Last movie you saw?

[Matto]

I downloaded Tokyo Story and Diary of a Chambermaid.

I hope you enjoy Tokyo Story. It is not a very well known movie. Most regular people do not know about it. On IMBD it only has around 31,000 user ratings while The Godfather has over 1.2 million user ratings. But it is critically acclaimed and loved by directors and foreign film buffs. In the 2012 Sight and Sound magazine poll of movie directors' top 100 movies, Tokyo Story was actually voted the best film of all time by the famous directors polled, beating out The Godfather and every other movie.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/directors

[Kaesekopf]

Although he does not discuss it, I'm convinced he thought 'his own' would receive correction in humility.  It's obvious he's astounded at the worldliness of many traditional Catholics, thus, "commendable zeal" is an excellent description, PDR.

Lol, I like you, PED, but this just makes me laugh.

"He thought they'd listen to a random crank!  Why are they so worldly!"


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[PerEvangelicaDicta]

Although he does not discuss it, I'm convinced he thought 'his own' would receive correction in humility.  It's obvious he's astounded at the worldliness of many traditional Catholics, thus, "commendable zeal" is an excellent description, PDR.

Lol, I like you, PED, but this just makes me laugh.

"He thought they'd listen to a random crank!  Why are they so worldly!"


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From your perspective, Kaes, that is pretty funny and made ME laugh!

[Chestertonian]

Now I am intrigued.

Are you intrigued? I guess how I said that would make people interested. I will tell you one of my ideas that I think is strange but not some of the more extreme ones that I said are not appropriate to talk about publicly. One idea is about priests and penance. I believe traditional priests should do serious penances like the saints and the early Christians did. Things like fasting, wearing hairshirts, using the discipline, etc.

I'm sure there are priests who do this they probably keep it private.  Many traditional priests suffer in other ways without having to take on these practices.

The CFR priests I know, while novus ordo, fast q lot, sleep without mattresses, and don't have warm sgowers

[Chestertonian]

i think most catholics would agree that there are some forms of dance that are sexualized and sinful.  however dance has always survived in the context of catholic cultures through folk dancing as well as stuff like ballet and ballroom dance traditions.  on the scale of Irish step dancing to twerking, at what point is dancing sinful?  there doesnt seem to be any hard and fast line to me.  what consitutes "sensual" dancing  Back in the day my wife and I used to go salsa and merengue dancing at a club that used to have live music on the weekends.  last year for our anniversary she got me a gift certificate for wheelchair ballroom dancing lessons but we havent used it yet. 

[Matto]

I'm sure there are priests who do this they probably keep it private.  Many traditional priests suffer in other ways without having to take on these practices.

The CFR priests I know, while novus ordo, fast q lot, sleep without mattresses, and don't have warm sgowers

That is good to know. I am sure there are some good priests out there who do penances for their flock. Even Pope John Paul II who is not a hero for most of us here was greatly impressed with the life of the Cure of Ars and at times he would use the discipline and scourge himself at night before he went to bed. So such penances are not unheard of today.

[Kaesekopf]

Although he does not discuss it, I'm convinced he thought 'his own' would receive correction in humility.  It's obvious he's astounded at the worldliness of many traditional Catholics, thus, "commendable zeal" is an excellent description, PDR.

Lol, I like you, PED, but this just makes me laugh.

"He thought they'd listen to a random crank!  Why are they so worldly!"


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk

From your perspective, Kaes, that is pretty funny and made ME laugh!

That's my goal

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[Bernadette]

I downloaded Tokyo Story and Diary of a Chambermaid.

Bernadette, would you be so kind as to briefly contrast old and new B&B?  New one is really hyped.  It's hard to trust MSM reviews 

My mindset is if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Nothing wrong with the new one, per se, I just prefer the old one because it's the one I grew up with.

[Mono no aware]

i think most catholics would agree that there are some forms of dance that are sexualized and sinful.  however dance has always survived in the context of catholic cultures through folk dancing as well as stuff like ballet and ballroom dance traditions.  on the scale of Irish step dancing to twerking, at what point is dancing sinful?  there doesnt seem to be any hard and fast line to me.  what consitutes "sensual" dancing  Back in the day my wife and I used to go salsa and merengue dancing at a club that used to have live music on the weekends.  last year for our anniversary she got me a gift certificate for wheelchair ballroom dancing lessons but we havent used it yet.

