Sunday, June 17, 2007

Notes and Links

* Mocedades sings Thomas Aquinas's Pange Lingua (ht: The Dawn Patrol), circa 1969. Although you may not recall it at once, you certainly have heard of them before; Mocedades was a Spanish Basque singing group most famous in the English-speaking world for their song, Eres Tu (with Amaya Uranga singing the main part in such a way as to make it hers for all time). For Pange Lingua, this later one is, I think, a slightly better rendition by Mocedades.

* One of my favorite songs in French. Cerena did a French/Italian duet with Nek that was decent as well, although I actually prefer the lyrics of this song in Spanish, which seem to me (for reasons I can't quite put my finger on) to have a slightly sadder tone to them.

* Eugene Volokh has a nice paper on the meaning of 'free state' in the eighteenth century (PDF), in order to clarify what the second amendment to the U.S. constitution means when it starts out, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state".

* Presbyterian poet Ruth Bell Graham died recently at age 87. If you want to sum her up, I think Frederica Mathewes-Green did the best job of it. Noel Piper gives a sample of her poetry. Lisa at "Of all the liars in the world..." gives another specimen. My suspicion is that as a talented, underappreciated poet her name will outlast her husband's; and perhaps that is as it should be, given that she was so often eclipsed by him in the public eye while she was alive. God bless her; and may He through her work bless many generations to come.

* Sometimes a photograph is taken that will mark the memory of a generation. There was a photograph in The Tennessean of Christian Golczynski receiving the American flag from his father's coffin that is likely to mark ours.

* Ever wondered what the world's largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island is? Now you know.

* Rebecca talks about Sacred Harp singing.

* BK addresses a common misunderstanding of a claim made by Francis Schaeffer about Thomas Aquinas (whom that misunderstanding also misunderstands).

* Still listening to John Farrell's Doctor Janeway's Plague.

* Chaim Saiman has an interesting paper discussing the diverging legal theories of Jesus and the Rabbis as representative of more general differences in jurisprudence.