AND SPEAKING OF TAC, CHECK THIS OUT!:

I’ve recently released a website providing convenient access to the digitized archives of a wide range of periodicals from the last two centuries, most of which have never before been available outside the dusty shelves of research libraries.

Although many of these are generally conservative or rightwing, such as The American Mercury or Social Justice, many others are liberal or leftist, including IF Stone’s Weekly, The New Masses, Encounter, and The Reporter, while the majority are mainstream and relatively non-ideological. ...

Therefore, as a means of publicizing the website, I have announced a Historical Research Competition with a $10,000 First Prize, for the most interesting and important research discovery based on these archives.

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COLOR PHOTOS OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, 1940S. Via Flavorwire. Last one is my favorite.

One night in his study with brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, [my father] asked quietly, "Do you honestly think, my daughter, that dancing has progressed since the time of the Greeks?"

"No," I replied snappily. "Do you think you write any better than Euripides?" That ought to hold him, I figured.

He looked at me long and slow. "No, my dear," he said, "but we have Euripides' plays. They have lasted. A dancer ceases to exist the minute she sits down."

As Father spoke I understood death for the first time. I was a child of fourteen but I realized with melancholy that oblivion would be my collaborator no matter how fine my work.
--Agnes de Mille, "The Swan," in Dance to the Piper

Then live, my strength, anchor of weary ships,
Safe shore and land at last, thou, for my wreck,
My honour, thou, and my abiding rest,
My city safe for a bewildered heart.
That though the plains and mountains and the sea
Between us are, that which no earth can hold
Still follows thee, and love’s own singing follows,
Longing that all things may be well with thee.
Christ who first gave thee for a friend to me,
Christ keep thee well, where’er thou art, for me.
Earth’s self shall go and the swift wheel of heaven
Perish and pass, before our love shall cease.
Do but remember me, as I do thee,
And God, who brought us on this earth together,
Bring us together to his house of heaven.
--Hrabanus Maurus (a Benedictine monk and archbishop), addressed to Abbot Grimold of St. Gall. From Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (pdf), tr. Helen Waddell, and via RB.

"THE STYLITE." Via TA.

BEFORE AND AFTER D-DAY IN COLOR. Via PES, probably.

KARL MARX MONUMENT DISMANTLED, TO BE REPLACED BY CHURCH: The Google machine tells me this is real. Via WAWIV; click through to the link-within-a-link:

The monument to Karl Marx at Sovetskaya Square in downtown Penza was dismantled as a cathedral will be erected instead of it, the Penza Diocese told Interfax.

"A part of the Savior Cathedral will occupy this part of the square; its construction is underway," the interviewee of the agency said. ...

The world's first monument to Marx was set up in Penza on May 1, 1918, but it broke down as it was made of clay.

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THOMAS TALLIS FLASH MOB IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM! Via Wesley Hill. A nice description is here.

update: Unsurprisingly, the YouTube video doesn't have great sound quality. If you'd like to hear some really sublime music, though, check out the Tallis Scholars.

"PHILOSOPHERS," 1917.

CANTERBURY TALES BOARD GAME. This seemed like the sort of thing you people might like! Via Mark Shea.

BYZANTINE FRESCOES OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS: Via TKB.

THE FLYING MONK: Daniel Mitsui is running a series on "Early Catholic Aviators"--like, really early.

The first known serious flight attempt in world history occurred about a thousand years before the Wright brothers, in western England. Then, a young Benedictine monk leapt with a crude pair of cloth wings from a watchtower of a church abbey at the beginning of the 11th century. This monk, known to history as Eilmer of Malmesbury, covered a furlong - a distance of approximately 600 feet - before landing heavily and breaking both legs. Afterwards, he remarked that the cause of his crash was that he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail.

the rest of that entry!

and another!

Although its roots are traced back to the ancient world of mythology, the real birth of figure skating occurred in Stuart England.
--James R. Hines, Figure Skating: A History

Oh LOL, of course I would fall for the Restoration-era sport! ...And the one whose motto seems to be, "Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls."

(edited to fix quote and tags)

A MAN'S CASTLE IS HIS HOME! Building the modern medieval fortress in France; and in the Ozarks.

