tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-264373872024-03-07T04:52:40.257-05:00Aún Estamos VivosJeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.comBlogger442125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-49862212140775960072022-09-10T21:32:00.006-05:002022-09-10T21:40:27.382-05:00Breaking a 9 Year Hiatus<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRz7kLb2F5fYKTFClk0JePux3BE5pmVdmtfKPESo9I6hF1EgJFlW20Z-E7AjMbUwTPclptUEGx_g8JW9N7SG_pPRlm4tQVmNJMbrGHDNkU1t_cUuolfKSRox3sl5ACknzcXo0Op385Xqi0amReQ8KiHjkrdEeGvaANH6di5UxvEH6mKYWcX9A/s770/zurb.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRz7kLb2F5fYKTFClk0JePux3BE5pmVdmtfKPESo9I6hF1EgJFlW20Z-E7AjMbUwTPclptUEGx_g8JW9N7SG_pPRlm4tQVmNJMbrGHDNkU1t_cUuolfKSRox3sl5ACknzcXo0Op385Xqi0amReQ8KiHjkrdEeGvaANH6di5UxvEH6mKYWcX9A/s400/zurb.jpg"/></a></div>
Wow. I can't believe it has been almost 9 years since I last posted something. I am still alive. Sigo vivo. If you are still following this blog, thank you. I can report to you that I have been well and healthy, and I never gave up the faith.
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Does anyone still blog anymore? About the time that I had stopped blogging, Facebook and Twitter were well on their way to eating up the internet. What horrible platforms they turned out to be. There was plenty of trolling in the blogs back in the day, for sure, but they were a far better avenue for substantive discussions than Facebook ever turned out to be. As for Twitter, it's pure evil. I never even bothered to sign up for Twitter, because I knew I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to just throw some soul-killing snark at one high-profile blue-check personality after another. What a usesless time-suck that would be.
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As I look over some of these old posts, it's astonishing to me how much this country and how much the world has changed since 2013. I could see trouble on the way according the the degree of polarization we had already reached, but I had stopped doing this well before the Trump and Woke movements gave us any real indications they were on the way. Mama Mia...
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As for the blog itself, it's been so long that I've actually had to look at HTML that I find myself rather rusty with the adhoc commands I used to commonly make here. I tried to ditch this dark color scheme, which was truthfully already out of date by the late aughts, but with a white background it was too hard to read, considering the various color schemes I used for blockquotes in the past, so I'm sticking with a modified (updated) version of the simple dark template. I thought of dead-ending this blog and starting another, but hey, why the hubris? Who even knows if anyone will notice this?
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At one time a couple of years ago, I actually did start another blog on Wordpress called <a href="https://thechinathreat.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/why-do-i-say-that-china-is-a-fascist-state/">The China Threat</a>. <sp> As you can imagine, it's about what I consider to be the most dangerous and challenging problem facing the world today, which is the revanchism of the Chinese Conmunist Party. I found however, that might heart just isn't into doing that kind of writing.
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Spiritually speaking, as I said above, I never gave up the faith. If you are still following, I don't know if I can say to you that my views are all the same as they were before. Looking over some of these old posts, I still think I was right about a lot of things, but I also think I was wrong about a few things. I also could have been more generous in spirit, less isolated, and more respectful of other Catholic bloggers who'd been around doing this a lot longer than I had.
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Politically speaking, well... I've often pointed out here that I was a business school graduate in the 1980's. I still hear some of my old classmates talking about their libertarian views, which they like to call Eisenhower Republicanism. They say "I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative..." I'm not sure how much of a market there still is out there for that. Eisenhower's term ended 62 years ago. I felt like a fish out of water in that college because I was the exact opposite. I tended towards social conservatism and fiscal liberalism. I figured that a civilized society should have a social safety net, but that we'd be better off building a culture that dis-incentivized the kinds of behaviors that caused people to fall into it.
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Anyway, one of the original purposes of the blog was to kind of carve out a space for pro-lifers in the Democratic Pary, which was once the natural home for a lot of Catholics in this country. That has clearly gone off the boards, if there was ever even really any chance at all, but something else has happened since 2013. I used to think of myself as a socially conservative Democrat, but in the wake of the 2016 election I found out that such a person is actually called a "populist," and that being a "populist" is a very <i>bad</i> thing, whether it is populism on the Right <i>or</i> on the Left. In fact, this "populism" might even be considered "fascist," or at least "fascist-adjacent." So, I'm inclined to stay rather quiet about politics these days, or at least be very careful in the way I speak about it.
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In any case, I was exemplified into the Knight of Columbus today, so I figured it would be a good day to reappear, so to speak. Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-87053223789800790932013-12-04T23:19:00.000-05:002013-12-04T23:31:54.929-05:00Detroit as a National BellweatherToday, President Obama <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/obama-economic-inequality-is-hurting-americas-future/1803524.html" target="_blank">gave a speech</a> in which he called economic inequality and the resulting lack of social mobility "the defining challenge of our time." This comes right on the heels of Amazon announcing that they were seriously looking at using drones within the next few years to deliver packages to customers' doorsteps (what will happen to UPS and FedEx drivers?), and the news that the city of Detroit has been given the go-ahead to proceed with a <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2013/12/03/detroit-is-eligible-for-bankruptcy-and-city-pensions-are-at-risk/" target="_blank">bankruptcy filing</a> which is very likely to put existing public pension commitments at risk.<br />
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We've been hearing for quite some time about Detroit's long slow slide from decline to outright implosion. I just finished reading former NYT correspondent <a href="http://charlieleduff.com/" target="_blank">Charlie LeDuff's</a> book about his home town, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Detroit-American-Autopsy-Charlie-LeDuff/dp/1594205345" target="_blank">Detroit: An American Autopsy</a>. LeDuff is well aware that as far as Detroit is concerned, there is a fascination on the part of the rest of the country which he recognizes and dismisses as "ruin porn," but behind his stories of personal tragedy, ruined and abandoned neighborhoods, corrupt politicians, arson, drugs, young lives cut short by senseless murder, underfunded and understaffed police departments, and firemen with holes in their boots and water-pumping trucks that don't work, he teases out a broader cautionary tale. In looking at other cities like LA, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Harrisburg, he sees Detroit as a canary in the coal mine. As Detroit goes, so he warns, so the rest of the nation might go.<br />
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I fear there may be more than just a grain of truth in what he says. For all of the political noise we hear about deficits, the national debt, and whether or not a universal health insurance mandate is constitutional, the real problem this country faces is a lack of meaningful and renumerative work. Globalization has a lot to do with that, and so does robotics and automation, like the Amazon example I mentioned above. A great deal of it also has to do, however, with the fact that we have willingly embraced a winner-take-all brand of turbo-capitalism that has made it acceptable for this country's executive class to wage war on the middle class and on the poor.<br />
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One particular passage in the book I found poignant was a recollection Charlie LeDuff had when he <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20100225/METRO08/2250419" target="_blank">visited his brother Bill</a>, who works in a screw factory on the outskirts of Detroit. Correction - it would be more accurate to say that they buff and shine up screws that are actually made in China. As Charlie's brother tells the story of how his own fortunes have dramatically declined from his days as a subprime lender to his desperate days on the floor of the screw factory, Charlie recounts an observation made by a co-worker of Bill's, an illiterate man named Mike Straw, whom Charlie and Bill uncharitably call a "retard." Now, that's just wrong. "Retard" is a term that should never be used about anyone, but even Charlie had to acknowledge Mike's wisdom is summing up the plight of the country so succinctly. <br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">My brother pointed to the guy working at the next table over. “Go talk to him,” he said. “That guy’s actually paying off his debt. He’s an honest guy, I’ll give him that. But he’s sort of retarded. He’s too dumb to know he should just walk away from the debt.”
</span><br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">The man working next to my brother is named Mike. A functional illiterate, he earns $8 an hour but takes home about $75 a week. Up to his neck in house payments on a house that was no longer worth what he owed, Mike decided to pay the bank instead of walking away. Why? I asked him. A lot of people are walking out on debts. “A lot of people do, but I don’t,” he said. “If everybody walked away on what they owe, where would we be?”
</span><br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">He was potbellied, sported a poor Moe Howard “Three Stooges” haircut and was missing his lower plate of teeth. But he wasn’t complaining about the slow pace of a national dental plan. He was worried about his job.
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<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">“What happened?” I asked him as he fiddled with the same bolt I had seen him fiddling with for fifteen minutes.
</span><br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">“Happened where?”
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<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">“Here, in America. What happened to the economy? What happened to this screw shop?”
</span><br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">“Well,” he said with gummy exasperation, “a guy used to make plastic cars, see. Then they found a guy someplace else who can make forty plastic cars. But the guy that used to make the cars still likes the car. He wants to buy one for his son for Christmas. So he buys one with a credit card. But he don’t have no money to pay for that credit card. After a while, the man with the credit card wants to get paid, but the guy that used to make the plastic car don’t have no money to pay it.” He stopped abruptly and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s what happened, I guess.”
</span><br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">The illiterate understood it. And he told it as well as the New York Times ever did.</span></blockquote>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-11855343327489186362013-11-16T22:09:00.001-05:002013-12-01T11:38:35.978-05:00JFK's Last Speech<h3>
<span style="color: #93c47d;">President Kennedy's Speech in Forth Worth, Texas, on the Morning of November 22, 1963</span></h3>
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<i><b>At the time of his death, was JFK still a Cold War hawk, or was he a peacemaker in the making?</b></i> <br />
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Once again, as we approach November 22nd, we head into what is sometimes called "Assassination Season," when we analyze in excruciatingly minute detail the Zapruder film for the umpteenth time while re-parsing various conspiracy theories and waxing nostalgic about the Kennedy presidency and what might have been, but this year it is especially poignant, as it will mark the 50th anniversary of that day's tragic events. It seems like only yesterday to me that we passed the 25th anniversary in 1988. I remember thinking at the time, while watching old Walter Cronkite videos, how far away those days in 1963 felt, and that feeling is compounded today. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of the Kennedy assassination, and I can't help but to feel amazed at time at how much the country has changed in the intervening years.<br />
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Speaking of those intervening years, it is interesting to see the evolution in how that presidency has been perceived and evaluated. In the first few years, it was all about Camelot and the most saccharine hagiography you could imagine. You would think Kennedy was one of the three or four greatest presidents in our nation's history. In the years that followed, the pendulum swung completely the other way, and all you heard about was this reckless young man who was intellectually challenged, if not disinterested, and that JFK was not only an overrated president, but a dangerous one at that. You would think Kennedy did nothing but have sex parties in the White House pool all day with interns and press secretaries, in between trysts with Marilyn Monroe. While there was undoubtedly some of that going on, I think there has been a corrective shift in recent years to a more balanced and realistic view. John F. Kennedy was actually a pretty good president, and a more serious thinker than he has been given credit for. I think there was a tendency from the 1970s through the 1990s to judge him through his younger brother Ted. Ted, the so-called "Wizard of Uhs," was rather inarticulate without a prepared text, and in addition to his being a lush, it is well-known that in his years in the Senate, he had very accomplished staff doing a good deal of his work for him. John was not that way. In his monthly press conferences (which he was the first to hold), he showed himself to be engaged, quick on his feet, and well versed on the issues. Very much in command. Glib. Poised and at ease. For example, I think he handled himself very well in this press conference, where he fielded questions about rumors of independent CIA activities in South Viet Nam.<br />
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It's interesting that he defended the CIA in that press conference, when rumor has it that in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco he had fired Allen Dulles and said that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces." <br />
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Which is the truth? This is a paradox of sorts, which brings me to the main point of the post... <br />
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The other day I was listening to some recent America Magazine podcasts, and came across an <a href="http://americamagazine.org/media/podcasts/jfk-and-unspeakable" target="_blank">interview</a> with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Douglass" target="_blank">James Douglass</a>, the author of<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1439193886" target="_blank"> </a></i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1439193886" target="_blank">JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It
Matters</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRbFoSAAo0Lpqn-opSUoDNyTUKbbZLAAm8nT-mJaPbSAL6XHdFWbs-zF1DIzQM0wLtEBArklNzIspk9Rhfy6NQH6yg7pqciVg7pKjUWcswyjoJDJs5LZcvus_HPq8e9qXqZI6GLw/s1600/unspeakable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRbFoSAAo0Lpqn-opSUoDNyTUKbbZLAAm8nT-mJaPbSAL6XHdFWbs-zF1DIzQM0wLtEBArklNzIspk9Rhfy6NQH6yg7pqciVg7pKjUWcswyjoJDJs5LZcvus_HPq8e9qXqZI6GLw/s200/unspeakable.jpg" width="132" /></a></div>
Now, this Jim Douglass is a man after my own heart. As a teacher and peace activist in the Catholic Worker movement, friend and follower of the late Thomas Merton, he has written such other works as <a class="external text" href="http://wipfandstock.com/store/The_NonViolent_Cross_A_Theology_of_Revolution_and_Peace" rel="nofollow">The Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and
Peace</a>. He was in Rome in 1963, when he heard about Kennedy's murder. He was at the Second Vatican Council, working as a theological adviser on matters related to nuclear war and conscientious
objection. These days, Douglass has apparently taken advantage of a lot of newly declassified information about the assassination, and according to some people, has done an outstanding job in connecting enough dots to resurrect Oliver Stone's thesis that the CIA and the military industrial complex planned and executed a conspiracy to eliminate Kennedy based upon the fact that he had abandoned plans to liberate Cuba by force, had appeased the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was going to withdraw from Viet Nam, and planned to pursue a path towards nuclear disarmament. Douglass maintains that over the course of his presidency, Kennedy had learned to mistrust the military, the intelligence agencies, and other members of the National Security apparatus. He was chastened by the missile crisis and the standoff over Berlin, and was horrified by his generals' plans and advocacy for launching a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Douglass cites in particular Kennedy's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrspHo8uvmg" target="_blank">"Peace Speech"</a> at American University in June of 1963, where he spoke about a comprehensive nuclear test band treaty, and made some conciliatory remarks about the Russians. He said that day, among other things...
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<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings....
For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.</span></blockquote>
I've only started reading Douglass' book, but I have seen and heard some people claim that he makes a very compelling case with the evidence he says is very readily available, if we would only open our eyes to take a hard honest look at it. What he claims is the "Unspeakable," the very evil that lurks within our own government, first arose during the Cold War, and has only become even more powerful in our current "War on Terror."<br />
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It does give one pause... Do I think he's right? Well, I've always been of the opinion that there was a conspiracy of some kind. In my view, it was probably some kind of blowback operation related to Cuban exiles, rogue CIA elements, and Mafia figures. When someone like Oswald lived in the Soviet Union, had ties with US intelligence agencies, and was murdered with ease by a low level mob figure, it does lead one to doubt that Oswald was just an alienated lone gunman with grudge.<br />
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In any case, is Douglass right? The problem with Douglass' theory is this... There is another speech he doesn't mention in his book. It was the <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9538" target="_blank">last speech President Kennedy ever delivered</a>. He spoke before the Chamber of Commerce in Forth Worth, Texas, on the morning he was killed, and it was one of the most hawkish, militaristic speeches I've ever heard anyone deliver, anywhere, at any time.<br />
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Kennedy's speech begins at 31:26 in the video at the top of this post. It was a testimony to the work of the defense industry in Fort Worth, as Kennedy spoke appreciatively and enthusiastically about the capabilities of the Iroquois helicopter, the B-58 Bomber, and the TXF tactical fighter. It shows no hint at all of backing down from what Kennedy had indicated emphatically in his Inaugural Address; that the USA would "bear any burden" in the defense of liberty, and was willing to engage in limited wars in order to do so. Excerpts...<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">Three years ago last September I came here, with the Vice President, and spoke at Burke Burnett Park, and I called, in that speech, for a national security policy and a national security system which was second to none--a position which said not first, but, if, when and how, but <i>first</i>. That city responded to that call as it has through its history. And we have been putting that pledge into practice ever since. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">And I want to say a word about that pledge here in Fort Worth, which understands national defense and its importance to the security of the United States. During the days of the Indian War, this city was a fort. During the days of World War I, even before the United States got into the war, Royal Canadian Air Force pilots were training here. During the days of World War II, the great Liberator bombers, in which my brother flew with his co-pilot from this city, were produced here...The B-58, which is the finest weapons system in the world today, which has demonstrated most recently in flying from Tokyo to London, with an average speed of nearly 1,000 miles per hour, is a Fort Worth product. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">The Iroquois helicopter from Fort Worth is a mainstay in our fight against the guerrillas in South Viet-Nam. The transportation of crews between our missile sites is done in planes produced here in Fort Worth. So wherever the confrontation may occur, and in the last 3 years it has occurred on at least three occasions, in Laos, Berlin, and Cuba, and it will again--wherever it occurs, the products of Fort Worth and the men of Fort Worth provide us with a sense of security. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">And in the not too distant future a new Fort Worth product--and I am glad that there was a table separating Mr. Hicks and myself--a new Fort Worth product, the TFX Tactical Fighter Experimental--nobody knows what those words mean, but that is what they mean, Tactical Fighter Experimental--will serve the forces of freedom and will be the number one airplane in the world today....There has been a good deal of discussion of the long and hard fought competition to win the TFX contract, but very little discussion about what this plane will do. It will be the first operational aircraft ever produced that can literally spread its wings through the air. It will thus give us a single plane capable of carrying out missions of speed as well as distance, able to fly very far in one form or very fast in another. It can take off from rugged, short airstrips, enormously increasing the Air Force's ability to <b>participate in limited wars</b>. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">In the past 3 years we have increased the defense budget of the United States by over 20 percent; increased the program of acquisition for Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by over 60 percent; added five combat ready divisions to the Army of the United States, and five tactical fighter wings to the Air Force of the United States;<b> increased our strategic airlift capability by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces which are engaged now in South Viet-Nam by 600 percent. I hope those who want a stronger America and place it on some signs will also place those figures next to it</b>. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">This is not an easy effort. This requires sacrifice by the people of the United States. But this is a very dangerous and uncertain world. As I said earlier, on three occasions in the last 3 years the United States has had a direct confrontation. No one can say when it will come again. <b>No one expects that our life will be easy, certainly not in this decade, and perhaps not in this century. But we should realize what a burden and responsibility the people of the United States have borne for so many years. Here, a country which lived in isolation, divided and protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific, uninterested in the struggles of the world around it, here in the short space of 18 years after the Second World War, we put ourselves, by our own will and by necessity, into defense of alliances with countries all around the globe.</b> <b>Without the United States, South Viet-Nam would collapse overnight. </b>Without the United States, the SEATO alliance would collapse overnight. Without the United States the CENTO alliance would collapse overnight. Without the United States there would be no NATO. And gradually Europe would drift into neutralism and indifference. Without the efforts of the United States in the Alliance for Progress, the Communist advance onto the mainland of South America would long ago have taken place. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">So this country, which desires only to be free, which desires to be secure, which desired to live at peace for 18 years under three different administrations, has borne more than its share of the burden, has stood watch for more than its number of years. <b>I don't think we are fatigued or tired. We would like to live as we once lived. But history will not permit it.</b> The Communist balance of power is still strong. The balance of power is still on the side of freedom. <b>We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do as we have done in our past, our duty</b>, and the people of Texas will be in the lead. </span></blockquote>
As much as I would like to believe what Jim Douglass has said about Kennedy's <i>"teshuvah</i>," or "repentance" (change of heart) on issues of war and peace, it was very little in evidence on the last day of his life.<br />
<br />
Is it possible that Kennedy may have merely been playing to the crowd? Perhaps. Kennedy did in fact know that he was running a risk in visiting the super-heated cauldron that was Texas in November of 1963, but he had some fence-mending he needed to take care of inside of the Democratic Party, specifically, to heal the rift between Senator Ralph Yarborough one one side, and Governor John Connally and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson on the other. It's possible that Kennedy was giving a pork-barrell speech to an appreciative defense industry town, but on the other hand, those words about a willingness and readiness to fight limited wars are still in there.<br />
<br />
Author and commentator Jeff Greenfield has recently written an encomium to Kennedy titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/If-Kennedy-Lived-President-Alternate/dp/0399166963" target="_blank">If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History</a>. What if Kennedy have lived? What would have happened in Viet Nam, with the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, etc... It's hard to know and we will never know. While I do think Kennedy was a good president who was learning in the job, there was that Kennedy clan penchant for <i>secrecy</i> which I think would have undone them in the long run somehow.<br />
<br />
So, while I plan on reading Douglass' book in full, I'm not sure I agree with him on where Kennedy was headed in terms of geopolitics. I am very much in agreement with Lawrence O'Donnell, however, who puts Kennedy's finest domestic policy moment here....<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2GmZ1a5hnxo" width="560"></iframe> Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-50570141171803628732013-10-04T23:40:00.000-05:002013-10-04T23:49:11.954-05:00America's Common Sense Cardinal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Friday was the Feast of St. Francis, and while Pope Francis spent the day in Assisi celebrating and commemorating it, he was simultaneously lamenting the latest immigration <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24407808" target="_blank">disaster at Lampedusa</a>, saying,“Today is a day of tears. Such things go against the spirit
of the world.” </div>
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In the spirit of St Francis, it's good every now and then to offer a word of praise for our own Capuchin Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley. He's one of the Pope's so-called G-8 cardinals, who happen to be in Rome for meetings and consultations this week, and in my humble opinion, not only was O'Malley a wise choice for this group on the part of Francis, but the best choice out of the eight. </div>
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In the wake of Francis' now-famous interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, a few American bishops have written columns offering commentary and perspective on it. Some people might say that certain ones, including another particular Capuchin bishop, were offering spin. Michael Sean Winters reported on at least one bishop who seemed to "get" what Francis was saying in the interview, and some who did not, in his NCR blog posts<a href="http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/cardinal-burke-still-it" title="Cardinal Burke Still At It"> Cardinal Burke Still At It </a>and<a href="http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/wuerl-chaput-interview" title="+Wuerl & +Chaput on the Interview"> Wuerl & Chaput on the Interview.</a></div>
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I can say with some confidence that Cardinal O'Malley is one of those bishops who "gets" Francis, and has done so right from the beginning. Back in August he made the <a href="http://www.kofc.org/un/en/conv/2013/addresses/sd-keynote.html" target="_blank">keynote address</a> at the 131st Convention of the Knights of Columbus. I find it interesting that while Bishop Tobin in our neighboring state of Rhode Island was reprimanding Pope Francis for not talking about abortion enough, Cardinal O'Malley already understood where the new pope was deciding to place new emphasis<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">. </span>He could see that Francis was looking at a broader context for issues respecting the dignity of human life. He knew this well in advance of the Civiltà Cattolica interview. Interesting as well, that Lampedusa was mentioned in the keynote address, as it was by Francis today as a result of a fresh tragedy. In his August 6th speech, O'Malley said...</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Some people think that the Holy Father should talk more about
abortion. I think he speaks of love and mercy to give people the context
for the Church’s teaching on abortion. We oppose abortion, not because
we are mean or old fashioned, but because we love people. And that is
what we must show the world. Recently I read about an American relief
worker in Africa, who reported on being at a camp for a food
distribution line, it was very chaotic, even scary. He could see that
they were running out of food and that these starving people were
desperate. At the end of the line, the last person was a little nine
year old girl. All that was left was one banana. They handed it to her.
