History – David's Commonplace Book

Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day, the day we honor those who have fallen fighting for their country and freedom.

Memorial Day first started to be observed after the Civil War. That war was the bloodiest in American history and the casualties of that war were unprecedented. The number of killed and wounded in the three previous declared wars, the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War, were insignificant compared to the slaughterhouse that the Civil War became. After the war people in both the North and South began to commemorate the soldiers who died for their country. The date of this commemoration varied throughout the country until it settled on May 30.

In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill. This law moved the dates of four holidays, including Memorial Day, to the nearest Monday to create three-day weekends. This, I think, was unfortunate. I believe that converting the day on which we honor our fallen heroes into a long weekend tends to diminish the significance of this day. It becomes no more a day to take off work and for businesses to have sales. There should be more to Memorial Day.

Cinco de Mayo

Today is Cinco de Mayo, or the Fifth of May. Contrary to what is commonly believed (including by myself), Cinco de Mayo is actually more of an American, or at least a Mexican-American, holiday than a Mexican one. Cinco de Mayo is only celebrated regionally in Mexico, primarily in the states of Puebla and Veracruz. Schools are closed on this day, but it is not an official national holiday in Mexico.

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. In 1861, the Mexican government was bankrupt, and President Benito Juárez suspended payments on Mexico’s foreign debt. In response, Britain, France, and Spain sent naval forces to occupy the city of Veracruz and demand payment of the debts Mexico owed them. Juarez managed to reach an arrangement with Britain and Spain, but the French, under Emperor Napoleon III, had other ideas.

Louis Napoleon III was the nephew of Napoleon I Bonaparte. He had somehow managed to get himself elected president of the Second Republic of France in 1848. Still, he decided that president was not a grand enough title for a Bonaparte, and in 1851 he seized dictatorial power in France and named himself Emperor. Despite being the nephew of Napoleon I, Napoleon III was not a particularly aggressive Emperor and was mostly content to have France at peace with other European powers. With the crisis in Mexico, however, Napoleon III saw an opportunity for France to gain an empire in Latin America. The United States was involved in the Civil War and was in no position to try to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, an additional benefit to the French occupation of Mexico would be to give France a base with which to send aid to the Confederate States, keeping the nation divided and unable to resist the French conquest.

The French army invaded Mexico with 8000 men under the command of General Charles de Lorencez late in 1861. This army marched from Veracruz in April 1862 and defeated Mexican forces led by Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin on April 28. Seguin retreated to the city of Puebla, where the Mexicans had two forts. Seguin had only 4500 badly armed and trained men to defend the city. It seemed likely that the French would crush the Mexicans and march on to Mexico City without any further resistance.

On May 5, Lorencez attacked the forts with 6500 men. Against all odds, the Mexicans successfully defended the forts against three assaults. By the third assault, the French artillery had run out of ammunition, so the infantry had to attack without artillery support. They were driven back, and the French had to fall back. Then, Seguin attacked with his cavalry while the Mexican infantry outflanked the French on both sides of their positions. The French were routed with 462 men killed, while the Mexicans only suffered 83 dead. This unlikely victory has been an inspiration for Mexican patriots ever since.

The victory was a short-lived one. Napoleon III sent reinforcements to Mexico, and the French were able to conquer the country. Napoleon III placed the Austrian Habsburg Maximilian as the first Emperor of the Mexican Empire. He was also the last Emperor, since, as soon as the United States had finished the Civil War, the US government made it clear to Napoleon III that it would not tolerate a French colony on the southern border. Since Napoleon III did not want to fight a war against battle-hardened Civil War veterans, he removed the French troops. Maximilian, even though he sincerely tried to govern Mexico well, was quickly overthrown and executed.

Although Benito Juárez declared that the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla would be a national holiday, Cinco de Mayo was first celebrated by Mexicans in the American Southwest, the territories the US gained in the Mexican War. The former Mexicans began to celebrate Cinco de Mayo both to express their Mexican identity and to show their support for the North in the Civil War. It may seem odd that these unwilling Americans would care about a war half a continent away, but the Mexicans were against slavery, and Hispanics insisted that California enter the United States as a free state. Cinco de Mayo gained popularity in the 1960s with the rise of Latino activism and even more so in the 1980s, when beer companies realized that the holiday’s celebratory nature made a good marketing tool to sell more beer.

