little italy?
It is breakfast time outside the Grotta Azzurra on the corner of Mulberry and Broome. At an outside table Nick Bari nurses a smouldering cigar and reads the paper. All in black, Camile Garibaldi, the restaurant's manager, chats on the pavement with a friend before returning inside to see to customers.All is well this morning in Little Italy. Or so it would seem. Up and down Mulberry Street, the main thoroughfare where the tourists roam and the restaurants hawk their focaccias and linguine con le vongoles, banners on lamp-posts welcome first-timers to "Historic Little Italy". If you look down you will see that the posts have been freshly painted in red, white and green.
While small enclaves of ethnic identity pepper the street-maps of New York, few generate more affection than Little Italy. Its history as home to thousands of Italian immigrant families and – lest we forget – as stamping ground for the city's growling Mafia goons, still means it features high on the itineraries of Manhattan visitors.
But these days the neighbourhood finds itself in uncharacteristically defensive mode.
First came word from the US Census Bureau that Little Italy was, well, barely Italian any more...
The census data released earlier this year included one particularly startling fact. Of the 8,600 residents interviewed in the two-dozen-square block area of Lower Manhattan that might still be deemed Little Italy – determining its borders is another area of contention – not one was actually born in Italy. And descendants of immigrants from Italy (Italian-Americans) made up only 5 per cent of the area's population.
via The Independent.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:43 am
"In eternity when we see God face to face, either we will be those who love, or we will not be"
"Wherever the Christian life in commission or omission is good before God, the good thing about it is love"
"the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son, & the love of the Son for the Father, & it is this Spirit who is given to us"
"Not every man is in fact what it is decisive to be: Israel elect & loved of God... whose Head is Jesus Christ"
"If no one can hear without being a child of God, no one can be a child of God without ever hearing anew"
"Love to God consists decisively in recognising that we have nothing of our own to offer Him"
"Being loved by Him, and having Him as our Lord, we have no future apart from Him, and therefore no future without love"
"Thou shalt love can only mean: thou shalt not try to evade or escape thy future as opposed to thy present"
"where there is no otherness of the one who is loved, where the one who loves is alone, he does not really love"
"Our self-love can never be anything right or holy & acceptable to God. It is an affection which is the very opposite of love"
"The man who loves God will let himself be told & will himself confess that he is not in any sense righteous as one who loves"
"H.F. Kohlbrügge: the more the love of God increases in the heart, the more knowledge there is of inability... of unwillingness"
the sorrowful marks of the love of God in the children of God: http://goo.gl/2J9Fd
seeking & finding; finding & distancing : http://goo.gl/xzDks
"[Mt 5:48] is not a law which crushes & kills... it is the promise & form of the Gospel in the Law... news, glad & comforting"
feeling smugly superior reading barth on not making "certain anthropologico-theological presuppositions which are quite illegitimate"
"Love to God is the quintessence & hypostasised expression of what we know in a concretely perceptible & practical form as love to man"
"the commandment of love to the neighbour is enclosed by that of love to God. it is contained in it"
"we cannot understand the 'thou shalt' apart from the promise 'thou wilt'"
"if it is a real miracle that we can love God, it is necessarily a real miracle that we can love our neighbour"
on Luke 10:29 "this is a point at which Calvin's exegesis is obviously wide of the mark." obviously!
barth & the social gospel: http://goo.gl/VrW9o
"for it is this actual misery of man, the curse of an attempt to live which is fore-doomed to failure..."
"but this neighbor will cause me a really mortal headache" http://goo.gl/3tlVt
25,000 big macs
A retired prison guard ate his 25,000th Big Mac on Tuesday, 39 years to the day after eating his first ... nine. Don Gorske was honored after reaching the meaty milestone during a ceremony at a McDonald's in his hometown of Fond du Lac. Surely McDonald's most loyal customer, Guinness World Records recognized Gorske's feat three years and 2,000 Big Macs ago, and the 57-year-old says he has no desire to stop.
"I plan on eating Big Macs until I die," he said. "I have no intentions of changing. It's still my favorite food. Nothing has changed in 39 years. I look forward to it every day."
via sfgate.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 9:22 am
"Christians are sinners and... the Church is a Church of sinners... justified sinners... sanctified sinners"
"revelation is the removal of all religion"
"work is faith & faith is work"
"All things considered, the Christian life, the life of the children of God, consists in these two concepts of love & praise"
"The Christian life begins with love. It also ends with love. If we did not begin to love, we would not have come to faith"
"As Christians, we are continually asked about love, and in all that we can ever do or not do, it is the decisive question"
polygamy
He fell in love with his first wife because she was sincere and eager to please.
His second wife, a cousin, was irresistible because she did everything he wished and nothing he didn't.
"That alone made me love her."
His third wife won him because she submitted to his every request.
"I saw her, I liked her. I went to her parents and asked for her hand in marriage."
Wife No. 4 was very obedient. So was wife No. 5. Wife No. 6, the same. As were wives 7 and 8 and 9 and …
Well, by then — it was the late 1980s — things had taken off for Bello Maasaba, an Islamic faith healer in this city in Niger state. He went from a wedding every few months to one every few weeks.
All told, the 87-year-old has married 107 women, which, even in a society with a tradition of polygamy, is on the high side. The Nigerian government is not amused. Neither are Islamic authorities in the state.
But he's still marrying, every time Miss Right comes along. He now has 86 wives, the youngest 19 and the oldest 64. Nine have died and 12 he divorced (for disobedience).
via latimes.com.
my true neighbor
Barth, CD I/2, p. 430-431:
The fellow-man who is unaware of his true plight, the fellow-man to whom we can look and about whom we can concern ourselves, above all the fellow-man who helps us confirm and enhance us in the role of benefactor, mentor and ameliorator: this fellow-man does not constitute any serious problem, and any headaches which he may incidentally cause will not be mortal. But this in the last resort not at all disconcerting fellow-man is not our neighbour in the sense of the second commandment. He is not the one who, sent and authorised by God, shows mercy upon us. He is lacking in the most important quality, in which alone he could do so, an actual similarity to the crucified Jesus Christ. At least, he is so in our eyes and in his relation to us. That is why he is not at all disconcerting. That is why we do not experience any serious unwillingness in relation to him. But that is also why he cannot help us seriously. This fellow-man will not summon us to the praise of God. Only afflicted, sinful fellow-man can do that. Only this man is my neighbour in the sense of the second commandment. But this neighbour will cause me a really mortal headache. I mean, he will seriously give me cause involuntarily to repudiate his existence and in that way to put myself in serious danger. In face of this neighbour I certainly have to admit to myself that I would really prefer to exist in some other way than in this co-existence. I would prefer this because from this neighbour a shadow falls inexorably and devastatingly upon myself. The wretched fellow-man beside me simply reveals to me in his existence my own misery. For can I see him in the futility and impotence of his attempt to live, without at once mutatis mutandis recognising myself? If I really see him, if as propinquissimus he is brought into such close contact with me that, unconfused by any intersecting feelings which may influence me, I can only see his misery, how can it be otherwise? This is the criterion: if it is otherwise, if I can still see him without seeing myself, then for all the direct sympathy I may have for him, for all the zeal and sacrifice I may perhaps offer him, I have not really seen him. He remains at root that in no way disconcerting fellow-man. He is still not my neighbour. The neighbour shows me that I myself am a sinner.
This passage, which really needs its greater context to fully explain itself, is so characteristic of Barth's style, at least to the extent I've read him so far.
It's a strange new world...
This bit of Barth, it seems to me, has something to say to the question of why short-term missions are taking off, while local dying neighborhoods continue to experience neglect.