It Occurs To Me

that in my challenged health when I don't feel up to writing new stuff that I could offer you parts of what I type out from others. 

One of the things I started doing when I learned to use a computer was to type out long passages or even entire books as a means of studying their content more closely.  I've typed out a lot of books over the years, many which I kept a copy of in some now antiquated format (floppy discs) or lost some other way.   Keeping a typed out copy wasn't the point of it.   

While typing out this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's great but too little known book Living Jesus I thought of all the parallels of the problem of needing authority but that reliance comes WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT NO AUTHORITY, EVEN THE BEST OF IT IS ENTIRELY RELIABLE.   Of course I thought of all the other areas in life aside from organized Christianity that that is true of AS WELL AS THE OBVIOUS TRUTH OF JOHNSON'S CONFESSION ABOUT THE ENTIRELY FALLIBLE AND TOO OFTEN CORRUPT AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCHES.    

Academia, and I don't even consider the one and only one that most academics seem to care about,  actual and alleged and often quite dubiously attributed plagiarism.    The replicability crisis scandal in science,  the amazing record of outright fraud,  misfeasance, nonfeasance such as is regularly recorded by that great and too little known reporter of it,  Retraction Watch.  

The legal profession, which is saturated with lies, corruption, the institutional creation of lawyerly deception, dishonesty, greed, graft, grift in which only the paying clients interest is the measure of professional practice and ethics and the higher and higher consequences of that as lawyers are elevated - often by corruptly motivated politicians, executive and senatorial - into the judiciary and on to that most corrupt branch of the U.S. government,  the Supreme Court. 

The "non-profit" groups which are,  I suppose, something that is supposed to act as a secular replacement for all of the (sometimes all to human and fallible) religious charities.    There are so many examples of the various defects of those groups,  from the incredibly dubious identification of some of the most grotesquely wealthy and endowed legal entities in the world,  Harvard, Yale, Princeton, other private universities,   incredibly wealthy museums holding vast and often artistically or intellectully dubious collections of enormous and fungible value.   There are interest groups that serve the most corrupt and evil of governments - the ADL these days is a signal example of that - and the interests of millionaires and billionaires - so many obscenely endowed think tanks and public interest group.   Evil industry advocacy groups,  the gun industry, pollution generators,  etc.   And so many daffy, hypocritical groups on the alleged progressive to liberal to lefty identity.    All given tax exempt status as they serve the most corrupt interests and, through their having been granted the "non-profit" label, treated with an absurd and dishonest reverence by the media.

And don't get me started on the "free press" as the more often than not oligarchic knocking shop that it is. 

Here is what Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about the vicissitudes of the necessity of Christian teaching authority within The Church (the entire Church) at the end of Chapter 2 Learning Jesus Through Tradition

The Teaching Authority of the Church

The commitment to learn the living Jesus within the context of the church's tradition means coming to grips also with the leaders who from the beginning have been entrusted in a special way with maintaining the tradition.  It is this aspect of tradition - namely, its explicitly institutional character - that both the scholarly questions after the historical Jesus and the televagelistic marketers of Jesus most despise.  Academics resist authority in the name of intellectual freedom and integrity  freelance preachers reject ecclesial authority in the name of charismatic freedom and power. 

Those who commit themselves to tradition can scarcely miss the same inadequacies of human leadership that have been so brilliantly and consistently displayed in the history of Christianity.  They know that ministers of the gospel are often not as holy as they should be, are seldom as intelligent as we would like them to be,  and all too often identify the tradition with their own self-interest.  No matter how egalitarian the leadership of a community, or how hierarchical, the same human frailty and pettiness appear.  

Yet there can scarcely be tradition without institutional leadership.  Christianity is not simply a loose assemblage of those who at any time prefer to associate with each other;  it is a people with a history and a mission that must be articulated in specific social arrangements and dynamics.  The witness of leaders in the community, furthermore is at the heart of this tradition itself.  Those commissioned by the risen Lord as apostles were the first in a long line of shepherds for this flock  If every pope and bishop and presbyter and pastor and preacher has been unequal to the task,  that inadequacy has not made their role in maintaining the living thread of tradition any less essential.

