The world must raise their voices and stand up for persecuted Christians, Hungarian State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians Tristan Azbej said on Thursday.
Azbej was one of eight speakers at a side-event of the National Prayer Breakfast that was sponsored by the organization Save the Persecuted Christians.
“All of humanity should stand up and come to the aid of persecuted Christians,” said Azbej.
— Read on catholicherald.co.uk/news/2020/02/07/hungarian-government-urges-defence-of-persecuted-christians/
Monthly Archives: February 2020
Available to Pre-Order Now …
From Robin Armstrong’s Gravity Dream Records:
‘The Bardic Depths’ is an all new progressive rock project formed from the writing team of multi-instrumentalist, Dave Bandana with lyrics and concept from Bradley Birzer, plus contributions from Peter Jones (Camel/ Tiger Moth Tales) – Saxophone/ Vocals, Tim Gehrt ( Streets/ Steve Walsh) – Drums, Gareth Cole (Tom Slatter/ Fractal Mirror) – Guitar and Robin Armstrong (Cosmograf) – Keyboards/ Guitar/ Bass, amongst a host of other amazing musicians from the progressive rock community around the world.
“The album is about friendship and its ability to get us through anything including war, with the concept centering on the literary friendship formed between J.R.R Tolkien and C. S Lewis between 1931 and 1949. “ says the Lanzarote based band leader Dave Bandana.
Friendship also provided the catalyst to enable such a wide cast of musicians to come together for the record, largely from the community provided by the Big Big Train Group on Facebook. The resulting album is an immersive combination of ethereal soundscape with Floydian undertones, and Talk Talk progressive pop sensibilities.
The Bardic Depths is available to pre-order now from Gravity Dream on CD or in an extremely limited CD/T-shirt bundle. It’s also available on CD from Burning Shed, who provide the tracklist:
1. The Trenches
2. Biting Coals
3. Depths of TIme
i) The Instant
ii)The Flicker
iii) The Moment
4. Depths of Imagination
5. Depths of Soul
6. The End
7. Legacies
And of course, there’s an album teaser on YouTube:
— Rick Krueger
Real Community: Hutchinson and Longmont
A years ago, while on a panel with that extraordinary radio personality, Mike Church, and a few folks from another website, I think I caused a bit of a stir by arguing that a real man’s existence was about protecting one’s family from the world, conserving what little order could be found in the family against the shattering disorders of the modern and post-modern abyss.
While I’ve always favored a republic and have been a republican as far back as I can remember, my republic would be a Harringtonian one of extremely well-armed small families and associations of friends and like-minded persons. In my Harringtonian vision, admittedly somewhat idyllic and medieval, communities would come together for cultural celebrations, book festivals, commerce, and a celebration of the sacraments.
It would also, to my mind, uphold the essence of the American founding as understood through the Northwest Ordinance.
And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.
While I very much agree with our own John Willson that no “founding” ever existed, only foundings, I would not look askance at any one who claimed the above, taken from Article III of the profound 1787 law, serves as the “mission statement” of the founding of this republic. For those of us who love ordered liberty, we might speak in terms of commerce and business, but the right to associate applies as much to families, churches, and schools as it does businesses. If we do not have the right to form a family as we chose, the right to open a business means nothing. The right of association is all-encompassing. We have the right to form families, businesses, universities, and, even, websites dedicated to Russell Kirk’s vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
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Batman at 75
[From 2014]
“Happy Birthday, Batman”
Just a little over a year ago, I came out of the closet. I admitted it to the world and without reservations.
I was and remain a Batman devotee. Much to my surprise, a lot of The Imaginative Conservative readers are also rather fond of Batman. So, in my weirdness (at least in this particular one), I’m not alone.
[http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/08/batman.html]
Even more, I’m a Batman snob. No “pows”or “ka-pows,” no silly side kicks in Disney-lite costumes, no Bat dances, and no Bat “shark repellants.” I don’t want Adam West, Michael Keaton, or George Clooney as Batman. I don’t want the Batmobile driving up to the Burger King drive thru window to order something.
I want my Batman dark, serious, dedicated, persevering, swift, and, when necessary, brutal.
Happy 75th Birthday, Batman!
