If you have Passport, you may be able to stream all the episodes after 8 pm.
Watched first 90 minutes. Lots of talk among colonists about liberty and tyranny, but the crux of the biscuit boils down to land and taxes. Fair amount of thuggery (and not just sandwich throwing!) in Boston against British authorities leading to standing armies milling around threatening people. This will be a complaint in the Declaration. Trump now thinks a standing army is a great idea.
Question: Parliament prohibited expansion beyond the Appalachians, which enraged land speculators like Washington. Anyone know how land speculation worked? I presume that agents filed land claims on behalf of wealthy employers in wilderness areas, which were then surveyed and sold. Guessing that speculators had to navigate any agreements from Native tribes in the area and pay some kind of tax and registration fees on the claim to the Crown.
Let us know what you find out. It's grocery day here, so that will wipe me out for the afternoon. I should go help Raber with leaves. Our neighbor, who has some form of mental retardation, has been blowing them into our yard again, which about doubles our load. He's afraid of me, so Raber needs to remonstrate with him. His folks bought him the house next door, but they are in bad shape now and rarely look in on him. The neighbors will have to step up more to look out for him.
We don't have Passport but will be able to stream the episodes as they are released. We'll do it earlier in the evening, that's the nice part about streaming, you can choose your time. Kelly was watching the Chiefs and the Broncos game last night, those you have to watch in real time. I don't have the attention span (or the give a darn) for football.
I notice some wives are real football fans. I’m not although I’m still Philadelphian enough to pay attention when Philly teams start getting somewhere. I once played a football pool with no more football savvy than a chimpanzee. I took random picks and I won.
My husband is a big sports fan, especially football and basketball. But he is so confined these days he also watched baseball this year. I am not a fan. He misses having his sons around for the games and sometimes he calls them after to discuss a game. I also know several women who are fanatic football fans. Unfortunately for my husband, I’m not one of them.
Trump will feel justified in his defunding of PBS because this series, like others, is telling more truth about American history than he likes, such as the reality of the slave- owning Founding Fathers.
LOL, I'm glad to be somewhere else during games. I'm also glad to be a couch potato in the same room and read on my Kindle fire. I had to get my in laws used to me reading while they watched sports.
If my wife never watched another football game, I don't think she would miss it. But she often sits with me on Sunday afternoons when I'm watching the Chicago Bears, and she gets caught up in it. She's not as all-in as I am, but when an exciting play is happening (such as a long run for a touchdown), she's more likely to scream at the television than I am.
We don't go to professional football games in person (Sundays too busy), but we go to a college game on Saturday afternoon most years (Northwestern is our local team). She wouldn't describe herself as a rabin fan, but she enjoys the game atmosphere, the food, etc. We also go to the local high school games once or twice a year. It's a cheap date.
My wife and I watched the first episode last night. It was fine. A lot of it was things I already knew (but hadn't thought about in quite some time), but some of it was new to me, or at least made me see things in a new light. For example, I didn't realize the battle at Concord was so bloody.
It was also interesting that the historians pegged that 1774-75 time period as the specific period that colonists started to think of themselves as Americans rather than British. I read a biography of Lincoln in the last few years that made a somewhat similar point about the lead-up the Civil War: in the North, for some 30-40 years prior to the Civil War, abolitionists were not considered mainstream - they were radicals who were sort of marginalized, or at least were a smallish minority. But opinion started to shift in the late 1850s. Lincoln was among the first of the legacy Whigs in Illinois to observe the change.
Without disagreeing with Jean's mention of chair naps during football games (although golf is even better for that purpose), I find Ken Burns series to be excellent chair nap material. Last night I got under an afghan and drifted off somewhere between the Seven Years War (which, I confess, is still the French and Indian War in my brain, although I suppose we're not supposed to call it that anymore) and the Tea Party.
I started nodding off, too, which is why we paused the episode. A lot covered ground I knew about. And there is a certain "feel" to these productions that has become overly familiar and becomes soporific, like a familiar bedtime story. The keening violin music to which Burns is partial also starts to put me to sleep.
"the Seven Years War (which, I confess, is still the French and Indian War in my brain, although I suppose we're not supposed to call it that anymore)"
As I understand it, the French and Indian War was just one conflict in the larger Seven Years War, a three-way grab among Britain, France, and Spain for colonial territories across the globe.
Interesting that in Episode 2, one of the historians notes that the term Continental Congress signals the aspiration of the Americans to control all of North America.
Fun fact: The Brits refused to give up Fort Mackinac on Mackinaw Island, Mich, until 1796. They tried to get it back in the War of 1812. Strategic area to shipping travel. Very violent history in that area. Now it's all just tourism, fudge shops, and tandem bicycles.
The only Ken Burn's series that I have watched completely is the one on Country Music. Betty and I did that together and I found it helpful to have the book that accompanies the series to keep people strait.
I think I may have watched episodes of the Civil War and the Vietnam War.
There sure are a lot of them, I have been a PGS subscriber since the 1980s when l lived in Toledo. Betty has also been a subscriber for quite a while. I guess we should be able to get all of these for free.
I would be interested in hearing from everyone which series you have watched, which one's you particularly liked, and which were disappointments.
When I googled the topics it brought me to a PBS site that listed them all. However, I was not logged into the site. I suspect after I got the introduction to each, I would have to log in to see it all.
I watched Burns' Civil War series, Baseball, Jazz, Radio. The radio series was interesting because I worked in North Jersey and the NYC region was the birthplace of commercial radio. The story of the conflict between Armstrong, the genius behind radio, and executive mogul Sarnoff provided dramatic narrative. There was a woman employed at my workplace, a very eccentric woman, whose father was a founder and owner of Boonton Electronics. He owned considerable acreage near Boonton, NJ. During WWII, they would land B17 bombers on a strip on his property where his company would outfit the planes with radio equipment and they would take off. This lady had met Armstrong on occasions when her father had the great.engineer over for dinner. Under stress and depression due to his lawsuit with Sarnoff, Armstrong later jumped to his death from a hotel window. I guess, looking back at the Civil War series, I appreciate the expansion of what I knew about that war but I now have reservation because I got a sense of progress in the American Project. I no longer think we made much progress but swept the problems under the rug of myth. I guess I also have more reservations about Burns because he supported Kamala Harris while our country was materially supporting a genocide. Because of this, I no longer trust his viewpoint and think our problems are more intrinsic..
Jack, we liked the Burns biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Earnest Hemingway, Mohammed Ali, and the Roosevelts. My favorite was the Roosevelts.
I liked the Civil War and Prohibition (the former more than the latter). Where he sort of lost his shine for me was the one on National Parks. It was just dull. I sort of tuned out after that. I'm not aware of any of the ones on Anne's list, they must have come later.
I liked the Roosevelt one, too. I also liked the one about country music, even tho I am not a big music fan.
