Apologia

Indecision

2012-01-27T16:48:00.002-05:00

Re two posts ago, I still have time to get the ballot in, but haven't made my choice. Whom should I vote for?

More Prayer, please

2012-01-25T23:45:00.002-05:00

I want to reiterate my request in this post asking prayer for a friend's wife. I can't give details but the need is urgent and the recipients will be grateful.

Voting in absentia

2012-01-25T18:27:00.009-05:00

My absentee ballot for the Republican presidential primary came in the mail today. I read it carefully because that's what the instructions told me to do, and I am an obedient subject of the greatest democracy on earth. Instruction #3 tells me to "Mark only the number of choices as indicated on the ballot."

Now, grammar is sometimes important. On the ballot are nine choices. Can I choose them all? Being a careful reader, I went to the ballot itself and read above the choices, "TO VOTE, COMPLETELY FILL IN THE OVAL NEXT TO YOUR CHOICE." I'm going to interpret this to mean CHOOSE ONE. But you just know that some people who do not read so carefully as I will choose two or more.

Instructions 2, 4 and 6 are related. Number 2 says, "Mark your ballot in secret. No one should help you unless you are blind, disabled or unable to read or write." This one annoyed me. I called my wife into the room.

"Sweetheart," I said, "they want me to mark my ballot in secret, but since we have no secrets I want to mark it in front of you."

"Oh," she said, "that's sweet," and gave me a peck on the cheek.

Number 4 says, "After marking the ballot, re-fold it and place it inside this Secrecy Sleeve." The capital letters made me feel important. The problem is, the Secrecy Sleeve is the paper on which the instructions are written. It simply folds in half. There is nothing secret about it. When someone at the elections office opens the envelope, the ballot will quite likely slip right out of its Secrecy Sleeve. End of secret.

Number 6 says, "VERY IMPORTANT: You must sign your name or make your mark [???] in the box marked 'VOTER MUST SIGN IN BOX' or your ballot cannot be counted." Now the box in which the voter must sign his name is on the envelope into which the Secrecy Sleeve will be inserted, so that everyone from the mailman to the sorter to the clerk and all his buds at the election office can see that I'm a Republican, since only Repubs can vote in the primary. On the envelope is emblazoned OFFICIAL ELECTION MAIL. What if someone at the elections office happens to be, simultaneously, a neighbor of mine (or an acquaintance by some other means) and an Obamabot liberal-leftist? Aha, he thinks, so that Luse is a conservative lapdog, a lover of Wall Street and a hater of the poor, a defender of nonhumans in the womb and an opponent in general of the sexually libertine template to which our society is conforming as it progresses toward complete and total non-discrimination in all things disreputable. I think I'll slash his tires.

You think I'm paranoid. I think the political atmosphere is so poisoned that conservatives in many walks of life fear the enmity incited by their opinions. All right, I'll stop whining.

Most of the other instructions are uninteresting ("Don't forget to affix postage to your envelope"). But number 10 caught my eye: "FELONY NOTICE: It is a felony to accept any gift, payment, or gratuity in exchange for your vote."

My wife, still beside me, asked, "So who you gonna vote for?"

"What's the point?" I said. "Independents will determine the winner, so you and I are in the position of trying to pick whom we think the independents will vote for over Obama."

Yeah, she agreed, it's tough, but we have to choose.

Why? Why do we have to choose?

If everyone had that attitude, she said, the Republicans wouldn't have a nominee. Exactly, I said. A brokered convention. Many long for it. A colleague out at school said he's still fuming at Paul Ryan for not getting in. All the guys who could have won refused to step up to the plate. Oh, she said, it's not all that bad...

Then a light went on. "I was thinking," I said, "of voting for Ron Paul."

"Why would you do that? He's crazy."

"Well, I might be persuaded...."

She went to her purse and came back with a large bill. "I'll give you a hundred bucks to vote for anyone but Paul."

"Done."

I still haven't filled out the oval next to my choice, but when I do I'll make sure she's in the room.

Welcome to another Culbreath

2012-01-22T18:34:00.003-05:00

Theodore Andrew Culbreath.

His parents ask your prayers for the child, who has a medical condition that usually ends well but is "potentially dangerous."

I'll tell you what, in the Last Judgement, the Culbreaths will bear no culpability whatsoever for California's demographic problems.

Lives Worth Defending

2012-01-22T17:10:00.006-05:00

I had a student last semester who wrote her research paper "Against Abortion." One argument she used in her favor was that she herself had once had an appointment with "the procedure." That is, her own mother had wanted to abort her, but something (a change of mind or circumstance - I don't remember what) had interfered. She learned about this when she was 14, and is today 19, keenly aware of how much she loves being alive. This is hardly the first such story I've heard. There is also Sky's story, which I tell here. Miracles which have the appearance of mere accidents do happen. When the anniversary of Roe v. Wade comes around each year, I suspect people like these take notice.

President Obama took notice too. This fellow, whom even conservatives never seem to tire of calling " a very smart man," marked the anniversary by putting his keen intellect into the service of well-worn clichés accessible even to the dull-witted:

President Obama marked the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade court decision Sunday by saying that he remains committed "to protecting a woman’s right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right."

"We must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters"...Obama said Sunday that reducing the number of abortions was something that everyone could agree to, whether they supported or opposed abortion rights.

But if it's truly a private family matter, that is, no one else's concern, why should anyone care if the number of abortions gets reduced? Oh, why bother.

We might look instead at Melissa Ohden's story. I find it more compelling than Obama's boilerplate abstractions about 'reproductive freedom' and 'fundamental constitutional rights.' Melissa is just a woman who is also a wife and mother. She reminds me of some of my students because she, too, had a close call with abortion. She actually survived one. Her own mother's "reproductive rights" included subjecting her unborn child of 20 weeks' duration, Melissa, to a saline abortion. Melissa endured for five days an assault on her life that normally concludes within 72 hours. You can hear her tell about it in a video on this page. "Who in this room wants to tell my daughter that her mother's life was not worth defending?"

You can also see her in an interview with Fox News.

Melissa has founded an organization named after her daughter, Olivia, to "raise awareness of the intergenerational impact of abortion... Painfully aware that Olivia would not have come into existence if the abortion [had] succeeded in ending her life, Melissa felt driven to create this organization that would positively raise awareness of the ripple effect of abortion across generations."

There must be others like her out there. Let's give thanks today that they are now among us, and will have children of their own. And then there are many other 'others' who will not be joining us. What to do about them I don't know. Here's a picture of Melissa. God bless her and all who take heed to what she has to say.

Prayer request

2012-01-22T05:25:00.002-05:00

The wife of an old friend of this blog is suffering terribly and needs your petitions. The condition is not life-threatening, but involves relentless pain and consequent lack of sleep for which no treatment has yet proved effective. It sounds like the docs are guessing and hoping the next one will. May His mercy fall upon her.

Fox Trots to the Islamic Beat?

2012-01-20T22:24:00.005-05:00

Excerpts from a fascinating Andrew McCarthy article at NR, fascinating because I did not know this about Fox:

To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam — or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” — has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina...

Asked at a campaign appearance whether he’d ever consider endorsing a Muslim for president, Gingrich sensibly answered that he would not rule it out — "it would depend on whether [the hypothetical Muslim candidate] would commit in public to give up sharia." Naturally, the usual suspects are in full fury, with CAIR the loudest among them. They’ve trotted out the rote response, dutifully echoed by Fox, that sharia, Islam’s legal code, is simply a set of spiritual guidelines — one that, in CAIR’s portrayal, "teaches marital fidelity, generous charity, and a thirst for knowledge."

Actually, it teaches polygamy, the underwriting of jihadist violence through ostensible charity, and the Islamization of knowledge. Don’t take my word for it. I refer you instead to a CAIR favorite, the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Newt Gingrich is not pulling this stuff out of the sky any more than I am. It is all there in black and white, courtesy of CAIR’s Islamist allies....Fox is owned by News Corp, whose second-largest shareholder is the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose fabulous wealth spearheads the aggressive campaign to put a happy face on sharia while promoting it in the media and the academy — just as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna instructed in his elaborate plan for Islamizing societies. It is no surprise, then, to find Fox’s report on Gingrich parroting CAIR’s stock rebuttal that sharia is no threat to America because it mandates that "Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.".... Nearly two decades of boot-licking by a bipartisan parade of American politicians and administrations have conditioned these CAIR "civil rights" activists to expect — to demand — that no one will question them, not about sharia tenets, not about their organization’s sordid history.

Your Child, the lab rat

2012-01-20T16:28:00.004-05:00

From Yahoo via the original story at Cambridge News, we learn that a UK couple has kept their child's sex hidden from the world except for closest friends and family. Now that the boy - I mean human child - is five and entering school, the parents had to reveal his sex because schools apparently want to know stuff like that.

"Sasha," the article says, "dresses in clothes he likes -- be it hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother." I'd always thought kids that young generally dressed in the clothes with which their parents supplied them. Is there any chance that a 5 year old boy would choose to wear dresses and pink swimsuits without some guidance from Mom and Dad, especially Mom, since she's the one who usually pays closest attention to such things? For example, Sasha has plenty of dolls to play with, but Barbie is forbidden as are "hyper-masculine" toys and clothes (G.I. Joe, trucks, combat fatigues). Although Sasha has to wear a uniform at school, his mother dresses him in pants and a girl's blouse.

The boy's parents are Kieran and Beck. Beck is the mom (I'm pretty sure). The fact that one parent is female and the other male is important in that Sasha could not have been conceived otherwise. But post-conception, your sense of belonging to one or the other sex is not important. Why? "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," (Beck) Laxton said..."Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?"

So, those of us who are, theoretically, men, like me, who like guns and tools and, in younger days, playing football and admiring (with purest heart) beautiful women, do all those things because our understanding of ourselves and others is governed by stereotypes, not because of who we really are. We are blinded by them. I don't really love my wife because I can't see who she really is. I got so swept up in (enchanted by, knocked off my feet by, rendered spellbound by) her biological otherness that all this time I've been unable to appreciate the fact that her femininity, which had always seemed to me intimately connected to her biology, wasn't really important because I was allowing it to disguise her essential humanness. Ipso facto I haven't been able to fully appreciate my daughters, either; I've always delighted in the fact that they were girls, or appeared to be, in body and soul, but there's nothing but bad news these days, is there?

Some day, when we're a little more advanced, a new translation of the Bible will tell us that "God created humans in Its own image, in the image of God created It them; gender-neutral created It them..." He also told us to be fruitful and multiply. It's hard to do that in a gender-neutral fashion, but as long as we remember that the physical differences that allow it are truly trivial, we'll somehow suffer through it.

The Yahoo article concludes that

Maybe Sasha's early years will be character building, maybe he'll have a higher emotional quotient being raised with dual perspectives on gender. Or the reverse could be true: Sasha may have less of a formed identity because of his upbringing, and feel angry at his mom for dressing him in flowery shirts and telling the world about it. Then again, maybe he'll get over it.

We ask our kids to get over a lot these days. I'm still so blinded by stereotypes I wonder why there can't be a law against parents who aren't.

One of Sasha's human progenitors has a blog. It's accompanied by a profile picture. It looks like a woman to me, but what do I know?

Esolen on Pottersville

2012-01-18T21:16:00.006-05:00

Matthew Franck at First Things notes of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that it defends "the proposition that the FCC should cease and desist from enforcing any notions of decency in broadcast television..," causing him to wonder how anyone could "make such vacuous arguments." He thinks he might have found the answer in a Tony Esolen column called "Pottersville, USA," wherein Mr. Esolen speculates on a topic of recent interest here -

During a recent debate among candidates for the Republican nomination for president, one of the members of the media asked what has been decried as an absurd question. It was not about a massive health care bill, whose details were quite unknown to the very senators and congressmen who voted on it. It was not about American tax law, whose tendrils and curlicues are describable only by a judicious application of chaos theory. It was not about the American army attempting to make the world safe for – we aren’t sure. It was about whether in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court was right to remove from the states all authority to regulate contraceptive devices and drugs.

Apparently, it is a question to arouse contemptuous laughter, whether one is an extreme statist with the false name of liberal, or a moderate statist with the false name of conservative. It is as if the nation were now basking in the warm benevolent glow of the sexual revolution; Marriages are stronger than ever before, and divorce is almost unheard of; children grow up knowing both mother and father, within the fostering shelter of committed love; Abortion is considered a scandal.

Read the whole thing here.

Giving Our All

2012-01-16T20:20:00.006-05:00

In a thread here critiquing the RC Church's teaching on contraception, in which we find mystery being opposed to morality - what we might call the "I feel your pain" wing of moral theology - the host says:

...the modern Christian Church needs desperately to recover its mystical focus, even at the cost of setting aside its focus on specific moral conflicts.

People break the Christian Laws because they cannot understand, cannot feel, the reason for these precise Laws - and without this feeling the Laws seem merely arbitrary.

To which Jim Kalb offers a defense:

...The general role of sex in human life, and the weight and orientation of institutions essentially connected to sex (like marriage), depends I think on its general tendency to make babies. The habit of intentionally interfering with that general tendency denatures sex and makes it something to manipulate rather than something that essentially involves giving our all and therefore naturally gives rise to an absolutely fundamental personal connection.

As to the nature of Christianity, it's a religion that says God created the world and its order, found it good, and became incarnate within it. So to be Christian is among other things to accept that the world is charged with meaning and value. That leads me to believe that Christianity should not be spiritualized to the extent of not taking seriously how people live concretely, especially with regard to something as basic as sex.

And from someone whose handle is Proph:

...In fact, having tried many, many times to explain the natural law basis of the Church's ban on contraception to people (probably on 40-50 different occasions, online and in person), the resentment of the teaching is not that it is irrational. (Superficially that is the claimed objection -- once I explain the teaching, the objection becomes that it is TOO rational). People, at least the ones I've spoken to on the matter, resent it because they feel entitled to participate in the great, dripping cesspool for carnal delights that the modern world provides. They want sex available to them all the time. They want oral sex. They want to be able to masturbate. All without consequence and with the approval of their consciences.

I don't think Catholics should apologize for natural law. Reason is a good, and one liberalism more or less denies. Of course it is vulnerable, but that is no reason to forego its use.

Neither commenter made any progress with his hearers that I could see. Mr. Kalb's website is here.

Tebowie

2012-01-13T16:26:00.002-05:00

My daughter sent me this. She thinks it's funny.

In Extremis Santorum

2012-01-11T18:56:00.033-05:00

No sooner had the news hit that Rick Santorum had finished in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney in Iowa than the sexual liberation emergency alarm system sirens began going off throughout the land. A columnist at Salon.com screeched that "Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control." At National Review, another columnist shrieked back that No he isn't. In fact, Santorum himself screamed (okay, not literally) to Bill O'Reilly that he didn't want to illegalize contraception:

Someone asked me if the states have the right to do it? Yes. They have the right to do it, they shouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t vote for it if they did. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to do it. As you know, Bill, you’re a Catholic, [the] Catholic Church teaches contraceptive [sic] is something you shouldn’t do. So when I was asked the question on contraception I said I didn’t support it.

It's easy to get lost in all the "its," isn't it? The first 'it' presumably refers to a hypothetical state attempt to outlaw birth control, which I take Santorum to mean that if it happened in his state, he would oppose the effort. The second 'it' probably refers to the use of such control, which Santorum doesn't support because of his Church's prohibition of 'it.' (To which the Catholic Bill responded that this prohibition was "made by men," bringing to Santorum's face a look of incredulity but no interruption.) The third 'it' is the 1965 Griswold decision itself, which Santorum does not support, believing that the Supreme Court made up a new constitutional right to privacy not previously known to exist outside the emanations of the penumbras which point to 'it.'

Now, a president cannot outlaw anything all by his lonesome, so I presume what really exercises the liberals at Salon and the HuffandPuff Post is not that he could actually effect such a ban but that he thinks it would be a good idea. They wish to marginalize him by characterizing him as an extremist. No right-thinking American of any political persuasion can possibly believe that artificial birth control is anything but a blessing to the integrity of the American family, and especially to the hopes for happiness of all those poor people whose rates of reproduction left Margaret Sanger aghast.

But I think they're misreading Santorum. If they really want to take advantage of this political opportunity, they should label him not only 'extremist' but also 'hypocrite.' He thinks Griswold was wrong, but he wouldn't vote to outlaw contraception? We already know that he thinks Roe v Wade wrong and would vote for any restriction on abortion up to and including its eradication. Why not the same with the use of contraception, which many moral conservatives have argued bears a straight line, cause and effect relationship to the abortion liberty? Charles Cooke, the NR columnist, offers Santorum assistance with his rationale: that "to acknowledge that one’s legal opinions can be separate from one’s moral convictions" is not hypocritical but sophisticated; that "Santorum’s true position demonstrates that it is eminently possible to argue for public policy that yields outcomes of which one disapproves;" that, as "William F. Buckley Jr. famously argued, what 'is legal is not necessarily reputable;'" and finally, that, "while he may well believe that the states have the right to ban condoms and sodomy, that is not the same thing as advocating that they do so."

Voila, some might say, problem solved, while others, like me, see only a perpetuation of the hypocrisy, since separating "one's legal opinions...from one's moral convictions" sounds like what we conservatives say about liberal Catholics all the time, and inclines us to ask, "Why can't we ban condoms and sodomy? I mean, we did ban them once upon a time. What's so obviously legally and morally superior about the current, and very recent, state of affairs?

As suddenly as Mr. Santorum rose to prominence, he may quickly fall back into obscurity. But just for fun, let's pretend that his ascencion continues, and that his nomination for the presidency pans out. He will then find himself in debate with Mr. Obama, assisted by his sycophants among the media moderators, who will ask Santorum the following question:

"Senator Santorum, it has been noted in various press reports that you believe the Griswold and Roe v Wade cases were wrongly decided by the Supreme Court. Is it true, as some of these reports claim, that you would advocate outlawing American women's access to all forms of artificial birth control, and to their right to abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity, and thus that your desire is to meddle in the very private lives of American citizens - to bring into their bedrooms, no less, the police power of the American government? Your opponent in this election, most Americans, and even some in your own party, say that these are very extreme, even draconian positions, verging on the totalitarian. How would you respond?

The question is mildly loaded, but that's only what Santorum expects. On the supposition that he would not immediately run for butt-cover as he did with O'Reilly, he might try the following response, which I offer free of charge. He will need either to memorize it or use note cards. A teleprompter is acceptable:

Totalitarian? What an absurd charge. Contraception was once illegal in this country and no one called us totalitarian, but rather a nation striving to meet our virtuous ideals. Abortion was once illegal in this country, and no one called us totalitarian or draconian, but rather a nation of exceptionally humane concern, in our love for those least among us, and who remain most dear to us, even while hidden in their mothers' wombs. There was a time when the fruit of the womb was our future. No longer. Now our future ends with ourselves, for we have granted that self, not God, power over the life and death of the most innocent. If I am draconian, how would you characterize my opponent, President Obama, who would not vote to pass a born alive infants protection act when he served as senator from Illinois? He gave what he hoped were good reasons, about which he was later found to be dissembling. President Obama did not feel it necessary to compel, by law, medical personnel to try to save the lives of babies who survive abortions at whatever stage of development. Yet I'm draconian.

As to my "extremism" regarding contraception, let me repent by singing its manifold praises, and delineating in brief what it has done for us. Between 1965, the year of the Griswold decision, and 1980, the divorce rate in this country more than doubled. How can this be, since the justices based their decision on a wish to enhance the stability of marriage? How can it be that no sooner do the judges start enhancing than marriages start falling apart? It couldn't be - could it? - that once you make cheating easier, a bunch of people might decide to give it a try. Let me also praise the increased incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which, among the black population, rose from 26.3 percent in 1965 to 69 percent in 2000, and among the white population from 4.0 percent to 27 per cent. But don't worry about all those children born into fatherless families.. Most will adjust, some by joining gangs, others by repeating the pattern in their own lives. And some will be aborted to preserve the mother's life, health, financial viability, and her figure in a swimsuit, though that seems to me a rather "draconian" way of coping with the difficulty.

At first thought, a premarital pregnancy might seem to signal a failure to use contraception, and often it does. (People are foolish, aren't they?) But back in our extremist days, premarital sex often meant exactly that - sex before marriage. It doesn't anymore. Back then, a girl would ask of her one true love, "What happens if I get pregnant?" And he'd reply, "Why, I'll marry you, of course." And often he did. How do I know? The leftyish Brookings Institution tells me so: "Until the early 1970s, shotgun marriage was the norm in premarital sexual relations." Now, we're lucky if the question even comes up, because the girl is as likely to be having sex with someone she hardly knows as with her future husband, which makes what they're doing not really sex before marriage but sex before morning.

Does this mean that there has, on the whole, been an increase in the percentage of young single people, from teenagers on up, engaging in premarital sex? Just based on my observations of human nature, I'd bet real money the answer is yes. If you make it easy for people possessed of poor impulse control not to control their impulses, my guess is they won't. And if we bother to look it up, we find out that "The percentage of white women married from 1960-65 who were virgins was 43," which is, I admit, not a good figure from an extremist's point of view, but then you'll be comforted to know that in our more normal times the figure has dropped to 14%. I forgot to mention that there was another Supreme Court decision extending the contraceptive liberty first to single people and then to very young single people, even to minors, and without their parents' permission. But don't be alarmed. This is just normal behavior. Why? Because only 35% of the people in the country think that such sex is always wrong. About 75% have sex before marriage.

