The Dream Team: Romário and Ronaldo

Wow, has it already been 10 years since these two lit up the world?



Perhaps the two greatest pure center forwards in the history of Brazilian soccer, Romário and Ronaldo, both raised in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, played together for an all-too-brief less-than-two-year period in 1997-8. Romário had led Brazil to victory and was voted MVP in the 1994 World Cup, and Ronaldo had just been voted world player of the year in 1997.

Together, they were unstoppable.

In 19 games together with the national team, they scored an astounding 34 goals between them, Romario with 19 and Ronaldo with 15. With them on the pitch, Brazil won both the 1997 Copa America and the Conferations Cup.

And looked unbeatable in the run up to the 1998 World Cup.

Then, Romário injured himself in early 1998 (he was plagued by lower back and hamstring problems in the latter part of his career), quarreled with Assistant Coach (and fellow prima donna) Zico, and in great controversy was cut from the team just before the start of the Cup.



The rest is history. Without Romário, Ronaldo did not have a consistent strike partner. Brazil squeaked into the final, losing to Norway in the group stage and barely defeating Scotland, Denmark and Holland. The morning of the final, Ronaldo had a mysterious "seizure", and was initially scratched from the lineup before being reinstated right before the starting whistle. He played like he was in a stupour, and Brazil lost badly.

Man, what I wouldn't have given to see Romário in that final...

Evelyn Waugh on "Anglo Catholicism"

Evelyn Waugh saw through the traditionalist smoke-screen and recognized "Anglo Catholicism" for what it really was (italics mine).

Evelyn Waugh, waspish convert to Rome and satirical novelist, once said that he could believe that the church was defined by communion with the Pontiff, or that the classical Protestant position could be right in that the church had gone off course and needed radical reform in the light of the Bible at the Reformation.

What he could not believe as a theory was the Anglo Catholic view, that the true church was revealed as a small group of homosexual curates in 19th Century Oxford! That of course is a wicked remark, but it has a haunting resonance for this Lambeth Conference and its obsession with homosexuality and to a lesser extent women bishops.

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8732

The Anglican Communion in the West is reaping what was sown in the 19th Century by liberals of at very best questionable social preferences in high church garb who wanted to Romanize the Church of England without actually submitting to any other authority than themselves.

They re-interpreted or threw out the Anglican formularies -- Scripture, the 1662 BCP and the 39 Articles -- in order to try to get the Anglican system to buy into their vision, and in doing so opened the door for the further liberal depravities that we see today.

Their spiritual offspring lives on today not only in the liberal Episcopal Church and Church of Canada, where homosexuality is now a "sacrament" (a beloved Anglo Catholic term, along with non-BCP terminology like "Mass", "Eucharist" and "Holy Orders"). It also lives on in the bizarre proliferation of self-proclaimed "continuing Anglican" churches, which are neither "continuing" nor "Anglican" but are rather small pseudo-Romish sects with Bishops everywhere and no submission to any authority but themselves.

Vagante delenda est.

Wile E. Bishop At Lambeth

Obama, The Magic Negro

I wonder sometimes how otherwise thoughtful Christian people can even consider voting for a baby-killing far Left corrupt Chicago hack with "prince of light" charisma.

Here's one possibility:

But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro."

The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia.

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein19mar19,0,5335087.story

A Religious Idea Called "America"

The always excellent Brothers Judd excerpts David Gelernter's provocative A Religious Idea Called "America": How Puritanism Created It, What It Means, Why It Matters as part of their wonderful selection of Independence Day readings.

Americanism, or the religious idea called “America,” seems like a secular idea. It can and has been professed by devout atheists. Its creed, a central element of Americanism, is completely secular in tone--of course there’s no canonical version, but most people would agree that it calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind--or something on those lines.

I’ll argue that despite all this, Americanism is profoundly Christian in its inspiration and worldview.

It is in fact profoundly Puritan.

[...]

America is the Puritan nation. Europeans have always seen that clearly
enough; Americans might as well, too.

Hatred of Puritanism happens to be one of the best-established
bigotries of modern times. “Puritan” has been an insult for hundreds of years.
It suggests rigid, austere, censorious--exactly the kind of religion secularists
love to hate. Puritans were rigid and censorious, up to a point. Most
caricatures are partly true. But they were much else besides. They were creative
thinkers about man’s spiritual role in the modern state and the modern
world.

Puritanism was a British invention of the Elizabethan age. It reflected
the unhappiness of English Protestants who saw the Church of England as not
really Protestant or insufficiently Protestant; who wanted a purified church
with no hierarchy or no Catholic-style hierarchy, where each Christian dealt
directly with the Bible and the Lord.

Read the entire thing: http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2008/07/like_palmolive_1.html

The GAFCON Statement

Wow, this is better than even most optimistically hoped for: Scripture, the 39 Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer being held up as the confessional basis for the Anglican faith.

I expect quite a bit of gnashing of teeth and ankle biting from the so-called Anglo-Catholics, who outright reject a great deal of the core doctrines of these formularies of Anglicanism.

More importantly, may Anglicanism in the West see reformation and rejuvination from this. It's a shame that such great statements of faith as the 39 Articles and such a wonderful expression of corporate worship as the Book of Common Prayer have been honored only in the breach for the past 100-plus years.

Highlights:

We, the participants in the Global Anglican Future Conference, are a fellowship of confessing Anglicans for the benefit of the Church and the furtherance of its mission. We are a fellowship of people united in the communion (koinonia) of the one Spirit and committed to work and pray together in the common mission of Christ. It is a confessing fellowship in that its members confess the faith of Christ crucified, stand firm for the gospel in the global and Anglican context, and affirm a contemporary rule, the Jerusalem Declaration, to guide the movement for the future. We are a fellowship of Anglicans, including provinces, dioceses, churches, missionary jurisdictions, para-church organisations and individual Anglican Christians whose goal is to reform, heal and revitalise the Anglican Communion and expand its mission to the world.

1. We rejoice in the gospel of God through which we have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Because God first loved us, we love him and as believers bring forth fruits of love, ongoing repentance, lively hope and thanksgiving to God in all things.

2. We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.

4. We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

5. We gladly proclaim and submit to the unique and universal Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, humanity’s only Saviour from sin, judgement and hell, who lived the life we could not live and died the death that we deserve. By his atoning death and glorious resurrection, he secured the redemption of all who come to him in repentance and faith.

6. We rejoice in our Anglican sacramental and liturgical heritage as an expression of the gospel, and we uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer, to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.

8. We acknowledge God’s creation of humankind as male and female and the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family. We repent of our failures to maintain this standard and call for a renewed commitment to lifelong fidelity in marriage and abstinence for those who are not married.

Mmm, fellowship of confessing Anglicans. Sounds just marvelous!

Full statement here: http://pbs1928.blogspot.com/2008/06/statement-on-global-anglican-future.html