

In 1951, Father Averky arrived in New York State, where he became a professor and then rector of Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary in Jordanville, New York, and was thereafter renowned for his commentary on the New Testament.  In 1961, he was ordained Archbishop of Syracuse and Holy Trinity.  He fell asleep in the Lord on 13 April 1976, and though he has not been officially canonized, he was regarded by his spiritual child St. Seraphim Rose (+1982) as a friend of God – a saint.

What is of most interest to us for the purposes of this essay are those commentaries of the books of the New Testament.  In them, Southerners will find a startlingly clear vindication of their traditions:  honoring women by keeping them out of the grimy world of politics, a gradual end to slavery, a jaundiced view of money-getting, etc.

In Archbishop Averky’s commentary on I Timothy 6, he reveals his basic principles on the idea of social revolution, always so much in fashion in various places of Yankeedom, while being mostly abhorred at the South.  He is unequivocally opposed to it:

‘Chapter 6 of the epistle contains important instructions that resolve in the spirit of Christianity an important issue of social inequality, which so energizes the people in modern times.  The general meaning of these instructions is that Christianity abhors violent social upheavals.  Speaking in more contemporary language, Christianity encourages change in social relations by means of gradual development or evolution, by instructing and transforming great masses of mankind in the principles of true Christian love, equality, and brotherhood.  Conversely, Christianity condemns the path of revolution, for it is a path of hatred, violence, and bloodshed’ (Archbishop Averky Taushev, The Epistles and the Apocalypse:  Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament, Vol. III, Nicholas Kotar, transl., Vitaly Permiakov, edr., Holy Trinity Seminary Press, Jordanville, New York, 2018, p. 132; this book is available as a handsome hardcover here).

He then applies these principles directly to a subject that the South still wrestles with, slavery:  ‘This is why Paul says, “Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and His doctrine may not be blasphemed” (6:1).  Christian slaves must be especially careful if their masters are also Christian.  “And those who have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather serve them because those who are benefited are believers and beloved. . . .  If anyone teaches otherwise  . . .  he is proud, knowing nothing, but is obsessed with disputes” (6:2-5)’ (pgs. 132-3).

Abp. Averky says further about this in his commentary on Ephesians chapter 6, ‘Then the apostle exhorts slaves to show obedience to their masters, and masters to be fair and condescending to slaves.  St Paul does not even touch the political or social issue of the legality or abolition of slavery.  The Christian Church in general has never set itself the goal to drive forward external political or social revolutions.  Instead, Christianity seeks the interior transformation of mankind, which then will naturally entail the external changes in the social or political aspects of the entire life of humanity’ (p. 73).

Dixie was therefore not in the wrong for seeking a gradual end to slavery, but rather it was the Yankee abolitionists who were, who advocated precisely for the quick and violent end to slavery.

The archbishop also addresses forthrightly the issue of feminism, an ideology despised by traditional Southerners and excoriated particularly well by Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney and Louisa McCord.  The collective Southern distaste for it is illustrated easily enough by the reluctance of Southern States to approve the 19th amendment (granting suffrage to women) to the Philadelphia constitution.  Abp. Averky, commenting on I Timothy chapter 2, is in accord with them:  . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/a-soviet-refugee-affirms-the-southern-tradition.

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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!