The "See No Evil" Oblivion of the Boomers

We forget, those of us at middle age, that we grew up in a saner time. I'm in no way saying that the world I grew up in was perfect; however, it wasn't like it was today. For instance, the culture of free sex, abortion, pornography, only began to explode in the '70s. We have lived in it for over thirty years, but most of us have turned out okay. So we think our children will be fine, too. But they have never had a normal culture against which to balance this newer, sicker one. They have no references which point to the old, boring normality.

We assume that they know what we know, which is "this is not right!" But why would they know that? This is the only world they have ever known.
-Terry Polakvic, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Lecture Series

Of course, this statement provoked a well-meaning but naive audience member to claim Mrs. Polakvic was painting with too broad a brush. I thought the objection was reminiscent of those in a crisis who say "Problem? What problem?" Those of my parents' generation, like this doubter, often presume their mores were passed along relatively unaffected by the turmoils of the recent decades. They correctly claim that there were always wild kids. Yet they never even suspect that such adolescent dissolution now has very considerable cultural, economic and political forces promoting the moral haze of libertine sloth. They seem utterly oblivious to debauchery and violence, believing it safely confined to late night television.

With such nigh-ubiquitous polyannas, I have to say that I am grateful to Mrs. Polakvic for her realization that something momentous has indeed actually happened. The ability to state the obvious shouldn't be so uncommon.

More Semantic Gymnnastics From Political Biotech Scientists

Don't say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of "therapeutic cloning" to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being.

But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000 Americans whether they approved of deriving stem cells from embryos produced by cloning. For half of the sample they used the term "SCNT" instead of "cloning", and this raised approval ratings from 29 per cent to 46 per cent, Hudson told a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in New Orleans last week.
The New Scientist

Doing market research on how best to spin an ethical debate. I wonder if these people still give lip service to being disinterested pursuers of truth.

Another, Better Kevin Jones

A visitor's websearch has led me to discover another Kevin Jones, a priest in the UK who is currently in Burma helping an orphanage. How he manages to blog his efforts, I don't know.

Darwin Catholic posts a good short story by Giovanni Guareschi

Walker Percy Studies

Here's an excellent essay on Walker Percy by way of Matthew Lickona
(some explicit language)

Instead of accepting the vitality of limitation which Binx had discovered in the dirt in Korea, Lancelot, thrown into a darker pit by his discovery of be­trayal, chooses to take the route of "the Gnostic impatience with human limita­tions which can [and does in Lance's case] con­vert into a hubristic denial of one's own limitations."

[...]

As John Desmond has pointed out, Lance contradicts himself in, once having admitted an irreducible mystery, proceeding to "collapse metaphysical mystery into empirical categories." Epistemologically, Lance is thus beset by a typical Gnostic dilemma. He in­stinctively re­jects a purely materialistic categorization of the human self, yet he also abhors the possibility that he may partic­ipate in a mystery that is beyond his comprehen­sion.

Scout for Pending Reindeer Invasion of Colorado Killed

GREELEY - Wildlife officials were puzzled by the rare appearance of a caribou that was struck and killed by a car in Colorado this week, hundreds of miles from its normal range.

The buck, weighing an estimated 350 pounds and sporting a large rack of antlers, was spotted Tuesday grazing beside U.S. 85 about 10 miles south of Greeley and 40 miles northeast of Denver.
Rocky Mountain News

The Conservative Movement is Theocratic, Really!

Early YAFers took their ideas and principles seriously. So much so that from the beginning there was tension between YAF?s anticommunist and traditionalist side and its libertarians. The word ?God? only made it into the Sharon Statement by a narrow vote of 40-44.
-Daniel McCarthy discussing the history college Republican activism

Nagel on Dawkins

Via Verbum Ipsum comes some excerpts from Thomas Nagel's critical The New Republic review of the eminently mockable Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

Addendum:

Stephen Barr expands on Nagel.

State Secession from Other US States

Reactionary Radical Bill Kauffmann has lauded internal secessionist movements of the present day Union.

This idea has taken hold in regions such as West Kansas, 1992:

"They laughed at me," recalls Concannon three years later. "Then the people started carrying petitions," which in two weeks contained 800 signatures. The commissioners permitted a vote. And that spring the people of Stevens County voted 1,469?73 to divorce
from Kansas.

Upstate New York and New York City:

Assemblyman Donald Davidsen, a veterinarian from rural Steuben County, is the prime sponsor of the current effort to divide New York into two (or, as some Long Island legislators have proposed, three) states. "Ever since I was a little kid," says Davidsen, "when Upstaters get together you hear 'we oughtta just cut that off and let it float away'." When Davidsen introduced a bill to do just that it was dismissed by Governor Cuomo as "divisive"--which of course it is,-- the assemblyman concedes with a chuckle.

North and South, and sometimes Central California:

But in the course of leading his people out of California this Moses discovered that "there are not 10 commandments but 12. The eleventh is that San Francisco and Los Angeles don't really want to be in the same state. The twelfth is that rural California doesn't want to be in a state with either of them."

Colorado Domestic Partnerships: A Moocher's Dream

There is a same-sex domestic partnership referendum on the Colorado ballot this year, Referendum I. It extends the legal benefits and responsibilities of marriage to registered same-sex domestic partners. Its supporters disingenously insist that domestic partnerships are in no way the same as marriage. The considerable moral concerns about legitimizing homosexual acts are excluded from the opposing arguments in the Colorado voters' Blue Book entry on the referendum. Observing the rampant amorality of our government and the collapse of substantive public ethical discussion, this exclusion is hardly surprising.

Yet the Blue Book also neglects fiscal argument nearly as important. It relates especially to the pension provisions of Colorado's Public Employees' Retirement Association(PERA).

PERA pensions are quite generous. According to the association's website at www.copera.org, $2,108,791,000 in payouts were made to 71,401 recipients in 2005. This averages out to about $29,500 per recipient.

The Fiscal Impact Statement for Referendum I(PDF) declares: "Because Referendum I provides that persons in a domestic partnership have the same benefits as spouses, a surviving partner would be eligible for a PERA survivor benefit and enrollment in the PERACare health benefits program. Thus, the referendum would minimally impact PERA benefit liabilities in the Pension Fund and the Health Care Trust Fund."

The impact is minimal only because of the massive size of the pension fund. Should domestic partnerships be instituted, this system is ripe for mooching.

Let?s examine PERA in detail.

PERA members include employees from both state and municipal governments: teachers, highway patrolmen, university employees, and even judges. All members make a contribution of eight percent of their annual salary to their retirement fund, which compounds at a tax-deferred annual five percent interest. Their contribution receives some matching funding from state and county governments. Their years of service are factored into their retirement benefits, with more years of service rightly linked to higher benefits.

There are three payment options for PERA members.

Option one provides the pensioner with a significant lifetime monthly benefit; upon his or her death the remaining pension balance will be matched by PERA and transferred to his or her cobeneficiary in a lump sum payment.

Under option two, following a pensioner's death his or her cobeneficiary will receive a lifetime monthly benefit equal to one-half the monthly benefit the pensioner was receiving at the time of his or her death.

Under option three, following a pensioner's death, his or her cobeneficiary will receive a lifetime monthly benefit equal to the monthly benefit the pensioner was receiving at the time of his or her death. IRS rules currently prohibit non-spouses more than ten years the beneficiary's junior from receiving option three benefits, but it is unclear whether domestic partnerships will evade such prohibitions. Regardless, there are always the first two options.

How might domestic partnership impact PERA? The legislation explicitly forbids domestic partnerships contracted between immediate family members: "an individual shall not enter into a domestic partnership with an uncle or aunt or with a niece or nephew, whether the relationship is by the half or the whole blood." However, this does not forbid other familial contracts. The retired public servant who alerted me to this looming problem noted that, should his beloved wife proceed him in death, he could contract a partnership with his eighteen-year-old grand-nephew(or some other favored youngster). With some three decades of service, upon his death his grand-nephew could receive this substantial lifetime monthly pension of a veteran worker, freeloading off of state employees and taxpayers for the duration of his long and healthy life.

