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Pictures at 11

From today's Maureen Dowd column:

"Trapped in their blue bell jar,
drowning in unfulfilled dreams,
Democrats are the
'Desperate Housewives' of politics."

Sam Dean for The New York Times Law and Religion The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law. Go to Article

Click on picture for details. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird: "She's… broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with."

"Every performance was a gem,
including 'Mockingbird'…
sung by Toby Keith with his
17-year-old daughter Krystal."

— Michelle Snow

A Burning Cross
for Ireland

Friday's entries included a cross-burning in honor of the late Protestant activist Bobby Frank Cherry and of a 1963 bombing in Birmingham, Alabama:
 

Click on picture for details.

The following honors today's 30th anniversary of other bombings, apparently by Catholics, in another Birmingham — in England.
 

" 'Caritas' is a Latin word which means love, charity and compassion. The international symbol of Caritas is a flaming cross, symbolising Christ’s burning love for his people." — Catholic Lay Organisations of Darwin, Australia For Gerry Adams and all the Catholics of Ireland,  here's a hunka hunka burnin' love: Click on picture for details.

Trinity and Counterpoint

Today's Roman Catholic meditation is from Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army:

"I certainly regret what happened and I make no bones about that," Adams said on the 30th anniversary of pub bombings that killed 21 on Nov. 21, 1974, in Birmingham, England.

Those who care what Roman Catholics think of the Trinity may read the remarks of St. Bonaventure at math16.com.

That site also offers a less holy but more intelligible trinity based on the irrefutable fact that 3 x 8 = 24 and on a remarkable counterpoint between group actions on a 4×2 array and group actions on a 4×4 array.

For a Protestant view of this trinity, see a website at the University of Birmingham in England.

That site's home page links to Birmingham's City Evangelical Church.
 

Today's Sermon:
Canonization

The title of Cleanth Brooks's classic The Well Wrought Urn comes from a poem by John Donne:

We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes.

— The Canonization

"A poem cannot exhaust reality, but it can arrest it: by manifesting a vision of experience available in no other way. This is only possible because, like a physical urn, it is a distinct substantial object: only by its difference from human experience can a poem represent that experience, even as the urn can be a metaphor for a poem only if it is not itself a poem. The alternative to 'crystalline closure' is not, then, an endless and chaotic 'repetition and proliferation,' but a structured relationship of significance."

— The Old New Criticism and Its Critics, by R. V. Young, Professor of English at North Carolina State University

Related reading: At War with the Word, by R. V. Young.

Canon:

"A musical composition in which the voices begin one after another, at regular intervals, successively taking up the same subject. It either winds up with a coda (tailpiece), or, as each voice finishes, commences anew, thus forming a perpetual fugue or round." — Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

Canonization:

The process of making a musical theme into a canon:

"The phrase continues almost uninterrupted and unvaried until the canonization of the theme…."

— Program Notes for
   Greater Dallas Youth Orchestras,
   Sunday May 18, 2003, by Erin Lin
   on Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78,
   by Camille Saint-Saëns

For more on this concept, see the Log24.net entries of July 16-31, 2004, and in particular the entries of July 25.

See, too, Theme and Variations, with its midi of Bach's

Fourteen Canons on the First Eight Notes of the Goldberg Ground.