The teaching authority remains essential today,  however difficult it is to reconcile with the egalitarian and anit-establishment urges of our age.  No more than the canon or the creed can the leadership of the church arrogate to itself the loyalty that is owed only to the living Lord;  no more than the canon or the creed does this leadership adequately express the meaning of the tradition, much less the Lord in whose name the tradition exists.   The teaching authority of the community functions best when it is not isolated.  The teaching office of the church requires the voice of prophecy to be alive if it is not to grow distended;  through prophets the living Jesus can speak in new ways.  And the preservers of tradition need also to hear the voices of theologians whose task is not so much to preserve as it is to extend the boundaries of our understanding of the mystery of Christ.  The tradition is impoverished if the voice of prophecy is stilled and if th teaching of theologians is, for whatever reason, made an enemy rather than an enricher of the tradition.

Like the canon and the creed,  the teaching authority of leaders helps provide a framework for learning Jesus in the community.  From generation to generation from the beginning hands have reached out to select,  hands have been laid on heads,  words of commission have been whispered in the ears of those whose mission is defined by the task of preserving and protecting the tradition within which Jesus can continue to be learned.  

I doubt that there has ever been a more honest assessment of the necessity and danger of maintaining authority within human institutions and human life than that.   People are always going on about his book The Real Jesus, his take down of the quest for the historical Jesus, but I think this book in which he explores the real consequence for Christians believing in the Living Lord Jesus and the continued experience of the Living Jesus in our lives is far, far more valuable.  

Phil Moore Takes Apart Elon "Space Karen" Over His Ignorant Blather About Tolkein

 

I am not that hot on the Hobbit or the rest of it but I'm always glad to have someone point out what an idiot a billionaire is.  Especially Elon.  Just Phil's name for him,  "Space Karen" is worth it.   I commented on his conclusion that Space Karen had clearly watched the movies but never read the books was that it was like Trump's "Gatsby" party.    I thought it was obvious they had never understood the novel which was about the futility and ruin that wealth carries,  I thought they'd probably watched the Redford movie and never read the book,  RMJ said it was probably the more recent one which was even farther from the book. 

Democrats Should Read

The Sudden But Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel by Rick Perlstein for a few of the reasons that he is not to be trusted and certainly not to be voted for.  Here's an example:

. . . The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Nine months later, Chicagoans—and Democrats nationally—are suffering buyer’s remorse. Last month, a Cook County judge ordered the release of a shocking dashcam video of a black seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a policeman while he was walking away. Five days later, the officer was charged with murder. The charge came after four hundred days of public inaction, and only hours before the video’s release. Of almost four hundred police shootings of civilians investigated by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority since 2007, only one was found to be unjustified. So the suspicion was overwhelming that the officer would not have faced discipline at all had officials not feared a riot—especially after it was learned that McDonald’s family had been paid five million dollars from city coffers without ever having filed a lawsuit. Mayor Emanuel claims that he never saw the video. Given that he surely would not have been reëlected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only seventeen per cent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.

There are many examples in the article of how Rahm was an opportunist and traitor to Democrats and how his alleged achievements and gambits (I don't think he's really a strategic thinker, he goes on his own right-wing gut feelings) were disastrously wrong.

Victory, like defeat, can have a hundred fathers, and we can’t know what was ultimately responsible for the Democrats’ success that November. Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War (which Emanuel supported) certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it. “Rahm’s recruitment strategy” was “catastrophic,” the retired record executive Howie Klein, who helps run a political action committee that funds liberal congressional challengers, said, and it contributed to the massive G.O.P. majorities we have now, the biggest since the nineteen-twenties.

Obviously, that conclusion wasn’t shared by Barack Obama in 2009, when he named Emanuel as his White House chief of staff. There, however, Emanuel’s signature strategy—committing Obama only to initiatives they knew in advance would succeed, in order to put “points on the board”—nearly waylaid the President’s most historic accomplishment: health-care reform. Emanuel wanted to scale it back almost to the vanishing point. It took a concerted effort by Speaker Pelosi to convince the President otherwise. This time, it was Emanuel who apologized: “Thank God for the country he didn’t listen to me,” he said after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, in 2012.