The only social penalty this pensioner?s domestic partner in theft would face is an inability legally to marry while in a domestic partnership. Considering late marrying ages and contemporary habits of cohabitation, it is unclear whether this is a significant disincentive for a young man who must simply wait a few years until his partner, so generous with other peoples' money, finally expires.

I note here that I have neglected to examine here how such a couple could exploit health care plans under Referendum I provisions. Surely further explorations in this area will provide worries for the civic-minded, and delights for the opportunistic.

Referendum I's proponents claim domestic partnerships are not about marriage, but about basic legal rights. Yet precisely because they insist that their proposed domestic arrangement isn't really marriage, their system has little protection against cynical abuses such as that described here. Most people acknowledge a dislike for mercenary marriages. Yet why should domestic partnerships, lacking the respected name of matrimony, command the good behavior of their participants?

Names mean things. They have significance. Literally, they signify. Those advocating domestic partnerships equivocate between marriage and a state identical in material and legal benefits but certainly equivalent neither in content nor purpose. Such equivocations make for bad law. Should Referendum I pass, this wordplay will make for even worse finances.

(cross-posted at Denver YourHub

Just Plain Folks

"The Western world today wants the opposite of both facade and mystery, destroying them as soon as the suspicion of either arises. We speak of the imnportance of "image" and the kind desired is one of anti-facade. It must dispel, not create, the aura of grandeur and power and even dignity. Heads of state insist on being Tony or Jimmy; they grow in popularity when they are inarticulate. The plain man with the boyish, rather helpless look is the figure congenial to a democratic society."
-Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

CU-Boulder Gets ISI Thumbs-Up; Jonah Goldberg Embarrasses, Again?

An Intercollegiate Studies Institute-commissioned study has placed my alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder, in fifth place in terms of civic knowledge gains. Its results are questionable, since they rather lazily compare the entering Freshman class with the exiting Senior class, but I shall brag nonetheless. The Ivy League schools did not do so well, but Colorado State University placed second. Perhaps I shouldn't badmouth my state's universities.

Erin O'Connor has decent coverage of the study, but her comments are worth a glance. NRO's Jonah Goldberg showed up to pontificate. His gems of wisdom:

"Colleges have no responsibility to teach American history to all graduates. Given the increasing number of non-American students attracted to our universities, it's patently ridiculous."

Mr. Goldberg then goes on to prate with self-satisfaction against a classical education:

"Classics are fine for "cultural literacy," but why have students slog through disproven science, faulty logic, magical Platonism, primitive religious superstitutions, and Augustus' imperial apologists? Better to read analytic philosophy in English than Plato in Greek."

Color me speechless.

Addendum:

Lee in the comments sheds doubt over whether this really is the Jonah Goldberg from NRO. Oops.

Image, Identity, Democracy

Political coalitions in this country are not built around unifying Big Ideas, at least not anymore, nor even around the positive appeal of this or that policy. The coalitions are focused on a number of specific proposals, none of which can be too bizarre or ridiculous to significantly alienate a large bloc of potential voters. Voters approve of a coalition because it contains fewer objectionable items on its agenda and fewer provocative or offensive symbols. This is why the mushy politics of the center keeps prevailing, because the margin of victory typically keeps coming from those people whose attraction to one party or another is not motivated by that party's positive appeal but by the obnoxious things it doesn't say.
-Daniel Larison

Nobel Prize for Microcredit

Muhammad Yunus becomes a Nobel Laureate for developing a small loan system for the impoverished.

I've long wanted to dive into the details of such things, but haven't had the time. In the past I have wondered why the loans generally go to women. Are the men poor investments? Are they already at a position where they don't need such loans?

Perhaps I can study this eventually. For now, I'll have to wander around Catholic Relief Services' microfinancing page

Liberals Help Make the GOP *Look* Religious

Secular liberal advocacy and interest groups attacked every little thing the faith initiative did. When Executive Orders were issued permitting an organization to simply display a cross or a Star of David, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State called it "a crusade to bring about an unprecedented merger of religion and government." When we helped Boston's historic Old North Church (of Paul Revere fame) get new windows through a historic preservation grants program at the Department of the Interior, the clamor was the same. The net effect of all the jabbering was the appearance that great progress was being made.

Had these liberal groups or an alliance of charities held the White House accountable for how little was being done -- especially compared to what was promised -- there is no telling what might have happened...or what might still happen.
-David Kuo

Music from the Aviation Age

via Irish Elk comes a collection of flying songs from the twenties, thirties, and forties.

I suppose this is a fitting post in which to plug the movie Flyboys, a good World War I airplane movie with remarkable dogfights and only slightly lacking in script and acting. I am surprised the era hasn't enjoyed more Hollywood attention. Air combat was one of the most romanticized and least bloody areas of the Great War, and the movie Wings was one of the first giant hits in the budding film industry.

Italian Internet Poll on Return of the Latin Mass

Siete favorevoli al ritorno della messa in latino?

Sì 55.3%
No 44.7%

Numero Votanti: 18398
Corriere Della Sera

I will voice the standard distrust for such polls while promulgating such interesting statistics. Of course, for Italians Latin is a part of their history in a way it just isn't for Americans.

Jesuit Education At Work

The horror, the horror....

With enthusiasm, Dr. Raymond Reyes, the associate vice-president for Diversity at Gonzaga University, encouraged Regis faculty during the Fall Faculty Conference to get out of their chairs and "sing the world into being!" Faculty and staff attendees then moved their hips, clapped their hands, and smiled in good cheer as they addressed serious issues of diversity and social justice.

[...]

Furthering his discussion of diversity, Reyes also spoke of "the spirit of the hive." Connecting the idea of diversity to the Jesuit Mission, Reyes believed that in working together as bees do, we as a university community can "R.S.V.P God."
Regis University Student Newspaper

And all this time I thought the "hive mind" was a universal pejorative.

Thank You For Smoking Plain, Vanilla Liberty

One of the most unjustly neglected film releases of 2006 is now out on DVD. Thank You For Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's novel of the same name, offers a wry look at lobbying and counter-lobbying in the tobacco industry. The devilishly clever protagonist, spin doctor Nick Naylor, fights for poor, disenfranchised corporations while combating the smoking opponents led by a sanctimonious Vermont senator. In addition to this difficult role, he tries to reconnect with son Joey, who lives with his divorced mother.

Early in the film Naylor appears at little Joey's classroom for a presentation on his career. He cheerfully proselytizes for his cash crop, this exchange in particular catching my notice:

"It's good to listen to your parents--Joey.
All I'm suggesting is that there will always be people trying to tell you what to do and what to think. There probably already are people doing that, am I right?"
"yeah," the class mumbles.
"I'm here to say that when someone tries to act like some sort of an expert, you can respond: 'Who says?'"
A little boy pipes up: "So cigarettes are good for you?"
"No, that's not--that's not what I'm getting at. My point is that you have to think for yourself. You have to challenge authority!
If your parents told you that chocolate was dangerous, would you just take their word for it?"
The students raise their voice: "No"
"Exactly! So perhaps instead of acting like sheep when it comes to cigarettes, you should find out for yourself!"

Some have taken the film as a defense of freedom. Later in the film, Naylor indeed hits the favorite phrases of lifestyle liberalism: he declares that the world is a dangerous place and inveighs against treating mature adults like children.

Yet his earlier classroom escapade recounted above undermines such a libertarian reading: if children are taught from an early age that they already have the competence for such decisions, that "who says?" really is an argument winner, it is difficult truthfully to claim that they have the foundation for mature decision-making which makes paternalistic government unnecessary. Uncritical anti-authoritarianism is being preached by a confidence man who is boosting the self-regard of students in hopes they will become pliable, reliable consumers. The children are being indoctrinated into incompetent skepticism, being too poorly-formed to note the contradiction in their instruction.