I sometimes wonder what our country could have been thinking back in those days of Comstock laws and illegal contraception. It was illegal under those laws because contraception was considered one of several "obscene" materials that were not allowed as legitimate items of commerce or education. Those laws must have been the relics of Luther, Calvin and the Catholic Church, all of whom thought the frustration of fertility an abomination. (Those entities still do; it’s only individual Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics who do not.) I wonder what those judges of the Connecticut Supreme Court were thinking when they overruled a lower court in 1939 that had tried to nullify the prosecution of two doctors and a nurse who ran a birth control clinic. Well, they were thinking that "The police power could be employed 'in aid of what is ... held by the prevailing morality to be necessary to the public welfare'." And further:

"[w]hatever may be our own opinion regarding the general subject, it is not for us to say that the Legislature might not reasonably hold that the artificial limitation of even legitimate child-bearing would be inimical to the public welfare and, as well, that use of contraceptives , and assistance therein or tending thereto, would be injurious to public morals; indeed, it is not precluded from considering that not all married people are immune from temptation or inclination to extra-marital indulgence , as to which risk of illegitimate pregnancy is a recognized deterrent deemed desirable in the interests of morality."

In fact, the extremist Connecticut court "quoted with approval" a similar case from Massachusetts in which it was made clear that the "plain purpose behind restrictions on birth control" was (prepare yourself):

"...to protect purity, to preserve chastity, to encourage continence and self-restraint, to defend the sanctity of the home, and thus to engender ... a virile and virtuous race of men and women."

My, such language issuing from a court in our land, such deference to the legislature. But don't worry. It's all gone now. The Court rules and Griswold is revered precedent. You get to keep your birth control. We - the vast majority of Americans - have separated sex from the having of children and from the confines of marriage, and yet some of us bother to complain about this newly respectable, sterile concoction called "same-sex" marriage. We have lent lust a new legitimacy, and yet we complain that with a click of a mouse our children can access its pornographic simulation in living color and high definition, all the while maintaining our intellectual self-respect by abhorring censorship. We hold in high regard our notions of a right to sexual autonomy, but are horrified to find that our sons and daughters are living in sin at best, are sluts, rogues and cads at worst. Our national womb is barren, yet we complain that our Social Security taxes might be raised, our retirement age postponed, and the whole program might go bust because there won't be enough children around to foot the bill. We have turned our bodies into amusement parks, the romping grounds for a society of playful hedonists whose understanding of what sex is really for got stuck at the stage of juvenile delinquency. We'd get hauled into court if the judges weren't in on the scam.

So, yes, if all that's normal, I'm an extremist. If I were president and the congress sent me a bill proposing to outlaw contraception, I'd sign it. But we also know that that will never happen. We love our contraception too much because we love our childless sex. We are a dying society, soon to be rotting in our graves. On our tombstone someone will inscribe an ancient wisdom, that the circumstances of sex ought to be swallowed up in the permanence of love, that it is a sacred thing because so too is the life that comes from it. But it won't matter because when you're dead it's too late to learn.

But be of good cheer and vote for me anyway in November. I may be an extremist, but whatever you get from me can't be any worse than what you've got now.

He won't get elected after giving this speech, but it will have the benefit of consistency, and he will be able to go home with his principles intact.

Tebow

2012-01-09T03:01:00.001-05:00

Do you believe?

To blog or not, that is the question. Answer: hell, I don't know

2012-01-03T22:35:00.004-05:00

[A reader has pointed out that he was unable to comment. I've fixed this.]

From my old friend, Zippy, on retiring from blogging: "Non-participation in the blogosphere is remarkably peaceful, in no small part because I am not forced, by the bizarre distant intimacy of the format, to form low opinions of various people I hardly know."

Yes, I feel the peace. So now that I've retired from W4 (but not from The Christendom Review) I've decided to keep at it anyway. Maybe. Here, when I do it, if I do it at all. Shorter stuff here, longer stuff someplace else which I'll link to as necessary.

Some of you (it is a huge assumption on my part, I know, to imagine that any "some" of anybody is still reading this) will be glad to know that Jeff Culbreath has brought his Stony Creek Digest back to life, while people like TSO and Dylan never quit. Good for them. Hardy souls. I think TSO's latest post implies that there might be something sacramental about drinking. I heartily agree and will drink to the sentiment as soon as I'm done here.

Meanwhile, here are some recent things I've done which almost everybody has missed and probably with good reason, from oldest to newest:

A little Sunday meditation on the purpose of suffering. Or something.

Another one about agnosticism.

From back in September, another in tribute to the victims of 9/11.

A piece about a young woman and what happened on her way to the abortuary.

This one's called Wastage, but I can't remember what it was about. Probably important though.

On the new Dept. of HHS regulations, a consequence of Obamacare, requiring religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage in their health plans.

A guessing game. If you like Christmas music, a pleasant diversion.

Some thoughts on Christmas, my contribution to the editors' post at W4. It can be found here.

And finally some befuddlement about the necessity of giving 12 year olds the HPV vaccination. Lydia McGrew's comments are better than the post. It's not often you find a tour de force in net comments, but sometimes it happens.

Oh, I got a lot of Christmas presents. One was a book called The Complete Book of German Cooking, or The Complete German Cookbook - something like that. And it is complete. As I was leafing through it right after stuffing down Christmas dinner, I started drooling. It doesn't tell you how to make German beer, but I can buy that any day of the week. Anyway, I expect to be eating well in the coming weeks. Now I'm going to toast something or someone for no reason at all - well, for the reason that the eggnog I made for Christmas is still plentiful. It goes well with everything. Someone can let me know how the Iowa carcasses turned out in the morning.

Mary's Lullaby

2011-12-24T04:04:00.001-05:00

Frederika von Stade and Kathleen Battle

TCR

2011-12-16T14:55:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of The Christendom Review is now up.

TCR...

2011-11-24T04:56:00.002-05:00

We're experiencing an unavoidable delay in bringing the current issue of The Christendom Review online. But it shouldn't be long. Keep an eye out.

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving. To everyone.

Adoring the mystery of the mystery of life.

2011-08-06T19:23:00.020-04:00

[posted also at W4]

I visit Fred Reed now and then because he usually makes me smile when he's not drawing foolish moral and intellectual equivalencies (see his essay on patriotism). I opened up his recent piece on evolution because the truth that Darwinism deadens everything cannot be repeated often enough. In fact, I was smiling even before I started reading, until I ran into another of those equivalencies:

This agglomeration of everything under one theoretical roof appeals powerfully to minds that need an overarching explanation of everything. The great intellectual divide perhaps is not between those who believe one thing and those who believe another, but between those who need to believe something — I am tempted to say believe almost anything — and those who are comfortable with uncertainty and even the unknowable. Adherents of Christianity, atheism, scientism (as distinct from science) and classical evolutionism fall into the first category; the agnostic of every sort, into the second. Unshakable belief seems to alleviate unease with the unfathomed, the anxiety that naturally comes of not knowing where we came from, or why, or whither.

After that, Christians pretty much fade from view as Fred goes after the scientistic assumptions undergirding evolution, but are left to wonder why they should be grouped with such a crowd, especially since most Christians would agree with Fred on virtually every point of attack. We are left to suppose that the Christian's belief in Jesus (and all the depending dogmas that implies) and the naturalistic scientist's belief in Darwin's fairy tale are reflections of the same need: to believe in something, even though the things they believe in are polar opposites.

This, says Fred, "is very different from seeing the world as profoundly mysterious, as in many ways being beyond our understanding, as containing questions that have no answers."

I wonder what sort of Christians Fred's been talking to. The ones I talk to, even the semi-literate ones, utter the word "mystery" with a compulsive regularity exceeded only by that of a Tourette's sufferer. All you have to do is ask this semi-literate Christian a few questions about what he believes:

"I hear you Christians believe in God. Is that right?"

"That's right. We believe in the Holy Trinity."

"What's that mean?"

"Three persons in one God." (semi-literate Christian smiles; he knows what's coming next).

"How can that be? Sounds like a contradiction in terms."

"Well, it's a divine mystery." (Christian's face is glowing.)

"How can you believe in something so illogical?"

"Jesus told me to."

And should you go on to ask about Jesus, your Christian will try to explain the "mystery" of the Incarnation, which means that he can't explain it but still thinks it was real. Get into more detail and you'll hear about that God-human's virginal conception in his mother's womb, about a Transfiguration, a Resurrection from the dead, an Ascension into heaven and, from you adherents of the True Faith, about an Immaculate Conception, an Assumption, and a thing called Transubtantiation, all prefixed and suffixed by the word "mystery." Of the great mystery which is the source of all the others, the Trinity, you'll be told that it can be known but is ultimately unknowable. Christians even write books with titles like The Cloud of Unknowing, in which you're likely also to hear stories about miracles through the ages which are in themselves plenty mysterious, but only to a mind disposed to entertain their possibility. Even the mere fact of biological life on earth strikes many people as miraculous. The naturalist is not so struck. But I've heard many a Christian claim that the existence of life is so unlikely, the mechanism of even the simplest cell so complex, that God must have reached down and kickstarted the whole thing. That is, He performed a miracle. Now, even if one is convinced that this is probably not true, how does the assertion that "God did it" make the origin of life any less mysterious? To the naturalist it is a mystery only in the sense that it's a problem he has not yet solved. He has theories about it, has a story to tell, but he can't tell all of it. It's hard to see how he can blame the Christian for pointing out that the mystery remains.

But what is Fred's objection? (I am assuming he would make one.) Is it that the Christian should not assign a cause to an effect without certain evidence that it (the miracle) is in fact the cause? Okay. But there is a level on which he should welcome the Christian's answer, even if it might be wrong, since it respects the mystery he is so adamant to retain. In fact, what such a Christian is saying is that the origin of life is so mysterious, that only another mystery can explain it. And, as I said before, the areas in which Fred finds Darwinism lacking explanatory power - concerning the problems of consciousness, volition, morality, and reproductive necessity - are the very same areas in which he will find the average Christian cheering him on.

Maybe the problem with Christians is that, like physicalists, they have a creed. The latter avow that there is nothing beyond the physical, while the former claim that beyond the physical hides the Source of all the nothing. Fred will have no truck with those materialists, but I don't know exactly where to pin him on the religio-philosophical specimen board. With his love of mystery, I thought he might be a mysterian, a central tenet of which is that some problems are unsolveable, which is what Fred seems to prefer. It's a - I don't know what to call it - 'category of thinking' that I believe John Derbyshire embraced when he kicked Chrisianity to the curb. But I don't think it fits Fred because it's mostly drawn into service by the very materialists Fred despises, and usually in reaction to the mind-body (consciousness) problem. Ed Feser made mention of it at his blog:

...the conception of the Trinity as a “mystery” finds a parallel in the view of some contemporary philosophers of mind (e.g. Colin McGinn) that while an adequate naturalistic explanation of consciousness exists, our minds are too limited to understand it. This view even goes by the name “mysterianism,” and it is motivated not only by a desire to sidestep the various philosophical objections to materialism, but also by the idea that natural selection is unlikely to have shaped our minds in a way that would allow us to discover everything there is to know about the world. It is far more likely, mysterians contend, that the contingent forces of evolution so molded our cognitive faculties that they are useful only for understanding a fairly narrow range of truths, and that there are barriers beyond which they cannot push. This is certainly a very reasonable view to take if there are good reasons to think naturalism is true in the first place. (There aren’t, but let that pass...)

In other words it's a physicalist's trojan horse. We can't know everything there is to know about the relationship between mind and matter, but that doesn't prevent us from asserting that matter is all there is. (But since we can know only a narrow range of truths, how do we know that this very broad truth is one of them? Sorry, I got distracted.) No, that description won't fit Fred. As he says of its parishioners, "They are not immoral. They just can't explain why they are not."

But Fred is. Moral, I mean. He must be some sort of agnostic. Yes, there are different sorts. I just don't know much about them, except that they're always telling me how open-minded they are. I believe they are allowed to have morals, but can they explain why they have them, any better than a materialist can, by appealing to a vague sense of mystery? I had an agnostic in class this semester (I'm sure there were others), of Iranian extraction but with all the scales of Islam having fallen from his eyes, who wrote a paper full of resentment about having Christian (or any religious) values imposed upon society. I told him I didn't know what society he thought he was living in, but that over a million babies were slaughtered in their mothers' wombs in America last year against the wishes of most Christians, and wondered if he resented having atheist values imposed upon society. Because that's the fallback position, the default. I told him that the agnostic wish to be free of imposition was a fantasy freedom that existed only in his mind, and that most agnostics of my acquaintance were, in public policy terms, functional atheists. Remove Christian values and the atheist's "neutrality" will be substituted for them. Neutrality on certain issues is another way of issuing a death sentence. Was he okay with all that? I told him that Christians want to "impose" their values only because they cared about him, about his infinite worth as an individual in the eyes of God. That's the bottom line, the foundation stone on which all their other "culture war" positions are built. That's why those awful Christians don't like a law that would have allowed his mother to abort him, because that law doesn't care about his worth, does not consider that with his conception he occupied a purpose in God's plan, nor did it in any way allow for the possibility that his destiny is one belonging to eternity rather than the world. I asked him which vision he preferred, because it will be one or the other and the choice is rather stark.

Well, uh, he saw my point but, uh, he didn't want anyone's values imposed on him, and he hadn't really thought it all out yet, but uh...

But, uh, I'll tell you whatuh. Next Fall he'll walk into the booth and pull the lever for the Christian-atheist Obama, that's what. I can't tell you how hard these nuts are to crack.

Appearances aside, I don't mean to pick on Fred per se, but as a representative of a certain 'type.' Fred, as he avers, has morals. He doesn't like gay marriage, I don't think he likes abortion, he lauds homeschooling, and he despises feminism and all its rotten fruit. But why? I can't help but wonder. The 'type' I'm talking about won't be a materialist and won't be a Christian, but stands always in the middle. He will tell you that he cannot, "in good conscience," claim to believe what he cannot believe, and thus is bound to keep the proverbial 'open mind,' a stance that seems not quite akin to the purpose Chesterton thought it should serve: to close on something. Fine. I'm not here to attack anyone's conscience but to question his courage. How does a very vague appreciation for the "mystery of creation" (Charles Darwin claimed to have as much) lead to the conviction that gay marriage (or abortion, or any number of things,) is wrong?

I admit that a man who is willing to look at the world straight on (that is, with intellectual honesty) can come to the right conclusion. But what will bind his soul to this principle that he thinks he discerns? For what reason will he surrender his job, give up his friends, or lay down his life should circumstances ask it of him? That he perceives there is some great inexplicable mystery behind it all? I suppose it's possible. Aside from his great courage, Socrates may have had more than this, but by how much I'm not sure. But I do believe that had he an acquaintance with Christian revelation, he'd have known better than to lump their mode thinking in with the materialist sort. Even if he'd rejected the revelation, I think he would have seen us as brothers.

Since Fred can be neither a materialist nor a mysterian (since too many of the former are also the latter), maybe we should call his sort "mysterialist." It's the worship of the mystery of mystery, weekly club attendance and participation in rituals of obscure origin not required. There is no dogma attached except the core tenet: It's all a great mystery. That is all ye know and all ye ever need know.

But at least one disciplinary rubric ought to be required of members of this communion: drop the resentment against Christian certainty. All those Christians are saying is that the mystery has content; that, within limits, it can be delineated; that it is a definite thing, though not of this world; that it is worth revering because it is the source of all other things, which includes you. It is neither an indifferent nor impersonal "creative force", because such a phantasmagoric creature could never give birth to anything, never create. We know this (hold on now) because it has spoken to us, and it is trying to speak to you. And what the mystery has told us is that you instinctively revere it because it brought the world into being with a purpose, and that you are a part of that purpose. Thus it has a grip on your mind, your soul, that cannot be severed no matter how much you kick and scream. That, in essence, the Mystery loves you, and that this gratitude you feel for the creation in which you find yourself, and this reverence you feel for its unseen existence, is the impulse to love it back.

So, for God's sake, take a stand, and tell me once more how I think like a Darwinist.

2011-05-31T03:29:00.005-04:00

This blog is now in retirement. The page will stay up so that I can announce, twice a year, new issues of The Christendom Review.

Thanks to all who stopped by now and then.

TV Fright Nights

2011-05-09T17:45:00.020-04:00

Classes begin again tomorrow, so I've been watching more TV than I ought to. Because I hadn't seen it before, I DVR'd The Day the Earth Stood Still (the recent remake) starring Keanu Reeves, whose acting ability is probably still up for debate. He's an alien who comes to earth in a giant sphere - no doubt metaphorically significant - in order to save it. Not us, it. "It" is dying, says he. But, protests Jennifer Connally, "we can change." Instead of telling him to get his slimy alien ass back to his own planet, that he had no right to interfere with ours, especially since he was planning on wiping out the human race, she pleads like a prisoner up for parole: "If you let me out, I'll be good from now on. I'm all better now." Our alien really loves the earth. The other spheres that accompanied his sphere across the light years turn out to be "arks" for the plant and animal species. As for us? Well, the spheres release what appear to be little metallic cockroaches that multiply by splitting in half, an instantaneous mitosis (or is it parthogenesis?), and before you know it there are billions of them streaking around the planet eating every manmade object in sight - football stadiums, skyscrapers, roadsigns, railroads - and all the people who made them and those who didn't. The earth's going to start all over again without people. But our alien, who really loves the earth (maybe 'loves' is the wrong word - maybe he only finds the earth necessary to a sort of universal ecology that bridges the space-time continuum, or something), finally finds the human inside himself and changes his mind. I forgot to mention that he can heal the sick, raise the dead (as long as you haven't been dead too long), and walk on water. He somehow stops the metal and people-eating cockroaches so that we can have another chance. I suspect that a lot of people were devoured before he got that done, but I also suspect we're not supposed to view him as a mass murderer but as a superior (if not quite Supreme) being entitled to dole out justice and mercy in its measure by virtue of that superiority. And, after all, he showed by the end that he had a heart. Since the Hollywood scenarios generally avoid the question, I've always wanted to ask one of these aliens if he believes in God. Somehow I don't think I'll get the chance. Except for the special effects, the whole thing is preposterous unless you accept the apocalyptic "our planet is dying" scenario, which I don't. The citrus crop was bountiful this year, the trees are still green, the squirrels are happy, I still have to mow the growing green grass once a week, and I ain't having any trouble breathing when I step outdoors.

My wife has become inexplicably addicted to watching a show we ignored for the first, oh, six years of its existence: Criminal Minds. It's about a team of FBI agents who are experts in hunting down serial killers. Being forced to watch them, though, is not as bad an experience as you might first surmise. The shows are so formulaic as to be fun on the surface but forgettable in the end. You can watch them over and over without remembering what happened the first time.

I watched some of the South Carolina Republican presidential debate before I got bored and switched over to Criminal Minds. Or maybe it was Babylon A.D., another sci-fier about the earth's last best hope, which resides in the person of an innocent, virginal young blonde thing with an interesting European accent who was raised by nuns of some stripe in a convent quarried into a mountainside somewhere in the Far East, whose innocence does not prevent her from showing sexual interest in Vin Diesel's torso (her interest goes unfulfilled), and who in the end finds herself miraculously pregnant with twins. That she has done the Blessed Mother one better is probably supposed to be important, but I couldn't figure out why. Oh, and when she finally does give birth (which kills her for some reason), one of the kids is white and one is black. GET IT? I don't.

Anyway and as I was saying, present on the dais for the debate were the unelectable Ron Paul, the unelectable Herman Cain, the unelectable Tim Pawlenty, the unelectable Rick Santorum, and the unelectable Gary Johnson, of whom I'd never heard. Turns out he's a former guv of New Mexico. Not present were the unelectable Newt Gingrich, the probably unelectable Sarah Palin, and the debabatably unelectable Mitt Romney. Am I forgetting anyone? I use the word 'unelectable' in proportion to the frequency with which the American people cast their votes based on a deep familiarity with the issues, an ineradicable moral traditionalism, a hatred for attractive but superficial soundbites, and an equal hatred for attractive but superficial candidates, which, in my opinion, is almost never. Stand these guys (except possibly for Palin) up next to Obama and his charisma will devour theirs like, oh, metallic cockroaches devouring Manhattan. I wish Gingrich, Palin and Romney had been there because I'd like to have heard their take on the current Republican devotion to the doctrine of torture. They like to call it 'enhanced interrogation.' Among radio commentators like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin (two of whom are Catholic), endorsement of the doctrine is rapidly becoming a litmus test of your political loyalty, your true conservatism. This is the result of the revelation that the use of torture by the Bush administration apparently aided in the discovery of Bin Laden's whereabouts. It worked, they say, therefore you must embrace it. Among the panel of present debaters, only the unelectable Ron Paul and the unelectable Gary Johnson were against it. They say it doesn't work, or is at best unreliable. They also make noises about how use of "it" isn't "who we are," that use of "it" doesn't "reflect our values." But mostly we hear of whether it works or it doesn't. I've never understood how the efficacy of an act translates into moral goodness. I remember stealing a tootsie roll from a Woolworth's when I was 8 years old. I knew it was wrong, I felt bad about it later, but I did not get caught and never told my parents. I skated. My thievery "worked." Let's legalize it. Tim Pawlenty took the position (identical to Bill O'Reilly's, if that tells you anything) that permission to use such techniques should be allowed only to the President and only under special circumstances. I guess that means that under ordinary circumstances using them would be wrong. Your run-of-the-mill murder suspect should not have water poured over his face to deprive him of the air he breathes and thus be terrorized into believing he's going to drown. This should be done only to terrorists, because the terrorist wants to kill innocent people. Of course, run-of-the-mill murderers want to kill innocent people too, but maybe not as many. Numbers count. (I'm speculating here; I don't know what motivates muddled morality). The life of the one is of less value than that of the many. Or maybe it's what I heard Sean Hannity screaming about yesterday. He said that you could not justify shooting Bin Laden in the head while protesting the use of waterboarding. It's just plain inconsistent, it just is, it is, it is, he kept shouting. Of course, it's pretty pedestrian traditional morality (Hannity labels himself a "traditonal Reagan conservative") that it is not under all circumstances wrong to kill a human being, as is true of an enemy combatant in war, but that it is always wrong to torture a human being, whether he's an enemy combatant or not. If that latter status describes Bin Laden, then his killing was legitimate. All killing is not murder, but all torture is just that. To even begin to attempt to justify it would require extending the use of 'enemy combatant' to include people who are in fact completely within our power and at our mercy, which is pretty much the antithesis of 'enemy combatant.' It would require a redefinition not familiar to the traditional Western rules of war, let alone to the lowly Army Field Manual.