I still think his Civil War series had the most breadth and depth and for the sheer volume of photos, letters, and first-hand accounts that it pulled together. The godawful tragedy of the thing seemed personal and immediate. Just not getting from the Revolutionary War so far.
Jean, I liked the country music one even though I despise country music. I was raised in SW Pa next to West Virginia and so was very familiar with country music. However, Gregorian chant and all the Eastern Chants in our area had prepared me for loving classical music although I did not encounter it until I went to novitiate. I naturally gravitated to national public radio. Saint John's in Collegeville Minnesota where I went to college was one of the founders of Minnesota public radio.
My mom had music going constantly. A lot of classical, show tunes, Irish folk music, Frank Sinatra, etc. You could always gauge her mental health levels by what she was listening to. I was a reader and spent a lot of time in my room with Kleenex stuffed in my ears to shut out the show tunes and crooners. When the sad stuff came out and the crying started, I knew I had to be alert and start monitoring the liquor. Mom never had country music in the house. I suppose that's why I could watch that particular documentary without getting the whim-whams. I only listen to the talk and news programs on NPR.
Sleep while watching videos is a major problem for me. I don't have problems with watching liturgies or concerts but homilies quickly put me to sleep. There is something about listening to people talk that puts me to sleep.
Even the fifteen minute homilies from our favorite Boston parish have begun to put me to sleep. He is a dynamic celebrant and homilist, and their parish choir is excellent on par with the Shrine's professional recording choir. However, in recent Sundays he has put me to sleep. I can get around that by walking outside listening to my cell phone. But for two Sundays in a row that weather outside has not been good. I experience the sleep as unpleasant clogging of my brain. I guess when the weather is cold from now on, I will be doing some writing at my computer during the homily.
If we end up watching this or any other series by Ken Burns, I will have to turn it into an intellectual project, taking notes or underlying a book or something to keep me awake. Maybe Betty and I could each make collages for each program.
Next to my bed I have an old-fashioned clock radio, perpetually tuned into an FM classical music station. The station is old-fashioned, too: the only commercials it plays on-air are announcer-read. When I turn off my bedside lamp to go to sleep, I push a button on the clock radio that causes the radio to play for an hour and then turn itself off. For both my wife and I, it's how we fall asleep at night. When we travel and stay in a hotel, one of us uses a laptop computer to tune in the station and let it play till we fall asleep.
There is a book that goes with this series, like the one that went with Country music. Gives more elaborate material than the script though it follows the script closely. So I previewed the first episode by reading the book's first chapter.
Wow! I was born and raised in Washington County PA, whose capital is what we call "little Washington." Fort Necessity is about thirty miles to the east of us where the Alleghany Mountains begin. In my youth it was a frequent place for car trips
So, I knew the broad outlines of Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity, followed by his accompanying Braddock's attempt to take Fort Duquesne from the French, and the eventual establishment of Fort Pitt.
But I had no idea how central Washington was to igniting the Seven Years War. I just knew that the French and English were contesting one another in the Indian territory to the West of the Alleghanies, and this had some relationship to their contests elsewhere in the world.
I usually think of the Revolutionary War as something taking place in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia. I had not thought of its origins as part of a global war starting in Western Pennsylvania.
I think we learned Michigan history in 3rd grade, and it was pretty clear that the Revolutionary War in many ways.l extended well beyond 1776 as the US spread west and "liberated" territory from colonial rule. Control of the Great Lakes was a four-way struggle among the French, Natives, British, and Americans. At one point, a rogue Mormon declared Beaver Island a sovereign state, controlled the timber industry (and thereby the steamboats that needed timber for fuel) in northern Michigan, and got himself elected to two separate districts in the first Michigan State legislature in the 1830s.
Finished episode 3 last night. Interesting to hear about the general consternation over the Pennsylvania State constitution, which extended the vote to just about any white male who paid taxes, not just land owners. Horrors! What next? Women??
Also interesting about the Hessian mercenaries who were allowed to stay in the US. I think they settled largely in Pennsylvania. There was an interesting "Who Do You Think You Are" segment with Rob Lowe, who had a Hessian ancestor.
We are falling behind. And will fall farther behind because our youngest son and his family arrived last night. I’m learning a lot actually. We are immersed in Civil War history in this part of the country—lots of major Civil War battlefields etc within an hour or two drive. East coast Revolutionary war history in Boston and Philadelphia, as well as Yorktown and the homes and plantations of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe in Virginia, now operated as museums. Not a lot about the pre-1775 history in the lakes region. But I grew up in California, so my formal education wasn’t immersion in the Revolutionary and Civil wars, surrounded by the places where it all took place in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. California history was more immersion in the history of the Spanish explorers in Mexico and California, including Father Serra. California was part of Mexico until the mid-19th century.
Have a nice visit with your family. Episode 4 is more about battles. George Washington was not exactly a brilliant military strategist. He didn't get very good intel at times. Plus he had an all-volunteer army to begin (tho the draft is now starting up) and was outnumbered most of the time.
Looks like the French are going to get into it in a big way now.
Interesting how different regions of the US might have a different feel for the Revolution. As you said, California was a Spanish territory, probably less connected to the English roots in the East.
Michigan was dominated by the French. You still see that influence as you go to the far north, where French and Indian place names predominate. French surnames also predominate among Native Americans up there.
The Michigan history in school was of happy voyageurs who married Native women who turned Catholic with the help of the friendly Jesuits until the British horned in on the fur trade, built forts, and imposed a lot of rules on everybody. The French being everybody's buddy in these parts was a bit of a fiction. The French movie "Black Robe" examines the tensions between Natives and Jesuits.
The French were the reason the Battle of Yorktown, VA was decisive in ending the war. Since it’s east coast, and it’s a town we have driven through many times and when we had kids with us, we stopped a couple of times to visit the historical monuments.
The French school in DC is called Lycee Rochambeau, after the French General. AI summary “ Account of the British Surrender at Yorktown— French help was critical to the American victory at Yorktown through a combination of land and naval forces. The French navy, under Admiral de Grasse, blockaded the Chesapeake Bay, preventing British evacuations and reinforcements, while French troops, led by Comte de Rochambeau, joined George Washington's army to besiege and defeat the British forces under General Cornwallis. This combined Franco-American effort trapped Cornwallis, leading to the decisive surrender that effectively ended the war.”
The Spanish dominance of California is obvious from place names, just as the French names are common where you live. All the major cities and many of smaller cities and towns have Spanish names - San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, La Jolla, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, San Juan Capistrano, Montecito (where Prince Harry and Meghan live), San Luis Obispo, Palo Alto, Catalina Island, etc, etc, etc. The main road from the Mexican border to above San Francisco is El Camino Real. - hundreds of miles of the Royal Road up the Calif coast. In San Jose I looked for churches to go to - hardly any Episcopal. Lots of Catholic. It finally hit me that there were so few EC churches compared to what I’m used to here because Calif was settled by Spanish Catholics and the east coast was dominated by English and the Church of England. Duh. Sometimes I’m a bit slow to make connections!
