ICEL, the International Commission for Emotivism in the Liturgy?

Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 390, p. 84 (c. 980+)

How the heck do you get from

Domini est terra et plenitudo eius; venite, adoremus eum 

The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; come, let us adore him

to

Come, let us worship God who holds the world and its wonders in his creating hand 

(Antiphon to the Invitatory, Saturday, Weeks 1 and 3)?

Or to

Come, let us worship God who brings the world and its wonders from darkness into light 

(not yet sure where this one comes from, but see, if not the Liturgy of the hours itself, then at least DivineOffice.org)?

"The Christian can accept a fact which is incompatible with Christianity: he cannot accept a theory which is incompatible with Christianity."

     T. S. Eliot, "The Christian in the modern world," a previously unpublished lecture "delivered at the annual meeting of the Church Union Literature Association at Church House on January 31, 1935."  "Outside the catacombs," Times literary supplement no. _____ (July 7, 2017):  16 (16-18).  Eliot is discussing the distinction between "support[ing] a system which is in existence," and "giv[ing] assent to one which is as yet ideal," namely either Communism or Fascism.

"What ideological and semantic shifts might achieve better results, by enrolling everyone in a more productive dialogue?"

"Like Gay, when attempting to discuss white privilege, Eddo-Lodge encounters denial and defensiveness—this is, she says, 'one of the reasons why I stopped talking to white people about race.  Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me.'  Gay is more circumspect.  'We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics', she says, 'because we'll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking about difference.  Indeed, Eddo-Lodge nuances her own stance:  'I am also an insider in so many ways.  I am university-educated, able-bodied, and I speak and write in ways very similar to those I criticize.'  This begs the question:  if we accept that privilege is 'relative and contextual', as [Roxanne] Gay suggests, do we need to re-examine the notion and naming of white privilege?  What ideological and semantic shifts might achieve better results, by enrolling everyone in a more productive dialogue?"

     Bernardine Evaristo, "Check your privilege:  a provocative argument about race relations," Times literary supplement no. ____ (July 7, 2017):  12.

The "'structural' sin of modern liberal cultures"

"the peculiarity of our age lies precisely in its ability to render invisible, as it were, the primacy it accords to relations of power, through its claim of a technology or technical expertise or institutional procedures considered 'neutral' 'in themselves,' and thereby supposedly equally open to moral or immoral use.  Our age's distinctive 'imbecilism,' in other words, consists in its ignorance of the more basic—ontological-theological—sense in which a false primacy of power-relations is  hidden already in this claim of neutrality."

     David L. Schindler, "The meaning of the human in a technological age:  Homo faber, Homo sapiens, Homo amans," Communio:  international Catholic review 26, no. 1 (Spring 1999):  90-91 (80-103).

what is most objectionable about 'proceduralism' is not so much that it grants priority to (putatively empty) form over substance, but that the priority it grants to form itself already hiddenly contains (however unwittingly) the substance of mechanism.  'Empty' procedures are exactly the mechanized hence dumb procedures that Bernanos saw as the content of imbecilism.
     . . . an appeal to 'formal' institutional procedures and freedom of choice as the primary means for putting forward a genuinely creaturely notion of the self just so far already embodies (however hiddenly and unwittingly) a contrary, technological notion of the self.  Here, then, we see the peculiar difficulty in dealing with modern technological problems:  those who would offer a solution to these problems characteristically appeal to methods that imply a primacy of the (mechanistic) anthropology-ontology which, at the most basic (objective) level, generates the problems in the first place. . . .
     . . . particular attention must be given to the distinct way in which modern liberal societies conceal their (ontological-spiritual) ambiguity and indeed 'voluntarize-privatize' their sin:  that is, by claiming to have carved out 'public-institutional-technical-procedural' space empty in principle of any ('evil') ideology, leaving evil to be exhaustively identified with an always (supposedly) private abuse of freedom [(99-101)].

Hope springs eternal

"Believers told each other stories of how Hitler carryied a well-thumbed New Testament in his vest pocket.  Even in 1941, a rumor spread 'that Hitler had experienced a conversion [and] now confesses the Christian faith.'"

     Alec Ryrie, Protestants:  the faith that made the modern world (New York:  Viking, 2017), 273, citing The Third Reich and the Christian churches, ed. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh:  T & T Clark, 1981), 96.  This is followed immediately by the section on the German Christians, whose "de-Judaized Bible," the Botschaft Gottes (Weimar:  Verlag Deutsche Christen, 1940), got it nowhere with the Nazis (273-277).

"The condition of the place has been so sad, that I persuade myself it did exceed all history and example."

Unauthenticated source

     "Eyam plague was not, of course, a romantic interlude in village life: the bloody weight of the epidemic is unavoidably asserted by the death roll of the parish register, whether it was over three-quarters or under one half of the inhabitants who died. The villagers, Mompesson, Stanley and their neighbours may or may not have saved the area from further infection, but that this question remains unresolved hardly diminishes the horror of the events they experienced. This very extremity of experience which gives the story its enduring interest must also give us greatest pause for thought when seeking to understand such events or to interpret the heroic or romantic narratives that continue to permeate accounts of epidemics, even in the more recent inversions where the old heroes are dethroned and bravery reinterpreted as tragic ignorance. It is salutary to contrast the empathetic freedom felt by interpreters of such distant epidemics, and their willingness to judge individuals' failings or heroism, with the more recent recognition by historians and others of the difficulties of addressing and representing traumatic events such as genocide, which constantly escape our attempt to grasp and describe them. As William Mompesson noted after the epidemic had drawn to a close: 'The condition of the place has been so sad, that I persuade myself it did exceed all history and example.'"

    Patrick Wallis, "A dreadful heritage:  interpreting epidemic disease at Eyam, 1666-2000," History workshop journal no. 61 (2006):  50 (31-56).  Cf. Philip Jenkins, "The plague village," Anxious Bench, 27 March 2020.

"The real city produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster."

     Robert Warshow, as quoted by Oliver Harris in "LA confidential," Times literary supplement no. ____ (August 11, 2017):  26.