The birds and the bees according to...

Scientific American. This article is not for everyone, and I usually do not link to such frank discussions about private things. What I find remarkable is that the Church's teachings about the dignity of the human person and contraception are affirmed in an article that has no such intention.

This other article in the same journal does it again. Steroid use is discouraged in the press for athletes, but the biggest use of steroids in America is among women on contraceptives, and the related health problems are not minor.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Islam, Reason, and Paganism

Spengler argues that paganism is not necessarily the belief in many gods as the belief that God or the gods are arbitrary, capricious, and unknowable:

'Just what is paganism? It is the social order that underlies idolatry: the primacy of the animal ties of ancestry, in which the family is a small clan, the clan is a small tribe, and the tribe is a small nation. Pagans worship their own blood and soil at the altar of their nation. The attraction of self-worship is so strong that ancient Israel again and again fell back into pagan practices, while the self-styled "new Israel" of the Church was gutted in its home continent of Europe. America, a new people composed of individuals who abandoned ethnic allegiance, survived as the last home of Christianity in the industrial world.

'The Jewish (and later Christian) alternative to pagan social order is the Covenant: God in his love assigns rights to every human being, and establishes laws for the protection of the weak and helpless. Covenant is a concept alien to Islam, for by definition a God of covenants places a limit on his own power and enters into a partnership with a human society. The all-transcendent Allah does not stoop to make covenants with mere humans; not so YHWH of the Hebrews. No longer can the Roman paterfamilias command the death of his own children in the little empire of his home; the covenant protects every member of society directly. Because the covenant is expressed through laws, and laws require reasoning, the God of covenants must be a God of reason.'

China in the footsteps of Kaiser Wilhelm II

Making enemies.

War is expensive. This week Germany pays its last interest payments for the reparations of the Great War.

"If you could completely privatize just one government function, what would that be?"

David Warren would privatize the schools.

"Anglican Ordinariate Proceeds Apace"

Commentary and links by The Anchoress:

'I predict that eventually the beautiful Anglican Rite will top the Novus Ordo in popularity and attendance. I think the Latinists will keep to the Latin mass, but that we’ll see a slow migration by many Catholics, away from the Novus Ordo and the OCP hymnal and toward the exalted language and more classical presentment of the Anglicans. For those Catholics dissatisfied with the NO, but not inclined to Latin, the Anglican Rite will become the irresistible alternative that brings back “some” of babies thrown out with the bathwater “in the Spirit of Vatican II.”'

Marriage delayed

The econony is part of the reason, but social attitudes, in particular, the ideal of perfection rather than vocation, makes marriage a goal in itself instead of the means of perfection, holiness, and healthy life.

UPDATE: Leave it to government policies to be a major part of the problem, namely, that zoning and land-use laws make multi-generational housing arrangements far more difficult. We have atomized the nuclear family in suburbia and isolated the grandparents and single adult children.

Inverted morality and aesthetics

'Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west's inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own.'

Mark Steyn.

Religious illiteracy

Nothing surprising here.

Ingrid Betancourt's captivity

She was running for President of Colombia when she was kidnapped by gunmen from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (F.A.R.C.). She spent six years in captivity. Her book is called Even Silence Has An End. She told NPR:

"I had a problem," she says. "I had this belief that I couldn’t just accept to be treated as an object. It was a problem of dignity." She says her fellow hostages saw her behavior as arrogance or troublemaking. "But it wasn’t that. It was just that I couldn’t accept that they would call us by number, because I thought it would make it easier for them to kill us if they had to kill an object, a number."

The article continues:

'Betancourt says her time in captivity dispelled any romantic illusions she had about the FARC and their mission. "I am of a generation where we like Che Guevara, you know, the very romantic kind of revolution thing," she says. "And in a way, I thought that the FARC was kind of a romantic rebellion against a system that I didn’t like either."

'But in captivity, she says she came to realize that the FARC was nothing more than the military wing of Colombia’s drug cartels. "It was as corrupt as the system; it wasn’t a response to the problems we have in Colombia."'

Ann Althouse writes about Stephen Colbert's religion

Here and here.