As you might very well know, today is Batman’s 75th birthday. On this day, three quarters of a century ago, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics 27 (cover date: May 1939). Here’s the official write up from the company, DC (Time-Warner) that owns the Batman name:
In celebration of Batman’s 75th anniversary, DC Entertainment is partnering with thousands of comic book retailers and bookstores across the nation to celebrate “Batman Day” on Wednesday, July 23. As part of the festivities, fans who visit participating retailers receive a free, special edition of DETECTIVE COMICS #27, featuring a reimagining of Batman’s 1939 comic book debut, designed by Chip Kidd with a script by The New York Times #1 bestselling author Brad Meltzer.
In addition to the comic book, DC Entertainment is providing retailers access to an assortment of other collectibles to help in the celebration of “Batman Day” including a Batman 75th anniversary cape, bookmarks featuring essential Batman graphic novels and four Batman masks designed by comic book artist Ryan Sook spotlighting a variety of the character’s iconic looks from his 75-year history.
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Making Sense of a Chaotic World: “Red Metal” ~ The Imaginative Conservative
Now, three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, we have Red Storm Rising’s more than worthy successor, Red Metal, by Mark Greaney and Lt. Col. Hunter “Rip” Rawlings IV. While Lt. Rawlings is new to me, I have been reading Mr. Greaney’s novels for over a decade. He roared onto the literary scene during the revival of Tom Clancy co-authored books around 2010 and with his own extraordinary novel and hero (or anti-hero), The Grey Man, a year earlier. I have had the chance to praise Mr. Greaney several times, but never enough. Mr. Greaney is, in every way, our current and better Tom Clancy, taking thrillers into the twenty-first century. By this, I mean that Mr. Greaney fully understands that we live in a post-Communist world, a world of fundamentalisms as well as of nation-states and tenuous alliances. His own analysis of world affairs—though couched in fiction—is every bit as interesting as that coming out from any current periodical or think tank.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/02/making-sense-chaotic-world-red-metal-bradley-birzer.html
The Awesome 1980s
It’s hard not to laugh when my students think they’re imitating or comprehending the zeitgeist of—whether to honor or mock—the 1980s.
Though, in almost every way, it’s impossible to fault them for this.
The individual members of the incoming freshman class will have entered this world sometime in 1996 or 1997, a full seven to eight years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. To their active and eager minds, the 1980s meant lots of repetitive electronic pop music, an MTV that actually played music videos, leg warmers, bright colors, big checks and plaids, baggy pants and oversize shirts, top siders, goofy hair styles, televangelists, “duck and cover” safety from nuclear weapons, general happiness and prosperity, and John Hughes movies. It was a time before time, an era without wardrobe malfunctions, wacky chief executives, or reality TV.
Not all of these memories are wrong, of course, just selective.
From what I can tell, most current students idealize the decade in much the same way my generation—coming of age in the 1980s—viewed the 1950s. That nearly perfect decade represented peace, prosperity, primitive rock music, American assertion of power without lots of consequent deaths, innocence and naiveté, white t-shirts with packs of cigarettes rolled up in one’s sleeve, poodle skirts, leather jackets, James Dean shades, motorcycles, Marlan Brando cool, and tail fins on huge cars.
Everything, of course, was in black and white as well in the 1950s.
Well, so we thought.
But, two things must be remembered by those of us who lived in the 1980s and who want to teach our students the truth.
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Why I Went to CU: An Interview
An interview with Clint Talbott, Summer 2014.
Why did you choose a life in academe?
Two of the finest persons I knew as a child were my maternal grandfather and mother, both teachers. One Saturday, my grandfather decided to take me to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in his hometown of Hays, Kansas. He was always incredibly dignified. As we drove onto the campus of Fort Hays State, he saw a parking spot reserved for “Professor” somebody. He looked at me with his typical mischievous eye, and said, “Bradley, today, I think I’ll be a professor.” Whatever reason, I knew that a professor was somebody of importance (who, after all, could be wiser than my grandfather?), and the idea stuck with me throughout all of my schooling. I also had the great fortune of having a number of amazing teachers and professors, from grade-school Dominican nuns to some of the best lecturers and thinkers imaginable at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University.
How would you characterize the state of political discourse in the United States today?
Terrible. Absolutely terrible. But I must admit, I write this as a 46-year old jaded romantic who once would have given much of his life to one of the two major political parties.
Political discourse as of 2014 comes down to two things 1) loudness and 2) meaningless nothings. Oration is a dead art, and the news from CNN, Fox, and other outlets is just superficial talking points with some anger and show. Radio is just as bad, if not worse. As one noted journalist, Virginia Postrel, has argued, we probably shouldn’t take anything that someone such as Ann Coulter says with any real concern, as she “a performance artist/comedian, not a serious commentator.”
