Deacon’s Blog

The latest, named “Prayer” from an up-and-coming Polish Jazz artist Karolina Glazer. The song “Prayer” is a solo vocal only. There is no accompaniment. I think she’s remarkable.

Teledysk do utworu “Prayer” Karoliny Glazer from Krzysztof Szopa on Vimeo.

I also like her motto: “If you can’t sing it, improvise it.”

From her MySpace Music profile:

Karlona Glazer was born on June 10, 1982 in Gliwice, Poland. Karolina was brought up within an environment of people involved in art. Her house has always been full of music, dance and plastic arts. She began her adventure with jazz when she was only a teenager, spending time at jam sessions in the Silesian Jazz Club in Gliwice. She was a student of Krystyna Pronko and Anna Serafinska. She also developed her voice during International Workshops in SLS Vocal Technique conducted by American lecturers.

In 2003 she was won a prestigious XXX International Festival Of Jazz Vocalists in Zamość, Poland. It enabled her to continue her musical development and resulted in performances at various concerts in Poland (Smart Jazzpol Festival 2003, Bluse over Bóbr 2004, Gogowskie Spotkania Jazzowe, Pilsner Urquel Jazz 2005, Colours of sound 2006). She has been well received by the critics and journalists (Jazz Forum, Jazzi Magazine). In 2004, according to fusion.pl survey, she classified fourth in popularity ranking (vocalist / vocal group) in Poland. As professionals say: the jazz environment recognizes her as a rising star of Polish jazz vocalism.

Karolina specializes in an instrumental approach to human voice and pays attention to scat improvisation technique. She experiments with her vocals by using her great imagination and a 4-octave scale. Her music is characterized by an improvisational and colourful approach to jazz.

Tim Russet, the host of NBCs Meet the Press died today at the age of 58. From CNN:

Friends and colleagues remembered Russert on Friday not only as one of the country’s most respected and influential political journalists, but also as a friend, a devout Catholic and an avid sports fan, especially when it came to his home team, the Buffalo Bills…

Russert was born May 7, 1950, in Buffalo, New York. His parents were Timothy John Russert Sr., or “Big Russ,” a newspaper truck driver and sanitation worker, and Elizabeth Russert…

“Tim was a true child of Buffalo and the blue-collar roots from which he was raised,” Brokaw said Friday. “For all his success, he was always in touch with the ethos of that community.”

Russert credited his upbringing with helping him keep his ego in check as he became the man who interviewed presidents and important politicians of the day.

“If you come from Buffalo, everything else is easy. Walking backwards to school, for a mile in the snow, grounds you for life,” Russert told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz in 2004. “Plus, if you have a family the way I do, it’s a daily reality check…”

Eternal rest grant onto him O Lord and may the perpetual light shine upon him.

Also from Aaron Marshall. I admit - this does get me fired-up.

S.M. Lockeridge’s “My King” 2008 High Energy Remixed Version from Aaron Marshall on Vimeo.

A mix of C.S. Lewis’s audio book “Mere Christianity” dubbed over mixes of ambient house, drum n bass and electronica from Aaron Marshall of CHURCHSMO whom I follow on Twitter. This is really cool.

When I first read about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech on English jurisprudence, a speech from a highly respected scholar and theologian, to legal scholars, I thought to myself - he’s right.

Soon after that — very soon — I started to see the reaction. There was dismay from the mainstream press, rabid screaming from Evangelical/Fundamentalist ™ Christians, and the requisite calls for resignation, flogging, and the comfy chair.

For those so inclined - who really want to understand what occurred and the content of the Archbishop’s speech - I highly recommend three pieces from the Faith and Theology blog:

• On sharia and hysteria: or, why Rowan Williams is right
• Mike Higton on Rowan Williams and sharia
• Rowan Williams and sharia: time for some satire (note the link to why St. Paul should resign - a great piece by Kim Fabricius)

Like the allowance for other forms of jurisprudence, such as the Jewish Batei Din (per Wikipedia, Israel allows for religiously established courts with authority over those religions’ adherents), the allowance for Sharia among Muslims is just the sort of right a pluralistic society must accept, and as Mike Higton explains, a means to bring religious discourse into a conversation focused on a faith community’s public accountability, public discourse, public explanation, and public scrutiny.

