Marking this Day

[warch]

OK, I was all righteous and not gonna watch TV last night, but when it got later, well...I snapped on Bravo and caught a very well done film. An articulate, thoughtful piece. I recomend trying to catch it if you havent yet.

Three Weeks After Paradise
Playwright Israel Horovitz's moving monologue about his family's experiences after the World Trade Center attacks. Commercial-free presentation on September 11; also airs September 13, 28

It began as a stage reading, then was made into the film. It has also aired on German TV. I thought it was great.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally posted by Griff


Take it from a fellow 2nd amendment defender, you don't help the cause when you confuse a Clint Eastwood movie with reality.

The clergyman I had in mind was a 17th-century Scot. He preached with a brace of pistols on the altar during the period when a revised prayerbook was being introduced as The Official Word. It didn't sit too well with certain of his parishioners, who were inclined, in the words of a certain Irish song, to "make some comment upon it." I can't narrow it down much tighter than that without finding the reference again.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I was flipping through Fitzroy Maclean's A Concise History of Scotland when I came upon the pistol-packing clergyman. He was the then Bishop of Brechin.

Born in Scotland but raised English at a time when that counted for quite a bit, King Charles I had gone south at age three and did not return to Scotland until his eighth year on England's throne, in 1633. Charles had succeeded the religiously quaint and openly homosexual James VI and I -- notoriously "the wisest fool in Christendom." These monarchs were thoroughly Anglican, of the Episcopalian persuasion, Book Of Common Prayer and all, in a time when the Scots were were going Calvinist or otherwise Presbyterian. Charles I couldn't see Presbyterianism for sour owl schist, and sought to convert the Scots from it by force of law, making repeated demands and decrees. Scotland took a thoroughly dim view of this, and in the 17th century taking a dim view generally meant dirks drawn. The entire century was wholly intemperate about religious denominations; Catholicism had been in retreat from its previous catholicity throughout Europe for some hundred years, and the Protestants were going for each others' jugulars over who was backsliding into Popery or not. It was altogether too exciting a time to be a clergyman.

So Charles the First of England, never known for long-sighted wisdom, then repeatedly stuck his oar into Scotland because they weren't being Episcopalian enough for him. He was gonna put them on the Prayer Book, and an Episcopalian one at that, or he was by God going to know the reason why. It became clear that the English Prayer Book wouldn't be accepted by the Scots, so a Revised Prayer Book was drawn up and read from for the first time in the bishopric of Edinburgh at its cathedral, St. Giles, in July of 1637.

I don't know if they actually got through the service. Angry rumbles became shouting became disorder became violence. Chucking assorted furniture and other missiles at clerics speedily became a regular feature of devotions in various cities. It was right about this time, Fitzroy Maclean wrote, that "...the Bishop of Brechin, for his part, found it advisable to conduct Divine Services with a pair of loaded pistols laid in front of him in full sight of the congregation." Nothing about a hollowed-out Bible in Maclean, though.

Maclean goes on to report that nothing in these excitements swayed King Charles. The dust wasn't about to settle yet.

[Griff]

Interesting stuff at any rate.