Category: Uncategorized

Here’s a view of the dome of St. Peter’s from the museum:

Spiral staircase exiting the musuem:

St. Peter’s Square:

Inside St. Peter’s Basilica:

This picture really doesn’t convey how enormous and awesome the Basilica is.

Here’s a view from up in the dome (not a terribly easy climb I might add!) that may give a better feel for the scale:

Outside views from the top of St. Peter’s:

Castel d’Angelo, a fortress near St. Peter’s built by the Romans and later used by various popes during politically turbulent times:

As a Protestant I naturally have mixed feelings about the Vatican. On the one hand, St. Peter’s and the museum are undeniably amazing acheivements and it’s impossible not to be awed by them. On the other hand, they do seem to represent a certain papal opulence that would raise the hackles of any true-blue Prot.

I actually found St. Peter’s itself to be a bit overwhelming aesthetically. It may be so big and with so much going on that you can’t really take it all in. Sublime rather than beautiful, in Edmund Burke’s sense. Not sure what that means in terms of the proper theology of a place of worship.

Let’s split this into a few posts. First, pics from Rome. Keep in mind that this was our first trip to Italy, so this is Italy 101.

Your scribe arriving in Rome last Thursday morning on roughly one hour of sleep. This day consisted of a lot of bleary-eyed wandering around the area near our hotel.

Trevi Fountain

The Victor Emmanuel monument, commemorating the unification of Italy and constructed in the 1800s. My friend Patrick derided its “fascist aesthetic.”

The Pantheon, one of the architectural marvels of Rome, built around 125 A.D. under Hadrian. Later converted from a Roman temple to a Christian church. Unfortunately, you can’t actually see the dome, its most distinctive feature, in this picture.

Piazza del Poplo. The obelisk in the center, which is obscured by the scaffolding for some work they’re doing on it, was taken from the Egyptians by Augustus in 10 B.C.

We had a wonderful time, visiting Rome for four days and Florence for three. Lots of walking around gaping at magnificent Roman architecture, marvelling at Renaissance and Medieval masterpieces, peering into Baroque churches, enjoying the beautiful Italian weather, and consuming a lot of pasta and red wine (if red wine is really good for your health as they say, then this trip was like spending a week at a health spa).

We also got to see one of my best friends from college who currently lives in Berlin – he flew down to Rome and showed us some of his favorite spots. In Florence we hung out with a German friend of my wife’s (and his girlfriend). All in all a fantastic trip.

I’m going to try and post some pictures a little later.

Blogging will be more-or-less nonexistent over the next week or so as the missus and I are headed off to Italy! I’m very excited, never having made it to continental Europe before now.

Almost as exciting is the fact that I’ll miss the inevitable blog-mania surrounding the release of the Da Vinci Code movie.

I should be back to blogging sometime toward the end of May. And maybe with pictures from the trip.

That’s one description of Bill Kauffman’s just-released Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. Based on what I’ve seen, it continues the project Kauffman started in his earlier America First! of tracing a counter-tradition of American politics that dissents from the bipartisan consensus on the mega-state, corporate capitalism, and global interventionism. LHA discusses such unclassifiable figures as Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry, just as America First! sang the praises of American isolationists, pacifists, radical decentralists and regionalists who embodied the virtues of loyalty to a specific place and tradition. His Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette recounts Kauffman’s own journey from an aspiring D.C. policy wonk back to his roots in upstate New York and cultivation of a “localist” sensibility. You might describe his ideology as a kind of rooted libertarianism.

ISI books has set up a blog to promote the book with contributions from Kauffman and others such as Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker, Caleb Stegall of the New Pantagruel, and Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative.

I used to really love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At one time I would’ve put them among my top three favorite bands. Unfortunately, ever since the disastrous One Hot Minute – disastrous despite the promising addition of former Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro – they’ve pretty much been going downhill into middle-of-the-road, radio-friendly “alterna” pop. (Californication was actually pretty good, but not up to their past standards.)

Now they’ve run afoul of the VI iron law of the double album, and from the sounds of things the results are pretty much what you’d expect.

Maybe we need mandatory term limits for rock stars?

I’m glad Chris Daughtry got voted off American Idol last night. He’s a decent singer, but he turns everything he sings into some kind of bland late-90s “alternative” rock. (And I still haven’t forgiven him for his unutterably bad rendition of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” *shudder*)

Personally, I’ve been rooting for Elliott for a while now. I like his smooth-yet-humble vibe and, like Taylor, he seems to really love and appreciate music recorded more than five years ago.

I’ve never really given much thought to the medieval debate between Franciscans and Dominicans about whether the Incarnation would’ve taken place if humankind hadn’t sinned. I guess it always struck me as a classically “scholastic” debate (in the pejorative sense).

But now I’m not so sure. It seems that which position one takes could have important implications about the meaning of salvation among other things. On the Franciscan view, as exemplified by Duns Scotus, the Incarnation was God’s plan from the beginning and would’ve taken place even without sin. It was God’s way of communicating the divine life and entering into fellowship with God’s creatures. The Incarnation, on this view, is the whole point of creation. By contrast, the Dominican view, as held by St. Thomas, was that the Incarnation was primarily a response to sin. Thus atonement becomes the chief reason for the Incarnation.

Laying aside the exegetical question of which view comports better with the biblical witness, the Franciscan view seems to incorporate some attractive elements which the typical western penal or satisfaction view of the Incarnation has at times overlooked. For one, it emphasizes God’s love rather than God’s wrath, as at least some popular versions of satisfaction theory tend to do. Secondly, it seems more congenial to the “cosmic” aspect of slavation that we see, e.g. in Ephesians and Colossians. In the Incarnation God “pitches his tent” in creation and gathers all things in Christ in order to unite them to himself.

Presumably, though, atonement, in the sense of restoring the broken relationship between God and human beings remains a central, if not the central, part of Christ’s work. Maybe we should say that, under the conditions of sin, communicating the divine presence requires the work of atonement, even if it’s something God would’ve done anyway.

From USA Today:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

Read more…

But only people who are doing something wrong have any reason to worry, right?