Ah well. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. That's all the time I have for TV horror shows. Tomorrow I return to the fresh faces of the young, who watch their own fair share of TV. I make them write at least once about a show they either love or hate, and they come up with things I've never heard of. Some of them are cartoons (the only ones I remember having heard of are The Simpsons and South Park), some are talk shows (I have heard of Jerry Springer), but the most remarkable are the reality shows, which are remarkable for their sheer numbers and their apparently depraved situational dramas. The students almost universally claim to hate these shows, but then I have to wonder how they know so much about them. I don't know what proportion of them believe in virginal conceptions and saviors of the earth, but if any do, I know from experience that it will not prevent them from endorsing gay marriage, gays in the military, gays everywhere else, universal healthcare, sex-for-fun out of wedlock, abortion, unhindered access to pornography, legalized prostitution, amnesty for illegal immigrants, embryonic stem cell research, use of frozen embryos for embryonic stem cell research, UFO's as evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, and enhanced-to-the-point-of-torture interrogation techniques. Which, in several essentials, makes them like a whole lot of other people, including a fair number of Republicans. They are the future. I like most of them anyway because their souls are not set in stone.

Sunday Thought: Keeping Watch

2011-05-07T04:32:00.005-04:00

With Christians suffering under a persecution called by the Roman emperor Decius, St. Cyprian wrote from his place of exile a letter entitled "On the Unity of the Catholic Church" to the Christians in Carthage, ending with an exhortation to his sheep thereof, for he was their bishop. Now that Carthage has risen again, as much in need of his words as ever, is there anyone to listen?

This common mind prevailed once, in the time of the Apostles; this was the spirit in which the new community of the believers obeyed Our Lord's command and maintained charity with one another. The Scriptures are witness to it: But the crowd of those who had come to believe acted with one mind and soul. And again: They were all persevering with one mind in prayer with the women and Mary who had been the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren. And that was the reason why their prayers were efficacious, that was why they could be confident of obtaining whatever they asked of God's mercy.

But amongst us, that unity of mind has weakened in proportion as the generosity of our charity has crumbled away. In those days, they would sell their houses and estates and lay up to themselves treasure in heaven by giving the money to the Apostles for distribution to those in need. But now, we do not even give tithes on our patrimony, and whereas Our Lord tells us to sell, we buy instead and accumulate. To such an extent have our people lost their old steadfastness in belief. That is why Our Lord says in His Gospel, with an eye on our times: The Son of Man, when he cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth? We see what He foretold happening before our eyes. As to fear of God, or sense of justice, or charity, or good works - faith inspires us to none of them. No one thinks of the fears that the future holds in store: the day of the Lord and the wrath of God, the punishments that await unbelievers, the eternal torments appointed for the betrayers of their faith - no one gives them a thought. Whatever a believing conscience should fear, our conscience, because it no longer believes, fears not at all. If only it believed, it would take heed; if it took heed, it would escape.

Let us do our utmost, dearest brethren, to rouse ourselves, and breaking off the sleep of our past inertia, give our minds to the observance and fulfillment of Our Lord's commands. Let us be such as He told us to be: Let your loins be girt and your lamps burning, and you yourselves like to men who wait for their lord when he shall come from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh they may open to him. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching. Our loins must be girt, lest when the day comes for the campaign, it find us encumbered with trappings. Let our light shine brightly in good works, so that it may lead us from the darkness of this world into the splendor of eternal light. Let us await the sudden coming of Our Lord, ever attentive and on the alert, so that when He shall knock, our faith may be watching, ready to receive from Our Lord the reward of its vigil. Were but these commands obeyed, were but these warnings and precepts observed - it is impossible that we should be tricked and overcome by the devil in our sleep; from being watchful servants we shall, under Christ's lordship, come to reign ourselves.

Cyprian surrendered in 258 A.D. to Valerian's persecutors, becoming by his martyrdom blessed among those watchful servants who so remain.

Heavenly Choir

2011-05-04T05:40:00.006-04:00

From volume 1 of Good News From the Badlands, by Bob Ayanian

Dead and Buried?

2011-05-02T19:25:00.004-04:00

Reports are that Usama binlongtimegone Laden has been taken out by Navy Seals. As in he's dead. And buried at sea. So they say. Now that he's fish food, how will we know? I want to see his death certificate. The long form.

"I've got to be there because this is a moment in history that you don't want to miss."

2011-05-02T19:23:00.002-04:00

It turned out to be worth missing. Advice to Western women: stay out of Islamic countries, and don't ever, ever marry a man hailing from one.

On that euphoric day when Egypt's Hosni Mubarak relinquished the power of his presidency, and many Americans seemed to join their hearts with those of Egyptians in the street yearning for the fresh air of freedom, CBS reporter Lara Logan was made a prisoner by a mob of freedom-loving Egyptian males who brutally assaulted her physically and sexually. The perpetrators have not been found, and it is unlikely that anyone is looking for them. Logan is convinced that had she not somehow been saved, she would have died. She is married and the mother of two very young children. At last she tells her story:

The transcript is here. Follow-up video on this page.

Trump Card

2011-04-28T03:45:00.006-04:00

They say that any man's lunacy grows from a single, deeply buried seed of sanity. And if you think that one must be crazy to be a birther, then you'll be dismayed to learn that one might be running for president. Our friend TSO reminds us that some of such type wonder if Obama was born at all, or at least on this planet. As I said to him:

To renew my driver's license the other day, I had to show my social security card, two proofs of residency, and my birth certificate (in addition to those, my wife had to show her marriage license). Like Obama, I couldn't find my birth certificate, so I had to send off to Lassen County, Cal. to get a certified copy. Not a photo copy of the short form, but a certified copy with that official stamp on it. All told, the b.c. and license renewal cost me about a hundred bucks, just to prove I'm a citizen, which they already knew anyway. And unlike Obama, I have an all-American pedigree, descending from a father and grandfather who fought in a bunch of our nation's wars. All this just to be allowed to drive a car. But to be president of the entire country, I wouldn't have to show any of that. It's the arrogance that annoys, and the free pass issued by the legal authorities. Since Obie's on a spending binge, I'll stop complaining if he'll just reimburse me for the hundred bucks.

I don't know how many birthers are really out there, people who believe, or did believe, that Obama was not a citizen. I never could because it would have amounted to an act of imposture unheard of since The Manchurian Candidate. I haven't even taken the trouble to research what the constitution means by a 'natural born citizen.' But I do know that when people who have lived in the same place most of their lives are being asked to prove that they are who the Keepers of Records already know they are, resentment tends to build toward those who are exempted from the trouble.

From all appearances, it seems that Donald Trump got Obama to take the trouble. He got done what no establishment Republican could, mostly because they wouldn't touch the issue with a ten foot soundbite. This same establishment is now telling us that Trump is not a serious candidate. I think they ought to be more cautious in their claims, coming as they do from a rambunctious phalanx of new congressmen and women who charged into Washington all gung-ho to cut spending, balance the budget, and repeal ObieCare, and who then proceeded to cave to Obama's budget offer in terror of being blamed for shutting down the government and wanting to kill old people by restructuring Medicare. I bet they'll cave on the debt ceiling issue as well.

I think we're living in a time when people are sick and tired of bravado backed by cowardice. Maybe they're not sure what to make of Trump, but one thing they don't see (yet) is cowardice. And I think they're sick and tired of being told whom they must take seriously. Why shouldn't they be, when the people they elect don't take them seriously?

Fair is fair, sometimes (a post in which I already know the answers to all my questions)

2011-04-26T04:46:00.005-04:00

Found a couple of articles, one at the Orlando Sentinel, the other at WDBO, both so brief that the issue could hardly be of any importance. Their substance was to inform us that "Orange County leaders voted 6-0 this morning to extend health and other workplace benefits to the partners and children of gay county employees."

As a result, we get to pretend one more time that homosexual partners actually have children.

Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs (who got my vote in November but won't get another) said that "All people deserve to be treated compassionately. Those values of compassion, sensitivity and fairness are things we need to value."

Mayor Jacobs also said that she had to "wrestle through her own beliefs as a Roman Catholic on the sanctity of marriage." And, as invariably happens when politicians go to the mat with their faith, the Faith lost again. Just to be a pain in the ass, I'd like to ask a question: how is it compassionate to treat two homosexuals as though they were married when they're not and never can be? Isn't it cruel to encourage people to live in an unreality, and to puposely delude them? How is it "sensitive?" Or is that the same thing as compassionate? How is it "fair" to extend benefits to the partner of a homosexual employee when the two are not married, never can be, and such benefits have always been reserved to married people, that is, a man and a woman; and, furthermore, which partner had nothing to do with bringing the aforementioned children into the world, which could only have been accomplished via our employee sleeping at some point with a human female, or via some technological tinkering that made use of that female's egg? The partner had nothing to do with it. The child is not "theirs."

Am I being too picky? The questions seem to me to proceed from common sense, but common sense doesn't always pay benefits.

I know that said benefits have heretofore been reserved to married couples (that is, to repeat, a couple comprised of a man and a woman) because the WDBO article points out that "the county decided not to allow opposite-sex unwed couples to receive health insurance coverage because they have the option of getting married."

But why? Is there something disreputable about living together while not married? There must be. But then why would you extend benefits to unmarried homosexuals? If there is something morally questionable about living, and having sex, together while unmarried, isn't it still questionable whether or not one has the option to marry? If at a later time homosexuals acquire the "option to marry", will you then in hindsight admit that their previous arrangement was wrong? Or is it only wrong when the option is absent, because without that option one is, so to speak, forced to live in a state of sin, whereas with the option the sin is not sin? Sorry to sound suspicious but... is there an agenda here, some kind of subtle pressure being exerted upon the state to move it, and public sympathy, in the direction of same-sex marriage? How else to explain the urgency of extending compassion, sensitivity and fairness to homosexuals while denying it to heteros? At least the latter can "have" children, and extending benefits to them might confer a stabilizing influence on the union leading toward marriage. A real one.

Lest anyone think it's all been made too easy for the homosexual "partners" (such a vague word), it should be known that "starting January 1st, domestic partners of county employees and their dependents will be able to receive health, dental, vision, and life insurance, along with bereavement leave, if they meet certain requirements":

1. They "are in a long-term, committed relationship."

[Common sense question: how long is long-term. How committed is committed?]

2. They "live together for at least six months."

[Oh, that long.]

3. They "are jointly responsible for each other's financial welfare and basic living expenses."

[But can't heterosexual couples be also thus responsible? Sorry, I forgot. They have the option of getting married and therefore should be punished for not doing so, while the homosexuals do not have the option and therefore should be rewarded for not doing what they cannot do under Florida law and what does not even exist under God's.]

TCR

2011-04-18T02:21:00.001-04:00

The newest issue of The Christendom Review is now up. Poetry, essays, fiction, art and music (you read that right).

In Remembrance...

2011-03-18T23:17:00.002-04:00

...of Terri Schiavo, whose court-ordered murder began today six years ago. Mentioned also at W4.

Another recent post was called "Double Trouble, or Double Effect?"

New Blog

2011-03-01T21:13:00.002-05:00

If you like gospel music, you might like this site, where you can find literate appreciation of the genre (by a Yankee, no less, and a girl, even better) accompanied by video exemplars. It's the Southern Gospel Yankee blog.

Randall Wallace...

2011-02-08T04:11:00.004-05:00

...writer of Braveheart and other things, at the National Prayer Breakfast. In attendance (and also on the list of speakers) is President Obama, Michelle, and other eminences. The full video can be found here.

Cross-posted at W4.

Beam Me Up...please

2011-01-20T03:50:00.003-05:00

Paul Cella reminds us Why We Fight, via a post at Redstate recommending a forthcoming book by former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson entitled Unplanned. An excerpt:

At first, the baby didn’t seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby’s side, and for a quick second I felt relief. Of course, I thought. The fetus doesn’t feel pain. I had reassured countless women of this as I’d been taught by Planned Parenthood. The fetal tissue feels nothing as it is removed. Get a grip, Abby. This is a simple, quick medical procedure. My head was working hard to control my responses, but I couldn’t shake an inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the screen.

The next movement was the sudden jerk of a tiny foot as the baby started kicking, as if it were trying to move away from the probing invader. As the cannula pressed its side, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that it could feel the cannula, and it did not like what it was feeling. And then the doctor’s voice broke through, startling me.

“Beam me up, Scotty,” he said lightheartedly to the nurse. He was telling her to turn on the suction — in an abortion the suction isn’t turned on until the doctor feels he has the cannula in exactly the right place.

I had a sudden urge to yell, “Stop!” To shake the woman and say, “Look at what is happening to your baby! Wake up! Hurry! Stop them!”

But even as I thought those words, I looked at my own hand holding the probe. I was one of “them” performing this act. My eyes shot back to the screen again. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty.

Read the whole excerpt here.

Merry Christmas...

2010-12-24T16:34:00.004-05:00

...to all who visit here. And from last year, a Christmas medley for your Christmas Eve. Frederika von Stade and Kathleen Battle soloists.

Allah's Shadow

2010-12-22T17:11:00.003-05:00

At semester's end, one of my students (whom I will call A.) inadvertently provided some Advent uplift by telling me her mother's story. The details are spare, in virtue of the circumstances under which the essay was written, but sufficient to the purpose, and I offer it here, including occasional use of A.'s own words, with her permission.

Her mother was born of teenage parents into a very poor family. She was the oldest of thirteen brothers and sisters. Her own mother, A's grandmother, was married at the age of twelve to an eighteen year old boy, an occurrence, says A., which was "supposedly a normal thing to do in Singapore at the time." A's mother spent all her time taking care of her siblings and "selling food to the neighbors" to help make ends meet. She did manage to stay in school through 10th grade while all of her brothers and sisters dropped out sooner, by middle school at the latest. At the age of seventeen, she met an older man, twenty-eight years older to be exact: he was forty-five. He was also a Christian. It was this, and not his age, that incurred her family's severe disapproval. He converted to Islam so that he could marry the girl. A's older brother was born of this union which, though the husband provided "a wonderful life," didn't last. She doesn't say for how long it did last, or how old her mother was when she met A's father.

This new husband was also a Christian, and an American. He would not convert, for which the woman's family hated him. He was not himself very serious about religion, but liked his Christian background and was determined to stick by it. Her family's wrath notwithstanding, A's mother loved the man too much to leave him, married him in the end, and ultimately moved with him to America, ending up in Hawaii. (My student spells it Hawai'i). A was their first child, later supplemented by two brothers. Her dad, she says, "wanted the best for me," so he enrolled her in a private Christian school, against his wife's vehement opposition. Now, although the mother was not particularly attached to her own religion (nor the father to his; says A, "religion was only important to their families"), she "hated Jesus Christ and Christianity," a loathing no doubt absorbed from the culture in which she was raised. (I am making a presumption here.) But there was another side to her character: "she loved helping others, especially if it had to with cooking." So she volunteered at the school's church "to cook and give out food to the homeless people in Honolulu." The course of her duties required sitting through the Bible study lessons that accompanied the meals, and gradually her mind began to open concerning "this whole Christianity thing."

One night she had a dream. In it, Jesus and Allah were in two different buildings. Allah seemed to her like a shadow, while Jesus was vividly and concretely "there," so she went into Jesus' building, whereupon he "pointed his finger at her," which she took to mean that he wanted her to be with him. So she went to him and then woke up. The next day she knew she would have to convert to Christianity, in consequence "accepting Jesus as her Lord and Savior."

That was seven years ago. A's mother's dedication to God in the person of Jesus Christ has apparently inspired her father at last to start taking his religion seriously. "This whole process," says A, "is the best thing that has happened to our family." However, her mother still hasn't told her family about her conversion, in fear that their hatred will deepen, and that she will be disowned. They think she is still Muslim. She plans on telling them eventually, but it is a daily struggle. She reads frequently, to herself and sometimes aloud, the bible verse which cautions that "if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father in heaven."

A. obviously loves her mother very much, convinced that "she is a very gifted woman, and that God will use her talents to glorify Himself." She concludes on a note I don't see much in evidence among the young: "I do not deserve the love she pours out on me."

Well, I think you do.
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cross-posted at W4.

My Friend, Sam.

2010-11-14T22:43:00.004-05:00

What I do when I should be doing something else:

The current issue of The Christendom Review...

2010-11-13T16:42:00.003-05:00

...is now online, wherein you can read a fine essay by Tim McGrew (related to Lydia, by marriage, in fact), who describes the spiritual evolution of perhaps the most prominent evolutionist of his time, George John Romanes. Another beautiful reflection comes from sometime W4 (and Apologia) commenter Beth Impson, who looks back at a not-quite-forgotten little classic by John Gardner, and in the process reminds us of the first impulse and final purpose that gives (or ought to give) birth to art that is true and lasting. Painter, novelist, poet and screenwriter William Mickelberry takes apart Peter Taylor's "Venus, Folly, Cupid, and Time," and one of Beth's former students, Millie Jones, shows great promise as a poet, proving that very good things can come out of a Christian college.

And then there are the magnificent paintings of Chicago resident Nanci Mertz-King, who seems to me a master of color and value, among other things.

There's some other good stuff, too. Andy Nowicki attempts to reconcile a scriptural difficulty with Christian morality, and an excerpt from Rick Barnett's forthcoming novel describes a world in which the government has "gone Darwin."

Enjoy.

Sunday Thought: The Epic of Life

2010-10-03T04:51:00.003-04:00

There's a Sunday Guessing Game at W4. Meanwhile, for the rest of you:

If newborns could remember and speak, they would emerge from the womb carrying tales as wondrous as Homer's. The would describe the fury of conception and the sinuous choreography of nerve cells, billions of them dancing pas de deux to make connections that infuse mere matter with consciousness. They would recount how the amorphous glob of an arm bud grows into the fine structure of fingers agile enough to play a polonaise. They would tell of cells swarming out of the nascent spinal cord to colonize far reaches of the embryo, helping to form face, head and glands. The explosion of such complexity and order - a heart that beats, legs that run and a brain powerful enough to contemplate its own origins - seems like a miracle. It is as if a single dab of white paint turned into the multicolored splendor of the Sistine ceiling.

from "How Life Begins," by Sharon Begley, cover story for the January 11, 1982 issue of Newsweek.

Sunday Thought: Behind Every Successful Man There is a...

2010-09-19T05:54:00.004-04:00

In a sort of follow-up to my previous post, I’d like to say a word about another man who strode that Victorian stage along with Newman – sometimes beside him and sometimes not. They were often at loggerheads, being men very different in temperament, interests and degree and kind of ambition. He was significant enough that in biographies of Newman, he often needs a chapter all his own. Also a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, he was likely a very good man, possibly a holy man. His most passionate ministry was that which he exercised among the downtrodden slum dwellers of London. And he acquired quite the reputation for gaining converts. But there is one fact about him that I find most arresting, though I’m not sure why.

Born in 1808, Henry Edward Manning was by seven years Newman’s junior. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, an enrollment cut short when his father, a banker, experienced business reversals. While working as a clerk in the Colonial Office, he became convinced that he was called to the ministry, returned to Oxford, and eventually took Anglican orders. He did well wherever he went, making friends easily. One was W. E. Gladstone, who would later say upon Manning’s crossing to Rome that it was as if he “had murdered his mother.” They remained in contact for many years to come, Manning several times extending the hand of peace, but Gladstone remained essentially cold. He seems to have taken Manning’s decision as a personal betrayal, and never got over it.

Until I read a biography of Manning, or something he has written on the matter, the path to his conversion will remain not nearly so clear as Newman’s. He was, so this narrative claims, “outside the Oxford Movement,” meaning that at the time of its commencement he was not a High Churchman, and he disliked the Tracts for the Times, especially Newman’s Tract Ninety, which he felt misrepresented the meaning of the Thirty-Nine Articles. (So, that he was outside the movement is not to say that he was not influenced by it.) But six years later we find him subscribing to nearly all of Newman’s Anglo-Catholic principles, and very firmly in the camp of Newman’s great friends, Pusey and Keble. He moves from Luther’s view of Baptism in 1834 to, a mere eight years later, a belief in Apostolic Succession. On a trip to Rome he met with Pope Pius IX and wrote to a friend that “it is impossible not to love” him. Not long after he converted. I’m not sure of the exact year, but it was after Newman – I’m guessing around 1850, followed by ordination to the Catholic priesthood.

His reputation begins at once, and his rise was rapid:

During his first month in the Church, he converted seven; before he returned from Rome in 1852, he had converted fifteen; and while traveling home, he converted several more. He always kept a careful record of his conversions; this record shows that up to 1865 he had personally converted no fewer than 346 persons in England alone.

It became the common wisdom among Protestants that it would be wise to avoid religious conversation with Dr. Manning, as when it was over he would have you come out on the wrong side of the Reformation. His great failure was with Florence Nightingale, whose career he had done much to encourage. She came to the Church’s door, but balked on its threshold. He did, however, capture her friend and confidante, one Miss Stanley, daughter of the Dean of Westminster.

Of his differences with Newman I’ll mention only one, which I found amusing. Newman had written an open Letter to Doctor Pusey upon publication of the latter’s Eirenicon, against that work’s representation of Catholic teaching regarding veneration of Mary and the saints. The letter was widely hailed in Catholic circles, and even got Rome’s attention. Manning personally praised him for it. But then he gave approval for publication of an article in the Dublin Review, by one William George Ward, the Review’s editor, attacking Newman’s use of “certain phrases” in his Letter. Bishop Ullathorne put a stop to it, reminding Manning that Ward would be outside his rights as a layman to censure a member of the priesthood. (Ah, the good old days.) But Newman was rightly upset with Manning, and it took a while to put this one behind him, writing to the bishop:

I will say to your Lordship that I cannot trust the Archbishop. Last spring he wrote to me flattering letters upon my letter to Pusey; and then he followed them up by privately sending to your Lordship for approval an article…in which I was severely handled for certain passages in it. I think that, as a matter of prudence, I never shall trust him till he has gone through Purgatory, and has no infirmities upon him.