"So what happens when you're wrong?"
"Joey, I'm never wrong."
"But you can't always be right."
"Well if it's your job to be right then you're never wrong."
"But what if you *are* wrong?"
Okay, let's say that you're defending chocolate, and I'm defending vanilla. Now, if I were to say to you 'Vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream', you'd say:"
"No, chocloate is."
"Exactly, but you can't win that argument. So, I'll ask you: 'so you think chocolate is the end-all, be-all of ice cream, do you?'"
"It's the best ice cream, I wouldn't order any other."
"Oh, so it's all chocolate for you, isn't it?"
"Yes, chocolate is all I need."
"Well I need more than chocolate. And for that matter I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom, and choice when it comes to our ice cream, and that, Joey Naylor, that is the definition of liberty."
"But that's not what we're talking about."
"Ah, but that's what I'm talking about."
"But... you didn't prove that vanilla was the best."
"I didn't have to, I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong, I'm right."
"But you still didn't convince me."
"I said I'm not after you, I'm after them."
Points to surrounding crowd

This reduction of liberty to a choice between ice cream flavors is a sad but honestly funny reflection on our general inability to debate the superiority or inferiority of certain specific choices.

It is an artful cop-out, this sly change of subject. For Naylor's chumps, ways of life are neither higher nor lower, just "different." So different are they that the only thing they have in common is immunity from not just governmental action, but even critical engagement. That the content of our character is related to the quality of our choices in life, that we must be trained well to be fit to choose well, is rarely suggested.

When I saw this movie in an artsy theater, the crowd--a boisterous audience, to be sure--remained oddly passive during this scene. I was the only one who laughed. The humor behind Naylor's pandering is perhaps too subtle for those nursed on the thinnest form of freedom, a liberty that is all style and no content. Though he ends his so-called argument with grandiose emoting about sweet, chocolatey Liberty, It is quite fitting that Naylor started out defending vanilla.

It must be test time at the University of Southern California. I am getting several visitors from there looking for my summary of Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed.

That book is too good to be summarized, kids. Get to work!

62% of Catholics: "No King But Caesar"

What Pew actually did over two weeks in May was ask 820 self-identifying American Christians "Do you think of yourself first as American or as Christian?" And in this case, 42% of Christians did actually answer "Christian first." Another 48% answered "American first," while 7% ducked and said they thought of themselves as both.

Not surprisingly, the "Christian first" response emanated disproportionately from self-identified Evangelicals, 62% of whom said "Christian first." By contrast, the figures for other major Christian sectors were nearly reversed, with 62% of Catholics and 65% of Mainline Protestants saying "American first".
David van Biema, God or Country

The author tries to score "controversial" points by comparing these responses to American Muslims. How pedestrian.

If van Biema had wanted to start a titanic media firestorm, he could have tried to find a poll asking about Jewish loyalty. Heck, even an inconsequential blogger like myself can't even speculate about that hypothetical situation without worries I'll be lumped in with the nuts.

The nationalist sentiment reported to be strong among my coreligionists is typically disconcerting, but not surprising. As usual with such surveys, I would like specific statistical breakdowns considering mass attendance and other measures of Catholic practice.

"Sayyid Qutb: Freedom Fighter"

This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men.
-Sayyid Qutb, Milestones

The source essay for this quote seems a bit sketchy, with a few strained analogies. I wonder whether the line about "final decisions" can be assumed into Christian warnings against the divinization of the state without doing violence to Qutb's vision. Likewise, there's the possibility that Qutb could endorse forcing others to be freed from their enslavement to desire.

Denver Megachurch Under Scrutiny

The Denver Post today published a front-page article on Heritage Christian Center, a large Pentacostal church run by one Bishop Dennis Leonard. It alleges certain financial improprieties and neopotism in Heritage's leadership:

Project Heritage, a nonprofit founded by the church, was faulted for squeezing too much profit out of a government program to help low-income families buy renovated homes. Leonard's daughter-in-law and the daughters of the board chairman earned real estate commissions on the home sales, which the government flagged as a conflict of interest.
The Gospel of Prosperity

For Further Language Studies

The Foreign Service Institute foreign language instructional texts are now on-line. I'll have to check them out when I begin studying Spanish in earnest. The texts don't look amenable to being used at semi-fluent.com, but there are plenty of audio instructional tapes available for download.

via Papa Familias

Where Have All The TradCons Gone?

Leaders are necessarily elites. The elite of this country have no problem with homosexuality. None. Even if they oppose gay marriage politically, they have no problem hiring and socializing with homosexuals and their partners.

Heartland conservatives, the kind of folks who vote GOP, in contrast to their immediate economic interests, have no idea what their leaders are really like and what they abide culturally.

This is where Foleygate will impact voters in the Heartland and homosexual staffers and politicians in Washington. There is, and always has been, a disconnect between the values of professional conservatives and the people they profess to lead.

Professional conservatives live the life of Washingtonians. They don't go to church as much as the rest of the nation and they don't behave like the rest of America, at least not those they represent. They live a life much like their liberal counterparts.

They make the case for social conservatism in Washington but when they go out into Middle America and rail against the liberal elites, they are railing against themselves.
-A.C. Kleinheider, Volunteer Voters
via Daniel Larison

There are few men lonelier than a social conservative at a College Republicans meeting. If he is vocal, he will likely never get a leadership position, or a even a date. At most, he may receive a few patronising words. Functional libertarianism is the order of the day among these aspiring politicos. I would be interested in learning whether the same culture is manifest among the abused page corps. Did they, too, pride themselves on their acceptance of alternative sexual orientations while they looked the other way?

Considering the party's feeder organizations, it's little surprise that the GOP leadership shied away from criticizing Foley's "private life" until its crapulence spilled into the public eye.

Catholic Philistines?

"And then there are all the Catholic figures who have emerged in the various worlds of public discourse over the past twenty years. At the political magazines, at the think tanks, in the law schools, in the judiciary, on the television talk shows, on the book circuit, across the nation there's a way Catholics have of recognizing one another: a wink and a nod, a figurative handshake that declares joint membership in a particular intellectual culture."
-Jody Bottum, When the Swallows Return to Capistrano

Claes Ryn has attacked movement conservatives for having been politics-centered philistines, "political intellectuals [drawing] attention and respect away from efforts whose relevance to politics was not immediately obvious."

Bottom's essay sometimes exhibits this political philistinism, over-focused on politics at the expense of cultural and theological concerns. Note how his examples of the "revival" are either in the punditry or in law. Where are the fabulists, artists, and musicians? Mel Gibson, probably a schismatic, is the only notable Catholic in Hollywood. I know Bottum is working to rectify this sorry cultural situation, but the focus of his piece seems to compound the problem.

I am unsure how much this philistinism is his and his colleagues' fault and how much the fault of the activists to whom they are reacting. The radical, or even the liberal Catholics he describes themselves often eschewed cultural concerns in favor of political action--indeed, they often presented iconoclasm and talentless egalitarian aesthetics as necessary for their revolution against the bad old days.

Perhaps it is not surprising that conservatives mirror their opponents in this respect, but it is sad.

Louis Dupre and Pope Benedict: A Connection?

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.
-Pope Benedict XVI, Regensburg Lecture

Louis Dupre's expert study Passage to Modernity was among the first books I discussed in the second month of this blog's existence. (see here and here) It is an expanded discussion of those medieval philosophers and theologians who would inspire the amputated rationality of modern philosophy. Matthew Fish has written an excellent discussion of these medievals and their interpreters, including Dupre quoted here:

Seeking a foundation for the order of cognition, Descartes has redefined the ultimate ontological principles in the function of the epistemic order. The foundation both of the mind and of the world is conceived in accordance with the conditions and needs of knowledge…. While Greek philosophy of the classical age had defined being in terms of form and its dependence primarily (though never exclusively) in terms of participation, modern thought conceived of nature as a causal interaction of forces and of transcendence as a supremely powerful divine will which created and ruled all things by means of efficient causality.

Matthew Fish expands further:

God being relegated to an extrinsic influence, who no longer effects the cosmos formally, is left ghostly absent; where classically the cosmos had an interiority that always pointed to its participation in the Word, now nature was a neutral sphere, in fact a canvas for the mind to impose meaning upon, that the mind must inform since reality has now become void of intelligibility, and therefore any higher ordering or purpose. All meaning and purpose has been exclusively reserved to the inscrutable divine will.

I had not yet noticed the connection between Pope Benedict's and Dupre's analysis, nor have many others, but it is certainly an interesting link to explore. Matthew Fish's full essay excerpt is quite the worthy read.

