A Cerveja dos Monges "Ora et Labora" nos EUA.

Eu amo cervejas trapistes, como sabem aqueles que acompanham esse blog. Hoje li dois textos sobre o assunto. O primeiro fala sobre a primeira cerveja trapiste fora da Europa. Será feita nos Estados Unidos e se chama Spencer Trappist. O segundo trata da relação entre cerveja e catolicismo.

Frank Swigonski explicou o que significa ser uma cerveja trapiste e falou sobre essa nova cerveja produzida nos EUA. E David Bonagura Jr tratou da relação de cerveja com catolicismo.

Vou colocar aqui apenas parte do texto de Swingonski, leiam os dois textos clicando nos links.

Monks of St. Joseph’s: Trappist Beer in America

Frank Swigonski

 

Beer enthusiasts will remember that a few years ago the United States became home to the first Trappist brewery located outside of Europe. St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts, about an hour outside of Boston, began operating the Spencer Brewery in 2013. And next month, just in time for the holiday season, the brewery will be releasing a new beer: Spencer Trappist Holiday Ale. To help you enjoy this special beer, here’s a brief history of Trappist brewing and some background on St. Joseph’s Abbey and the Spencer Brewery.

 

“Trappist” doesn’t denote a style of beer or a type of brewery, but rather is an appellation — a legal designation similar to a trademark that indicates a product is made under the direct supervision of monks on monastic property. The Trappist designation isn’t just limited to beer. Trappist monks sell everything from soap to ceramics under the Trappist appellation. Monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey, for example, made jelly prior to getting into the beer business a few years ago.

 

The artisanship protected by the Trappist appellation is directly related to the daily life of the Trappist monks and the financial success of the Trappist monastery. Trappist monks belong to a special order of Roman Catholic monks, the Cistercians of the Strict Observance. In addition to the standard Catholic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, these monks also live by the rules of St. Benedict, of which there are 73 separate chapters.

 

The daily life of the Trappist monks can be summed up by the motto “ora et labora” or “work and prayer.” They pray 7 times a day and engage in daily labor, the fruits of which are used to support the monastery.

 

Those Trappist monasteries that brew beer use the proceeds from the beer’s sale to cover the operating costs of the monastery, take care of the monks, and support different charities. These costs can be substantial in a monastery with a growing population of elder monks. St. Joseph’s Abbey, for example, houses 63 monks with an average age of 70. Health care costs make up a third of the monastery’s expenses. “The health costs are huge,” the Abbey’s ranking number 2, Father Dominic Whedbee, told the Huffington Post. “Our infirmary is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That way we can take care of all our men for the rest of their lives, which is our commitment.”

 

Given the remarkable growth in demand for a variety of new and innovative beers in the United States, it’s no surprise that St. Joseph’s Abbey would turn to beer-making to help support itself and its members. Indeed, it isn’t the only monastery to recently turn to commercial brewing. The number of monastic breweries holding the Trappist appellation for beer has increased from seven to 11 in the last five years. Starting a brewery can be a smart long-term investment for a Trappist monastery. Other Trappist monasteries are raking in an excess of $50 million per year — all of which goes to support the monastery and associated charities — from the sale of beer and other products, such as cheese.

 

The monks at St. Joseph’s certainly have a long tradition of brewing to draw on. There are Trappist breweries in Europe that were founded before the first settlers landed in Jamestown. Widespread commercial production and refinement of the current styles offered by Trappist breweries didn’t really begin until the 19th and 20th centuries. But these monks have been brewing beer for hundreds of years. Luckily for the monks at St. Joseph’s, Trappist brewers also have a long history of helping out their fellow monks. The monks at St. Joseph’s toured the brewery at Notre-Dame de Scourmount, which produces Chimay. Not wanting the new brewery to damage the Trappist brand, European Trappist brewers helped the brothers at St. Joseph’s develop a good recipe for their beer.

 

One can imagine no better teacher for the art of brewing than a Trappist brewmaster. It just so happens that if you devote your entire life to only work and prayer (and your work is brewing beer), you end up making some pretty damn good beer. The beers produced at Trappist monasteries are nothing less than world class. The highly sought-after and impossible to pronounce (or procure) Westvleteren XII consistently ranks in the top ten on BeerAdvocate and as the best beer on RateBeer. And it receives accolades by beer reviewers from Randy Mosher to Garrett Oliver. The Chimay Red and Westmalle Tripel are archetypes of the abbey style. And Orval is as unique stylistically as the bowling pin-shaped bottle it comes in.

 

Morgan Stanley Anuncia "Investimento para Católicos". Que Católicos?

Texto do site ThinkAdvisor noticia que o grupo financeiro Morgan Stanley resolveu criar um "programa de investimentos com valores  católicos". O grupo teria sido estimulado pela passagem do Papa Francisco no Estados Unidos.

Antes de saber dos detalhes. Pensemos. O que seria um investimento católico?

Para mim, seria um investimento usando como abordagem aquilo que diferencia o catolicismo de muitas outras religiões. Como por exemplo, um investimento que lutasse contra o aborto ou a eutanásia e defendesse o casamento tradicional.

Acontece que o programa de "investimentos com valores  católicos" do grupo financeiro fala apenas em investimentos que protegem o meio ambiente, moradia barata, contra discriminação e "outras políticas construtivas".

Isto é, o que o grupo chama de "valores católicos" são valores seculares, "humanistas", defendidos por inúmeros ateus que podem até odiar as doutrinas da Igreja Católica.

E o ThinkAdvisor ainda diz que o anúncio do programa de investimentos vem no mesmo dia que o grupo é acusado de investir muito na indústria de carvão, a mais ambientalmente poluente produtora de energia.