Rahm Emanuel is a creation primarily of his own PR and the callow unsophistication of those like the governor Bill Clinton and the two-year Senator Barack Obama.  Imagine how Obama would be remembered today if he didn't get as much of the reduced stimulus he got through Congress or if Rahm Emanuel had succeeded in killing even the impaired ACA that NANCY PELOSI WAS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR PASSING.   Obama and Harry Reid had given up on it, it was Nancy Pelosi who got it through.  It should rightly be called Pelosi Care.  

Rahm Emanuel is someone who should have been driven out of politics by the more scandalous aspects of his career.   If he were a Woman or Black he would have probably been sent into obscurity by only a few parts of his record.   Democrats should be reminded of what a treacherous little piece of shit he has been and certainly still is. 

There Are Democrats Who I Really Don't Like

and a few I come close to hating. 

But there aren't many I loathe as much as I loathe most Republicans.   Rahm Emanuel is one on that short list.  Hell, he's the first on that list.   And he's announcing a run for president. 

Does he really want a full investigation of his time as Mayor of Chicago?  Because I'd really like there to be a full investigation of his time as Mayor of Chicago because I suspect he is as much of a sleaze and crook as the worst of them.   

Not to mention his time in the Obama first administration selling us out to big pharma and generally convincing Obama to waste the best situation a Democrat had been given since 1964.    Not to mention what all of the myriads of Democrats he has screwed over the years will have a lot to say about the little piece of shit.  He'll run a dirty campaign and will damage any far better and more credible candidate along the way, he should be considered a Republican spoiler.   Which I would not be surprised if that is his intention and part of one of his backroom deals.  

Hate Mail - For All I Know

 the worst chief "justice" in the history of the corrupt Supreme Court,  John Roberts, really believes he's "just calling balls and strikes"  or, since he's a professional liar and conman,  maybe like many such he's convinced himself that he really believes that's what he's doing as he so consistently finds for the team he is so obviously a member of as he plays umpire.   Though I doubt he's that unreflective about that thing which all conservatives are most concerned with, HIS OWN SELF, to not realize the game he was playing as he told that one lie among the many he told during his confirmation hearings.  

I've never been stupid enough to buy any of the sports metaphors applied to the law or politics or the alleged news business or public life in general.   Trump is the triumph of that stupidest and most dishonest innovation in stupidity as entertainment, "reality" TV.  Such reality being entirely unreal and entirely stupid and nothing to do with reality but which is  as cheesy and planned as a soap opera script or the originally male version of that, the phony sporting events known as "professional wrestling."   All sports, even the real stuff, like all TV (including, as Keith Olbermann has said, TV "journalism") is show biz. 

Sports have nothing much valuable to tell us about reality, in real life.  Real life doesn't go by a rule book that calls for a "level playing field."  The whole reason that the totally planned, totally fake event and results of pro-wrestling are taken for a sport is because it really doesn't matter in the slightest bit in real life who wins and who loses even a genuine sports event.  If it does matter, as it does so often for gangsters engaged in sports gambling, you can bet that those rules get bent AND IT ALWAYS MATTERS IN REAL LIFE IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY TO OUR INDIGENOUS GANGSTERS, THE RICH AND THE RACIST.   But, as in the case of "reality" TV, mistaking such phoniness as real can have real consequences in real life or why is the total idiot and, or so I read, lousy football coach Tommy Tuberville blighting American life from a Senate seat from Alabama right now.   Why is Jim Jordan, sex-molesting doctor enabling assistant somewhat real wrestling coach and never practicing lawyer the chair of the House Judiciary Committee?   Why did so many who he has harmed, killed, maimed, believe that big-boss Trump had their backs when he only had his hand in their wallets?  

