Magic Statistics

Two days ago, I posted an excerpt from an Advent essay that I saw at the Bruderhof Communities web site. This morning I received an e-mail saying the site had been closed without warning and asking me to publicise another website called Bring Back Bruderhof, which is asking Bruderhof to re-establish their site. This was news to me, but I checked and indeed the site has been closed. The home page shows only a mailing address and telephone number.

The Bruderhof Communities website had much inspirational and thought-provoking Christian writing. If you benefited from what was posted there, please visit Bring Back Bruderhof.

C.S. Lewis wrote an imaginative essay about two groups of Niatirbians who celebrated two winter festivals which were called Exmas and Crissmas. Here's an excerpt:

In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound, (the Niatirbians) have a great festival called Exmas, and for 50 days they prepare for it (in the manner which is called,) in their barbarian speech, the Exmas Rush.

When the day of the festival comes, most of the citizens, being exhausted from the (frenzies of the) Rush, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much as on other days, and crowning themselves with crowns of paper, they become intoxicated. And on the day after Exmas, they are very grave, being internally disordered by the supper and the drinking and the reckoning of how much they have spent on gifts and on the wine.

(Now a) few among the Niatirbians have also a festival, separate and to themselves, called Crissmas, which is on the same day as Exmas. And those who keep Crissmas, doing the opposite to the majority of Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast.

At least one Niatirbian writer maintained that the two festivals were actually one and the same. Lewis thought not.

Read the whole thing. (This link points to a column in The Denver Catholic Register containing the excerpt I posted. After a Google search, I found Lewis's complete essay posted here.)

via Ignatius Insight Scoop.

The UK Government has not allocated any money to support the British Olympic Association in its work of developing and training athletes for the upcoming games.

The association was shocked that there was no funding announcement from the chancellor in his pre-budget statement and claims it is being hampered in its stated ambition of moving Britain into fourth place in the medals table. It is seeking in the region of an extra £50m a year.

Mick Hume is not surprised.

London’s Olympic bid never had anything much to do with winning gold medals. From the starting pistol, it was more of a [Millennium] Dome-style attempt to use recreation as an instrument of social engineering, depicting the Olympics as a means towards urban regeneration, saving the environment, combating social exclusion, reducing child obesity, fighting crime: sort of sport-for-anything-but-sport’s-sake.

The leading politicians in the Olympic campaign do not have a sport-loving bone in their bodies, particularly when it comes to sporting excellence. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, played a central role in teaching schools about "inclusive sports days" where nobody loses.

I know the Olympics have on occasion recently departed from their original ideal of hard work and honest competition, but they still have winners and losers.

They think it tops the list of children's books.

CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is the single most important book for a child to read, according to a poll of specialist children's librarians.

Interesting contrast between children's librarians and some political columnists, for example, this one and that one.