In spite of their differences, in the end it came down to this, as Manning wrote to a friend in 1866: “I should be ready to let him [Newman] write down my faith and I would sign it without reading it. So would he.”

But here is that fact I find so interesting. Back in the early 1830’s, the newly ordained Anglican Manning had fallen in love with one of the beautiful, “sylph-like” daughters of a Dr. Sargent. Her name was Caroline. They were married in 1833 by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (one of the four sons – the others were Henry, Robert and William, who all became Catholic – of William Wilberforce, leader of the anti-slavery movement). It was a brief marriage. Caroline suffered from tuberculosis and died within four years. But it seems his memory of her was a thing kept very much alive in his heart. Upon becoming a Catholic, he writes, “Fifteen years ago a crucifix stood in sight of her dying bed, which taught me the article of Communion of Saints. And I have never been without one.” On the day he entered the Roman Academia for study, after his ordination, this went into his diary: “Nativity of Caroline, most lamented.”

After Manning’s own death in 1892, Herbert (later Cardinal) Vaughn related the following to Baron von Hügel:

…this is what happened shortly before his death. I was by his bedside; he looked around to see that we were alone; he fumbled under his pillow for something; he drew out a battered little pocketbook full of a woman’s fine handwriting. He said, ‘For years you have been as a son to me, Herbert. I know not to whom to leave this – I leave it to you. Into this little book my dearest wife wrote her prayers and meditations. Not a day has passed , since her death, on which I have not prayed and meditated from this book. All the good I may have done, all the good I may have been, I owe to her. Take precious care of it.’ He ceased speaking, and soon afterwards unconsciousness came on.

---------------------

Cross-posted at W4.

In Thanks for Friends in High Places

2010-09-15T23:09:00.011-04:00

This appreciation must be decidedly brief (I hope to do a lengthier one for an upcoming issue of The Christendom Review), but Paul has asked me to note that today the Pope travels to England, his trip culminating on Sunday in the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman. He will be declared as blessed with all the company of heaven, and worthy of public veneration.

People come to faith in various ways and in their own time. Newman came to his young (by my lights) at the age of fifteen, when, after reading some books “of the school of Calvin,” put into his hands by a Reverend Walter Mayers, he experienced a revelation: “I received it at once, and believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious, (and of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet,) would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory.” To his liberation from the doctrine of predestination he thanks the writings of Dr. Thomas Scott, of whom he says, “I almost owe my soul.” Not long thereafter he felt called to the celibate life, setting his mind on it by the age of 28, and, finally, to Anglican orders.

One might think that the consequences of a conversion - with the light of Christ now illuminating the mind – ought to be swift and certain, all difficulties resolved. But it seems that quite often conversion is not the end of a journey, but its beginning. As regards the recognizable form and substance of Christ’s one Church, I remember waking up one day – within a year of finding faith – to understand where I should be. Newman would require another 29 years of careful investigation before his conscience could clear the way.

It was this care for the dictates of a conscience seeking the Lord’s will that finally endeared him, after the eloquence of the Apologia, to his own countrymen, even those not of his fold, an effect still exerted on the modern reader. But before the Apologia, and especially before the Essay on Development, it was this cautionary nature that got him accused by all camps, Anglican and Catholic, of hesitation, evasion, prevarication – in short, of not knowing his own mind while happily casting the minds of others into doubt and leading them astray. It was almost as though Newman’s character required, before it could be convinced of a point, that he write a book about it.

Ever sensitive to imputations against his honesty, he was hurt by the accusations. After he became Catholic, they continued. Among the Protestants it was that he was unhappy in his new communion and would soon return to the sanity of the Anglican hearth. Among certain militant Catholics of unsubtle mind and a penchant for incomprehension, it was the suspicion that “he is not really one of us.” What kind of Catholic, after all, writes an essay entitled “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine?” It was the Apologia that quieted much of this and, in bringing him back to the attention and affection of his countrymen, brought joy to his heart.

But it was this care for conscience, and this need, which others found vexing, to deliberate at great length before making a move of any consequence that he readily extended to others. At the passing of his old friend, John Keble – whose preaching of the sermon “National Apostasy” is generally credited with beginning The Oxford Movement – unkind things were said of him, Keble, by ex-Anglicans of both the sceptic and Catholic-convert variety, to wit, that in his failure to become Roman Catholic he had been shown a hypocrite. Though a college was in time named after him, Keble was at the end living, so to speak, on the outskirts of his own communion, his High Church Anglicanism much diminished in prestige, as at Oxford that communion was rapidly yielding its influence to the Benthamite and Millsian philosophy, and to a pervasive religious indifferentism. Entering students were no longer required to subscribe to the 39 Articles. Of the unkindnesses uttered against him, Newman wrote to a friend:

“It is grievous that people are so hard. In converts it is inexcusable. It is a miserable spirit in them. How strange it is; - Keble seems to have received all doctrine except the necessity of being in communion with the Holy See…it seems to me no difficulty to suppose a person in good faith on such a point as the necessity of communion with Rome. Till he saw that (or that he was not in the Church), he was bound to remain as he was, and it was in that way that he always put it.”

The nature of the friendship between Newman and Keble is revealed in a letter written by the latter just prior to Newman’s passage to Rome:

“Besides the deep grief of losing you for a guide and helper, and scarcely knowing which way to look, you may guess what uncomfortable feelings haunt me, as if I, more than anyone, was answerable for whatever of distress or scandal may occur. I keep on thinking, ‘If I had been different, perhaps Newman would have been guided to see things differently, and we might have been spared so many broken hearts and bewildered spirits.’…And now I wish you to help me. That way of help, at any rate, is not forbidden you in respect of any of us.
“My dearest Newman, you have been a kind and helpful friend to me in a way in which scarce anyone else could have been, and you are so mixed up in my mind with old and dear and sacred thoughts, that I cannot well bear to part with you, most unworthy as I know myself to be. And yet I cannot go along with you. I must cling to the belief that we are not really parted; you have taught me so, and I scarce think you can unteach me.
“And having relieved my mind with this little word, I will only say, God bless you and reward you a thousand fold for all your help in every way to me unworthy, and to many others. May you have peace where you are gone, and help us in some way to get peace; but somehow I scarce think it will be in the way of controversy. And so, with somewhat of a feeling as if the spring had been taken out of the year, I am, as always, your affectionate and grateful,--J. Keble.”

Many converts no doubt owe much to Newman. Even if his works were not the agent of conversion, his arguments in adumbrated form are everywhere, through generations passing the lips of priests in pulpits and flowing through the pens of lesser apologists. He is now a part of the Church’s pedagogy, and impossible to escape.

In my own case, I had not even heard of Newman until after becoming Catholic. I had known slightly of Chesterton since high school, but he and Newman were excluded from my college anthologies in favor of Ruskin, Carlyle and Mill. A good Jesuit steered me in the right direction, and upon reading Newman for the first time I experienced, not a reconversion, but a continuation of the original. It is for this that I feel a debt to him. His was the kind of writing that, after reading one thing, there was created in me an insatiable demand for the next. I worked literally backwards from the Apologia to the Essay on Development to that great historical and theological mystery story, written in his Anglican days, Arians of the Fourth Century, wherein we become witnesses to the miraculous passage of the orthodox creed through a labyrinthine minefield of heresies, its purity protected by the valiant Fathers of the Ancient Church (to whom Newman had an abiding devotion, and of whom he is a modern descendant), and by the faithful themselves, its victory assured by the Spirit of Truth who made them His knights in battle.

But after years of immersion in his writings, one returns later to notice the quieter, more unsung moments. For a man is not beatified because of his erudition, his silver tongue, or his Ciceronian prose, but because he is holy. This is the part of the man, of any saint, hardest to find (save in the works they do in the world), for we cannot know what the confessor must, and no one can know what only God can see. We have been given glimpses: his unwavering devotion to truth and to the salvation of souls in his writings and priestly conduct, and his bravery on behalf of the afflicted during the cholera outbreak. But these alone are no guarantor, no proof that the Christian virtues have been lived to a heroic degree. Other glimpses are even less so, but affecting nonetheless as evidence of a sensitive heart, such as the story that an old man later identified as Newman, “poorly dressed…in an old gray coat with the collar turned up, and his hat pulled down over his face, as if he wished to hide his features,” was spotted “leaning over the lych-gate of the churchyard that surrounds the Littlemore church, which Newman had built thirty years before; and that the old man was crying.” He had returned after twenty-two years to lay eyes on the place where so many conversations of seemingly grave import to the revival of the Church of England had taken place, and to remember the old friends who had taken part, many now passed away. It was also the place he spent those last years suspended between two churches, before the Essay on Development freed him.

But then there is the testimony of those who knew him best, and whom we must trust in the end. In his last days, the Cardinal was visited by Bishop Ullathorne, who gives us another glimpse:

“I have been visiting Cardinal Newman today. He is much wasted, but very cheerful. Yesterday he went to London to see an oculist. When he tries to read black specks are before his eyes. But the oculist tells him there is nothing wrong but old age. We had a long and cheery talk, but as I was rising to leave an action of his caused a scene I shall never forget, for its sublime lesson to myself. He said in low and humble accents, ‘My dear Lord, will you do me a great favor?’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. He glided down on his knees, bent down his venerable head, and said, ‘Give me your blessing.’ What could I do with him before me in such a posture? I could not refuse without giving him great embarrassment. So I laid my hand on his head and said, ‘My dear Lord Cardinal, notwithstanding all laws to the contrary, I pray God to bless you, and that His Holy Spirit may be full in your heart.’ As I walked to the door, refusing to put on his biretta as he went with me, he said, ‘I have been indoors all my life, whilst you have battled for the Church in the world.’ I felt annihilated in his presence.”

The “law to the contrary” was the common rule that the lower Dignity should kneel before the higher.

On his deathbed, after receiving the Last Sacraments, he asked that a handkerchief that had been given to him some thirty years before by a “poor, indigent person” (whether man or woman I do not know), a complete stranger, be brought to him that he might put it on. At the time of receiving it the scarf had been accompanied by a message of sympathy and respect (its content again I do not know). It was a time of “great tribulation” for him, and in gratitude he died with it on. It was his last act in the world.

Now the Church this Sunday will take the opportunity to say publicly to this “good and faithful servant” what its Eminences sometimes failed to say during his lifetime: “Well done.” A miracle was required, and one has been reported. The rest of us, who did not know him in life but merely drank from his pen, will echo in our hearts Cardinal Manning’s proclamation at his brother priest’s funeral – “We have lost our greatest witness to the faith” – and with our prayers offer that witness our thanks. Now may he intercede for us in all our journeys.

For we believe that the same man who could thunder a warning to his parishioners that they might be too comfortable with the world - such that, “were you to die tonight you would be lost forever” – meant also for us what we read in his devotions, that

“I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; whether I be rich or poor, despised or esteemed by man, God knows me and calls me by name.
“God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission – I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his…Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away…He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me – still He knows what He is about…I ask not to see – I ask not to know – I ask simply to be used.”

We believe, that is, that he lived his motto – Cor ad cor loquitur (“heart speaketh unto heart”) – addressing it not only to his God, or to his friends in life, but to all those, we, who would be his friends “out of time.” That is what he most wanted to do – to speak to your heart – and to make of you first a friend to Christ, and only secondly to himself. This is, in part, what I take from him, what I thank him for this day, and will again on many another.
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cross-posted at W4.

On that Day

2010-09-12T16:13:00.003-04:00

Betty Ong, Flight Attendant on American Flight 11.

102 Minutes that Changed America:

The Boy with the Black Brain

2010-09-08T20:33:00.000-04:00

New post at W4.

Erica Blasberg's death a suicide...

2010-08-24T22:45:00.002-04:00

...or so the county coroner has ruled. You can listen on that page to Dr. Thomas Hess's 911 call. He was later arrested for removing items from the scene, which included Erica's suicide note. Now why would a doctor do that? In addition to all the drugs in her system, she was found with a bag over her head, a detail not released in initial press reports.

(This is a follow-up to a previous post. Thanks to friend Ann Crews for the heads-up.)

Portrait of a Girl

2010-08-13T04:37:00.001-04:00

Magnificent Muslim Woman

2010-08-12T05:20:00.001-04:00

Raheel Raza. When they're free, their full beauty emerges.

Sunday comment on the "marriage" debate...

2010-08-08T17:55:00.002-04:00

By Lydia, here:

I consider that when everyone has to say that two men whose claim to the term rests on the act of homosexual sodomy are "married," the sky has fallen. When people seriously suggest that something else has to happen before we have reached a "sky is falling" scenario, this tells me that our world has gone insane...

The Muslim girls were all right...

2010-08-06T15:41:00.004-04:00

before they ended up dead. Maybe now they're saints in heaven (it is possible), martyrs to a cause: the freedom to live and love as we see fit. Even if we see wrongly, the punishment of death seems disproportionate. In 2008, these two girls, Amina and Sarah Said, received such punishment, allegedly at their father's hand:

If you have TV access, Fox News airs a program tonight at 10 P.M. Eastern called "Honor Killing in America," which features the case of Amina and Sarah. I cannot, of course, vouch in advance for the show's quality, but it might be worth a look.

Prop 8 Goes Down

2010-08-06T15:35:00.002-04:00

From Maggie Gallagher's SF Chronicle article:

If this ruling is upheld, millions of Americans will face for the first time a legal system that is committed to the view that our deeply held moral views on sex and marriage are unacceptable in the public square, the fruit of bigotry that should be discredited, stigmatized and repressed. Parents will find that, almost Soviet-style, their own children will be re-educated using their own tax dollars to disrespect their parents' views and values.

Those in power will call it tolerance, they will call it pluralism, but in truth same-sex marriage is a government takeover of an institution the government did not make, cannot in justice redefine, and ought to respect and protect as essential to the common good.

Her blog is here.

Zippy says...

2010-07-30T03:32:00.001-04:00

Goodbye.

In lesser news, I've a post at W4.

Chihuahua Freedom

2010-07-16T21:15:00.003-04:00

This is why I can't watch those animal rescue shows anymore. You can take only so much human cruelty, stupidity and negligence. I can tell you from personal experience that if you have one of these as a pet, you'll have a completely devoted friend for life. His friendship is so intense, that some people are not suited for it. So give him to someone who can handle it, rather than ignore him to the extent that his eyes become infected and he goes blind.

An Important post...

2010-07-13T04:10:00.001-04:00

...by Kevin Jones. If this is not an aberration but common practice, then the Canadians can't be the only ones to have seen it, and the culture we're defending is not worth saving. Get out of Afghanistan.

The Christendom Review...

2010-07-11T03:34:00.002-04:00

...now has a Facebook fan page, so if you're on FB and want to become one, do it. Fans can post comments, links to items of interest, and even write longer posts under the "Discussions" tab. Permissible subject matter includes the arts and culture broadly construed. Lack of civility results in damnation.

Katie's Story

2010-07-05T20:18:00.005-04:00

The full episode is here.

If you missed it on ABC's 20/20, it's worth watching. The death penalty for the offenders wouldn't disturb me at all. As Katie's mother said, it's hard to think of such people as human beings. The main offender got two life sentences, which means that he will spend at least 16 years in prison. The other could be out in 6. Britain has a funny way of doing math these days.

What Katie used to look like, in the days when, says she, "I used to be the most important person in my life.":

Hibiscus at midnight

2010-06-27T03:16:00.002-04:00

Graduation Day

2010-06-11T05:50:00.002-04:00

Got an email from an old high school friend the other day. He'd just gotten back from the 45th reunion (this is up in Maryland), which I didn't make. I had a good excuse: too much to do here at home. But I could have made it. It would have put a kink in my schedule's regularity, forced the postponement of a necessary task or two, but I could have managed it. My friend had a great time, even though only 30-40 people showed up, probably because there'd been a 40th followed by a "60 years old" birthday party for everyone. There'll be another in 2015, and he really wants us all to put it on the calendar. That's because it will be the last.

He mentioned the names of some of those who'd attended. I remembered most of them, but could not put a face to some. I felt bad about it. It didn't seem right, as though I owed it to them to remember. And I can't find my damned yearbook.

(I was up there in 2005 to watch Bernadette play in the LPGA Championship at Bulle Rock, and had hoped that among the gallery I might run into some old friends. It didn't happen. I later learned that two of them, husband and wife, had worked that tournament as volunteers, but if we ever saw each other, recognition was not in the cards.)

Then he reminded us that out of a graduating class of approximately 275, thirty-one have passed away. I had known of some, of course, because a few - including my best friend - had been killed in Viet Nam. Another in an industrial accident. Another died of AIDS. But of the deaths of those listed this time, I hadn't known. One was a nice girl, almost pretty, liked by everyone, and the kind to whom boys didn't - but should have - paid more attention. (Isn't it always that way?) I don't remember seeing her at all the dances. She eventually married, had children, lived a good life, I presume: of injuries sustained in a very recent catastrophic car accident.

Another fellow had been on the football team with me, and part of my "crowd." He pretended to be a tough guy at times, but wasn't really. He'd be there for you though if you needed him. He called me out of the blue back around 1990 (or was it 95?), trying to coax me into coming up for the 25th or 30th reunion. (I have no idea how he hunted me down.) I said I'd try, but - as good as it was to hear his voice - I didn't make that one either. I haven't made any of them. This guy married too, three times last I heard, and had children of course. He lived his whole life in this little town where I first met him: of complications from diabetes.

Another I'd played basketball and baseball with. He was short, well-muscled, a pretty good athlete and a "good guy," in the sense that I never perceived that he was especially close with anyone, yet liked by all. We became temporarily close during baseball season because we both got punished at the same time (suspended one game) for misbehavior of some kind. I don't know what happened with the rest of his life: of a heart attack.

But it was the first name on the list that sent the cascade of a prickly cold chill down my spine and it hasn't gone away yet. Sometimes it does, but it keeps coming back. It was the name of a girl I'd once dated - seriously, I guess you could say - but who, in the end, I let down because I could not love her, certainly not in the way she deserved. And she did deserve it. She's one of the few people I've ever known about whom no one ever had a single backbiting thing to say. She was a cheerleader, socially at ease, and quite popular. She was also, like the girl mentioned above, almost pretty. The real source of her beauty, and hence her popularity, was in her personality, an indefinable quality that shone out like a special grace. The shine was taken when cancer took her.

I realize I've been speaking of all these people as 'good', or 'nice', or 'liked by all', and though it's always easy to speak well of dead people, I'm not lying. I remember the good. A lot of dross falls away with time. Everything back then that I might have found to criticize, "cut," despise (except in myself, of course), denigrate, mock, fight over or sneer at simply isn't important anymore. All that memory wants to latch onto is the essence of what made me like these people in the first place. I feel helpless but to wish them only the most ordinary of good things: that they have known reasonably good health, found love, got married, had children, and enjoyed whatever measure of happiness is allowed us in this life.

Maybe it's just that I hear the swish of the scythe now whispering through the field of all our lives, and I'm hiding out in the weeds in a corner of that field where I've yet to be found, knowing all the while that the whole of it must, and will, be harvested. But that can't be all of it, because that cold chill has returned every night since I heard the news and sends me to bed with a prayer on my lips, and the prayer asks of that girl with a special grace that she will forgive me. I treated her badly on a couple of occasions (in ways you would expect of a vain and shallow boy), and know that I accomplished a very simple but very bad thing - I hurt her feelings. I hope she found that love she deserved, and if God is truly merciful, he will see that she gets the message.

Reading Assignment

2010-05-31T04:26:00.003-04:00

You're probably in the mood to read some poetry, by various poets with very distinctive voices.

You'd probably like to read a spellbinding essay by Paul Cella explaining the incredibly complex financial securities game that almost ruined our nation. Real smart people invented the game. Problem was, they liked playing more than they loved their country.

You've probably been waiting for someone to properly appreciate Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. Well, Lydia McGrew's done that for you.

How about a short story by Jeff Trippe, a modern romance about a guy, a girl, and a...well, you'll have to read it.

Or an explication of Hemingway's "The Killers."

Or would you like to look at some oil paintings by one of America's best landscape artists?

Of course you would. It can all be found in the current issue of The Christendom Review. Tell everyone you know.

Our thanks to Todd McKimmey.

Sunday Thought - The Elephant in the Salon

2010-05-30T01:22:00.007-04:00

This book is an attempt to develop a set of instructions, an analysis of what has gone wrong in recent years with the various arts - especially fiction, since that is the art on which I'm best informed - and what has gone wrong with criticism. The language of critics, and of artists of the kind who pay attention to critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about feelings or intellectual affirmations - not talk about moving and surprising twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas -but sentences full of large words like hermaneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, or opaque language, and full of fine distinctions - for instance those between modernist and post-modernist - that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficult than ever before to read, criticism has become trivial.

The trivial has its place, its entertainment value. I can think of no good reason that some people should not specialize in the behavior of the left-side hairs on an elephant's trunk. Even at its best, its most deadly serious, criticism, like art, is partly a game, as all good critics know. My objection is not to the game but the fact that contemporary critics have for the most part lost track of the point of their game, just as artists, by and large, have lost track of theirs. Fiddling with the hairs on an elephant's nose is indecent when the elephant happens to be standing on the baby.

At least in America art is not thought capable, these days, of tromping on babies. Yet it does so all the time, and what is worse, it does so with a bland smile. I've watched writers, composers, and painters knocking off their "works" with their left hands. Nice people, most of them. Artists are generally pleasant people, childlike both in love and hate, intending no harm when they turn out bad paintings, compositions, or books. Indeed, their ambition guarantees that they will do the best they know how to do or think they ought to do. The error is less in their objects than in their objectives. "Art is play, or partly play," they'll tell you with an engaging smile, serving up their non-nutritious fare with the murderous indifference of a fat girl serving up hamburgers. What they say is true enough, as far as it goes, and nothing is more tiresome than the man who keeps hollering, "Hey, let's be serious!" but that is what we must holler.