I think I've said enough on that count so I'll answer the point brought up to me.   IN THE CHOICE BETWEEN EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY,  ECONOMIC JUSTICE,  SOCIAL JUSTICE, JUST PLAIN JUSTICE OF ANY KIND AND OLIGARCHIC-WHITE-SUPREMACIST FASCISM ANYONE WHO THINKS A "LEVEL PLAYING FIELD" IS DESIRABLE OR ETHICAL IS A TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE CHUMP FOR OLIGARCHIC-WHITE-SUPREMACIST FASCISM.   This isn't a goddamned game, it's reality.    Far from giving any moral or rational or even somewhat tethered to reality senator a reason to vote for him when he lied out his "balls and strikes" lie,  THAT ROBERTS EQUATED THE ENTIRELY SERIOUS MATTER OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY OVER THE INJUSTICE THAT ALL OTHER FORMS OF GOVERNANCE AND LAW GUARANTEE WITH A FRICKIN' GAME SHOWED HE REALLY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.    I know that in doing that he was doing, what the fascists have done over and over again,  they've used the language that was first thought up by the kind of generally affluent, generally professional (generally lawyers) liberals who played us for suckers by such advocacy, whether from the ACLU or Common Cause or other of the playing-field-levelers who clearly never cared about those who are inherently saddled with an inability to get any fair treatment because they have nothing or little and none of the resources or power that the side they'll go up against have INCLUDING THE FACT THAT THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE WEALTH AND POWER WILL BE THE ONES PLAYING GODDAMNED REFEREE. 

I'm done with the kind of affluent play-liberals, professional lawyers who play that game because politics, the law, journalism (the real thing, not what we get under the frickin' First Amendment) isn't a game and no one who mistakes it for one has any business pretending they're in it for anyone but the oligarchs and their tools, America's indigenous and very powerful fascists.   

Don't Be Fair To Fascists, Don't Be Nice To Nazis, Being Fair To Them Enables Them

THANK GOD MAINERS VOTED DOWN REPUBLICAN-FASCIST'S ATTEMPT to bring Jim Crow style voter suppression to Maine and they finally voted for the minimum standard of sanity on guns, a red-flag law.   I know a young mother in Maine whose former boyfriend is a paranoid schizophrenic who has a gun who the police and a court have not taken it from on the basis that we had no red-flag law.   It might not make her as safe as she needs to be from him but it's something whereas the hunting-gun industry in Maine has defeated previous attempts to impose the minimum of sanity on our state which has had one horrific mass shooting, a direct result of the libertarianism of our gun laws before now. 

I'm sure those who want to bring Jim Crow to Maine will try again as will the gun-hunting industry who have way too much influence in this rural and often benighted state.  Our insanely lax 1970s liberal era ballot access laws will give them and the millionaires and billionaires who are funding our return to Jim Crow - they bought themselves a Supreme Court to do it for them so even a referendum isn't a safe bet to prevent it.   I'm sure the 1970s era liberals figured that things were just going to get progressively better, such was the callow, ahistorical sense of that rather stupid decade among such liberals. 

I TOTALLY APPROVE OF THE CALIFORNIA INITIATIVE TO GERRYMANDER THEIR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS TO KEEP REPUBLICANS OUT OF THE HOUSE.   I say that as someone who is morally opposed to gerrymandering but am even more opposed to the idiotic liberalish-libertarian  proposition that we are to play totally stupid in the face of Republican-fascists,  the millionaire-billionaire and white-supremacist (fascist) coalition of the greedy and hateful using every defect in the Constitution, the structure of government and those put there by that most corrupt of all the branches of the government,  the Supreme Court to destroy equality and democracy.

The real American liberals, based in such things as egalitarianism and economic as well as social justice need to dump that idiotic rule that they are to always play dumb, roll over and let the fascists win to maintain some minor or even just relatively less important point of scrupulosity.   That stupid idea in 1970s era ballot access that Maine liberals in the legislature adopted because it would theoretically perform that stupidest of all desiderata in the "Code of Liberal Ethics"  create a "level playing field" even as it gave us several of the worst governors, senators and house members in our history who were aided by Green Party and other Republican spoilers is just such a stupid idea of such liberalish-libertarian scruples.  

When you're fighting against millionaires, billionaires and their violent allies in America's already empowered and enabled fascists - they have governed several states for their entire history as well as a majority of states at least at some times - including Maine -  preening in your own private moral purity isn't a virture,  it's an act of the grossest immorality and, most likely even more often, TOTAL COWARDICE.   I know for a fact that in my state, such acts of "principle" have been sourced in those who are professional or at least trained lawyers,  a profession whose inbred surrender to the fascists and, especially, the rich on such "principle" I'll wax at length on the least provocation these days.   To such principle I say go fuck off and die,  your theories have been tested in time and produced disaster.    Just go away and shut up.  I don't want to hear it anymore. 