In Poland, the Jewish population (pre-1793) was granted broad authority in managing its own affairs. This extended so far as to allow for an entirely parallel system of government. The Jewish population had its own parliament (a hybrid between the old Sanhedrin and the modern Knesset) and civil courts were only involved in matters where Jews and non-Jews were in conflict. This sort of system was representative of the pluralistic society Poland encompassed.

For an excellent recap of religious freedom and pluralism in Poland see Poland’s 1997 Constitution in Its Historical Context from which I excerpt:

Jews had been in Poland at least since the ninth century (predating the introduction of Catholicism), establishing separate communities alongside Polish cities and villages. By a law of 1367, these Jewish communities, called kahały were given substantial autonomy to establish their own organizations and tribunals. By the sixteenth century some 150 thousand Jews lived in Poland, mostly in and around the larger cities, and they were self-governed by Jewish parliaments known as waady. Jewish liberties in Poland were not absolute, however. Aside from the continual, unofficial intolerance they suffered from burghers and peasants, Jews were also legally prohibited from owning land, taking out tenancies, leasing state revenues, and trading in royal cities. Nevertheless, Jews did own land, take out tenancies, and even refused to pay taxes under protection of the nobility.

The nobility “cultivated a special relationship” with Jewish communities for reasons that were largely economic. Unlike most other European countries, Poland allowed Jews to establish businesses and engage in various trades; they were not restricted to money-lending. Because Poland’s Jews could become debtors as well as creditors, the nobles who lent Jews money to start businesses or trades were incented to ensure their well-being. Consequently, when the King abandoned his legal responsibility to protect the Jews, the nobility became, first, their de facto protectors and, later, their new legal protectors (under laws enacted in 1539 and 1549). Under the nobility’s auspices, Jewish tradesmen were able to circumvent cumbersome town-guild regulations, and Jewish financiers were able to loan money at favorable interest rates set by the Sejm. And, like other minority groups in Poland, Jews were able to lobby the Sejm to protect their rights; they contributed to officials and attended meetings of Parliament.

In sum, in the sixteenth century, while Jews were being expelled from whole regions of Germany, Austria, and Bohemia, they lived in Poland in relative peace and prosperity. With the exception of the “Catholic elite,” their situation in Poland differed little from that of any other group. Indeed, they were not the only minority group to prosper under the political reign of the nobility. The szlachta became the guarantors of religious liberty for all parties in Poland throughout the Renaissance and into the Counter-Reformation.

Every law the Sejm enacted which protected religious or civil liberty had its roots in the nobility’s struggle to retain its own political rights. And the szlachta resisted every call for religious persecution out of fear that legally sanctioned intolerance might result in increased royal authority at their expense. But their motivations were not only political and economic; a real streak of libertarianism runs through their writings. For example, Jan Zamoyski, Chancellor of the Polish Crown in the sixteenth century (during the reign of King Stefan Batory), wrote, “I would give half my life if those who have abandoned the Roman Catholic Church should voluntarily return to its pale; but I would prefer giving all my life than to suffer anybody to be constrained to do it, for I would rather die than witness such an oppression.” Even the King, Zygmunt August (the last of the Jagiellonian dynasty), reflected the religious tolerance of his time when he wrote, “‘I am not king of your consciences, I wish to be monarch equally of the sheep and of the goats, I am afraid of tearing wheat as well as tares.’”

Poland had been officially Catholic since the tenth century, but while other Catholic countries were persecuting their religious minorities and executing dissidents (especially during the Reformation), Poland consistently permitted its minorities and dissidents to pursue their own religious beliefs and practices unhindered. In the eighteenth century, the French Catholic Rulhiere wrote of sixteenth-century Poland: “‘This country, which in our day we have seen divided on the pretext of religion, is the first state in Europe that exemplified tolerance. In this state, mosques arose between churches and synagogues.” Indeed, in 1616 there were more than 100 mosques in Poland.

Religious toleration was not only official policy in sixteenth-century Poland; it was the law, codified in the 1573 Warsaw Confederation, reputed to be the first document in European history to constitutionalize religious toleration…

Countries claim broad mandates for freedom and tolerance. Their citizenry has a right to know - to what extent freedom, to what extent tolerance, to what extent do we live together in mutual respect? Multiculturalism and pluralism are concepts bandied about - but rarely put into practice — just try to ignore the Jones next door. May a citizen be who he or she wishes to be? A good question. A question Christians must consider because we owe allegiance to no man, to no country, only to God. Does our government allow for that? Can we say that freely? Are we willing to enter into a broad dialog with society over what we believe? Are we willing to face public accountability, public discourse, public explanation, and public scrutiny? This would not be a problem if we who claim belief, who have a faith built on natural reason, are willing to take that faith and belief into the fray.