Much easier to find a Catholic Church than an EC in Michigan, too. According to Pew, evangelicals now outnumber Catholics 21 percent to 19 percent of those residents who claim religious affiliation. I would bet that the northern half of the state is still predominantly Catholic. The Irish and Italians followed the French up there.
During the second Iraq war, I remember the big mouths decrying French non-support and blathering about “freedom fries”. All I could think of was all the support of the American Revolution by the French. In related hustory, the Soviet Union did most of the heavy lifting in WWII. We waited and stalled while the Russians were dying in millions. It was kind of a proxy war with Germany for a good long time. When we finally seriously entered the fray with D-Day, it was like boxing with an opponent who just did several rounds with Mike Tyson. Were FDR and Churchill clever? Very. But let’s not lionize ourselves too strongly.
Not lionizing the French. They wanted to weaken Brit colonies and get them for France. The Revolution in America took troops away from Jamaica, Barbados, etc. But it does give the lie to the notion that the US did it all on their own.
Tonight's episode includes the hideous account of the raids on Native towns in New York. I had no idea that this was going on on such a large scale before the war was even over.
Washington and his land speculators slaughtering and running off thousands of people to Canada. All treaties with the Brits null and void.
Sounds like “warts and all” coverage. Maybe I will find a way to watch this thing. The Revolutionary War was the beginning of a new expanding empire with a religion called democracy as a justification for anything. Meanwhile, we suppressed democratic movements all over the world. Whenever I hear democracy used as a justification today, I get nauseous. Just like Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust, it is tired and worn out. The spell is broken.
There was certainly no support for the kind of modern universal suffrage we have today among the Founders. I think if you bemoaned the current administration to anybody in the Continental Congress, they'd tell you that this is what happens when you let any dumbass vote. Their idea of representative government was to represent the land-owning elite with money and education.
Universal education should take care of that except that mainstream media cancels it out. Anyway, with the billionaires and corporations running the show, the Founder’s wishes in the matter seem to have been fulfilled. That’s why things are so great.
Yes. Universal education (an aspiration of the Puritans that pre-dated the Revolution) cannot seem to fight the American predilection for titillation. I agree that that has been fed by "the media" (including the entertainment industry), which has blurred the lines of reality and favors personalities and scandals over ideas and policies.
If anything brings down Trump, it won't be because of callousness to the environment, ICE thugs, quackery about Tylenol, housing shortages, the price of beef, or executive overreach.
Do you think Epstein could bring Trump down? Remember, he said he could get away with shooting someone on 5th Avenue. But he has a huge chunk of hubris, which does tend to bring people down in the end. One can always hope.
I keep reading that young men are in a bad place mentally, because they feel unvalued and pushed aside. Because women are taking their place, or something. I say, move over, fellas. Musk and his AI buddies want to make all of us redundant. But I think they are high on their own supply.
The Ken Burns documentary on Ben Franklin provides a lot of history and insights about how he influenced France to support America’s revolution during the years he lived in Paris. He was also involved with the signing of the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war.
Katherine, I too read frequently about the malaise of young men who complain endlessly about losing out these days and how unfair it is. But it’s not the fault of women or others of their age cohort who aren’t flailing that more boys than girls fail to finish high school, and also earn fewer college and advanced degrees needed for “good” jobs. I suspect that’s one reason trumps war against DEI appeals to them. They don’t blame their own failures, but those they imagine only got good jobs because of discrimination against white males. It’s been pounded into them.
Personally I’m sad that colleges and universities seem to have simply become career training institutes primarily, frequently abandoning the liberal arts. But they do prepare the young for the world of work at least. It seems like the young men aren’t willing to put in the same effort as the women ( and minorities) do, now that the doors that used to be closed to them have mostly opened. Did they simply assume that being male entitles them to better jobs and more career options? And that now that women encounter a more equal opportunity environment these Peter Pan lost boys can’t handle the competition? If they can’t handle competition from women and minorities, the had better hope that the chicken little predictions about AI are exaggerated.
The glass ceiling still exists, it is shattered more frequently these days.
I get tired of the young male whiners, now being manipulated by the Jordan Petersons, Charlie Kirks, and, apparently, now by Nick Fuentes, the worst of them all.
I realize that my sons, at 47 and 51, are a different generation than the gen Zs. But at the time they graduated, the job market wasn't great either. I never heard them whine about it though. They took some temporary jobs until the ones came up that were a fit for their education. I am sad that because of budget shortfalls, the university system of our state is dropping four majors which aren't "STEM".I feel that it is short sighted, because not everyone fits the science and technology field.
It's a mistake to generalize too much. As a college instructor, I felt the most disrespect from white Gen X frat boys who aspired to be Gordon Gekko. I flunked a few of them for plagiarism, and probably found their distress over getting nailed more satisfying than was good for my soul.
I found Millennial veterans of our post-9/11 conflicts to be very thoughtful and having a hard time dealing with American indifference to the rest of the world, especially troops who were embedded with locals in Afghanistan.
I was also struck by so many Millennials and GenZers who opted to live at home. Family and economic stability seems to be important to them.
What I and my Boomer instructor cohort did find fairly shocking was how few parents from 1980s on read to their kids or promoted reading outside of school for fun. I started reading very short excerpts from assigned readings to students at start of class (learned this from librarians) or playing recordings of assigned readings in class. This increased reading of assignments on their own and coming to class more prepared. I almost think someone had to model pleasure and enthusiasm for them.
Also I learned you had to make their phones your friend, a la: "We're reading Phyllis Wheatley today. You have 5 minutes to get out your phones and come up with 10 interesting things to tell me about her." They were all over that.
I wish more Catholics understood and appreciated this about converts from Anglican and other mainline Christian groups. People running RCIA or whatever it is now just do not get this (snip):
... for those who left an Anglican church to join the Catholic Church, it was “not so much a turning away or rejection of their rich and precious Anglican heritage but an experience of an imperative to move into the full visible communion of the Catholic Church”.
Thanks for the link to the NYT article, Jean. I think some of the people who are running OCIA don't get the part that convers aren't rejecting their previous faith heritage so much as moving into a fuller expression of it. I'd like to tell them not to say cringe-worthy things which come across as smug and triumphalistic. I have not seen an explanation of why the PTB changed "rite" of Christian Initiation to "order". And is it " Christian initiation" unless they previously weren't Christian? That said, I think having people go to a series of classes where there is discussion with others and information is a good thing. It keeps it from being a siloed experience with a simpatico priest and/or internet information. That encourages people who have been Catholic for like, five minutes, to think they know more than the pope. The NYT article mentioned that the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion seemed to be driving conversions to the RC. Which seems a bit problematic. The article linked a bunch of other articles, one of which was about a Rwandan Anglican bishop rejecting the new Archbishop of Canterbury because she is a woman.