She peeled the banana and gave half each to her younger brother and
sister. Then she licked the banana peel. The relief worker said at that
moment he began to believe in God.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We must be better people; we must love all people, even those who
advocate abortion. It is only if we love them that we will be able to
help them discover the sacredness of the life of an unborn child. Only
love and mercy will open hearts that have been hardened by the
individualism of our age.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">In the United States we are an immigrant Church. It is very
significant that the Holy Father’s very first trip as Pope was to
Lampedusa, to underscore his concern for the plight of immigrants. As
the Archbishop pointed out so eloquently in his homily, this is an issue
that it is great importance to us as American Catholics.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">When the Holy Father went to the island of Lampedusa he threw a
wreath of flowers into the sea where thousands of refugees have perished
in the modern day coffin ships the bring refugees from North Africa.
The Holy Father talked about the globalization of indifference –
indifference to the suffering of others, to the fate of the unborn, the
elderly, the handicapped, the mentally ill and the immigrants.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We must overcome this indifference in our own lives and help people
to see that the Church’s teaching is about loving and caring for
everyone. In his talk to the Brazilian bishops last week, Pope Francis
said: “We need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of
mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of entering the
world of wounded persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and
love.” The Holy Father alludes to Cardinal Kasper’s work on mercy when
he says that mercy without truth would be consolation without honesty
and is empty chatter.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">On the other hand, however, the truth without mercy would be cold,
offputting and ready to wound. The truth isn’t a wet rag that you throw
in someone’s face, but a warm cape that you wrap around a person, to
protect and strengthen them.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
Project Rachel has been just that kind of a combination of mercy and truth that the Church’s pro–life efforts need to be about.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Our efforts to heal the wounds of society will depend on our capacity
to love and to be faithful to our mission. The Holy Father is showing
us very clearly that our struggle is not just a political battle or a
legal problem, but that we must evangelize and humanize the culture,
then the world will be safe for the unborn, the elderly and the
unproductive. The Gospel of Life is a Gospel of ercy. If we are going to
get a hearing in today’s world, it will be because people recognize
that authenticity of our lives and our dedication to building a
civilization of love. We are called to live our lives as a service to
others and commit our lives to give witness to the presence of God’s
love and mercy in our midst. </span></blockquote>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-65762256953569443942013-10-01T23:08:00.002-05:002013-10-04T23:50:10.820-05:00No Redemption for Walt?<h4>
<span style="color: #93c47d;">Breaking Bad and Morality in a Post-Religious Age </span></h4>
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<span style="color: #93c47d;"> </span></h4>
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At the last moment he found a bit of peace, perhaps, but not redemption.<br />
<br />
I've had Badfinger's <i>Baby Blue</i> playing in my head for the last couple of days now. It was one of the best uses of of a classic rock song to close out a TV series or a movie that I've seen in quite a while, as <i>Breaking Bad's</i> main character Walter White looked wistfully for one last time over the object of his “special love” and the pinnacle of his life's work, his meth lab, just before dying. Music was used quite masterfully in the series overall, from what I could tell, such as the scene when Walt was pushing his last barrel of money through the desert as if it contained the weight of his accumulated sins, to the strains of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14PejsN99ng" target="_blank">Take My True Love</a>. I've always felt that a dissonant juxposition of music with what is happening on screen can be devastatingly effective, ever since I first saw Martin Scorcese use Donovan's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUlQAfJuXE" target="_blank">Atlantis</a> as the soundtrack for the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKHLMZGus3Y" target="_blank">Billy Batts incident</a> in <i>Goodfellas</i>.<br />
<br />
The first time I heard about <i>Breaking Bad</i> was on a highway in northern Indiana in the Spring of 2011. I was in a rental car, driving my oldest daughter from Chicago to South Bend. She was a senior in high school at the time, and we were on our way to visit St. Mary's College for an accepted students day. Just a few miles out of South Bend, she was telling me about this new TV show that she’d recently become hooked on. Alternately horrified, fascinated, and intrigued by the fact that my daughter was telling me about watching a show that gave a sympathetic treatment to a meth-amphetamine cook, I must have stepped more heavily on the gas than I realized. I was clocked by the Indiana State Police at 85 mph and was given a speeding ticket.<br />
<br />
Not that my wild ride was anything like the existential mid-life crisis that Walter White, played brilliantly by Bryan Cranston, had in <i>Breaking Bad.</i> Even after I first heard about it, I had no real interest in watching a show about the meth trade, whether it was sympathetic to the characters or otherwise. It wasn't until this year that I heard enough buzz about the excellent writing and acting associated with the program, to finally give it a look-see. I didn't start watching it, in fact, until after Walt's DEA agent brother-in-law Hank finally discovered that Walt was in fact the mysterious Heisenberg, the meth-making genius that he'd been hunting for. Therefore, I missed the vast amount of high drama in the show. Nevertheless, just watching those last few episodes was enough to get me completely hooked, and to leave an emotional impact on me when it ended.<br />
<br />
My wife was as dubious as I was when I first heard about it, and she remained so. Myself, I wouldn’t tolerate for one moment the hell on earth that is meth addiction, or the hideous crime of it’s production and distribution. For me, however, the series was about much more than that, chiefly, how easy it is for human beings to make minor moral compromises that can snowball into major ones, leaving lasting damage in their wake. It brings to mind St Paul saying, ’I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” A show with such an edgy premise and theme was only as successful as it was because it was characterized by expert writing, but more importantly, because of its superb casting. They couldn't have done the casting more perfectly.<br />
<br />
From the beginning of the show to its end, there has been a lot of consternation about the moral ambiguities presented within it, and what it says about us as a society, as we become more and more disengaged from traditional Judeo-Christian values. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-world-according-to-team-walt.html?hp" target="_blank">Ross Douthat</a>, for one, fretted about those who identified with, and were rooting for the main protagonist, no matter what kind of atrocities he committed, in a group he refers to as “Team Walt.” While realizing that they are not reading the writer’s intentions for the show quite properly, he’s concerned about the Darwinian ethics they’ve embraced.<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The allure for Team Walt is not ultimately the pull of nihilism, or the harmless thrill of rooting for a supervillain. It’s the pull of an alternative moral code, neither liberal nor Judeo-Christian, with an internal logic all its own… embracing Walt doesn’t requiring embracing “individual savagery” and a world without moral rules. It just requires a return to “old rules” — to “the tribal, family-oriented society and the honor culture that actually did precede the Enlightenment’s commitment to universal values.”</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
To be clear, I don’t think the show itself is actually on Walt’s side. I think Team Walt badly misreads the story’s moral arc and vision.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
But the pervasiveness of that misreading tells us something significant... </span></blockquote>
I’ve surely considered the same thing myself, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the whole story.<br />
<br />
Granted, I came in late, so I didn’t see <i>all</i> of the terrible things that Walter White did. Maybe I’d feel a lot differently about his character if I did. The question remains, however, as to why so many people had sympathy for Walter White… Why were so many rooting for things to turn out all right for him and his family in the end? Why were so many hoping for his redemption?<br />
<br />
I think a lot of it simply came down to the skill of Bryan Cranston, the actor who played him. I haven’t seen an actor in quite some time who has been able to deliver sheer pathos the way that he did. Every pained, angst-ridden expression spoke more than a thousand words, and the raging conflicts within him just exploded out of every glance and gesture. I think there is an instinctive reaction on a large part of the audience; a reaction that just wants to assuage that kind of pain.<br />
<br />
While I don’t necessarily know what goes through the mind of younger viewers, I wonder if the prolonged economic situation we are living through strikes a chord with the middle-aged who are living under a cloud, living those “lives of quiet desperation,” feeling their health decline, feeling at mid-life that they’ve lived little more than a beige, mediocre life. Walter White steps out of this and his life spins out of control, but he barely looks back. Maybe there are many who wonder if such a thing could live within themselves.
<br />
Many were waiting for redemption in the final episode, but apparently Cranston and the writer, Vince Gilligan, decided that it was not to be. In his final visit with his wife, there was this exchange…<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Skyler: "If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family..."</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
Walt: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really -- I was alive."</span></blockquote>
Speaking of Vince Gilligan, what is his take on what kind of a moral message, if any, are we to take out of the show? David Segal of the NYT reports on it in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/the-dark-art-of-breaking-bad.html" target="_blank">The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’</a>, and it confirms much of what I observed myself. Most of the characters in the show made some kind of serious moral compromise at some point, and they all paid for it in spades.<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Gilligan and his writers have posed some large questions about good and evil, questions with implications for every kind of malefactor you can imagine, from Ponzi schemers to terrorists. Questions like: Do we live in a world where terrible people go unpunished for their misdeeds? Or do the wicked ultimately suffer for their sins?</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
Gilligan has the nerve to provide his own hopeful answer. “Breaking Bad” takes place in a universe where nobody gets away with anything and karma is the great uncredited player in the cast…</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
Cranston has found many nuanced ways to enact Walt’s many miseries, the most wrenching of which was the loss of his wife’s love. There is a long history in art of foisting suffering on characters who sin, but it seems to have fallen out of favor. As awful as Tony Soprano was, it’s left purposefully unclear at the end of “The Sopranos” whether he paid the ultimate price. Or consider the “simple chaos” take on the universe as represented in movies by Woody Allen, a director whom Gilligan admires. “And Woody Allen may be right,” Gilligan says. “I’m pretty much agnostic at this point in my life. But I find atheism just as hard to get my head around as I find fundamental Christianity. Because if there is no such thing as cosmic justice, what is the point of being good? That’s the one thing that no one has ever explained to me. Why shouldn’t I go rob a bank, especially if I’m smart enough to get away with it? What’s stopping me?”</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
“If there’s a larger lesson to ‘Breaking Bad,’ it’s that actions have consequences,” Gilligan said during lunch one day in his trailer. “If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end.”</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">
“I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something,” he said between chews. “I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. ‘I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell.’ </span></blockquote>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-47285014802871416272013-09-29T18:14:00.001-05:002013-10-04T23:57:37.156-05:00Regarding Pope Francis... Will Everyone Please Chill?<h4>
<span style="color: #93c47d;">The Catholic Circular Firing Squad goes on, like an endless loop of Reservoir Dogs</span></h4>
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I suppose it was only a matter of time before our segmented, siloed, sorted, and completely polarized American political culture infected us as a Church. How could it not? It has been percolating since Holy Thursday, but look at the recent fallout over <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview" target="_blank">"The Interview."</a> We treat popes now the same way we do presidents and other politicans.<br />
<br />
So much for us being united as the Mystical Body of Christ. Maybe the late Fr. Raymond Brown was right when he said in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Churches-Apostles-Left-Behind/dp/0809126117/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380495589&sr=1-1&keywords=the+churches+the+apostles+left+behind" target="_blank">The Churches the Apostles Left Behind</a>, "Within Roman Catholicism, if we have another decade of the dominance of the People of God imagery, the Body of Christ motif will need to re-emerge."<br />
<br />
Poor Pope Francis... One has to feel badly for him, because of all the pastoral damage that had already been done before him. He has a mighty hill to climb.<br />
<br />
Despite mostly favorable MSM coverage so far, take for a moment the challenges he faces with people on the Left...<br />
<br />
Even when he says all the right things, many liberals, at least here in the USA, are still going to dislike and discount him. For example, simply take a look at the comments about him on posts referencing him on liberal sites like the Huffington Post. Even if he talks primarily about inequality and concern for the poor, he gets comments like "How about if the Vatican sells off all of their riches first," as if they are sitting on mountains of cash instead of museum pieces and a chronically chaotic and mismanaged bank.<br />
<br />
Those are the kinder comments. As we all know, the pedophilia scandal is the "gift" to anti-Catholics that keeps on giving, and it is the well dipped back into over and over again for combox screeds. That may take centuries to erase, if ever.<br />
<br />
Among the specifically <i>Catholic</i> Left, I suppose <a href="http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2013/09/pope-francis-sermonizes-on-church-as.html" target="_blank">some are disappointed</a> in the way he speaks of "spinsters" and "female machismo" in a fashion that convinces them that he has an anthropologically retrograde, Latin American way of thinking about women, and they would actually like to see some concrete changes in doctrine, which is very unlikely. If not that, they'd at least like him to back off of the LCWR. I think that may still happen, but unless doctrine actually changes on women's ordination and same-sex relationships, I don't think these folks are ever going to be truly happy, no matter what kind of tone he sets. As I said, that's highly unlikely.<br />
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The real matter for concern, however, is the absolute conniption that's being thrown on the Right.<br />
<br />
Laypeople on the Left have a long history of criticizing popes openly, but except for the sedevacantists on the fringe, this was unthinkable for conservatives prior to now.
<br />
While recognizing that their "enemies" aren't exactly crawling back in repentance like the prodigal son, these Catholics would do well to remember the father's words to the older son.<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours ~ Luke 15:31</span></blockquote>
Why all the anger and sense of betrayal? To an extent, I suppose I can understand the frustration. My wife and I have six kids and have always been vocal and active in regard to our Pro-Life views. It hasn't always been easy, in a pornified cultural sink, where people can be hostile, condescending, or simply uncomprehending in regard to our beliefs, but we can also see what hasn't been working. Like Pope Francis, we can see that there are battlefield casualties that need healing.
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<br />
Francis didn’t say we were wrong to have opposed abortion, or to have wasted our time talking about it. He didn’t say we shouldn’t continue to oppose it or continue to talk about it. He just told us to put it in the proper context and not to obsess over it. At the end of the day, the Faith is about Jesus Christ and his salvific mission, and we always have to be careful about cultivating and nursing our own pet idolatries instead. What I mean by that is, for all the good work we do in the Pro-Life sphere, for some of us, opposition to abortion has not become just a marker of the Faith and primary moral concern, but the be-all and end-all of the Faith. In a sense, for some of us, it has become the Faith itself. This isn’t meant as a condemnation on my part of the doctrinally conservative, so please don’t read it that way. The progressives can equally make an idol out of social justice, or the poor, or any other issue. All of us need to be cognizant of our own obsessions and tendencies, because idolatry is pernicious in the way it creeps up on us.<br />
<br />
<br />
So, while I recognize to a degree that this is a sort of trial for those who feel like they've suffered through sacrifices and the slings and arrows of the culture wars, only to be stabbed in the back, I think there is something else larger going on here. After all, in regard to the moral issues and "tone," Rod Dreher has done a good job of pointing out that Benedict has at times <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/is-the-pope-protestant-well-was-the-last-one/" target="_blank">said very much the same thing</a> as Francis.<br />
<br />
I think a lot of it comes down to this... Not only more liberal, but ordinary, lax, half-catechized, cultural Catholics love Francis in a way that they never extended to Benedict, and are showing signs of responding more favorably to the Faith again.<br />
<br />
Before Joseph Ratzinger became the pope, he was well-known as a lightning rod, but he had a sizable and devoted following. He had a "fan club." John Paul II, by contrast, nor any other pope before him, for that matter, ever had this. After Joseph Ratzinger became the pope, Ignatius Press published just about everything he ever wrote. You couldn't go into your local Barnes & Nobles and look at the Catholic section of books without seeing a veritable wall of his writings. This was a pivotal moment. For his devoted followers, this was when things were finally going to be set to rights. Every thought of the pope was published and analyzed,and it was incumbent upon every serious Catholic to get to know the mind of this "teaching pope." The papacy had become more important than ever before. In their enthusiasm, I think they may have missed how much the sartorial splendor and constant scolding coming from Rome was grating to other people, but they may not have cared even if they did.<br />
<br />
The resignation was a shock, right when the pendulum swing to the right looked like it was picking up it's full head of steam and building towards a critical mass.<br />
<br />
Pope Francis came in. Then the comparisons began, along with the unadorned affection of the great unwashed for Francis.<br />
<br />
This is what they seem to hate most of all. They had gotten used to being coddled and pampered and catered to during the pontificates of JPII and Benedict, especially the latter, who believed in having no enemies to the right. They were the darling children, the creative minority, the faithful remnant, and they were looking forward to the day when everyone else would be kicked out, or, even more charitably, to <i>die off,</i> useless, aging hippies that they were.<br />
<br />
The Right could not be comfortable loving Francis if <i>they</i> loved him too. Either <i>they</i> loved him for the wrong reasons, or something must be terribly wrong. The folks at the Vatican who still read all these blogs that they used to be so hopeful about must be very alarmed at these reactions right now.<br />
<br />
Even though Francis is <i>clearly</i> his own man, <a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/" target="_blank">Father Zuhlsdorf</a>, for instance, who's become a sort of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf" target="_blank">Baghdad Bob</a> these days, insists that we can and must "Read Francis through Benedict." For the SSPX-sympathizing types at places like <a href="http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Rorate Caeli</a>, they are not fooled. <br />
<br />
I mentioned the former Catholic Rod Dreher earlier, and he summarizes the reaction on the Right in a post called <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/conservative-catholics-zmirak-chapp-pope-francis/" target="_blank">Conservative Catholics Confront Francis’s Message</a>. Some interesting stuff in there. He quotes favorably and powerfully from Larry Chapp at <a href="http://ethikapolitika.org/2013/09/27/honest-francis/" target="_blank">Ethika Politika</a>, but I think he missed the key quote from Chapp's column, which was this...<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Along these lines, I have to say that I have been harboring the guilty hope that this liberal honeymoon with Francis will soon be over and things will get back to normal as soon as they see he is “not one of them.” That will make me feel “vindicated” again and “right.” But why should any of us hope that they stop liking the Pope? Why should we not hope instead that this first acceptance of theirs of his message will bear fruit as their own hearts open to truths that they too will see they should be more willing to accept? So what if they like him for what we think are “the wrong reasons”? How are the Right-wing bloggers so certain that they don’t dislike him for all the wrong reasons? Why should we not hope that a new conversation can be started where, even if we still disagree, our common love for Christ and his Church will forge a new amity? Why should I hope they return to alienated distrust? This Pope is calling all of us out of our selfish and pinched pettiness. And God knows we all need to heed that call. I know I do. I am starting to think this Pope might actually be, indeed, a truly wise and holy man.</span></blockquote>
<br />
Amen. Go ahead. Love Pope Francis. We love him too. Why can't we both? Enough of Catholic infighting.