Robert P. George Contra Perdurantism

Robert George and Patrick Lee write another substantial essay about the ethics of stem cell research. Their take on the view that human consciousness is the sum total of quantum experiences:

The first difficulty is that, according to this view, a human being (or any ultimate subject of existence) is the sum of time-slices suitably connected (say, by biological or psychological continuity). But what is a time-slice, and, how could time-slices give rise to a human organism's (or any organism's) extension through time? If the time-slice itself does not have temporal extent, then the addition of any number of time-slices to each other will not give rise to a temporally extended series -- just as the addition of any number of unextended points will not produce an extended line. On the other hand, if the time-slice of a human being does have temporal extent, then no explanatory gain has been achieved by denying a persisting human being, since one will then (by necessity) have admitted that an individual as a whole can persist through at least some extent of time. But if one must admit persistence through time at one level, why not admit it at the level that common sense and explanatory practice seem to demand -- that is, the lifetime of a human individual who persists through time?

I am under the impression that David Hume, with his theory of sense impressions, inspired the view they criticize here. If any reader can confirm or deny my impression, please do so.

George and Lee's essay does not cover the phenomenon of twinning, which seems to be what their target has in mind at points. Their literal use of the word "individual" would of course run into a bit of trouble when applied to twinning, for at that point there really are at least two possible individuals within the whole organism. I am also curious how they would interpret the concept "human organism," and relate it to "human being."

Retro Walker Percy

Clark Stooksbury presents the '80s-era cover art of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman

Injecting Some Decency into the Foley Fracas

For the past two days, a conservative blogger has ginned up publicity for his work outing a 21-year-old young man--a former congressional page and current deputy campaign manager for a heartland Republican congressman--who received sexually explicit instant messages from disgraced Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley when he was 17 and 18 years old. I have received several e-mails from the blogger and readers flogging the post.

I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger's scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page's name and identity. Seizing on ABC News' redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man's privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.
Michelle Malkin

Denver Minutemen Assaulted; "They had it coming" says ex-Pol

The local Minuteman group was filming an informal day-labor pickup station where employers pick up cheap illegals. I do not know the precise reason why the men were filiming, though I presume they were preparing film for anti-immigration activist purposes.

Robert Copley, Jr., was one of the cameramen. He was assaulted by several illegals, and another cameraman almost had his camera stolen. I am unable to find a written account of the episode, but there is video coverage at Fox News.

Former state senator and Hispanic activist Polly Baca implies they had it coming: "The minutemen are acting in a totally unamerican fashion... it is not their place to enforce our laws, it is the place of our police officers, our safety officers to enforce our laws."

I do not know whether Fox News significantly misrepresented her remarks, but talking that way about an assaulted citizen journalist is despicable. I don't follow the Minutemen, but when their efforts at perfectly legal amateur information-gathering are classified as unamerican the message is loud and clear: "Shut up!"

I actually met Polly Baca at my home parish's immigration forum a few weeks back. Her speech contained plenty of cant, but was hardly so offensive as her remarks on Fox News. She proposed a Marshall Plan for Mexico, a proposal which seemed to me a recipe for corruption. Pressing her on this point, she said we needed to get good people into office. Flatteringly, she suggested I get involved. I made a joke about the joys of apathetic anarchism, yet I was really laughing at something else. If only she knew that Pat Buchanan is one of my favorite pundits...


Addendum:
A Freeper rewrites Senator Baca's statement:
"it is not their place to not enforce our laws, it is the place of our police officers, our safety officers to not enforce our laws."

Christians and Modernity: A More Optimistic View

The St. Elizabeth of Hungary Theology Lecture Series is proceeding nicely. Here are some somewhat messy notes on Father Chrysostom Frank's lecture "The Politics of Liberty in a Postmodern Era":

Pre-moderns: trusted in authority passed down through tradition
Moderns: lost confidence in authority, confident in human reason
Post-moderns: maintain diffidence towards authority, but also have lost confidence in human reason.

Crisis of meaning: how do we ground meaning if transcendence removed? Father Chrysostom related a shocking story describing how some of his students at Regis U outright admitted that the only difference they saw between Mother Theresa's hospices for the dying and the concentration camps was personal preference.

At present, it is difficult to defend politics of liberty other than maintaining it is simply a personal preference.

Meaning is a problem only because we already have an intuitive sense of the fullness of the reality towards which we are being pulled. By searching for the infinite in the finite(as in the modernist project) we set ourselves up for failure and despair.

The death of the modern project is reawakening us to eternity; meaning can only be found in its relationship with the transcendent.

The central illumination of the modern age, what has emerged as a viable social and political order, is grounded on conviction that individual human being has inviolable liberty and dignity. That conviction is the spark of transcendent meaning on which Christianity and modernity can make common cause against the cynicism of postmodernity and the barbarities of political Islam. While only Christianity can best ground that meaning, Liberalism still having immanentist temptations, Christians nonetheless dismiss Liberalism at our peril.

Father Chrysostom expresses nervousness when Catholics on rare occasion bad-mouth liberty and the individual. From having lived in South Africa, and having spent time in post-Soviet Russia, his opinion is very understandable.

By way of further reading Father Chrysostom recommended the works of David Walsh, who has flown under my radar.

On the whole, the lecture was a very good summary of the history and philosophies involved. I don't think there was anything particularly new to me, yet its delivery was compact and far more hopeful than other examinations of the postmodern condition.

Book Review: James Webb's Born Fighting

To state the obvious, white ethnics are rarely described in any substantive manner. Whites are either a race whose counterparts are delineated in equal opportunity checkboxes or an ethnic group vaguely defined by Hispanics as "Anglos." While it is accepted practice to dilate upon the real and imagined virtues of minority groups, Americans of European ancestry are lumped into one homogenized mass. Italians and Swedes, Poles and Englishmen, Irishmen and Germans are all subsumed into racial categories. With this kind of categorical homogenization now dominant, it is easy to find refreshment in James Webb's history-cum-family memoir Born Fighting, a history of the Scots-Irish in America.

Originally colonists in sixteenth-century Northern Ireland, these Scottish Protestants found themselves and their Presbyterianism despised by their English lords almost as much as by the native Irish. Already a migratory people, many set off for the New World and settled in what would become the American South. Frontiersmen and pioneers, Webb believes these kinsmen of his to be independent, egalitarian, pugnacious, and tribal. These characteristics, forged in the wilds of the American frontier, have forged a major part of the American way of life.

Webb's history is somewhat derivative, especially his treatment of the Scottish-English conflicts for which he relies far too heavily upon Winston Churchill's history. These chapters read like a lazy student essay: long excerpts interspersed by a novice's summary. Yet his reliance on older generalist historians frees his analysis from the trendy shackles of specialization. He rightly treats ethnic formation as the product of numerous factors: geography, history, war, religion, each is discussed at some length. Though I am hardly widely read in the genre, I find this focus unusually competent compared with other contemporary popular histories.

Being a retired Marine, his discussions of the Scots-Irish at war are particularly energetic. American frontiersmen, he suggests, learned their radically novel tactics from their engagements with the Indians. While reading his energetic treatment of the Battle of Kings Mountain, I first realized that the legendary Rebel Yell could have originated in those pitched battles between the old Scots-Irish and the Indians, where Scottish battle cries fused with native war whoops.

Webb's characterization of the Scots-Irish as independent men who only respect proven leaders seems at odds with his depiction of their prowess in the organized national military. Their alleged disdain for hierarchy would, it seems, undermine military functioning whenever an undeserving officer takes command. As a former Marine and secretary of the Navy, Webb's unapplied expertise on this point is especially regrettable.

Webb complements his large-scale history with stories from his own family's past, remembering his forefathers and their lives. Being a Southerner, he includes a pretty typical defense of the Civil War: the North wasn't as abolitionist as it appears in retrospect; poor Southern whites weren't fighting for slavery but resisting an invading army in defense of the land they loved; competing ideals of national and state sovereignty; and so on. There is little unique to his arguments other than a more ethnic and class-based sympathy with poorer Southern whites. Yet upon encountering such apologetics still another time, the thought occurred to me that conservatives' precious habits of playing the tiresome find-the-racist game might derive in part from Southerners declaiming Yankee racism and hypocrisy.