In small rural parishes like ours, you might only have one or two converts. Also, RCIA was developed for catechumens, but there aren't the resources to run separate sessions for candidates, so they get lumped in together. Discussion is great, but our group was often outnumbered by the cradle Catholic leaders who blabbered on and on about how great it was to be raised Catholic. One of my RCIA classmates was also my hair person, and I got more out of chatting w her during our hair appts than with the Church Ladies droning on about their Easter blessing of the kielbasa and how strict the nuns were. Really, I think we both might have dropped out of RCIA had we not encouraged each other. Both of us have now lapsed, but I honestly think she has always lived--and continues to live--an exemplary Catholic life of love and kindness under circumstances that would have made me angry and bitter. The Church lost a good one when she left.
What differentiates living an exemplary Christian life from an exemplary Catholic life? Sacraments? For that matter, what differentiates an exemplary life of any religion or none from an exemplary Christian life? Showing love and kindness is not limited to Catholics or to Christians.
She lives the love and mercy as Catholicism teaches it thru the radical examples if the saints, tho Catholics do not have a monopoly on love and mercy. Better? Do I get credit for not writing that we are both "fallen away"? I remembered to edit it so you wouldn't get mad this time.
Aaah. The message I attempted to teach got through to you, Jean, at least. I have not fallen away, nor have you, nor has your friend. We all made a choice - to leave active participation in the Roman Catholic Church.
Most Anglicans who converted to Catholicism ( amazingly few- about 3000, mostly in the first year or two after Benedict went fishing in the UK) after Benedict created the Ordinariate were motivated by misogyny - their opposition to women priests. This includes some Anglican priests. They were allowed to keep their own liturgy, the BCP, and priests could be married. Since they didn’t lose anything, they could pretty easily jump ship and avoid seeing a woman on the altar. Interesting that the bishops didn’t convert until after retirement, locking in their pensions I guess. They aren’t a “ blessing” to the Catholic Church, just malcontents who could sign up without giving up anything they valued in Anglicanism. In Africa, the Anglicans are both anti- woman and anti- gay. Some Anglican bishops ( joined by a few RC bishops) support prison and even the death penalty for homosexuals.
The C of E line was "we're ordaining women, but if you don't want one in yr parish, you don't have to hire one." I guess they figured that a woman priest would be pretty routine by the time the old no-women-priests guard died out, and women priests would be widely accepted.
I think that strategy has pretty much worked in parishes and dioceses where the pillars of Anglicanism--reason, Scripture, tradition--are in sync.
Those Rwandan bishops and their renegade need to saw that tradition pillar down to size. Or go be Catholics. There's nothing in Catholicism that an Anglican doesn't believe except Purgatory and papal infallibility.
Finished the Burns documentary. I think we've all mentioned its soporific effect, which may have something to do with us all getting older and maybe the fact that the Burns docu style is predictable.
My main criticism us that people will be able to read whatever they already believed into the presentation. If you want American exceptionalism, it's there. If you want to trace the roots of American intolerance and imperialism, it's there. If you want to make a case for strong states rights or strong central govt, both are there. If you want to make the Brits out to be bad guys or good guys, it's there.
There is no overarching thesis here, and no scholarly voices to push for any particular point of view, except from the Native commentators. There's kind of a limp and hurried attempt at the end to show that the Revolution inspired other movements around the world. But most Americans have little taste for spending lives and money on pushing representative government abroad since the failures--from Korea to Afghanistan--have been so spectacular.
There are some good stories and interesting facts. But the overall effect for me was underwhelming.
On the other hand, the US has been very successful at extinguishing representative governments. Chile had democracy for a century before the CIA extinguished it. We killed Iranian democracy and installed the Shah. We’re very good at suppressing it, too. We killed 200,000 filipinos for wanting the same thing we had (yes, had). It’s no wonder it’s collapsing here. Maybe democracy in America was only ever a side gig. It was always a businessocracy.
Yes, US foreign policy has always favored dictators willing to create a favorable climate for our corporate overlords over freely elected commies and pinkos fussing over malnutrition and disease. And ... well, helllloooo, Prince Mohammed! Let's not let one measly dismemberment stand in the way of progress.
Katherine might be interested in this morning's story about near death experiences in the Wash Post: https://wapo.st/47XDgKh
There is a link in the story to a larger study of psych counseling for those who have experienced these things. Interesting that a near death experience is not something people take to their clergy. It seems to be viewed as a trauma to be treated vs a mystery to be contemplated.
Thanks Jean. It makes sense that people might need help processing something like that, since it is something most people haven't experienced. They would feel that they wouldn't be in understood if they talked about it. There is an organization that studies near death experience, IANDS. In most near death accounts I have read, one effect is that the person is no longer afraid of dying, and that their priorities have changed. I haven't ever had a near death experience, and though they are interesting to read about, I don't want to have one. If I die I don't want to come back here, I want to go on to what comes next. I have shared before that I follow a podcast of a Dominican priest who is contacted in dreams by souls who need help moving beyond their traumatic death. https://nathan-castle.com/podcasts/. But they aren't near death, they are dead, full stop. I'm afraid that would make me afraid to go to sleep, lol!
I dunno. "Processing" experiences so often seems to amount to grinding them down with pills and endless talk so you can quit pestering other people with your thoughts.
I think NDEs are just the hallucinations that occur as O2 levels and electrolytes get screwed up as someone dies. Saw this with my dad, grandma, and uncle. Vivid dreams and visions in the evening/night that dissipated in daylight after they ate or drank something and their O2 levels went up. Once they could no longer eat or drink and their breathing was suppressed because of the morphine, the hallucinations persisted 24/7. Sometimes happy, sometimes not.
Correction: 8:00-10:00 PM. Repeated 10:00-12:00 PM (on my local station, WNET Channel 13).
ReplyDeleteIf you have Passport, you may be able to stream all the episodes after 8 pm.
ReplyDeleteWatched first 90 minutes. Lots of talk among colonists about liberty and tyranny, but the crux of the biscuit boils down to land and taxes. Fair amount of thuggery (and not just sandwich throwing!) in Boston against British authorities leading to standing armies milling around threatening people. This will be a complaint in the Declaration. Trump now thinks a standing army is a great idea.
Question: Parliament prohibited expansion beyond the Appalachians, which enraged land speculators like Washington. Anyone know how land speculation worked? I presume that agents filed land claims on behalf of wealthy employers in wilderness areas, which were then surveyed and sold. Guessing that speculators had to navigate any agreements from Native tribes in the area and pay some kind of tax and registration fees on the claim to the Crown.
I’m curious about the land purchases west of the Appalachians also. I plan to do a little research on that when I have more time than I do today.
