Right now, I’m listening to the overture from “The Marriage of Figaro” for the second time. (if I were John, I’d have typed “Le Nozze di Figaro,” but I’m not as cultured as he is.) I can’t listen to it just once — like Al Franken and pie a la mode, I have to have more and more until I’m satiated. What a little gem of a piece — sprightly and tuneful, one of the few perfect earthly things.
When I tell my older son Charlie that living in heaven is better than anything in this life, he says, “But I like living on this planet.” (He’s under the impression that heaven is a different world.) There are a few pleasures that incline me to agree with him.
Author: Eric Johnson
Ann Coulter on Rush’s critics
I don’t always agree with her, she is manifestly a bomb-thrower, and her language and reasoning sometimes go off the rails. But damn do I love Ann Coulter’s columns sometimes. She’s in fine form as she rails against Rush Limbaugh’s detractors:
“In liberals’ worldview, any conservative who is not Jesus Christ is ipso facto a ‘hypocrite’ for not publicly embracing dissolute behavior the way liberals do.”
Judging from their reaction to Rush’s predicament, many liberals’ souls are black with hatred, spite, and envy. That’s a far worse problem than a chemical addiction or buying medication without a prescription.
Davis going down
Good. Thanks, John. Let me be the first to say that I’m glad Gray Davis is going down hard. True, his replacement will be a pro-abortion nominal Catholic, like him. However, his replacement has never had a spokesman publicly rebuke a bishop for daring to teach the faith.
Other people have lost, too, including
• The Los Angeles Times. They just happened to finish its dirty story on Arnold a few days before the election, which didn’t exactly lend credibility to their tales.
• Feminists. Even Maureen Dowd says that feminism died in 1998 when Gloria Steinem defended Bill Clinton’s dalliance with a subordinate. They tried to make a stink about Arnold’s boorishness…but who listens to them now? And speaking of Clinton…
• Former president Bill and his lovely wife Bruno. Showing the political acumen that lost the House and Senate to the Republicans for at least a decade, the Clintons campaigned hard for Gray Davis and he still took a dive. As opposed to 2000, when Algore lost, and 2002, when most of the Senate candidates they supported lost. Yet people still praise their “political skills,” which demonstrably don’t extend past their own self-promotion.
Hiatus
I am not going to post anything else until another Catholic Lighter posts something. That is all.
‘The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance…’
After spending a lot of time reading through the Navarre Gospels, I’ve decided to step back in time to the Old Testament. Specifically, I want to learn more about the prophets and the psalms. One thing that’s always struck me about the latter is that they are impossible to reconcile with the squishy, saccharine God of the Suburbs. (Who is a false image, an idol deserving to be smashed.)
The smug bumper sticker that says, “God is too big to fit into one religion” is true if they’re talking about the anorexic, consumerist version of religion that passes for Christianity in far too many American churches. The God of the psalms is shown in his plenary nature, and is too big for an emaciated religion. The psalmist regards each aspect of the deity with love one moment, fear the next; he cries out for mercy because of his sinfulness in one psalm, then begs God for his enemies’ destruction in another. The hearts of the lion and the lamb truly dwell within this eclectic collection of songs.