PHILIP II OF MACEDON TO THE LEADERS OF SPARTA: "You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city."

LEADERS OF SPARTA: "If."

"...some truths are so obvious that only experts can deny them

-Peter Kreeft

(From an essay printed in Celebrating Middle-Earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization)

Some folks read dystopian sci-fi to escape. Others apparently read it to get policy ideas.

-Rebecca Fuentes

H/T Mike Flynn

"All fiction is about human nature. What kind of human nature you write about depends on the amount and kind of your talent, not on what you may consider correct behavior to be. The best forms of behavior are not more desirable than the worst for fiction if the writer sees the situation he is creating under the aspect of Truth and follows the necessities of his art"

-Flannery O'Connor

(H/T Jason Sims)

Martyrs

My friend Vicky wrote a beautiful poem, and she gave me permission to post it, so I have included it below. :-)

Martyrs

The Land drank

And drunk became

Pure wine poured 

Into her heart

It sang in joy

It sang in grief

Mysterious water

Into her bosom

It gave her life

It gave her pain

Where did you come from

Wine of victory 

Wine of defeat.

 Rulers of the world

Envied their bodies

Feared their souls

Took their breath

Intact their core

And Earth received 

This precious gift

This blood made white

By the Lamb of God

First born that died 

The Living One...

His death was life...

Their death in Him

The same.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. Psalm 116:15

Our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

-C.S. Lewis

...the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story- and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy...Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is *only* a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. *But* since the author of it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Ananke of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.

 -J.R.R. Tolkien, "Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien", Letter 89, To Christopher Tolkien, 7-8 November 1944

"Progressives hate the idea that Peter and the Apostles can bind. Traditionalists cannot fathom that Peter and the Apostles can loosen."

-reader of Mark Shea's blog

[Needless to say, those terms need qualification. For instance, for "Traditionalists" such as sedevacantists, such a saying would be applicable to, but a member of the FSSP would be different]

Just reading through the comments on a blog, I came across a quote that (quite apart from its immediate context in the specific argument) is such that I have to remember. lol.

"[He] is a remarkable man. He has the rare gift of being able to build a straw man using straw that has already been through the horse."

-Tom Simon (commenter on John Wright's blog )

“A weak man can never be meek, because he is never self-possessed; meekness is that virtue which controls the combative, violent and pugnacious powers of our nature, and is therefore the best and noblest road to self-realization. The meek man is not a man who refuses to fight, nor is he a man who will never become angry. A meek man is a man who will never do one thing: he will never fight when his conceit is attacked, but only when a principle is at stake." 

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Cross and the Beatitudes)

The Church has not been tried for three hundred years; it has not even been considered; it has only been ignored. The world knows less about her than about the man in the moon. It has never studied her claims, never searched out her secrets; and it dispenses itself from doing so for the same reason the first hearers of Christ dispensed themselves from hearing His message: 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Ignorance can be accumulated just as well as wisdom, and during the last three hundred years the world has accumulated a tremendous amount of ignorance concerning her."

~ Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 'The Prodigal World' January 1936, p 19. [GCStevenson 03.02.2013 - Gospel reading Lk 15:1-3, 11-32]

Found in a comment on a post on the official Facebook page for the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation

The moral genius of Catholicism is that we can fail over and over again to live up to the ideals of the gospel...and it never occurs to us to lower our standards so that our failures earn us cheap blue ribbons for good conduct. We repent, receive God's mercy, and get on with doing what we promised to do.

-Fr. Philip Powell, O.P.

Neuhaus' Law: Where orthodoxy becomes optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

Why God wishes us to worship him.

Perhaps you should contemplate the difference between Christ crucified and Kim Jong Il. A God who calls us to worship him is, by definition, giving us the best he has, which is himself. A man who demands worship is substituting himself for the best there is, which is God. Jesus didn’t exactly get the royal treatment when he came.

-Mark Shea (in a comment on his blog)

God is no more a “factor” in the mechanics of evolution than in the mechanics of automobiles. My auto mechanic takes neither God nor Darwin into account when repairing a transmission. There is no mention of God in the postulates of Euclidean geometry, either. I don’t know why anyone thinks this is astonishing. It all depends on the nature and depth of our considerations. I don’t take my laundry into account when mowing the lawn.

 Creation and evolution are simply not the same sort of thing; and God cannot be reduced to a mere efficient cause in the World among other efficient causes. The workings of Nature are not somehow independent of God’s giving existence to Nature. Otherwise, gravity and electromagnetism would be as upsetting as evolution.

 “You poor fools,” said William of Conches back in the day. “God can turn a cow into a tree. But has he ever done so? Therefore, give reasons why a thing is so or cease to hold that it is so.”

Or to quote St. Albertus Magnus: “In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass.”

(That is, methodological naturalism in the sciences was a medieval Christian invention.)

-"Ye Olde Statistician" (Mike Flynn) in a comment on Mark Shea's blog)

Religion is not the opium of the people. Opium is the drug of deserters who are afraid to face the Cross-the opiate that gives momentary escape from the Hound of Heaven in pursuit of the human soul.

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Rainbow of Sorrow

Fidelity to Christ cannot be separated from faithfulness to his Church.

-Presbyterorum Ordinis

We're a Paris Hilton people in an apocalyptic world

-Mark Shea

No group is as rigidly conformist as a bunch of college freshmen. They have been introduced into a new society – college – different from and presumed superior to their home. They MUST fit in – it’s a human drive as powerful in most people as sex and hunger. The keepers of this society are largely the professors, and those who can play the professors’ games. So, college freshmen are exceedingly unlikely to question anything their professors and peers tell them – they are painfully aware that they are the provisional junior members of this tribe. So, they not only accept Power Dynamic analysis, deconstruction and relativism without question, they become their staunchest defenders. Problem is, their defense consists entirely of pointing out that any questioner is not a member of their tribe – no argument is made (in fact, it’s difficult to imagine a 19 year old traditionally educated college freshman having the intellectual chops to even make a rudimentary argument about anything at all. Assuming they’d want to, which they don’t). Mockery, insult and presumed intellectual and moral superiority are the tools.

-Ishmael Alighieri

(h/t Mike Flynn)