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-8306016529978653632013-09-08T14:09:00.001-05:002013-10-04T23:57:59.210-05:00More on Syria and Other Matters...Some interesting things on the web I noticed over the weekend...<br />
<br />
1) A beautiful prayer from a Syrian Jesuit who is now studying at Creighton University.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://thejesuitpost.org/site/2013/09/a-prayer-for-syria/" target="_blank">A Prayer for Syria </a></span><br />
<br />
2) A Syrian-American woman gives an earful to John McCain at a town meeting.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/oURvN8B8m58" width="420"></iframe> <br />
<br />
As for Obama, shame on the Democrats for not speaking up more strongly on this. It if was George W. Bush doing this, they'd be all <i>over</i> him. Shame as well on Catholic politicians of both parties who are supporting this proposed attack. <br />
<br />
3) A certain Father Zuhlsdorf commented yesterday on <a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/09/how-the-catholic-left-will-support-pres-obamas-attack-on-syria/" title="How the Catholic Left will support Pres. Obama’s attack on Syria.">How the Catholic Left will support Pres. Obama’s attack on Syria,</a> and a couple of days earlier on<a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/09/the-jesuit-generals-selective-indignation/" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to The Jesuit General’s selective indignation"> The Jesuit General’s selective indignation</a>. With regard to the "Catholic Left" at the National Catholic Reporter, which he calls "The Fishwrap" (which might have been funny the first 100 times he did so), he quotes Matt Bowman from CatholicVote saying: <br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">On the NCReporter’s main page, it has forgotten how to plainly condemn bombing. It lists some articles in favor of the bishops’ view, yet at the same time it hosts what can only be called a “diversity” of views on the topic.</span></blockquote>
Hmm. Here's what NCR's page looks like this morning.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Awqu9BJPKrn9Xf5gamw6anxdRTG7IcT-jYRqcbPYSEEPT6o8H3E8Zet5EJJ0qIB01pM-GzuFY690Zo3WA3o0WQAx1bO_ol_HOpteUw_mWMke7QfW0um1CyG_enCJeWiS1DhwCw/s1600/ncr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Awqu9BJPKrn9Xf5gamw6anxdRTG7IcT-jYRqcbPYSEEPT6o8H3E8Zet5EJJ0qIB01pM-GzuFY690Zo3WA3o0WQAx1bO_ol_HOpteUw_mWMke7QfW0um1CyG_enCJeWiS1DhwCw/s400/ncr.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Seems like a pretty unambiguous focus to me.... Granted, it seems as if the main thrust of Mat Bowman's attack, and by extension, Zuhlsdorf's, is the supposed reticence of Michael Sean Winters to get with the program over at NCR, but as Fr. Zuhlsdorf laments the selective indignation on the part of NCR and the Jesuits, supposedly for taking this Syrian matter more seriously than topics like abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage, where have <i>his</i> posts been, unambiguously condemning bombing in Syria or elsewhere? <br />
<br />
4) Finally, I noticed Sandro Magister had pointed out that the current head of the CDF, Gerhard Muller, co-wrote a book with Gustavo Gutierrez about liberation theology. but of course, Magister says that Francis is dead-set against LT, saying <a href="http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350589?eng=y" target="_blank">Bergoglio Isn't Falling For It</a>.<br />
<br />
It isn't quite that simple... Despite the fact that Magister takes into account in his article the public rift between Leonardo Boff and his brother Clovodis, who plainly stated that even with his change of heart his "intention [was] not to disqualify liberation
theology," he seems to miss the nuances and breadth of views within LT itself. Magister seems to cling to the perception that in order to do LT, you need to have a beard and a beret like Che Guevara, quote Marx, and carry a Kalashnikov.<br />
<br />
Despite what Magister says, even Father Zuhlsdorf <a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/09/pope-francis-and-liberation-theology/" target="_blank">cites the article</a> and is accepting the fact that he will have to come to terms now with some form of liberation theology during this pontificate. Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-89853391110143269252013-09-06T08:53:00.002-05:002013-09-06T16:48:17.168-05:00The Syrian Question<span style="color: #93c47d;"><b>We don’t understand this region at all. It is ruled by the Law of Unintended Consequences</b></span><br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8ArGecnrzPyd6aciZIQj6NzUbM9C-2WNS17uMsNYOQfBTTgbKyvZ40y0mptbLALqXVb-lq58GgvPxjEre09JMbw-HbvIQMSoxFu92EDGoq4GPyegdqB5ZNVp_GrYw7QesbK3E7w/s1600/syria.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8ArGecnrzPyd6aciZIQj6NzUbM9C-2WNS17uMsNYOQfBTTgbKyvZ40y0mptbLALqXVb-lq58GgvPxjEre09JMbw-HbvIQMSoxFu92EDGoq4GPyegdqB5ZNVp_GrYw7QesbK3E7w/s400/syria.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I’m old enough to remember the various escalations, de-escalations, truces, cease-fires, harbor minings, troop buildups, troop withdrawals, and intensified bombing campaigns that took place during the war in Viet Nam, all geared towards the purpose of “sending a message.” Ultimately, it was all fruitless effort expended in a part of the world that we had barged into without fully understanding.<br />
<br />
It was a mistake that we shouldn’t repeat, and if events of the past decade can also serve as lessons to us, embarking on a war of choice is a mistake as well. Wars are a lot harder to get out of than they are to get into. At least Congress is going to do their job and take a vote on it. I was worried for a while there that they wouldn’t.<br />
<br />
I fully understand the importance of maintaining an international consensus that puts the use of chemical weapons beyond the pale. It’s pure barbarism, beyond the acceptability of any civilized norms. Unfortunately, the international community has shown little interest in supporting the idea of collective security envisioned in the charters of the United Nations, and even less inclination to do anything about the use of biological and chemical weapons. It’s unfortunate as well that our claims to moral superiority in this regard ring hollow to the rest of the world, due to the fact that we knew Iraq was using chemical weapons in their war against Iran during the 1980s, but provided covert strategic assistance to the Iraqis anyway. The strategic imperative was to stop an Iranian victory at any cost, and we did not protest or intervene. Our unlimited use of drone strikes around the world doesn’t help us to make a persuasive case either.<br />
<br />
As much as I might be sympathetic towards Obama’s goals on this issue, it is actually the <i>limited</i> nature of what he is proposing that most makes me inclined to oppose it. Getting rid of Assad might be one thing, but what he is proposing would have little practical effect other than to bolster Assad and to get more people killed. Inevitably, more <i>innocent</i> people will be killed.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Fundamentally, it is morally wrong to kill people for the purpose of “sending a message.” </b><br />
<br />
Even if we were to intervene in a way that would tip the balance against the Assad regime, is that what we really want to do? I’m no expert, but from what I’m gathering, most of the secular-minded and ordinary citizens who took up arms in the Free Syrian Army against the regime a couple of years ago have either been killed, fled the country, or gone home in disillusionment. The anti-Asad movement now seems to be dominated by foreign jihadis and the al-Qaeda affliated Jabhat al-Nusra.<br />
<br />
A few months ago I saw this interesting speech given by Sheik Nasrallah in Lebanon around the beginning of the year, about Hezbollah's looming showdown with al Qaeda in Syria. What he warned about has since come to fruition, and Hezbollah is now providing overt military support to the Assad regime, destroying its own credibility on the Arab Street in the process…. The Middle East never lacks for irony as Hezbollah, of all people, whine about the "meanness" of people who set off car bombs.... This has become a sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict through and through, and we should not allow ourselves to be pulled into it. There is blowback for everything we try to do in the Middle East. I feel badly - terribly - for the children of Syria, but unfortunately the place is ruled by the Law of Unintended Consequences.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FuQXAgubqwg" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Putting up a video like the one below is somewhat out of character for me, but there are much more explicit and barbarous ones out there. It shows the actions of the “Takfiri” that Nasrallah speaks of… The treatment of Christians in Syria is well-documented, if still not widely known, but look at how these sectarian thugs treat a small, unarmed group of muslim truck drivers who fail their Sunni quiz. These were guys just trying to make a living. Their trucks weren’t even hauling trailers. I was deeply moved by the courage of these ordinary men, as they stoically came to realize that they could lose their lives at the hands of these crackpot zealots, for just trying to do their jobs. (WARNING… Very disturbing).<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CE9LP8z_2_U" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Senselessness. Somewhere the cycle of tit-for-tat violence needs to stop. When will these wars end? Let’s heed Pope Francis’s advice on the Day of Prayer and Fasting. To suggest a fast is something new, positive, inspiring and welcome. It puts faith and sentiment into notable and noticeable action.
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-88442773467712083132013-09-05T21:55:00.001-05:002013-09-05T21:55:37.535-05:00Pope Francis: renewed appeal for peace<a href="http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-renewed-appeal-for-peace-full-text">Pope Francis: renewed appeal for peace</a>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-10432733203046383712013-09-04T17:52:00.003-05:002013-09-04T19:35:08.880-05:00The Charismatic Moment?<h3>
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</h3>
<h3>
<span style="color: #93c47d;">Fr. Marcelo Rossi is quite something, but I’m still feeling a little wary of celebrity priests. </span></h3>
<br />
Way back in 2006, I put up a post called <a href="http://estamos-vivo.blogspot.com/2006/08/do-we-need-fulton-j-sheen-for-today.html" target="_blank">Do We Need a Fulton Sheen for Today?</a> I was lamenting the fact that the American Church seemed to lack spokesmen with charisma and communication skills like Father Sheen's.<br />
<br />
Man, did we ever get them after that.<br />
<br />
Man, were we ever sorry.<br />
<br />
There was the infamous John Corapi meltdown and scandals involving Fathers Thomas Williams and Thomas Euteneuer. There were minor financial scandals involving Fathers Peter Stravinskas and Frank Pavone. It appeared instead as if celebrity priests were the <i> last</i> thing we needed.<br />
<br />
The USA may be one thing, and Brazil another.<br />
<br />
The conservatives and the Latin Mass trads blame progressives and liberation theologians for losing Latin America to Pentecostalism. Maybe there's some truth in that, maybe not, but these people in Brazil don't look to me like they are missing the Latin Mass very much.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KoGC6YQmrfo" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
That’s not to say that these folks aren’t conservative, but there’s one thing and one thing only that Pope Emeritus Benedict and the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff have in common. They both have little use for Fr. Marcelo Rossi and the Charismatics.<br />
<br />
It's strange stuff to me too, this show business, but Rossi and priests like him seem to be the only guys keeping people in the Catholic Church in Brazil. They’re the only ones keeping the mass exodus in check.<br />
<br />
When B16 was in Brazil in 2007, they didn't let Rossi anywhere near him, but Francis let him take part in WYD this year.
To be fair, it should be noted that by 2010, Benedict may have had a change in heart, when he bestowed the Van Thuan Solidarity and Development Award on Fr. Rossi.<br />
<br />
As for Boff, nothing doing. No change of heart. Here are some excerpts of choice remarks he’s made about Rossi <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/they_want_him_to_stop_singing/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://iglesiadescalza.blogspot.com/2009/04/leonardo-boff-uncensored.html" target="_blank">there</a>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Leonardo Boff, a former Franciscan priest and the most well-known liberation theologian in Brazil, was acerbic, describing Father Rossi as the Brazilian equivalent of a “dumb blonde,” and as a “byproduct of the market economy, which provides the sort of druglike joy that people want [in order] to forget the commitment to the poor. He is not committed to the poor.” </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Theologian Leonardo Boff has been especially critical of Rossi, calling his style ‘commercial religion’. ‘Father Marcelo is happy believing God is in heaven, without realizing that people don’t have bread,’ says Boff, author of 40 books on theology and the Church... </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">When I want to get really angry, I tune into the religious programs on television. They are in bad taste and poor. They are not up to the Christian message. They are closer to <span style="color: #ffcc00;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="http://xuxa.globo.com/">Xuxa</a></span></span> than to the Gospel. There is a lack experience in dealing with the media and the Church is not preparing them for that. What they do is manipulate emotions. I have never seen Father Marcelo Rossi say that there are 1.1 million unemployed in Sao Paulo or ask God to guide the government in the path of justice and ethics. But I did see him do aerobic dancing. </span></blockquote>
<br />
Rossi’s either too charitable or too shrewd to respond in kind, but he did have this to say about <a href="http://catholicexchange.com/marcelo-rossi-the-singing-priest-whos-setting-brazil-on-fire/" target="_blank">liberation theology</a> and <a href="http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350151?eng=y" target="_blank">Leo Boff</a>...<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Father Rossi responded that a large number of the people who feel renewed by his Masses and songs “are very poor people, those who suffer most.” </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">When I rediscovered the faith,Father Marcelo said in an interview, it was a period in which the Church was immersed in political questions, because of the influence of liberation theology. A form of theology that certainly had a positive role during the dictatorship, but that has left a void. I had lost one of my cousins, and I was looking for the word of God, but when I went to church they were talking about politics. From that moment, I understood what I had to do.” Which meant returning to the essential, proclaiming the Gospel using the means of communication, in particular music, the greatest and most widely shared conduit of emotions and words in the daily life of the people. Using it to meet the thirst for God and reawaken love for the Church, for Mary, for the Eucharist, worn away by the proselytism of Pentecostal groups and factions. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Father Marcelo is also a priest who recalls the importance of faithfully following the magisterium, of knowing and defending Catholic doctrine. And who, as he has stated recently, feels more at ease with the spiritual children of Escrivà de Balaguer than with those still attached to the utopias of the Boff brothers. </span></blockquote>
<br />
To that last one, the Boff boys Leo and Clovodis might say “ouch,” but let me say this to Fr. Rossi.<br />
<br />
Well done. Keep up the good work, but keep your wits about you. You’ve placed too heavy a burden upon your own shoulders to ever throw it all away with a scandal. You would destroy the faith of millions. Watch yourself with the ladies and elsewhere. Looks like you have a lot of adoring fans.<br />
<br />
Always remember that it’s all about Christ and not about you. I don’t want to be reading about you what I’ve read about these other guys.