Two examples, I think, help illustrate this. Look at any speech delivered by almost any prominent American from 1774 to 1870 or so. The speeches are rhetorically complicated, the vocabulary immense, and the expectations of a well-informed audience high. To compare the speech of a 1830s member of Congress with one—perhaps even the best—in 2014 is simply gut-wrenchingly embarrassing.
Another example. The authors of the Constitution expected us to discuss the most serious matters with the utmost gravity. Nothing should possess more gravitas in a republic than the issue of war. Yet, as Americans, we have not engaged in a properly constitutional debate on the meaning of war since the close of World War II. We’ve seen massive protests, some fine songs, and a lot of bumper stickers, but no meaningful dialogue.
As a humanist, I crave answers for this, and I desire a return to true—not ideological—debate and conversation. Academia has much to offer the larger political world in this.
If you were asked to summarize what you hope to accomplish during your year as visiting scholar, what would you say?
I have dedicated my own academic career to the study of two things: 1) the human person as a unique manifestation of universal truths in a culturally- and temporally-specific setting; and 2) the humanities as best understood through the classics of western (and, at times, world) civilization.
CU is already rich in all of this, but I hope to add to that richness and to benefit from the same. No community can survive without a conversation with those of the present, those of the past, and those who are to come.
The Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at CU-Boulder was created because of a perceived imbalance of perspectives among faculty; do you see this as an issue that should be addressed, and, if so, how should it best be addressed?
Though I grew up (in Kansas) vacationing in Boulder and the Boulder area, I have only been a part of the campus community on the day I came for the interviews. Of course, I had a brilliant time. Regardless, I don’t really know what the state of discourse is on CU’s campus. I plan on being involved in as many discussions as possible, and I also plan on sharing those discussions with non-Coloradans through the website, The Imaginative Conservative (imaginativeconservative.org).
And, of course, it’s an absolute privilege to be invited to be an additional voice in such a vibrant intellectual community of scholars as that in Boulder. My voice, I hope, though will be that of Brad Birzer who happens to have strong conservative and libertarian leanings rather than as a libertarian or conservative who happens to be named Brad Birzer.
And, as much as I appreciate a relatively recent historical figure such as Barry Goldwater, I still much prefer Cicero and Virgil.
How do you view the value of higher education today, particularly given its rising cost and rising student-loan burden?
This is a terribly difficult problem, and, from what little I know of economics, so much has changed over the past fifty years due to strange incentives in funding, etc. But, we also continue to specialize and specialize in our professions and disciplines to the point we can no longer talk across the self-imposed barriers. A person might gain from this, but a society and the persons that make up that society do not.
I’m rather a devoted patriot of and for liberal education. From Socrates forward, the goal of a liberal education has been to “liberate” the human person from the everyday details of this world and the tyranny of the moment. Our citizenship, as liberally-educated persons, belongs to the eternal Cosmopolis, not to D.C. or London or. . . .
College-level education must return to the fundamentals of the liberal tradition. Interestingly, this is the least expensive way to teach and to be educated. The best education involves a professor, a group of students, a primary text, and three hours a week in discussion.
Given how readily available the texts of the greats have become through the liberation and decentralization of publishing through the internet, the complete writings of Plato are within reach of anyone with access to the web.
Real education does not have to be expensive.
This is in no way meant to discount professional education. Training for engineering, law, the sciences, etc. is vital for a functioning and healthy world and happy citizenry.
But, in our own titillation with what we can create, we often forget what came before and what will need to be passed on in terms of ethics and wisdom. The best lawyer, the best engineer, the best chemist, will be a better person for knowing the great ideas of the past: the ethics of Socrates; the sacrifice of Perpetua; and the genius of Augustine.
Lecture: Cato, A tragedy
How Joseph Addison’s 1713 play, CATO: A TRAGEDY, fundamentally shaped American republicanism, the American founding, and, especially, George Washington.
A huge thanks to Christine Dunn Henderson, Mark Yellin, and everyone at Liberty Fund for such an outstanding edition of the play.
Please listen, like, share, and subscribe!
V for Vendetta
Throw together an English Roman Catholic terrorist from 1605, a 1930’s noir atmosphere, a damsel who is only somewhat in distress, a government that makes Ingsoc look humane, some psychedelics, some fortuitous but random evangelical proof texting of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, some references to the mass killings of the twentieth century, a bit of Ray Bradbury, Max Ernst, and Patrick McGoohan, a rather tame lesbian romance, a fictional 1980s that went exactly against what actually happened, and two young cocksure perfectionist English artists who wanted to avoid mimicking their American counterparts. You probably still would not end up with the disturbing masterpiece that is V FOR VENDETTA. J
A penny for the English guys.