DeleteLet us know what you find out. It's grocery day here, so that will wipe me out for the afternoon. I should go help Raber with leaves. Our neighbor, who has some form of mental retardation, has been blowing them into our yard again, which about doubles our load. He's afraid of me, so Raber needs to remonstrate with him. His folks bought him the house next door, but they are in bad shape now and rarely look in on him. The neighbors will have to step up more to look out for him.
DeleteWe don't have Passport but will be able to stream the episodes as they are released. We'll do it earlier in the evening, that's the nice part about streaming, you can choose your time. Kelly was watching the Chiefs and the Broncos game last night, those you have to watch in real time. I don't have the attention span (or the give a darn) for football.
ReplyDeleteI honestly think that the appeal of football is that it makes women go away so men can eat in the living room and take chair naps.
DeleteI notice some wives are real football fans. I’m not although I’m still Philadelphian enough to pay attention when Philly teams start getting somewhere. I once played a football pool with no more football savvy than a chimpanzee. I took random picks and I won.
DeleteMy husband is a big sports fan, especially football and basketball. But he is so confined these days he also watched baseball this year. I am not a fan. He misses having his sons around for the games and sometimes he calls them after to discuss a game. I also know several women who are fanatic football fans. Unfortunately for my husband, I’m not one of them.
DeleteTrump will feel justified in his defunding of PBS because this series, like others, is telling more truth about American history than he likes, such as the reality of the slave- owning Founding Fathers.
LOL, I'm glad to be somewhere else during games. I'm also glad to be a couch potato in the same room and read on my Kindle fire. I had to get my in laws used to me reading while they watched sports.
DeleteIf my wife never watched another football game, I don't think she would miss it. But she often sits with me on Sunday afternoons when I'm watching the Chicago Bears, and she gets caught up in it. She's not as all-in as I am, but when an exciting play is happening (such as a long run for a touchdown), she's more likely to scream at the television than I am.
DeleteWe don't go to professional football games in person (Sundays too busy), but we go to a college game on Saturday afternoon most years (Northwestern is our local team). She wouldn't describe herself as a rabin fan, but she enjoys the game atmosphere, the food, etc. We also go to the local high school games once or twice a year. It's a cheap date.
My wife and I watched the first episode last night. It was fine. A lot of it was things I already knew (but hadn't thought about in quite some time), but some of it was new to me, or at least made me see things in a new light. For example, I didn't realize the battle at Concord was so bloody.
ReplyDeleteIt was also interesting that the historians pegged that 1774-75 time period as the specific period that colonists started to think of themselves as Americans rather than British. I read a biography of Lincoln in the last few years that made a somewhat similar point about the lead-up the Civil War: in the North, for some 30-40 years prior to the Civil War, abolitionists were not considered mainstream - they were radicals who were sort of marginalized, or at least were a smallish minority. But opinion started to shift in the late 1850s. Lincoln was among the first of the legacy Whigs in Illinois to observe the change.
Without disagreeing with Jean's mention of chair naps during football games (although golf is even better for that purpose), I find Ken Burns series to be excellent chair nap material. Last night I got under an afghan and drifted off somewhere between the Seven Years War (which, I confess, is still the French and Indian War in my brain, although I suppose we're not supposed to call it that anymore) and the Tea Party.
I started nodding off, too, which is why we paused the episode. A lot covered ground I knew about. And there is a certain "feel" to these productions that has become overly familiar and becomes soporific, like a familiar bedtime story. The keening violin music to which Burns is partial also starts to put me to sleep.
DeleteWhose is the main narrator voice? It's sort of folksy yet portentious (in a neutral way). His voice does it for me. But I'm sleep-deprived.
DeletePeter Coyote. Started watching this earlier this evening so maybe I won't fall asleep.
Delete"the Seven Years War (which, I confess, is still the French and Indian War in my brain, although I suppose we're not supposed to call it that anymore)"
DeleteAs I understand it, the French and Indian War was just one conflict in the larger Seven Years War, a three-way grab among Britain, France, and Spain for colonial territories across the globe.
Interesting that in Episode 2, one of the historians notes that the term Continental Congress signals the aspiration of the Americans to control all of North America.
Fun fact: The Brits refused to give up Fort Mackinac on Mackinaw Island, Mich, until 1796. They tried to get it back in the War of 1812. Strategic area to shipping travel. Very violent history in that area. Now it's all just tourism, fudge shops, and tandem bicycles.
The only Ken Burn's series that I have watched completely is the one on Country Music. Betty and I did that together and I found it helpful to have the book that accompanies the series to keep people strait.
ReplyDeleteI think I may have watched episodes of the Civil War and the Vietnam War.
There sure are a lot of them, I have been a PGS subscriber since the 1980s when l lived in Toledo. Betty has also been a subscriber for quite a while. I guess we should be able to get all of these for free.
I would be interested in hearing from everyone which series you have watched, which one's you particularly liked, and which were disappointments.
I didn't know there were so many of them. I'll have to look for the titles, we are wanting something to watch besides murder mysteries.
DeleteWhen I googled the topics it brought me to a PBS site that listed them all. However, I was not logged into the site. I suspect after I got the introduction to each, I would have to log in to see it all.
DeleteI watched Burns' Civil War series, Baseball, Jazz, Radio. The radio series was interesting because I worked in North Jersey and the NYC region was the birthplace of commercial radio. The story of the conflict between Armstrong, the genius behind radio, and executive mogul Sarnoff provided dramatic narrative. There was a woman employed at my workplace, a very eccentric woman, whose father was a founder and owner of Boonton Electronics. He owned considerable acreage near Boonton, NJ. During WWII, they would land B17 bombers on a strip on his property where his company would outfit the planes with radio equipment and they would take off. This lady had met Armstrong on occasions when her father had the great.engineer over for dinner. Under stress and depression due to his lawsuit with Sarnoff, Armstrong later jumped to his death from a hotel window.
DeleteI guess, looking back at the Civil War series, I appreciate the expansion of what I knew about that war but I now have reservation because I got a sense of progress in the American Project. I no longer think we made much progress but swept the problems under the rug of myth. I guess I also have more reservations about Burns because he supported Kamala Harris while our country was materially supporting a genocide. Because of this, I no longer trust his viewpoint and think our problems are more intrinsic..
Jack, we liked the Burns biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Earnest Hemingway, Mohammed Ali, and the Roosevelts. My favorite was the Roosevelts.
DeleteI liked the Civil War and Prohibition (the former more than the latter). Where he sort of lost his shine for me was the one on National Parks. It was just dull. I sort of tuned out after that. I'm not aware of any of the ones on Anne's list, they must have come later.
DeleteI liked the Roosevelt one, too. I also liked the one about country music, even tho I am not a big music fan.
DeleteI still think his Civil War series had the most breadth and depth and for the sheer volume of photos, letters, and first-hand accounts that it pulled together. The godawful tragedy of the thing seemed personal and immediate. Just not getting from the Revolutionary War so far.