"America's One-Child Policy"

By Jonathan V. Last.

His prior piece was "There Goes the Neighborhood: Rage Against 'Breeders'".

Conversion is not shallow.

Skopeji posts and makes me reflect further on yesterday's Gospel reading of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

Anglican incoherence

At Curt Jester.

40 Days for Life

The words of JPII.

Christianity and the French Revolution

Elena Maria Vidal discusses how France's Revolution warped the country:

"The French revolution represented a concerted and deliberate attempt to dechristianize the nation, including:

"The implementation of a new calendar to replace the Christian one. The calendar, which was adopted in 1793 and used for the next 12 years, employed a ten day week (in a 10 day week, no one could ever know which day was Sunday) and had 1792 (the year Louis XVI was taken into custody) as year 1. This was known as ‘the year of liberty.’

"The dispossession, deportation and brutal martyrdom of thousands of clergy.

"Christians being denied freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of thought if it contravened the secular humanist ideology of the revolution. The criminalization of all religious education.

"The elimination of all Christian symbols from the public sphere, including removing the word ‘saint’ from street names and destroying or defacing churches and religious monuments."

"The replacing of Christian holidays and symbols with civic and revolutionary cults like the ‘Cult of Reason’ and ‘Cult of the Supreme Being.’ A statue to the goddess Reason was even erected and worshiped in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November 1793."

A nation's polity does not recover quickly or easily from such attempts to reinvent humanity by legislation enforced with bayonets.

Saint Vincent de Paul

Remembered today.

"The Jesuits and England"

Hysterical fear of the Jesuits has driven the English press for centuries.

G.K. Chesterton's friends and their comments

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic, Ross Douthat in The New York Times, and Michael Brendan Dougherty on his blog.

Chesterton was a happy warrior whose humor is poison to those who need Christianity to be the religion of the sour and dour.

Casualty of the Vietnam War

François Xavier Nguyen van Thuân spent thirteen years in a "reeducation camp," nine of them in solitary confinement.

"What's missing in contemporary movies?"

L.Q. Jones, a Hollywood veteran (who is on reruns of Westerns day and night) answers the question succinctly.

As noted in this blog, I have voted with my feet against Hollywood for years.

Fidel Castro's awakening cognition

Too late for tens of thousands. He is just getting to know what Cuba's citizens cannot bluntly tell him.

Sea power is still the name of the game.

Robert D. Kaplan notes the rise of China's navy, now the second strongest in the world, while the people and politicians of the USA remain fixated on the Middle East.

"The Enraged v. the Exhausted"

Peggy Noonan's commentary on the coming election.

Can someone identify the statue in this photo?

This is one of the few surviving photographs taken of my great-grandfather. He was thrown from a horse in Central Park and died in New York City in October 1918. I hope one of my New Yorker friends might know this spot.

"Yellow Fever Martyrs"

A story I did not know from Holly Springs, Mississippi.

My grandfather was born in Tchula, Mississippi in 1884. The town is most famous for The Blues, namely, Jimmy Dawkins and Lester Davenport.

Creative Writing Anyone?

Skopeji leads me to D.G. Myers, who says:

"Literature has survived even the rise of creative-writing programs, although poetry seems not to have."

Myers has a great blog.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Commencement Address (1978)

"A World Split Apart."

So he never took a Dale Carnegie course.

"Are Americans Turning Inward?"

Mark in Spokane discusses reactions to interventionist foreign policy.

One thing about America will not change: 25% of the population is very close to isolationist regarding military deployments overseas. This full quarter of our country is almost evenly distributed across the spectrum from Pat Buchanan to Howard Dean. It can steer the foreign policy of either party depending on the circumstances.

China's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in approximately 45 million deaths.

Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, essentially places Mao Zedong among the worst mass murderers in history.

Ann Althouse's post drew lots of comments.

Is mandatory sentencing a violation of the separation of powers doctrine?

Norm Pattis argues that mandatory sentencing has unjust results, and there is no doubt he is right:

"Transform mandatory minimum sentences into rebuttable presumptions, and this problem disappears."