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-71886995498947344642013-03-30T06:25:00.006-05:002013-03-30T06:36:55.066-05:00The Kind of Pope We've Needed<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HnHkKygE61I" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
My faith was never really in danger, but it needed a real boost, a real shot in the arm. <br />
<br />
The election of Pope Francis has provided that for me. His predecessor was not without certain strengths, and the press has been presenting various contrasts and continuities between the two, but for me, the main difference is this...<br />
<br />
Francis genuinely loves us. People can sense it. They can feel it. The sad truth is, Benedict, for all of is intellectual strengths, held many of us in a kind of cool contempt. He was a relentless scold.<br />
<br />
A particular subset of traditionalists has fallen into sheer panic over Francis, as especially shown by the way they've flipped out over his washing of the feet of females. What a spectacular failure they show in their ability to internalize the Gospels. They give truth to the old saying, "They only obey the Pope when he obeys them." <br />
<br />
The symbolism of the Washing of the Feet is not meant to represent the ordination of priests but the injunction upon the priests to be servant leaders. To be the Servants of the Servants of God. I was particularly moved by some of <a href="http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/03/28/letters_from_prison/en1-677778">these letters</a> written by inmates in a juvenile detention facility in Los Angeles, after Francis had washed the feet of incarcerated youth in Italy.<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Dear Pope Francis, Thank you for washing the feet of youth like us in Italy. We also are young and made mistakes. Society has given up on us, thank you that you have not given up on us. </span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Dear Pope Francis, My many friends are in two different maximum security prisons in one of our state’s 33 state prisons.Calif. I am writing to tell you that I feel bad that more youth of color are in prison in our state than any other place in the world. I am inviting you to come here next year to wash our feet, many of who have been (given) sentences to die in prison. God bless you. </span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Dear Pope Francis, I read that the harshest sentence that a youth can receive in Italy is 20 years. I wish this was true here. I hope I hear back from you. I have been catholic and glad I am catholic because I have a pope like you. I will pray for you every day because we need examples of God like you are in this violent world. </span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Dear Pope Francis, When Jesus washed the feet of his friends he gave an example of humility. I have been raised to believe that it is only with respect in hurting your enemy that you are a man. Tonight you and Jesus show me something in this washing of the feet something very different. I hope we kids learn from this. </span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Dear Pope Francis, I have never been to Rome. I do not know if it is near Los Angeles because all my youth I have only known my neighborhood. I hope one day I will be given a second chance and receive a blessing from you and maybe even have my feet washed on Holy Thursday. </span></blockquote>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-81062314614180876322012-10-08T16:30:00.000-05:002012-10-08T16:53:34.024-05:00Tom Friedman's Busted Escalator<strong><span style="color: #93c47d;">Someday we'll have to admit that protectionism is the only answer</span></strong> <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoFBX3-y6Qh5ZGTQ99LxjLXhcZAlm4ZR_36sU29-q9gbTSPTuk4QUPMgpj54e5-wuMUF2vkth4UHEjMDpX5HCvnxPbe5Bgj0yvV74MzIw3OlK9en25EaQ5DNNBvO6MMjgrY3ni_A/s1600/escalator1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoFBX3-y6Qh5ZGTQ99LxjLXhcZAlm4ZR_36sU29-q9gbTSPTuk4QUPMgpj54e5-wuMUF2vkth4UHEjMDpX5HCvnxPbe5Bgj0yvV74MzIw3OlK9en25EaQ5DNNBvO6MMjgrY3ni_A/s400/escalator1.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
It isn't every day that you'll see me offer words of praise for a FOX commentator, but I guess there's a first time for everything. <br />
<br />
Actually, <a href="http://www.theglobalist.com/AuthorBiography.aspx?AuthorId=180" target="_blank">Martin Sieff</a> may be better known as an author and analyst at an outfit called The Globalist Research Center than he is for his work at FOX. A few years back he wrote a book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Middle-Guides/dp/B005EP2THI/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_4" target="_blank">The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East</a>. I'm dubious about how useful the politics in it was, but there sure was a lot in it that was just plain incorrect. As I recall, his main thesis was that the only time the Middle East was functional at all was when the Ottoman Turks ran it despotically with an iron fist, and that this is what it needs today, with the Saudis basically filling in the role that the Ottomans once did. I don't think I was able to get all the way through it. <br />
<br />
There is one particular matter, though, where I find myself in complete agreement with Mr. Sieff (even though that troubles me somewhat), and that is in his blistering critique of the free trade, globalizing thoughts of Thomas Friedman, who recently wrote a book with Michael Mandelbaum called, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/That-Used-Be-Us-Invented/dp/1250013720" target="_blank">That Used to Be US: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back</a>. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIVr0a05v5XS6DC1hEzOSllRkpq27FbVayeFlCOOoicRuXNLjjRCkMJg2NkUa7fHdu6AES7IV_AmeOKhYYgns1bbqLcmlhtbDWxA4AiScKaE44icP9Ie7VbrqAzorftTwlZzI7Yw/s1600/lastemperor.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIVr0a05v5XS6DC1hEzOSllRkpq27FbVayeFlCOOoicRuXNLjjRCkMJg2NkUa7fHdu6AES7IV_AmeOKhYYgns1bbqLcmlhtbDWxA4AiScKaE44icP9Ie7VbrqAzorftTwlZzI7Yw/s400/lastemperor.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
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I've <a href="http://estamos-vivo.blogspot.com/2008/03/from-good-samaritans-to-bad-samaritans.html" target="_blank">written about Friedman before</a>; about his wide influence and how in his previous books, speeches, and interviews, he has succeeded in turning "protectionism" and "fair trade" into dirty words. In his latest effort, much like Charles Lindbergh returning from the Third Reich in the 1930s, he laments the fact that the USA lacks the drive and efficiency that he saw in the fascist state he just visited. Having been recently bedazzled by a high-speed railway station and a convention center thrown up by the Chinese in a matter of months, he couldn't help but to compare them to the broken escalators he saw in Washington DC subway station, which had been out of service for almost as long a period of time as it took the Chinese to build their state-of-the-art monuments to the 21st Century. In an interview he did on <a href="http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/10/05/thomas-friedman" target="_blank">WBUR's On-Point</a> program, it was described this way:<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">In September 2010, Tom attended the World Economic Forum’s summer conference in Tianjin, China. Five years earlier, getting to Tianjin had involved a three-and-a-half-hour car ride from Beijing to a polluted, crowded Chinese version of Detroit, but things had changed. Now, to get to Tianjin, you head to the Beijing South Railway Station -an ultramodern flying saucer of a building with glass walls and an oval roof covered with 3,246 solar panels- buy a ticket from an electronic kiosk offering choices in Chinese and English, and board a world-class-high-speed train that goes right to another roomy, modern train station in downtown Tianjin. Said to be the fastest in the world when it began operating in 2008, the Chinese bullet train covers 115 kilometers, or 72 miles, in a mere twenty-nine minutes.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The conference itself took place at the Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center¬a massive, beautifully appointed structure, the like of which exists in few American cities. As if the convention center wasn’t impressive enough, the conference’s co–sponsors in Tianjin gave some facts and figures about it. They noted that it contained a total floor area of 230,000 square meters (almost 2.5 million square feet) and that “construction of the Meijiang Convention Center started on September 15, 2009, and was completed in May, 2010.” Reading that line, Tom started counting on his fingers: Let’s see—September, October, November, December, January . . . Eight months.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Returning home to Maryland from that trip, Tom was describing the Tianjin complex and how quickly it was built to Michael and his wife, Anne. At one point Anne asked: “Excuse me, Tom. Have you been to our subway stop lately?” We all live in Bethesda and often use the Washington Metrorail subway to get to work in downtown Washington, D.C. Tom had just been at the Bethesda station and knew exactly what Anne was talking about: The two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months. While the one being fixed was closed, the other had to be shut off and converted into a two-way staircase. At rush hour, this was creating a huge mess. Everyone trying to get on or off the platform had to squeeze single file up and down one frozen escalator. It sometimes took ten minutes just to get out of the station. A sign on the closed escalator said that its repairs were part of a massive escalator “modernization” project.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">What was taking this “modernization” project so long? We investigated. Cathy Asato, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, had told the Maryland Community News (October 20, 2010) that “the repairs were scheduled to take about six months and are on schedule. Mechanics need 10 to 12 weeks to fix each escalator.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">A simple comparison made a startling point: It took China’s Teda Construction Group thirty-two weeks to build a world-class convention center from the ground up -including giant escalators in every corner- and it was taking the Washington Metro crew twenty-four weeks to repair two tiny escalators of twenty-one steps each. </span></blockquote>
Why, those lazy American slackers! Why can't they work hard, fix those escalators chop-chop, and make the trains run on time like El Duce and Der Fuhrer...er, sorry... I mean <span class="st">Hu Jintao<em>...</em></span> There are all kinds of things wrong with the simplicities laid out in those paragraphs, but I'll leave it to Martin Sieff to take apart Mr. Friedman's analysis. This following is taken from the introduction to his riposte to Friedman's book. It is called, <b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/That-Should-Still-Be-Friedmans/dp/1118197666" target="_blank"><i>That Should Still Be Us</i>: How Thomas Friedman's Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs. </a></b><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Here we have the core of Thomas Friedman’s prescription for America.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">First, we let China and South Korea have all those high-paying old-fashioned- jobs making cars. We don’t need them. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Second, we retrain all those auto workers as doctors, engineers, and MBAs. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Then, we get those Asian countries to start venture capital funds to pay for thousands of start-ups that may or may not bring products to market. Everybody wins! </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Well, no. China wins! South Korea wins! Japan wins! But America loses! America loses! America loses! </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">America loses because most of the well-paying industrial jobs in China, South Korea, and Japan are not in Friedman’s cutesy little enterprising high-tech startups… </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Memo number one to Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum: if you insist on focusing US government efforts on high-tech research and development and refuse to protect low-tech, far-from-cutting-edge traditional industries, you can expect endless delays in getting spare parts for your Metro rail escalators, your buses, the wonderful new high-speed-train systems, and everything else you fantasize, because you no longer have the broad industrial base to produce those spare parts and basic systems yourself. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">And that is likely also the real reason why China was able to build its new super railway station in only eight months: it’s capable of producing most, if not all, of the components for anything it wants to build right there in its own factories. And it has the foreign currency on hand to easily afford the rest overseas. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">And why is that? Because the Chinese, like the Germans, have very sensibly protected their own industrial economy from potentially destructive foreign competition. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">And where did they learn to act in this manner, which is so different from the idealized flat world of Friedman’s endless siren songs? They learned it from us because <i>that used to be us.</i></span></blockquote>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-67826527916445140732012-07-04T10:26:00.001-05:002012-07-07T11:53:49.005-05:00New Books Remembering Sargent Shriver, One of the Last of a Vanishing Breed<strong><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">"Break your mirrors... Serve, serve, serve, for in the end it will be the servants who save us all." </span></strong><br />
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This is what a Catholic public servant and statesman used to look like. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqb7BMd_jk9OaNu1yH8As7Yt9y0zinBYDWBGybf5ak08x8IQIzii7jifYWk3CuNGk3eHdSr6ZgZM4dOFdH6RsH5KEyUUMdDP39lHBy29iTmkABkM5sfyxag4xQ1YsM6Z7GKFakSw/s1600/sargent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqb7BMd_jk9OaNu1yH8As7Yt9y0zinBYDWBGybf5ak08x8IQIzii7jifYWk3CuNGk3eHdSr6ZgZM4dOFdH6RsH5KEyUUMdDP39lHBy29iTmkABkM5sfyxag4xQ1YsM6Z7GKFakSw/s320/sargent.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.nndb.com/people/499/000025424/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sargent Shriver</a> passed away in 2011 at the age of 95, after a long and difficult struggle with Alzheimer's. At one time he was well-known as one of the Kennedy in-laws, married to JFK's sister Eunice. He was a man of prodigious energy, with a long and distinguished career in civil service. As he once put it, "Joe Kennedy isn't in the habit of having incompetents around. I wouldn't have lasted three months if I didn't have some ability." <br />
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A man of deep and abiding faith, a daily communicant, he provided the driving inspiration behind the creation of the Peace Corps, and directed that organization at the same time he was also running Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty." He's also known for his work at the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, his work on integrating Chicago's Catholic schools, founding the Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, and serving as President of the Special Olympics, which was started by his wife Eunice. He was a signatory to the 1992 document <a href="http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=28241" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A New Compact of Care: Caring about Women, Caring for the Unborn</a>. <br />
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To but it bluntly as this blogger did, he represented the time when <a href="http://mondaymorningclacker.com/?p=5771" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">When Liberals Had Balls, Made Sense And Wore Ties</a>. <br />
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Among all the members of the Kennedy clan, you might say that "Sarge" and the rest of the Shriver family have acquitted themselves over the years with the most decorum and the most impressive accomplishments. Sargent Shriver helped run JFK's presidential campaign and also organized his funeral. Despite the poisonous relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Shriver, in his openness and integrity, was admired and trusted by both men. At one time, during his 1964 campaign, Johnson was seriously considering having Shriver on the ticket as the vice-presidential candidate, unbeknownst to Shriver. As reported in the new book by Scott Stossel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sarge-Life-Times-Sargent-Shriver/dp/1588341275" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver</a>, when Bobby got wind of this, in a rare moment of tension between them, he confronted Shriver in Hyannisport, grabbing him by the lapels and hissing, "Let me make something clear. There's not going to be a Kennedy on this ticket. And if there were, it would be me!" <br />
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It wasn't such raw ambition, though, that drove Shriver so much as his faith-driven imperative to pursue social justice - to serve. He was know for saying things like "It's the most rewarding thing to be a civil servant," and "It is well to be prepared for life as it is, but it is better to be prepared to make life better than it is," and challenging each of us to ask ourselves "What have I done to improve the lot of humanity?" <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHcxwsZUsIijGRnPZ3oebogGvMUTFaGu7-5-ZSG_WxuwGKfH4cMOzq740Jr3Hr_TzwuDdSqnSD70xl_bVZYEu0ZSebg3CVH_sPiJDIh2JEfnWAijAUa5T746fQ02qJkm9OpFmicA/s1600/sgtshriver.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHcxwsZUsIijGRnPZ3oebogGvMUTFaGu7-5-ZSG_WxuwGKfH4cMOzq740Jr3Hr_TzwuDdSqnSD70xl_bVZYEu0ZSebg3CVH_sPiJDIh2JEfnWAijAUa5T746fQ02qJkm9OpFmicA/s200/sgtshriver.JPG" width="154" /></a></div>
It's sad, and even tragic, that this kind of idealism is considered corny, sappy, and provokes eye-rolling today. It's sad to see how much the libertarian-inspired hatred and distrust of government taken hold of the popular mindset in this country. It wasn't always this way. People didn't always hold contempt for public service, I'm old enough to remember that. Unfortunately, as the hopes of the Sixties crumbled into the ugliness, disillusionment, and failures of the Seventies, even the mention of LBJ's "War on Poverty" causes people to wince today, and the work and reputation of men like Sargent Shriver in needlessly and unjustly tarnished. <br />
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Even back in those days there were people who described him as a "boy scout" in his do-goody-good liberalism. By 1972, the otherwise progressive-minded <i>National Lampoon</i> magazine cruelly satirized him with their spoof entitled "Sargent Shriver's Bleeding Hearts Club Band." <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVM9qCTgl2pAwmCwXXCHkIt-1zNNaLIOD49y1SCHGG1Pqgp2pVK6iTVCDLGPb4dyqWdLhYpn_lgAqSINamAXd-kY33q1EDv4pbr29gfVe3xfOYbmX9vDtLqIcvkuDmcRzpYtmSpw/s1600/band.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVM9qCTgl2pAwmCwXXCHkIt-1zNNaLIOD49y1SCHGG1Pqgp2pVK6iTVCDLGPb4dyqWdLhYpn_lgAqSINamAXd-kY33q1EDv4pbr29gfVe3xfOYbmX9vDtLqIcvkuDmcRzpYtmSpw/s400/band.JPG" width="400" /></a> <i><br /><br />(Lyrics sung to the tune of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) </i><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Just a dozen years ago today,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Sgt. Shriver taught the clan to play</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Once they played for Bobby and for John</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Now they’re guaranteed to raise a yawn</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We now reintroduce to you</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The act we’ve blown for all these years,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We’re Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The martyred brothers’ kith and kin.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We’re Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Sit back and watch the votes roll in.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Sgt. Shriver’s bleeding, Sgt. Shriver’s bleeding,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">It’s wonderful to be here,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">It’s certainly a thrill.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">You’re such a dumb electorate,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We’d like to take you home with us.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">America, come home!</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We don’t really want to stop the war,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">But that’s what you’ll all be voting for.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">You’ll forget amidst this stupid sham,</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We’re the ones who got you into ‘Nam.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">So let us introduce to you</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The once and future Tommy—who?</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">And Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band.</span></blockquote>
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Well, whatever one might make of that, it's interesting to note that Sargent's son, Mark Shriver, has written his own book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Man-Rediscovering-Sargent-Shriver/dp/0805095306" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver</a>, sharing his reflections on the significance of his father's life and on their relationship. He's keen to point out that his father was a "good man," if not necessarily a "great man." By that, he means to say that great men are known for their power, or their wealth, and are hailed in the press for one reason or another... Good men are good in the small corners of life, as devoted husbands, fathers, and men of faith. They treat the more invisible people in life like waitresses and airport workers the same way they treat big shots, even when the cameras aren't on them. <br />
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Please listen to this America Maganzine podcast interview with Mark Shriver here, in <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/podcast/podcast-index.cfm?series_id=1343" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A Man for All Seasons</a>. <br />
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Mark Shriver described the three principles driving his father's life as Faith Hope, and Love. As a student at Yale he once invited Dorothy Day to speak there, and he took seriously the injunction to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless. <br />
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In an anecdote I found interesting, Mark related a speech that his father gave at Xavier University in 1966. I think it would be considered quite poitically incorrect today; a view on church and state that's way out of line with where we are now in 2012, when culture war issues have become encrusted around reproductive, gender, and orientation issues. The poor have somehow been forgotten.<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Just three or four years ago it was practically impossible for a federal agency to give a direct grant to a religious group. People said there was a wall between church and state, but we said that wall was put there to keep government out of the pulpit, not to keep the clergy away from the poor. </span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br ?="" /></span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">That wall protects belief and even disbelief. It does not exclude compassion, poverty, suffering, and justice. That is common territory, not exclusively yours, or mine, but everybody’s, with no wall between. </span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">And so we said “Reverend Mr. Jones, or Father Kelly, or Rabbi Hirsch, if you’re not afraid to be seen in our company, we’re not afraid to be seen in yours, because we are all about Our Father’s business.” </span></blockquote>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-18661889857535521652012-06-12T18:02:00.003-05:002012-06-13T06:00:02.640-05:00Peter D. Williams Wins the Laurel Leaf<strong><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">He has a new fan in me</span></strong><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGGUYYaP5GT1QeCVfY1zWZ0BgAbDB4A-xwYHlOEVUl7gOhlQ2MytDxHFqup58kp5WZwrFIAoKOEcB8oI7cKoi826aA3fyzwUDclEuwzky2lKprXD0DglzuF_Av5D-_NJN5U-C-eA/s1600/more.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGGUYYaP5GT1QeCVfY1zWZ0BgAbDB4A-xwYHlOEVUl7gOhlQ2MytDxHFqup58kp5WZwrFIAoKOEcB8oI7cKoi826aA3fyzwUDclEuwzky2lKprXD0DglzuF_Av5D-_NJN5U-C-eA/s400/more.jpg" width="311" /></a> <br />
<b><i>Sir Thomas More</i>, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1527)</b> <br />
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My wife is an anglophile. It’s understandable. She has some English and Welsh in her blood. As for me, not so much. Sure, I love Downton Abbey, British comedies, and much of what can be seen on PBS <em>Mystery</em> and <em>Masterpiece Theater</em>. I love the British Invasion bands from the Sixties, and the Punk and New Wave bands from the Seventies and Eighties too. Almost all of the best actors on both stage-and-screen come from there. <br />
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There is a coldness in the rule-ridden reserve of the UK that rankles me, however, and the reflexive, knee-jerk anti-Catholicism of the place just ticks me off to no end. It seems that the Book of Martyrs and the shadow of the Spanish Armada still hang heavily over the British psyche, for both believers and atheists alike. <br />
