Sunday surprise in seven volumes and a cake

Fred Zimmerman:

December 17th, 2015 at 3:56 am

That first sentence is a real stopper. Jihad first because this is a strategy blog? Should jihad even be part of the conversation? It’s a theological concept. Why not transubstantiation first?

Charles Cameron:

December 17th, 2015 at 6:55 pm

Hi Fred:
.
I trhink I can get off your nicely-plaved hook fairly simply, by quoting the title of a Wa;id Phares book, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West and backing it up with Sarah Zabel’s “Carlisle Papers in Security Strategy” entry, The Military Strategy of Global Jihad — along with the Center for Security Policy’s Strategy for Defeating the Global Jihad Movement.
.
Still, you had me thinking, and I’d certainly be happy talking about transubstantiation — my reading this morning has included an exhortation to appreciate the paradox by which Catholicism celebrates the birth of Christ specifically in light of his death and resurrection — “true God and true man” even when a squalling babe — and an email I wrote this morning included this eucharistic quote from the great Dom Gregory Dix’s book, The Shape of the Liturgy, p 744 in the current edition:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

I might also say that I far prefer Dom Gregory Dix to Walid Phares, Sarah Zabel or the CSP report!

Grurray:

December 18th, 2015 at 3:17 am

On the beach at Normandy http://bit.ly/1OaHlXY

Charles Cameron:

December 18th, 2015 at 6:16 pm

Thanks, Grurray — to my eyes, a powerful image indeed.