In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue - by reason and by banging the table - for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least an evasion of too fashionable simplifications. My basic message throughout this book is as old as the hills, drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and standard in Western civilization down through the eighteenth century; one would think all critics and artists should he thoroughly familiar with it, and perhaps many are. But my experience is that in university lecture halls, or in kitchens at midnight, after parties, the traditional view of art strikes most people as strange news.

The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art, like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality. That art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game - or so a troll might say - because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.

Like legitimate art, legitimate criticism is a tragicomic holding action against entropy. Life is all conjunctions, one damn thing after another, cows and wars and chewing gum and mountains; art - the best, most important art - is all subordination: guilt because of sin because of pain. (All the arts treat subordination; literature is merely the most explicit about what leads to what.) Art builds temporary walls against life's leveling force, the ruin of what is splendidly unnatural in us, consciousness, the state in which not all atoms are equal. In corpses, entropy has won; the brain and the toenails have equal say. Art asserts and reasserts those values which hold off dissolution, struggling to keep the mind intact and preserve the city, the mind's safe preserve. Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness.

---------------------------------------------
Readers are welcome to tell me whose words these are. Without research.

I once was Lost and never found, twas blind...

2010-05-24T19:28:00.006-04:00

...and still can't see.

I saw the final episode, and it's just as I suspected all along: everybody was dead. I'm not sure when they died exactly; in the plane crash I suppose. Which means that everything that happened post-crash was a sort of purgatorial phantasm. Which further means that viewers and characters both have been seeing dead people. I can only hope that the transition between this life and the next one won't really be drawn out to six seasons worth of TV shows with summers between. In the end, they were all gathered in a church somewhere (except for Ben - don't know what his fate is) and when Jack's father opened the church doors a great white light poured in. None of them fell to their knees, though, so I guess the actual sight of heaven is not the smack-down moment I thought it would be. I got Lost somewhere between seasons 3 and 4, and I think the writers did too and started making stuff up while they decided what their series was really all about. I dare anyone to explain - rationally - all the twists and turns in the storyline so that they add up to the final result. Emphasis on the word 'rationally.' In capital letters.

This guy tries, but I'm not buying. His most telling line: After years of insane complication of plot and character, no ending could have “explained” the show in a wholly satisfying way, and it might have been better not to try. So he then writes a two page column trying. My advice: do not go into the light.

I do think, however, that Evangeline Lilly is something of an angel and ought to be resurrected so that she can appear in as many TV shows, movies, and commercials as possible. She doesn't even have to do anything. Just look at the camera.

Herpephobia

2010-05-18T17:10:00.007-04:00

There's a snake in my garage. Writhed his way under a box before I could get hold of him. Excuse me while I do a little search on the internet to find out whether or not he poses a mortal threat.

[Update]: It appears the little fellow was probably one of these:

A ring-necked snake, that is, Diadophis punctatus punctatus, and nonvenomous. That means I can pick him up and pet him (when I find him) rather than take his head off with a machete. Oh, you think I don't have a machete. Well here it is, right next to the axe:

Sharp as a razor, too. It'll take down palmettos, weeds and small trees. I got the axe last summer and went around the yard slamming it into wooden things just to hear the sound of it. The backside can be used as a sledgehammer. Around the same time I got a saw that I really like.

It will cut anything. If you wanted to be one of those serial killers who dismembers the body afterwards, this is the saw for you. Virtually zero spatter. It, along with a chainsaw, resulted in the sleek look of the camphor tree.

When I told my wife there was a snake in the garage, she freaked out. I tried to calm her down by informing her that the ring-necked snake is quite harmless and beneficial. It eats things you don't want around. I told her if she saw it to just pick it up and throw it in the bushes. It's not inclined to bite when handled. She just looked at me like I'd had too much to drink. Hard facts seldom overcome a fear of reptiles. I once saw her kill a gecko by spraying it with Raid. It was an awful death. I just hope I find that snake before she does. I probably will, because there's not much chance she'll go looking for it.

Worldly Women

2010-05-17T16:39:00.002-04:00

Cos-mo-pol-i-tan: 1. belonging to all the world; not limited to the politics, interests or prejudices of one part of the world. 2. of or characteristic of a cosmopolite; worldly; sophisticated...3. completely absorbed in one's self; vain; 4. completely obsessed with one's own sexual persona; promiscuous; 5. complete lack of interest in anything other than 3 or 4.

I made up 3, 4 and 5, but somebody had to do it. Meanings change, and dictionaries have trouble keeping pace. The cover of the current magazine advertises an interview with a girl named Pink: "The Most Badass Chick We've Ever Interviewed." Pink is on the cover. I don't know who Pink is, as in I've never heard of Pink. Pink's wearing a tight grey skirt seemingly held together by metal rods. Her hair is cut very short, like a guy's. It's an unnatural silvery color. The v-neck of her tight grey skirt plunges to her solar plexus. I don't know why she's a badass. When I was growing up, I never heard a girl described that way.

Other articles advertised on the cover:

"100 Facts your Gyno Should Have Told You." This sounds medically useful. But if your gyno is leaving out so many facts, maybe you should consider changing doctors. And, just out of curiosity, what do you need him/her for other than subscriptions for birth control pills?

"Caught With Their Pants Down: you'll die laughing...and vow to lock the door." Frankly, I don't want to know the details, but at least the theme is familiar.

"Sexy New Hair and Makeup Looks." Remove the first word and nobody will read it.

"Stuck in Neutral? Gutsy Little Moves that Will Make Your Life Awesome." Don't bother. This is the only one in which the theme's not familiar. Besides, your life's already awesome. You're a Cosmo girl.

"75 Sex Tips from Guys: Sizzling, Sinful, and Surprising Things They're Craving Now." Get serious. No guy knows more than one or two things, so I'm figuring these tips came from 75 different guys, and that by the time you get to number 10 we're well on the road to perversion. Since the descriptive "Sinful" is sort of a major theme of the magazine, you're probably not put off by it. But if a guy wants to do something to you that you find "surprising," I'd suggest you get out of the building. I say this because "surprising" is likely a euphemism for "shocking," which they will not use to avoid passing judgement upon other people's sexual perversions. Or should that be 'preferences'?

I'm just guessing because I haven't read the article. It might be chock full of 75 perfectly harmless things, like handholding and butterfly kisses, that reinforce the sacred and immortal love between you and the men of your dreams, the ones to whom you are not married and with whom you hope to avoid having any children. I just don't like the odds.

The last one is "Girl Traits No Man Can Resist," the most important of which (IMO) is that you actually are a girl. As a teenager I always felt lucky when the person I put my arm around in the movie theater was a girl. Of course, this magazine is not written for teenagers but grown women, although the terms "men" and "women" do not show up on the cover, just 'girls' and 'guys.' Anyway, if you're one of those women-girls, one, that is, whose interests are not particularly wide-ranging (cosmopolitan) this might be the magazine for you.

Erica Blasberg, RIP

2010-05-11T03:50:00.007-04:00

This one's kind of hard to take.

In the 2004 U.S. Women's Open, Bernadette and Erica played their first two rounds together. (Neither girl made the cut.) Both girls' fathers caddied for them. In December of that year, both went through the same Q-school and won their LPGA cards as fully exempt players. In June of 2005, at the LPGA Championship in Havre de Grace, Md., we ran into Erica in the lobby of our motel, so Bern invited her to dinner. She accepted and seemed delighted to have someone to hang out with. On the course she was fiercely competitive (testimony to which, not all of it flattering, I can give but will not), but off the course could be quite engaging. She was blessed with a big bright smile. I got the sense that evening of someone mildly struggling to put herself at ease with her company, of trying to enjoy a 'normal' moment, but maybe I read too much into it. It might have been due merely to my presence. Fathers are conversation inhibitors.

I took a picture of her and Bern in front of the motel, but now I can't find it.

Another memory sticks in the mind. A few weeks later at the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills in Denver, we ran into Erica on the driving range. She and Bern hugged, of course, and then Bern asked her what time she teed off. Well, it turned out that during qualifying she had finished as an alternate, and was hanging around hoping that a spot would open up. It didn't. She had traveled a long way from somewhere just on a hope.

Like Paula Creamer, she had been one of those young phenoms just before the arrival of Michele Wie. She was a two time All-American at Arizona, and a Curtis Cup player. She had one good year on tour; the others were a struggle. This current year she had conditional status, which means waiting around for a phone call telling you that there's a spot open because the field didn't fill, or playing Monday qualifiers. It's a miserable grind either way. Nevertheless, she had recently qualified for a tournament in Mexico, Lorena Ochoa's curtain call, and had finished 44th.

I got another impression, too: that Erica didn't have many friends on Tour, keeping mostly to herself. (There is testimony to this as well.) But Bernadette was her friend, and liked her a lot. That friend is at the moment stunned by the news, and busy recalling all the times they ate out together, played practice rounds and pro-ams together, and equally busy trying to understand.

Erica Blasberg was 25. There's a story here; the authorities aren't saying much about the circumstances, for it appears an investigation is underway. God rest her.

Who Said It?

2010-05-01T05:19:00.002-04:00

Expressing reservations about the prospects for Christian empire:

The Emperor has become a Christian - the Devil has not.

The Least of These

2010-04-29T04:03:00.002-04:00

"Baby boy survives for nearly two days after abortion..."

From the U.K.'s Telegraph:

The mother, pregnant for the first time, had opted for an abortion after prenatal scans suggested that her baby was disabled.

However, the infant survived the procedure, carried out on Saturday in the Rossano Calabro hospital, and was left by doctors to die.

He was discovered alive the following day – some 20 hours after the operation – by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.

He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing...

Found via Mike Liccione.

Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo...

2010-04-01T02:51:00.003-04:00

1963-2005
Dehydrated and starved to death
by order of the State of Florida's Sixth Judicial Circuit Court

I'm out of words, so I thought it was nice of the Two Sleepy Mommies to remember Terri yesterday with a picture.

Bible code?

2010-03-13T05:05:00.012-05:00

Someone sent me this by email about a hundred years ago. I don't vouch for nothin' in it, but it's sort of fun to watch. To advance the pictures, click on the double arrow in the playbar, or put your cursor on the right side of the screen to move forward, on the left to move back (but why would you want to do that?). Best way to watch this one is to click on the full screen icon in the lower right corner.

TheBibleDV

Signs of Spring

2010-03-02T04:22:00.004-05:00

The plum tree is in bloom.

Saw the first robin red breast yesterday. He just sat in the grass and posed for me. I said a few words but he didn't answer. (In case I haven't mentioned it before, birds like me, except for the blue jays who try to steal the nuts I leave out for the squirrels.) I went back inside and got a piece of bread, which I tore up and threw the chunks a few feet from him. He just watched, cocking his head. Then he flitted up to a branch on the drake elm and watched me some more. So I went back inside and when I came out again later the bread was still there. Those robins are cute but they could be stupid.

2010-02-24T04:28:00.001-05:00

God does not force the good upon us, and human love cannot supply what God will not compel. Love is not enough.

Happy Birthday to the Colonel

2010-02-01T03:33:00.010-05:00

That would be my father. He's retired career military, and son of a retired (and deceased) career military, so he likes music in the following genre, a CD of such-like I recently burned for him:

But he was also, as a young officer back in '56 or 7 or thereabouts, fortunate enough to see the original Broadway version of My Fair Lady. That is, in person, in the actual Broadway theater. From that moment on, I think he might have been smitten lifelong with Julie Andrews, but Maw never protested, or else she'd have had to explain her own smittenness with Rex Harrison. They seem to have worked it out.

Happy 86th, Colonel.

Christmas in Tennessee

2009-12-23T06:09:00.004-05:00

This one should probably go out to Beth at Inscapes.

Goin' To See the Queen

2009-12-10T03:29:00.005-05:00

The Dancing Queen, that is. She's guesting as the Snow Queen and Sugar Plum Fairy for the Catskill Ballet Theater. (Embedded youtube trailer on front page.) Snow country. If I get any good pictures, I'll share.

Meantime, this one goes out to Dylan. I always thought she was one of the great voices of the last 40 years or so. She was a big star, no doubt, but not paid as much attention by the hipsters, whose only regret was that Janis Joplin wasn't better looking, and who knew there wasn't a God because she died so young. But this girl actually sang about Him, and with sufficient conviction that you might think she believes the words.

The first one is from a "mid-late 1980's Tennessee Ernie Ford TV special." After watching it, take a look at the second one from a recent PBS special, in which she sings her hit "Marry Me Bill" to the man she's been married to for the last 40 some years, and tell me how her voice is doing. Keep in mind she's older than I, which means...just what it says. (Biography here. Hers, not mine.)

And now to the present:

Sunday Appeal: Christmas in God's Country

2009-12-06T04:04:00.011-05:00

Got a Christmas CD in the mail gratis Wyoming Catholic College and their fledgling choir. I knew they wanted money and figured I must be on a mailing list. Hard of heart, I decided to listen to the music before making up my mind:

All right, they're trying. But it wasn't the music that made up my mind. It was the stuff in the Reverend Cook's cover letter. The college has placed itself under the "protection of Our Blessed Mother, Mary Seat of Wisdom," and the faculty take a "Profession of Faith and Oath of Fidelity to the Magisterium." Oh, and

At Wyoming Catholic College, we will never invite or honor any public figure who acts in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.

I figure they're worth a few bucks.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T16:18:00.006-05:00

To all you givers of thanks, which you ought to do even if you're an ingrate.

Update: And to get you in the mood for the upcoming season (starring Elizabeth, of course, from a 2000 dress rehearsal for the School of Performing Arts, choreographed by Russell Sultzbach). Slightly larger version here.

Volume I, Issue 3

2009-11-23T14:09:00.003-05:00

The new issue of The Christendom Review is up, with stories by John Farrell and Rick Barnett, a variety of poetry, photography by Todd McKimmey, and introducing Lydia McGrew, literary critic, who ponders Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. And in our Signs of Grace column, Kateri Howard of Atlanta's 40 Days for Life campaign tells us why we ought to keep praying and never lose heart.

Sunday Despair: Is Doggie Heaven a Boondoggle?

2009-11-22T04:55:00.004-05:00

So Catholic Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher Ed Feser puts up a post considering Plato's argument in the Phaedo for the immortality of the human soul. I'm always up for reassurance on that score, so I checked it out. Plus, I've actually read the Phaedo. A long time ago. So long ago I can't remember what was in it.

Dr. Feser's purpose was to point out that many modern philosophers don't think much of Plato's case, but ought to. He's probably right.

Once I got there, it turned out that - though I like reassurance - I'm pretty well convinced of the soul's immortality, and instead of examining Plato's soundness (responding, in other words, to the post's actual subject) I got distracted by other thoughts. I think it's called threadjacking. But not before some other guy beat me to it. Said he:

What comes to mind is Francis of Assisi, who no doubt observed the following in nature, as I certainly do in dogs, but not so intensely in people..."Love is patient, love is kind, etc..."

I submit it is just these noble qualities in the essence - the soul – of dogs which has made them man's best friend. I am inclined to think that what Aquinas so scholastically asserts to be the high moral value setting humans apart and superior to the other creatures – knowledge, or intellect – subordinates the sublime to the clever.

To which Dr. Feser responds:

To love someone, in the deepest sense, is to will what is good for him. But will is something only beings with intellects have. Furthermore, the fulfilled intellect is one which is wise, not one which is merely clever. (Lots of intelligent people are clever; very very few are wise.) So, it seems to me you're selling Aquinas short.

To another commenter he points out that Aquinas says

that "the souls of brutes are corrupted." What he means is that though forms per se don't perish, nevertheless the particular instantiation of the form or soul in this particular brute disappears when the animal does (while the human soul, by contrast, does not).

The original doglover responds:

I think, like Hartshorne, the anthropomorphic bias inherent in Aquinas' system as well as that of plain humanism "does not do justice to the creatures."

Could you give a succinct definition of this will and intellect?

That's where I jump in, asking

Is this a necessary conclusion of A-T metaphysics, or might there be some attributes in the sentience of certain creatures that would allow us to entertain at least the possibility of immortality, and which would not be incompatible with that metaphysics if certain knowledge of the attributes were available to the A-T'er.

Says Dr. Feser to the first guy:

Intellect is the power to grasp abstract concepts and reason on the basis of them. Will is appetite moved by intellect, by what the intellect grasps. Non-human animals cannot grasp abstract concepts -- the most they can manage are something like general mental images (but a general image of a man, say, is not the same as the concept "man"). And since they cannot, their appetites are mere appetites, not governed by reason. This is why they cannot love in the strict sense. They can manage affection and the like, but that is not the same thing.

Oh. And then to me:

William, Yes, I'm inclined to say that it is a necessary consequence, at least given that brutes carry out no activities that involve an immaterial power. Unlike intellectual activities, sensation and imagination (which animals do have) are from an A-T point of view entirely dependent on matter. So lower animals have nothing which might carry on beyond the deaths of their bodies.

"Brutes", huh? My feeble response was to note that I didn't know how to break this to my daughter. She has a chihuahua...

Mallory Code, RIP

2009-11-11T03:13:00.002-05:00

Bernadette sends me this link to a Golfweek story noting the death of a girl Bern used to play with in the Florida Junior Golf Association. Her name is Mallory Code, and she was afflicted all her life with cystic fibrosis. She was cared for in the bosom of a strongly Christian family, her stout heart admired by all who knew her, and only 25 when she passed away. Unexpectedly, I should add. God bless her.

Life is Cheap

2009-11-07T03:17:00.004-05:00

I always thought it was supposed to be safe, legal and rare. That's what Bill Clinton told me, but I should have known better than to trust The Great Prevaricator. Well, it's not rare and, of course, it's never safe for the baby. But 'safe' for the woman surely meant that the murder would take place in a sterile atmosphere, such as a hospital or clinic surgery, with a fully qualified and state-licensed killer doctor on hand. An accomplished accomplice nurse might come in handy too. But enterprising American human beings are always on the lookout for a way to save a buck. And even though this particular kind of murder is legal, most women who avail themselves of it seem to want to hide the fact from everyone else. So, with both these goals in mind, a 7 months pregnant 17 year old Utah girl hired a thug to beat her up, the primary target being her belly. The cost of hiring a pregnant belly-beater: $150. She later "entered a no contest plea in May 2009 on charges of second-degree felony criminal solicitation of murder." This was subsequently vacated by a judge who ruled that her actions "fit the state's definition for an abortion and, therefore, she 'cannot be held criminally liable for'" them. So she walked. The guy who beat her pled "guilty to second-degree felony attempted murder."

The irony? The baby survived and is currently in foster care. His mother is trying to get custody.

Everything happens for a reason

2009-10-27T04:05:00.002-04:00

Well, no, says one of my students. She wrote a story about losing her father last year. That means he died. She was real close to him, and has come to a denial of the wisdom she'd grown up with (imparted in the title to this post): there was no good reason why her father should have died. Death separated him from those who loved him and depended upon him. Plus, he was a nice guy. Everybody liked him. He did a lot of good and had more to do, etc.

Which led me to wonder: if he died for no reason, was he also born for no reason? Or are those different questions?

Sunday Command: "Come with me. I want to show you something."

2009-10-11T01:41:00.008-04:00

And a question, which I'll get to in a moment. A passage came to mind from a book I read a long time ago (don't ask why; things just come to mind, okay?). It's a long passage, so I'll try to summarize a lot.

There was this fellow, middle-aged or thereabouts I'm guessing, afflicted with bronchial asthma and emphysema, who got into a coughing fit and ruptured a disc which left him in agonizing pain. He was eventually referred to a neurosurgeon who put him in the hospital and into traction. He needed surgery, so a lung specialist was called in to help strengthen the patient. The anesthesiologist didn't want to put him under, but finally consented. The operation was scheduled for Friday. On the previous Monday

I went to sleep and had a restful sleep until sometime early Tuesday morning, when I woke up in severe pain. I turned over and tried to get in a more comfortable position, but just at that moment a light appeared in the corner of the room, just below the ceiling. It was just a ball of light, almost like a globe, and it was not very large, I would say no more than twelve to fifteen inches in diameter, and as this light appeared, a feeling came over me. I can't say that it was an eerie feeling, because it was not. It was a feeling of complete peace and relaxation. I could see a hand reach down for me from the light, and the light said, "Come with me. I want to show you something." So immediately without any hesitation whatsoever, I reached up with my hand and grabbed onto the hand I saw. As I did, I had the feeling of being drawn up and of leaving my body, and I looked back and saw it lying there on the bed while I was going up towards the ceiling of the room."

As he left his body, he felt that he had taken on the same 'form' as that of the light. He experienced it as mostly circular in shape, of the substance of "a wisp of smoke or a vapor...like the clouds of cigarette smoke...illuminated as they drift around a lamp." And yet he knew that the form had certain attributes, for he had taken the light's hand with his own. After this, he and the light begin traveling - through walls and down corridors - with a sensation of motion but not speed. Instantaneously, it seemed, they arrived at the hospital's recovery room, the location of which the patient had not known. Below them, doctors and nurses in green uniforms went about their chores.

This being then told me, "That's where you're going to be. When they bring you off the operating table they're going to put you in that bed, but you will never awaken from that position. You'll know nothing after you go to the operating room until I come back to get you sometime after this."

The light's voice, by the way, was not an audible one. But the patient insists that it was "vivid" in form and unmistakable in content. Then the light revealed the reason for this little trip: that he didn't want our patient to experience any fear when the time came, because "he", the light, would not be there at once, though he "would be overshadowing everything that happened and would be there for me at the end."

