Afternoon Links — 1.3.11

Franciscan brothers from the Bronx settle in a rough Irish town . “And we were shown this area Moyross and it seemed like a perfect place: there were burnt out houses there was graffiti on walls there dogs and horses wandering around aimlessly sometimes kids wandering around,” said Brother Shawn O’Connor. “So I said this is a good place for us to be.”

“[T]he future of modern religiosity” is indicated by ” Maria Lionza, the nationalist syncretic cult of Venezuela ,” writes Arturo Vasquez. “[T]he days of institutional Catholicism’s influence are numbered. On the purely Christian side, evangelical Protestantism, particularly that of the Pentecostal-type, will eat its lunch.”

An Anglican theologian answers a reader’s question ” which “version” of Anglicanism is more accurate to history : the more reformed one or the Anglo-Catholic one.” “I hope that my theology is catholic, evangelical, critical, and orthodox,” he writes. ” To the extent that I am an Anglican, it is because I understand Anglicanism to be a Reformation (that is, reforming) movement in the Western Catholic church.”

“[T]he illegal wildlife trade may be the world’s most profitable form of transnational crime ,” reports Foreign Policy .

Mozart was once considered a lightweight composer, but his reputation has risen greatly in the last century , so that “as we have moved into the 21st century there is no sign at all that Mozart has lost his pre-eminence among classical composers,” reports a Mozart scholar writing in the Daily Telegraph .

The Telegraph also offers thirty of the cutest animal photos of 2010 .

Writing in The New Criterion , Mark Steyn explains ” Dependence Day ” and the decline of America and the West.