Eric Johnson – Page 77 – Catholic Light

LtCol. Robert Zangas, RIP

I met LtCol. Robert Zangas when he was a captain and I was a mere PFC. He had a sly sense of humor and an honest demeanor, and though I did not know him well, he seemed like am excellent officer, and he was well-liked by everyone in our civil affairs unit.
His tour ended at our unit, but a decade later he returned, just in time to go to war. I was in the first detachment to go to the Mideast, and he was with the rest of the unit, but after the war we all regrouped in the city of Al Kut to run Wasit province until we could turn things over to the Army. LtCol. Zangas’s professionalism and good humor was a calming influence on many Marines, and his leadership contributed greatly to our successes.
After the war, LtCol. Zangas returned to Iraq, this time as a civilian working for the Coalition Provisional Authority as a press officer. This week, two men dressed as policemen murdered him, another CPA employee, and their Iraqi translator. He leaves behind a wife and three children.
Please pray for the soul of Robert Zangas, and for his widow, and his fatherless children. Also, please pray that we never abandon Iraq to the vicious thugs who prowl about that country seeking to oppress its people once again.

Break their teeth in their mouth, O God!
Break out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!
Let them flow away as waters which run continually;
When he bends his bow,
Let his arrows be as if cut in pieces.
(Psalm 58:6-8)

UPDATE: There’s an AP story about the attack here.

Hatred is not a family value (but it is a liberal one)

As we suspected, Ashcroft-haters are full of glee that the Attorney General is in intensive care. Michelle Malkin, conservative Catholic columnist and total badass, takes them apart in her latest column.

Starting a plainchant choir

For several years, I’ve been bouncing around the idea of helping start a plainchant choir at my parish. Mainly, the idea has been bouncing around in my head, because my desire exceeds the amount of free time I can spare, as well as my expertise (which is pretty much limited to loving chant and having many CDs of early church music).
Then one of the organists at our parish said he would be willing to help coordinate a plainchant group and help with the music. He also knows of one other bass who could sing. This may come to nothing, but if the time commitment isn’t too great, I’m very excited to do it.
Anyone have any advice? How to pick music, how many voices to recruit? Your thoughts will be poured into the empty vessel that is my mind.

How your choices make things reeeeeeally expensive

The Washington, D.C. area is built around two-income families. The second income might be part-time or full-time, but it has to be there or else you’ll fall behind, because the price of everything is calibrated to households with two parents working.
We’re looking for a new house, and confirming the above statement. Desirable real estate is a finite commodity, and people are willing to pour increasing amounts of money into acquiring it. Ergo, prices are rising fast. Ergo, more mothers are pressured to go to work to pay the bills; a lot of the money they earn is then devoted to real estate; and the prices rise even higher.
Today we bid on a house, and lost. That’s okay — it was the first contract we wrote, and it can take several before you get one accepted. What’s crazy is not that we bid $10,000 more than the asking price, and the winning bid was $10,000 more. That is merely discouraging. The terrible thing is that of the four bids they were considering, ours was the only one that required an inspection.
“Why the italics, Eric? What is the big deal?” You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive. And you would want a trusted mechanic to look the car over, right?
These folks are willing to take their chances with something 20 times as expencive. If the house has a bad roof, cracked foundation, or extensive water damage, you aren’t going to see that during an open house when the real estate agent is serving cider and cookies.
You could easily be stuck with $25,000 of damage, with no legal recourse. There are apparently a lot of kooky people out there who don’t see that as a problem. Their kookiness becomes our problem, because all else being equal, if they offer the same price as we’re offering, the sellers will choose the nutty no-inspection contract over ours.
This rant is not a cry for sympathy. I have confidence that God will help us find a place to live. Financially, we’re doing pretty well, mainly because we made a tidy profit on our previous house. My point — you were hoping I had one, if you’ve even read this far — is that people’s selfish choices make a big difference. If you choose to pursue your upscale lifestyles, it ratchets up the price for everyone else. (How the hell can a working-class family buy a house around here?) Next time you hear someone say, “What I do doesn’t affect anybody else,” you have my permission to smack them with a rolled-up real estate section.

Krauthammer’s unbloody libel

More comments on a movie I haven’t seen:
Charles Krauthammer’s column today about “The Passion” is most unfortunate, mostly because he’s wrong, but also because his analysis is one of the most penetrating.
So it is with sadness that I read him saying that “…Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ such a singular act of interreligious aggression. He openly rejects the Vatican II teaching and, using every possible technique of cinematic exaggeration, gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews.” Further, “these deviations [from the written Gospels] point overwhelmingly in a single direction — to the villainy and culpability of the Jews.”
Usually, Krauthammer’s Friday column is worth reading because his analyses are better-written and original than most writers. This column is a tired rehash of points that have been made a thousand times elsewhere, and the writing itself is perfunctory. Saying that Jews “come off rather badly” is completely disingenuous — does Jesus come off badly? How about his mother? Mary Magdalene? Simon of Cyrene? From what I’ve heard, they’re all portrayed sympathetically, and from what I’ve read, they were all…Jews!
What people are really objecting to is not “The Passion” but the Christian understanding of the Crucifixion — that it was an internal Jewish dispute that the Romans were dragged into. Preferring to keep the peace rather than do justice, the local imperial representative ordered Jesus of Nazareth to death.
The only way to call that an anti-Jewish interpretation is if you say that Christ and the members of his movement were not “really” Jews. Perversely, that’s what anti-Semites have done throughout history, and that warped tradition continues to this day. Is he saying that some portion of the Judean population could not have possibly urged the death of Jesus Christ? Or that a Jewish mob, constituting a small percentage of the population, might have urged his death — but we should never mention that fact, even if it is coupled with the teaching that whatever group was the proximate cause of Jesus’ death, we are all ultimately responsible for crucifying Christ because of his sins?
It’s extremely disappointing to see Charles Krauthammer lend his considerable prestige to a false and insulting charge against believing Christians.