So happy Cinco de Mayo, or should I say Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Is This Pope Catholic?

Some time ago, I asked this question about Pope Francis. It seemed to me that the previous Pontiff was more concerned with upholding the Gospel of Wokeism than the Gospel of Christ or the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Now the time has come to ask whether Pope Leo XIV is actually Catholic.

What prompts the question is this tweet from the Holy Father:

This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).
— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) March 29, 2026

It seems to me that Pope Leo is jettisoning hundreds of years of Catholic Just War doctrine, not to mention the noble traditions of the Crusades, in favor of a kind of pacifism more associated with such sects as the Quakers or Mennonites, or with a different tradition altogether, such as Jainism.

While there are pacifist traditions within Christianity, mainstream Christianity rejects pacifism. Pacifism is only effective when it is unanimous. Everyone must reject the use of force or violence. If only a single person is willing to use force to achieve his ends, pacifism only enables the aggressor. It makes victims of those unwilling to fight.

The only way to prevent the use of force for evil ends is the use of force for good ends. An individual can turn the other cheek when offended. The state cannot. The state must use force internally to enforce the law and externally to deter aggression.

Christianity is not a pacifistic religion. Christianity is a fighting religion. J Christians are not neutral between good and evil, as some Eastern and pantheist traditions are. We believe that good and evil are real, and we are called to support the good and fight the evil. Yet, Christians do not believe war and violence are good in themselves, as do the Islamic jihadis. We do not fight for glory and booty or to extend the rule of Christ. Christians fight to secure peace and justice. We fight in self-defense and in the defense of the innocent. War, in Christian thought, is an evil but often a necessary one.

Because Christians accept the need for war in a fallen world yet do not wish to glory in war, we have developed the doctrine of the Just War. The Catholic Church, in particular, has given a lot of thought over the centuries on the criteria under which a war can be considered just. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, these criteria are:

the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

there must be serious prospects of success;

the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Contrary to what Pope Leo XIV believes, the doctrines of the Church he is supposed to be leading are not that Jesus Christ rejects war and those who wage war. John the Baptist did not tell the soldiers who came to him to give up their swords. Nor did Jesus tell the centurion who asked for his servant to be healed to resign his commission as an officer in the Roman army. The Old Testament is full of wars that are often justified. King David is held as a model king, yet he fought many wars. God did listen to David’s prayers. In fact, the Book of Psalms is filled with the prayers of David.

I am not certain whether Pope Leo had our current military action against Iran in mind when he made his comment. The Pope has said that his general intent has not been to attack President Trump. I will take him at his word.

It seems to me, though, that America’s current military action against Iran fulfills all the listed criteria for a just war. Iran has been responsible for numerous acts of aggression against the United States and its allies. The seizure of the United States embassy by the current Iranian regime back in 1979 was an act of war. The United States has made multiple attempts to repair relations for seven presidential administrations, to no avail. Iran has either taken advantage of American peace overtures or ignored them. The military campaign thus far has been one of the most successful in our history. The purpose of the campaign is to prevent Iran from developing atomic weapons. Given Iran’s stated intention to make use of nuclear weapons to eliminate both the Great Satan and the Lesser Satan (America and Israel), it is difficult to imagine any evils created by the United States greater than the potential threat of an atomic bomb in the hands of terrorists.

Is this Pope Catholic? It is perhaps presumptuous for me to say. Like his predecessor, he seems more interested in spreading the Gospel of Social Justice than Christ crucified. My concern is that Pope Leo XIV seems to be more interested in appeasing the persecutors of Christians than confronting them. He appears to be concerned with accommodating the Muslims, who are the foremost persecutors of Christians. He visits mosques and praises Islam, while seemingly ignoring the victims of Islam and whitewashing its savage and violent history. I may be doing the Pope an injustice by characterizing him in this fashion. I hope I am. I would rather be mistaken by what I see as pusianmmity in the face of the enemies of Christ.

