A Baroque Birthday

Johann Sebastian Bach
March 31, 1685 - July 28, 1750

"To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time."                                 ~ Pablo Casals

"If Bach is not in Heaven.....I am not going!"                           ~ William F. Buckley

The Bravest

"US Soldier in Baghdad," photo by Karen Ballard

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it."

~ Thucydides (460-395 BC)

Fanaticism

"All men harbor fears and doubts. We struggle to overcome them. Fanaticism springs from the effort to deny them."

~Professor Conrad Woolsey in THE ASSASSIN LOTUS

The Big Picture

Martyrs

Icon paintings of the infamous beheading of St. John the Baptist are a long tradition among the Eastern Orthodox. Recently the Coptic Egyptian Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles, Southern California and Hawaii asked digital artist Tony Rezk to make an icon of the 21 Coptic Egyptian men who were beheaded by ISIS in Libya.

(click to enlarge)

As Father Peter Carota describes: "The Icon shows them kneeling near the Mediterranean Sea before they were beheaded for Christ. They are in the orange jumpsuits they died in and have red sashes to show that they shed their blood for Jesus. The angels are showering down on them the crown of martyrdom.  Many verbally professed Jesus as they died." 

Read an interview with the artist HERE.

Spirituality

"Spirituality is like a bird.
If you cage it in too much, 
it is stifled.
If you let down all guards, 
it flies away.

~Rabbi Yisrael Salanter

The Final Battle

The dreams of the Islamic State go far beyond a caliphate. They're fighting for the End of the (Christian) World.

As Graeme Wood explained in his recent cover story for The Atlantic, ISIS holds “a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.” His use of the term 'apocalypse' is not hyperbole. ISIS believes their army is the vanguard of the End Times, ushering in the long-prophesied redeemer of Islam, a Messianic figure known as the Mahdi, who will finally appear to rid the world of evil and make the entire planet Muslim.

The prophecy of the Mahdi is believed by hundreds of millions of Muslims. Wood’s article in The Atlantic finally brought this to the attention of the mainstream press, but an American scholar named TimothyFurnish has been warning about the dangers of “Mahdism” for decades. He says belief in the Mahdi has a long history within Islam: 

“Apocalyptic traditions and movements, led by a Muslim claiming to be the End Time Mahdi ("rightly-guided one"), are not new with ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusrah or any of the other modern groups proclaiming belief in such. They go back to the early days of Islam, and are intrinsically connected to the more general Muslim practice of jihad, or holy war against 'infidels.'"

Furnish holds a PhD in Islamic, World and African history, is a former US Army Arabic linguist and officer, and currently works as an author, Islamic World analyst and consultant to the US government and military. His informative website, MahdiWatch.org, was a great resource for me in writing The Assassin Lotus, which involves a cult of Mahdist assassins seeking to trigger the "Final Battle." Here is Furnish explaining the religious basis for that fight:

“A very important point which no one in the analytical, and few in the journalistic, community wants to admit (hence State's Marie Harf adducing phantoms such as poverty-driven jihad): the ISIS Caliph and his minions refer to the United States of America as 'defender of the cross.' Not 'proponent of Ayn Rand,' 'guardian  of the Enlightenment' or 'warden of Jeffersonian democracy.' Caliph al-Baghdadi and his decapitating/immolating rank-and-file forthrightly (if inconveniently) spell out exactly why they hate us: because, in their eyes, we are a Christian nation. There are those who will dismiss this as a mere progagandistic trope. But they would be wrong to do so. IS, along with Boko Haram and al-Qa`ida and Jabhat al-Nusra and the Taliban (to name only a few of the Islamic legions), as well as the non-terrorist but Muslim fundamentalist movements such as Wahhabism, Deobandism and Salafism, all view the world through a simplistic but legitimately Islamic lens of Dar al-Islam v. Dar al-harb: the 'house of Islam' v. the 'house of war.'  And for 14 centuries the vanguard of the latter has been Christendom. Some decry pointing this out as crass  'Crusaderism.'

But as that combat veteran J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out--via his main female protagonist, Éowyn, 'it needs but one foe to breed a war, not two'--and when that enemy declares its war on us in religious terms, why should we pretend otherwise?”