Dick Cheney's Death Comes Fifty Years Too Late

HE LED A LIFE OF EVIL and shares responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, Women and Children,  the enslavement and oppression of many millions of others and a lifetime of self-seeking and personal enrichment.   He can't take the loot he got with him but he can take the responsibility for what he did to get it.   He helped to destroy the American republic in the first mainstream blow of the wrecking ball to it,  the Bush v Gore suppression of the vote to install the boy-king,  Bush II as he governed as unofficial regent,  he exploited the attack that came about during the Bush II years,  an warnings of which the team that Cheney-Bush II put into place incompetently and insouciently ignored (I still want to know how Condi Rice's little star turn recital with YoYo Ma figured in that nonfeasance) in order to lie us into the total disaster of the invasion of Iraq.   I don't know what role he played in putting the worst Supreme Court chief "justice" in American history into place, the corrupt John Roberts or the equally corrupt Alito but I have every confidence he had a hand in that continuing and likely fatal attack on American democracy and even its existence as a republic.   And there is no possible honest appraisal except that Roberts is the actual worst chief "justice" in U.S. history.  

And that's only what he did in this century.  

If anyone deserves to go to hell,  it's Dick Cheney.   Like the woman in the Irish joke who tells the priest she doesn't want her late husband out of purgatory but to spend a good long time there,  I will admit that I hope Cheney is finally getting the corrective justice he earned.    If that's determined by the seriousness and number of sins,  he's got a hell of a hell to go through, yet.    

I'll get back to you on this if Bush II dies before I do. 

Mathematical Truth

 Anti-antifa(scist) = profa(scist).

If you want proof, look at all the goddamned fascists who are going on about "antifa" this and "antifa" that.   Uniformly fascist of the traditional, white supremacist American variety, even the ones of color (stupid Future Kapos of Amerika). 

I'm the son of United States veterans in the fight against European and Imperial Japanese fascists, both father and mother.   I'm congenitally antifa on both sides and couldn't be happier to declare it. 

My Current Idiosyncratic Take On This. - Yes, I Know That The Book Of Wisdom Isn't In The Protestant Bible

but it is in the Orthodox,  Syriac, Ethiopian and Catholic Bibles and it was almost certainly considered to be Scripture among many of what would later become Jewish communities around the Mediterranean in the 1st century.   I doubt the Greek speaking and writing early gentile Christians would have known about them or the other Jewish Scriptures if that hadn't been the case.  

Wisdom is generally believed to have been written by a Jewish scholar in Alexandria in the 1st century BC though when the Masoretic text was chosen centuries later the choice was made to not include a Hebrew translation of the Greek it was written in.   I might respect the right of those in early modern Judaism and much later Protestantism to make the choices they did - Protestants and other Christians, by the way, altered the ordering of the Old Testaments from the different ordering with quite different intents in the Jewish Bible so their Biblical choices differed from those who formed and kept what became modern Judaism, too.  

As it is, the Septuagint, which was produced by Jews from the two or so centuries before Jesus was born till, likely, a while after,  are as Jewish as any of it.  It is certain that for a lot of Jews at the time of Jesus, to put it anachronistically as modern Judaism is a somewhat later development (and no one should read that chronology as conferring lesser legitimacy) the Greek Scriptures WERE THE BIBLE THEY KNEW even in parts of the Middle East as certainly as the King James Versions (and there are a number of those) are to lots of American Protestants.   Paul who, as the Jewish New Testament Scholar Amy Levine has pointed out,  is the only self-declared Pharisee for whom we have any writings, at all, certainly relied on the Greek version of the only Scriptures around during his time, the Jewish ones, as he was perhaps unwittingly writing what would become the earliest books of the Christian Scriptures.    I hold with the idea that Matthew very likely wrote one of if not the actual and now likely lost (in its earliest form) logia compiling at least many of the sayings of Jesus which later formed the basis of the Synoptic Gospels, especially Matthew.    I base my thinking on that to some of the earliest writings about the writing of the New Testament which say Matthew wrote that and later writers translated into Greek from the original "Hebrew" (I think they might have meant Aramaic but it's possible a literate Jew living near Jerusalem might have written Hebrew) and that that includes what became the Gospel of Matthew when, as in Luke, they relied on earlier logia and sayings and reports.  

