Sermon on the Mount

The American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday that it will remove names given to North American birds in honor of people and replace them with monikers that better describe their plumage and other characteristics. The group said it will prioritize birds whose names trace to enslavers, white supremacists, and robbers of Indigenous graves. Among them is one of the most famous birders in U.S. history, John James Audubon.
True to the Left, when a problem is visualized, rearrange the environment.

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More than 300 years later, a group of advocates is pressing for recognition of victims who have been left out of previous efforts to clear the names of those convicted or executed during the witch hunt hysteria of the Puritan era. Pardons and exonerations have largely focused on those executed in Salem, which leaves nearly 200 others unaccounted for, including those who were accused, imprisoned, indicted, or lived elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

Fine-tuning the past is going to take a lot of work.

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The Tedeschi Trucks Band will open for the Eagles this weekend, serving as a replacement for Steely Dan while Donald Fagen recovers from an undisclosed illness.

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Sermon on the Mount

The All Saints gospel is the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes. Christ's description of the Good in the Beatitudes includes meekness, the poor in spirit, and those who mourn--they are not limited to the dramatic apostles, their dramatic lives and deaths.

In many respects, these qualities are in the everyday.

Saint Irenaeus was a man of the Second Century, a man who campaigned against the Gnostics. He has a famous quote: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” This has been debated for years; does it imply the value of self-fulfillment, without God? In fairness, he answers this himself in the next phrase: “The life of a man is the vision of God.” However, it implies that spiritual fulfillment is possible for humans in their daily interactions.

The author Alan Furst gave an interview once on his writings, a collection of WWII spy stories that describe the heroism of everyday men during the time before the war. He says that his readings of the period have led him to believe that evil, a true evil life, requires full-time application. That it was simply too hard to be devoted to evil without eliminating all other elements of your life. (Or perhaps evil eventually fills the moral space?) So the caricatures of Evil are true.

Goodness, on the other hand, emerged as a by-product of living a normal thoughtful life inspired, as Irenaeus would say, by God.
Not at all tooth and claw. And achievable by all.

With hesitation, I mention another book, Jailbird by Vonnagut. The story is delivered by another deadpan narrator, a bright guy who is wandering from failure to failure with ironic acceptance. At one point he is in front of a Senate investigation committee and is asked why he became a communist. (In the story, he gives up his membership at the ratification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.) His answer is, wide-eyed, "The Sermon on the Mount."