In the meantime, I keep thinking the Roman Catholic Church would be better served by the likes of Urban II or Julius II. But I guess they don’t make popes like they used to.

Easter

We left the story of Jesus of Nazareth last Friday. He had been executed in the most painful and degrading way possible. His closest followers were dispersed and in hiding. It must have seemed that Jesus and his movement had ended in utter failure. But then, something remarkable happened. This something is commemorated by the Easter holiday. Although Christmas is the more popular Christian holiday, Easter is actually the most important holiday in the liturgical year as the celebration of Christ’s resurrection is theologically more important than his Nativity. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Gospel of Mark has the most concise account of what happened that first Easter.

¹ When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. ² Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb ³and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

⁴ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. ⁵ As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

⁶ “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

⁸ Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

⁹ When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene,out of whom he had driven seven demons.¹⁰ She went and told those who had been with him and who were mourning and weeping.¹¹ When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it.

¹² Afterward Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking in the country.¹³ These returned and reported it to the rest; but they did not believe them either.

¹⁴ Later Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.

¹⁵ He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.¹⁶ Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.¹⁷ And these sign swill accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons;they will speak in new tongues;¹⁸ they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

¹⁹ After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God.²⁰ Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it. (Mark 16:1-20)

Mark 16:9-20 seems to be a later addition. At any rate, the earliest manuscripts do not have those verses. Whether the original ending has been lost or Mark intended to end his account so abruptly is unknown.

Matthew has more details.

¹After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

² There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. ⁴ The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

⁵ The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

⁸ So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

The Guards’ Report

¹¹ While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. ¹² When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, ¹³ telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ ¹⁴ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” ¹⁵So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

The Great Commission

¹⁶ Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. ¹⁷ When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. ¹⁸ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt 28:1-20)

Luke and John have more to say about Jesus after His resurrection, but I won’t quote them here.

The date of Easter has been a matter of some controversy in past centuries. The date of Easter is related to the date of Passover. The calculations used to determine the date of Easter are based on a lunisolar cycle, like that of Passover, but the cycle is not the Hebrew calendar. Generally, Easter falls about a week after Passover, but it occurs about a month later in three years of the nineteen-year cycle. Various groups of Christians have used different methods to calculate Easter over the years, and these differences have led to bitter disputes. There is still a different date for Easter among Eastern churches because they use the Julian calendar for the liturgical year, whereas Catholics and Protestants use the Gregorian calendar.

Among Catholics and some Protestants, Easter is generally celebrated with an Easter vigil that begins the previous evening. At dawn, a mass or service begins, etc.

And, of course, many people celebrate Easter by finding Easter eggs and eating candy delivered by the Easter Bunny.

Good Friday

Today is Good Friday, the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. It may seem strange to call it “Good” Friday, since being crucified wouldn’t normally be considered part of a good day, but the word “good” is used in an obsolete sense, meaning “holy.” Good Friday is generally celebrated with fasts and vigils. In the Roman Catholic church, no mass is held on this day.

Once again, I will be using the Gospel of Mark to tell the story.

Mark 15

¹Very early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law and the whole Sanhedrin, made their plans. So they bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate.

² “Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.

“You have said so,” Jesus replied.

³ The chief priests accused him of many things. ⁴ So again Pilate asked him, “Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.”

⁵ But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.

⁶ Now it was the custom at the festival to release a prisoner whom the people requested. ⁷ A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. ⁸ The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did.

⁹ “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate, ¹⁰ knowing it was out of self-interest that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. ¹¹ But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.

¹² “What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.

¹³ “Crucify him!” they shouted.

