Among the intricate undertakings for the project
are the restoration of original plaster and an art glass skylight that
was blocked.
Ferndale-based Russell Plastering
is handling the plasterwork while New Jersey-based Femenella &
Associates is undertaking the skylight restoration.
Arthur
Femenella, vice president of Femenella & Associates, said his firm,
along with New York City-based ODA Architecture, used an old photograph
of the dome and the remaining cast iron frame with dome to aid in the
design. The restoration process will involve replicating the missing
framework and glass, which will feature 7,000 jewels — of which 3,000
will have to be replicated. The dome and glass will be put back into
place and a new undercroft built.
Femenella said the project is a rare one.
“In
75 years of experience in our office, we’ve never seen anything like
this," he said. "Doing this type of design, again, is something very new
to us. We’re going to make this whole entire thing based on the old
means and methods, which we had to learn by reverse engineering.”
Read the whole thing. Note especially the restored bronze work.
When it reopens, I will get in there with my camera and post the pics here.
Were there really some Catholics on Twitter accusing Archbishop Jose Gomez of dog-whistling for "White Nationalism"? For saying this?
Archbishop Ireland believed deeply in what Reverend Martin Luther
King and others have called the “American creed” — the belief expressed
in our founding documents, that all men and women are created equal and
endowed with sacred dignity, a transcendent destiny, and rights that
must never be denied.
Yep, I can hear Charlottesville Tikists cheering from here.
There's nothing they love more than hearing a Mexican-born immigration advocate quote MLK Jr.
But of course there were Catholics spitting outrage. I'm not looking for them, but there's no shortage of prominent [adjust values of "prominent" for being a Catholic twitterer] ones who have merged politics with faith who could say such things.
Keep talking--there are few things that make the Faith more toxic than cloaking your politics in its dead, flayed flesh.
Speaking of the Faith as a skin-suit, let's look at the nuncio's commentary at the conference:
Realities are more important than ideas. We can have all the theological ideas about the Eucharist – and, of course, we need this –
but none of these ideas compare with the reality of the Eucharistic
Mystery, which needs to be discovered and rediscovered through the
practical experience of the Church, living in communion, particularly in
this time of pandemic. We can become so concentrated upon the sacrality
of forms of the liturgy that we miss the true encounter with His Real
Presence. There is the temptation to treat the Eucharist as something to
be offered to the privileged few rather than to seek to walk with those
whose theology or discipleship is falling short, assisting them to
understand and appreciate the gift of the Eucharist and helping them to
overcome their difficulties. Rather than remaining trapped in an
“ideology of the sacred”, synodality is a method that helps us to
discover together a way forward.
Now, remember that the essential job function of a nuncio in the current era is to make sure everyone bellies up to the pontifical word salad bar--no matter deficient in mental nutrition it turns out to be.
"Realities are more important than ideas" being a particularly dumb piece of sloganeering.
There's nothing more real than a motivating idea in the soul of a human being. People struggle and die for ideas every day, and change the grim realities they live in into something better because of them. If you think of the dumb slogan as a verbal
truncheon to be swung at ecclesiastical opponents, it might make
slightly more sense, at least as a tactic. But it's still worthy of contempt.
Taken on its face, it is a pernicious argument for stasis and privilege.
And, speaking of privilege: the bleak irony is that privilege is precisely what the nuncio and those who fret about "the weaponization of the Eucharist" are defending.
The right of privileged Catholic political elites to do whatever the Hell they want in their public lives despite the grim contradictions to the faith they loudly profess.
For a regime that talks about championing the poor, those on peripheries, and other related ideas, the reality truly is greater than ideas: the pontiff has no trouble kissing up to the privileged and the powerful and tossing the weak, poor and peripheral to the side.
And by taking the side of Catholic ruling castes to ensure that they get their wafers every Sunday, this privilege is made ironclad. Those Catholics who wrestle with conscience and decide to stay in the pews when the communion line forms? The message from the top is that you're chumps and almost certainly suspect for adhering to the Old Piety.
More to the point: you struggling nobodies in the pews can't cut the Church out of the public grant money.
I saw this yesterday, but it did not sink in until Kevin Tierney pointed it out.
The bishop of Charleston leaves the spiritual equivalent of a flaming bag of crap on the porches of his sheep. Only a contemptible ideologue or equally contemptible company man could try to legislate this.
But it matters not at all which he is. Click on the picture to magnify.
What matters is that the gratuitous cruelty of the law invites disobedience, so here's hoping it is ignored when those members of the faithful seek it anyway.
The rural quiet of the Island has attracted many, so it was not surprising that the young couple fell in love with the place. Their vineyard planting had already begun, in fact:
On the surface, their dream might seem as
far-flung as this island in the northern waters of Lake Michigan, but
the couple has planted roots on a 120-acre tract deep in the woods of
the island, the third-largest in the state. Their planting of 2,100
vines on a fallow field this past spring came after their own extensive
research and consultations with others in Michigan’s flourishing wine
industry.
“It feels like a
place somewhere along the road where you could stop and have a glass of
wine with new friends,” said Kate Leese, 35, who grew up in Charlevoix, a
resort town across the lake, about 30 miles away. “Our goal is to have
that kind of place that brings people together.”
Wine
grapes have been cultivated by others on the island in the past but not
for commercial use, the couple says. They'll be the first to bottle and
sell their wine on the island as well as the mainland.
It’s
not hard to imagine that kind of operation happening here, on the open
lawn behind a turn-of-the-century farmhouse the couple is restoring.
