Schola Sancta Caecilia Stocking Stuffer

A year and a half ago, New Liturgical Movement did a small feature on the Schola Sancta Caecilia, a choir of young women who regularly sing at the Tridentine Mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their first recording, Stella Splendens, received a great deal of praise. I am confident their new album, In Bethlehem, will receive even more.

From the looks of it, the CD has not had its full launch through the usual channels, but I thought I should make all of you aware of it now so you can let the possibility of purchasing it percolate in your brains for a bit. All of the proceeds from the album will go to support Sacred Heart’s outstanding music program.

I will post more details on the disc when they become available. In the meantime, if you don’t yet own Stella Splendens, you can purchase and/or download it here. The album is also available on iTunes.

Ropke on Income Distribution

As I was sorting through some old boxes of books I came across my copy of Wilhelm Ropke’s Economics of the Free Society. In flipping through the pages I was surprised to discover a great deal of underlining and some marginal notes that I must have made several years ago when I was still enraptured by libertarianism lite. This paragraph, which I had bracketed, jumped out at me (pg. 210):

As a last resort, there is available the extra-economic correction of the distribution of income. This consists in the state awaiting the results of the economic distribution of income as they are crystallized in the market processes, and then correcting these results by taxing the rich and spending for the poor. As a matter of fact, a considerable portion of the public finances is devoted to such rectification, supplemented by the efforts of private welfare groups. Obviously, there are certain limits here which may not be overstepped if paralyzing effects on the process of production are to be avoided. It is, of course, clear that the state can go much further in employing such corrective measures the smaller are its expenditures for other purposes.

On Whether to Move Forward

Because it is snowing still in West Michigan and the icy streets have me trapped inside for the second day in a row I am going to break from the typically “detached” nature of this web-log for a bit. The good news is that this will provide a break for those of you who are tired of what seems like an endless series of posts on the Christian East. The bad news is that I am still neglecting the other topics that seem to draw the most readers here, namely Catholic Social Teaching (CST), traditional Catholicism, and liturgy. What can I say? Sometimes I bore even myself with the subjects that matter to me most.