Regrets of a nun who wanted to start a revolution

And ended up leaving her order and the Church.

Pope Benedict at Westminster Cathedral

Defending the Eucharist.

More about the Eucharist from Martin Mosebach.

Nice posts by Christine at Laudem Gloriae.

Ten Things about J.R.R. Tolkien

Here. Hat tip to Timothy Heines.

"Is the Archbishop of Canterbury being B16-slapped?"

Taylor Marshall thinks so. I am not paying close attention, but I figure he is right.

"If the world hates you..."

Fr. Dwight Longenecker on Ss. Cornelius and Cyprian- and Pope Benedict XVI's trip to England.

The Brutality of Collectivist Conformity

As bad as some of our current federal programs and proposals are, there were and are few as bad as the National Recovery Administration. George Will recalls a New Jersey man who went to jail for pressing men's suits for 35 cents rather than the NRA-mandated 40 cents.

(Will also recently had a nice column about life without racial-identity politics.)

Gridlock is Good- Part 12

Gridlock is a common topic on this blog, and I believe it to be the safest thing for the U.S. Constitution in these times, if not almost all times.

Neither party can be trusted with the reins of government. Both parties are full of crony capitalists who believe that trickle-down economics begins with their friends, supporters, and donors. If you could tell investors and consumers that there would be gridlock to the point that no major legislation would be passed for the next forty years, prosperity would be right around the corner.

Though we long for less partisan times, those times came forth from the unity of World War II and the Cold War against common enemies. Today the people who live and die by politics believe that their best interests are to destroy and humiliate the opposition.

Thus, my Thanksgiving Day wish is for a Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives and a slim Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. The Republicans would be able to stifle the worst ideas of the Democrats without getting a case of Newt Gingrich-itis. Senator Harry Reid is no favorite of mine, but the Republicans might need him to remind the voters of what a Democratic majority leader is like.

Repeat after me: Gridlock is good. No legislation is almost always better than enacted legislation.

"Aligned With Liberty"

As the creator of a blog dedicated to Russell Kirk, one might think I would avoid linking to neo-conservatives, but as a conservative I am quite ecumenical. My maternal great-grandfather was a Grover Cleveland Democrat and an outspoken anti-imperialist at the time of the American annexation of Hawaii and the American occupation of the Philippines. Nonetheless, my paternal grandfather participated in the grandest project of American power: the Panama Canal, and my father grew up in Panama and served in both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army. Though I often question our deployments, I cannot help but think of U.S. military presence as generally positive. The decisive use of military force early can prevent long bloody conflicts. Thus, I must be Kirk's imperialistic step child.

Sol Stern reviews Thomas L. Jeffers' Norman Podhoretz: A Biography. An excerpt from the review:

'By 1968, Podhoretz found himself shivering rather than celebrating over the faux revolutionary eruptions at Columbia University and the Chicago Democratic Convention. He was dismayed by the increasingly violent, anti-American rhetoric of the student New Left. He was even more outraged by the spectacle of the intellectually respectable New York Review of Books, founded by his old friend Jason Epstein, adorning its cover with a diagram for a Molotov cocktail and running a paean to black rioters burning down their own neighborhoods in cities all across America.

'In the late 1960s, Commentary began fighting back against what seemed like momentary aberrations amongst the New York intellectuals. The magazine was still trying to save all that was best in left-liberalism and the Democratic Party’s internationalist and New Deal traditions from the New Left’s corrosive anti-Americanism. Podhoretz also rejected any suggestion that his magazine had turned politically “conservative.” If questioned about his politics, he called himself a “left-wing liberal.” It was not until the Democrats nominated George McGovern in 1972 that Podhoretz could bring himself to cast a vote for a Republican presidential candidate.'

Neo-conservatives are often left-wingers who were "mugged by reality." My favorite in the blogosphere is Neo-Neocon, whose turn to the right after 9/11 has made her an enigma if not an anathema to her old friends and professional colleagues.

"America Has Become Too European"

Insightful analysis by Thomas Straubhaar in Der Spiegel, not generally a source for good articles about America.

