Sacred Scripture "cuts all the way through, to where soul and spirit meet"

In Miss Stowe's 1852 classic, Tom is being driven in a wagon to be re-sold at auction. The slave trader is congratulating himself on his merciful nature in limiting the fetters to Tom's feet.
           

"As to Tom, he was thinking over some words of an unfashionable old book, which kept running through his head, again and again, as follows: 'We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come; wherefore God himself is not ashamed to be called our God; for he hath prepared for us a city.'  These words of an ancient volume, got up principally by 'ignorant and unlearned men,' have, through all time, kept up, somehow, a strange sort of power over the minds of poor, simple fellows like Tom. They stir up the soul from its depths, and rouse, as with trumpet call, courage, energy, and enthusiasm, where before was only the blackness of despair."



UPDATE:  Corrie ten Boom was a survivor of Ravensbruck -- a German concentration camp north of Berlin. Her sister, Betsie, died there in 1944. (Another woman who lived to tell of her experience at Ravensbruck was Fiorello LaGuardia's sister Gemma).

Corrie ten Boom writes:

"As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God... 'Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.'
"... It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute -- poor, hated, hungry... Not 'we shall be.' We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
"Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry."

RUSSIA, CRIMEA, AND THE U.S. -- Dithering à la Hamlet while declaiming like Lear

With this map from the 'Washington Post' anchoring us, it's time to decide which experts have best cut to the quick regarding how Americans should view the developments in Ukraine.

Dmitri Simes provides a good perspective on the U.S. government's response to the crisis: speaking loudly and carrying a small stick.

The best five-minute explanation of the ramifications is given here by Professor Stephen Cohen.

Check out these maps at CNN.

And David Brooks, pulled by a troika of Russian philosophers from a century ago, sets forth some of the ideas now animating the new Russia.

"The world is even smaller today, though… across the gulfs and barriers that now divide us, we must remember that there are no permanent enemies. Hostility today is a fact, but it is not a ruling law. The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God..."
  (President Kennedy during his visit to Ireland)

Pence on Santayana's faulty understanding of America

George Santayana, the Harvard professor who died in 1952, failed to appreciate the founding spirit of his adopted country. (Born in Spain, he grew up in Boston.) This essay by Father Longenecker contains a prominent quote by the philosopher.
                         

America was not in any way a secular founding, if secular means atheist or materialist. Our history is unabashed Christian and Protestant; and those sturdy believers trusted, absolutely, in the Living Lord. He was a God concerned with the affairs of public men in cities and nations.

We flourished here because the Founders tilled a garden for free churches. When we planted the oak of the Catholic Church -- she grew incredibly well.  America did not corrupt us... we did that.  But, now, we shall reform ourselves and give God thanks for the USA where the Catholic Church flourishes; and the Spanish Catholic and Anglo Protestant cultures will meet to establish the next great phase of Christendom. 

"Tinúviel! Tinúviel! / He called her by her elvish name"

One of the tales told in the first book of Lord of the Rings (the "Knife in the Dark" chapter) is that of the fairest maiden who ever lived: Lúthien Tinúviel, daughter of a King of the Elves. She falls in love with a mortal man, Beren; rescues him from the dungeons of Sauron; cradles him in his arms when he is slain by the Wolf; and spurns immortality so that she might follow her love.


Mr Tolkien recites the verses here. Also, check out this stirring musical version done more recently.

                                                     

Wagner’s final opera centered on knights, chivalry, and purity

                                 

Take a listen for a few minutes to this excerpt from Richard Wagner’s creation of 1882.

And this will get you up to speed about the story (or here).

                       

If you go to the 5:00 mark of this video, you can watch some of the Holy Grail scene.


A comment from a German tenor who recently sang the lead role:

“Every time I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of this music… It really pulls you into this world. Even people who are not religious become religious while hearing this music…
“I had people telling me that this opera makes you understand again why you are a Christian, and they were saying that in the audience the person next to them turned round saying ‘it makes me actually very jealous, I wish I were a Christian like you!’ ”