Though a newcomer to the Democratic Party, Webb does not shirk from playing typical identity politics on behalf of his people. Webb recognizes that, as is typical with a long-neglected ethnicity, the Scots-Irish people have been long-neglected. They suffered at the hands of Yankee domination during reconstruction; they are tarred as violent, bigoted, and dumb rednecks in popular culture; they disproportionately do the front-line fighting in the military, with little credit; they are underrepresented in the American university. But noble people that they are, they don't complain. Much.

I realize the previous paragraph have been harsh towards Webb. I should note here that Born Fighting is nowhere near as flattering towards its targeted readers as Cahill's sickeningly oleaginous How The Irish Saved Civilization, a regrettable pop-history primed for Irish-American viewers of Oprah.

As regards academic representation, Webb marshals some statistics that do indeed suggest a problem. The Harvard graduating class is twenty percent Asian, twenty-five to thirty-three percent Jewish, and there a fifteen percent minority quota in admissions. Subtract legacy and prestige admissions, and the openings for a Scots-Irish Southerner, like many other Americans, are few indeed.

Besides such underrepresentation, he also suggests reasons that Southerners sympathized with populist concerns: white Southerners, impoverished by Reconstruction, could enthusiastically support FDR's new deal. They could easily believe the wealthy did in fact acquire privileged positions through injustice and fraud because their own ancestors had told them as much about rich Yankee carpetbaggers. The populist elements in the Democratic Party therefore lost significant support as the Southerners switched to the GOP after decades of hostility to the party of Lincoln.

While certainly of special interest to those of the tribe it celebrates, Born Fighting manages to engage a wider audience, especially by claiming the Scots-Irish as a major source of typically American values. This is a traditional appeal of the special interest genre, and one wonders to what extent it distorts the nature of its subject matter, the wider nation, or both. Yet while hardly a masterpiece, Webb's book provides a sturdy springboard for further reflection on the deeper currents of American history. For that, we can be thankful.

Cruise Lines Support Dissident Catholic Clerics

An old story about cruise lines taking on "Rentapriest" clergy. Rentapriest blog wrote some disingenuous comments on the story.

Supposedly such priests would go on cruises with their wives, only to have duped laity discover their relationship during the voyage.

Being Criticized is a Sign of Relevance

"The most profound changes emanated from the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, the most problematic of all the Council documents at least in its implementation. This constitution quite properly called for dialogue with the surrounding culture rather than condemnation and urged us to emphasise what was common rather than to begin immediately with our differences. This is fundamental to the way we now see ourselves as an integral part of Australian society, the main reason why the majority accepts us as such and why all educated Australians now automatically and rightly presume that they have every right to comment publicly on distinctively Catholic teachings on e.g. the impossibility of womens' ordination, or contraception or the mandatory celibacy of priests. Most Australians are much slower to do this with e.g. the Orthodox or the Jews and Moslems."
-Cardinal George Pell

Clio's Revenge

The main intellectual defect in current American foreign policy is the lack of any sense of history, particularly as the British historian Lewis B. Namier defined it: a trained intuitive sense of the way things do not happen. (How they actually happen depends on the evidence.) America's leaders and their advisers, including some so-called historians and political scientists, not only are ignorant of history and insensitive to it, they despise and repudiate it. Their favorite epithet for opponents is to accuse them of having a pre-9/11 mentality, of believing that history before September 2001 still tells us something.
-Paul Schroeder, Liberating Ourselves

Of course this ignores the experts stuck in 1938, but the larger point stands. Our degraded knowledge of history, composing caricatures unworthy even of comic books, has crippled us.

Arabic Bravado, meet American Brawling...

An anthropology student at Rants and Raves has posted his reflections on Arab culture after a stay in Saudi Arabia:

In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.

Thus an ultimatum is often not taken seriously and the reality comes as a surprise. Remember the "Mother of all Battles"? Like many other Mediterranean peoples, Arabs don't seem to mind making a scene in public and have a high blown sense of drama. Paul Harvey once described how he had spent the Suez Crisis hiding under the bed in his hotel room because of the blood-curdling radio broadcasts, before he learned that Arabs talk like that when they're arguing over a taxi. "This is my taxi and I will defend it to the death!" "You lie, it's mine and rivers of blood will flow in the street before I give up my taxi!"�

An Arab will scream at you, get into your personal space and sometimes kick dirt on your shoe -- and they react with utter surprise when an American up and decks him. "What did I do?" To say the least, this makes negotiations difficult.

It makes me wonder whether the nuclear saber-rattling in Iran is quite different from the nuclear saber-rattling going on in some Western cricles.

The Paulist Press in 1945

via Gashwin Gomes, a reaction to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Here we come upon the essential evil. The American people have for some years been indoctrinated with the heresy that there is no such thing as a universal everlasting law. Professors of ethics say there is no Absolute, that is to say, no God and that if there were, we have no means of knowing His mind or even if He is a person and has a mind. That there is no such thing as natural law; that laws are temporary and arbitrary, made up, so to speak, as we go along; that the law that served our ancestors may be obsolete in our days. If that kind of ethics prevails, our Christian civilization will dissolve in gas like the bodies of the 100,000 to 300,000 victims of the first atomic bombing. No discussion of this question can neglect the argument that the atomic bombs were used to bring about a quicker surrender of Japan and thereby in the end, to save lives. The end does not justify the means. It is not permissible to do evil that good may come. If obliteration bombing is evil -- and this is the question -- it cannot be made good by the supposition or even the certainty that it will in the long run be more merciful that a surely legitimate way to make war.
-Rev. James Martin Gillis, CSP, Editor, The Catholic World, September 1945

The standard apologists for atomic bombing often dismiss those who judge "with the clarity of hindsight," implying that the strikes enjoyed unanimous approval back in the good old days. Let them read Rev. Gillis.

John Locke the Stockholder

If Locke's political ideas are sometimes caricatured for picturing the state as a joint-stock company, this caricature seems nowhere more appropriate than in the birth of the Bank. The scheme of Locke's friend Halifax had made 1,272 individuals actual owners of the state. Interestingly enough, Locke was among them.
-Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle

This comes from Daniel Larison, who has successfully exceeded his monthly bandwidth quota with but one day left.

Despite my foray into Straussian hermeneutics discussing Locke, with all the school's close readings and sometimes labored interpretations I can't recall Strauss or his epigones ever pointing out this very germane fact.

Dying for a joint-stock company seems as ignoble as killing for the telephone company. Does a strong and respectable stream of Western Liberalism really rest upon a self-justifying political tract?

Waterboarding OK? Demonstrate it on YouTube, Then.

Vasko Kohlmayer, a writer for FrontPageMag.com, has endorsed waterboarding:

Waterboarding, on the other hand, is fleeting in duration with the actual discomfort lasting seldom more than a couple of minutes. And since a man can be safely deprived of oxygen for at least twice as long, there is almost no risk of long-term harm. The possibility of injury is further reduced by the fact that the procedure calls for no direct physical contact between the subject and his interrogators. Not even as much as pushing or chest slapping is required at any time, making waterboarding one of the safest and least confrontational among interrogation methods. Involving the lowest risk of long-term harm and the least amount of cumulative discomfort, it is also the most humane. Most importantly, it is the most effective.

I doubt this writer would voluntarily waterboard or be waterboarded himself. Yet all we really need for a demonstration of waterboarding(assuming even a demonstration is morally permissible) is a stuntman, a trained medical professional, and a filming crew willing to post their film on YouTube. A fictional portrayal of waterboarding is already on display at that site. Since some apologists argue the method is not that bad, perhaps we can observe for ourselves what some endorse in the abstract and get a reaction from a "subject" who can speak our language in the Fear Factor style to which we have become so inured.

Gay Activist Intimidation in Colorado Springs

Catholic Exchange reports a CO Springs family had their lawn set on fire, their home vandalized, and their family threatened for placing signs against a domestic partnershim initiative on this November's ballot. The threat read in part:

"This sign is a symbol of hatred" YOU ARE NO BETTER THAN A TERRORIST BECAUSE YOU DISPLAYED THAT SIGN!

"The purpose of this document is to inform not you, but all who share your anti-gay or any other discriminatory beliefs, your world is about to change" SO TAKE WARNING! Your life, your government and the world as you know it is about to change. YOU ARE EITHER WITH US OR AGAINST US!

