NOVAE MILITIAE

I recommend that everyone who reads this blog rent this movie.  It stars Richard Farnsworth, who was dying of cancer when he made this film (and who tragically took his own life later because he suffered so).  Farnsworth was an actor from another realm, and  I mourned his passing.

The film, rated G, is about Americana and grace, and there are certain scenes that are full of grace.  I think especially of the scenes with the teenage runaway and the conversation with the Catholic priest.  The film was directed by David Lynch, known for his offbeat productions, but one reviewer called this movie his most "heartwarming" one.  And indeed it is.  It is as if Lynch got clean and sober, took his anti-psychotic meds, and then got religion before he made this film.  There is still the occasional signature, like the scene between the twin brothers who repaired Straight's rider mower.  (I'll say no more.)  There is no question that this was Lynch's.  But it is radically unlike all his others.  And God speaks through it a message of Christian love, forgiveness and reconciliation. 

http://www.lynchnet.com/sstory/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/02/AR2006050201873.html

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2006/003/18.34.html

The concluding paragraphs of the two articles:

(WaPo): Driving away from the house of the Crunchy Cons, go ahead and eat the slice you took along in a paper towel. Eat it before the first stop sign. It is warm and comfortable. It's the bread of the new right. God, we think, merging onto the freeway, those people sure seem happy.

(Xty. Today): Dreher nods in the direction of another, more deeply Western source when in his final chapter he points us toward St. Benedict, who in an earlier age helped keep alive "the light of knowledge, of faith, of virtue, through centuries of chaos and despair." But with the same hope and for the same reason we might also look to the early Franciscans. With their devotion to radical charity and self-abandonment, Francis and his band sought, in Chesterton's marvelous phrase, "to astonish and awaken the world." And awaken it they did—one lasting sign of which is what Chesterton calls the "Catholic Democratic" tradition, so crucial to the story of the West.

If the awakening and renewal Dreher longs for is to occur in our midst, it will surely be because somewhere some people dared to embody a moral vision deeply sacramental and sacrificial at once. It will not be because they chose to be, simply, "liberals" or "conservatives."

Well, it's actually the bread of the Old Right -- the Very Old Right, in fact -- but we chose to overlook the WaPo's poor choice of terms.  The main point I want to make is that the assessment we find in these articles is quite different than we hear from some of CC's shrill Catholic detractors.

http://www.landinstitute.org/

I've linked this site over on my Resources page under Christian Agrarianism and Distributism. I enjoin you to devote some time exploring it. Here is the Land Institute's Mission Statement:

The Land Institute has worked for over 20 years on the problem <