Alan Jacobs

It was Odilo’s stroke of genius to place his new holiday as the matching bookend of All Saints’. For ... there are suffering souls who depend on the ordinary mass of the faithful just as the ordinary mass of the faithful depend on the saints. While it is true that the prayers of the pious monks of Cluny held special power, no prayer by any Christian is useless. Though some are stronger than others, all can pull on the same rope, and every little bit of energy helps the cause. The feast of All Souls became a way for simple and quite unsaintly Christians to reciprocate, to participate in the economy of prayer not just as receivers but as givers.

This is what Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy meant when he claimed that the creation of All Souls’ marked “the first universal democracy in the world.” The saints have special access to God, they are our patrons and friends, but then we too may befriend those departed who in their suffering are very far from God….

The Cluniac vision of all Christians joined in a vast circle of the prayerful, loving and interceding for one another, is a powerful one, especially since, just as there are saints whose spiritual power and even existence are unknown to us, so too there are poor suffering souls in a place of torment whose names equally unknown and who are therefore in particularly dire straits. Thus in the Sarum Primer — a vastly influential collection of liturgical prayers developed at Sarum, near modern Salisbury, in England — there is a poignant “prayer to God for them that be departed, having none to pray for them.” Such poor souls, “either by negligence of them that be living, or long process of time, are forgotten of their friends and posterity”; thus they “have neither hope nor comfort in their torments.”

In societies which place a great emphasis on familial duty, a phrase in that Sarum prayer can be stinging: “by negligence of them that be living.” Thus an anthropologist named Andrew Orta has recently reported on the way All Souls’ Day is practiced among the Aymara people in the Bolivian highlands: they build household altars and pray for all the ancestors whose names they know, and then, when memory fails, they pray for all the unknown ancestors as laqa achachilas — dust grandparents.

— from my book Original Sin: A Cultural History

Many journalists continue to demand the release of the "Pepper Hamilton Report." You should know, while the lawyers from Pepper Hamilton gave presentations to the Board of Regents and some administrators about their findings, they never created or delivered a written report.

— here. Perhaps President Garland should explain why that is. Wouldn’t a written report be a normal and expected thing for such a legal team to produce?

I hope that this site will indeed offer “The Truth.” My fear is that it will offer spin.

[caption id=“attachment_29345” align=“aligncenter” width=“900”] here[/caption]

Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

But the ecosystem for independent publications is fundamentally broken. Getting discovered, building a readership, and profiting from your work as an independent writer are all much, much harder than they used to be.

— Redesigning Waxy, 2016 edition – Waxy.org

Peter Brown, that great historian of early Christianity, has given the most cogent explanation for the arising of the cult of the saints in the late Roman world. He explains that the emphasis of early Christian preaching on judgment, on the human need for redemption from sin, brought to the minds of common people — among whom Christianity was early successful — their social and political condition. Having strictly limited powers to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing, they turned, when they could, to their social betters in hope of aid. If a local patrician could befriend them — could be, at least for a time, their patron — then they had a chance, at least, of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus. For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render malleable seemingly inexorable processes, and to bridge with the warm breath of personal acquaintance the great distances of the late-Roman social world. In a world so sternly organized around sin and justice, patrocimium [patronage] and amicitia [friendship] provided a much-needed language of amnesty.”

As this cult became more and more deeply entrenched in the Christian life, it made sense for there to be, not just feast days for individual saints, but a day on which everyone’s indebtedness to the whole company of saints — gathered around the throne of God, pleading on our behalf — could be properly acknowledged. After all, we do not know who all the saints are: no doubt men and women of great holiness escaped the notice of their peers, but are known to God. They deserve our thanks, even if we cannot thank them by name. So the logic went: and a general celebration of the saints seems to have begun as early as the fourth century, though it would only be four hundred years later that Pope Gregory III would designate the first day of November as the Feast of All Saints.

— from my book Original Sin: A Cultural History

 — Lithub

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] P. D. James by Michael Taylor (1996), National Portrait Gallery, London[/caption]

I did ask him during a break if he was intending to make me look sinister or mysterious, to which he replied, "I have enough problems putting down what I see without trying to see something else." He has put down precisely what he saw: an elderly, much-lined woman with, I suppose, a certain authority. It is the painting of a seventy-five-year-old woman by someone still young, and is literally wart and all. It is a powerful painting which I much admire and, like all powerful paintings, provokes controversy. Some of my friends complain that it verges on caricature, but no one says it isn't like me.

— P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“737”] via Biblipeacay[/caption]

I believe that it is in the question of schism rather than heresy that the key to the problem of the disunity of Christendom is to be found. For heresy as a rule is not the cause of schism but an excuse for it, or rather a rationalization of it. Behind every heresy lies some kind of social conflict, and it is only by the resolution of this conflict that unity can be restored.

— Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (1942)

The very best thing about having been born into an economically marginal family in Birmingham, Alabama, having been raised largely by my grandmother while my mother worked and my father was in jail, and having worked a minimum of 25 hours a week to pay my way through an undistinguished public university, is that now I get to enjoy the boon of hearing people whose parents sent them to Ivy League schools constantly lecture me about how privileged I am.