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I only spent a few days in London at my brother-in-law’s ordination to the deaconate a couple of years ago, and although it was a nice visit, I got the distinct impression that it must be a difficult place to be a Catholic these days… <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlOwowc7zFg2DxPvv82Cbbq9yn4k61II5iZ2w5h7rBsCafjacJcozRZ-X8A8KhcjBeMxEJ2fJEPKYWuXpAy4e87wKKcnkiRz2K2xshrhKqC_NGvHeXgqU0O92J60jHZ9FMw1n51Q/s1600/williams.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="100" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlOwowc7zFg2DxPvv82Cbbq9yn4k61II5iZ2w5h7rBsCafjacJcozRZ-X8A8KhcjBeMxEJ2fJEPKYWuXpAy4e87wKKcnkiRz2K2xshrhKqC_NGvHeXgqU0O92J60jHZ9FMw1n51Q/s320/williams.jpg" width="100" /></a> Which brings me to <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Peter.D.Williams" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Peter D. Williams</a> of <a href="http://www.catholicvoices.org.uk/the-project/team" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Catholic Voices</a>. I first heard Williams on Justin Brierley’s <a href="http://www.premierradio.org.uk/shows/saturday/unbelievable" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Unbelievable</a> program, a weekly show on Premier Radio that usually pits believers and unbelievers against each other in debates that last for about an hour-and-a half. It’s a pretty interesting show if you can get past certain biases peculiar to the UK. I enjoy listening to the podcasts quite often. One time I heard Williams in a debate with a secularist about <a href="http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={CB12F0A3-D683-46C6-945B-04A232AAAA11}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">whether or not the Catholic Church was a force for good or evil</a>. In a way, it was an attempt to undo the debacle we suffered in the infamous <a href="http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/catholic-church" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Intelligence Squared debate</a>, when Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry just massacred Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe. I thought Williams did a really nice job. On another occasion, William Johnstone, another apologist from Catholic Voices, debated <a href="http://protestant-truth.org/aboutus/duncan_boyd.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Duncan Boyd</a> of the Protestant Truth Society about <a href="http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={50c90ecc-2c78-4f06-ad75-174fa09c1fa4}" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">whether or not the papacy was biblical</a>. I thought Johnstone did pretty well too, but I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “I wish it had been Peter D. Williams who’d debated Boyd.” <br />
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To my surprise, I just found out the other day that Williams and Boyd had in fact actually squared off once, back in 2010, just before Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK. It was on a show called Live @ 9 on Revelation TV. The topic was, get this, “whether or not Benedict’s visit was good for the country.” In effect, they were arguing about whether or not Benedict should even be allowed to make a state visit to the UK! <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="368" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/15305970" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/15305970">Catholic Voices: Peter Williams debates in Revelation TV</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user4821346">Jack Valero</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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Now there are plenty of Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who aren’t fans of Benedict, but there really aren’t that many who would question whether or not the guy should be allowed to make an official state visit to the USA, but, as you can see, the UK is a very different kind of place. Very different indeed… <br />
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Anyway, I thought Williams did a superb job dismantling the glib, but smug, mean-spirited and hateful Duncan Boyd. Not only was he knowledgeable and well-prepared to defend against the invectives being hurled against the Church, but he was patient, even-tempered and charitable, even when he was being attacked by a one-sided and exceedingly hostile audience, who openly questoned his personal integrity, sputtering in red-faced fury about his “Jesuitical arguments.” Williams was mild-mannered throughout and handled it with grace and aplomb. <br />
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Well done, Mr. Williams. You won the laurel leaf in that debate, as far as I’m concerned. I’m looking forward to hearing more from you!Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-86746681726190066202012-05-15T18:09:00.000-05:002012-05-15T18:12:46.248-05:00The Facebook IPOWell, there's a certain amount of buzz going on regarding Facebook's big IPO week, and whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is showing the suits on the Street enough respect, turning up with a hoodie and a cocky attitude and all.... A lot of buzz, but maybe not as much as was expected.<br />
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I don't know, something about Facebook feels like a house of cards to me, like the <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_17/b3678084.htm" target="_blank">Dutch Tulip Craze</a>, when the price of tulips went through the roof in the 17th Century during a period of wild speculation, until somebody with sense stopped and said, "Hey, these are just a bunch of freaking tulips." <br />
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The habits of people under the age of 30 may be one thing, but the wise investor may ask him or herself just what people over the age of 30 find Facebook particularly useful for. Personally, I've found it quite useful in discovering the differences I've developed in political and religious views from some friends that I haven't seen in decades, but I sense a lot of it has to do with the the beauty of FB stalking that allows a lot of people to say with grim satisfaction....<br />
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...which can only carry you for so far, but then again, I'm no investment genius. Who am I to argue with 900 million people?Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-63365160347658562082012-05-07T17:30:00.001-05:002012-07-04T11:00:47.156-05:00The Meaning of Mr. Hollande<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FwzB8eIjRAI" width="560"></iframe><br />
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As predicted by many, the Socialist Francois Hollande has defeated the sitting French President Nicolas Sarkozy. <br />
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In absurd fashion, the right-wing Drudge Report has tried to spin this event in its headlines as bad news for Obama because it's a case of an incumbent being unseated. <br />
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Contrary to what Drudge might think, it's clearly a case of people in Europe becoming fed up with IMF-mandated austerity, but what is the broader picture? It looks like it may be the beginning of the end for austerity, and possibly the end of the Eurozone itself, if France breaks with Germany in the current strategy for dealing with the debt crisis so far. Does it also mean a resurgence of the left in Europe? Maybe not. The French Socialists are known for being pragmatists rather than ideologues. Things might not change that much. Should the Socialists in France take heart at the results, or was it more a case of the French people being fed up with Sarkozy's arrogance and buffoonery? The strong showing of the the far-right, anti-immigration National Front Party of Marine Le Pen in the first round has caused more than a little bit of disquiet. <br />
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I was reading an article in <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2012/05/europe_s_far_right_is_the_true_winner_of_france_s_presidential_election_.single.html" target="_blank">Slate</a> the other morning, which seemed to indicate that despite the Socialist victory, the real story of these results is the resurgence of extreme right-wing parties, not only in France, but throughout all of Europe. The thesis of Yascha Mounk’s article seems to be that instead of strangling them in their cribs like they should have, center-right parties in Europe formed coalitions with extreme rightist parties over the years in order to win elections against the left, but have now lost the ability to control them.<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The true winner of this election isn’t France’s left; it’s Europe’s far right…The reason is simple. In this election, France’s establishment has embraced Islamophobic ideas to an unprecedented degree. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Right-wing populism, once a fringe phenomenon, has been conquering the bastions of Europe’s political mainstream with frightening speed.. It’s difficult to know whether Europe’s populists are approaching the zenith of their power or will continue their steady rise. But one thing is certain: At no point in Europe’s postwar history has the far right’s influence been as pervasive as it is now…. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">All of this matters beyond France because, historically, what happens in Paris often portends what will happen elsewhere on the continent. It’s not just that most Europeans think of the French Revolution as the cradle of modern democracy… Up until now, populists have celebrated their biggest successes in countries like the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland. But France isn’t as small as the Netherlands, as politically dysfunctional as Italy, or as new to democracy as Poland. The sad spectacle of the last several weeks is the culmination of a wider European trend of accommodating the far right—and it may suggest it’s about to get much worse... </span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Like in France, established political parties across the continent at first vowed to shun surging populist leaders like Jörg Haider of Austria or Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. A cordon sanitaire was to unite all democrats in their fight against the far right threat. But unity did not last long. As populist parties in these countries gained in strength, traditional coalition governments, especially those formed by center-right parties, lost their majorities. Center-right leaders realized that to gain or preserve power they would have to cooperate with the populists. As a result, in one country after another, center-right parties that had once vowed to fight the far right have come to rely on them to prop themselves up.</span></blockquote>
Is there something to this? I've been reading a book that suggests that there is less here to worry about than meets the eye, but on the other hand, the book is a few years old now. It's called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sixty-Million-Frenchmen-Cant-Wrong/dp/1402200455" target="_blank">Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French</a>. In explaining the strength of extreme parties in the first round of French presidential elections in 2002, when Le Pen’s father made it into the second round of voting, it says....<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">In the French system, the main danger comes from the potential of electors to express too large a variety of points of view; This is exactly what produced the upset of the 2002 presidential elections (When Le Pen’s National Front advanced to the 2nd round). The left spread its vote across too many parties, which allowed the extreme right candidate to push the left out of the second round…. Like all European extreme right politicians, Le Pen’s platform was strongly anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, and law and order. Naturally, all of France and the entire world decried Le Pen’s first round victory, Jacques Chirac, who had come first, called the French to rally behind him and on May 1, one million people gathered in Paris to protest the extreme right. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The aftermath was interesting. Le Pen was completely isolated and hardly made any progress. On the second round, he garnered 19 percent of the vote, which was barely the sum of the total extreme right vote in the first round.</span></blockquote>
Who’s right? Have things changed significantly in the last ten years? <br />
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This has been parallel-posted on Wordpress at <a href="http://thedoge.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/the-meaning-of-mr-hollande/" target="_blank">The Doge</a>.Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-51897074277223085942012-05-02T15:25:00.000-05:002012-05-02T17:01:38.466-05:00A Missed Opportunity<strong><span style="color: #93c47d; font-size: large;">The Best Scene in The Passion of the Christ</span></strong><br />
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A few months ago I caught an episode or two of <em>Person of Interest</em>, the CBS series starring Jim Caviezel. It's not something I'd watch all the time but I think he does a pretty good job in it. He's a solid actor. </div>
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I was glad to see this, because in the wake of the 2004 Mel Gibson film, <em>The Passion of the Christ</em>, I was wondering if he was going to be caught in that Jesus part forever, as well as the culture-war imbroglio that followed it. Gibson warned him that it might harm his career, and last year Caviezel <a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2011/05/03/jim-caviezel-playing-jesus-christ-cost-me-my-acting-career/" target="_blank">seemed to agree</a> that this was in fact the case. I went to a Boston Catholic Men's conference in 2005, and he was a guest speaker, parlaying off his role in the film. His talk went over well with the audience, but I recall being struck by two things. Not only was he as devout and strident as his director Mel was at the time, but he seemed just as angry as well. I'm wondering how he feels now... I hope he's more at peace with it all.</div>
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During the Lenten season, I was looking at clips from some of the old Jesus films, the passion and crucifixion scenes in particular. I was amazed to see a <a href="http://youtu.be/0BnCHVzzDMM" target="_blank">stencil-colored one</a> dating back all the way to 1903... but it made me remember how disappointed I was in Gibson's film when it came out. I had really looked forward to seeing it. I'd heard some of the criticism before I saw it, and I wanted the critics to be proved wrong. Unfortunately, I found it to be dark and demonic, and not in a constructive way. Gibson was approaching the height of what seemed to be some kind of self-loathing blood fetish in those years. In retrospect I found it no surprise that it was more popular with evangelicals of a fundamentalist stripe than it was with Catholics. In a sense, they were snookered into watching a movie version of the Stations of the Cross. For their part, Catholics were snookered into watching an extremely gory endorsement of penal substitutionary atonement.</div>
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In any case, one bright spot was the fine performance of Caviezel in the Jesus role, particularly in the flashback episodes. The flashback scenes were the best scenes in the film, particularly this one, and the one with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzzVwci8qJY" target="_blank">Jesus and his mother</a> at home. The flashbacks were welcome breathers from the almost non-stop brutality and gore throughout the rest of the film, and I couldn't help thinking what a lost opportunity this was; what a waste of an insightful and nuanced performance by Caviezel.</div>
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Credit needs to be given to Gibson for the idea of using Aramaic in the movie. That was a masterstroke. A brilliant idea. He cast it well too. If only he had done a more traditional Jesus movie, one that traced the whole arc of Christ's ministry, like <em>King of Kings</em>, or <em>The Greatest Story Ever Told</em>. If he had, it would have been The Greatest Jesus Film Ever Made.</div>
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This scene, in which Jesus teaches the crowd to "love your enemies" is the best half-minute of the film in my humble opinion, but it almost wasn't in there at all. It was done after everything else had been shot. Gibson was so piqued by the criticism he was receiving from Jewish and liberal scholars, based only on what they'd heard about the script, he included it as both a riposte and a spiritual reminder to himself. Very nicely done by Caviezel here. He'd done his research on semitic idioms, gestures, and mannerisms as well. In fact, as someone who's done a bit of acting himself, I'd venture to guess that he'd studied some videos of a sheikh or imam or two...
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This post is parallel-posted on Wordpress at <a href="http://thedoge.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/a-missed-opportunity/">The Doge</a>.Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-71774677443214912632011-09-16T14:10:00.011-05:002012-07-04T11:02:47.191-05:00The Facebook Thread<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3qx_8ts2ZmNtdhDsQtDgr1h8yUv637T4tVt4MuJQt6TUoe6ph0396CljsrvbvLMqC1m9dgL3QOSq_rQ8kWIEuFzb_Les3OcHpwSVsqKfGkoVLfiH5vCkm70e95XwFB_lXYqvLQA/s1600/ZBTCrest.gif"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5653048129557161154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3qx_8ts2ZmNtdhDsQtDgr1h8yUv637T4tVt4MuJQt6TUoe6ph0396CljsrvbvLMqC1m9dgL3QOSq_rQ8kWIEuFzb_Les3OcHpwSVsqKfGkoVLfiH5vCkm70e95XwFB_lXYqvLQA/s400/ZBTCrest.gif" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 253px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 250px;" /></a><br />
<b><em>Zeta Beta Tau, Delta Omega Chapter (R.I.P) Oh, how we miss it so...</em></b> I've gone on record before saying I'm not a huge Facebook fan. I'm not especially enamored of the format, the concept, or the knowledge that I am their product rather than their customer. I don't really appreciate the fact that they are voraciously trying to find out as much about us as they possibly can in order to build marketing profiles on us. If I didn't need to keep an eye on my teenagers' accounts, it's doubtful that I would even have an account of my own at all. Generally speaking, I try to keep a pretty low profile over there, but I admit it's also kind of nice to be back in touch with some old friends again, and every once in a while I'll put a little something up, or comment on something I find interesting.<br />
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The other day, I put up a post signifying that I was excited about Elizabeth Warren's entry into the 2012 Massachusetts Senate Race (challenging Scott Brown), and it led to a short political discussion between me and a few of my college fraternity brothers. When I pointed out that they all seemed to share libertarian leanings with different points of emphasis, I was challenged on that by brother Bob, who denied having libertarian inclinations. In doing so, he also voiced some strong views, as is his wont, and in doing so he touched on the topic of abortion.<br />
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Now, I don't even really like to talk about the "A" bomb here, let alone on Facebook. It's such an emotional topic, I figure most people I'm friends with really wouldn't appreciate having it in their morning feeds. What do I know about the private lives of some of my FB friends? What do I know about what kinds of pain or losses they've gone through?<br />
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At any rate, I suggested taking it up over here. It's not an evasion or a dodge. As many of the people who correspond with me here (if they are still reading, that is) are likely to disagree as agree with me on this, so here goes... Here is how it went on FB:<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><strong>Bob:</strong> Libertarian? Me? Jeff, you are WAY off. I look over my right shoulder with binoculars to see Karl Marx. I exaggerate. A little. I'm a social ultra-liberal and a fiscal conservative. I'm in favor of social safety nets for people that NEED them (as opposed to the leeches that milk them for all they're worth.) I'm in favor of enacting legislation to abolish for-profit health insurance, because the ability of a citizen to get health insurance shouldn't be determined by an HMO accountant. I'm against having military bases all over the planet and being the world's police force. I'm VEHEMENTLY against allowing religion to have ANY say whatsoever in the operation of government, and think churches should pay taxes. I'm in favor of equal rights for all citizens, all the time. I'm in favor of same-sex marriage and transgender non-discrimination bills. I'm in favor of women having the 100% iron-clad right to decide what they do with their bodies - including if and when they will carry a fetus to term. I know (not "believe," but KNOW,) that a collection of undifferentiated cells or an embryo that has yet to develop a central nervous system or a functioning brain is NOT a human being and should not be accorded the rights of one. I'm in favor of erasing all laws that would be enforced by a "vice squad," and vigorously prosecuting the white-collar Wall Street thieves that brought us our current financial crisis. I don't know what all that makes me, but i do know it ain't a Libertarian.<br />Wednesday at 10:51pm · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><strong>Jeff:</strong> Bob, I admit that when I read “I'm a social ultra-liberal and a fiscal conservative,” that translates as “libertarian” to me, and probably to most other people as well, but I suppose it’s not a precise match with the actual philosophical definition.I believe that we should have a social safety net, as every human being has dignity just by virtue of the fact that he or she is a human being, and does not have to earn that basic level of dignity by their utility. At the same time, we should discourage, by non-legislative means as much as possible, the behaviors that cause people to fall into safety nets.<br /><br />Facebook is not a blog, and I think it’s a horribly inappropriate venue to discuss such an emotionally hot-button topic like abortion, but when you say… </span><br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">"I know (not "believe," but KNOW,) that a collection of undifferentiated cells or an embryo that has yet to develop a central nervous system or a functioning brain is NOT a human being and should not be accorded the rights of one.”</span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #33ffff;"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">… I have absolutely no idea how you can come to such a conclusion, or why anyone else should feel compelled to agree with such a subjective value judgement stated with such vehement authority, especially when you reject omnipotent authorities, but I’m not getting drawn into an abortion discussion on Facebook.<br /><br />I do have a blog, however, where I discuss religious, political, and cultural issues. I’d be glad to discuss such things over there. If anyone is at all interested, you can message me to find out what it is.<br />Yesterday at 7:25am · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><strong>Bob :</strong> It's simple Jeff, if something doesn't have a brain or a nervous system, it's not a human being. A human being has a brain for thinking and a central nervous system for feeling. The idea that "life begins at conception" is a religious belief, not a medical fact. The fetus i described can't think and can't feel, and therefore has no means of experiencing physical distress and no self-awareness to "kill."</span></span>http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lripmsvxJy1ql6xr1o1_500.jpg<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">18 hours ago · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><strong>Jeff:</strong> Is that a fertilized egg? The acorn already has every single solitary genetic attribute designating what it will ever be as a tree... The caterpillar is not a dress, but it is the same exact creature that will be recognizable later as a butterfly.... By what scientific reasoning does a central nervous system and a brain constitute what a human being is? That's as subjective a value judgement on what "personhood" is as any religious dogma I've ever heard. What gives you the right to say that "thinking and feeling" defines what a human being is, and that it represents a consensus on what the rest of us should believe? The notion that sentience is the defining factor over anything else is philosophy, not science.<br />7 hours ago · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><strong>Allen:</strong> Bob: How do you know that?<br />7 hours ago · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><br /><strong>Craig:</strong> Though we'll likely never resolve the "when does a?" question, we should all recognize the loss we all suffer when the government takes an interest in and insists upon awareness of the gestational status of every female private citizen.<br />7 hours ago · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><strong>Jeff :</strong> Oh well... I asked - politely - to be messaged on this, but my request was ignored... To Craig's point, yes, it is always best to propose rather than to impose... I find it interesting that at the same time the acceptance of gay marriage and full civil rights for gay people is growing, the support for the pro-life postion is ALSO growing. I haven't led an innocent, risk-free and sheltered life, and I do get the nature of the back-alley problem. I get it. Having said all that, I'd like to add that even if we did entertain the notion that 'thinking and feeling" had something do with defining personhood, you need to say * precisely when * that begins, and if you can't do that, you need to err on the side of caution and go back to the begining. If people of a scientific bent want to plant an arbitrary yardstick on this, why not set it at the point when our entire genetic makeup is defined?<br />6 hours ago · LikeUnlike<br /><br /><strong>Craig:</strong> Give us the link! Just caught up with this one late last night, and figured I'd toss in a moderating two cents...<br />6 hours ago · LikeUnlike</span></blockquote>