They returned to the patient's room and he to his body. He knew now that he was going to die, but was "not in the least afraid," and entertained no questions, such as "What can I do to keep this from happening?" When shaving before the mirror, he "noticed that my hand didn't shake like it had been doing for six or eight weeks before then." On the day before the operation, he began writing letters to his wife and adopted son, a nephew, with whom they were "having some trouble." While writing he began to weep, uncontrollably, and again felt the presence. No light this time, but it asked him, "Jack, why are you crying? I thought you would be pleased to be with me." And Jack said that he very much wanted to go with 'him,' but that he was worried his wife wouldn't "know how to raise" their nephew, and thought that his own presence might have done the boy some good. The presence replied that "Since you are asking for someone else, and thinking of others, not Jack, I will grant what you want. You will live until you see your nephew become a man." And then he was gone.

The operation went flawlessly, and Jack woke up in the same bed that the presence had pointed out. The anesthesiologist was there when he regained consciousness, with all kinds of fancy equipment on hand, but was amazed that he didn't have to use any of it. Jack had recovered like a man with normal lungs.

It was three years after the event that he gave this testimony. Up to that point, he had told only his wife, brother and minister of his encounter with the presence. He felt no need to proselytize, or to convince others. He claimed that the encounter was as real as any waking experience in his life, even more so, though he could not explain why. And further, "I don't have any doubts anymore. I know there is life after death."
---------------------

Taken from Raymond Moody's well-known book, Life After Life, 1975.

My question is: Is this sort of thing possible?

Todd McKimmey...

2009-10-09T22:54:00.002-04:00

...without whose talents The Christendom Review and my own book would probably not be available, has won the "Photo of the Month" at this site. Congratulations to him.

Saturday Evening in Orlando

2009-09-30T03:27:00.004-04:00

Good Luck, Mr. Snedeker

2009-09-16T02:49:00.010-04:00

Upupdate: Haymes finished tied for 7th. When I find out where he's playing the first stage, I'll post it.
-----------------------------------
Update: after 3 rounds, Haymes is in 10th. That's fine. He hasn't shot a round over par yet. Today's the last day. If you scroll down the leaderboard, you'll see in 18th place Andrew Giuliani. Yup. Rudy's son.

After pre-qualifying come two more stages of qualifying (about 6 rounds per stage) followed by the final stage. In terms of mental stamina, it may be the most grueling experience in professional sports.
---------------------------------

I played golf this past Sunday at Disney's Magnolia Course with Bernadette and her partner from Big Break X, Michigan, Haymes Snedeker. Winning the Big Break qualified Haymes to play in Disney's November PGA tournament, The Children's Miracle Network or something like that, so he was out to get familiar with the course. Since I used to play that course on the mini-tours back in the 90's, they've lengthened it to keep up with technology. There are now four 500 yard par 4's, not to mention a few more in the 475 to 85 range. It's hard to relate. So I was worried about his length, but even with that funny swing, he seemed to me to be averaging between 290 to 300 yards per drive. So no problem there. And he can play all the other shots too. I only worry about how quickly he plays. (A refreshing change, actually, since I've gotten into the habit of taking a nap while waiting for Jim Furyk to line up a shot.)

This particular round of golf, and even the Disney tournament itself, was not all that important compared to where he was going after the round was over: to Dade City to play in a PGA Tour pre-qualifying tournament. Yep, he's going to Q-School. So wish him luck. Yesterday was the first day of competition, during which he shot 67, putting him in third place. The top 43 after four days of golf will move on to the next stage.

I should add that, though we've corresponded, this is the first time I've met him, and he's just what he appeared to be on TV: a gentleman with an impish sense of humor. The baby his wife delivered during the filming of the Big Break is now 14 months old.

Here's a Facebook video golf tip featuring Bernadette and Haymes.

Below is some wildlife seen on the golf course. Sorry I forgot to get the wild turkeys. I'll shoot one next time. The Disney tournament's just before Thanksgiving.

Be sure to click on the image to enlarge.

Remember 9/11...

2009-09-11T21:26:00.008-04:00

...it's victims, that is, in your own way, but do remember. Many have chosen silence and prayer, and that's good too. Poor at silence while bereft of insight, I can only offer this thing from three years ago. Three years, for God's sake. I often wonder if a day goes by that memory of that day does not cross my mind. I don't think so.

A few others who have put something up: Susan at Lilac Rose, Dylan of Dark Speech...(with a Dylan Thomas poem two posts above that which seems appropos); Elena, who reminds us of Project 2,996, offering her own contribution from 3 years ago; and Paul Cella at W4.

BTW, I saw this show last night. Don't know if they'll be replaying it any time soon. If not, the DVD is worth the money. The History Channel did good work yesterday.

Sunday Remembrance: Robert Schindler, RIP

2009-08-30T02:28:00.003-04:00

Lydia tells me, and posts about it, that Terri Schiavo's dad has passed away. She got it from Wesley Smith.

I can't say I'm surprised. How long would your heart hold out after watching the legal organs of the country you love - the very organs you count on to keep you and yours safe from harm, and to seek redress on your behalf should they not - murder your child? "Judicial homicide," he called it. He gets the last word. Now he can hold his daughter again.

Sunday Exercise: The Hastings Center Makes Waste

2009-08-23T13:16:00.005-04:00

I have a question, which I'll offer after giving, briefly, the appropriate background.

In a recent Hastings Center Report (you may have to register to get the complete article), a Rebecca Stangl puts up a thing entitled "Plan B and the Doctrine of Double Effect." Plan B is an "emergency contraceptive" that sometimes has an abortifacient effect, preventing implantation of an embryo in its mother's womb. It may also prevent pregnancy by inhibiting ovulation or fertilization. (How it does this is not well understood.) Assuming that intentionally procuring an abortion is always wrong, the first of these three mechanisms is the one that concerns us. She asks: "Suppose that emergency contraception works exactly as its opponents claim. Would it follow that taking emergency contraception is morally equivalent to intentionally procuring an abortion?"

She answers: "Perhaps surprisingly" [actually, Rebecca, it doesn't surprise me at all], "I shall argue that it would not. If one accepts the doctrine of double effect, there would be circumstances in which the former is permissible even if the latter is never permissible."

She defines double effect as follows:

The doctrine makes a crucial distinction between harm that a person merely foresees will be the result of her action, and harm that she intends either as a means or as an end. According to the doctrine of double effect, it may be morally justifiable to perform an action that one foresees will result in some harm even if it would be unacceptable to aim at that very same harm, either as an end or as a means. Whether this is so in any particular case depends on whether the good to be achieved is proportional to the harm that is foreseen. I will argue that taking hormonal contraception can be justified by the doctrine of double effect even if it is true both that it can have an abortifacient effect, and that one may never intentionally obtain an abortion.

She attempts to "prove" her thesis as follows:

Someone who obtains a first trimester surgical abortion directly intends to secure the death of the fetus, either as an end or as a means to some other end. But someone who uses emergency contraception need not intend the death of any particular fetus...She may believe that, under exceptional circumstances, the contraception will fail to prevent the conception of a fetus. And in a proportion of these cases, the changes in her body brought about by the use of emergency contraception may mean that the fetus will not be able to implant itself in the womb. But she need not intend for that to happen...Not every effect of a person’s action need be intended.

She employs an analogy:

An example from another area of bioethics may help here. Opponents of euthanasia generally concede that we may give dying patients high doses of morphine even if we know that such treatment may hasten death. What we may not do, they claim, is directly intend the death of the patient and administer the morphine as a means to that end. So the same action—administering morphine—has a different moral status depending on the structure of our intentions. Because this one action has two different effects, it is possible to directly intend one of the effects and merely to foresee the other. If we take the morally good end (the relief of suffering) as the object of our intention, the action may be permissible. But if we take the morally bad end (the death of the patient) as the object of our intention, the action will be impermissible...if this distinction works in the end-of-life case, it seems to me that it must also work in the case of emergency contraception...We can then agree that directly intending the death of any particular fetus, either as a means or as an end, is impermissible, while allowing that if our intention is merely the morally good end—the prevention of a pregnancy—then the action may be permissible...Indeed, it seems to me that opponents of emergency contraception must accept something like the intend/foresee distinction.

She employs another analogy:

It appears, for example, that breastfeeding causes changes in the endometrium that are similar to the changes brought about by the use of emergency contraception. If such changes can have an abortifacient effect in the former case, then there is no reason to think they cannot also have an abortifacient effect in the latter. But no one takes this to be a reason not to breastfeed...A breastfeeding woman does not intend the death of any particular fetus by breastfeeding. Even if there is an extremely rare risk of this occurring, it will occur only as a wholly unwanted side effect of her action...

She then deals, in conclusion, with the problem of proportionality:

One might object that such a good [preventing pregnancy], while important, could never be proportional to the foreseeable possibility of the harm of the possible abortifacient effect. If the embryo really is a person with moral rights, perhaps only the risk of the mother’s death would be proportional to the foreseeable possibility of the death of the embryo. But this doesn’t seem right. Even on the interpretation of the empirical facts most favorable to opponents of emergency contraception, the chance that it will result in the death of an embryo, in any particular case, is very small.

In essence, "I claim that women who use emergency contraception need only intend the contraceptive effect of the medication, and not any possible abortifacient effect it may have."

My question is: what's wrong with her argument?

The Dancing Queen...

2009-08-22T04:28:00.007-04:00

is now employed by this Chicago company, called NoMi LaMad. I forget how the name came about, but can find out. More contemporary than classical, but still plenty of pointe work, I've been led to believe. And yes, that's her (excuse me, 'she') on the front page.

For you Chicago people, there's a performance in mid-September at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, which appears to be a part of the Harold Washington Library on State Street.

I always knew evolution was an art

2009-08-05T04:57:00.006-04:00

Timothy ones is making available in stages the progress of a new painting, "China, Brass & Peaches". Start here and work your way up. Tim's work was featured in the last issue of The Christendom Review.

Update: Better yet, go to the front page, scroll down 4 posts and start there. He's gotten another stage done since yesterday.

2nd Update: It's finished, here. Magnificent.

Sunday Thought: Our Lady of Sleep?

2009-08-02T05:03:00.004-04:00

I caught the end of some TV show about sleep disorders. I had meant to watch the whole thing but, as often happens, got distracted by something else (probably another show), and remembered only when the hour was almost up that I was supposed to be watching that other thing. So I flipped back real quick and saw a young boy tucking himself into bed while the narrator said that he (the boy) would lose 10-15 years off his life every time he went to sleep. That can't be right. I must have heard wrong, or else the narrator's guilty of bad grammar, or sleep deprivation. I have heard that a condition called sleep apnea can take 10-15 years off your life all told. That's if it doesn't kill you first for not breathing. Anyway, the two second snippet I saw put me in mind of the Blessed Virgin, but it wasn't my fault. I rummaged around in the old cerebral suitcase for a while before it finally came to me. I did some more rummaging through one of our bookcases and finally found it too (the book, I mean). Then I had to rummage around in the book to find the passage. (All the rummaging took over an hour.) It was in a letter from Flannery O'Connor to one of her friends. Apparently the friend (who at the time was religiously curious, later converted to Catholicism under O'Connor's influence, before finally de-converting, to O'Connor's grief) had mentioned in her own letter something about broken sleep, to which Flannery responded:

The business of the broken sleep is interesting, but the business of sleep generally is interesting. I once did without it almost all the time for several weeks. I had high fever and was taking cortisone in big doses, which prevents your sleeping. I was starving to go to sleep. Since then I have come to think of sleep as metaphorically connected with the mother of God. Hopkins said she was the air we breathe, but I have come to realize her most in the gift of going to sleep. Life without her would be equivalent to me to life without sleep, and as she contained Christ for a time, she seems to contain our life in sleep for a time so that we are able to wake up in peace.

The reason it rung the bell for me is that when I have trouble sleeping, I head for the rosary. Well, more accurately, I start saying Hail Mary's. Holding the beads doesn't help. I'm usually too tired to keep track of which bead I'm on in which decade, so I just jump in with "Hail Mary, etc." and keep going. (I've more than once realized that I've said several Hail Mary's while still holding on to the same bead, so I have to start over.) I do try to think of a few intentions beforehand so that I'll feel like I'm doing something more important than counting Mary's in lieu of sheep. I'll just have to trust that the Lady doesn't mind. After all, she gave the idea for the rosary to some saint way back when, it's repetitious by nature, so she can't complain if people use it as a sleep-aid. It was her idea. Plus, the only reason it ever occurred to me to use it that way is that she once rocked baby Jesus to sleep, so I figure she can do the same for me. Rocking is repetitious, but so are the good habits that end in virtue. (So they tell me, not having gotten that far.)

The only other technique that works nearly as well is stuffing the King James Bible under my pillow. I don't know why it works, but it does. Just trust me.

I won't have that problem tonight, though. I did a lot of yardwork and inhaled enough beer to keep me yawning through this post. Probably best not to tempt fate. The night might come when I can't sleep and she won't let the Hail Mary's work. Fine. I have a backup plan. It's called the Miraculous Medal. No beads to count. Just hang on and say the words. Over and over.

Obama, Barkeep

2009-07-30T19:51:00.004-04:00

Although he's called it a "teachable moment," I haven't quite figured out what his role is supposed to be. To lend a commiserating ear to the complaints of both men? It's probably over by now, but I was just wondering what it is that's being taught by the beer summit, and who it is that's being instructed. And what's in it for the white guy. If I were that latter fellow, I wouldn't go. Attending implies that there's a reason to attend. I'd go if Obama had said beforehand, "I'd like you to come to the White House so that I can apologize to you for having acted stupidly." It would be even more enticing if he'd added, "And so that I can advise that race-leech Henry Gates to apologize as well, and to crawl back into whatever academically protected pc fever swamp he crawled out of."

But what it's going to look like is that we have two men possessed by grievances of equal legitimacy, who will behave better toward each other next time around once Obie the Post-Racial Mediator has shown them a better way. Why is Officer Crowley sharing a beer with a man who thinks he's a racist? Does Crowley have something to apologize for? Is there something he can learn from Mr. Gates, the man who wrote on his Yale application, "As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself," and whose resentment of whitey seems to have ripened with the years, along with his collection of academic honors and his general prosperity? "This isn't about me," he said on a morning talk show while contemplating a possible lawsuit. That's what people always say when they want to universalize their personal nuttiness. But no, he's just speaking for black people everywhere.

I know some black people for whom "being black in America" is awful. I know some white people like that too. But Henry Gates is not one of those for whom it is awful. Being black and Henry Gates in America is comparatively wonderful, especially if he can keep his mouth shut.

So what we have at the summit (which I think would have been more revealing if they'd thrown the bar open to other repasts, like vodka and whiskey and various foreign-grade wines) is one tenured, racial crank whose alternate reality will be found worth exploring, one liberalism-on-steroids politician whose mediocrity is revealed in his preference for stereotypes over facts, and one cop who did his job. No, I don't see anything in this for the white guy at all.

Except beer. It's free, so he should drink a lot of it, claiming as excuse that this is not about him, but about upholding the reputation of hard-drinking Irish cops everywhere. Anybody know how many Obama had?

Hurts So Good: Confronting Transcendance in the Scum of the Earth

2009-07-15T23:38:00.005-04:00

There are those whose intellects get tied up in Chinese puzzles when confronting the question: "is torture ever justified?" If the answer is 'no', but you're not quite sure they mean it, try a follow-up: "Is waterboarding torture?"

Should the answer be a furrowed brow accompanied by a solemn, "Wow. That's a tough one. Let me think about it," you'll know that the answer is not 'no'. "Tough" can only imply that, upon first consideration, your moral intuition cannot know the truth of the matter, that what you see is not what you get, as when you see a father disciplining his eight year old son with a fist to the mouth, and feel pretty sure you know what you're looking at.

Well, that's what my moral intuition tells me about waterboarding, and as a consequence I suspect that people who find that conclusion 'tough' to arrive at, and who wish to experience a self-induced migraine before pronouncing one way or the other, are probably looking for a way to justify it, or at least leave it in a state of such delicious irresolution that the activity continues uncondemned.

I had hoped never to discuss the subject again, before, that is, stumbling across an article by Gilbert Meilaender in a recent Weekly Standard. It's called "Stem Cells and Torture," and he uses rationales for the former by way of analogy to the latter. It's a fairly extended discussion, and a mostly very fine one, and I simply don't have time to do justice to all its parts. I need, as best I can, to cut to the chase.

I say 'mostly' because Mr. Meilaender is one of the more reliably staunch apologists for traditional Christian morality, yet in this article I sense an ambivalence, or perhaps a hesitancy, at just that place where I'd expect him to give an answer firm and to take a stand forthright. (I want to be fair, so if any see it another way, I'll certainly entertain the correction.) It caught my attention because it seems atypical of his writing, which is always (and is this time as well) characterized by its accessibility to the layman; a mildly elegant, yet unadorned, prose style suitable to clarity; perfect honesty; and a fearlessness in argument touched by humility. One never gets the sense that this humility leads him to avoid or finesse some possible objection; neither does it (in my experience) lead him to shy away from a necessary conclusion, as though he were left wringing his hands at how 'intractable' it all is.

As I said, he leads us to torture by way of stem cells, presenting the usual rationales for embryo-destructive research and the usual objections to them. He eventually moves from the usual to the extraordinary by asking (and calling to his aid the Jewish thinker Hans Jonas):

But what if the issue is not improving but, more starkly, preserving society? Jonas was prepared to acknowledge that there are "examples of what, in sober truth, society cannot afford." It cannot afford to let an epidemic "rage unchecked." Some epidemics are acute--as, for example, the Black Death was. Others are public calamities of a more chronic kind--as, for example, "the life-sapping ravages of endemic malaria" may be. Of these possibilities Jonas wrote: "A society as a whole can truly not 'afford' such situations, and they may call for extraordinary remedies, including, perhaps, the invasion of private sacrosanctities." Jonas did not think of this as a matter of numbers alone, since, as he noted, there is also a sense in which society cannot afford a single injustice or violation of rights. Still, there might be cases "critically affecting the whole condition, present and future, of the community" that could constitute something like a state of emergency in which disaster could be averted only through "extraordinary means" of experimentation--means otherwise forbidden...It is not silly to think of terrorist activity--which intends, after all, to undermine all settled social life by returning us to something rather like Hobbes's state of nature--as a political parallel.

Readers will recognize this as the bio-ethical version of the much beloved and belabored ticking time bomb scenario. Having gotten us there, his description of torture is as follows:

In torture we seek to overcome another person's conscientious resistance to our will. We aim to "break the conscience which is commanding him to keep silence." This differs from what Thielicke calls "temptation by desire," which seeks to work "by way of the man's own decisions." Nor can torture be equated with coercion, with an attempt to force a decision out of the person. Torture seeks to inflict pain severe enough to eliminate the ego, to bypass "the sphere of decision altogether." It seeks, we might say, to turn the person--a subject--into an object, a thing...His [Thielicke's] fundamental category is not torture but dehumanization. Temptation and coercion attack--but without bypassing or subverting--the person, and they may sometimes be permitted or, even, required. Torture and truth serum bypass--we might say, "thingify"--the person, taking away "the personal right to decision." But if the human person is a representation of transcendence, it is the transcendent that has then become our target.

The central objection to both torture and ESCR is, using Helmut Thielicke's phrasing, that they require a

"direct confrontation with transcendance." This happens when the personhood of another human being, "the bearer of an alien dignity" and "the direct representation of transcendence," is at stake.

And which imposes upon us what ought to be obvious to any Christian, that there are "limits which cannot be transgressed."

But what about that emergency situation?

To return to the stem cell analogy for a moment, suppose that what was needed was not an entire industry devoted to the use and destruction of embryos in an on-going program of research, but, instead, just three specific embryos. Produce and destroy them, and we position ourselves for continual progress in the war against degenerative diseases. Draw back, and we forgo all such good results. It's a hypothetical with no purchase on reality, of course, but I have often wondered what my answer to it would be.

And he never does answer it, although he seems to know that he should:

In theory, my answer ought to be clear. If human beings were simply members of our species, it might sometimes make sense to sacrifice one or another of them for the sake of the species as a whole. But human beings are not just members of the species or parts of a whole. Each human being is a "someone" who belongs to no earthly community to the whole extent of his being. That is why we are not interchangeable. The "value" of one thousand people may be more than that of one, but the thousand are not more than one in personal dignity...

and concluding a few paragraphs later that "wrong, but very little harm, has been done."

Likewise, he asks of torture:

Would I authorize that the captured terrorist be slapped around? Yes. Deprived of sleep for a time and disoriented? Yes. Water-boarded once? Now I begin to suspect that it is corrupting to try to answer that question in advance, as if there were a policy we could formulate to protect ourselves in a moral no-man's land.

And again he does not answer, preferring theory instead: "But the answer must, I think, turn on whether doing it once would be more like an attempt at coercion, which is still a test of strength, or whether from the start it would aim to thingify the captured terrorist, trying to bypass altogether his capacity to decide." And does it not do this? My moral intuition tells me, without hesitation, that not only does it do this, but that this is precisely what it was designed to do.

And yet again a few paragraphs later:

Waterboard that captured terrorist once? Well, I'm not sure we have a rule to cover the question. Water-board him fifty or a hundred times? Surely not. That is no longer a test of strength, but of will.

Which, at first reading, prompted me to scribble in the margin, "It wasn't the first time either," which I will explain in a moment. So yet again he fails to answer. My overall impression is that Meilaender is headed in the right direction, wants to get to his destination, but can't quite summon the resolve to cross the finish line. He seems to want to make allowance for transgressions in acute emergencies, as opposed to the normal run of things:

What if we face not an acute but a chronic epidemic? My own sense is that this is quite a different matter...It is one thing--perhaps never to be done and perhaps always wrong--to step into a moral no-man's land in the face of an acute emergency. But if the crisis continues indefinitely, it ceases to be an emergency and becomes everyday life. Not three embryos destroyed just once, but an ongoing industry of embryo-destructive research, with which we make our peace on the ground that we do this in the face of the ongoing crisis of human suffering. We should reject the notion of a "war" against disease; it will turn out to justify transgressing most moral boundaries that present themselves.