Such activists have been lively before. Fifteen years back, some vandalized the Catholic cemetery. It is disturbing that this is happening in one of the most conservative cities in the state. I am also curious that this story hasn't made the mainstream press, circulating only in special-interest news sites. I suspect it is overshadowed by the atrocity in Bailey.

Focus on the Family is the source for this story. The family's campaign signs seem typical for Colorado Springs evangelicals, simultaneously earnest and embarrassing. That's no excuse for vandalizing intimidation, and I hope this event gets more coverage soon.

Misdirected Chastity?

In the typical "conservative" church, pastors were falling strangely silent on the sins that beset their own flocks, mostly sex outside of marriage and before marriage, while they were often trumpeting their churches' beliefs on the sexual activities of gays and lesbians. It was the old plank-in-the-eye issue.

I thought it was interesting that I was told, while working on one of my earliest columns about the "True Love Waits" movement, that some of the strongest opposition to the concept came from adults, not teens. The problem was that pastors could not offend divorced deacons or other adults in the church who were having sex before marriage or outside of their marriages.

When it comes to sex, the typical conservative pastor is much more afraid to talk about premarital or extramarital sex than about homosexuality. There is a story there, I think, and it's an important story.
-Terry Mattingly

The Constitution As Figurine

And even some Republicans who said voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the habeas corpus provision, ultimately sending the legislation right back to Congress.

"We should have done it right, because we're going to have to do it again," said Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, who had voted to strike the habeas corpus provision, yet supported the bill.
NYTimes, "Senate Passes Detainee Bill Sought by Bush"

This is exactly what happened with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. The legislature passed that bill expecting its grossest requirements to be struck down, yet the Supreme Court failed to oblige. That a legislator can acknowledge that he has voted for a bill he believes to be unconstitutional shows the sorry state of limited government.

The next time we laugh at the antics of England's House of Windsor, deriding them as figureheads, let's remember that our Constitution might itself have become a mere totem. Our fierce and respected political foundation has lapsed into a sentimental icon; it is turning into a Precious Moments figurine, put on display for a bit of fawning civic discussion before being returned to its small cabinet, easily ignored until the next tea party.

Local Color

Douglas Groothius, a professor at Denver Seminary on sabbatical in Arizona, is blogging at The Constructive Curmudgeon

There's some good advice on getting into the tech sector with a Liberal Arts degree over at Darwin Catholic

Army Sends 52-year-old Woman into Combat?!?

Obituary of a Humvee Gunner. Radical feminism wrapped in the flag.

I thought this was against military regulations. What happened?

(See Bonnie Erbe present the case for chickenhawk feminism)

FBI Snooping on Pro-Lifers

"In August of that same year,[1994] Attorney General Janet Reno established a task force, the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy (VAAPCON) group to investigate anti-abortion violence and civil disobedience. VAAPCON included representatives from the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, the US Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms ­ the thugs who carried out the killings at Ruby Ridge and at Waco. By 2000, it was clear that the VAAPCON task force was investigating many pro-life groups and individuals who had no connection to any crimes against abortionists. Documents released under pressure of lawsuits showed that the FBI had assembled dossiers on Cardinal O'Connor of New York, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Feminists for Life, Concerned Women for America, the American Life League, the Christian Coalition, and other law-abiding pro-lifers. Some FBI agents objected on legal and ethical grounds against this surveillance, but their objections were overruled by the upper levels of the Justice Department. Attorney General John Ashcroft is keeping the VAAPCON task force in existence."
-Lee Penn

Having an FBI dossier was once a much-trumpeted badge of honor on the left. Outside of WorldNetDaily and FrontPage Magazine, I remember no large outcry when these surveillances were revealed.

Quite worrisome that VAAPCON is possibly still around.

(Anti-)Political Poetry

Through Daniel Larison I have discovered an excellent old poem of medium length. Selected Excerpts:

Thus, while around the wave-subjected soil

Impels the native to repeated toil,

Industrious habits in each bosom reign,

And industry begets a love of gain.

Hence all the good from opulence that springs,

With all those ills superfluous treasure brings,

Are here displayed. Their much loved wealth imparts

Convenience, plenty, elegance, and arts !

But view them closer, craft and fraud appear,

Even liberty itself is bartered here.

At gold's superior charms all freedom flies,

The needy sell it, and the rich man buys;

A land of tyrants and a den of slaves,

Here wretches seek dishonorable graves,

And, calmly bent, to servitude conform,

Dull as their lakes that slumber in the storm.

[...]

As nature's ties decay,

As duty, love, and honor, fail to sway,

Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,

Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe.

Hence all obedience bows to these alone,

And talent sinks, and merit weeps unknown;

Till time may come, when, stript of all her charms,

The land of scholrs, and the nurse of arms,

Where noble stems transmit the patriot flame,

Where kings have toiled, and poets wrote for fame,

One sink of level avarice shall lie,

And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonored die.

[...]

In every government, though terrors reign,

Though tyrant kings or tyrant laws restrain,

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure !

-Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller

Derbyshire on Europeans Enslaved by Muslims

Papal Lecture Controversy Influences Colorado House Races

After the flap about the Pope's speech in Regensburg, local US House Rep. Tom Tancredo wrote a letter to the Pope supporting his statements. An opportunistic attempt to ride the papal coattails, end of story.

Not quite.

Tancredo provoked the ire of a congressional staffer of Colorado US Rep. John Salazar, a staffer who started the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association. So now Ms. Nayyera Haq is a campaign issue. See
To the Right and Google News for the latest.

Mirror of Justice links to an Ireland Religious Freedom case involving a Jehovah's Witness and blood transfusions.

The Good News of Predestination

Daane suggests that the Arminian construal of election is unpreachable because it is too humanistic; but this misses, I think, the crucial point. Arminian predestination is unpreachable because it is not good news about anything. It doesn't build up the body of Christ. It doesn't edify. It doesn't embolden or encourage. It simply gives an answer to a perplexing theological question that is of interest only to a few. Why waste limited preaching time on predestination? Good preachers have more important words to speak to their congregations. The Arminian pastor cannot stand before his congregation and announce to them that they are the elect of God, because he does not know who in his congregation will persevere in their faith and be saved and thus "become" the elect.

But Reformed preachers are in no better position. There is a gap, asserts Daane, between what is declared in the Reformed confessions and what is preached in the Reformed pulpit. Why? Because in Reformed reflection predestination goes hand in hand with reprobation...
The good news that became unpreachable, Pontifications

Baptist Terrorists in India?

News to me:

The most prominent among the terrorist outfits of Tripura is the NLFT (National Liberation Front of Tripura). It employs terror tactics to effect mass conversion to Christianity (The Statesman 1999, 2000; Ghosh 1999) and is a predominantly Baptist (Protestant) organisation.

[...]

The sectarian nature of the Baptist terrorists has come to the fore. They killed a Catholic priest called Father Victor Crasta on July 25, 2000. In protest the Catholic Church of Tripura called a bandh (closure) in all Catholic run institutions on August 10, 2000. (The Telegraph 2000)
Terrorists in North-East India get support from America

Christianity and Buddhism, Cultural Cross-Fertilization

Catholic missionaries to Tibet in the early part of the last century were struck by the outward resemblances to Catholic liturgy and discipline that were presented by Lamaism—its infallible head, grades of clergy corresponding to bishop and priest, the cross, mitre, dalmatic, cope, censer, holy water, etc. At once voices were raised proclaiming the Lamaistic origin of Catholic rites and practices. Unfortunately for this shallow theory, the Catholic Church was shown to have possessed these features in common with the Christian Oriental churches long before Lamaism was in existence. The wide propagation of Nestorianism over Central and Eastern Asia as early as A.D. 635 offers a natural explanation for such resemblances as are accretions on Indian Buddhism.
Buddhism, Catholic Encyclopedia
via Daniel Mitsui

It seems to me there are pop-speculations aplenty about Buddhistic influences on Christianity, but little about influences in the reverse direction. I do not know whether present comparative religion studies would back up this article from the early twentieth century. However, Peter Leithart acting in a similar spirit once suggested that influences from liberal Protestantism helped sift Buddhism into a Sunday-school friendly form of religion.

Stupid Blurbs: A New Guerilla Marketing Technique?