Other than him it isn't obvious that the other writers of the New Testament would have known any Scripture other than that which they had in Greek.   I think the author of James and Hebrews and possibly Mark were likely Jewish as well, though that's far from known.   I think that the Greek version of the Old Testament, including the books not chosen for inclusion in the modern Jewish and Protestant canons, are as legitimate as the later ones, including some of the best evidence of the contemporary Jewish understandings of the Hebrew Scripture that those Jewish scholars translated.  Even the texts that you are always hearing are later "Christian forgeries" to make them seem more predictive of Jesus.  I doubt that last accusation which is a later polemic not in earlier evidence. 

I was raised a Catholic and when I got round to studying something about the history of all of those various Bibles, from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish Septuagint* to the Orthodox, Syriac, Catholic, Ethiopian, Masoreic and Protestant Bibles (listed roughly in order of their presumed writing or canons being formed),  I figured to try to respect everyone's choices, at least for themselves.   I once said that I'd hate to see the book of Wisdom go because a number of really good motets and chants were setting from it.  You've got to admit, the Jewish scholar who wrote it wrote a really good text for All Souls Day.   I think it's right, too, or I wouldn't have posted it to start with.  

* I don't know a lot about how the Samaritan Scriptures differ from the Hebrew or much about their antiquity or if they consider anything about the other Writings that are included in other canons of Scripture but I figure I should mention them as part of the same development.  I have read that they maintain many of the other Writings but they're not considered as part of their Scriptural canon which only has the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures represented.  At least that's what I've read.  I want to respect everyone's honest choices.   I agree with Rabbi Heschel.  The existence and persistence of religious diversity is an indication that God isn't greatly opposed to it or it would have been made even harder to maintain it.   She hasn't even crushed the dishonest and currently politically dangerous dispensationalist heresy out of existence, at least not yet. 

American Media Keeps Us Ignorant Of How Good Healthcare Is In Other Places

so their partners in that industry and the goddamned insurance crooks can rob us blind while giving us Soviet style healthcare under capitalism

Here's a little video of a German who recently had to go to an American hospital only to find out he had to go to another American hospital, etc.

This reminds me of Ali Velshi whose father had to have major heart surgery in Canada under Canadian healthcare and the only cost to him was to park his car.  

All Souls Day

3 But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them.

2 In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure was taken for misery:

3 And their going away from us, for utter destruction: but they are in peace.

4 And though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality.

5 Afflicted in few things, in many they shall be well rewarded: because God hath tried them, and found them worthy of himself.

6 As gold in the furnace he hath proved them, and as a victim of a holocaust he hath received them, and in time there shall be respect had to them.

7 The just shall shine, and shall run to and fro like sparks among the reeds.

8 They shall judge nations, and rule over people, and their Lord shall reign for ever.

9 They that trust in him, shall understand the truth: and they that are faithful in love shall rest in him: for grace and peace is to his elect.

Wisdom 3:1-9  Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition

I haven't heard anyone read from the Douay-Rheims Bible since the 1960s when it was what they read the Gospel at mass from,  I'd guess.   Just thought I'd use it for this one, thinking about my grandparents and parents.   I don't know if this would have been in the lectionary cycle back then, Vatican II greatly expanded the Old Testament readings in it. 

I see this as an extension of All Saints Day because I believe in the eventual reconciliation of all beings with souls (animals), finding the arguments of the universalists more convincing than the infernalists.  Though I think a lot of those who have gone on still have a long way to go.  Don't we all. 

Having had such a recent and still shocking death in the family has really colored this whole three-day triduum of the dead.  I'm not much for the Day of the Dead thing as it currently is,  too much like a commercialized American holiday for my taste,  too colored by the infernalist nonsense kingdom of the devil and horror in the Americanized versions of it I've seen - an extension of infernalist-Hollywood Halloween more than anything to do with relligion.  Maybe in some very small towns it might still be a family day that has some real meaning, just not in most places, now.   Not in the US where everything is transaction and commerce.   Nothing could be farther from the real purpose of the day.