¹⁴ “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

¹⁵ Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. (Mark 15:1-15)

It would seem that this meeting of the Sanhedrin at night, before Passover, was highly irregular, and some have questioned the historicity of the Gospel accounts on that basis. I think that if the elders and priests of the Sanhedrin believed Jesus to be on the point of declaring himself the Messiah and leading a rebellion, they might not have been too concerned with fine points of legality in the face of a national emergency. Little is known of Pontius Pilate, but in the historical accounts of Josephus and others, he does not seem to be the sort of man who had any scruples about putting a troublemaker to death, even if he wasn’t certain of the man’s guilt. It is possible that he was impressed by Jesus’s force of personality. On the other hand, Josephus makes it clear that Pilate was a tactless man who did not like the Jews much. He was eventually recalled because his actions seemed likely to cause rebellions. Perhaps Pilate resented having the High Priest and others, whom he might have considered semi-barbarians, insist on his crucifying a man he believed to be innocent. He might have refused just to be obstinate.

¹⁶ The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace (that is, the Praetorium) and called together the whole company of soldiers. ¹⁷ They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. ¹⁸ And they began to call out to him, “Hail, king of the Jews!” ¹⁹ Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. ²⁰And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.

The Crucifixion of Jesus

²¹ A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. ²² They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”). ²³ Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. ²⁴And they crucified him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get.

²⁵ It was nine in the morning when they crucified him. ²⁶ The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS.

²⁷ They crucified two rebels with him, one on his right and one on his left. ^[28]^[a]²⁹ Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, ³⁰ come down from the cross and save yourself!” ³¹ In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! ³² Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.(Mark 15:16-32)

Luke has one of the thieves taking Jesus’s side.

³⁹ One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰ But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? ⁴¹ We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

⁴² Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.^[d]”

⁴³ Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43)

Crucifixion is probably the most painful method of execution ever devised. The victim is slowly asphyxiated as he hangs on the cross. It was not uncommon for a man to linger for days, writhing in pain the whole time. In addition to the pain, crucifixion was meant to be a humiliating, shameful punishment. Only the lowest of the low were crucified, which might have been a stumbling block to early Christian proselytizing.

³³ At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. ³⁴ And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).^[b]

³⁵ When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”

³⁶ Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said.

³⁷ With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

³⁸ The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. ³⁹ And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died,^[c] he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

⁴⁰ Some women were watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joseph,^[d] and Salome. ⁴¹ In Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs. Many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem were also there.

Those words were the first verse of Psalm 22. Matthew’s account parallels Mark’s, but Luke and John report different last words.

⁴⁶ Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”^[e] When he had said this, he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46)

²⁸ Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” ²⁹ A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. ³⁰ When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.(John 19:28-30)

John adds another detail.

³¹ Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. ³² The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. ³³ But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. ³⁴ Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. ³⁵ The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. ³⁶ These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,”^[c]³⁷ and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.” (John 19:31-37)

Strange as it may seem, the breaking of their legs was an act of mercy since they would die sooner. It was surprising that Jesus had died after only being on the cross for about six hours.

⁴² It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, ⁴³ Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. ⁴⁴ Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. ⁴⁵ When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. ⁴⁶ So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. ⁴⁷ Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid. (Mark 15:42-47)

To anyone on the scene, this must have seemed the end of the matter. Jesus of Nazareth was dead, and his followers scattered. It would seem that, at best, he would only be a minor footnote in history.

Palm Sunday

Today is Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter. Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and the beginning of the climax of his earthly ministry.

Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King

¹ As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, ² saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. ³If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

⁴ This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

⁵ “Say to Daughter Zion,
‘See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

⁶ The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. ⁷ They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. ⁸ A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹⁰ When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”

¹¹ The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” (Matt 21:1-11)

Palm Sunday is often celebrated by worshippers in churches with palm leaves. If palm leaves are not available locally, then other tree branches may be substituted. In many churches, the priest or other clergy bless the palms, and they are saved to be burned on Ash Wednesday the following year.

The actual date of Palm Sunday, like Easter, varies from year to year because it is based on a lunisolar cycle, as in the Hebrew calendar. The date differs between Western and Eastern Christianity because most Eastern churches still use the Julian calendar for their liturgical year, even though the Gregorian calendar is universally used for civil purposes.

Palm Sunday begins Holy Week, or the last week of Lent.