Beyond the clearing, where the young vines are sprouting from grow
tubes, hardwoods frame the horizon. Apple trees, remnants of another
farming era, and sugar maples, exploding in fiery colors, dot the
bucolic landscape.
“We have wanted to plant a
vineyard, but it was something that we thought about doing 20 years from
now, in the future,” said Leese, who has a background in biochemistry
and who, like her husband, is passionate about wine. “So many things
came together for us in the last year."
Those things
included finding a property on Beaver Island after a random stop in fall
2019, in the wake of a boat trip up the northwestern Michigan
coastline. They were ready for a more stationary existence after
spending three years on the road, pulling a renovated Airstream around
the continental United States, working remotely.
“Almost
immediately after we pulled into the marina here, we knew this was the
level of quiet we were looking for,” said Kendall, 37, a Jackson
native who has a background as an attorney. “At night, there’s almost
complete silence here. There’s no light pollution. You can hear every
car (if one goes by). It’s the kind of place we had been looking for as
our next spot.”
* * *
Part
of an archipelago, Beaver Island is home to about 600 year-round
residents. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, where
everybody waves as they pass one another, where neighbors pitch in to
help one another and where everyone does what they can to help the
community.
The House is expected to vote this week on President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. The social spending bill
includes investments in clean energy and affordable child care — but it
also includes a $285 billion tax cut that would almost exclusively
benefit high-income households over the next five years.
The measurewould
allow households to increase their deduction from state and local taxes
from $10,000 to $80,000 through 2026, and then impose a new deduction
cap through 2031. It’s the second-most expensive item in the legislation
over the next five years, more costly than establishing a paid family
and medical leave program, and nearly twice as expensive as funding
home-medical services for the elderly and disabled, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The "SALT" (state and local tax) deduction allows high-earners in high-tax states to rob the Federal treasury via a deduction for those taxes. Likewise, since it decreases the pain on such earners, it lessens the pressure on the leaders of high tax states, allowing them to maintain them and shove the loss on to the rest of the country.
Back in the time of Orange Man Bad, this regressive deduction was capped at $10K, to howls from the wealthy and high-tax jurisdictions.
Now they are trying to "fix" that and turn the cash sluice back on.
Hypocrisy? Not at all.
No, hypocrisy presumes a person's occasional nod to a moral standard external to him even as he violates it.
When the object of power is power, there is no hypocrisy.
My parents wisely flee northern Michigan before too much snow flies--and some did fly while we were up there, coating the ground and trees.
A great four days of family togetherness before they go. Alas, the schedules for my brother's family and mine did not work out, so we went up later. Hopefully, next year will be better that way. But still a great time.
Weirdly, my spiritual compass points more toward the Franciscans than any other order. A story for another time, perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Also, Dad gifted me with an eight-foot long flatbed steel trailer. Very nice, and my middle son and I will be modifying it into a cargo-hauler with a frame of two-by-fours bolted onto it. Ratchet straps only do so much to secure luggage, but they worked this time. Next time, we'll have fewer to worry about.
Especially since ratchet straps seem to be some cunning IQ test that I almost invariably fail.
I've been reliably informed that it is a padded version of a doctoral dissertation by some assistant professor.
I have also been reliably informed that it is, like many dissertations, Not Good At All.
I know that without reading it.
Gasp--that's not fair!
Normally, yes.
But all rules have exceptions, and here's one: any religious tome that has an insult in the title is candidly admitting to you that it is Not Good At All.
We must first look into the use of this term
‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it
is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more
exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to
those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of
pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of
it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel
obliged first to define the term?)
Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of
‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse.
In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and
ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more
like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’
simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its
cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to
depend on who is using it.
In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for
example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including
Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout
secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone
who believes there is such a person as God.
The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical
element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the
right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full
meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like
‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of
mine’.
--Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief
(Oxford: 2000), 245.
Thus, to summarize: some guy with tenure at a small college devoted his dissertation to venting about that "stupid sumbitch" Scott Hahn. And then he gussied it up a bit for a wider audience.
(Re-)publish or perish!
Truly a work destined for Dollar Tree's shelves, right next to the remainders from failed politicians paid to have someone ghostwrite about My Vision For America.
The trees that died for books by Harry Reid and Tim Pawlenty... And the academic equivalent of an "I HATE THAT GUY" Reddit page joins them--albeit in a much tinier print run.
The real scandal is that someone handed the guy a doctorate for it, but it's not my alma mater, so whatever.
The correct response to this trivial ankle-biter is to not boost the signal. And that includes not linking to the debunkings of the, uh, work, either. Anything else will only boost the print run, and encourage more of the same.
So, today was the day we were supposed to be getting nine new high-tech, energy-saving vinyl/etc. windows to replace the last remaining originals on our 1947 bungalow.
We diligently cleared spaces, and the crew arrived.
A spot of bother: someone at The Window Installer Company Corporation, LLC had entered the wrong specs for the six downstairs windows.
They were four inches too tall for the space to be occupied.
Not something you can trim off with the utility knife.
Never take it out on the lower-level staff is my operating principle, and it was followed here.
We insisted they install the three fitting windows upstairs, which were in the worst shape anyway. Phone calls were made, so at least that part of the nightmare is done, and was done well.
Now we have to wait, despite being reassured as to our project being moved up to "RUSH" status.
Frankly, the fact we didn't pay a dime yet toward the windows that were installed is probably going to be the thing that puts oomph into the "RUSH."
But we're still looking at four weeks yet.
Assuming supply chain and labor issues don't raise their heads for a third time.