He finishes with this reminder:

Life, and our shared way of life, are always fragile and insecure. That is not a crisis; it is human history. And during our share of that history it will always be true that how, rather than how long, we live should be our central concern.

Which seems most morally salubrious except for that word "crisis," with which (again) he seems to leave room, in the extraordinary situation, for letting "how long" take priority over "how."

And so (assuming I'm reading him correctly) I'd like to try to nudge Mr. Meilaender over the finish line by first providing a gentle reminder of my own: St. Paul's prohibition against doing evil that good may come is what Anscombe called "bedrock." It applies to any evil whatsoever, intrinsic or otherwise, and makes no provision for exigent circumstances - "emergencies," in other words. I'm sure Meilaender knows better than I that to surrender it is to justify precisely what he most dreads, "transgressing most moral boundaries that present themselves." A presumption to the contrary would have to contend that our nation will ultimately keep its sanity, that we will not institutionalize in our ordinary affairs what we resort to in the exceptional.

The problem is that we already live in that nation, the one in which the disabled and the unborn are routinely murdered, by permission of law, and in which each individual is allowed to ratify his (or her) situation as being in itself a paradigm of acute necessity. The acute is already chronic. Meilaender himself sets side by side the words of two thinkers from different traditions. One is Helmut Thielicke, who says of the Christian that he

owes to the world...the public confession that he is one who is committed, "bound," and hence not "capable of [just] anything." If we make ourselves fundamentally unpredictable, i.e., if as Christians we think that torture is at least conceivable--perhaps under the exigencies of an extreme situation--we thereby reduce man to the worth of a convertible means, divest him of the imago Dei, and so deny the first commandment. This denial can never be a possible alternative.

The other is an oft-quoted passage from Cardinal Newman with the same essential import:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

Meilaender's conclusion? He's not sure he wants

to agree with either Newman or Thielicke...It is, however, to say the very least, instructive to find Thielicke, whose brand of Lutheranism always flirts with antinomianism, insisting that, at least in this instance, what we do counts for more than what we accomplish, and insisting upon it in a way as relentlessly demanding as Newman's.

And I find it instructive to note that Newman's words amount to no more than a re-assertion of Paul's prohibition, ornately rendered.

Secondly, I'd like to take a closer look at Dr. Meilaender's sense of what waterboarding is, of what category of acts it belongs to. When he says, "Waterboard that captured terrorist once? Well, I'm not sure we have a rule to cover the question. Waterboard him fifty or a hundred times? Surely not," he appears to assume that it might be treated as akin to other kinds of acts of which we know that "If no rule can quite tell us when we have transgressed a line that should not be crossed, that does not mean there is no such line." If it were possible, I'd like to persuade Dr. Meilaender that waterboarding is not that kind of act, but rather belongs to a class of others Meilander has already set apart as not being subject to line-drawing - such acts as forced nudity, being compelled to sit or sleep in one's own urine and feces - because they lack the quality of "parts", the capacity to be parceled out in careful measure. They do not acquire their "fullness of being", so to speak, with frequency or duration of use, but are what they are from the beginning. And because the intent to dehumanize is so manifest in their very nature.

"Well, I'm not sure we have a rule to cover the question." But we do. All intrinsic evils are forbidden in a very familiar form: Thou shalt not... So the question must be whether one instance of waterboarding is that kind of evil, or only becomes so if done to excess. (What's "to excess?" I don't know. Draw a line.) Is it more like a slap in the face, or forced nudity? Or does it matter? Is a slap in the face (which Meilaender would allow), whether dealt in anger or intimidation, not evil? I ask because Paul's prohibition covers any evil, not just those judged to be intrinsic. But if that slap in the face is the first in a sequence which you have determined ahead of time will not cease until the information has been divulged, is it not intrinsic from the get-go?

What I'm getting at is that certain kinds of acts, in their very conception, are incapable of "tipping over" into another kind. All good acts can be corrupted by circumstances or intentions, while no evil act can ever be made good. But among these latter we must make distinctions. Circumstantially evil acts, such as slapping your terrorist prisoner in anger or frustration (or hatred), can be forgiven. You regain your composure and self-discipline, confess to your superior officer, resolve to do it no more, and likely that's the end of it. But should you be aware of the fear that the slap has struck into the prisoner, and then resolve by repetition to use it as a likely means to your end, what began as circumstantial evil is now intrinsic, as the intention behind it has changed utterly.

Likewise with depriving your terrorist of sleep, which in its inception I should think is no evil at all. Keeping a man up a few hours past his bedtime, perhaps withholding food and drink, appears to fall within the bounds of lawful coercion. We know, however, that this tactic, aggressively pursued, with no strictly determined limits in mind at the outset, can cause great physical and possibly mental harm. If a line has not been drawn beforehand, a line which you know you will not cross, then what began as lawful coercion has tipped over into what it is absolutely forbidden. A good act has been corrupted.

But this line-drawing, this tipping point, will not apply to an act like waterboarding. You do not set out to waterboard a man in a fit of anger, or even as purposeful but carefully limited intimidation, even though much planning is involved, very meticulously detailed planning, if we are to be sufficiently scrupulous in our concern that no permanent harm (meaning brain damage or death) come to the prisoner. (He is, of course, unaware of our concern.) Your reason for employing the tactic will be as follows: "I am waterboarding this terrorist scum only that innocent lives might be saved." So if innocent lives were not at stake you wouldn't do it? And if not, why not? Or does the prohibition against doing evil only apply when the anticipated outcome is inconsequential? If your prisoner were a common criminal in possession of life-saving information regarding a kidnapped child, would you allow our police to indulge this tactic?

So the justification given has as its end a very noble thing - to save lives - and it is offered virtually always in just that form, which I hope any honest reader will recognize as just another way of saying that the end justifies the means, and of rejecting St. Paul's dictum. Most claim to love it as long as we don't take it too seriously. Its beauty seems to lie in its malleability. It's a very noble principle in theory, until the consequences of obeying it become more than I can bear, which renders it not a principle at all but a quaint sentiment, another of those lofty biblical counsels people love to wrap their lips around with no intention of swallowing. Mine eye offends me most every day, but it's still in my head.

So when a man says that we must do this particular thing to save innocent lives, we should at once notice that he has leapfrogged over his real intention to give us a false one disguised as an unarguably good end. And what is that real intention? It is, in the case of waterboarding, to terrorize a man into believing he is going to drown so that he will divulge information that will enable me to save lives. Before holding up that wonderful end for universal admiration, I ought at least to acknowledge what comes before it, the chosen means to my end, which is my unequivocal (and not merely coincidental) intention to terrorize a man into giving me what I want, to (using Meilaender's language) "thingify" him, to bypass his freedom of will, literally to de-soul him since his soul is of no account to me other than as it is convenient to my end. Unlike sleep deprivation, waterboarding does not start out as lawful coercion and then only later slide over into iniquity. It is evil from the outset. My motive in doing it the 100th time is no different than it was the first. I intended the first time to instill a mortal fear of dying, and I intended it the last.

The same would apply to such means as extracting the prisoner's fingernails one-by-one with a pair of pliers. Or touching an electric cattle prod to various parts of his body. From the prisoner's perspective the loss of his 10th nail may seem a more cumulative horror than his loss of the first, but as an individual act, the 10th extraction is identical in content, in motive and object, and is thus no worse in itself than the first; just as, at the sight of ten murdered people, we should not cry out in horror at the pile of bodies, but at the fact that there is even one among them, for the crime against the 10th was of precisely the same gravity as against the first.

Thus, if I were compelled to define torture, it would run along these lines: it is an act, belonging to a category of such acts, which, in its inception, is incapable of "tipping over" into another kind of act. It is not made worse (from the perspective of the torturer's intention) by repetition, nor better by reduction in the frequency of its use. It is not subject to our scruple for line-drawing because, as a tool, each instance of it is a self-contained, fully discrete packet of torment inflicted with the same intention and object as in every other instance. Every instance of waterboarding begins with the object of overpowering, by means of suffering, the very thing that makes a man human. In its attempt to destroy his soul's dominion over the power to choose between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, it is a form of figurative murder, temporary murder, we might say, and which cannot be said of other forms of lawful (meaning moral) coercion, as when a parent spanks his child in corrective punishment, or a prisoner is sentenced to ten lashes with a bullwhip for assaulting a guard. (I should say that Meilaender doesn't distinguish among punishment, coercion and torture - only between the latter two - though I think it's of the essence.)

I assume that most parents inflict pain on a child as the price to be paid for this particular transgression, and only to the degree that he is left free to choose whether to do it again, and that none among you would take it to such a level that he would never think of doing it again - not because he has freely chosen the good, or because he loves his parents' friendship more than his selfish pleasure - but because his terror of you is so profound. His soul is no longer his own, but belongs to you. He is less your child than your slave. If you had good warrant to believe that your teenage son was in possession of the names of fellow students planning a copycat version of the Columbine massacre, but whose names he refused to divulge for whatever reason, to what lengths of force would you allow the police to go in extracting that information from him? Would it include waterboarding?

Now it is certain that pain can be licitly administered as corrective punishment, becoming illicit only as its measure exceeds the gravity of the offense. That is, by means of a humane prudence, we try to insure that the punishment given is retribution for a known crime (its first purpose), as deterrence to future bad behavior (its second), which we hope will redound to the prisoner's own benefit (otherwise known as rehabilitation, its third), and to the peace and security of society (its fourth).

Is an act of waterboarding ever described by any of the above aims of punishment? No: because, first and foremost, it is not being delivered as punishment. Retributive punishment, as an attempt to approximate justice, is described in our moral tradition as an act "good in its kind." Punishment, by definition, takes cognizance of the humanity of its recipient, and is apportioned accordingly. An act of torture is never licitly engaged as punishment for a past transgression, but is taken in hand for the sole purpose of pre-empting some future (and entirely hypothetical) transgression, bypassing all those other aims except the last, society's peace and security. In its attempt to render null and void the soul's autonomy, it cares nothing for its victim's humanity, nor for any profit to which we might aspire on that humanity's behalf, but only for the end to which the torment is directed; and therefore, by definition, can never be proportionate to a known offense since, from its inception, it is not directed to that offense. In short, it is the sort of act that is not at all concerned with justice, but with results. (In Meilaender's formulation, with what we accomplish, not what we do.)

If it is indeed possible that, e.g., waterboarding is a licit coercive technique, why is it not more widely practiced? It is by some reports delightfully, and demonstrably, effective, which should recommend it to our use. If it is indeed an act "good in its kind," then it must be good for serious cases other than ticking time bomb scenarios. Police often have before them suspects of whose guilt they have little doubt. Why should they be denied use of the waterboard to confirm their suspicions about a serial rapist?

And yet there is no agitation among the branches of the military to modify the code of justice to which they are sworn, or among the police of this country to have access to these techniques, and I suspect the reason is that they know in their guts that if they had such access, they would no longer be just policemen upholding the law, but something else. They would leave work every day with the stench of criminality clinging to their own character. At the risk of seeming overly sanguine, I don't believe that most of our policemen or our military knights of the realm want to be anything like the criminals they strive to bring to justice or the enemy they engage in battle. Moral intuitions do serve a real purpose and are capable of apprehending what is true, what these police and military men already know: that their very integrity and self-respect would be at stake.

I'm perfectly aware that most people don't give a whit for the soul of a Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In light of the plans he had for us, and for the one successfully carried out on 9-11, he had coming whatever he got. Such people are free to remind us of that seminal event, and to amuse themselves concocting ticking time bomb scenarios to drive the point home, as long as they're also willing to admit that ttbs's are just a long-winded way of rejecting the biblical prohibition against doing evil that good may come; that such scenarios are constructed with no other purpose than to evade that prohibition. They should say it out loud, slowly and carefully enunciated: I reject the principle that I may not do evil that good may come.

In his article, Meilaender cites a "paradox" noted by law professor Zachary Calo, who wonders somewhat aghast at a principled morality requiring "that the community perish so that its laws might be upheld." The obverse requirement is that the laws be ignored so that the community might survive. We could probably get along quite well if the laws against jaywalking fell into disuse, but of those undergirded by a divine command, their loss would no doubt extract a steeper price, something akin to the community selling its soul for Wales. And, as I mentioned previously, we're well on our way. I also wonder what kind of community that would be, and whether in the long run any of us would really want to live in it once its true nature became manifest.

TSO's beloved German Shepherd, Obi...

2009-06-29T17:39:00.002-04:00

...bows out.

Sunday, uh, Image: A re-imagined replica of a reputedly real relic

2009-06-27T17:25:00.005-04:00

We inherited this picture from my wife's grandparents after they died (many years ago). At the picture's bottom is inscribed:

14 colors were used to achieve this effect.
This picture is also known as "St. Veronica's Handkerchief" and is a copy of the celebrated painting by Gabriel Max, an Austrian, who was born in 1840. The original painting, valued at $25,000, is in a private collection in Prague, Austria. His best known work in America is "The Last Token" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

But it also says: "If you watch the eyes closely, they will suddenly open!"

It's never worked for me, but maybe it will for you. You might want to click on the picture to enlarge it before trying.

The Fly Talks Back

2009-06-22T04:20:00.007-04:00

Provoked by political scandal, Emily takes another look.

I buzzed a lot before I died
And joined the stillness of this room,
Before the presidential pique brought down
The cultured hand of doom.

He fixed me with his gimlet eye -
Calculating, cold, was he -
No Buddha in transcendant trance who
Took no note of me.

He's bound (he claims) by higher things,
Like fixing health care 'ere we die,
By duty at a camel strains but
Must needs swat the fly.

"All victory to the King!" they cry
As one (a monolithic group),
"His stroke was pure, the outcome sure,
No maggots in the soup!"

But every creature finds its niche - I've heard -
And mine is surely here,
Sucking presidential sweat
From off the royal ear.

Power corrupts, we must conclude - for
When it came to me -
My crucial place in God's good plan
He could not see to see.

He who loves diversity lets
All creatures in the door,
But looked down so indifferently
At me on the floor,

Where, before the windows failed,
He saw but one of me -
My many-chambered eyes saw death -
In multiplicity.

Dead Man Walking

2009-06-18T03:16:00.005-04:00

I've been wanting to put up a post dealing with all kinds of important matters, but the several of you who still visit are lucky I'm here at all. I should be a dead man. I came into the house the other evening after mowing the yard, all filthy dirty and sweaty and looking forward to the required refreshment. I walked into the living room where the wife's relaxing in a recliner and watching TV. "It's done," I said. "We're the envy of the street."

"Oh, good," she said. "There's something for you out in the guestroom."

"For me?" It's not my birthday so I'm puzzled. "Should I go out there and see what it is?"

She nodded. So I head out to the other building and find a good size, brand new barbecue grill waiting for me, which we've been needing because the bottom's rusting out of the old one. Well, I thought, ain't that sweet? She saved me a trip to Home Depot. On the grill was a card saying "1973-2009. WOW! That's a long time!"

I don't know what's happening to my mind, but for some reason I thought she was congratulating me for keeping the old grill going for so long. It wasn't until I got back inside that the math settled out and it occurred to me that we hadn't owned that grill for 36 years. It was only about 20 years old.

"Well thanks," I said, "is that my Father's Day present?"

She just rocked back and forth in her combo rocking chair-recliner and wearing a half-smile with a sort of bitter twist to it. "Did you see the card?" she asked.

"Yeah, 1973 to 2009...?"

She looked briefly toward the ceiling, then turned that weird smile back on me, which set my mind to racing. My head had been filled lately with the kind of desperation that accompanies the need to think of something for a daughter's birthday, something for my Dad on Father's day, to find time to fix the gutter, repair the chimney, put a new screen on the front door, take a chain saw to the camphor tree, write a blog post, do some reading and finish a painting and so on. So my mind was racing through June trying to figure out what I'd overlooked. Then of course it hit me.

"Is today the 15th?"

She nodded and rocked.

"I forgot our anniversary?" She nodded and...

I put my head in my hands. It wasn't entirely an act. "Can I make excuses?"

She shook her head.

"What are you going to do to me?"

"Do? What can I do that would do any good? You are what you are."

"You do realize I've treasured every moment."

She was back to nodding and rocking.

"Thirty-six years," I said, in a voice filled with awe. "That's a long..." She turned the weird smile upon me.

"Well," I said after a moment, "why have you stuck it out so long? A normal woman would have gotten rid of me."

"Oh, for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death..." It sounded like she was reciting the sentence she'd been handed by the judge.

"Hell," I said, "nobody pays attention to that anymore."

"Maybe not some people."

"It's the girls, isn't it? I gave you a couple of good-looking, good-hearted daughters so you thought you'd reward me by hangin' round."

"They haven't hurt any."

I finally wished her happy anniversary. She said, "Thanks, Bill," then went back to watching TV. I dragged my dirty sorry self outside, flopped down in a rubber deck chair and started sucking down the Pauli Girls. I suspect anniversaries are more important than all the other days we celebrate except maybe the religious ones. You can't have fathers' days and mothers' days and grandparents' days and kids' birthdays without them. A marriage has to come first. And I'd forgotten it. Even Valentine's Day points in that direction. Even Christmas and Easter are different when you're married with children. I don't know how much I'd care about them without my marriage. Its anniversary really is more important to me than all the others. And I'd forgotten it. She seems to have moved on, but I don't know what it does to a woman inside, because they're real good at hiding that sort of thing. I ain't dead yet, but I probably oughta be.

I also suspect I better put that grill to good use this weekend. She likes porterhouse, with a subtantial tenderloin attached. Rare. Coming right up.

Sunday Thought: Interview with Malcolm, on the occasion of his 75th birthday

2009-06-07T16:13:00.003-04:00

From the old archives, July 2004. I keep finding things that never made it over here.

Mr. Buckley: Recently from these quarters I spoke with Malcolm Muggeridge on the subject of the search for religion, his encounter with it, and the desolation of abomination that came from it. What we did not get into, and propose to do in this hour, is the question of denominationalism. Is he a member of a particular communion, and if not, why not? What is the role of the institutionalized church? ... These questions...we explore in the study of Malcolm Muggeridge...who...says he has visited America for the last time, and if this is indeed the case, we can be grateful, as we seldom have been before, for the benefits of television.

I'll begin, then, by asking what I suppose is the most obvious question, particularly inasmuch as I am one myself: Why are you not a Catholic?

Mr. Muggeridge: It's not altogether easy to answer that actually, Bill. I've, believe it or not, longed to be a Catholic...I've longed for it as though it were the most marvelous thing, but I've never been able to feel in honesty that I could present myself for instruction, and it's extremely difficult to know why. The truth is, I think, that I take a very pessimistic view of the Catholic Church, despite the very brilliant Pope you've now got. It seems to me that it's dropping to pieces; and of course it had a severe blow after the Vatican Councils. Therefore, I would be joining something of which I was enormously critical, and this isn't really an honorable thing to do.

Mr. Buckley: That's never bothered you before.

Mr. Muggeridge: I've never contemplated anything so serious as joining a church. I mean, even if you were to turn to mundane things - joining a club - if you were to join it quite confident that you were going to challenge all its rules and have rows with all its members, it would be a rather foolish step to take.

Mr. Buckley: You once called yourself an imperfect Christian. Is this a sign of pride?

Mr. Muggeridge: I don't think so, because I would have no troubles if I felt that I could go as a sinner into the Church. I'm sure many people have. It's a feeling that I would go there in some degree under false pretenses. I don't know. There was an incident which, trivial in itself, played quite a part in my decision not to become a Catholic. The time when I was nearest to going and asking to be instructed - and I'd planned that I would go to Father D'Arcy because I had a great love for him - it was when I was rector at Edinburgh University, and I ran into a row there which you might have heard of when I was asked, as rector, by the students -

Mr. Buckley: To supply contraceptives.

Mr. Muggeridge: That's right - to recommend that they should be given, unquestioningly, free supplies of contraceptives by the University medical unit, and I refused to do this and there was a hullabaloo. And I thought to myself, you see, "Well, there are a thousand Catholics in the University, and they'll be on my side anyway. I've got a thousand men on my side." What happened was that the first big blast against me was a letter in The Scotsman by the Roman Catholic chaplain at the University, saying what a monstrous thing this was that I had done.

Mr. Buckley: Excuse me, but why was it monstrous?

Mr. Muggeridge: It was monstrous, according to him, because it accused the students of wanting to be promiscuous; but in a letter I wrote in answer to it, I said I wondered what the Reverend Father thought they wanted the contraceptives for? Was it to save up for their wedding day? He offered no answer to that. But then I thought that somebody would give him a very big reprimand. But no such thing happened. Then I thought he'd almost certainly become a bishop. But that didn't happen either. What happened is the perfect payoff of the whole episode: He's now rector of Edinburgh University. (laughter)

Mr. Buckley: Is that right?...And did they get their contraceptives?

Mr. Muggeridge: Oh yes, oh yes. But there was nobody who reprimanded him. One Jesuit monk wrote to me and said that he thought it was monstrous and that he'd written to this Father and suggested that he should apologize to me, but nothing came of that. Anyway, it was a small episode, but it gave me the feeling that - One of the things I admired the Church for so much was Humanae Vitae. I think it's absolutely right that when a society doesn't want children, when it is prepared to accept eroticism unrelated in any way to its purpose, then it's on the downward path. So I admired it so much, and then I realized that since I was involved in this row, their adherence to it was very, very ceremonial rather than actual. They didn't really believe in it themselves...and they haven't practiced it.

Mr. Buckley: Well, I'm, to put it lightly, stupefied that you would make a decision whether or not to extend your loyalty to an institution based on the behavior of some its communicants. I can't imagine any time in history when anybody would have become a Catholic if he had been so easily put off.

Mr. Muggeridge: That's true. That obviously wasn't a major thing, Bill, but what it did was it kind of crystallized certain feelings I had that these things that I so enormously admired...are the very things that it's turning its back on - that I would be involved in endless controversies connected with them.

