Yes, I am

The Christian Science Monitor asks, "Are you smarter than an atheist?" I correctly answered all the questions in the most annoying online quiz I've ever taken, so I guess I am smarter than an atheist, and everyone else, too:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups in a 32-question survey of religious knowledge by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. On average, Americans got 16 of the 32 questions correct. Atheists and agnostics got an average of 20.9 correct answers. Jews (20.5) and Mormons (20.3). Protestants got 16 correct answers on average, while Catholics got 14.7 questions right.

How is the quiz annoying? It consists of 32 questions, starting with number 32. I nearly stopped right there, but they didn't: half of the multiple-choice questions are worded as yes/no questions. Number 30, for example: "Do you happen to know which of these is the king of gods in ancient Greek mythology?" There are three possible answers to that question: Yes, No, or Huh? Come on, CSM, sentences aren't that hard to build.

Heere endeth the pointless Rant.

An irregular verb

I am firm
thou art stubborn
he is a bigot

Cranmer's collects

Online from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, courtesy of William S Peterson. Please, take a look and read a couple of them aloud. That there is what the English language was meant to do. Note how gracefully and easily the tongue and lips move when they pronounce perfectly-composed English. Cranmer may have been a crazed schismatic, but he sure could write.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick & the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth & reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick & the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth & reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

Mencken on preaching

This, via Daniel Mitsui, is too good not to pass along:

Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry - for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary and of the liturgy itself. A Solemn High Mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early Church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder, these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.

This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity... If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

7pm CST tonight

Wolfram Alpha goes live at 7pm CST tonight. The whole thing will be screencast live here, for better or worse, from the "launch center" here in Champaign. Here's a bit from BBC 4 about the launch, and a handy guide to British accents (of which there are four in that BBC piece).

What's a poetical line like you...

...doing in a Bible like this? "The witchery of paltry things obscures what is right." -- Wisdom 4:12. A welcome spot of "dark speech" in the soggy cardboard of the New American Bible.

For the last few days I've been avoiding what's called "news" - the witchery of trivia, political propaganda and other paltry things. To follow the news nowadays is to be a misinformed citizen. Instead, I'm spending more time with Elizabethan poets, Constitutional history, the worthwhile blogs, etc. It's refreshing.

Don't wet my pallet!

This guy unleashes a magnificent eggcorn - he wants to get my pallet all wet (see the end of the article). No, thank you. If I had pallets, I'd like to keep them dry and build a compost heap container with them. You may whet my palate, though, especially for things concerning Wolfram Alpha.

It's a 'an' thing

Have you noticed it lately? If you listen to a few interviews on the radio, you'll almost certainly hear someone using 'a' instead of 'an' before a word that starts with a vowel. Drives me up the fargin' wall. Doesn't take much, huh?

Tasting of His roseate blood

Br. Stephen of the Cistercian abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank gives us the Easter Vespers hymn Ad cenam Agni providi and John Mason Neale's English translation of it. In particular, Br Stephen delights in Neale's use of roseate to describe Christ's blood. Neale himself, in his Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences, tells why he chose the word roseate, which is often changed to crimson in other editions of his hymn:

Again, in the same Hymn:---
Cruore ejus roseo

is translated by
And tasting of His roseate Blood.

The epithet is everywhere altered to crimson: because the editors did not see its force. The poet would tell us that, though one drop of our Lord's Blood was sufficient to redeem the world,

(Cujus una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere,
as St. Thomas says,) yet out of the greatness of His love to us He would shed all. As every one knows, the last dainings of life-blood are not crimson, but of a far paler hue: strictly speaking, roseate. Change the word, and you eliminate the whole idea.

Psalm 1

From one of my multitude of small text-formatting projects, the first of Sir Philip Sidney's Psalm translations:

PSALM I.

Beatus vir.

He blessed is who neither loosely treads
The straying steps as wicked councel leads,
      Ne for bad mates in way of sinners waiteth,
      Nor yet himself with idle scorners seateth;
But on Gods law his whole delight doth bind,
Which night and day hee calls to marking mind.

He shall be like a freshly planted tree,
To which sweet springs of waters neighbours be;
      Whose branches faile not timely fruite to nourish.
      Nor withered leaf shall make it faile to flourish:
So all the things whereto that man doth bend
Shall prosper still with well succeeding end.

Such blessing shall not wicked wretches see,
But like vile chaff with wind shall scattred be;
      For neither shall the men in sinne delighted
      Consist when they to highest doome are cited,
Ne yet shall suff'red be a place to take
Where godly men do their assembly make.

For God doth know, and knowing doth approve
The trade of them that just proceedings love:
      But they that sinne in sinfull breast do cherish,
      The way they go, shall be the way to perish.

Here's the KJV.

The Sidneian Psalms online!

Here's a gem of English psalmody: the 1823 edition of the Psalm translations of Philip Sidney (nos. 1-43), completed by his sister, Mary Herbert, after his death in 1586. John Donne wrote a short poem about their work.

The quest for the Eye of Satan

The latest from Neil Peart, who changed the color scheme of his updates! It used to be a nasty blinding white-on-black that left an afterimage when I looked away from the computer; now it's a readable dark red on gray parchment. Thanks, Neil!

T. S. Eliot on the New English Bible

Lege. Two excerpts:

The age covered by the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I was richer in writers of genius than is our own, and we should not expect a translation made in our time to be a masterpiece of our literature or, as was the Authorized Version of 1611, an exemplar of English prose for successive generations of writers.

We are, however, entitled to expect from a panel chosen from among the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: "What is happening to the English language?"

So long as the New English Bible was used only for private reading, it would be merely a symptom of the decay of the English language in the middle of the twentieth century. But the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.

There may be Ministers of the Gospel who do not realize that the music of the phrase, of the paragraph, of the period is an essential constituent of good English prose, and who fail to understand that the life of a reading of Gospel and Epistle in the liturgy is in this music of the spoken word.

Fr Neuhaus on Bible translations

Three articles from his magazine First Things in which the good Father rails against our Catholic Newspeak Bible and endorses the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. A tip o' the hat to Dylan, an aficionado of good translations.

• Bible Babel, May 2001
  
• More on Bible Babel, January 2006
  
  • "...it is very difficult to share thoughts when we do not share words."
• 70 or 70x7?, July 27, 2007
  

On this feast of Mary

Here are some texts for today's Mass from the 1966 Saint Joseph Daily Missal and Hymnal from the Catholic Book Publishing Company. As far as I can tell this was the last official "Englishing" of the Tridentine Mass before the Mass of Paul VI was introduced in 1970. It's satisfying to note echoes of the apparition at Lourdes in these texts: flowers appear; the cleft of the rock; the watered land and so on.

Gradual Canticle 2:12; 10:14

The flowers appear in our land,
the time of pruning has come,
the song of the dove is heard in our land.
Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come!
O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
in the secret recess of the cliff.

Alleluia, alleluia.
Show me your face,
let me hear your voice,
For your voice is sweet
and your face is beautiful. Alleluia.

Or, after Septuagesima,

Tract Judith 15:10; Canticle 4:7

You are the glory of Jerusalem,
you are the joy of Israel,
you are the honor of our people,
You are all-beautiful, O Mary,
and there is in you no stain of original sin.
Happy are you, O holy Virgin Mary,
and most worthy of all praise,
For with your virgin foot
you have crushed the serpent's head.

Communion Antiphon Psalm 64:10

You have visited the land and watered it;
greatly have you enriched it.