Links via the Rattus.

reader #2:

My initial response to the suggestion that we revive vowed friendship is, "Yes, obviously." It's madness that marriage is the only meaningful public mode of intimacy that our society allows. It just leaves so much of the psychological landscape... nameless.

As the very last person to be actually interested in undertaking a vowed friendship (I'm a married white male who considers his wife his best friend and who has no significant male friendships to speak of), I nonetheless had much the same reaction to the idea of vowed friendship that you did. The world of vowed friendships is the one that really resonates with me. And this for many reasons, including, but not limited to...

1. The world of vowed friendship almost automatically has a saner view of marriage. After all, in practice, there's a lot of overlap between eros and philia. The marital relationship has a lot to do with being friends and co-workers, but with those aspects of the relationship consumed in public discourse on the one hand by silence and on the other by the equation of worthwhile work with money-making, marriage is left only with its distinctives -- sex and childbearing. Oh... except not those either since the Birth Control Revolution. A robust theology of friendship accompanied by a meaningful liturgical corollary would go a long way towards giving us a way to think sanely about marriage.

2. The Catholic Church says that homosexuality is wrong only insofar as sodomy is wrong. That means that the Church ought to decry the condemnation of homosexuality as a culture/genre/predisposition (and especially the condemnation of chaste same-sex love) as error. The Church has not done this in an open way (though, I would argue, it has done so in an implicit way), and I would really like to see that happen. It would appeal to my sense of justice, and it would seem to me that the Church was striking a really startling blow against modern heresies -- both pro- and anti-homosexual.

and

3. I'm down with pretty much anything folks did in the Middle Ages so long as it doesn't involve gruesome death.

However... but... and also... I still see merit in some of the arguments you speak against.

You are correct to say that the potential for misuse is no reason to avoid doing something that is inherently good to do. However, the potential for misuse may mean that we have to do that inherently good thing in an extremely cautious manner. Thus, the Tridentine mass is good, and Benedict XVI has always spoken out in favor of it, but he nonetheless has been cautious in his efforts to bring it back into common usage because of its mistreatment by the St. Pius X Society and others (as well as the unfavorable reputation it has with a certain generation of bishops).

Just so, I think that much groundwork must be laid both theologically and politically before the vowed-friendship rite may be meaningfully restored. Were it simply released to the many winds within the Church, it would be tossed about and treated ill. It would be taken by the press and the public at large as a concession by the Church to the gay marriage movement rather than as a ressourcement coming out of Catholic tradition. And many Catholic faithful (though men and women of great faith) would be unsophisticated and uninformed enough to suffer great scandal. More to the point, though, I think the vowed-friendship in its true form (and not as a surrogate for gay marriage) would be short-lived and little used.

I would suggest that what the Church needs is a point man in the form of a (conservative) bishop who truly and deeply understands the need for a theological understanding of friendship to let his own flock be a liturgical laboratory. After a few years of sermons and letters (maybe a nationally-distributed book) on the subject, perhaps he could hand-pick a few well-respected pairs of friends to help resurrect the rite on a very small scale. And so on and so on... little by little.

Basically, as with all rites, the community comes first. The soil must be ready for the seed.

But again, I agree with your basic point. The vowed friendship and a theology of friendship underlying it is something the Church (and the society in general) need... I would go so far as to say "desperately need." My only concern is cultural and political logistics.

Thanks for getting people talking about this issue. Here's hoping the conversation is... preparing the soil (?)

LOYALTY BINDS ME: Some notes on Alan Bray, The Friend. The first thing to say is that I love this book. It's a study of the culture, rituals, ethics, and tensions of same-sex friendship in England, from 1000 AD through, essentially, the death of John Cardinal Newman.

I could not love this book more if it were made out of chocolate and shaped like Sophia Loren, with a cameo by Iron Man.

But now that I've got that out of my system: This is such a heartfelt book, and such a humble one. Alisdair MacIntyre rabbits on about how some virtues are necessary products of certain practices (like, chess isn't chess if you cheat); this book demonstrates how history as a practice can inculcate, or reflect, or strengthen, a genuinely spiritual humility. Bray can be wry, he can be pointed, but he's always ready to submit his preferred conclusions to the uncertainty of the evidence. This is basically the opposite of a polemic; it's a complication.