Mr. Buckley: Well, you would be the millionth Catholic who was.

Mr. Muggeridge: (laughing) Yes, I suppose so. But can't you see that the - Perhaps it's an excuse I've invented myself. It's quite possible.

Mr. Buckley: You have no problem then, I take it, with the Apostles' Creed?

Mr. Muggeridge: None at all.

Mr. Buckley: Or with apostolicity?

Mr. Muggeridge: Not at all. I assent to it. Or the infallibility of the Pope; that doesn't worry me at all. I can see the purpose of all those things, and I see the context of people that I so admire - like St. Augustine and St. Francis - who were ready to accept all that...On the contrary, it's the feeling that the Church itself is moving away from these basic beliefs that is distressing. Or maybe it's just some kind of instinct.

Mr. Buckley: But there can't have been a more resonant reaffirmation of them than by the present Pope. I'm not here to try to convert you. I'm just exploring.

Mr. Muggeridge: No, no, no. I know. This is absolutely true, and of course, it has given great joy to many people because of that, but it still remains the case that I can't join it; and I'll have to meet my Maker not having joined it. Probably I'll get a frightful pacing in purgatory for it, but I can't help it. No.

Nuther Update - TCR

2009-06-05T05:04:00.003-04:00

Issue 2 of The Christendom Review is now available for purchase in book form here. There is also a cheaper pdf download on the same page. Please support us. The online version will always be free.

Since the Review is available only in black and white, art lovers can purchase separately, either in book form or download, the visual arts excerpt featuring Tim Jones' fine work.

I should mention that Lydia has an article in the June Touchstone that is sort of an offspring of her TCR piece. You can view the table of contents here, but hers is not available online, so I guess I'll have to buy the freaking issue. Since the impetus for it was the fact that she had managed to collect (and put in one place on the web) all the 2000 Schiavo trial testimony for the Review article, it seems exactly the sort of article that ought to be online. But they don't exactly consult me on editorial matters.

Quick Update-Cella's visit

2009-06-05T03:50:00.002-04:00

Got a daughter coming to town, so there doth my interest lie.

Still, I should make mention of Paul Cella's visit a couple weekends ago. He and his father-in-law (a great guy - Paul got lucky in his in-laws) hit the links with Bernadette and me. I've got video of Paul's swing, but not permission to post it. Let's just say that he now knows more about Florida wetlands than the Okeechobee Water Management District. And yet a pleasanter course companion you could not ask for. (Bernadette, by the way, beat us all. Handily.) He can't blame his golf on the clubs, though. We gave him the set Bernadette used in her first year on tour, top-o-the-line Callaway irons, the driver she used to place 10th at Q-School, a Cleveland wedge, and a Taylormade putter. (I'll have to say he putted well and wanted to keep the instrument of his success.) The reason he had to use Bern's clubs is that his own were stolen out of his own car in front of his own house right there in All-American suburban Atlanta. Afterwards we came back to my place and sucked down some Newcastles and Coronas before Paul and his Dad-in-law had to rush back to Disney so as not to displease the wives, who apparently had everyone on a schedule and no idea what a cold beer and good conversation mean to a man after 5 hours in the hot sun and 95% humidity. "Who's running things?" I asked the father-in-law.

"They are," he said, no hesitation.

That was Monday. Friday, after getting into town, Paul and his wife and three daughters came for dinner. That's right, count'em, 3. One man against 4 women. He's a goner. The girls, if I recall, are two, four, and nine. And basically delightful. It was fun watching Paul's wife (not using her name because I don't know if she wants me to) cut up the barbecue into little tiny chunks for the little ones. I'd forgotten I used to do that. We had ribs, pulled pork, fries, beans, slaw and cornbread. I'd mowed the yard earlier to make the place look half decent, so I knocked back a fair number of Staropramens and Coronas. Bernadette pretty well kept pace with me. I love having daughters for drinking companions. Paul managed one or two Newcastles, and everybody else was on water and cranapple juice. The oldest daughter (Paul's) played the piano (as did TSO's wife when she was here) and drew a picture on a sketch pad I loaned her. The weekend happened to coincide with Elizabeth's birthday, and Mary Helyn missed her so much she went ahead and bought a birthday cake and watched Paul's kids eat it. And then, before I knew it, it was over. Paul and I didn't get to talk much about The Important Things, but then the important stuff was probably happening right in front of us. Said he'd be back soon, though. He'd mentioned bringing along some Chesterton to read in his down time (I can't imagine when that might have been) and has posted some of the fruits of it here. Pretty good stuff.

Summer Update

2009-05-15T04:28:00.038-04:00

I'm back in beer mode. Had a week's break during which the weather finally found its way back into the 90's. That means yardwork, lots of it, the beer providing the incentive. The break's over, but the load's lighter, so I'll be able to stay in character most of the week. I promise not to drink before meeting a class, although sometimes it's hard to see how much it could hurt. For example, I read to one class a story by Guy de Maupassant. I told them to re-read it at home, and gave them some questions to answer. Next class I gave them a test. One of the questions was: in what city does the story take place? The second question was: in what country? Now, aside from the author's at the beginning, certain other names had popped up in the story, things like "the Seine," and "Champs Elysees," and "Rue des Martyr," and denominations of money like "francs," and "sous" and "louis," and terms of address like "Monsieur" and "Madame" and "Madamoiselle," and people with names like "Ramponeaux," "Forrestier," and "Loisel." One girl guessed the city as Rome, which she felt pretty sure was in the country of Italy. All but about three left the question blank. When I asked what famous river is mentioned in the story, someone answered "the Nile." In the face of this, I don't see why a teacher should be denied the fortification provided by a good whiskey or just about any brand of foreign lager.

While we're on the subject of the country's future, I saw in the news the other day that the city I live in (maybe it's the whole county of Orange - can't remember) is now comprised of a majority of minorities (49. something % white), and that approximately one-third, maybe more, of the entire country is now non-white, and that by some not-so-far-off year, say 2030 or 40, it'll be majority-minority. If any of you are old enough to have assumed that America would always be, at its core, the new and improved version of Europe-across-the-Atlantic, now's the time to wake up. It wouldn't bother me all that much if I could just be assured that, say, 90% of the illegals crossing the southern border knew in what country the Seine could be found, or that Ben Franklin is known for more than kite-flying. The lit class mentioned above is comprised of a few blacks, a few whites, a few Hispanics, and a couple of Muslims. I didn't get the impression that the whites knew their geography any better than the others. So if things end up going to hell, don't blame it on the minorities. It'll be everybody's fault, especially the white people who not only did a poor job of training their successors, but fell down on another one as well. In the immortal words of John the Tavernkeeper:

The Democrats own the blacks and the Hispanics and will continue to do so. Combined with that portion of the white population that considers itself liberal, and those that can be bought either under the table or with "programs", the Democrats have a lock on the American political future.

If the GOP had wanted a future it should have paid more attention to Pope Paul VI and Humanæ Vitæ 45 or so years ago.

And if, as you get older, you find yourself growing nostalgic for the company of white people, just remember that whatever fault you wish to find with other ethnicities, they knew more than you did about the purpose of one very fundamental thing: sex. They may be having a lot of it out of wedlock, but they reproduce nevertheless. White people don't like babies. Well, maybe one or two, but more than that and the little tykes become annoyances. They're expensive, and obfuscate the fun for which sex was primarily designed. Thus, we've decided to sterilize ourselves into obsolescence. To everything there is a season, and ours is over.

As the political and demographic landscape changes, some things remain the same. Like Notre Dame. A commenter at some website was of the opinion that the university had probably "learned its lesson" in light of the lay and ecclesial outrage which has greeted the invitation extended to Obama by Catholic bootlickers. I don't know what time warp that commenter stepped out of, but Notre dame's been doing this sort of thing since the 70's. Some people think it's still a Catholic university, but real Catholics don't hire people like Richard McBrien. Or Father Jenkins. In his article at The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum (formerly known as Jody, sometimes as J.) finishes up by asking:

If Georgetown doesn't appear Catholic to ordinary Catholics, that's just Georgetown. But if Notre Dame is shaky--if the most identifiably Catholic place in America doesn't seem Catholic--then the old connection between Catholic culture and Catholic institutions and the Catholic Church really is broken beyond repair. And where will Catholics send their children to school then?

I've got the answer: Notre Dame. And Georgetown, and Fordham, and USF and a bunch of other places that try to serve two masters. Why? Because most Catholics are no more Catholic than Notre Dame. Mr. Bottum himself points out that "He [Obama] won 54 percent of the Catholic vote in the last election, after all, and at least 45 percent of the vote of Mass-going Catholics."

Them's a lot of Catholics. If we restrict ourselves to the Mass-going kind, that 45 percent must be comprised of those who are against torture except when it's inflicted on born-alive infants. Well, there's comfort in the fact that 55 percent didn't vote for Obama. Maybe. I'm willing to bet that well more than half of that 55 percent either favor torture or make ambivalent apologies for it ("yes, it's wrong, but..."). It's the flavor of the day for the cafeteria conservative who wants to keep it safe, legal, and rare. Abortion and infanticide are far graver evils, of course, but when consequentialism is the modus operandi for over half the Catholic population, we got a problem.

* * *

Okay, I started this two days ago and I see that Obie's already given his speech. I saw Father Jenkins on a newsclip cuddling up close for the photo-ops. Most of the students seemed happy to have Obie on hand, and the only people arrested for fanaticism were abortion protestors, among whom was Norma McCorvey, the original Roe. They gave Obie an honorary law degree. Isn't he already a lawyer?

How did Yeats put it? "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." That may describe something in general, but it's wrong. The best on Notre Dame's commencement day ended up in jail, at least for a while. Hopefully they were all released on their own recognizability as decent human beings.

My initial purpose was not to write about societal degradation. It was to bring you up to date on...something. I'll remember before we're done. The problem is, I was sober at the time, a condition which inclines one to be half-serious about things. Now that I've done some yardwork washed down by a few Czech lagers, I see clearly what's really important.

You've probably been wondering, for example, about Sam the squirrel. I still feed him regularly. There's more than one squirrel, though, and I'm not sure which one's Sam. All I know is that I put nuts in the camphor tree on a regular basis, which inclines one squirrel to try to terrorize the other into leaving. He (Sam, I presume) chases him or her into the topmost branches to keep it all for himself. So I put nuts in more than one crook so that both can feast. One day I came out the back door and Sam was hanging from a big branch by his hind legs to attract my attention. Literally hanging there and swinging in the wind. I didn't have my camera handy, but I did get a shot of him eating the nuts:

video here.

Pretty single-minded about it, isn't he? Unlike a lot of people, he's true to his nature. Without fail. Animal nature can be disturbingly complex, though. I assume some of you saw the vids on youtube of Christian the lion. Animal Planet revisited the history of it recently, which included interviews with the two young men (now in late middle-age, or worse) who originally bought the lion cub at Harrod's in London back in the sixties and took him home as a pet. Here he is, still a cub, but not exactly your average kitty-cat:

And here he watches a newborn flock of chicks walk by without laying a paw on them:

As lions do, Christian grew big, too big to live in London outside of a zoo, so arrangements were made to take him to Africa, where George Adamson had agreed to try to acclimate him to the wild. George's story, and that of Elsa the lioness, was told in the movie Born Free. The actress who starred in that movie, Virginia McKenna, and her co-star, Bill Travers, met Christian and may have facilitated the arrangement with Adamson. So Christian was put on a plane and, many thousands of miles later, greeted by his owners:

Video.

As part of his introduction to a new life, Christian had to meet the full grown lion, Boy, already in Adamson's camp. Boy beat up on him pretty good, and once the dominance factor was established, the two were set free to start a pride of their own. They returned periodically of their own free will to Adamson's camp. One day Boy showed up, having been badly mauled by rival lions. He was treated for his wounds, of which he healed, but his temperament had changed. One day he showed up at camp and killed one of the black men who had worked with Adamson for years. I don't know what happened to him after that. But Christian had met with success, starting a pride of his own. He had been living in the wild for a year before his owners returned for a visit. Adamson knew where to find Christian, and took the young men with him. Christian just stared at them for an uncomfortably long time, and then this happened:

Video.

They saw him one more time, when he had come to full maturity, huge mane and all. He still recognized them and still displayed affection, but also more distance. After that they never saw him again.

Speaking of animals, Bern came home and I think I've captured the essence of her relationship with Cedar, as when they nap together...

...and when they're awake:

We also played golf and saw some more of these over the fence along the fairways:

Back in April I took a trip to the Quad Cities to see Elizabeth perform. Along the way, I saw some clouds from the topside at 30,000 some odd feet:

I know, big deal. Have you ever seen Atlanta, the town where Paul Cella lives, through the haze?

Well then, have you ever landed at Hartsfield Airport? I know you've always wanted to. If you're afraid of flying, this should put you at ease:

Video.

I know, it was just like being there, wasn't it? Busiest airport I've ever been through, by the way. I don't see how we got from the runway to the terminal without being hit. Planes taking off and landing all over the place. I wonder who coordinates it all.

Anyway, we eventually got where we were going so that we could look out over the ratty rooftops of Rock Island from our hotel window:

We crossed the river into Davenport to see the ballet. It appears to be a little more, oh, upscale than R.I., but the whole time I was there I kept thinking, as I had last time I was in Massachussetts, that this is one of those states where homosexuals can marry. For real. I mean pretend-for-real. It's an actual right imposed by judges, and will probably have social effects down the road somewhere, but it's a right to do something that can't be done. It entitles people to a relationship that doesn't really exist. For real. I think much of our moral and political life has become a fantasy life. How many states is it now, in which this fantasy right has come, or is about to come, to fruition? Massachussetts, New York, New Hampshire [!!], Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, and Iowa? Have I forgotten anybody? How many will it take before equal protection becomes mandatory?

The only thing I took the trip for was real enough, though - Elizabeth, with friend Josh, who works nearby as a computer whiz for John Deere, and who graduated from the same university as my girl.

One other thing the trip confirmed for me, after probing my child's heart about her experiences: the ballet world is full to repletion with vain, self-obsessed, petty, power-hungry, small-minded, visionless, heartless, no-talent narcissists. These qualities are exacerbated when they do have talent. They're almost as bad as writers.

I think I'm taking the rest of the summer off. Not sure, but it sounds like a good idea. At last semester's end, one of my students handed me a note as she left the final exam.

Mr. Luse, Thank you for making my first year at Valencia memorable. I am so glad I took your class. I will always remember you as you were the first teacher whose class I enjoyed. Thank you once again, H.

She's thoroughly American, but of a dark-skinned variety whose family's origins are by way of Egypt. I think they're Coptic Christians. Well, H., you just might keep me showing up for work one more year, just as my Elizabeth keeps going because every now and then, at the most unexpected moment, she runs into someone who offers the kindness of a compliment. It's such a little thing, isn't it?

Sunday Thought: Journey to Nowhere

2009-05-10T05:21:00.005-04:00

...The pleasure of a search, like that of a hunt, lies in the searching, and ends at the point at which the pleasure of Certitude begins...Such are the pleasures of investigation and discovery; and to these we must add, what I have suggested in the last sentence, the logical satisfaction, as it may be called, which accompanies these efforts of mind. There is great pleasure, as is plain, at least to certain minds, in proceeding from particular facts to principles, in generalizing, discriminating, reducing into order and meaning the maze of phenomena which nature presents to us. This is the kind of pleasure attendant on the treatment of probabilities which point at conclusions without reaching them, or of objections which must be weighed and measured, and adjusted for what they are worth, over and against propositions which are antecedently evident. It is the special pleasure belonging to Inference as contrasted with Assent, a pleasure almost poetical, as twilight has more poetry in it than noon-day. Such is the joy of the pleader, with a good case in hand, and expecting the separate attacks of half a dozen acute intellects, each advancing from a point of his own. I suppose this was the pleasure which the Academics had in mind, when they propounded that happiness lay, not in finding the truth, but in seeking it. To seek, indeed, with the certainty of not finding what we seek, cannot in any serious matter, be pleasurable, any more than the labour of Sisyphus or the Danaides; but when the result does not concern us very much, clever arguments and rival ones have the attraction of a game of chance or skill, whether or not they lead to any definite conclusion.

Are there pleasures of Doubt, as well as of Inference and of Assent? In one sense, there are. Not indeed, if doubt simply means ignorance, uncertainty, or hopeless suspense; but there is a certain grave acquiescence in ignorance, a recognition of our impotence to solve momentous and urgent questions, which has a satisfaction of its own. After high aspirations, after renewed endeavours, after bootless toil, after long wanderings, after hope, effort, weariness, failure, painfully alternating and recurring, it is an immense relief to the exhausted mind to be able to say, "At length I know that I can know nothing about any thing" — that is, while it can maintain itself in a posture of thought which has no promise of permanence, because it is unnatural. But here the satisfaction does not lie in not knowing, but in knowing there is nothing to know. It is a positive act of assent or conviction, given to what in the particular case is an untruth. It is the assent and the false certitude which are the cause of the tranquility of mind. Ignorance remains the evil which it ever was, but something of the peace of Certitude is gained in knowing the worst, and in having reconciled the mind to the endurance of it.

John Henry Newman, from A Grammar of Assent.

Issue 2 of The Christendom Review...

2009-05-06T17:47:00.004-04:00

...is now up. (Yes, I should have posted this yesterday.)

The Special Features section takes a look at the legacy of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. People who actually knew her - including the priest who delivered her funeral sermon - are the ones doing the looking.

In The Modern Error, Lydia McGrew revisits the legal sham (imho) that delivered Terri Schiavo to her Maker. This is the only analysis I know of that uses all of the eyewitness testimony from the original 2000 trial as source material. (The transcripts of that testimony can be found at Lydia's website the only place online - again, as far as I know - where it is gathered in one place.) I think the article's of a groundbreaking nature, but don't expect to see it lauded in major new outlets. At least you'll know that the truth is out there.

There is also a mix of fiction and poetry (I especially like Bill Miles' short story, Chocky's Debut; Bill's an interesting character and you'll no doubt be hearing more from him) and a sampling of Tim Jones' brilliant artwork.

Please read it and, if you're able, support the site by purchasing a softcover book version at the link provided under "Support this Site" in the left margin. And link to the Review from your own website if you like what you see and want it to continue. Some have already done so, like Dylan and TSO, and I'll find the rest of you in due course. (Well, maybe. If any of you know of folks who have done so, please alert me so that I can thank them.)

I can't sufficiently express my gratitude (first) to Lydia McGrew for her investigative efforts, "elegant mind", and the sheer intrepidity of her devotion to finishing a task; and secondly to Todd McKimmey, whose brilliance with regard to all things Web makes the site possible.

First Things has linked to the Review, for which we are greatly appreciative; and Paul Cella did us a similar kindness by linking from Redstate and W4.

Mass of Reparation

2009-05-04T03:54:00.003-04:00

From Catholic Online:

The Orlando Diocese, where Thomas G. Wenski is bishop, has announced a Mass of reparation for "the many shortcomings and transgressions committed against the dignity and sacredness of human life in our world," specifically for Notre Dame's decision to honor pro-abortion President Obama at commencement. The Mass is taking place at the Cathedral of St. James on May 3, 2009.

In a column on the Orlando Diocese website, Bishop Wenski writes, "Notre-Dame (at least in its Administration and Board) has forgotten what it means to be Catholic. Last year, in Washington, D.C., Pope Benedict XVI addressed Catholic educators, including university presidents," wrote the bishop. "He said 'to justify positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission. Father Jenkins, Notre-Dame's president, must have nodded off during the Pope's speech," he concluded.

I didn't even know about it. My friend in Atlanta, Rick Barnett, told me by email, just as an aside: "Kudos to your Bishop for offering that Mass, etc." What Mass? I don't know about no Mass. I went to the evening Mass with the wife and a daughter and it turned out to be that Mass. So there I was in the middle of it while he said flat-out what kind of pro-abort Obama was and dinged Notre Dame for being of the world rather than merely in it. Kind of cool. Problem was, the acoustics for music in the cathedral are great, but not for a sermon. Only certain kinds of voices come through clearly unless you're sitting in the front row. Still, when he was done, he received nearly universal applause. Bernadette said she saw a few people on the other side of the church shaking their heads angrily. Oh well. I wondered about the black family sitting right in front of me, but when the Bishop sat down, they clapped along with everyone else.

Still, the whole mess is cause for minor depression. Though the church was better attended than usual for a 6 p.m. service, there were still some empty seats. The number of Catholics who are deeply disturbed by Notre Dame's treachery are probably quite few.

The Bishop's column at the Diocesan website.

[Update: Amy Welborn at Beliefnet has linked to this pitiful post. If I'd known she was going to do it, I'd have gone into way more detail. Hell, I'd make stuff up. I hope a couple of you will take the trouble to leave enough comments to outnumber the idiots who seem to enjoy plaguing her. I know she's tough and all but a woman who's just lost her husband shouldn't be bothered by anyone for at least a year. You know, just shutup for a while.]

Before there was Susan Boyle...

2009-05-01T22:32:00.007-04:00

...there was Paul Potts. Maybe some of you, or a lot of you, have already seen it (I generally don't keep up with this stuff). I found it at Old World Swine, Tim Jones' place, and he found it back in 2007. Listen to Paul, and then to a snippet from a PBS tribute to Pavarotti. Still, Mr. Potts is pretty impressive. A pauper to a prince, says Amanda. Or maybe it's a frog to a prince.

The videos are here.

The elder daughter has a question...

2009-04-23T05:06:00.002-04:00

...We were discussing Terri Schiavo last time she was here and got onto the question of whether someone is obligated to receive treatment - ever. For example, you're diagnosed with, say, some kind of fatal cancer. You're given two years to live. There will of course come a time when the end is in sight, at which point you might decline further intervention. But at the beginning of the two years: are you morally obligated to take treatment (some of which might be fairly unpleasant), or are you free to say 'no'?