Solemn Liturgy of the PreSanctified
Good Friday, 4:00 PM
Chanting of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. John. Gregorian settings with polyphonic responses by Victoria
Adoration of the Cross
Holy Communion of the Presanctified


Solemn High Mass, Sunday Morning, 9:45 am
Mass Ordinary, Schubert's Mass in G Major, w mixed choir and strings, Propers from the Liber Usualis sung by the men's schola. Motets by Praetorious, Handel and others.



Holy Rosary Church
344 6th Street (the Romanesque building between Brunswich and Monmouth)

No, it was Muslims who flew into the towers but the article was talking about churches being active locally, not Mosques. While there is a humanistic strand of Islam, irrationality predominates.

The so called goods of secularism were really fruits of Christianity. Aristotle taught that slavery was natural. St. Paul equivocated. However, Christian civilization was distinguished from the ancient world in that it was not slave based. Thus, the lack of slaves spurred techonolgical innovation. The early modern revival of slavery was spearheaded by pragmatic colonial powers in league with Islamic slave traders. The abolition of slavery was directly a result of Christian activism.

Similarly, the ancient world, though not Rome where women had significant legal rights, and Islam suborndiated women so that they were virtually a separate species. Christian society, in comparison, insisted on rights of women from the start. For instance, from inception, a woman could not marry in a Christian land against her will. Women in Christian Europe were educated in the middle ages and in religious orders women made tremendous civil and cultural contriburtions. Devoutly Christian families often cultivated the intellects of their daughters, e.g., St. Thomas More's daughter Margaret was reputed to be one of the most brilliant persons in Europe at the time. Full citienzenship of woman happened in very religious countries in the Christian West (it was virtually the apogee of the US as a Christian nation that the franchise was extended to women). While Christianity is traditional and sees woman as primarily wives, mothers and home makers, and men as husbands, fathers, and workers, that is because it recognises realities that inhere in nature.

Peace!

On Reality:
Atheism does tend to be reductive. It is materialistic and cannot distinguish between hypothesis and reality. Epistimology, the branch of philosophy which examines how we know, is a fascinating subject. It is uncontroversial that the human mind works in paradigms. At the end, whether one is an atheist or believer, there is a jump of faith.

A familiarity with intellectual history will also trim the sails of the ardent scientific atheist. It is no accident that science arose in the Christian West. Albertus Magnus and the Domincans took up science where the Greeks had left off (the Islamic contribution is really limited to preserving texts for the most part and importing hindu numbers to the West). A compelling argument can be made that the Judeo Christian embracing of creation and of rationality is what made science possible.

On Violence
Atheisim and theism deal with ultimate issues which can get people pretty agitated. I do believe that the Crusades, the Inquisitiion, and wars between Protestants and Catholics can be understoon very differently from how the village atheist describes it (For example, the Crusades were the response of Christian civilization which had been on the defensive for four hundred years from an expansionist and coercive Islamic army; the various inquisitions were state tribunals, not Church tribunals and although the inquiry dealt with matters of faith, the motivation was as much to do with civil order as theological faith; the wars between Catholics and Protestants were more likely explained as a a product of unbridled nationalism and the worship of the nation state than of the violence of religion.
But even if one rejects all of that and wants to consider these as vioelnt aspects of Christiantity, one has to consider that since 1789, all the violence has been done in the name of Atheism. Starting with the genocide in the Vendee in 1793, through the rise of Bolshevism which killed more poeple during its reign than the any other ideology in history (think the Gulag, think the Cultural Revolution, think Pol Pot, think Ceacescu, think the Great Leader). Moreover, contra the attempt to describe Nazis as a sort of Christiantiy, it was clearly a form of neopagnanism. which derided the Catholic Christ as a weakingling following Nietche and wanted to ressurect the Teutonic gods of the barbarians. It is, in fact, the height of irrationality to indulge in screeds about the danger of Christians.




Bu

Also, Clockers, a book by Richard Price and movie by Spike Lee (who moves location to Brooklyn); Five Finger Discount by Helene Stepinski (which is a riotous memoire); Mysteries of My Father (another funny but touching and evocative memoir) by Thomas Fleming; Powerticians by Francis X. Smith which was printed by a Vanity Press but is a fantastic read.

And isn't John Sayles City of Hope suppossed to loosely inspired by Jersey City?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Hope_(film)

Oh, thanks for reminding me about the Wallace Stevens poem!

Another mention for JC, is in Will Cather's short novel, My Mortal Enemeny. Myra and her husband Oswald return to their fictional hometown of Parthia, Illinois, to visit their relatives. Nellie and Aunt Lydia then leave to spend the Christmas holiday in New York City with them. They live on Madison Square. If I recall correctly, there are two scenes at the old Railroad Station (now in Liberty State Park). Cather is very descriptive about the station in the snow.