Meant to add that I also liked his Lewis and Clark docu.
DeleteJean, I liked the country music one even though I despise country music. I was raised in SW Pa next to West Virginia and so was very familiar with country music. However, Gregorian chant and all the Eastern Chants in our area had prepared me for loving classical music although I did not encounter it until I went to novitiate. I naturally gravitated to national public radio. Saint John's in Collegeville Minnesota where I went to college was one of the founders of Minnesota public radio.
DeleteMy mom had music going constantly. A lot of classical, show tunes, Irish folk music, Frank Sinatra, etc. You could always gauge her mental health levels by what she was listening to. I was a reader and spent a lot of time in my room with Kleenex stuffed in my ears to shut out the show tunes and crooners. When the sad stuff came out and the crying started, I knew I had to be alert and start monitoring the liquor. Mom never had country music in the house. I suppose that's why I could watch that particular documentary without getting the whim-whams. I only listen to the talk and news programs on NPR.
DeleteSleep while watching videos is a major problem for me. I don't have problems with watching liturgies or concerts but homilies quickly put me to sleep. There is something about listening to people talk that puts me to sleep.
ReplyDeleteEven the fifteen minute homilies from our favorite Boston parish have begun to put me to sleep. He is a dynamic celebrant and homilist, and their parish choir is excellent on par with the Shrine's professional recording choir. However, in recent Sundays he has put me to sleep. I can get around that by walking outside listening to my cell phone. But for two Sundays in a row that weather outside has not been good. I experience the sleep as unpleasant clogging of my brain. I guess when the weather is cold from now on, I will be doing some writing at my computer during the homily.
If we end up watching this or any other series by Ken Burns, I will have to turn it into an intellectual project, taking notes or underlying a book or something to keep me awake. Maybe Betty and I could each make collages for each program.
Next to my bed I have an old-fashioned clock radio, perpetually tuned into an FM classical music station. The station is old-fashioned, too: the only commercials it plays on-air are announcer-read. When I turn off my bedside lamp to go to sleep, I push a button on the clock radio that causes the radio to play for an hour and then turn itself off. For both my wife and I, it's how we fall asleep at night. When we travel and stay in a hotel, one of us uses a laptop computer to tune in the station and let it play till we fall asleep.
DeleteMy husband and I used to listen to Hearts of Space. I don't even know if that is still going. But it was pretty soporific
Delete"Safety Committees." Those sound fun.
ReplyDeleteThere is a book that goes with this series, like the one that went with Country music. Gives more elaborate material than the script though it follows the script closely. So I previewed the first episode by reading the book's first chapter.
ReplyDeleteWow! I was born and raised in Washington County PA, whose capital is what we call "little Washington." Fort Necessity is about thirty miles to the east of us where the Alleghany Mountains begin. In my youth it was a frequent place for car trips
So, I knew the broad outlines of Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity, followed by his accompanying Braddock's attempt to take Fort Duquesne from the French, and the eventual establishment of Fort Pitt.
But I had no idea how central Washington was to igniting the Seven Years War. I just knew that the French and English were contesting one another in the Indian territory to the West of the Alleghanies, and this had some relationship to their contests elsewhere in the world.
I usually think of the Revolutionary War as something taking place in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia. I had not thought of its origins as part of a global war starting in Western Pennsylvania.
I think we learned Michigan history in 3rd grade, and it was pretty clear that the Revolutionary War in many ways.l extended well beyond 1776 as the US spread west and "liberated" territory from colonial rule. Control of the Great Lakes was a four-way struggle among the French, Natives, British, and Americans. At one point, a rogue Mormon declared Beaver Island a sovereign state, controlled the timber industry (and thereby the steamboats that needed timber for fuel) in northern Michigan, and got himself elected to two separate districts in the first Michigan State legislature in the 1830s.
DeleteFinished episode 3 last night. Interesting to hear about the general consternation over the Pennsylvania State constitution, which extended the vote to just about any white male who paid taxes, not just land owners. Horrors! What next? Women??
ReplyDeleteAlso interesting about the Hessian mercenaries who were allowed to stay in the US. I think they settled largely in Pennsylvania. There was an interesting "Who Do You Think You Are" segment with Rob Lowe, who had a Hessian ancestor.
We are falling behind. And will fall farther behind because our youngest son and his family arrived last night. I’m learning a lot actually. We are immersed in Civil War history in this part of the country—lots of major Civil War battlefields etc within an hour or two drive. East coast Revolutionary war history in Boston and Philadelphia, as well as Yorktown and the homes and plantations of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe in Virginia, now operated as museums. Not a lot about the pre-1775 history in the lakes region. But I grew up in California, so my formal education wasn’t immersion in the Revolutionary and Civil wars, surrounded by the places where it all took place in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. California history was more immersion in the history of the Spanish explorers in Mexico and California, including Father Serra. California was part of Mexico until the mid-19th century.
ReplyDeleteHave a nice visit with your family. Episode 4 is more about battles. George Washington was not exactly a brilliant military strategist. He didn't get very good intel at times. Plus he had an all-volunteer army to begin (tho the draft is now starting up) and was outnumbered most of the time.
DeleteLooks like the French are going to get into it in a big way now.
We would have lost that Revokutionnwithout the help,of the French.
DeleteSure seems likely at this juncture!
DeleteInteresting how different regions of the US might have a different feel for the Revolution. As you said, California was a Spanish territory, probably less connected to the English roots in the East.
Michigan was dominated by the French. You still see that influence as you go to the far north, where French and Indian place names predominate. French surnames also predominate among Native Americans up there.
The Michigan history in school was of happy voyageurs who married Native women who turned Catholic with the help of the friendly Jesuits until the British horned in on the fur trade, built forts, and imposed a lot of rules on everybody. The French being everybody's buddy in these parts was a bit of a fiction. The French movie "Black Robe" examines the tensions between Natives and Jesuits.
The French were the reason the Battle of Yorktown, VA was decisive in ending the war. Since it’s east coast, and it’s a town we have driven through many times and when we had kids with us, we stopped a couple of times to visit the historical monuments.
DeleteThe French school in DC is called Lycee Rochambeau, after the French General. AI summary
“ Account of the British Surrender at Yorktown—
French help was critical to the American victory at Yorktown through a combination of land and naval forces. The French navy, under Admiral de Grasse, blockaded the Chesapeake Bay, preventing British evacuations and reinforcements, while French troops, led by Comte de Rochambeau, joined George Washington's army to besiege and defeat the British forces under General Cornwallis. This combined Franco-American effort trapped Cornwallis, leading to the decisive surrender that effectively ended the war.”