Boogs, Row Hands, Hacking Coos, and being Thruff

Ricky Ricardo struggles with English.

Ricky has a point. Spanish, like most written languages that use an alphabet, is spelled phonetically. Spanish spelling is consistent. Words are spelled as they are pronounced, and each sound uses the same letters. English, notoriously, is not. As Ricky discovers in English, the same set of letters can be pronounced six different ways, and the same sounds in different words can be spelled with any number of different letter combinations. English really is a crazy language.

Actually, English is completely phonetic if you speak it as it was pronounced around 1500. The trouble is that pronunciation has changed over the last five hundred years, but spelling has not kept pace. Standardized spelling only developed in written languages along with the invention of printing. Before that time, everyone simply spelled the words as they heard them. There might be regional variations in dialects or different ideas about how to spell individual words, but as long as the reader could make out the intent of the writer, it didn’t matter. Since every copy of a given book had to be copied by a copier, there were few copies of any single title. A book with a hundred copies throughout Europe was a runaway bestseller. Each copy could be spelled differently, and no one would notice or care. No copyist would influence spelling much.

This changed with the invention of printing. Now there could be hundreds or even thousands of copies of even the most unimportant books and pamphlets. The first printer to set up shop in a country could have an enormous influence on that country’s language. That printer could establish which dialect became the language’s standard literary form. He could determine how words would be spelled.

This was certainly the case when William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476. Caxton sought to use a language that would be understood by as many English-speaking people as possible, so he settled on the London dialect already in use by the English government, the chancery standard. Caxton’s decisions on spelling influenced English orthography to this day.

The problem was that Caxton worked when the English language was changing rapidly in pronunciation. The Great Vowel Shift was already beginning to drastically change the sounds of English vowels, and the generations after Caxton saw even greater changes. English was developing from Late Middle English to Early Modern English, and the English printers fossilized English spelling just as the sounds were changing. It didn’t help that, because printing was a new technology in England, Caxton had to hire typographers from the Netherlands, who tended to spell words as they would be spelled in Dutch.

Ricky seems to be having particular trouble with “gh“. In Old English, “gh” represented a hard ch or kh sound, as in Loch (Scottish) or Bach (German). After the Norman conquest, English gradually became Frenchified, and the hard ch either softened or was lost. Sometimes the loss of the gh caused a preceding vowel to lengthen. So words like light, night, or bright were originally pronounced something like licht, nicht, and bricht with a short i. You can still see this in German, which has been more conservative than English in some ways. The German words for light and night are Licht and Nacht. The German word for bright is hell, but there is an older word, bercht, derived from the same Germanic root as bricht, which developed into berumpt, meaning “famous”.

Bough was pronounced bohkh in Old English. The Great Vowel Shift changed the “oh” to an “ow,” and the final “kh” was lost. The German word Bogen, which means “bow,” retained a softened final g sound. Bow, the thing that shoots arrows, bow to bend down, and bough all derive from the same root bog or bog, meaning a tree branch, which presumably bends.

Rough and cough were pronounced something like “roukh” and “kohkh”. Over time, that final kh softened into a final f. The German word for rough is Rau, so German dropped the final ku altogether. The German word for cough is Husten, but in Old High German, there is kohhon, meaning to cough.

Through is an interesting one. In Old English, through was pronounced like thoorkh. Again, the final kh disappeared, and the word became through. In German, the word retained the final kh, but the initial th became a d, so durch. German tended to shift initial t’s to d’s, so we have three, thing, thorn, and that, becoming drei, Ding, Dorn, and das. In this case, English is more conservative.

Since English has become the common language of the whole world, we should probably update English spelling to make it easier for the millions of people who have to learn it. That is less easy for English than for many other languages. France and Spain have National Academies empowered to determine matters of usage and spelling. French- and Spanish-speaking people in their former colonies follow their lead. Many other languages have similar institutions. The governments of the German-speaking nations cooperate to set standards, the most recent example being the German Spelling Reform of 1996. The Communists in Russia and China simplified Russian and Chinese writing by Force. Atatürk compelled the Turks to switch from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet, and his government created colloquial Turkish almost from scratch.