This is a portion of one sad advertisement from the BlogAds network for the philistine atheist Sam Harris' book Letter to a Christian Nation. It quotes one Jaeger on Myspace: "it's a big middle finger from Sam Harris...."

The full quote is found on the book's Myspace page and reads "I just got the book and it is great... Its a big middle finger from Sam Harris to the idiotic christians (and all other religions)"

(Adding that apostrophe to his blurb sure was a nice editorial touch.)

Bad punctuation, village atheism, references to obscene gestures, MySpace user... need we mention that Jaeger is eighteen years old?

Sure, it's in bad taste to pick on young kids, but it's even more tasteless to quote a kid to advertise a non-fiction book advocating a "mature" belief system.

These blurbs are suspiciously tasty blogfodder. Relapsed Catholic noted another stupid Harris blurb ripe for ridicule. Were I more confident in the marketing savvy of the publishing industry, I'd suspect I was being used.

Ave Atque Vale!

The New Pantagruel closes up shop. Good fun, thanks you all.

When Fundies Read Beowulf

Via The Crockery comes some truly bizzare literary analysis:

Why, then, do so many literature critics say that Beowulf is fiction? It is because they do not believe that dinosaur creatures lived at the same time men lived. Their evolutionary worldview says that dinosaurs lived long ages before men evolved on the earth. Therefore, in their minds, this all must be fiction. But with a Biblical worldview, we can see that dinosaurs entered the ark with Noah--land species at least--and they lived on the earth again after the Flood. But the post-Flood earth was not so hospitable to large creatures and they eventually became almost extinct.
Beowulf: Fiction or History?

The New Democratic Party Summed Up

It is obviously much more difficult to politically organize masses of people if they all think of themselves as individual consumers or as expressive individualists, each freely choosing his own unique (even if vapid and banal) lifestyle, than to organize masses of people who think of themselves as members of working classes or local communities, who share in common most of the important conditions of their lives.
-James Kurth The Rich Get Richer

How Greeley, Colorado Inspired 9/11

Mark Steyn discusses Sayyid Qutb's experience in that university town:

What was so awful about Sayyid Qutb's experience in America that led him to regard modernity as an abomination? Well, he went to a dance in Greeley, Colo.: "The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips..."

In 1949, Greeley, Colo., was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser's charm song Baby, It's Cold Outside. But it was enough to start a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri in Egypt to bin Laden in Saudi Arabia to the mullahs in Iran to the man arrested in Afghanistan on Sept. 11. And it's a useful reminder of how much we could give up and still be found decadent and disgusting by the Islamists. A world without Baby, It's Cold Outside will be very cold indeed.

It seems Steyn's source is Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road To 9/11. I wonder how detailed the Greeley years are.

Colorado Conviction of Saudi Sex Slaver Spooks Off Foreign Students

From Arab News, via FR:

Due to the intimidation and harassment Saudi students have been recently experiencing in the United States, especially after what happened to Homaidan Al-Turki and his family, Saudis are thinking twice before sending their children to study in America.

"Such discrimination and humiliation would discourage parents from even thinking about sending their children to study in the US," said Muhammad Al-Enezi, 39.

On Aug. 31, a Colorado court sentenced Al-Turki to 27 years in prison for sexually assaulting his maid, forcibly imprisoning her and not paying her wages -- charges he vehemently denies.

[...]

Al-Turki, 37, said that US authorities were persecuting him for "traditional Muslim behaviors". He blamed anti-Muslim prejudice for his conviction and the severity of the sentence. He claimed that the prosecutors persuaded the maid to accuse him after they failed to build a case against him as a terrorist.

Somehow I'm not perturbed by these principled refusals to study in the US.

The article does reveal one true area of cross-cultural misunderstanding that could use some correction:

People across Saudi Arabia have little faith in the US government and constantly accuse the authorities there of double standards by harshly punishing Al-Turki, while simultaneously letting off the perpetrators behind the Abu Ghraib fiasco in Iraq with a slap on the wrist.

It was not the Federal government but the Arapahoe County DA who secured Al-Turki's hefty sentence.

Another Dying Language...

A father laments that his son's peers might never learn BASIC:

Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.
David Brin
Why Johnny Can't Code

This article has many good points about the loss of under-the-GUI computer skills. Besides good old Logowriter on the elementary school's Apple IIe, I had at home an old Atari 400 with BASIC support. My dad would type in programs from preteen geek magazines, which would inevitably fail due to a typo somewhere. QBasic was a bit more productive for me. Then a few years later I was dumb enough to blow over $150 on Borland C++ 4.0 for Windows. Without any clue, I tried to learn the language by following a book. Ignorant of the included command-line interpreter, I tried to write DOS programs in a Windows environment. Ah, wasted youth. I was a little like the Koreans who first learned Christianity from books picked up in the Beijing court.

At last I got my hands on a DOS compiler, learning C alongside PASCAL. My one brief peak of high school popularity involved my near-exclusive ability to program games for the TI-85 calculator. I don't think many teachers ever realized that students weren't really "studying math."

Though I jumped the Computer Science boat to learn Latin and Greek, that hobby was certainly more productive than my videogaming, and the loss of BASIC-type programs is truly lamentable.

The "Doctor Dooms" of the Republican Party

Earlier this year we learned of Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a herpetologist who at a scientific conference suggested the death of 90% of the human population would be a good thing.

The usual conservative suspects were quite admirably on the case, and provoked a few days of debate about crackpot messianic scientists saving the people from themselves.

So it is interesting to read this account from the Congressional Record

Mr. Speaker, as chairman of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population, I would like to comment on two newcomers to the Washington scene. They are Dr. Philip Handler, the new president of the National Academy of Sciences and Dr. Roger Olaf Egeberg, the Assistant HEW Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs subject to his confirmation by the Senate. I was extremely heartened by the sense of urgency expressed by both of these national leaders on the problems of overpopulation and dwindling resources. In a recent interview with This Week magazine, Dr. Handler stated:

"The greatest threat to the human race is man's own procreation. Hunger, pollution, crime, overlarge, dirty cities-even the seething unrest that leads to international conflict and war-all derive from the unbridled growth of human populations. It is imperative that we begin a research campaign in human reproductive physiology. Second to the problem of overproduction is that of feeding the world. As we look toward the end of this century, we get closer to the time when the total food supply becomes limiting. If we do not provide more food, we face worldwide famine."

Dr. Egeberg has displayed his keen awareness of the crisis our world is facing by emphasizing that at the top of his list of priorities will be intensified efforts in environmental and population control through technological innovations and family planning, the reclamation of waste products, and the development of a low pollution automobile.

Representative George Herbert Walker Bush
US House of Representatives
Monday, June 30, 1969

Then-Rep. Bush was kind enough to include for the record the complete text of the This Week interview with Dr. Handler:

There are something over 300 known hereditary diseases of man. We have learned to circumvent a number of them by keeping young people alive who suffer from those diseases. They grow up and reproduce, and spread their genes in the population. Instead of improving, the genetic pool of mankind is deteriorating. I think the total good of humanity demands that we minimize the incidence of these defective genes. We have no historical ethic to guide us in this matter, but perhaps such people should not be allowed to procreate.

The other side of the coin is to prevent the problem In the first place. There are some who hope to make DNA--containing only "good" genes--and insert it into the germ plasm of prospective parents. Maybe that will be possible In the distant future.

Or you could improve inheritance by breeding. As its farthest extreme, using the processs I described for cattle, one could, conceivably, deliberately make more Einsteins, Mozarts, or whomever you choose. Another, more practical way is to pick distinguished men and preserve their sp*rm by freezing it in "sp*rm banks." Then married couples might enjoy their own sex relationship, but when they want to have a child, use sp*rm from the sp*rm bank.

Well, there you have it. A future president of the United States is on the record praising popultion control and toying with eugenics. Was this ever an issue in his later election campaigns? Does anybody care?

More on Chancellor Maier's Christian-Islam Relations Talk

Denver Catholic Register follows up on the story. No word of kooky Old Man's Q&A exploits, with good reason. I suspect he's more flattered to have been left out than to have been included.