An excerpt:

'But what is good for Europe and Germany does not automatically work for the US. The settlers of the New World rejected everything, which included throwing out anything with a semblance of state authority. They fled Europe to find freedom. The sole shared goal of the settlers was to obtain individual freedom and live independently, which included the freedom to say what they wanted, believe what they wanted and write what they wanted. The state was seen as a way to facilitate this goal. The state should not interfere in people's lives, aside from securing freedom, peace and security. Economic prosperity was seen as the responsibility of the individual.

'If you take this belief away from Americans, you are destroying the binds which interlink America's heterogeneous society. Removing this belief could lead to conflicts between different sections of society, clashes which have long bubbled beneath the surface.'

"Terry Jones: Asymmetrical Warrior"

Spengler does what he does best.

Peggy Noonan reflects on the Tea Party

An excerpt:

'So far, the Tea Party is not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it. This was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when GOP operatives dismissed Tea Party-backed Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. The Republican establishment is "the reason we even have the Tea Party movement," shot back columnist and Tea Party enthusiast Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News. It was the Bush administration that "ran up deficits" and gave us "open borders" and "Medicare Part D and busted budgets."

'Everyone has an explanation for the Tea Party that is actually not an explanation but a description. They're "angry." They're "antiestablishment," "populist," "anti-elite." All to varying degrees true. But as a network television executive said this week, "They should be fed up. Our institutions have failed."'

"The Bridge: Bob Dylan, the ‘Ruling Class,’ and the ‘Country Class’"

An excerpt:

'In the mainstream media, Dylan’s image is still rigidly defined by the social upheavals of the 1960s, though he rid himself of those shackles when he was only 26. To be precise, he divorced himself from the increasingly leftist, anti-American politics of his own generation when, in 1967, he moved to a house in upstate New York to record the Americana-drenched Basement Tapes with The Band. Soon after that, while free love made love to riots and psychedelic stalks burst from a million brain sockets, he married, started a family, and wrote more good songs, few of which had revolutionary applications, although “Dear Landlord” will surely always have a place in city-dwellers’ cramped, rent-obsessed hearts....

'[T]o emphasize the ideological or even the counter-ideological is to go against the spirit of Dylan himself. What can be gleaned from the totality of his songs is a fixation on the eternals: love between men and women; an obsession with the mystery of creation and/or God; reverence for freedom and the individual; a love-hate relationship with urban life; and a forceful facing-up to mortality that many of his peers are surgically cutting and putting off.'

Dylan never made it to Piety Hill in the 1970s to break bread with Russell Kirk, but he would have liked most everyone there: the hobo Clinton Wallace, the folk singers and poets, the priests and monks, the unwed mothers, the writers, the exiled New Yorker who fixed everything, and the numerous other "refugees of progress." Dylan and Kirk, born more than two decades apart in the Upper Midwest, are both voices of the heartland full of irony and pathos yet free of sentimentality. Kirk was born at the end of World War I and set his face against the brutal utilitarian conformity of the 1930s and 1940s. Dylan was born just a few months before Pearl Harbor and set his face against the spiritual darkness of the 1960s. Both are as American as a hardy wood-frame house against a cold northwind.

"How Debt Can Destroy a Budding Relationship"

The student loan, for many years considered a necessary evil for the acquisition or maintenance of middle-class life, is turning into a cause of poverty. My wife attended the University of Georgia when the tuition was less than $1,000 per semester. Nobody can tell me that UGA offers a better education today, though it might be more "prestigeous" for all that's worth and offer more programs, but the in-state tuition is $8,736 while the out-of-state tuition is $26,946. A teenager would be hard-pressed to earn $8,736 in a year, much less earn enough extra to pay for campus or town living. Out-of-staters better have a rich uncle or the willingness to pledge years of income to Uncle Sam's approved lending agents.

Here is a piece in The New York Times about student loans destroying relationships. In the Eighties, the big fear was a mate with AIDS. Today, it's a mate with $250,000 in debt that did not buy a house. Hollywood is likely to ride this one: some sort of remake of either Fun With Dick and Jane or Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry in which the troubled lovers commit robberies or fraud to pay those debts which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Hat tip to Western Confucian.