English has no academy that sets language standards. No English-speaking country is likely to be taken over by a totalitarian government that can simplify spelling by decree. The only successful effort to simplify spelling was Noah Webster’s Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published two centuries ago. Webster’s reforms were adopted in the United States but not elsewhere, leading to two standards of written English: British and American. It is unlikely that a more recent effort would succeed either in America or Britain. Anglophones across the Anglosphere tend to resist simplification and regularization of every sort. The United States is almost the only nation in the world to refuse to use the metric system. I suspect the English would also refuse if they were given a choice. England still retains old, obsolete institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords. We’ll all insist on keeping our crazy spellings, unless the millions of people forced to learn English as a second language tire of the nonsense and revolt.

St. Patrick’s Day

Today is St. Patrick‘s day and I thought it might be appropriate to write about St. Patrick. So, who is St. Patrick and why does he get a day? Not very much is known for certain about his life. It is possible that his story has been confused with one Palladius, a missionary who became the first bishop of Ireland. Still, Patrick wrote a short autobiography called “The Declaration” or “The Confession” as part of a letter that seems to be genuine.

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Patrick, or Patricius was a Roman who lived in Britain. He may have been born around 387 and lived until 460 or possibly 493, so he lived during the twilight of the Roman Empire in the West. At the age of 16 he was captured by raiders and enslaved. He worked as a shepherd in Ireland for about six years. He managed to escape and return to his home, but then he became a priest and returned to the land where he was a slave and worked to convert the pagans to Christianity. He seems to have been very successful during his lifetime, though there were many other missionaries in Ireland. He helped to organize the Church in Ireland and is supposed to have traveled to Rome to seek the Pope’s assistance in this endeavor.

According to legend, Patrick died on March 17, so that date has become his feast day. He has never been officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. He became known as a saint long before the modern procedure for canonization was developed. He is obviously the patron saint of Ireland, and also Nigeria, Montserrat, engineers, paralegals, and the dioceses of New York, Boston, and Melbourne.

There are many legends about St. Patrick. The most widely known is that he chased all the snakes out of Ireland, thus ruining the local ecology. Another is that he used the example of the three-leaved shamrock to illustrate the trinity.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all the Irish, and Irish at heart, out there!

Sorry about the green text. I couldn’t resist.

Pi Day

For all of the nerds out there, including me, today is International Pi Day, the day when we celebrate our favorite mathematical constant. Pi Day is best celebrated by pi memorization contests, walking in circles, and, of course, eating pies, or is it pis? I think I will celebrate by writing a little about pi.

Pi or π is, as everyone should know, the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. Pi is an irrational number. By this, they do not mean that pi makes no sense, but rather that pi is a constant that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers. Numbers like 2 or .445 or 1/2 can be expressed as a ratio of two integers and so are rational. Numbers like pi or the square root of any number that is not a perfect square, the square root of 2, for instance, are irrational. An irrational number expressed in decimal form never ends or repeats but continues to infinity. Thus, there can never be a last digit of pi.

The symbol π was first used by the mathematician William Jones in 1706 and was popularized by another mathematician, Leonhard Euler. They chose π, the Greek equivalent of the Latin letter p, because it is the first letter of the word periphery. Π, by the way, is not pronounced “pie” in Greek but “pee”, just like our p. I don’t think that international “pee” day would be nearly so appealing.

Although the symbol for pi is relatively recent, the concept is very old. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians knew about it. Pi is even mentioned in the Bible.

²³He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits^[o] to measure around it. ²⁴Below the rim, gourds encircled it—ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. (1 Kings 7:23-24)

Properly speaking, the line around the “Sea” should have been 31.5 cubits, but the ancient Hebrews were not very knowledgeable about geometry and measuring techniques were crude.

There is no particular reason to calculate pi to so many digits. No conceivable application of pi would possibly take more than 40 digits. Still, the challenge of calculating pi to the farthest digit possible has been an irresistible one for mathematicians over the years.