Allowing for Sharia is not all that far from allowing for Holy Mass, private confession, and most especially the preaching of the Gospel. The Gospel is supposed to be our guiding life principal, encompassing the way we live, act, and interact from day-to-day.

There is much consternation out there over several issues that have come to the fore, seemingly simultaneously.

As I look through these events I continually ask myself - what do we as Catholics believe, what is our foundation, and why does any of this worldly stuff matter to us.

Of course our foundation - our rock - is Jesus Christ, true God, true man, the second person in the Holy Trinity. Acknowledging that, everything else becomes rather secondary. Politics - bleh. The media - huh? Sports celebrities, talking heads, pundits, actors - who they?

If that is our faith, and I am certain it is, I propose a new tactic in dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the worldly, the worldly that surround, and may indeed, outnumber us. That tactic is prayer and silence.

I will start with a few recent hot button issues.

ESPN controversy

It appears that some commentator as ESPN wishes to have intercourse with Jesus. A person by the name of Dana Jacobson went off on an anti-Christian tirade at a recent ESPN function honoring ESPN Radio personalities Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic. The vulgar speech has raised the ire of various defense and anti-defamation leagues. All the callings on the carpet, chest beating, call for apologies, and subsequent apologies do not really amount to too much. If a professional person can do something of this caliber - without thinking twice before speaking - well I am sorry for her.

Rather than react, I propose that we pray, and bear these insults in Holy silence. That tongue biting we do is our penance for the times we ourselves have spoken callously of others. In addition it is the kind of sacrifice - the kind of silence - that brings results.

Clergy bless abortion clinic

In my neck of the woods — LifeSite News reports: Pro-Abortion Clergy Bless New York Abortion Business as “Sacred Ground”

…a group of pro-abortion clergy in Schenectady held a ceremony at a local abortion business to bless it and call it “sacred ground.” Religious officials who are pro-life call the ceremony sacrilegious by blessing a place that kills the life God creates.

Rev. Larry Phillips of Schenectady’s Emmanuel-Friedens Church dedicated the ground, according to a report in the Albany Times Union.

…

Another minister prayed for safety for the abortion business and a local rabbi blew a shofar to dedicate the building as an honorable place in the community.

My gut reaction is that this is horrible. A good dressing down of the Rev. Phillips and the others involved? Outrage? Scathing criticism? Rather, prayer and Holy silence.

Jews, and Muslims, and Hindus, oh my

The Western Confucian (thanks to the Young Fogey for the link) discusses the rage of the Hebrews. Good points in the quid-pro-quo sense. This, along with events like the Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles’ apology to the Hindus (thanks again Fogey) are issues best left to God - and beyond the value of discussion.

In the PNCC we certainly pray for the conversion of all who do not believe in Christ or for that matter believe in God at all. That includes a pretty large chunk on the world. Our neighbors in the Hindu Temple - yep, them. The Jews at Chabad House in Colonie - yep. The Muslims in Albany - yes. The Mormons in Latham - them too. Unitarians, agnostics, atheists, and anyone else who does not believe in God as He revealed Himself - One and Trinitarian.

Better yet, on Holy Saturday, after the Third Exhortation we pray:

Lord God,
You are an immovable power
and an eternal Light.
Look graciously on this mystery,
which is Your whole Church,
and the vehicle of our salvation,
with unceasing direction and sufficient assistance.
May the whole world witness
that You raise up the humble,
and make old things new.
May all humanity come to know
that all things return to their pristine existence
through Jesus Christ, Your Son…

…and after the Fourth we pray:

Almighty Eternal God,
in Jesus Christ You showed us
the best example to follow.
Grant that all nations of the world
will unite in Him with love for You…

In these, and all the prayers of the Holy Church, we acknowledge God as He is - and we really do not think anyone else has a clue or insight that can beat God’s self revelation. They may well be on the road to salvation - and they are well within God’s merciful hands - something we in the PNCC acknowledge in our Confession of Faith:

I BELIEVE that all peoples as children of one Father, God, are equal in themselves; that privileges arising from differences in rank, from possession of immense riches or from differences of faith, sex and race, are a great wrong, for they are a violation of the rights of man which he possess by his nature and the dignity of his divine origin, and are a barrier to the purposeful development of man.