"Deciding Not to Screen for Down Syndrome"

Amy Julia Becker writes in The New York Times why prenatal testing harms as much as it helps. An excerpt:

'On the other hand, the way these tests are administered, the way information is provided to women and the way our culture talks about and conceives of individuals with chromosomal abnormalities contribute to my concern that prenatal testing more often serves to devalue all human life and to offer parents and doctors an illusion of control.

'When a friend of mine, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, declined amniocentesis for her next pregnancy, her doctor shrugged and said, “Well, if it happens again, don’t blame me.” Another friend, upon receiving the results of her amniocentesis, was asked, “When would you like to schedule the procedure to terminate?” Peter and I have participated in a program through the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in which medical students meet families with a child with a disability. These doctors in training have told me that before they met Penny, they thought Down syndrome was the worst possible thing that could happen to a child.'


My wife and I declined the amniocentesis too. We prayed for years for our one pregnancy, and we promised God that if He gave us a child, whether by nature or adoption, we would love the child no matter what.

(Hat tip to Leticia Velasquez at Causa Nostrae Laetitiae.)

A little history of the word "agape"

Skopeji quotes Fulton Sheen:

'The Greeks did not need such a word, because Plato held that there could be no real love between God and man, inasmuch as the gods being perfect desired nothing; therefore, they had no love for man. Aristotle argued in the same way. He said that there was too great a disporportion between man and God to have any love between the two.

'When God sent His only Son to this world to save it, and when His Divine Son offered His life on Calvary to redeem it, then was born a love between God and man which the Greeks could not and did not understand. That kind of love was best expressed by "agape." In contrast to it, the word "eros" is nowhere found in the New Testament; the word "Philia" in all its forms is found forty-five times, but the word "agape" is found 320 times.'

What's this murder case about anyhow?

Norm Pattis is a trial lawyer whose blog I discovered a few weeks ago. He writes about defending criminals, and for this vocation he spends more time with the forgotten and condemned than almost anyone I know of.

Today's post is about a strange turn in the murder trial of State of Connecticut v. Hayes.

He had earlier posts on the trial and the lawyers and the reason why there must be a trial: A defendant cannot plead guilty to capital murder, so the state must shock the jury into giving him the death penalty.

It reminds me somewhat of the state that held a man on death row who was deathly ill. By law, the state could not execute him because of his poor health, so everyone hoped he'd get better... so they could kill him.

Jesse Owens and Luz Long

Luz Long reached out and congratulated Jesse Owens in 1936 when Owens won the long jump; Long placed second. It was more than a courageous act. He shook Owens' hand in front of Adolf Hitler and everyone in Berlin attending what was supposed to be the international demonstration of the German supermen. Sally Thomas contributes a nice piece on the Anchoress' blog.

Long died in Italy during World War II, and his last letter was to Owens. Fulfilling his last request, Owens served as best man at the wedding of Long's son Karl after the war.

"The Terry Jones Saga Shows the Strength of Anti-Americanism"

Janet Daley writes a nice piece in The Telegraph about how Terry Jones is what many Europeans want and need Americans to be. Her understanding of both American history and European culture is keen. The comments are also interesting.

An excerpt:

'What is unique about the US – and indispensable to the understanding of it – is that it is a country of the displaced and dispossessed: a nation which invented itself for the very purpose of permitting people to reinvent themselves, to take their fate into their own hands, to be liberated from the persecution and the paternalism of the old cultures they had left behind. Almost every American either is himself, or is descended from, someone who made a conscious decision to pull up his roots and take his chances in a land he had almost certainly never seen and which, until quite recently, offered no protection or security if the gamble failed.'

Developing a Catholic identity

Jeffrey Steel watches his children watch an anti-Catholic program on British television.

The intemperance of our opponents is one of the best forms of Catholic catechesis.

NYC statues

I am searching for a statue of a man reclining in a chair with curved back legs. The chair is low to the base of the statue. I have a photo of my great-grandfather posing in his Army uniform just before he was thrown from a horse and killed in Central Park in October of 1918.

