May 2007

“Truro. It was a name as lonely as the edge of the sea.” – Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain

This weekend I visited Truro and St Austell in Cornwall. I went to Evensong on Saturday (Augustine of Canterbury) and Eucharist on Whitsunday (Bede and John Calvin) at Truro Cathedral.

I spent a disproportionate amount of time at the bookshops, and found that my friend Michael Everson and his friend Nicholas Williams have been parties in the debate about modern Cornish-language orthography. I found an article “Worship in the Cornish Language” by Brian Coombes in the May 2007 issue (number 128) of An Baner Kernewek (The Cornish Banner, said to be erstwhile the party organ of the Cornish Nationalist Party; ISSN 0306-8079):

In 1986, following the research of Dr Ken George, the Cornish Language Board adopted a “phonemic” spelling system for Unified Cornish – seeking to provide closer links between pronunciation and spelling. This was adopted, but a substantial number remained using the 1928 “Unified” system. The situation has been complicated by two further variants. Dr Nicholas Williams of Dublin has modified Unified Cornish, (“Revised”) less radically, partly by adopting the late Medieval period as standard […]

In 1996, the Bishop’s Group held a one-day conference in St Austell about the rendering of Biblical names, place and personal. From this grew the idea of translation from the original languages and the aim of completing the New Testament by the centernary of Jenner’s “Handbook” in 2004. The team had been ably led by Keith Syed of Cheltenham, and in the New Testament six translators were involved, the books being published in part between 1999 and 2004. It is Common (“Kemmyn”) Cornish, though Unified versions are available for services and the Cornish Language Board aims to produce Unified versions when any corrections needed are apparent. The full New Testament [ISBN 1-902917-33-2] was launched at Bodmin Parish Church in August 2004 and a specially bound copy was presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury [Rowan Williams] (himself a native Welsh speaker and member of the Welsh Gorsedd) at a service in Truro Cathedral in November that year. As well as the New Testament, some books of the Old Testament have also appeared.

In the meantime, in 2002, Nicholas Williams of Dublin brought out his own one-volume New Testament from the Greek [ISBN 1-953975-4-7; typeset by Everson]. However, this was in his “Revised” version of Unified Cornish, which may limit its utility – though it is good to have two version from the Greek as well as “secondary” translations from other languages.

(For balance, I should mention that my party, the Green Party of England and Wales, is a partner with Mebyon Kernow, the other Cornish party: “Cornish, green, left-of-centre, and decentralist”.)

Catholic Dissenter
Chris Kessing of Assumption College has a blog. Like everybody else, he blogs about Tom Lewis.

Anarchism begins in the home
Michael Iafrate, thinking about Howard Zinn:

From a radically Catholic perspective, since the central social reality is the Church, and not the state, it is more helpful to think of the family as the basic building block of the Church — the new society — rather than the basic unit of the state, or of society. Indeed, in Catholic circles you sometimes hear it said that the family is the “domestic church.” If, as I believe, the Church is (also) a political reality, an alternative social body and way of life that will always be at odds with the societies in which it finds itself, then the family, as the “domestic church,” will also be a revolutionary society that resists indoctrination into the system of domination and violence, or, drawing on Zinn’s terms, an ecclesial “pocket of insurrection.”

Worst op-ed ever
This NY Times anti-vegan op-ed is so bad, Erik Marcus issued an “emergency podcast.” You might want to compare the op-ed with the thoughts of an actual nutritionist, the staff of Vegan Outreach, or Isa Chandra Moscowitz.

Nameless Mike
One nice thing about digitizing videos as a WCCA volunteer rather than an employee is that I can post whatever I feel like on a particular day, without taking other things into concern.

Here’s an interview from 2005 with vegan ultra-athlete Mike Benedetti, talking about his hikes of the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and Continental Divide Trail. (This happens to be the first time I met Mauro. Kinda neat to have a recording of the beginning moments of a friendship.)

Rolling your own municipal network infrastructure
The cable/phone duopoly has done a cruddy job wiring our nation. DIY on the local level is one solution sometimes tossed about. Doc Searls shares his thoughts:

Q: Isn’t local infrastructure build-out a case of government competing with private industry?

A: No.  It’s a case of citizens finding a way to do what a protected duopoly cannot.  What we are doing is also not competitive.  We want to open our new fiber infrastructure to use by anybody, including cable and phone companies.  We have their interests at heart too.  By building out pure Net infrastructure — rather than competing with cable TV and phone systems — we are protecting and supporting their core businesses.

Here’s a recording of myself reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.

To listen, see the Internet Archive page, or download a zip of the mp3s (559MB).

For a taste, listen to Chapter 12 (the conclusion), which is the best reading of the bunch.

