I chanced upon this beautiful church building while wandering around a secluded part of Warsaw.
Love the church bells that ring out in Warsaw:
The church exterior was generally impressive all over:
With meaningful war memorials:
I didn't take any pictures inside, because, sadly, it was very bare, Vatican II style.
One of the few lines of small business that seem to have survived the current virus/almost lockdown situation quite well are the flower shops in Warsaw.
Passed this small theatre while near metro Politechnika on Saturday:
Every time I pass the place, I think that I should go and see something there.
Little chance of doing that now, of course.
I picked up my copy of Kenneth D. Whitehead's One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic in of all places Salt Lake City back in 2008.
I'm currently reading the Douay-Rheims Bible (the Old and New Testaments simultaneously), and find Whitehead's book a wonderful accompaniment to the New Testament. The information about early saints such as St. Ignatius of Antioch having known and continued the work of the apostle John is absolutely fascinating.
Whitehead's book is also fascinating for going into detail about how early Church councils (Nicaea and Constantinople) defend and promulgate the fundamental Catholic teaching of the Trinity. Tied in with this, the book is a wonderful account of how the ancient Catholic Church was born from the New Testament and how it came to flourish inside the Roman empire after three centuries of awful persecution.
I'm just short of being 100 pages into the book now, and can't wait to see what the remaining 200 pages or so have to hold.
While following the extreme left protests around Warsaw for the last five weeks, I've become more and more curious about the music vans that accompany the pro-abortion ideologue/ringleader, Marta Lempart.
For me, it is the music vans that prompt some disenchanted young adults (often left-wing university students) and bored teenagers (with no school to go to) to traipse round Warsaw in zombie-type states rather than the often foul-mouthed rhetoric of Lempart herself.
On Saturday November 28th, I finally found myself with the opportunity to look at one of Lempart's music vans up close,
while Lempart and her extreme left entourage were trying to create chaos and disorder down near metro Politechnika, just a short stroll outside Warsaw city centre.
Moreover, it gave me the opportunity to see the kinds of characters who work closely alongside Lempart.
Would've loved to have seen what was going on behind the curtains in Lempart's music van, but I guess that her crew would've tried to kill me if I'd poked my head inside.
Still, members of the Lempart roadshow kept going in and out of the van.
All the while, Lempart was keeping the crowd 'entertained' with all kinds of speeches and pretend fainting and drama outside.
But her music van crew got concerned that a few members of the crowd were taking more of an interest in the music van itself, and at some point, they felt a need to surround and guard the van.
I think it was a case of a mob on the hunt feeling that they were now the ones being hunted.
And, of course, the music van registration plate was now covered up.
The cardboard placard is a play on Descartes' famous quote, the adaptation here being "I think, I feel, I decide" (my admittedly not too brilliant Polish can come in useful from time to time).
At one point, the music van had Sham 69's 'If the Kids Are United' blaring out. I remember this tune from being an early teenager in the late 1970s in north-west England, it was a big favourite with the Old Trafford football crowd, of course. Lempart's crew used it as a simple mantra for their sheepish crowd to hum and jump along to. This seemed to be the modus operandi of the Lempart crew, playing a kind of Pied Piper role.
Was near Warsaw Central train station, when I saw that free hot soup was being given out to whoever wanted/needed it:
Couldn't work out which organisation was giving out the soup:
But plenty of people, mainly men, were lining up for it:
I bought Charles Taylor's A Secular Age more or less when it first came out in 2007.
Until recently, I'd just dipped into the book if I'd wanted or needed to look at anything specific. However, now I find myself reading it from cover to cover and the book is absolutely fascinating.
I'm now 100 or so pages into the book, which is kind of telling the story of the change in Western human consciousness from the Catholic worldview of the year 1500 up to the exclusive humanist ideologies of the contemporary world, and how we got there. In other words, the book is showing in massive philosophical and theological detail how medieval people were porous selves open to the magical enchantment of the external world, and how over the last 500 years, people have come to be buffered/ more introverted selves lacking in piety and enchantment.
So far, Taylor has shown how the growth of the mendicant orders; pre-Reformation unrest; the Reformation; the Counter-Reformation; the detachment of nature/science from religiosity/theology etc. gradually contributed to the growth of what would become the contemporary, buffered, materialist mind. One thing that I found especially interesting is that animals were allowed inside Catholic churches before the Counter-Reformation. Of course, I can't wait to read the rest of the book.
