Through him you give us all these gifts. You fill them with life and goodness, you bless them and make them holy.

Per quem haec ómnia, Dómine, semper bona creas, sanctíficas, vivíficas, benedícis, et praestas nobis.

Through him you give us all these gifts. You fill them with life and goodness, you bless them and make them holy.

Through whom
you continue to make all these good things, O Lord;
you sanctify them, fill them with life,
bless them, and bestow them upon us.

Through whom you are always creating, sanctifying, vivifying, blessing, and presenting to us all these good things, O Lord.

Through whom you create, sanctify, vivify, bless, and present to us all these always good things, O Lord.

Eucharistic Prayer I, or the Roman canon, as reproduced here in Latin, here in 2nd-edition ICEL English, and here in 3rd-edition ICEL English.  The last two renditions are mine.  Of these the second is only grammatically permissable.

I must confess to feeling that though the English of the 3rd edition is closer to the original, that of the 2nd is somewhat superior as poetry.

Snyder on Longerich on the Holocaust

"Killing was not the original technique of the Final Solution, but it was the technique whose efficacy Himmler proved. [Peter] Longerich's magnificent biography of Himmler reveals him navigating among different policies of destruction, finding ways to match Hitler's immediate needs with German's practical possibilities. The grand 'positive solution' of a racially ennobling war gave way to the total 'negative solution' of the planned destruction of the people defined as the chief enemy, the Jews.
"Historians of Germany have pushed the date of the crucial decision to eliminate all Jews later and later, until it seems that it could go no further. They debate whether the critical moment was June 1941 (which few now believe), or October 1941, or December 1941. Longerich calmly pushes through late 1941 and January 1942, the month of the Wannsee Conference, without recording a moment from which the Holocaust as total extermination was inevitable. He believes that there was in fact no crucial moment when Hitler decided, or communicated his decision, to kill all Jews under German control. In his view, 'we should abandon the notion that it is historically meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a single decision' that led to the Holocaust. . . .
"It was only in the summer of 1942, Longerich maintains, that mass killing was finally understood as the realization of the Final Solution, rather than as an extensively violent preliminary to some later program of slave labor and deportation to the lands of a conquered USSR. To see mass killing as itself the Final Solution was, in Longerich's view, to abandon the prospect of any military victory over the USSR in the near future. . . .
"The emerging image of a Holocaust resulting from political motives denies Longerich's readers the expected moment of doom at the bottom of a descending narrative arc. More obstinately than almost all other historians, Longerich resists the temptation to insert a novelistic climax into the history of the extermination of the Jews."

So what were the decisive factors? 1) "the Führer and his ideology" as coupled with 2) "The political style of Hitler and other Nazi leaders", which "was to issue general guidelines and to expect subordinates to find the ways to realize them", to act "as creative conformists" in pragmatic response to 3) "Germany's practical possibilities" at any given point in an ever-shifting historical situation. "Hitler achieved his racist ends" by "requir[ing] of the Germans not just obedience but initiative," such that "the pattern of creative conformity established before 1939 enabled bloody escalation during the war."

Timothy Snyder, "A new approach to the Holocaust," The New York review of books 58, no. 11 (June 23, 2011): 54-56. Longerich's two books Holocaust: the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 [1998]), and Heinrich Himmler: Biographie (Berlin: Siedler, 2008), get the lion's share of the attention in this review.

"pardoning a fornicator is worse than pardoning a murderer"

Ha!  Fie, these filthy vices!  It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness, that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid.  'Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made
As to put metal in restrained means
To make a false one.

Angelo, in Shakespeare's Measure for measure II.4, ll.41-48, as interpreted by Frank Kermode in Shakespeare's language (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), 160 ff., as filtered through Charles Rosen, "The revelations of Frank Kermode," The New York review of books 58, no. 10 (June 9, 2011):  36 (34-36).