Written in the first third of the 1980s but not published as a graphic novel until 1988, V FOR VENDETTA broke into the cultural mindset of the intellectual rising generation like nothing else.
For someone growing up in that decade—with New Wave, Blade Runner, Reagan, Rush, New Wave, Macintosh, Red Rain, and Nuclear Winter—V FOR VENDETTA took the extreme desires and fears of a whole generation and made them into a coherent (mostly) tale.
If John Hughes captured our most adolescent suburban libertinism, V FOR VENDETTA made them into our most terrifying libertarian nightmare.
The story, written jointly by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, takes place in the late 1990s. In 1983, a Labour government replaced the Tories, kicking out the American nuclear missiles, thus leaving the U.K. free from destruction. Soon, the Americans and the Soviets went after each other, leaving America, especially, in ruins.
The resulting economic turmoil in Europe led to the rise of a National Socialist/Fascist government in Britain. Though the leaders personally gave into every lewd pleasure in and out of the bedrooms, they outlawed homosexuality, non-whites, and non-Protestant Christians. Those who weren’t deported or executed found themselves in prison camps, the playthings of progressive eugenicists, willing to see the body contorted in every possible manner to “perfect the race.”
Under the slogan “England Prevails,” the fascists maintain control through mass surveillance as well as through armed thugs known as “Finger Men” who have the power to kill, rape, and pillage at will, all in the name of England. Signs litter the streets with the hypocritical propaganda: “Strength through Purity; Purity through Faith.”
Of the internment camps, one of the most brutal was the Larkhill Settlement, out of which emerged the anarchist anti-hero, V. The authors intentionally keep his identity hidden, as he represents an idea more than an individual person. Still, the reader does come to know that V had been interned and had survived the experiments. In some way, never explained, the experiments made him more human than human, endowing him with extraordinary powers of resistance to bodily harm, astounding concentration and memory, and near perfect agility. It would, however, be better to describe the final product of the experiment as the creation of a Batman rather than a Superman. The only one of the test subjects to live, V gained the favor of his captors, set the camp aflame, and departed.
The main story takes place years after the destruction of Larkhill. Now, one by one, every person who ever worked at Larkhill is being systematically murdered. Though, the more appropriate term would be “assassinated.” V, of course, is proudly the killer. He not only kills his victims, but he does so with immense poetic justice. Each person assassinated—reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno—dies according to his or her vice.
A Story of Friendship: Star Trek
As young children, my older brother and I watched the original Star Trek series on Saturday mornings. We weren’t big TV watchers as a family, but Star Trek was special. To make it even better, it was the local PBS that aired Star Trek, presenting it free of all commercials.
Every Saturday, Todd and I awoke very early and watched the rerun for that week. This would have been around 1975, almost a decade after the show first aired. After each episode, Todd and I would talk, always mesmerized by the possibilities of space, life, and a billion other things. How much of the galaxy had this crew explored? Were they the modern Lewis & Clark? What happened when someone transported from one place to another? How smart were the computers? Were the Klingons the Soviets and the Romulans the Chinese? Or, maybe the other way around? Why did we only see the military aspects of Starfleet? What about the colonists, the pioneers? How did time travel work? If the Enterprise found itself sent back to Earth, why did it happen to arrive the same year the show was being filmed.
Pretty serious stuff for an eight year old sitting with his much admired thirteen year old brother.
I had no idea at the time, but the show’s founder and creator, Gene Roddenberry had actually described Star Trek as a “wagon train to the stars” when he first shopped it to studios. It would be set, though, on the space equivalent of an aircraft carrier, a mobile community as diverse as Gunsmoke’s Dodge City, he continued in his show treatment. The crew, roughly 203 of them, would be as diverse as possible, asserting that racial prejudice and ethnic strife would be things of the past in the non-specified time of Star Trek. Only later did the show writers decide it took place in the 2260s. From its beginning, however, Roddenberry’s Star Trek represented a brash Kennedy-esque liberalism, a confidence that America could teach the world the principles of civilization, tolerance, and dignity. [Sources: Whitfield and Roddenberry, THE MAKING OF STAR TREK (1968); and Paul Cantor, Gilligan Unbound (2003) and The Invisible Hand of Popular Culture (2012)]
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Spirit of Cecilia 
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