Haven't found it yet, but I have found Balto [above], who saved Nome, Alaska from an epidemic, Alexander Hamilton, and and Sir Walter Scott.



Let me know what statues in NYC are familiar to you, and better yet, if you know someone who knows the city's statuary.

British historian Sir Charles Petrie

Elena Maria Vidal links to Australian writer R.J. Stowe.

"Ten Reasons to Love the Pope"

This piece is written by an English non-Catholic.

Hat tip to the Anchoress.

"Progressivism: The Snobbery of Chronology"

The Anchoress comments on Peter Kreeft's essay and other writings.

"Scientists Playing at Philosophers"

Speaking of Stephen Hawking.

Bl. John Henry Newman

Danny Garland, Jr. remembers the most famous Anglican to convert to Catholicism in the last two hundred years.

Jennifer Fulwiler's conversion story

There is an audio of her speaking to an RCIA group.

"Saint John of the Playground"

Pentimento's post on finding Christ in those in need.

I searched for "Dorothy Day" on her blog and found several posts. I don't think I've posted this one before.

Meeting angels unaware...

Skopeji writes: 'Christ, the poor one, is everywhere I go. He shadows me. As Mother Teresa noted: There are many more poor ones than those with physical needs. The need for deep love, for compassion, for deep friendship, for understanding and care, so lacking in our world; too often in our own families.'

Compline

I recently attended Compline for the first time at a Benedictine monastery. Compline is the last prayer of the day. It is a meditative prayer which contemplates light and darkness, life and death. St. Benedict wrote the prayers himself.

Catholic and Orthodox differences

Nice post by Fr. Christian Mathis.

Fr. Longenecker on the Mass

The problems are cultural more than in form.

Thought from Russell Kirk

"All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk."


Hat tip to Mark in Spokane.

Dion DiMucci

Grew up at Mount Carmel parish in the Bronx. His story is linked.

Catholic Understanding of Salvation

Jason Evert writes on "once saved, always saved." Because the scriptures discuss salvation in the past, present, and future tenses, we must understand salvation accordingly. St. Ignatius of Antioch, who heard St. John the Apostle preach, knew that his salvation would be completed with his martyrdom, and he faced the persecution of the First and Second Centuries accordingly, as did St. Polycarp.

This does not mean that only martyrs are saved. It does mean that we must be steadfast. Do apostates who deny Jesus at death receive eternal salvation? God alone is the judge of each soul, but I would hate to face my Maker if I had denied Christ on my dying day.

Taylor Marshall's story is on the first several pages of the PDF. Paul Thigpen's piece on salvation appears on pp. 10-11. The sidebar quotes several scriptures that discuss salvation in past, present, and future tenses.

Pope Benedict to say Latin Mass in England

Taylor Marshall discusses this announcement.

I read Tay's story in Marcus Grodi's newsletter this month. He became a Christian through the words of former baseball catcher Darrell Porter.

"Grace is Sufficient"

A short post by Marie Therese.

"My conversion to Catholicism isn't particularly spectacular, though I suppose it did involve a fair amount of kicking and screaming on my part."

Jordana's story.

A question (and challenge) about the Mass...

Verily Times commented below:

'Greetings...... can you help me understand the heart of your faith the mass? Please see my blog and the article under false teachers that has info on the mass. Can you answer these points and reply?

'Thank you and God be praised!'

I replied:

'I have posted dozens of times on the Eucharist. I quote and link great Catholic writers. Here are two posts from my personal story:

"Crawling Through No Man's Land" and "Four Pontoons to Bridge the Tiber River."

'You are welcome to comment, so long as you show respect to those who disagree with you, in particular, my friends who gave up much more than I to embrace the ancient Church and partake of the Holy Eucharist.'

UPDATE: My comment on his blog has been deleted. The link he wanted me to read is by John McArthur; few who read this blog regularly would take it seriously. My comment contained John 6:53-58. I include it here in the KJV, where it is more than obvious that Jesus was not talking about symbols:


53 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.

54 Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

56 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

57 As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

58 This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.

"Why Taylor Swift Matters"

A nice piece by Danielle Bean in Inside Catholic.