The Catholic liturgist who had never heard of the Te Deum

"I was present back in the 90s at the ordination in Fort Worth Cathedral (Texas) of a former Anglican priest who had been received into the Catholic Church with his people (virtually all of them came). It was a moving event; and afterwards, back at the parish church . . . his first Mass was celebrated, and was followed by the singing of the Te Deum, of course in the old 1662 Prayer Book translation, and sung to the famous setting by Charles Villiers Stanford. The 'diocesan liturgist', who was present, presumably, to make sure that no reactionary enormities were perpetrated, asked me at the reception afterwards about the Te Deum, of which (I’m not making this up) she (a supposed liturgist) had never heard. 'Is that a typically Anglican prayer, would you say?', she asked me, quizzically."

     William Oddie, "Curiouser and curiouser:  the Pope has now turned the Book of Common Prayer (well, quite a bit of it) into a Catholic liturgy" (8 June 2011).  The Te Deum has been dated to the early 5th century.  I don't know that this (rather than, say, the one in C) is the Stanford setting Oddie considers the famous one.  Cf. Kreeft:  "When God saw that the Church in America lacked persecutions, he sent them liturgists."
     For a recent re-translation of the Te Deum, see Worship 90, no. 5 (September 2016):  462-469.

Mascall on "the exhibitionism of dogmatic nudists"

"acquaintance with the theological world in recent years leads one to suspect that the supply of heresies is beginning to run dry.  The old favorites tend to reappear, though wearing new costumes and bearing new names; or else some worn-out relic is galvanised into a temporary paroxysm.  So, together with the resuscitation 'for positively the last time' (though it never is in fact the last time) of zombies which one hoped had been permanently laid to rest by Athanasius or Augustine, we have the exhibitionism of dogmatic nudists, who try to outstrip one another in their professions of unbelief."

E. L. Mascall, in his Foreword to Thomas G. Weinandy's Does God change?  The Word's becoming in the Incarnation (Still River, MA:  St. Bede's Publications, 1985), ix.

"It is how you tell their stories that matters."

"'Don't you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?' said a stern neighbor of mine in London.  And I find I am shaking as I answer, because this matters."I tell her that there are plenty of netsuke in the world, sitting in velvet-lined trays in dealers' cabinets off Bond Street or Madison Avenue, Keizersgracht or the Ginza.  Then I get a bit side-tracked onto the Silk Road, and then onto Alexander the Great's coins still being in circulation in the Hindu Kush in the nineteenth century.  I tell her about travelling with my partner Sue in Ethiopia, and finding an old Chinese jar covered in dust in a market town and trying to work out how it had got there.

"No, I answer.  Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost.  People have always given gifts.  It is how you tell their stories that matters."

Edmund De Waal, The hare with amber eyes:  a family's century of art and loss (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 348.

The Fathers on the continuing indaba and mutual listening (and other such failures to fish)

"Now, if they who hold such views have authority to meet, your wisdom approved in Christ must see that, inasmuch as we do not approve their views, any permission of assembly granted to them is nothing less than a declaration that their view is thought more true than ours.  For if they are permitted to teach their view as godly men, and with all confidence to preach their doctrine, it is manifest that the doctrine of the Church has been condemned, as though the truth were on their side.  For nature does not admit of two contrary doctrines on the same subject being both true.  How[,] then, could your noble and lofty mind submit to suspend your usual courage in regard to the correction of so great an evil?  But even though there is no precedent for such a course, let your inimitable perfection in virtue stand up at a crisis like the present, and teach our most pious emperor that no gain will come from his zeal for the Church on other points if he allows such an evil to gain strength from freedom of speech for the subversion of sound faith."

     Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 202 to Nectarius, Bishop of Constantinople, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow (Christology of the later Fathers, ed. Edward Rochie Hardy and Cyril C. Richardson, Library of Christian classics 3 (Philadelphia, PA:  The Westminster Press, 1954), 231-232).  The views in question were those of Apollinaris, who was asserting 1) "that the carnal nature was in the Son from the beginning", 2) "that the Godhead of the only begotten fulfills the function of mind, and is the third part of this human composite," and 3) "that the only-begotten God . . . is mortal, and underwent the Passion in his proper Godhead", and of course death as well (231).