…and

I BELIEVE in immortality and everlasting happiness in eternity in union with God of all people, races and ages, because I believe in the Divine power of love, mercy and justice and for nothing else do I yearn, but that it may be to me according to my faith.

But still, we do not deny our faith, or refuse to offer them our prayers, our Holy silence, and our wish that they come to Christ - because doing so is Christian charity.

We truly do believe in God. We believe that He offers all that we need. As such the vices of the world cannot harm us. Our responses to provocations and the ways of the worldly must be borne of complete charity - which is love - and that love finds its fulfillment in our prayer, our sacrifice, and most particularly the ultimate prayer - the Holy Mass.

The fact is that prayer and Holy silence will actually accomplish more than our words, protests, and blogging will ever accomplish. They are proactive in the sense of calling down grace. They place us in the experience of the Divine interlude. It is the music of the place that is between heaven and earth. It is where we stand in the breech, bringing the world to God and God to the world. Couple our prayer and Holy silence with some fasting and works of charity - and most of all love toward these sad folks - folks who are angry, hate-filled, resentful, misguided, and ultimately apart from those whom they disparage - and we will be doing the work of God.

A family member recently noted that Christians pray for the faithful. She wondered why we do not pray for those without faith - because they need the prayers. She is right. Both the faithful and the faithless need prayer - in equal amounts. The faithful so that they remain true. The faithless so that they are brought to God’s self revelation in accordance with God’s timing and God’s grace.

If we love rather than react with rage it is not capitulation. Silence is not acquiescence. Prayer is not useless. We must remind ourselves - do not volunteer yourself onto someone else’s stage, and if you are dragged there - He will give you the words. We must act on the eternal stage and bear a witness to truth that is beyond time and place. Surely we are to speak the truth, but on our stage - and on the terms set down by the Heavenly Father.

Those who hate cannot be won by argument or voices raised in protest. Only the grace of God can change their hearts. For this we pray. Lord have mercy on us. Amen.

From The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams which I picked up from Why Pullman Killing God is no Bad Thing:

I read the books and the plays as a sort of thought experiment: this is, after all, an alternative world, or set of worlds. What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny. For Pullman, the Church evidently looks like this most of the time; it isn’t surprising that the only God in view is the Authority.

…

But this should not be read as a way of wriggling out of Pullman’s challenges to institutional religion. I end where I started. If the Authority is not God, why has the historic Church so often behaved as if it did indeed exist to protect a mortal and finite God? What would a church life look like that actually expressed the reality of a divine freedom enabling human freedom?

A modern French Christian writer spoke about “purification by atheism” - meaning faith needed to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. I think Pullman and Wright do this very effectively for the believer. I hope too that for the non-believing spectator, the question may somehow be raised of what exactly the God is in whom they don’t believe.

Amen.

I ran across a blog called GodBeGone.

Looking at the writing there I drew an immediate comparison to the recent controversy over the Golden Compass movie.

Fr. Martin Fox pegged the objections to the movie in his article: Golden Compass author: ‘My books are about killing God.’

In it he says¹:

Parents can’t always keep up with popular culture—and when a movie is promoted as a fun adventure, featuring children riding enchanted polar bears, all in time for the Christmas season, what’s not to like?

Unfortunately, the film’s makers have an agenda. The film is based on the works of author Phil Pullman, who has written a series of entertaining stories called “His Dark Materials.” In his own words: “‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ says Pullman. ‘Mr. Lewis [C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia] would think I was doing the devil’s work’” (from the Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2001). And, “I’ve been surprised by how little criticism I’ve got. Harry Potter’s been taking all the flak…. Meanwhile, I’ve been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God” (from the Sydney Morning Herald, Dec. 13, 2003)…

I read a review of the Golden Compass in The Atlantic, aptly titled How Hollywood Saved God.

That’s true in that Hollywood watered it down so as to make it meaningless.

Substitute any characters in the movie - plug Saint Francis in here or Bing Crosby in there, and we’d all be singing White Christmas as we process to church with little animals at our side.

Mr. Pullman got ripped off big time. Hollywood took his book and turned it into a movie that was 99% fluff and little substance. So much for the strength of his convictions standing before the all powerful Hollywood money machine.

What I was most struck by as I read through the Atlantic review and the GodBeGone blog was the lack of reasoned argument and scholastic integrity from the “there is no God” folks.

…and isn’t that it.