[Download Chapter 12 mp3 (17MB)]

I read most of this book under less-than-ideal circumstances, as documented below:

• Chapter 1: valium
• Part 1 intro: fasting, tired
• Chapter 2: just woke up
• Chapter 3: too much coffee
• Chapter 4: caffeine withdrawal
• Part 2 intro: fasting
• Chapter 5: too much coffee, very tired
• Chapter 6 : woke up in the middle of the night
• Chapter 7: a few drinks
• Chapter 8: hungry, skipped lunch
• Chapter 9: too much melatonin
• Chapter 10: trazodone
• Part 3 intro: lots of coffee plus valium
• Chapter 11: tea
• Chapter 12: happy to be in the home stretch

I really gotta re-record Chapter 1 one of these days.

Thanks to Nick Nassar, Avera Morrison, and Doug Higgs for equipment solidarity.

Here’s some audio from the day I spent at the conference, April 16, 2007.

The session was on “Property Ownership in Modern Society: Rights and Responsibilities.” If you’re truly curious, check out the Archive page or download the mp3 zip file (75MB). For a taste, download Ed Schofield’s closing comments (8MB mp3).

Speakers:

• Daniel Dick, past president of the Tatnuck Brook Watershed Association and creator of the Energy Studies curriculum at Worcester State College
  
• Brayton Shanley of the Agape Community, Ware, MA
  
• Michael and Diane Boover of Worcester
  
• Fred Enman, SJ, Assistant to the Dean, Boston College Law School and founder of “Matthew 25,” on the urban housing rehabilitation nonprofit and Catholic social teaching
  
• Dr. Peter Weiskel, Ph.D., hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey
  
• Edmund A. Schofield, Director of Education at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Boylston, and past president of the Henry David Thoreau Society
  

Ed Schofield

Northern Ireland: BBC Radio 4 Sunday Worship (2007-05-20): Celebrating Northern Ireland power-sharing: “From Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, Belfast, where Presbyterians and Catholics from the Clonard–Fitzroy Fellowship mark the return of a devolved power-sharing government to Northern Ireland. Led by the Very Rev Dr Kenneth Newell.” I met the Very Revd Newell on my trip to Northern Ireland in 2003.

Russia and abroad: The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is formally reunited with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Long-time Worcester resident Tom Lewis was out of town this weekend, up in Maine to protest a new Aegis destroyer coming out of Bath Iron Works. But that didn’t keep him from appearing all over the blogosphere.

Linking to a Catholic Free Press article, Defend the Faith notes that Tom and Fran Warner, who both have artwork in the ARTSWorcester Biennial, have covered their work to protest Planned Parenthood holding a fundraiser in the gallery.

Michael Iafrate remembers the recent 39th anniversary of the Catonville Nine, in which nine Catholic activists napalmed draft records, by quoting Tom’s testimony from the subsequent trial:

I wasn’t concerned with the law
I wasn’t even thinking about the law
I was thinking of what those records meant
I wasn’t concerned with the law
I was concerned with the lives
of innocent people

Rock over London,
Rock on Worcester,
Tom Lewis — the freshmaker.

Tom Lewis, Harry Duchesne, Michael Boover at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast, 2006

Snow Ghost Community Show tapes first episode
We’ve been talking about it for months. We’ve been planning for weeks. And now it can be told: the first episode of the Snow Ghost Community Show has been posted. In this episode, we talk about the Three Stooges with Catholic Worker Scott Schaeffer-Duffy. (If you have comments, please post them at the WCCA blog post.)

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, the discussion begins with honeybees (here’s the article I mention) and Bill Richardson’s ad choices. We then talk with Shannon Senior, one of the leaders of the campaign against a proposed Worcester Wal-Mart.

Hosts: me, Janine Duffy, Jim Henderson.

Recording with TalkShoe continues to be fun and challenging. My controls died about halfway through this episode, and there’s a long silence at the end when I restarted the controls so I could click “Terminate episode.”

[Download the mp3]

Pie and Coffee: Courtyard Cafe. We’ve been talking about going there for a long, long time.

Bruce: And we finally did it.

P: And you feel a sense of accomplishment?

B: Oh yeah. The first thing I noticed when I walked in there, the funny thing about it is like, and this goes back way before, it’s like every time I used to do errands for Joe, Elwood Adams and stuff like that—

P: —back when you used to run errands at Java Joe’s?

B: Yeah. And I would go by there or, it goes back even farther than that. I have to back up a little bit. I used to go to Al Bum’s a lot, up on Highland Street, and I used to go by that coffee place a lot, the Courtyard. And I never found an apparition to go in there until . . . .
Read the rest of this entry »

This week is the annual Christian Aid Week in these isles. Christian Aid is the development agency of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, and is a member of Action by Churches Together, linked with the World Council of Churches. This year, the material for the Week drew its inspiration from El Salvador and Archbishop Óscar Romero, who said in his last homily:

We have just heard in the gospel that we must not love ourselves more than him; that we must not refrain from plunging into those risks history demands of us, and that those wanting to keep out of danger will lose their lives. On the other hand, those who surrender to the service of people through the love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because the grain of wheat dies. The earth allows itself to be sacrificed, to break up; only in being broken does it produce a harvest.

By the way, Christian Churches Together in the USA has recently come into existence.