Craig, please feel free to moderate away, if you like...Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-38298567855474011422011-07-03T08:46:00.013-05:002012-07-04T11:27:16.719-05:00The Maryknoll Centennial<span style="color: #99ff99;"><strong>Commemorating 100 years of serving in "The Field Afar."</strong></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5kL5IIl8snqjRQspk8ePt9iWanjLNMo8ZeKVcAdjM8OOuPr1z_Kq4aMcULGvMX1732-gPASbohf2tlnt71N2L3EAnfc_Q95zk4Jm-N93SS3aBf5KsMfAo5u-ajcE9SCLSQOrjwg/s1600/mkfounders.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625123459701854818" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5kL5IIl8snqjRQspk8ePt9iWanjLNMo8ZeKVcAdjM8OOuPr1z_Kq4aMcULGvMX1732-gPASbohf2tlnt71N2L3EAnfc_Q95zk4Jm-N93SS3aBf5KsMfAo5u-ajcE9SCLSQOrjwg/s400/mkfounders.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 316px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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I've always been an admirer of the Maryknolls. They were the subject of one of my very first blog posts, <a href="http://estamos-vivo.blogspot.com/2006/05/church-in-china-remembering-first.html">The Church in China. Remembering the first Maryknoll missioners</a>. At one time, shortly after WWII, my father-in-law was a seminarian with them. In his own words, he may have been "too interested in longing for my old motorcycle than in serving in far-away missions."<br />
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<em><span style="color: #33ffff;"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">"I'm only just now discovering the civilization of China and falling on love with it... To think that China was completely equipped with a literature and culture 3,000 years before our ancestors was a hard blow to an Irishman... We come to China not to barbarians, but a civilization thousands of years older... Our Lord never condescended; He never betrayed superiority in His dealing with others."<br /></span>- </span><a href="http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Missionary-to-China-Bishop-Francis-X-Ford-M-M-Pat-McNamara-06-14-2011?offset=0&max=1"><span style="color: #ffcc00;">Francis X Ford</span></a><span style="color: #33ffff;"> </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">(top-left in photo above). Consecrated as bishop in China in 1935 with the episcopal motto "Condolere," meaning "to have compassion." He died under brutal treatment in a Chinese Communist prison in 1952</span></em><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">.</span><br />
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I ran across a very nice video tribute here.<br />
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From the very start, Maryknoll men and women have embarked upon courageous missionary service in full knowledge of the risks involved with their vocations, which have extended in some cases to the point of accepting martyrdom, from China in the first half of the 20th Century to El Salvador in the second half.<br />
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What I found particularly interesting was the story of one of the first missionaries, <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12910">Fr. James E. Walsh</a> (at the bottom-right of the photo above - not to be confused with one of the co-founders, Boston priest James A. Walsh - at the bottom-center of the photo above). He entered China with Fr. Ford in 1918. Like Ford, he was also made a bishop (in 1927) and like Ford he was also accused by the Communists of being a spy (in 1959) after years of being under house-arrest, and was given a twenty-year prison sentence. After over a decade in solitary confinement, he was released in 1970 just before the Nixon visit to China. He still had his marbles and wits about him. A tough old mick, for sure. What faith he must have had... He lived until the age of 90.<br />
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Some excerpts on the history of the Maryknolls in the <em>America</em> magazine article <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12918&comments=1">Outward Bound</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">A century ago, an attentive subscriber to the Catholic mission magazine <em>The Field Afar </em>might have noticed the following announcement in its pages: “Youths or young men who feel a strong desire to toil for the souls of heathen people and who are willing to go afar with no hope of earthly recompense and with no guarantee of a return to their native land are encouraged to write, making their letter personal, to the Editor of Field Afar.”<br /><br />In the words of the historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, the first decade of the 20th century was a time when the Catholic Church in the United States finally “attained ecclesiastical adulthood.” The great migrations of European Catholics to the United States were ongoing, and Catholics were trying to take root in a culture more or less hostile to “popery.” As a result, the energies of the institutional church were often directed inward...<br /><br />The story would change dramatically over the next few decades, however, as the psychology of the U.S. Catholic Church reversed from that of mission territory to that of missionary culture. A driving power behind that transformation was the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, the Congregation of Maryknoll Sisters and, eventually, the Maryknoll Lay Missioners—collectively known as Maryknoll...<br /><br />Maryknoll also played an important sociopolitical role in U.S. culture. For many Catholics around the world, the Maryknoll missionary became the public face of the American “brand” of Roman Catholicism for much of the 20th century. At the same time, the inspiring and sometimes tragic stories of Maryknoll missioners overseas had a powerful effect on the American national imagination, a phenomenon that continues today, not only in religious circles but in political and social realms as well...<br /><br />The history of Maryknoll begins with three names: James A. Walsh, Thomas F. Price and Mary Josephine Rogers (known as Mollie and later as Mother Mary Joseph). The first, a Boston priest who had been appointed diocesan director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1903, was also founder of The Field Afar, an English-language magazine designed to support foreign missionaries.<br /><br />Mollie Rogers was a schoolteacher and a 1905 graduate of Smith College. She traced her own desire for mission work to an experience she had while a junior at Smith when she witnessed some of the school’s brightest students dancing in public in celebration of their pledge to go to China to work in Protestant mission schools or hospitals. “Something—I do not know how to describe it—happened within me,” she wrote. “I passed quickly through the campus to St. Mary’s church, where, before Jesus in the tabernacle, I measured my faith and the expression of it by the sight I had just witnessed. From that moment I had work to do, little or great, God alone knew.”<br /><br />The first group of six seminarians joined in the fall of 1912, when the order also moved its headquarters to a hilly 93-acre farm in Ossining, N.Y., which they named Mary’s Knoll. They were joined in 1912 by four women, including Mollie Rogers, who became the superior of the Teresians. While Father Walsh seems to have envisioned them as a kind of ladies’ auxiliary assisting in the quotidian operations of the seminary, Mollie Rogers retained her vision of direct overseas service.<br /><br />In September 1918 the first group of Maryknoll men left for China. Father Price was appointed the group’s superior but died in Hong Kong almost exactly a year later of appendicitis. The first group of Maryknoll women religious was missioned to China in 1921.<br /><br />In China and Korea, the adaptability of the mostly young, mostly American members of the first mission groups proved valuable. China’s interior was not only isolated but underdeveloped by Western standards. Everything from travel to catechetical methods to cloistered living needed adaptation from the Euro-American norm. The American background of the early Maryknollers made them uniquely suited for foreign mission work. Untethered to geographic locations or class distinctions, their attitudes and lifestyles differed markedly from more traditional expressions of Catholic religious life. A more freewheeling approach was also encouraged in their training as missionaries, where both Father Walsh and Sister Rogers stressed that adaptability and individuality could be positive virtues in the missions, rather than simply temptations toward disobedience or pride.<br /><br />The importance of the “American style” became apparent soon after in Kaying, one of the Maryknoll mission territories of China. After a visit from Sister Rogers in 1923 produced much excitement among the local population (who had never seen a Western woman in direct evangelical work), the local superior, Father Francis Ford, created the Kaying Method, in which religious women were sent out in pairs, living among the local populations for a month at a time or traveling from remote village to village, training lay catechists and establishing contacts with unevangelized areas. They were cut off from the sacramental life of their communities for long periods and also lived with far less privacy than was customary for religious women, making the method controversial. By 1939, however, because of the success of the model (and the large numbers of Maryknollers volunteering for such work), the Kaying Method received a commendation from the Vatican, and its use became widespread throughout mission territories in China.<br /><br />The association of Maryknoll with the international fight against Communism became more pronounced after the Communist rise to power in China in 1949 brought Maryknoll some of its first martyrs. Many suffered in virtual anonymity, though the stories of two Maryknoll bishops became famous in the United States: Francis X. Ford, who created the Kaying Method; and James E. Walsh. Both had been among the first group to arrive in China in 1918.<br /><br />Ford had been ordained a bishop in China in 1935. He and his secretary, Sister Joan Marie Ryan, were arrested by Chinese Communist authorities on charges of espionage in 1950 and publicly beaten by mobs as they were taken from town to town in the region. The last American to see Bishop Ford before his death in prison in 1952 described him as so emaciated that another prisoner carried him “like a sack of potatoes.”<br /><br />Father James E. Walsh served for 18 years as superior of the Maryknoll missions in China and was ordained a bishop in 1927. He was arrested in 1959 on charges of espionage and given a 20-year prison sentence. He served almost 12 years in nearly complete isolation before his sudden release in 1970 at the age of 79, presumably as sop to U.S. President Richard Nixon before his visit to China. The high public profile and obvious suffering of the two Maryknoll bishops made headlines in the United States, where they were lionized in the popular press for their anti-Communism as much as for their religious commitment.<br /><br />Following the Second Vatican Council, the mandate for reform of religious orders brought new challenges and opportunities to the Maryknoll congregations, particularly from that council’s explicit calls for greater solidarity with the poor, new approaches to evangelization and a greater role for the laity in the mission of the church. The presence of Maryknoll missionaries on the front line of evangelization efforts in the developing world gave particular urgency among Maryknoll’s members to the implementation of all three aspects of this vision in the decades that followed. The political and ecclesial implications were to bring Maryknoll’s missionaries into the forefront of the American imagination once again, with new champions and new detractors.<br /><br />Instead of China, the new flashpoint was Central America, where the work of Maryknoll missionaries on behalf of the poor and marginalized aroused the ire of repressive governments and raised again the specter of martyrdom. The most famous of these martyrs are “the churchwomen of El Salvador,” Sister Ita Ford (a Maryknoll missionary and cousin of Bishop Francis X. Ford), Maura Clarke (a Maryknoll missionary), Dorothy Kazel (an Ursuline missionary) and Jean Donovan (a Maryknoll lay missionary). All four women were working in El Salvador in the late 1970s in various church ministries aiding the poor and refugees from that nation’s bloody civil war.<br /><br />At a Maryknoll conference in Managua in December of 1980, Sister Ford read from a homily of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who had been assassinated earlier that year: “Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive—and to be found dead.”<br /><br /><br />Upon returning to El Salvador, Sister Ford disappeared along with Sister Clarke, Sister Kazel and Ms. Donovan. Their bodies were discovered days later; all four had been tortured, raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard... In the decades since, the churchwomen have become symbols of the church’s evangelical efforts against structural economic injustice and political repression, just as in earlier generations Bishops Ford and Walsh had inspired Catholics attuned to the dangers of the oppressive and atheistic Communist regimes...<br /><br />...as Maryknoll begins its second century in a church that sometimes seems to be turning inward again to deal with its own concerns, can the outward thrust and global mission of its congregations offer a similar challenge to a new generation of American Catholics?</span></blockquote>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-22052252802168769672011-06-18T09:18:00.028-05:002012-07-04T11:28:14.841-05:00"Reading Jesus" with Mary Gordon: The Prodigal Son<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwD6EZ6f4G5q9OpW_pvCKatf2BDwiVCLbU6QCrrJft65EReRdXqpkq3YMfxtdZC_w0SmVSp-X6JwGdSZOFUYxfZrbnpY-dXYjBsXA7cIV5HWn-zPBqnsMom7rG7-MPOlOV9WxiUA/s1600/Honthorst_1622.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5619564396848863874" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwD6EZ6f4G5q9OpW_pvCKatf2BDwiVCLbU6QCrrJft65EReRdXqpkq3YMfxtdZC_w0SmVSp-X6JwGdSZOFUYxfZrbnpY-dXYjBsXA7cIV5HWn-zPBqnsMom7rG7-MPOlOV9WxiUA/s400/Honthorst_1622.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 268px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<strong><em>The Prodigal Son</em>, by Gerrit van Honthorst (1622)</strong><br />
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The other day I was going through some <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/podcast/podcast-index.cfm">America magazine podcasts</a> from last year that I hadn't gotten around to listening to yet. One of them was Kerry Weber's <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/podcast/files/podcast-119.mp3" target="_blank">interview with author Mary Gordon.</a> Gordon normally writes novels and memoirs, but in 2010 she wrote a book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Jesus-Writers-Encounter-Gospels/dp/0375424571">Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels</a>.<br />
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She was inspired to do so out of a taxicab ride she had taken in New York city. The driver was listening to a fundamentalist radio station, and as she listened to the preacher urging his listeners to "pick up your book and read the words along with me" she became indignant about the message.<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Then he begins speaking, or rather, shouting, about how at the end of the world Jesus will come in fire, separating the sheep from the goats. He is literally quoting chapter and verse: Matthew 25:31-33. They happen to be chapters and verses I'm familiar with - the words, that is; I wouldn't have known the numbers. He moves from quotation to interpretation.. The goats are homosexuals, abortionists, divorcees.<br /><br />It isn't call-in radio, but if it were I would say, "Wait a minute, Reverend... that chapter, those verses, don't say anything about homosexuals, abortionists, and divorcees. Jesus is talking about people who will not feed the hungry. Pick up your book, Reverend, and read."</span></blockquote>
Upon reflection, however, Gordon realized she had been rather diffident about reading the Gospels herself. She had lots of ideas and impressions about Jesus that she had accumulated over the years, but had not read all the way through the four Gospels herself, and realized that whatever her criticisms of the fundamentalists may be, they had. How could she be in a position to criticize if she had not taken the time and effort to do so herself?<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The radio preacher and his audience are the kind of devoted readers that writers like me long for and only dream of. They read, and they reread. They know the text more thoroughly than people like me, who think of themselves as living for literature, know any text, even the ones to which we devote ourselves, professionally or for plain love. The radio preacher and his audience are the new people of the book.<br />When they read the Gospels, they say they are reading the Gospels. When I say that I am reading the Gospels, I say that I am reading the Gospels. And yet I find their readings so different from mine, it is difficult to for me to believe that we are doing the same thing, that one word, "reading," is adequate to describe these very different experiences. </span></blockquote>
Right then and there, she resolved, as a writer, to read the gospels straight through without stopping and to write her impressions on them "because what is being done in the name of Jesus seems to me a betrayal of everything I understand the Gospels to be about."<br />
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Much of what she discovered in the journey is what you might expect. To her surprise and consternation, however, she did discover there were some things she discovered about Jesus that she didn't like, such as what seemed to her to be a callous indifference towards family ties, as in..<br />
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<em>"Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother." </em><br />
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..and...<br />
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<em>"Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me." </em><br />
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...and...<br />
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<em>"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” </em><br />
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...and...<br />
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<em>"Let the dead bury their dead."</em><br />
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But she has some very clever insights worth sharing. I'm still pretty early into her book, but she had some things to write about the Parable of the Prodigal Son that I thought were very good.<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Is that the story of the Prodigal Son is the first story I remember?<br /><br />There were images that I felt kinesthetically rather than saw. The first were the husks provided for the pigs; he longed for the husks, envied the pigs: even husks had not been provided for him. I imagined used-up corncobs, tossed on the ground after a summer picnic. Dried out; devoid of succulence. I understood that he would have to wait even for these until the pigs had had their fill; without articulating it, I knew that he was less valuable to his employer than the pigs were. This frightened me: that kind of hunger.<br /><br />I was the child of an ardent father, so I could imagine the heat of a father's embrace that was led up to by a yearning run: the unseemly speed of the father who could not wait to see his child. Who runs for him, unable to bear the slowness of the normal progression, the son's ordinary pace. I could feel the warmth of the father's ardent arms; I knew the boy's safety, his sense of relief. Forgiveness...<br /><br />Of the four Evangelists, only Luke presents it. Luke, the most domestic, the most poetic, the most contemplative of the four. It is the third of three parables that speak of the importance of recovering loss. The first is the parable of the lost sheep, which makes the point that the good shepherd searches for his lost sheep, and treasures the lost one the most dearly. The second parable of the series, the woman and the lost coin, tells the story of a poor woman who sweeps her house, searching desperately for a lost coin, and focuses on her joy when she at last recovers it. It is a response to an accusation of the Pharisees and scribes, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."<br /><br />We are told that there is a father, and he has two sons. The younger son wants his money, now. We know this will lead to no good. We doubt the father's wisdom, granting such a heedless wish. Had he said no to his young son, the boy would have been forced to stay at home and share the sensible location, the prudent placement of the elder brother.<br /><br />But the father says yes. Thus far there are only shadows, traces or hints of characters. The father and his greedy son. Of the older son we as yet know nothing.</span></blockquote>
Mary Gordon goes on to share some insights the parable reveals in regard to both the younger and older sons, and I'd never thought of them before. Is the parable really more about the older son?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi78s-C7coZ2zONH91tivsaRu503fYy6F8F02UfLShZdy9421qY-eTgRFb6wMYrrP4lwVsscKZbqqNw4wI0ueQTamLveG2smQlnAzuHOq7r6KrC6fHsTnqm_hFcer1qw6qUP9VH8A/s1600/hhonthorst_1623.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5619564227830939170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi78s-C7coZ2zONH91tivsaRu503fYy6F8F02UfLShZdy9421qY-eTgRFb6wMYrrP4lwVsscKZbqqNw4wI0ueQTamLveG2smQlnAzuHOq7r6KrC6fHsTnqm_hFcer1qw6qUP9VH8A/s400/hhonthorst_1623.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 315px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<strong><em>The Prodigal Son</em>, by Gerrit van Honthorst (1623)</strong><span style="color: #33ffff;"> </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGFVq39-IExkKgAXbYuzIJVvB7SkkgbrIesvfGd3lhuJ_b3gTLcxITZ2lgIw1YiEBYM1IYjR8SXl17ztXOSeCcPzkfG5vmkGjyH7klq__KWv6xgEhA0C1hqCGrS9FjVozNdIw6SQ/s1600/rembrandt.jpg"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5619564585802328610" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGFVq39-IExkKgAXbYuzIJVvB7SkkgbrIesvfGd3lhuJ_b3gTLcxITZ2lgIw1YiEBYM1IYjR8SXl17ztXOSeCcPzkfG5vmkGjyH7klq__KWv6xgEhA0C1hqCGrS9FjVozNdIw6SQ/s200/rembrandt.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 154px;" /></span></a><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">As a child, and as a young person, I paid no attention to the older son. If you had asked me, I would not have been able to tell you that he had a place in a story. The young are prodigal; providence is a virtue of the middle-aged. I have gone from being heedless to being careful: I have become much more the son who never left home and worked hard than the traveling boy, the squanderer.<br /><br />And so, reading it recently, my heart goes out to the older brother. Of course he is outraged; his sense of justice has been thrown into a cocked hat. He has worked hard for his father; his brother has run away and squandered everything in a particularly disreputable way. And what has he earned for his good behavior? Not even a goat. Certainly not a party. His father has betrayed him, and he responds to his father with what is usually the child's first ethical statement, "It's not fair."<br /><br />A great deal is at stake with this unsettling story. Suppose it says that loyalty counts for nothing? Suppose love is unearnable, unearned? Suppose instead of a situation of rights, there is an economy of grace? Suppose it is unfathomable, as divorced from the rational as the impulse that sends the father running to meet his child on the road? That animal impulse, that full of the heat of blood? Suppose that life is larger, odder, less predictable, and more surprising than we had thought or even hoped. Particularly those of us who by the very virtue of reading this particular example of English prose are more likely to be descendents of the careful brother than the prodigal?<br /><br />"Everything I have is yours."<br /><br />The good boy is not left bereft. But what has been lost has been found. What is acknowledged here, what is given the greatest weight, is the terrible blow of loss. The loss that has seemed final, and then: reprieve. Resurrection. A new chance. A rebirth whose wage is celebration. "We had to celebrate and rejoice." Had to: an injunction, a duty. The duty of celebration. In King James: "It was meet that we should make merry."<br /><br />And the story ends here. With an assertion of the rightness of celebration. The propriety of joy.<br /><br />But what of justice? The difficulty of accepting an economy of mercy is echoed in the parable of the vineyard, which recounts the incident of a landlord who pays the same wages to workers who have worked all day as to those who have worked only an hour. When the workers complain, they are greeted with the question:<br /><br />"Are you envious because I am generous?"<br /><br />It is an impossible question, calling for an impossible honesty, one that makes self-love nearly impossible. The answer: yes. I am envious because you are generous. I am envious because my work has not been rewarded. I am envious because someone got away with something. Envy has eaten out my heart.<br /><br />It is to me one of the most ethically complex, therefore greatest questions ever presented. A question with no answer. A circle without a break. Except the break of mercy, the break of grace.<br /><br />But why, then, should we strive, why should we give our best, our all? Does this kind of striving only lead to envy?<br /><br />The radical challenge of Jesus: perhaps everything we think in order to know ourselves as comfortable citizens of a predictable world is wrong.<br /><br />And then how do we live?</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><em>In celebration.<br />Without envy.<br />Generously.</em><br /><br />And justice? What is to become of that?<br /><br />It is easy to focus on the potential narcissism of an insistence upon justice if one is not being oppressed by the unjust. But what of justice for the victims? Isn't mercy another excuse for <em>noblesse oblige </em>rather than an assertion of the primacy of human rights? Isn't it better that there should be some clearly stated measure, some setting out of obligations, some recourse to law ... a law which can be enforced or abrogated, but is stable, within reach for consultation and recourse? We are given, instead, two sentences, each in its way unbearable.<br /><br />"Are you envious because I am generous?"<br /><br />"Everything I have is yours."<br /><br />But we are creatures of outsize appetites, and sometimes when we hear "everything," our response is: "Not enough."</span><br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We follow the fate of the younger son. He shoots his wad. He blows it on whores. Of the three characters who will populate the story, the youngest son is the least completely drawn, and in a way we know him least: he remains of the three most a type, least a character. A spoiled boy—we aren't even convinced of the sincerity of his apologies to his father. He plans his words in advance; first we hear him rehearsing them, and then repeating them in his father's actual presence. The father's emotions are named; he is "filled with compassion."</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We know the elder son's emotional state; he is angry. But the boy — he seems to have the lack of self-consciousness of the irresponsible user.</span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The father has not much interest in the apology. It is something that has to be said, something to be got through. It is certainly not something that makes possible what follows it.</span></blockquote>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-31853313320466329222011-06-16T07:12:00.005-05:002011-06-16T07:29:54.662-05:00That Was Mad Whack<strong><span style="color:#99ff99;">The Boston Bruins win their first Stanley Cup in nearly forty years</span></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEZ_Sez8Ky3EN5r1nnhY8DRYImpgx142LsYaVih7uV6LKBeygkD0BWrefkJk4n5ynTGSbHUsXL_BswRNn_H14wzXgpL3xiG1cIc8uChuvC5lKCq5HPQU7iWad3XtbDKOeuJR_QXg/s1600/thomas.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5618789720501577650" style="WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 290px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEZ_Sez8Ky3EN5r1nnhY8DRYImpgx142LsYaVih7uV6LKBeygkD0BWrefkJk4n5ynTGSbHUsXL_BswRNn_H14wzXgpL3xiG1cIc8uChuvC5lKCq5HPQU7iWad3XtbDKOeuJR_QXg/s400/thomas.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />As far as another Boston championship goes, I'm a little late to the bandwagon once again. I confess I don't follow hockey as much as I used to when I was a kid, when I practically lived for it. The Bruins won the Stanley Cup in <a href="http://youtu.be/AVOGbfgcnoo">1970 and 1972</a>, and it felt like their dominance would last forever. Little did we know that we'd be in the wilderness for decades.<br /><br />Ever since those halycon days die-hard fans of the Bruins, who were one of the original six NHL franchises, watched in misery as cups were won in cities like Tampa, San Jose, and Anaheim, where hockey usually elicits a big yawn.<br /><br />It's not like they haven't had good teams over the years. In the playoffs, though, they've been stoned quite often by hot goaltenders. This time, however, we had the hot goaltender in Tim Thomas, and it made all the difference. He made nearly 800 saves in the playoff run, in which the Bruins won an unprecedented three seven-game series.<br /><br />Another reason this series caught my interest... This Vancouver Canucks team was a really classless bunch, and their fans turned out to match them in kind. As far as I'm concerned, the city of Vancouver really disgraced itself last night by booing in deafening fashion during the presentation of the Conn Smythe Trophy and Stanley Cup, throwing things on the ice, and burning cars in the city.<br /><br />As for Boston, we will enjoy a long awaited celebration when the cup finally comes back to its proper home later this week. Well done, B's!Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-26002358776453687712011-06-11T16:55:00.018-05:002012-07-04T11:28:41.103-05:00Sacred Interiors<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEtVGo_cvelbxmd8D6a2R7qmWAm67TGTcSKSG0FDYumwqCXI2bBUQgvXeFIlcDz_CIQeDiGxPrNiJjqjDkpoM3A41btiHtSxptTEIzsDG5uMayQPnZ_TI-r9Us_64AWHx3WojGVw/s1600/Perpetual_Adoration.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5617084583547216546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEtVGo_cvelbxmd8D6a2R7qmWAm67TGTcSKSG0FDYumwqCXI2bBUQgvXeFIlcDz_CIQeDiGxPrNiJjqjDkpoM3A41btiHtSxptTEIzsDG5uMayQPnZ_TI-r9Us_64AWHx3WojGVw/s400/Perpetual_Adoration.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 124px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<em><strong>The Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament<br />St. Clement's Eucharistic Shrine, Boston MA</strong></em><br />