The story's page includes news of several newly scheduled lectures for the Fall, including Robert Royal and Communio's M. Jean Duchesne. Prof. John Cavadini of Notre Dame and J. Bottum of First Things are scheduled for this Winter or Spring. I'm a bit annoyed at the so-called "neoconservative" bent of Royal and Bottum, not to mention a few boneheaded First Things editorial decisions by Bottum, but I'm also pretty excited that they'll be in town.

The lecturer quality seems to have gone up a notch over those of years past. The Archbishop's lectures, combined with the promising series on the Auraria campus, will certainly provide me plenty of cogitations and blogfodder. Which reminds me, I haven't replied to the Archbishop's fundraising appeal yet.

House vs. Hippocratic Oath, Medical Ethics

Dr. Eric Foreman: You are aware of the Hippocratic oath, right?
Dr. Gregory House: The one that starts, "First, do no harm", then goes on to tell us: no abortions, no seductions, and definitely no cutting of those who labor beneath the stone? Yeah, took a read once. Wasn't impressed.
-House M.D., Fox Network

Is irreverence ever truly refreshing? Is House's characteristic cynicism towards a long medical tradition salutary? Though few laymen seem to know this, the Hippocratic Oath is lapsing into desuetude, being replaced by a melange of emotivism, respect for autonomy(whatever that is), and a dubiously flimsy relativism. The sneers of House sometimes merely underscore the dismissive attitude towards traditional Christian medical ethics found in medical ethics classes, either among the professors, the students, or both.

In a world of selective scaremongering, one searches with difficulty to find polls of the medical professions' attitudes towards life, death, and the more quotidian aspects of their daily practice. Perhaps systematic studies, or media reports on such studies, are not done for fear of provoking the wrath of medical associations and their members. What would House say to that?

Master Masons And Their Passions

I have previously mentioned my admiration for a local one-man castle-builder.

Yet he is not the greatest among amateur builders. Gallego Martinez has surpassed him by building a cathedral on his own. His building lacks just a few more years' work and a bishop.

Catholic Theology Lecture Series in Denver

via John Wren comes news of an impressive lecture series at St. Elizabeth of Hungary parish on the Auraria campus:

ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY
FALL THEOLOGY SERIES

Church, Politics, and Society


Sponsors: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church and SS Cyril and Methodius Russian Byzantine Catholic Community

Where: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church on Auraria Campus
1060 St. Francis Way, Denver, CO. 80204

When: 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Snacks will be served



Thursday, September 21:
"War, Progress and the End of History: A Russian View on the Human Drama"
Dr. Joel Barstad

Thursday, September 28:
"The Politics of Liberty in a Post-Modern Era"
Rev. Dr. Chrysostom Frank

Thursday, October 5:
"The Crusades and their Significance for Today"
Dr. Michael Woodward

Thursday, October 12:
"Should a Christian be A-Political?"
Keith Ruckhaus

Thursday, October 19:
After Forty Years of Feminism, What Next?"
Terry Polakvic

Thursday, October 26: "Polish Catholicism: A Christian Pedagogy for the Oppressed People"
Fr. Raymond Gawronski, S.J.

For more information and directions to the place on Auraria
where this will be held, see http://www.stelizofhungary.org/

I especially look forward to Professor Michael Woodward's talk because I know he is both a solid Catholic scholar and quite dissatisfied with the Crusade apologists on both national and local levels. It will be good to see his less militant interpretation of history.

Papal Remarks Might Cause Further Violence, Media Hopes

When I left for a nice weekend off-line, I was worried about the potential for violent reaction to the mendacious coverage of Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech.

Alas, that potential has moved into the actual. One nun possibly dead in result, several churches firebombed, and nutty Islamists sharpening their blades for some televised decapitations.

Before the first reports cycled in, I pondered the the role of the Western media in fanning the flames of Islamic rage. Did some Western editor think "let's you and him fight, that'll sell newspapers!"� and frame the story in such a way that would be sure to tick off the Islamic media? Did this story first get its wings in the Islamic world first, and then find outlets in Western news?

David Warren suggests this deadly circus was indeed first manufactured by Western journalists, specifically the BBC:

The BBC appears to have been quickest off the mark, to send around the world in many languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, and Malay, word that the Pope had insulted the Prophet of Islam, during an address in Bavaria.

Pitiful. Prepping for export the most inflammatory spin on Pope Benedict's lecture, the BBC journalists were especially yellow. Here is the introductory paragraph to their story Muslim Anger Grows at Pope Speech:

Speaking in Germany, the Pope quoted a 14th Century Christian emperor who said the Prophet Muhammad had brought the world only "evil and inhuman" things.

Of course, the emperor only claimed what was *new* in Islam was evil and inhuman, but the BBC's actions show little regard for either the accuracy or the consequences of its tendentious framing of this speech. People have died, churches have burned, and the BBC seems awfully proud about itself.

There are some patently ridiculous apologies for the press coverage: Pope Benedict should have known he'd be misrepresented by the small-minded ink-stained wretched of the Earth. He should have also known that these falsehoods would then be used by mullahs around the world for the sake of provoking their followers into violence.

In summary, they believe Benedict should have spoken at the level of those with little ability and even less willingness to read with charity and critical engagement.

Here we see why only the blandest of platitudes are fit for public consumption: the distortions of philistine journalists prompt one's public words to remain vanilla for fear of misrepresentation, and the often-used blades of barbarians' knives encourage pedestrian remarks for fear of others' lives.

The public media and its readership demand submission to their simplistic creed of the One Liner. Their leveling of public discourse is among the greatest threats faced by a free people.

Progressive "Whig History" and Islam Today

"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
-Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, Quoted by Pope Benedict XVI

Brief reaction:

The emperor here presents a kind of traditionalism, holding that the best age is behind us: the Truth has already been revealed, the best has already been done and said. "The Tradition is always smarter than you." At our best, we can but imitate the past. Generally speaking, novelties are to be shunned as corruptions.

Perhaps this view has some features in common with Islam, yet at present it is its contrary, progressivism, which sparks these comments.

In modern times "Progress" in its crude secularized form is taken to mean that what comes later is a higher manifestation of previous events. The best is in the future, the worst is in the past. The old is corrupt, the novel worthy of success.

This view is, I hope, too incoherent to be held by people worthy of rational response, but doubtless it has considerable influence on the popular understanding of history. These are the same people who think Martin Luther was an agent of progress, either ignoring or dismissing the monk's reaction against that other supposed marker of progress, the Renaissance.

It is important to consider that, from the perspective of an uncritical progressive--say, a Whig historian's bastard brainchild--Islam is a superior manifestation of religion simply by dint of appearing later in time than Christianity.

Ever-enamored of his dictionary, a progressive sophist might deduce from the pejorative "byzantine" completely superficial ideas about the Empire's quality. He might even claim its subjection to Islam as proof of the latter's superiority, exuding gushing imagery straight out of the Romantic era's infatuation with Turkey and the Arabesque. I could easily imagine such an enraptured devotee make the maddening claim that Mohammed was the Luther of Eastern Christianity. It would not startle me were I to discover that Voltaire or Gibbon or their like have actually ventured such an odd analogy.

Progressivism and primitivism are recurring themes in Western modernity. In much analysis of Leftist interaction and cooperation with Islam one finds an emphasis on primitivism. These brief speculations suggest a paradox: progress is in fact the ally of the primitive.

Feminist Pod Person Possesses Republican Candidate

On his website George Allen, Virginia Republican, blasts Marine opponent James Webb for Opposing Feminist Military Policy. Allen's campaign provides Webb some free publicity for his excellent, substantive essay Why Women Can't Fight, though it's missing page 147.

Has Rush stopped blasting "Feminazis"? Though on occasion pundits cry "sexism" against liberals and the left simply as a petty anti-hypocrisy debating tactic, putative conservatives have generally absorbed feminist critiques of a sexist society. Allen is following a party tradition: the GOP itself, historically having a sizable feminist contingent, has generated some of this numbskull feminism otherwise associated with the Dems. The Democrats, at one time the party of Southerners and traditionalist ethnics, once resisted this feminism with more or less vigor until the McGovernite takeover ended their influence for good--or rather, for the worse.

James Webb shows himself to be a throwback on this issue, and I hope he maintains the stands taken in his excellent essay. With a fool's hope, I hope he'll become even more of a throwback on the other issues where he now follows the McGovernite faction's party line.