When you say "dance has always survived in Catholic cultures," you probably mean that it has always survived after the strictures against dancing were relaxed.  From the testimony of the Early Church Fathers who addressed dancing, it seems that all dancing was considered sinful.  They appear to have been wondering, in the context of Christian dignity, meekness, and decorum, what the point was in moving and jerking your body around to music like a fool (or, worse, like a stripteaser).  For them dancing was part and parcel of the secular pagan worldly culture they were seeking to respectfully keep themselves apart from. 

Things like ballet and ballroom dancing did not come along until much later.  Maybe "Irish folk dancing" existed in some form, but it probably wasn't cute little kids high-stepping about with their arms at their sides.  At that point, the Celts were painting their bodies and (if Julius Caesar is to be believed) burning people and animals alive in wicker men.  It was the age of the Druids.  They were a dark, mystical, and untamed race; to some extent they still are.  We can only wonder what their primitive dances were like.

[Carleendiane]

I think it is quite obvious by watching dancing , what is sensual and what is not. There are many ethnic dances that are truly not sensual. It's not hard to sense sensuality in dance. Clogging is not sensual. Celtic  dance, which many children and teenagers participate in, for the most part, is not sensual. Not saying these types cannot be sexualized. Any type can be, if so desired. A baby, or toddler will move their bodies to certain rhythms. Thats a natural response to pleasing and joyful tunes. Is that wrong? My brain says not. The sensuality is present not only by certain tunes, but by the dress and posture. When I watch the Dutch kids or Irish kids dance I do not see sensuality. I see energy and joy. Possibly the harm may come in simply by performing with an audience. It could be that a body moving to music as in performance for an audience is just wrong. Any display to please onlookers could be a type of vanity. Having people watch your body movements could be where the problem lies. A child or adult could learn to like being watched and to desire being the object of attention. Which obviously could be harmful to the soul.

[Chestertonian]

I think there are plenty of reasons to enjoy dance as a performing art  other than wanting to  draw attention to yourself.  My son wanted to do Russian ballet so he can learn to throw girls in the air


A lot of the appeal is in the opportunity for self expression  you get to play a role in telling a story through dance.  My son is  eccitedbecaisegoing to be a mouse in the nutcracker.  No one watches the nutcracker for the mice though

[Carleendiane]

Ches, I was thinking more about young girls, and didn't make the post with boys in mind. Girls are more prone to display and like being seen. Looking pretty and being admired. This is what I would caution about. Even little girls can be terribly vain. Activities that feed the appetite for attention can create more appetite for attention. Boys are wired differently of course. Boys may do these things purely out of love of music and movement. Quite often, there is little vanity involved. Females learn to display themselves for notice. I understand they are not calculating their activities to get that attention. That they too love music and movement, but many, not realizing it, get a lot of satisfaction from the attention these activities naturally provide. Is this bad? I guess you know your child. Only you know whether or not they are susceptible to flattery, compliments, admiration, being seen and complimented. I'm not saying all girls are like this, some are real freebirds, just enjoying the moment and not looking for anything, but the joys of movement. Others are hungry for attention and have such craving for being front and center.

I had one daughter in particular who was so terribly hungry for admiration and would do anything to get it. I saw it,  but didn't know what to do for it. I knew I had failed her when it came to helping her feel confident and secure in her own skin. The things she would do for attention cringed me out, but at the same time showed me how certain activities, instead of building her confidence, only fed the beast. It wasn't until she was in her late teens that she was able to grasp her neediness as a child. Now she is a well formed stable confident adult, by the grace of God. But had she been allowed to flaunt herself, maybe a bad choice of word, and be in the limelight performing, well it would not have been good for her. It's a thin line sometimes between building self esteem and feeding the ego.