<br />
It's quite easy to instigate a heresy, intentionally or otherwise. In our household, we are dealing with a self-inflicted controversy we call "The Donutist Heresy."<br />
<br />
You see, when the children were little we enticed them towards good behavior in church by promising them that they could have donuts after mass if they behaved and comported themselves well. Perhaps in this we were too successful. Over time, the donuts became expected, then <em>demanded</em>, until it finally came to the point where the purchase and consumption of donuts became an almost integral part of the liturgy itself. In fact, if there were no donuts to be had shortly after the recessional it might even lead them to question if it was really a "valid mass."<br />
<br />
We tend to cross things up now and then with a different venue, but it can't always be helped... In our relentless Sunday morning pursuit of sweets, we may have even exacerbated matters by upping the ante...<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU39_RgRBoTX2LAlvLsC2d4e3iFzEJUxl-9XyNEtV_SdD2sz4ogeMQcSmu9U9Au4C746SGnY1abahNVSvXRvycyA0wWWJKmmbriRupnTVBia0N9PQxDe2AutSUmsBbQnyhyphenhyphenILHqg/s1600/sacredheart.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5617089735119131618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU39_RgRBoTX2LAlvLsC2d4e3iFzEJUxl-9XyNEtV_SdD2sz4ogeMQcSmu9U9Au4C746SGnY1abahNVSvXRvycyA0wWWJKmmbriRupnTVBia0N9PQxDe2AutSUmsBbQnyhyphenhyphenILHqg/s400/sacredheart.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 300px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<strong><em>Sacred Heart Church in the North End, Boston MA </em></strong><br />
<br />
As we do on occasion, last Sunday we attended mass at Sacred Heart Church in Boston's North End, which is like New York's version of Little Italy. It's been a heavily Italian neighborhood since the 1870s. After mass, true to form, we couldn't help heading for coffees and capuccinos at the <a href="http://www.vittoriacaffe.com/">Caffe Vittoria</a> and pastries at <a href="http://www.mikespastry.com/">Mike's</a>. I'm partial to to Mike's espresso cannolis, myself. I can be be pretty good about sticking to an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Abs-Diet-Flatten-Stomach/dp/1605293164">Abs Diet</a> while I'm at work all week, but on weekends my discipline does tend to break down a little bit.<br />
<br />
It always feels very special to me to have all the kids there at Sacred Heart because of family history. My late mother and my aunt used to say novenas there (and in other West End and North End churches) back in the 1940s and 1950s.<br />
<br />
It's a small church filled with dozens of statues, votive candles, and a rosary society made up of local elderly ladies replete with their walkers and canes. The second reading and the hymns are always in Italian, and on occasion we have the good fortune to have a Franciscan friar from nearby St Leonard's come by to say a wonderful mass. My daughters say he gives the best homilies they've heard.<br />
<br />
One of the things I really like about Sacred Heart is that it's unabashedly, unashamedly, and unapologetically full of statuary and other images. Some of the statues are clearly too big for the small enclosed place, but it's fine just the same.<br />
<br />
In looking for an <a href="http://s129089483.onlinehome.us/churchgallery/graphics/photos/massachusetts/boston_sacredheart.jpg">image of the interior</a>, I came across a wonderful little website that I'd like to give a hat-tip to:<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: 130%;"><a href="http://s129089483.onlinehome.us/churchgallery/index.html">The Church Gallery</a><br /></span></strong>Lot's of nice photos there of beautiful Catholic churches from around here and elsewhere. One thing I found curious enough was how many beautiful churches there are in Hartford, CT, for some reason...<br />
<br />
Anyway, I love the incarnational emphasis that lies behind the adornment, art, and imagery in our churches and I wouldn't have it any other way, iconoclasts be damned. Let God be immanent, and caring of humans and our fragile human flesh, made in the divine image, not remote from us and utterly transcendent. The people who object the most to images tend to be the same ones who insist with the most vehemence that Christians are no longer under the Law, so go figure...<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.doctorsofthecatholicchurch.com/JD.html">St John Damascene</a> said:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">We have passed the stage of infancy and reached the perfection of manhood. We receive our habit of mind from God and know what may be imaged and what may not. Especially since the invisible God took on flesh, we may make images of Christ, Who was visible, and picture Him in all His activities, His birth, Baptism, transfiguration, His sufferings and Resurrection.<br /><br />We proclaim Him [God] by our senses on all sides, and we sanctify the noblest sense, which is that of sight. The image is a memorial, just what words are to a listening ear. What a book is to those who can read, that an image is to those who cannot read. The image speaks to the sight as words to the ear; it brings us understanding. Hence, God ordered the Ark to be made of imperishable wood, and to be gilded outside and in, and the tablets to be put into it, and the staff and the golden urn containing the manna, for a remembrance of the past and a type of the future. Who can say these were not images and far sounding heralds?<br /><br />You see that the law and everything it ordained and all our own worship consist in the consecration of what is made by hands, leading us through matter to the invisible God</span></blockquote>
The diversity of the architecture and imagery in our churches is as wonderful and as diverse as we can be (at our best) within a unified community. Some other fine churches we've been in recently, albeit very different...<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV9p2rsSmssRYBRlX96Dp5nWXJig1yhyphenhyphenkwGJuEMU8cfEYH4QiXqh4EGYlvuSrs8YZ5Pp2Ytp7lgEoUbLrQ2Xeou2XByK4EyaOlHHye4BPb0ZyYCL2YVgknWtxMLLaM5EQlFEFxiQ/s1600/Blessed.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5617099741456488626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV9p2rsSmssRYBRlX96Dp5nWXJig1yhyphenhyphenkwGJuEMU8cfEYH4QiXqh4EGYlvuSrs8YZ5Pp2Ytp7lgEoUbLrQ2Xeou2XByK4EyaOlHHye4BPb0ZyYCL2YVgknWtxMLLaM5EQlFEFxiQ/s400/Blessed.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 300px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<strong><em>The National Shrine of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, Fonda, NY </em></strong><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3brhO_FIWqm0z1QN-kG8hhGA-QemVwxzgBCYGgp7bmWHTCDbrXwbzkGPXKqO5k6YyH0qdGVouITTl5OhUR362n852wKx9_uUbR7D0tGqEArAAjlT_BVdGLTLo2QQXWy8F13EnOQ/s1600/st.clements.bmp"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5617100391159607890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3brhO_FIWqm0z1QN-kG8hhGA-QemVwxzgBCYGgp7bmWHTCDbrXwbzkGPXKqO5k6YyH0qdGVouITTl5OhUR362n852wKx9_uUbR7D0tGqEArAAjlT_BVdGLTLo2QQXWy8F13EnOQ/s400/st.clements.bmp" style="cursor: hand; height: 400px; width: 283px;" /></a><br />
<strong><strong><em>St. Clement's Eucharistic Shrine, Boston MA</em></strong></strong>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-85523884067888271662011-05-28T13:35:00.058-05:002012-07-04T11:04:55.692-05:00Fear o' Hell II: John Casey's Critique of Calvinism<strong><span style="color: #99ff99;">Do Double-Predestination and Total Depravity Still Make Any Sense?</span></strong><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVbFFz-3N2S7I19oUAl0Xt8e4Dh_Sgic0D5Vs7Xf0wG3sGSKA5gUAv-VSCR4hyiJy441Z3tsK3OtJgFpL6e2j1zJ4WdPXFlRXmew-4Oxf9EPCNTXVmk8Vfbz4mFhgOpHIGBsXa-w/s1600/no-calvin.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5611839221144342786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVbFFz-3N2S7I19oUAl0Xt8e4Dh_Sgic0D5Vs7Xf0wG3sGSKA5gUAv-VSCR4hyiJy441Z3tsK3OtJgFpL6e2j1zJ4WdPXFlRXmew-4Oxf9EPCNTXVmk8Vfbz4mFhgOpHIGBsXa-w/s400/no-calvin.JPG" style="cursor: hand; height: 266px; width: 248px;" /></a><br />
<strong>The Sorcerer's Apprentice, John Calvin</strong><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><em><strong>Question 12:</strong> What are the decrees of God?<br /><br /><strong>Answer:</strong> God's decrees are the wise, free, and holy acts of the counsel of his will, whereby, from all eternity, he has, for his own glory, unchangeably foreordained: Whatsoever comes to pass in time, especially concerning angels and men.<br /><br /><strong>Question 13:</strong> What has God especially decreed concerning angels and men?<br /><br /><strong>Answer:</strong> God, by an eternal and immutable decree, out of his mere love, for the praise of his glorious grace, to be manifested in due time, has elected some angels to glory; and in Christ has chosen some men to eternal life, and the means thereof: and also, according to his sovereign power, and the unsearchable counsel of his own will (whereby he extends or withholds favor as he pleases), has passed by and foreordained the rest to dishonor and wrath, to be for their sin inflicted, to the praise of the glory of his justice.<br /><br /><strong>Question 14:</strong> How does God execute his decrees?<br /><br /><strong>Answer:</strong> God executes his decrees in the works of creation and providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will.<br /><br />-- From the Westminster Shorter Catechism</em></span><br />
<br />
A thought experiment...<br />
<br />
Suppose that you have been found guilty of a capital offense and that you are in prison on death row with ninety-nine other guilty people.<br />
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Before your execution day comes up the governor makes an announcement. According to his sovereign power, and the unsearchable counsel of his own will (whereby he extends or withholds favor as he pleases), he has decided to grant you clemency and spare your life. The other ninety-nine are still consigned to death.<br />
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Bear in mind, the clemency granted to you had absolutely nothing to do with your merits in comparison to those of the other prisoners. It had nothing to do with your repentance, behavior in prison, amends, or restitution that you may have made in regard to the crimes you have committed. This decision was made by the governor in an inscrutable fashion, for reasons known only to him and which appeared entirely arbitrary to everyone else. In fact, if you had claimed any merits on your own behalf, or attempts at making amends at all, it probably would have been held against you. The governor hears petitions from no one who calls out to him on their own, only from those he draws to himself.<br />
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As you collect your belongings and pass through the gates of the prison into freedom, honestly, would you be crying tears of joy and gratitude that you had been spared the fate that still awaits the other ninety-nine? Would you swear your undying love to the governor and praise him for all eternity for showing you such kindness and mercy?<br />
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Or, rather, would you feel a certain quickening in your step as you leave, considering yourself merely lucky to have been the beneficiary of a strange, cruel and capricious whim on the part of a disciplinarian but volatile governor? That you had somehow escaped from the clutches of an unpredictable despot who gets a sense of satisfaction out of levying forms of justice and mercy that are understandable only to himself?<br />
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If you answered to the former, I suppose you would feel comfortable within the sect of Calvinism.<br />
<br />
What if you were one out of ten instead of one out of ninety-nine? Would it change your answer? What if it was one out of two?<br />
<br />
Well, considering how narrow the Calvinists consider the gate to be, the scenario would probably be more like one in a thousand. Maybe even one in a hundred-thousand. I've noticed that those who profess to believe the most in grace alone tend also to believe in the stingiest application of it.<br />
<br />
What if the crime that you were guilty of was hereditary? It was for something a distant forefather had done, and was no fault of your own? Same answer?<br />
<br />
What if the governor, rather than just letting you walk, actually <em>punished</em> his <em>own</em> beloved son in <em>your</em> place? Would you still be praising him for his glory, or would you think that he was a sociopath?<br />
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What if <em>everyone</em> was in the prison? According to the governor, we all deserve death for this inherited crime. Isn't it merciful then, for the governor to let some of us live, when none of us deserve to...?<br />
<br />
I know, I know, elements of this can be seen in Catholic theology as well... We believe in the Fall, Original Sin, the necessity of grace for salvation, and that Jesus died to take away the sins of the world... We even have a place within our theology for predestination and foreknowledge... After all, St. Augustine was one of ours, we recognize Augustinianism when we see it, and what is Calvinism, really, other than Augustinianism taken to the nth degree?<br />
<br />
There is an obsessive fixation within Protestantism, however, and within Calvinism in particular on the Koine Greek word <em>dikaiosune</em> (righteousness) and all of its variations along with an emphasis on the polemical texts in the gospels and Pauline letters that are used in regard to election and chosenness (taken out of the original historical context of the disputes between Jews and Christians and between Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians) that negates much of the broader theme of salvation history to be found throughout the Old Testament and New Testament.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCXdNt-utCF4Khb1mzYu4TbKr6iwrt-Enhdm20B0B2KCidqtqGF_WgDG7jWI8v7vwC7g5FK4M0DJHg7wJoH2-_9swUBsic_6x50eKjY1WX6e0oYs_EwwELQnrBj7jmpEt94i44oA/s1600/therules.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612152643716169010" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCXdNt-utCF4Khb1mzYu4TbKr6iwrt-Enhdm20B0B2KCidqtqGF_WgDG7jWI8v7vwC7g5FK4M0DJHg7wJoH2-_9swUBsic_6x50eKjY1WX6e0oYs_EwwELQnrBj7jmpEt94i44oA/s400/therules.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 400px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 256px;" /></a>All that talk in the Old Testament about taking joy out of contemplating, studying, and following God's laws? All that talk about the law being very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out (Deut. 30-14)? The way the Calvinists read Paul, God's giving of the law was like a father catching his son smoking and subsequently forcing him to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes in order to break him. In other words, the law was meant to convict man of his sin and show him his utter helplessness.<br />
<br />
All of the Bible's exhortations to good works, looking after the needs of the widow, orphan, and stranger, of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, of Jesus' own words to the young man who asked what a man needed to do to attain eternal life, to the biblical exhortations to hate evil and love good, to let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream - All of this is subsumed in a system in which God in his wrath is determined to crush and destroy any puny and presumptuous human who dares to take credit for any good that he does... Even though that man's nature, faith, and fate were set up and predetermined by God from the beginning of all time anyway.<br />
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Now, if you were to tell a pair of Calvinists that you could never believe in such a monster god, they'd glance at each other, exchange a knowing smile, and one would likely turn back to you and say "I know." You see, they know that the mind of the unregenerate man isn't capable of understanding it. As for themselves, they are fine with it, because a potter has the right to do whatever he wants to do with his clay vessels, doesn't he? Who are you, O man, to answer back?<br />
<br />
If you tell them that their theology makes God the author of sin and negates man's free will, they would respond, "Not at all. Man has free will, but due to his depravity his inclination is toward sin, so his free will can only lead him into sin and rebellion against God."<br />
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If you were to tell me that these answers were unsatisfactory in answering the charges, I would agree.<br />
<br />
My son has a sandbox in which he keeps his toy soldiers. He gives them orders, he moves them about, he builds and takes apart their worlds; everything happens according to his plans. According to his own decrees, for good reasons known only to him, he decides which ones will live and which ones will die. Do his toy soldiers love him? In his own mind, I suppose he can imagine that they do, but in reality they are inanimate. If they could respond to him, it is more likely that they would merely <em>fear</em> him rather than love him, and any love expressed by them would be feigned. He has no real relationship with them.<br />
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But we each are capable of having a relationship with God in which we respond to him or refuse to respond, saints and sinners alike, saved and lost.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvFFBj3gvbG0OIAmw-M5RAVpUjHGxwpI_0PP2c5qrFr3m8C4vc1SqH_rFnG-dNyArEHy75E7D9A0hm2_NgHDI4FGFL32iqRUANmD3FvMEinbMj4sXULJZXAp3CWecgmfJi-389tA/s1600/grace.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612152739336989842" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvFFBj3gvbG0OIAmw-M5RAVpUjHGxwpI_0PP2c5qrFr3m8C4vc1SqH_rFnG-dNyArEHy75E7D9A0hm2_NgHDI4FGFL32iqRUANmD3FvMEinbMj4sXULJZXAp3CWecgmfJi-389tA/s400/grace.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 400px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 269px;" /></a>It's important to be as fair as I can about this before going further. As obnoxious and un-Christian the Calvinist doctrines of Double-Predestination (<em>God has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction</em>) and Total Depravity (e<em>very person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin and, apart from the efficacious or prevenient grace of God, is utterly unable to choose to follow God or choose to accept salvation as it is offered</em>) are to me, I must admit that they have an ironclad logic to them and plenty of scriptural support, as long as the scriptures are being read through a certain type of lens - as long as you accept certain anachronistic presuppositions that read 16th century European concerns back onto 1st century Near Eastern texts.<br />
<br />
The definitions of some of these terms can be subtle as well, and are not always congruent with the way they sound at first hearing. For example, Total Depravity does not mean absolute or complete depravity. It doesn't mean that man is as bad as he can be. To say "total" is to say that the corruption extends to all aspects of the human personality in an extensive way, not an intensive way. It maintains that every part of man is corrupt, even if they are not completely corrupt. Under this doctrine, it is recognized that there are still good things that a person can do out of "common grace."<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, Total Depravity assumes that man is dead in his sins and that the "good" that he does is self-centered and egoistic, not God-centered. To quote from <a href="http://www.prca.org/fivepoints/chapter1.html">here</a>: "This means that his nature is so thoroughly corrupted by sin that it is incapable of producing anything good. There is nothing which the sinner can do which is pleasing in the sight of God. His heart is dead."<br />
<br />
Is this credible? Is this supportable from what we know today about human nature? In the field of psychology, we have come a long, long way from the armchair theorizing of quacks like Sigmund Freud. Today we recognize that the capacity for good and evil is built into every one of us from our ancestral past. We have proclivities towards both altruism and selfishness. Humankind is not totally depraved. Neither is human nature a neutral blank slate which can only express evil if evil is learned from others. Both good and evil are coded into our DNA. We are capable of selfless acts of kindness and acts of utter brutality. We tend to base our relationships on reciprocity, and our altruism is usually directed towards kin and others we can categorize as being part of our in-group, and hostility and team aggression are directed towards those we consider strangers or part of an out-group. We are capable of enormous empathy, but we also have an inbred ability to turn it off and to treat others as less than human.<br />
<br />
There are some evolutionary atheists like Richard Dawkins who might agree in a certain sense with the notion of Total Depravity, arguing that our altruistic characteristics are motivated at their very bedrock by selfishness. Other, like Frans de Waal, would be likely to disagree.<br />
<br />
Take the example of a firefighter who lays down his life as part of his job. Is he selfishly motivated by the notion of posthumous honor and glory? Most probably not... What if he died in the service of rescuing someone of a different race or ethnicity? Did he die trying to unconsciously rescue his own set of recognizable (kin) genes? Again, probably not. Experience shows us that some people, even non-religious people, are capable of true goodness and altruism, with no self-serving motivations behind them.<br />
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A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Cambridge University scholar John Casey's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/After-Lives-Guide-Heaven-Purgatory/dp/0195092953">After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.</a> He had an interesting take on some of these matters. In a chapter titled 'Predestination: Augustine to Calvin and Beyond' he takes on Total Depravity in particular....<br />
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Casey makes mention of when Erasmus of Rotterdam (<em>'On the Freedom of the Will'</em>) took up his pen in a debate with Martin Luther (<em>'On the Bondage of the Will'</em>).<br />