Okay... there are some twitches. Bray frequently, but super-briefly, falls into a utilitarian-universalism, where the *~*real*~* purpose of Christianity is friendship/reconciliation/social order. (To put the three terms in order from most awesome to least.) This is a complete anomaly from someone who generally goes out of his way to acknowledge alternate readings. It's a misunderstanding of tradition-in-general and English-Christianity-in-particular, since few robust traditions are simple enough to have one "real" purpose, one "central" concept. A tradition builds persona (see below!) precisely by being much more complex than this.

And Bray does have occasional fits of rhetorical Protestantism. I don't have any idea whether that reflects his actual beliefs--for all I know he was as Catholic as Morrissey when he wrote this book. But at least twice, to take the most notable example, he writes that a vowed same-sex friendship might be considered "more Christian" because it did not require the gatekeeping approval of a priest. I totally agree with him that a Christian pledge of love does not become less Christian in the absence of a dogcollar, but that isn't what he says; if you turn what he does say inside-out, like a glove, it imples that sacraments which require a priest are less Christian than those which don't. I doubt Bray himself would really argue that the Eucharist is less Christian than marriage! So I read this as a verbal tic, signifying a genuine defensiveness about the ability of the laity to sanctify their lives and loyalties, but not meant to be read too literally.

Speaking of the Eucharist, I love how thoroughly Bray has placed this sacrament at the heart of his book. Anyone interested in Eucharist as love-feast and as quintessential Christian prayer cannot afford to miss this book, for real.

Similarly, you can't read this book and then attend an ordinary American Mass without wanting to cry at the loss of the Kiss of Peace. The "handshake of peace" is a horrifying sign of how far we have come from the world of Bray's book.

This is not "weaponized" history. I think it does provide hope and succour for those of us who wish to create a fruitful, joyous, and sublime way of life for contemporary gay Catholics; but I'll talk tomorrow about some of the tensions and cautions this book outlines for that project. Bray's own position I think will be clear to anyone who reads the afterword, but even there, he speaks with the bone-deep humility of a historian who has fallen deeply in love with his subjects and will, therefore, respect their memory by not getting in the way. He doesn't put his own heart over their faces.

This book overlaps, at the very end, with the very beginning of Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. It made me want to re-read Roden, to play the two off against one another.

I'll close by saying that he's a terrific stylist. I especially love his trick of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger!

As in our own time the permafrost of modernity has at last begun to melt--and a more determinedly pluralistic world has bounded back into an often troubling life--the world we are seeing is not a strange new world, revealed as the glaciers draw back, but a strange old world: kinship, locality, embodiment, domesticity, affect. All of these things, but I would add that at times we are seeing them in something as actual--and as tangible--as the tomb of two friends buried in an English parish church. We did not see those tombs because they did not signify; but they are beginning to signify again.
--last lines of The Friend (not counting the afterword)

What one then sees is a diverse set of practices that cannot be reduced to a single overarching motive but nonetheless employed the same rhetoric: practices of peacemaking, of countenance, of kinship. The same rhetoric that could ease the reconciliation of enemies could also enable the acceptance of a gift, or bind the affection of friends. It could enable adversaries to lay down a quarrel, without losing face. It could ease the passing of a gift, by its tactful indication that (as the language demonstrated in which a gift was offered) the giver also knew the limits beyond which the obligation it might create would not be pressed. And it could sustain by its binding force a true affection that might one day grow cold, through the infirmity of our natures. ...

The story I have set out to tell in this book is drawing near its end; but one final question remains, to which I now turn. What happened to the world I have described?
--The Friend

We assembled again around the table, the shop assistants rubbed their hands, red from the cold, and the prose of their conversation suddenly revealed a full-grown day, a gray and empty Tuesday, a day without tradition and without a face. But it was only when a dish appeared on the table containing two large fish in jelly lying side by side, head-to-tail, like a sign of the zodiac, that we recognized in them the coat of arms of that day, the calendar emblem of the nameless Tuesday: we shared it out quickly among ourselves, thankful that the day had at last achieved an identity.
--Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, tr. Celina Wieniewska