[Chestertonian]

Ches, I was thinking more about young girls, and didn't make the post with boys in mind. Girls are more prone to display and like being seen. Looking pretty and being admired. This is what I would caution about. Even little girls can be terribly vain. Activities that feed the appetite for attention can create more appetite for attention. Boys are wired differently of course. Boys may do these things purely out of love of music and movement. Quite often, there is little vanity involved. Females learn to display themselves for notice. I understand they are not calculating their activities to get that attention. That they too love music and movement, but many, not realizing it, get a lot of satisfaction from the attention these activities naturally provide. Is this bad? I guess you know your child. Only you know whether or not they are susceptible to flattery, compliments, admiration, being seen and complimented. I'm not saying all girls are like this, some are real freebirds, just enjoying the moment and not looking for anything, but the joys of movement. Others are hungry for attention and have such craving for being front and center.

I had one daughter in particular who was so terribly hungry for admiration and would do anything to get it. I saw it,  but didn't know what to do for it. I knew I had failed her when it came to helping her feel confident and secure in her own skin. The things she would do for attention cringed me out, but at the same time showed me how certain activities, instead of building her confidence, only fed the beast. It wasn't until she was in her late teens that she was able to grasp her neediness as a child. Now she is a well formed stable confident adult, by the grace of God. But had she been allowed to flaunt herself, maybe a bad choice of word, and be in the limelight performing, well it would not have been good for her. It's a thin line sometimes between building self esteem and feeding the ego.

yes, I suppose there may be some people who get into the performing arts due to a "need for attention" but at the same time, if you are that sort of person, performing arts seems like a healthy outlet for it, as opposed to something like sexual promiscuity, acting up in school and negative attention seeking at home. 

my wife and i went to laguardia arts, a high school for artsy fartsy kids.  There were a lot of melancholics there.  my wife majored in ballet and a lot of her friends have gone on to careers in dance and dance related fields like dance/movement therapy, dance education etc.  The amount of work it takes, and the stress on your body, is so intense that attention alone is not enough.  One of my physical therapists works weekends doing broadway shows, these dancers and actors dance onstage for an hour and come backstage and the PT tapes them up and puts their joints back together.  A significant # of these people have eating disorders because of the pressure to have almost no body fat

i've encountered a lot of dance schools that teach dance in a way that is very developmentally inappropriate and overly sexualized.  They tend to prey on the type of person you're describing--the kind of mother who wants to see her daughter wear a glittery pink tutu in a recital so she can post her picture on facebook.  the child takes lessons for a year or two then moves on to some other extracurricular when they realize that dancing is actually pretty hard and requires a lot of discipline.  I would avoid any school that has young kids doing recitals with ridiculous costumes.  Often these schools charge extra money for the recital, and another fee for the costume.  but if you're careful you can avoid these places.  a good dance school is process oriented and will not stress performance at a young age.  This also weeds out the kids whoare just in it because they want to put on a lace tutu and pretend to be a ballerina, and keeps it focused on learning proper technique so you can eventually work up to performing.  From what I've experienced in the performing arts, there is no shortage of opportunities to learn humility since you have to deal with criticism, rejection, and competition.  You have to perform in front of a jury who pick apart every note you play or every dance move you make. skinny, atheletic ballet dancers are told that they have to lose 5 pounds before the performance or they'll be cut.  it's pretty insane. 

[Gardener]

Gardener, I misunderstood you.  When you said the strictures against dancing and sensuous music were declared in the context of "pagan worship," I took it to mean that you thought the "nuance" was that the Church Fathers were only against such music and dancing if they were done as a tribute to some pagan deity, or at a pagan religious festival.

In fact, the links you provided are not nuanced but generalized.  St. Justin's hatred of "flutes that provoke to lustful movements" is put under the heading "Shameless practices of the Greeks."  Surely he didn't mean that these were shameless and vain for the Greeks but okay for Christians.  That would be the most absurd instance of relativism in Christian history.  Shamelessness and vanity are shamelessness and vanity, for pagan or Christian, Gentile or Jew.  He was reviling these practices of the Greeks because he found them abhorrent as a Christian.

The editor of St. Ambrose's sermon even summarizes it as "against dancing" (perhaps he missed the nuance), and the aspects of Salome's dance which St. Ambrose took exception to are not just the "striptease" aspects but the sensuous music and lustful movements as well.  But thank you for the link; this is a terrific phrase: "the reward of the dancer is the death of the prophet."  That's a beautiful aphorism.  Everything is contained within it on worldliness and holiness, the sacred and the profane.  That is the spirit that has gone.  And now we are left only with the letter—the endless parsing out of nuances and justifications; the dead burying their dead.