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<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Erasmus had, in fact, argued only for a modest contribution of the will to human goodness, and had allowed an extremely limited scope for the will's freedom. He asserted that if the will is simply enslaved, as Luther suggests, and if all human sins are predetermined, there would be no point in passages of scripture that seem directly to call people to repentance. For instance "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17; Mark 1:15) and Paul's adjuration: "Let us cast off the works of darkness" (Rom 13:12) along with Paul's demand for a "sloughing off of the old man and his acts." How, Erasmus asks, can we be ordered to throw off and strip off our old bad selves if we really cannot do anything for ourselves at all? Erasmus proposes a "middle way" in which the human will is not completely passive, but cooperates with God's grace. Just as reason had been dulled but not extinguished in those who lack grace, so "it is probable that the power of the will has not been absolutely extinguished in them either, but only rendered incapable of doing good."<br /><br />Luther's rage at the middle way of Erasmus (which would later be confirmed as Catholic orthodoxy by the Council of Trent) may testify to his almost psychotic sense of sin and of personal impotence in the face of the perfection of God. It also shows, though, that he had a very good instinct for the way things were going. The Catholic Church, while keeping predestination in theory, would be in practice ready to soften it and adapt it to more humane instincts—indeed, to something like humanism.</span></blockquote>
Casey then moves on to describe how John Calvin's views built upon, and in some ways differed from, Augustine's.<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">It is possible that <em>total</em> depravity is even more certainly a doctrine of Calvin's than it is of Augustine. This is because Calvin does not seem to share Augustine's vision of evil as the privation of good. In the <em>Confessions</em> Augustine writes that all things are good even if they are corrupted. Man's being consists in his enjoyment of God's goodness; so if his corruption is so total as to deprave utterly, he would cease to exist... So Augustine's philosophical theory about the good does —just— mean his picture of human depravity is not quite as thoroughgoing as Calvin's. But it is a close-run thing.<br /><br />Calvin does add something to Augustine's account of original sin and human depravity. For him man is <em>totally</em> depraved. Yet for Calvin the sense of impotence and even of despair that the conviction of sin engenders, the misery of the human predicament and the sense of a fallen world, are not purely negative, because he sees them as the starting point of our knowledge of God. "For, as a veritable world of miseries is to be found in mankind, and we are thereby despoiled of living raiment, our shameful nakedness exposes a teeming hoard of infamies. Each of us must, then, be so stung by the consciosuness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God."</span></blockquote>
Calvin's views are also contrasted to those of Thomas Aquinas.<br />
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<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">In the same Augustinian spirit, Calvin concludes that the whole of human nature is overwhelmed by original sin "as by a deluge," so that all which proceeds from man "is to be imputed to sin." It is not just the brute appetites that need to be obliterated, but the whole of man's corrupted heart and mind - indeed, his whole rebellious spirit. Calvin criticizes Plato and Aristotle for believing that reason, though clogged and sometimes conquered by the senses, nevertheless "like a queen governs the will." He rejects utterly their conviction that to be virtuous is, in the end, a matter of free human choice.<br /><br />Thomas Aquinas had upheld a doctrine of predestination that looks very like that of Augustine. He taught that "some people God rejects" and that this rejection can properly be called "reprobation." There is hardly any softening — for instance, Aquinas says that reprobation does not indicate God's foreknowledge only, for as predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory, so reprobation "includes the will to permit someone to fall into fault and to inflict the penalty of damnation in consequence." Nevertheless, the reprobate abandon grace out of a free decision of their own. Within the general scheme of God's providence Aquinas allows a free choice of the individual will.<br /><br />It is a tiny concession, but one not to be found in Calvin who (as we shall see) will teach the stern doctrine of "double predestination" — i.e., that God not only determines some souls, before their creation, to eternal bliss but a consigns others, in the unsearchable counsel of his own will, to everlasting torment. (Calvin's Catholic critics accused him of teaching that God actually wills the sins of the damned.) Calvin reserved some of his harshest strictures for those Catholic theologians who even hint that man can, of his own free will, cooperate with God's grace, or that he does, sometimes, even if ineffectively, "somehow seek after the good." He quotes with approval St. Augustine's insistence, in his reply to Julian of Eclanum, that without the Spirit the will is not free. Not even one single good work is possible without grace.</span></blockquote>
Casey than briefly explicates Calvin's central doctrines.<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Since man's will is so corrupted, he actually sins willingly. So, although the will is not free, and man is subject to the necessity of sinning, his very wickedness ensures that he sins with gusto and determination—hence, guiltily. So he sins of necessity, but without compulsion.<br /><br />It obviously follows that good works avail us nothing — and Calvin, while<br />grimly praising Augustine because "he admirably deprives man of all credit for righteousness, and transfers it to God's grace," complains nevertheless that Augustine does not go far enough, since he "subsumes grace under sanctification, by which we are reborn in newness of life through the Spirit."<br /><br />Calvin moves without apparent hesitation to the conclusion that defines "Calvinism" — since man is totally depraved, and since only God's grace, freely granted, can save him, a grace that includes the gift of faith in Christ, which is both necessary and sufficient for salvation; and since God has known from all eternity whom he would chose to favor with his grace and whom he would pass over, it follows that all human beings are, from all eternity, predestined by God either everlasting bliss or everlasting torment — the notorious doctrine of double predestination comes in. As we saw, the Roman Church would put the darkest construction on Calvin's doctrine — that God does not simply permit the sins of those who will (as he foresaw) be damned —he actually <em>wills</em> them. Not only did he permit Adam to sin, he willed it. He furthermore wills every actual sin.<br /><br />There is no doubt but that the doctrine of original sin, grace, and predestination as developed by Augustine and Calvin has a magnificent logic. If man's nature is indeed as depraved as the doctrine of original sin entails, so that moral evil proceeds not from the appetites and passions overcoming reason — as Plato and Aristotle thought — but in a taint that runs through all of human nature, then it is entirely plausible to conclude that from human nature alone nothing good can proceed. Hence, any good in man comes from the free granting of God's grace, which none of us merits. Therefore we are, through the unsearchable counsel of God's will from all eternity, either of the elect or of the reprobate, and if of the latter, we are condemned to an eternity of torment through a decision God took before time began.</span></blockquote>
Finally, Casey gets to the heart of the matter as to whether or not this view of Total Depravity holds water.<br />
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<blockquote>
<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Post-Enlightenment pictures of human nature have tended to move toward an Augustinian pessimism. At any rate, our being in the grip of forces that we can neither acknowledge nor control is an idea to be found, in one way or another, in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Augustine's account of concupiscence also finds echoes in modern philosophy. Sartre finds sexual love to be a locus of conflict, a source of impossibly self-contradictory desires. In desiring another, I want to reduce him to his flesh, to abrogate his freedom, convert his subjectivity into an object of my own will. My means of achieving this is to evoke in the Other sexual desire for myself... This has analogies with what Augustine says of concupiscence, and why he finds in the involuntary movement of the sexual parts in erotic love a deformity, a product of original sin.<br /><br />But can evidence of perversity, irrationality, the power over us of unconscious forces support a doctrine of human nature since the Fall as fundamentally depraved?<br /><br />In consequence of the horrors of the twentieth century it became quite common for people to say that they had rediscovered a belief in original sin. But did they really mean that they see human nature as so depraved that we cannot possibly bring about any good through our own efforts? For we can bring contrary evidence — of a mother acting with heroic self-sacrifice to save her child; of people sacrificing their lives for the good of their country, of those whose sense of justice overcomes self-interest; those with a generous love of fine qualities in other people; others who struggle with increasing success to overcome childish jealousies and resentments.<br /><br />In pointing to such things, we need not be falling into some optimistic trap, a Panglossian view of human nature...<br /><br />Were our understanding as depraved as Augustine and Calvin suggest, it is very hard to see how we could know our own depravity. They argue, of course, that we see our own blackness when we contrast ourselves with God. But this does not help their argument. Whatever our conviction of the supreme goodness of God, it does not follow that we have a clear idea of the profound depravity of man. Even though God be infinitely superior to us in goodness, that does not help us to understand how, say, a moment of irritation with someone is no different in its gravity from mass murder (as Newman appeared to suggest). Nor would the fact that God is entirely just show that we cannot see some human acts as more just than others. The very idea of depravity, of perversity, depends on our being able to think of some actions and motives as being better than others.<br /><br />We could not understand human actions at all unless we were capable of seeing some people as acting courageously and honorably, others as moved by spite or envy, of distinguishing between kindness and sadism, generosity and mean spiritedness. We know that some people are more dominated by irrational fears than others, that some are more mature and others more childish. Some can subordinate their own urgent desires to the common good, can defer gratifications, can see a situation as it really is.<br /><br />At any rate, some of us— probably, most of us — can exercise some of these virtues some of the time and fail in them at other times. If we acknowledge that for practical purposes — for the purpose of seeing intelligible patterns in human action —this is true but nevertheless add "But it is not strictly true, for we are helplessly depraved," then that remark and others like it would become simply a sort of incantation or a cog unattached to a wheel. It would be like saying "I have no real belief in the solidity of physical objects" while unconcernedly sitting on a chair or mounting a staircase.<br /><br />If we accept that we can in practice understand the moral distinctions that we make all the time, but insist that these have no ultimate validity in theory, it is unclear what we are doing. It seems that we are denying that any evidence can come to bear. But this again would seem to be paying lip service to an idea that has no actual purchase on our experience.<br /><br />Augustine based his belief in human depravity not primarily on experience but on revelation. The support for the idea that he found in experience — especially in sexual desire — was a sort of optional extra. But even revelation cannot make the idea of total depravity ultimately intelligible if does not answer to our experience, and, indeed, if it conflicts with it.<br /><br />Augustine's picture of fallen nature has power and persuasiveness, but it can never escape its inherent paradoxicality. To refuse to distinguish between different degrees of goodness, or virtue, or benevolence in human motivation makes it impossible in the end to understand human actions at all.</span></blockquote>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-27207332421270582542011-04-17T10:02:00.015-05:002012-07-04T11:06:19.869-05:00An Unconventional Palm Sunday Reflection<strong><span style="color: #99ff99;">Shrugging off <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>. The Kingdom of God continues to be obscured for Pie in the Sky... or even less. Fighting the Hijacking of Christianity by Objectivism</span></strong><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6ZnbE4BH0uI6QABkZm3srV8b0JDbfVmflX6wsU66wD6_grdL0UMkr8cm2kcFjVp0PiTdaj4BBMmG4c66k6ZDxl1T3TD-r97fBLOap9keQabKOZ2rHiYil68qEIokaWLdmf2RKHg/s1600/greco.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596568497913708850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6ZnbE4BH0uI6QABkZm3srV8b0JDbfVmflX6wsU66wD6_grdL0UMkr8cm2kcFjVp0PiTdaj4BBMmG4c66k6ZDxl1T3TD-r97fBLOap9keQabKOZ2rHiYil68qEIokaWLdmf2RKHg/s400/greco.jpg" style="cursor: hand; height: 326px; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<strong><em>Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple</em>, by El Greco (1570)</strong> <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhztBkJUUQX-RDRnV9E_rjKI0oamKNCF_M4blgkZA1scxDrZUvWGaBKxHjTpHtlwHuUBeyYhbVTADhQMdYMz5kC89MbHvZ2NKTTWNsJOFjshrYzkLapjz8IypEwNhMlmqd6r6_8eg/s1600/atlas.jpeg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596572285523624658" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhztBkJUUQX-RDRnV9E_rjKI0oamKNCF_M4blgkZA1scxDrZUvWGaBKxHjTpHtlwHuUBeyYhbVTADhQMdYMz5kC89MbHvZ2NKTTWNsJOFjshrYzkLapjz8IypEwNhMlmqd6r6_8eg/s200/atlas.jpeg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 133px;" /></a>They make a lot of garbage films in Hollywood and elsewhere these days, but did anyone notice this weekend that the Drudge Report had a <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/04/15/will-conservatives-make-atlas-shrugged-a-hit/">link</a> cooing about the release of a film adaptation of Ayn Rand's <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>? I guess it's been a long time coming, but I'm still surprised that someone made a movie out of that stack of trash. With the rise of the Tea Party, I suppose someone thought it was an opportune moment to make it. As distasteful as Tea Party values are to me on a purely secular and political level, what bothers me more is that it seems to have gained credibility and a certain cachet with Christians too, and sadly, young Catholics in particular. They'd never admit that they've bought into <a href="http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_intro">Objectivism</a> (an atheistic and virulently anti-Catholic philosophy), but in effect, that is what they have done. By contrast, many young evangelicals seem to be coming to their senses in the opposite direction. They've been down that road enough times to know that they've been used by people who actually disdain them. <br />
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Time to dust off and re-present Supply Side Jesus:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/X8xU-gKK17A" title="YouTube video player" width="480"></iframe><br />
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By the way, Andrew Sullivan at <em>The Dish</em> absolutely nailed this with a post called <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/04/ayn-rand-vs-jesus-christ.html">Ayn Rand vs Jesus Christ</a>. He reposts some great contrasts between Objectivism and the scriptures from <a href="http://www.stjohnswv.org/pages/sermon-inthename.htm">another article</a>, and makes this devastating observation of his own:<br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">It is possible to read the Gospels as entirely a personal and not political message, and certainly not view Christianity as a short route to socialism. But it is impossible even in one's personal life to be a Christian and to be a Randian. The whole point of the Gospels is that Rand's value system leads to profound misery and spiritual loss. And the whole point of Rand is that Nietzsche was onto something.</span></blockquote>Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26437387.post-52445672005447519402011-04-16T05:02:00.028-05:002022-09-10T22:39:10.779-05:00Fear o' Hell: John Casey on the Biggest Change in the Catholic Church<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKIl8hCiRGCROsCSvOpM9L94e1kq-IYqujXP5CAe7NKEbT6vd7_QLmtk7lvcbEXrxm9GUtBAdasXbacN71jwwDUmxtsqIJXJ70VEp695wZAAOmzdfsXnVuT7Y1L_FWziyLLW9V9g/s1600/bostschool.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596242975986239346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKIl8hCiRGCROsCSvOpM9L94e1kq-IYqujXP5CAe7NKEbT6vd7_QLmtk7lvcbEXrxm9GUtBAdasXbacN71jwwDUmxtsqIJXJ70VEp695wZAAOmzdfsXnVuT7Y1L_FWziyLLW9V9g/s400/bostschool.JPG" style="cursor: hand; height: 314px; width: 400px;" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">
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Militant and Triumphant. No nonsense in Boston, 1943 (my mother, top-row, far-right)</span> <br />
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I noticed the cover article in Time magazine this week - <a class="toc_hed" href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2065080,00.html" title="">Is Hell Dead?</a> It's about a book by evangelical pastor Bob Bell called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Wins-About-Heaven-Person/dp/006204964X">Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.</a> Its universalist message isn't going down well with many of the other well-known preachers in the evangelical community. As for my own community, it just might. <br />
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A priest in my parish has been heard to say, "There are things that are important, and there are things that are only important on the internet." He would certainly know, as he himself is the subject of a rather strange blog that is uniquely dedicated to "exposing" him. <br />
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He's right, of course. Looking at the Catholic blogosphere you would think that the most important issue gripping the Church today is the reception of <em>Summorum Pontificum</em> and the availability of the Tridentine Mass. It's either that, or tales of liturgical abuse, as if every parish in the nation was inundated by wymyn-priests in clown wigs liturgically prancing across our altars every Sunday. <br />
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In your average parish, however, day-in and day-out, these issues are practically unheard of and count for nothing. Vatican II did usher in great changes, and I don't mean to totally underplay the impact of the changes in the liturgy, but I don't think that was where the biggest change in the life of the Church occurred. As I've said here before, my own catechesis was a combination of what was presented in the pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II Church. The council occurred during my childhood, and it took a while for things to change at the local parish level in any event. My training for my First Confession (before they called it Reconciliation) and First Communion were decidedly pre-conciliar. It was pretty tough stuff. Things changed significantly later. <br />
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During the 60's there were enormous changes in the role of women and young people in society. The introduction of the birth control pill changed the trajectory of human society more than any technological innovation that I can think of, and that's saying something. In the wake of the Viet-Nam War, the assassinations, and Watergate, there was an enormous loss of public trust, and authorities were not held in the same unquestioning esteem as they were before. Some would say <em>Humanae Vitae</em> had the same effect on the Church. As society changed, the life of the Church changed as well. Fr Andrew Greeley likes to say that The “Catholic Revolution” lasted most generously from 1965 to 1974, but was more accurately within the period from 1966 to 1970. In my own experience, I'd put if from 1968 to 1972. In my view, the world was one way before the pivotal year of 1968 and was completely transformed by the time 1972 came along. For all the sturm and drang over litugy, or <em>Humanae Vitae</em>, the role of the laity, the crash in the number of vocations, or whatever hot topic we want to bring up, it doesn't touch what the biggest difference is. Some traditionalists do like to mention it, and in at least this much they aren't wrong... <br />
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The biggest difference I can see, is that in the pre-conciliar Church, before 1968 or so, Catholics were deathly afraid of going to hell. <br />
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Hell was mostly what you heard about in Catholicism. It was a fire-and-brimstone church. <br />
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In the post-conciliar period, for whatever reason, after 1972 or so, nobody talked about hell anymore and nobody was afraid of going there. Well, perhaps I can amend that... They were no longer interested in hearing any <em>priest telling them </em>that they were going there. <br />
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I remember some people referring to themselves as "Recovering Catholics" a few years back. If they still do, well, I'm sorry. With the very important exception of people who've suffered from sexual abuse (I ignore that <em>by no means</em>), if you are under the age of 45, you haven't got much to recover from. You never got hit with the brimstone like we did. <br />
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A couple of years ago, Cambridge University scholar John Casey wrote a book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/After-Lives-Guide-Heaven-Purgatory/dp/0195092953">After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.</a> In the introduction he summed up this sea-change in his own Catholic Church quite succinctly. <br />
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<span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Beliefs held almost without question for centuries, and enforced by the authority of venerable institutions, can unpredictably evaporate. <br /><br />For almost nineteen centuries the great majority of Christians had accepted, even embraced fervently, certain doctrines about man's final end. <br /><br />These beliefs were at the center of the Christian imagination. Among Protestants in Northern Europe there had been some dilution of belief among intellectuals and the growth of liberal theology; but this did not begin to affect the masses until the early twentieth century. <br /><br />The Roman Catholic Church preserved the orthodox teaching on heaven and hell with energy and rigor until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), after which the deliquescence of serious belief in damnation (heaven remained an attractive, if vague, possibility) was astonishingly rapid. Although the doctrines remained officially in place, they were played down and lost most of the resonance they used to have with the faithful. It could be that the new model army of enthusiastically orthodox priests, which emerged during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II (1978-2005), will eventually reconvert Roman Catholics to a lively terror of the possibility of damnation—but at the moment that seems unlikely. You will rarely meet a Catholic who believes (to use Browning's words) that God watches him <em>"As he believes in fire that it will burn, / Or rain that it will drench him...” </em><br /><br />Yet in the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth, people converted to Roman Catholicism in the conviction that by this means, and this only, could they save their immortal souls. Gerard Manley Hopkins was afraid that his favorite composer, Henry Purcell, was in hell because he was a heretic. Graham Green wrote novels in which damnation was the central them. A vivid assent to the reality of another world was everywhere to be found... <br /><br />It is hard for modern Christians – at least in the West – to conceive how seriously all this was taken not much more than a generation ago… The integrity of the "deposit of faith" in the world of Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Stalin, and Hitler was preserved by an authoritarian, managerial discipline. That is why the valiant attempt of Rome to hold on to the ancient convictions is more striking than what happened in Protestantism. <br /><br />It is also why the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council were also of great significance. For although that council did not formally change any articles of faith, it produced a climate in which some central doctrines seemed to lose their purchase on the Catholic imagination, shaped as it had been by the Counter-Reformation. The cultural change is still working itself out and its full implications may not be understood until many more years have passed. Before the council, many even among those who rejected the faith were profoundly colored by it. In the early twentieth century there were those brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition who both intimately and imaginatively understood the doctrines about the next life, but who found them so at variance with modem experience that they could only treat them with a profound — if not necessarily unsympathetic — irony. </span></blockquote>
I'll let individual readers discern on their own whether or not this was a good thing. It's my own opinion that the actual theology discussed and presented in the Vatican II documents was <em>excellent</em> theology - much better than the legalistic neo-scholastic manuals that were in use in the period just prior to that. Can the subsequent collapse be blamed on good theology? Maybe. Maybe a lot of people really do prefer motivation by fear - or prefer "religion" over real faith. That would be a shame if was really the case. <br />
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To stress God's love and mercy over the pain of hell was probably the right thing to do, the healthiest thing to do and the truest to Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, in a materialistic, consumeristic society in which virtues have been largely forgotten, and the most elementary trust broken down between both individuals and groups, isn't it a tragedy that we've lost a collective sense of what sin is, and of our own sins?Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10754406706300818849noreply@blogger.com16