Around 250 BC, Archimedes was the first mathematician to seriously try to calculate pi. He used a geometric method of drawing polygons inside and outside a circle and measuring their perimeters. By using polygons with more and more sides, he was able to calculate pi with more precision and ended up determining the value of pi as somewhere between 3.1408 and 3.1429. Archimedes’s method was used in the West for more than eighteen hundred years. The Chinese and Indians used similar methods. The best result using the geometric method was the calculation of pi to 38 digits in 1630.

With the development of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the 1660s, it was possible to calculate pi using infinite series, or the sum of the terms of an infinite sequence. The best calculations with these methods were done by the mathematician Zacharias Daze, who calculated pi to 200 places in 1844, and William Shanks, who spent fifteen years calculating pi to 707 digits. Unfortunately, he made a mistake with the 528th digit. Meanwhile, in 1761, Johann Heinrich Lambert proved that pi is irrational.

Computers made the calculation of pi much faster so pi could be calculated to more digits. ENIAC calculated pi to 2037 places in 1949. This record didn’t last long. A million digits were reached in 1970. As of 2011, pi has been calculated to 10,000,000,000,050 places.

Pi is not just used in geometry. There are many applications of pi in the fields of statistics, mechanics, thermodynamics, cosmology, and many others. Here is a list of just some of the formulae that use pi. It seems you can find pi everywhere.

With that in mind, then, happy Pi Day! For your enjoyment, here are the first thousand digits of pi.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

  58209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679

  82148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128

  48111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196

  44288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091

  45648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273

  72458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436

  78925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094

  33057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548

  07446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912

  98336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798

  60943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132

  00056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872

  14684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235

  42019956112129021960864034418159813629774771309960

  51870721134999999837297804995105973173281609631859

  50244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881

  71010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303

  59825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778

  18577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989

The Revenge of the Elite

I have just started to read Dean Koontz’s latest work, The Friend of the Family. In an early chapter, there is a subplot involving eugenics. Naturally, the good people in the novel oppose the idea. As I read this, I wondered if their negative reaction to eugenics was perhaps an anachronism. I recall that eugenics was a very popular idea at the time. I did a bit of research on the eugenics movement to see if Koontz’s idealism had not gotten in the way of accurate characterization.

The eugenics movement was based on the belief that the human species can and should be improved by selective breeding. Persons deemed fit should be encouraged to have many children. Persons deemed unfit should be discouraged from breeding. This might not seem controversial at first. However, the trouble was that the unfit category encompassed not only those with hereditary diseases, but also people with a family history of substance abuse, low intelligence, criminality, or even poverty. In effect, the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society were targeted. If persuasion didn’t work, forced sterilization was the next step.

Eugenics was popular across the political and social spectrum. It was a mainstream notion. Nearly every one of importance supported at least the premises on which the ideology was based. Liberals believed eugenics would help the poor by weeding out the unfit among them. Conservatives liked the idea of breeding out the criminal element in society. Eugenics was popular among many socialists.

Yet, Koontz’s portrayal of his heroes opposed to eugenics was not wholly unrealistic. There was opposition. The Roman Catholic Church, to its credit, was the most prominent institution to consistently oppose eugenics. The Church held that eugenics violated natural law and human dignity by turning means instead of beings created in the image of God. Other Christian groups opposed eugenics, though not so consistently. Classical liberals saw eugenics, particularly the coercion, as a violation of civil rights. A few socialists noted that eugenicists targeted the disadvantaged. Marxists focused more on revolution than breeding to create their utopia.

So Koontz’s characters could have been among the minority who opposed eugenics, especially if they were Catholic. Koontz did not specify their religious affiliation in the novel. Koontz himself is Catholic, and it would be natural for the characters he creates to default to Catholic. Still, eugenics was not the belief of a fanatical minority of intellectuals, as one might gather from the novel. Eugenics was mainstream.