I fully agree with people’s right to believe or disbelieve as they see fit. I am confident enough that Jesus Christ and the Holy Church can stand up in any reasoned argument, but these folks rarely bother with reasoned argument.

Mr. Pullman is just repeating a mantra made up by someone else. He’s offering his literary skills as a mouth piece for that mantra without any real study of the points-of-view involved² which just makes him intellectually dishonest.

Any debate or discussion that relies on unstudied diatribes (Mr. Pullman going off on the crusades, witch hunts, blah blah) and the repetition of accusations as a substitute for reasoned argument or scholastic integrity is meaningless. In the GodBeGone blog you find repeated shots at God through the improper use of the English language (let’s not capitalize Jesus or Christianity or anything else we find silly because, well that’ll get ‘em).

Consider the historical parallels.

If we repeatedly accuse a group of folks of all sorts of bad things, supporting such with horrible literature, twisted history, and bad scholarship, and we use language in such a way as to make them inhuman (don’t capitalize their names - they’re not human anyway), don’t we set them up for inhumane treatment, concentration camps?

Scholarship takes more than sound bites. It takes more than blog entries. It takes time, study, an understanding of the core beliefs of your opponent, unadulterated by fluff and histrionics.

As the Young Fogey might point out, tolerant conservatism does not demand that you believe what I believe, nor does it force my beliefs upon you. It does demand that we be gentlemen about the process and that you respect my rights equally, including my right to be treated humanely and to profess my beliefs.

So have at it. Tell me how wrong I am.

From The Wall Street Journal: On Polish TV, Desperate Wives Sound Like Guys

Voice-Over Artists Strive To Keep Dialogue Flat;

WARSAW — When Walt Disney Co. brought the hit ABC TV series “Desperate Housewives” to Poland, producers found just the right local actor to do the voices of the show’s sexy, tempestuous female stars: Andrzej Matul, a 59-year-old guy with a deep voice and a flat delivery.

Mr. Matul is a lektor. In Poland, American shows aren’t dubbed by actors mimicking the original, English-speaking actors. A lektor, the Polish term for voice-over artist, simply reads all the dialogue in Polish. While the lektor drones on, viewers hear the original English soundtrack faintly in the background.

On Polish TV they can be heard every day: lektors, men who read the voices of every part in foreign TV shows, including women and children. See some examples and a report by WSJ’s Aaron Patrick. The approach is popular in Poland, where viewers still feel comfortable with a style deeply rooted in the country’s communist past. Lektors, traditionally men with husky voices, pride themselves on their utterly emotionless delivery, a craft honed through thousands of hours in recording studios. Fans appreciate the timbre of their voices, often tempered by years of cigarette smoking.

Jan Wilkans, 49, who got his first lektoring job narrating a pirated version of the movie “Dead Poets Society,” says he has his own rule: “Interpretation, yes; expression, no.”

Lektoring is also popular among American TV distributors. It offers them a low-budget way to get their programming into a market with a young population and strong economy.

As a result, lektoring is booming, just when it should be dying out as viewers all over the world are coming to expect higher production values.

About 45 foreign channels started up in Poland in the past five years, including the Discovery Channel, ESPN and HBO Polska. Last week, the British Broadcasting Corp. said it is starting three channels with lektored programming in Poland. The Disney Channel began broadcasting in December. On the main networks there are often more than eight hours a day of lektors reading in Polish what is being said in English and other languages.

“It doesn’t seem right to Westerners,” says Costa Kotsianis, managing director of Hippeis Media Ltd., which translates shows throughout Europe from its headquarters in London. “But the very good lektors can record a whole show in one take. It saves a lot of money.”

One little problem is that Polish words are generally longer than English words, and they’re rich in consonants. A lektor can’t fall behind the action and he needs to read in a steady, slow, low voice. So, the dialogue is simplified.

In “Desperate Housewives,” for example, a seven-word apology from prim Bree Van De Kamp to her husband at his hospital bedside becomes three, with Mr. Matul saying, “Mam wyrzuty sumienia.” (”I have pangs of remorse.”)…

The same applies to films. No reading subtitles, just the lektor.

On my visits to Poland I found it off putting at first, but grew to like it. I listened to the characters for the drama and inflection, and listened to the lektor for the words. No different than the little voice in my head reading the subtitles, among other things .

A photo slide show of our Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Anthony Mikovsky blessing our recently installed cross. The blessing was followed by High Holy Mass and a dinner and reception.

The slide show was developed by one of our parishioners.