The Spanish dominance of California is obvious from place names, just as the French names are common where you live. All the major cities and many of smaller cities and towns have Spanish names - San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, La Jolla, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, San Juan Capistrano, Montecito (where Prince Harry and Meghan live), San Luis Obispo, Palo Alto, Catalina Island, etc, etc, etc. The main road from the Mexican border to above San Francisco is El Camino Real. - hundreds of miles of the Royal Road up the Calif coast. In San Jose I looked for churches to go to - hardly any Episcopal. Lots of Catholic. It finally hit me that there were so few EC churches compared to what I’m used to here because Calif was settled by Spanish Catholics and the east coast was dominated by English and the Church of England. Duh. Sometimes I’m a bit slow to make connections!
Much easier to find a Catholic Church than an EC in Michigan, too. According to Pew, evangelicals now outnumber Catholics 21 percent to 19 percent of those residents who claim religious affiliation. I would bet that the northern half of the state is still predominantly Catholic. The Irish and Italians followed the French up there.
DeleteDuring the second Iraq war, I remember the big mouths decrying French non-support and blathering about “freedom fries”. All I could think of was all the support of the American Revolution by the French. In related hustory, the Soviet Union did most of the heavy lifting in WWII. We waited and stalled while the Russians were dying in millions. It was kind of a proxy war with Germany for a good long time. When we finally seriously entered the fray with D-Day, it was like boxing with an opponent who just did several rounds with Mike Tyson. Were FDR and Churchill clever? Very. But let’s not lionize ourselves too strongly.
DeleteNot lionizing the French. They wanted to weaken Brit colonies and get them for France. The Revolution in America took troops away from Jamaica, Barbados, etc. But it does give the lie to the notion that the US did it all on their own.
DeleteTonight's episode includes the hideous account of the raids on Native towns in New York. I had no idea that this was going on on such a large scale before the war was even over.
Washington and his land speculators slaughtering and running off thousands of people to Canada. All treaties with the Brits null and void.
Sounds like “warts and all” coverage. Maybe I will find a way to watch this thing. The Revolutionary War was the beginning of a new expanding empire with a religion called democracy as a justification for anything. Meanwhile, we suppressed democratic movements all over the world. Whenever I hear democracy used as a justification today, I get nauseous. Just like Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust, it is tired and worn out. The spell is broken.
DeleteThere was certainly no support for the kind of modern universal suffrage we have today among the Founders. I think if you bemoaned the current administration to anybody in the Continental Congress, they'd tell you that this is what happens when you let any dumbass vote. Their idea of representative government was to represent the land-owning elite with money and education.
DeleteUniversal education should take care of that except that mainstream media cancels it out. Anyway, with the billionaires and corporations running the show, the Founder’s wishes in the matter seem to have been fulfilled. That’s why things are so great.
DeleteYes. Universal education (an aspiration of the Puritans that pre-dated the Revolution) cannot seem to fight the American predilection for titillation. I agree that that has been fed by "the media" (including the entertainment industry), which has blurred the lines of reality and favors personalities and scandals over ideas and policies.
DeleteIf anything brings down Trump, it won't be because of callousness to the environment, ICE thugs, quackery about Tylenol, housing shortages, the price of beef, or executive overreach.
It'll be Epstein.
Do you think Epstein could bring Trump down? Remember, he said he could get away with shooting someone on 5th Avenue. But he has a huge chunk of hubris, which does tend to bring people down in the end. One can always hope.
DeleteI keep reading that young men are in a bad place mentally, because they feel unvalued and pushed aside. Because women are taking their place, or something. I say, move over, fellas. Musk and his AI buddies want to make all of us redundant. But I think they are high on their own supply.
I don't think Epstein will bring down Trump, but those stupid files so far are the only issue the MAGAs seem willing to break with him over.
DeleteThe Ken Burns documentary on Ben Franklin provides a lot of history and insights about how he influenced France to support America’s revolution during the years he lived in Paris. He was also involved with the signing of the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war.
ReplyDeleteKatherine, I too read frequently about the malaise of young men who complain endlessly about losing out these days and how unfair it is. But it’s not the fault of women or others of their age cohort who aren’t flailing that more boys than girls fail to finish high school, and also earn fewer college and advanced degrees needed for “good” jobs. I suspect that’s one reason trumps war against DEI appeals to them. They don’t blame their own failures, but those they imagine only got good jobs because of discrimination against white males. It’s been pounded into them.
Personally I’m sad that colleges and universities seem to have simply become career training institutes primarily, frequently abandoning the liberal arts. But they do prepare the young for the world of work at least. It seems like the young men aren’t willing to put in the same effort as the women ( and minorities) do, now that the doors that used to be closed to them have mostly opened. Did they simply assume that being male entitles them to better jobs and more career options? And that now that women encounter a more equal opportunity environment these Peter Pan lost boys can’t handle the competition? If they can’t handle competition from women and minorities, the had better hope that the chicken little predictions about AI are exaggerated.
The glass ceiling still exists, it is shattered more frequently these days.
I get tired of the young male whiners, now being manipulated by the Jordan Petersons, Charlie Kirks, and, apparently, now by Nick Fuentes, the worst of them all.
I realize that my sons, at 47 and 51, are a different generation than the gen Zs. But at the time they graduated, the job market wasn't great either. I never heard them whine about it though. They took some temporary jobs until the ones came up that were a fit for their education.
DeleteI am sad that because of budget shortfalls, the university system of our state is dropping four majors which aren't "STEM".I feel that it is short sighted, because not everyone fits the science and technology field.
It's a mistake to generalize too much. As a college instructor, I felt the most disrespect from white Gen X frat boys who aspired to be Gordon Gekko. I flunked a few of them for plagiarism, and probably found their distress over getting nailed more satisfying than was good for my soul.
DeleteI found Millennial veterans of our post-9/11 conflicts to be very thoughtful and having a hard time dealing with American indifference to the rest of the world, especially troops who were embedded with locals in Afghanistan.
I was also struck by so many Millennials and GenZers who opted to live at home. Family and economic stability seems to be important to them.
What I and my Boomer instructor cohort did find fairly shocking was how few parents from 1980s on read to their kids or promoted reading outside of school for fun. I started reading very short excerpts from assigned readings to students at start of class (learned this from librarians) or playing recordings of assigned readings in class. This increased reading of assignments on their own and coming to class more prepared. I almost think someone had to model pleasure and enthusiasm for them.
Also I learned you had to make their phones your friend, a la: "We're reading Phyllis Wheatley today. You have 5 minutes to get out your phones and come up with 10 interesting things to tell me about her." They were all over that.
Off topic and of possible interest to Anne: Times UK report about conversion of Anglican clergy to RCC since women's ordination in 1994.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thetimes.com/uk/religion/article/anglican-priests-converted-catholicism-2prkck7x9
I wish more Catholics understood and appreciated this about converts from Anglican and other mainline Christian groups. People running RCIA or whatever it is now just do not get this (snip):
... for those who left an Anglican church to join the Catholic Church, it was “not so much a turning away or rejection of their rich and precious Anglican heritage but an experience of an imperative to move into the full visible communion of the Catholic Church”.