It seems to me that the greatest evil of eugenics is that it denies agency to the individual. Essentially, eugenics says you are what your genes are. The individual with a family history of criminality, drug abuse, or any other trait deemed unfit is not responsible for his behavior. He has no opportunity to become more than his heredity. Still less to raise children to overcome their heritage. He is a rotten branch to be cut off.

Eugenics disparaged the concept of individual rights. What value are the wishes of a single human being compared to the grand project of improving the whole species? Individuals do not matter. Only the race as a whole matters. What does it matter that a person judged unfit does not agree to sterilization? He must be compelled for the good of humanity. Of course, it is a small elite that decides what traits are unfit.

It seems to me that many of the other ideologies at the time of The Friend of the Family shared this denial of individual agency and disparagement of individual rights. Marxism or Communism gained some mainstream popularity during the Depression when it seemed to many that capitalism had failed. Marxist ideology is not based on biology but on economics.

Marxism holds that your class determines what you are. A person’s behavior is based on class interests and his economic circumstances. A member of the oppressor class, the bourgeoisie at this time is always bad, regardless of individual virtue. A member of the oppressed class, the proletariat, is always good, regardless of individual viciousness. Individual rights and welfare do not matter when considered against the needs of the working class and the revolution. For all the talk of the liberation of the working class, it is a small elite of professional revolutionaries, the vanguard, that determines the interests of the working class.

Another popular contemporary ideology, Fascism, fits the pattern. Again, there is the disregard of individual agency. Here, it is the nation that determines what characteristics you possess. In Fascism, the needs and rights of the individual are outweighed by the needs of the nation, as determined by the ruling elite.

These ideologies all developed around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These authoritarian ideologies based on the rule of the elite seem to be a sharp reversal of the trends toward liberalism of the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries. The century of liberalism was the century of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. For the first time in history, people were considered to have rights as individuals. All men were declared to be equal, with the right to alter or abolish governments that did not respect their rights.

This liberal ideal grew across Europe and the Americas, and eventually even in Africa and Asia, until by the beginning of the twentieth century, even the most autocratic regimes had to make concessions. Yet, at the moment liberalism seemed to be on the verge of becoming triumphant, the intellectual elite turned on the ideal. Why? What social conditions or sickness of the soul caused this reversion to the old idea that some human beings are destined to rule and others to be ruled? In fact, the new ideologies were more despotic than the old ancien regime. At least the kings of old did not view their subjects as mere things to be molded at will.

One reason might be the decline of old certainties. Several developments in the second half of the nineteenth century brought into question ideas that Westerners had held for many centuries. Darwinism and higher Biblical criticism increased doubts about Christianity. The effects of industrialization caused people to question whether laissez-faire capitalism was really the best system. Liberalism itself eroded older social and political hierarchies. Perhaps this led to a vacuum that the new ideologies could fill.

But I think there is more to it. Liberalism, with its emphasis on human rights and democracy, has little place for a hereditary or permanent elite. It has little attraction for would-be members of such an elite. The older conservative elites fought against liberalism throughout the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they had lost the battle. The new elites, brought to power by liberalism, had no intention of losing power through it. So all the more authoritarian ideologies of the early twentieth century were, in a sense, the revenge of the elite. A bid by an elite to maintain power under the guise of revolutionary change. They would continue to guide humanity either through eugenics or authoritarian politics.

This analysis may not seem relevant a century later. Fascism and eugenics have been entirely discredited in our time. Marxism has been mostly abandoned except in a few obscure corners of the globe and on American college campuses. It might be that the revenge of the elite has failed. Yet this is not the case. The dumbed-down, bastardized version of Marxism called political correctness or wokeness, while suffering some recent setbacks, is all too prevalent in our institutions.

Still, the democratization of information, which began with the invention of the Internet, is a powerful solvent of orthodoxy of every sort. For the first time in human history, ordinary people across the world can exchange information without a gatekeeper to tell us what to think. Will this be enough to spread freedom across the globe and defeat the plans of those who would be our betters? Time will tell.

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The Guards’ Report

The Great Commission

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Mark 15

The Crucifixion of Jesus

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Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King

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