Incidentally, one of my favorite Sinéad O'Connor songs begins with the lyric, "I'm dancing the seven veils."  It's a real toe-tapper, infectious and sensuous.  There is probably someone out there with the casuistic genius to argue that St. Ambrose would've been fine with it.  But not me.

Um... St. Justin Martyr's Discourse to the Greeks is entirely about their gods... (and thus culture), so yeah, that does fall under paganistic worship. The NWE article on St. Justin Martyr categorizes his Discourse to the Greeks as: "Discourse to the Greeks - a discussion with Greek philosophers on the character of their gods;" Also, the section/chapter title is an add-in. It's not what he titled it, but the translator. So basing an argument off of that is like some Protestant touting a verse numbering difference as proof of Catholic destruction of the Scriptures. It's just asinine.


It would seem to me that there is a danger of viewing the condemnations of the past through the rose colored glasses of what we imagine that past to be. People tend to think of the past as some far more innocent time, so surely those condemnations are of things more innocent than we see today. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I'd say the past was far worse in a sense, and we are only now coming up to a reiteration of it.

In the CE entry on dancing, it states that even pagan emperors banned dances of the pagan variety. They displayed scenic reenactment of love stories and myth. Given their narrative, one could conclude they probably got really into it.

The CT today article states:

By contrast, dance played a prominent role in many pagan cults, such as the orgiastic cult of Dionysius. Because early Christians in no way wished to be associated with such rites, they most likely avoided dancing in church, though their intense, sometimes ecstatic worship (see Acts 2:43, 1 Cor. 14:26 for examples) may well have included motions of some sort. Christians avoided social dancing, too, as it was usually associated with drinking and sexual immorality in Roman culture.

And I'd add, not just drinking in a "few beers" sense, but drinking in the Animal House sense... John Belushi and the boys, all in togas. #College

The NWE article on St. Justin Martyr categorizes his Discourse to the Greeks as: "Discourse to the Greeks - a discussion with Greek philosophers on the character of their gods;"

This is Irish hard shoe/step dancing from 1963:


Hardly invoking to lust. Laughter, maybe... lust not so much.

Here's some boys of recent times demonstrating it:



A far cry from the fake curls wigs and high hemmed "skirts" that the wannabe Jon Benet Ramseys wear -- something anathema to Irish dancing traditionalists. (For that style was primarily for men in its inception).

The idea that they condemned things generally and not in the context of a culture or its associated practices is, in my opinion, dangerous ground upon which one may stomp their rhetorical foot. That's not to say that one should engage in jesuitical sophistry where one concludes, "well, they didn't condemn *this* dance, so it's ok." There are principles one can glean from their condemnations which could be applied. Irish step dancing wouldn't fall under those, nor would classical dances, and probably not the majority of folk dances as we might now see in a barn or parish hall.

I would agree that a huge amount of entertainment and cultural accoutrements therein today ARE illicit for Catholics. From the sex (likely acted out in fact) and murder of the Greek Theatre to Game of Thrones; from the Dionysian cult of specific intention to the Dionysian cult of "let us speedily use the creatures as in youth" (Wis 2) club culture; from the flutes of ancient sexual songs to the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" filth which passes for country music today.

But let us not engage in a puritanical calvinism from a misreading of the Fathers. Catholic culture has always included natural and supernatural joy, baptizing of elements which are not intrinsically evil from the converted pagans, etc. It would be a grave mistake to view the past (and its condemnations) through rose colored glasses and eschew the natural entertainment which humans engage in. If the Fathers are saying what you insist, then John Smith, John Calvin, etc. are of far more use to our salvation than we have been led to believe. On the risk that's true, I'll happily dance on their graves and wager it's entirely false.

Article on dancing w/ quotes:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/2008/august/did-early-christians-dance-in-church.html

CE entry on dancing:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04618b.htm

NWE: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Justin_Martyr

[Heinrich]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LEAiGDw220[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4AkcqTvjRo[/yt]