Tudo realmente é muito estúpido e hipócrita no mercado financeiro. Vejam texto do ThinkAdvisor

Morgan Stanley Introduces Catholic-Focused Investing Program

The news comes the same day the company is targeted for its support of the coal industry

The influence of Pope Francis’ recent visit to New York is being felt at Morgan Stanley (MS). The wirehouse said early Friday that it is rolling out a tool kit for financial advisors based on Catholic values.

“We are pleased to provide our [individual and institutional] clients with strategies to pursue risk-adjusted financial returns in tandem with faith-based objectives,” said Hilary Irby, Head of Morgan Stanley’s Investing with Impact Initiative, in a statement. “There continues to be a growing range of investment choices and opportunities in the Catholic values space, across mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and separately managed accounts.”

According to the firm, the initiative aims to help investors “customize their portfolios to align with their personal and institutional faith-based goals.”

It is part of Morgan Stanley’s broader Investing with Impact Platform, which was introduced in 2012 and includes more than 130 investment products focused on environmental and social impact investing.

News of the company’s Catholic-values rollout came on the same day that the Rainforest Action Network staged rallies in nine major cities calling for Morgan Stanley to divest from the coal industry. According to the group, Citigroup said recently it would make cuts to its coal-financing projects, and Bank of America also made a similar pledge.

The financial sector boosted income 7% on average in the latest period as sales jumped 19% from a year ago.
 

In early June, Morgan Stanley issued a $500 million green bond to fund the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. As for when it may consider changing its approach to coal, the company referenced its enviornmental policy statement that says it is "committed to considering environmental issues in all aspects of our business, including how we evaluate companies, transactions and risk ... and how we promote and develop new market opportunities. We believe that our approach to environmental issues helps us pursue our principal focus of creating long-term value for our shareholders and serving the long-term interests of our clients."

The company’s Catholic-values program can assist investors who want to invest in firms that support affordable housing, high environmental standards and other constructive policies, according to a press release: “It also provides guidance to investors who seek to avoid companies that engage in discrimination, predatory lending or other activities inconsistent with Catholic values.”


(Agradeço o texto ao site Center for Law and Religion Fórum)

Top Cientista: "Mudança Climática é Mistério Humano (pela estupidez) e Não Mistério Científico"

Dr. Freeman Dyson, top cientista, conselheiro de presidentes dos EUA, disse o que ele pensa da ideia de mudança climática antropogênica (provocada pelo homem) que tanto estimula palavras de Obama a Papa Francisco. Para ele, há um cegueira absoluta para ver que essa ideia é "bullshit", bobagem. Cegueira que pode ser explicada, segundo ele, pelo dinheiro.

Dyson estudou o clima durante 25 anos de sua vida acadêmica. Ele é considerado gênio desde que tinha 5 anos de idade. Ele diz que os efeitos benéficos do dióxido de carbono superam os efeitos maléficos.

Apesar de ser eleitor do partido democrata de Obama, Dyson diz que os republicanos estão certos.

Vejamos texto abaixo do site Breibart News:

Top Physicist Freeman Dyson: Obama Has Picked The ‘Wrong Side’ On Climate Change
by James Delingpole

The climate models used by alarmist scientists to predict global warming are getting worse, not better; carbon dioxide does far more good than harm; and President Obama has backed the “wrong side” in the war on “climate change.”

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson (pictured above), the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.

It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation. 

It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.

Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party’s unscientific stance on the climate change issue.

It’s very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people’s views on climate change]. I’m 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side.

Part of the problem, he says, is the Democrats’ conflation of “pollution” (a genuine problem) with “climate change” (a natural phenomenon quite beyond mankind’s ability to control).

China and India rely on coal to keep growing, so they’ll clearly be burning coal in huge amounts. They need that to get rich. Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless. 

At the same time, coal is very unpleasant stuff, and there are problems with coal quite apart from climate. I remember in England when we burned coal, everything was filthy. It was really bad, and that’s the way it is now in China, but you can clean that up as we did in England. It takes a certain amount of political willpower, and that takes time.  

Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn’t understand that.

The short-to-medium term solution to the pollution problem, he argues, is the replacement of coal with much-maligned shale gas, whose rejection by much of Europe he finds unfathomable and counter-productive.

As far as the next 50 years are concerned, there are two main forces of energy, which are coal and shale gas. Emissions have been going down in the US while they’ve going up in Europe, and that’s because of shale gas. It’s only half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal. China may in fact be able to develop shale gas on a big scale and that means they burn a lot less coal. 

It seems complete madness to prohibit shale gas. You wondered if climate change is an Anglophone preoccupation. Well, France is even more dogmatic than Britain about shale gas!

Dyson, 91, has enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a physicist, mathematician and public intellectual, showing promise as early as the age of five when he calculated the number of atoms in the sun.  During World War II, he worked at the Operation Research Section of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, before moving to the US where Robert Oppenheimer awarded him a permanent post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He also worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, looking at the climate system 25 years ago, before it became a hot political issue.

The dangers of carbon dioxide, he believes, have been much overrated. In a foreword to a report for The Global Warming Policy Foundation by Indur Goklany called Carbon Dioxide: The Good News, – as reported here at Breitbart – he says:

To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage. 

I consider myself an unprejudiced person and to me these facts are obvious. But the same facts are not obvious to the majority of scientists and politicians who consider carbon dioxide to be evil and dangerous. The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence.

He likens the “climate change” issue to some of the other “irrational beliefs” promoted through history “by famous thinkers and adopted by loyal disciples.”

Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a large number of human victims. George Washington was one of the victims. Other irrational beliefs, such as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community.

Dyson’s refusal ever to accommodate himself with the modish notions of the hour may explain why, unlike some of his less distinguished and brilliant contemporaries over the years, he has never been awarded a Nobel Prize.

He concludes:

“I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.”