Thanks for the link to the NYT article, Jean. I think some of the people who are running OCIA don't get the part that convers aren't rejecting their previous faith heritage so much as moving into a fuller expression of it. I'd like to tell them not to say cringe-worthy things which come across as smug and triumphalistic.
DeleteI have not seen an explanation of why the PTB changed "rite" of Christian Initiation to "order". And is it " Christian initiation" unless they previously weren't Christian?
That said, I think having people go to a series of classes where there is discussion with others and information is a good thing. It keeps it from being a siloed experience with a simpatico priest and/or internet information. That encourages people who have been Catholic for like, five minutes, to think they know more than the pope.
The NYT article mentioned that the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion seemed to be driving conversions to the RC. Which seems a bit problematic. The article linked a bunch of other articles, one of which was about a Rwandan Anglican bishop rejecting the new Archbishop of Canterbury because she is a woman.
In small rural parishes like ours, you might only have one or two converts. Also, RCIA was developed for catechumens, but there aren't the resources to run separate sessions for candidates, so they get lumped in together. Discussion is great, but our group was often outnumbered by the cradle Catholic leaders who blabbered on and on about how great it was to be raised Catholic. One of my RCIA classmates was also my hair person, and I got more out of chatting w her during our hair appts than with the Church Ladies droning on about their Easter blessing of the kielbasa and how strict the nuns were. Really, I think we both might have dropped out of RCIA had we not encouraged each other. Both of us have now lapsed, but I honestly think she has always lived--and continues to live--an exemplary Catholic life of love and kindness under circumstances that would have made me angry and bitter. The Church lost a good one when she left.
DeleteWhat differentiates living an exemplary Christian life from an exemplary Catholic life? Sacraments? For that matter, what differentiates an exemplary life of any religion or none from an exemplary Christian life? Showing love and kindness is not limited to Catholics or to Christians.
DeleteShe lives the love and mercy as Catholicism teaches it thru the radical examples if the saints, tho Catholics do not have a monopoly on love and mercy. Better? Do I get credit for not writing that we are both "fallen away"? I remembered to edit it so you wouldn't get mad this time.
DeleteAaah. The message I attempted to teach got through to you, Jean, at least. I have not fallen away, nor have you, nor has your friend. We all made a choice - to leave active participation in the Roman Catholic Church.
DeleteMost Anglicans who converted to Catholicism ( amazingly few- about 3000, mostly in the first year or two after Benedict went fishing in the UK) after Benedict created the Ordinariate were motivated by misogyny - their opposition to women priests. This includes some Anglican priests. They were allowed to keep their own liturgy, the BCP, and priests could be married. Since they didn’t lose anything, they could pretty easily jump ship and avoid seeing a woman on the altar. Interesting that the bishops didn’t convert until after retirement, locking in their pensions I guess. They aren’t a “ blessing” to the Catholic Church, just malcontents who could sign up without giving up anything they valued in Anglicanism. In Africa, the Anglicans are both anti- woman and anti- gay. Some Anglican bishops ( joined by a few RC bishops) support prison and even the death penalty for homosexuals.
DeleteThe C of E line was "we're ordaining women, but if you don't want one in yr parish, you don't have to hire one." I guess they figured that a woman priest would be pretty routine by the time the old no-women-priests guard died out, and women priests would be widely accepted.
DeleteI think that strategy has pretty much worked in parishes and dioceses where the pillars of Anglicanism--reason, Scripture, tradition--are in sync.
Those Rwandan bishops and their renegade need to saw that tradition pillar down to size. Or go be Catholics. There's nothing in Catholicism that an Anglican doesn't believe except Purgatory and papal infallibility.
Finished the Burns documentary. I think we've all mentioned its soporific effect, which may have something to do with us all getting older and maybe the fact that the Burns docu style is predictable.
ReplyDeleteMy main criticism us that people will be able to read whatever they already believed into the presentation. If you want American exceptionalism, it's there. If you want to trace the roots of American intolerance and imperialism, it's there. If you want to make a case for strong states rights or strong central govt, both are there. If you want to make the Brits out to be bad guys or good guys, it's there.
There is no overarching thesis here, and no scholarly voices to push for any particular point of view, except from the Native commentators. There's kind of a limp and hurried attempt at the end to show that the Revolution inspired other movements around the world. But most Americans have little taste for spending lives and money on pushing representative government abroad since the failures--from Korea to Afghanistan--have been so spectacular.
There are some good stories and interesting facts. But the overall effect for me was underwhelming.
On the other hand, the US has been very successful at extinguishing representative governments. Chile had democracy for a century before the CIA extinguished it. We killed Iranian democracy and installed the Shah. We’re very good at suppressing it, too. We killed 200,000 filipinos for wanting the same thing we had (yes, had). It’s no wonder it’s collapsing here. Maybe democracy in America was only ever a side gig. It was always a businessocracy.
ReplyDeleteYes, US foreign policy has always favored dictators willing to create a favorable climate for our corporate overlords over freely elected commies and pinkos fussing over malnutrition and disease. And ... well, helllloooo, Prince Mohammed! Let's not let one measly dismemberment stand in the way of progress.
DeleteKatherine might be interested in this morning's story about near death experiences in the Wash Post: https://wapo.st/47XDgKh
ReplyDeleteThere is a link in the story to a larger study of psych counseling for those who have experienced these things. Interesting that a near death experience is not something people take to their clergy. It seems to be viewed as a trauma to be treated vs a mystery to be contemplated.
Thanks Jean. It makes sense that people might need help processing something like that, since it is something most people haven't experienced. They would feel that they wouldn't be in understood if they talked about it. There is an organization that studies near death experience, IANDS.
DeleteIn most near death accounts I have read, one effect is that the person is no longer afraid of dying, and that their priorities have changed.
I haven't ever had a near death experience, and though they are interesting to read about, I don't want to have one. If I die I don't want to come back here, I want to go on to what comes next.
I have shared before that I follow a podcast of a Dominican priest who is contacted in dreams by souls who need help moving beyond their traumatic death. https://nathan-castle.com/podcasts/. But they aren't near death, they are dead, full stop. I'm afraid that would make me afraid to go to sleep, lol!
I dunno. "Processing" experiences so often seems to amount to grinding them down with pills and endless talk so you can quit pestering other people with your thoughts.
DeleteI think NDEs are just the hallucinations that occur as O2 levels and electrolytes get screwed up as someone dies. Saw this with my dad, grandma, and uncle. Vivid dreams and visions in the evening/night that dissipated in daylight after they ate or drank something and their O2 levels went up. Once they could no longer eat or drink and their breathing was suppressed because of the morphine, the hallucinations persisted 24/7. Sometimes happy, sometimes not.