The Politics of Science at Work

I have asked the leaderships of both the American Society for Cell Biology and the International Society for Stem Cell Research to conduct anonymous on-line polls of their membership regarding their views on human embryo research. Neither has been willing to do so. Many scientists who do not support human embryo research are afraid to speak out because of possible reprisals from powerful scientists who can affect grant success, publication acceptances, tenure promotion, and employment.

To clone or not to clone, an interview with James Sherley, associate professor of biological engineering at MIT

Veritas from Harvard

My desires haven't altogether changed; I still want my pain to go away. Anyone who felt what I feel and said otherwise would be talking nonsense. But I no longer want it quite so desperately as I once did. Other wants have changed too. For much of my working life, my most desperate desire was to avoid failure and embarrassment. My heart's most fervent prayer was: "Please don't let me mess up too badly." When that prayer failed, I had a backup: "If I do, help me cover it up so no one will notice." I don't pray those sad prayers now. One benefit of living with agony is that professional failure seems a smaller thing than it once did. So does professional success. I take more joy in my work now than I did when my back was healthy; not coincidentally, I have less ego invested in it. I care more about getting things right and less about convincing others that I’m clever. I love the ideas more, and I love the praise I get from them less, which makes for better ideas, and a more satisfying professional life.

From William J. Stuntz reflection on Suffering, Doing Your Duty

My own condition has given me joyful freedom. No longer am I incredibly anxious about my future, a worry which had been a looming tyrant in my healthier days. Any lengthy experience of one's powerlessness exposes petty successes and failures for what they are.

Following Servais Pinckaers, I'm a bit worried about the author's emphasis on Duty and Obligation, which sometimes overshadow Virtue, but perhaps I'm reading too much into this. Stuntz touches upon the Cross, but generally avoids Christology. John Paul II's Apostolic Letter on the Christian meaning of human suffering, Salvifici Doloris, fills this gap nicely.

Priesthood Controversies: Being vs. Functioning

The issue is not about the marriage or celibacy, or sexuality at all _ not really. The issue is how does our culture make sense of Catholic priesthood when we have come to understand the diminishing role of clergy (Protestant as well as Catholic) solely in terms of functionality?

[...]

Now contrast this development with what was claimed of the Catholic priest in the same 16th century. Committed to the idea that what one is has priority over what one does, Roman Catholicism came to understand the priest as an icon of sorts: He was a sign of the "other." It wasn't that he was holier or wiser, or even necessarily a good person. But the priest bore a certain other-ness, often (usually?) in spite of himself.
Rev. David Lewis Stokes, Jr., When the Priesthood Becomes a Bundle of Cliches
Via Eve Tushnet

In her work Icarus Fallen Chantal Delsol noted the collapse of role into function:

“In a practical sense, roles remain determined. Not that playing them is compulsory—a mother may abandon her child, and [Vaclav] Havel could have refused to lead. But to take on a role is very often a response to a felt moral obligation. In a sense, the person inherits the role because of the position he is in, the responsibility he has accepted, or the irreplaceable experience he alone can draw upon. Because he is irreplaceable, and because action is necessary, he simply cannot turn away without failing to live up to his duty.

The very idea of obligation, in combination with the inegalitarianism inherent in the notion of role, has led contemporary society to reject roles in favor of functions. Functions have no obligations because they can always be carried out by someone else. They leave open the freedom to abandon one’s post, which is not considered a desertion. And because of their neutral and anonymous character, they presuppose that virtually every and any individual can fulfill them. Functions serve both liberty and equality. And so our contemporaries reject roles, which create both obligations and distinctions.

Just as functions have replaced roles in modern society, the individual has come to replace the person, the latter phenomenon being a corollary of the former. The person is unique, the individual interchangeable. The more functions there are, the more human beings define themselves by their competencies and repertories of technical abilities. This is the price of equality. With the disappearance of roles, the individual is left to himself and is henceforth able to choose anything. A society cannot make absolute equality a reality. In our society, however, we have managed to at least make it a virtual reality: anyone can, in theory, take the place of anyone else.

Thus, the modern individual no longer expects at all to be “indispensable.” Everywhere replaceable, he has become free and indistinct. He has gained liberty at the expense of his uniqueness, and even further, at the expense of his identity. For we identify with what makes us distinct from others more than with what makes us the same: we prefer to present ourselves to others by talking about our athletic accomplishments, the volunteer work we do for such-and-such a cause, or a hobby in which we have suddenly found interest,rather than by referring to our professional titles, which we share with a hundred thousand others. It is obvious that personal identity is attached to roles rather than functions.

The society of roles saw inequality everywhere, even where it did not exist. The society of functions sees equality everywhere, even where it does not exist.”
(Icarus Fallen, p. 143-144)

So too we see the flattening of "Father" or "Mother" into a functional "caregiver," and a "husband" or "wife" or even "spouse" is transmogrified into "partner." Even the origin of life itself, the womb, is now viewed as simply a functional uterus which can be replaced by artificial and impersonal means in just a few years.

All this functionalism makes one feel like one is simply another part in the Matrix. No wonder the movie was so popular.

Cant Cant Cant

The Denver Post gave psychologist and community college professor Keith Swain some space to lecture Catholics on their doctrine. Apparently Swain is an Episcopalian with an affinity for pretending to be places he wasn't.

Also, She Who Runs Off At the Mouth Dani Newsum flips out at the Denver Post bloghouse site in another typical Catholic-bashing screed.

Both seem to have relied on the critique-o-matic for lazy thinkers.

I generally ignore these things, but since these are locals I feel obliged to reply.

For Swain's piece, I dashed off this letter to the editor:

Opinion pieces generally only have space for saying "this is good!" or "this is bad!" Professor Swain's Dec. 6 essay "Sex and the church" proclaims "Catholic sexual ethics: bad!" He claims the restatement of a ban on gays in the priesthood to be wrong-headed, but considering that 80% of abuse victims were adolescent males, that there are rumors of a "Lavender Mafia" blackmailing their way out of disciplinary action, and that a gay male can only with great difficulty proclaim in full sincerity the glories of Christian marriage and its consumating act, such a ban is a very reasonable measure.

Of greater concern is Prof. Swain's casual dismissal of two millennia of Christian ethics in favor of a modish masturbatory ethos. This is no place for theological discussion, but to sum up: Catholics love sex. Since fertility is part of sex, that is also to be loved and not to be shunned, as are the babies who are the marital act's greatest fruit. For further explanation, I suggest reading the last pope's sublime Theology of the Body, or local writer Christopher West's concise summaries of said theology for the average reader.

My response to Dani Newsum's rant:

Ms. Newsum,

Have you tried prayer and fasting?

It might have kept you from mindlessly parroting Reformation-era agitprop, which only distracts from the very real failings of the episcopal hierarchy.

I'll note that one indisputably fatal aspect of modern feminism is the mass extermination of the unwanted unborn. It's sad to say, but thanks to feminists' dehumanizing of the fetus in the past few decades altar boys have actually been safer than a babe in her mother's womb. The libertine ethos which feminism encouraged has also lead to disease and unfathomable personal distress and familial disorder. But now I'm the one distracting the discussion.

Phillip Jenkins, among others, claims that the rate of abuse among Catholic priests is no greater than among any other organization. The problem was magnified because the bishops, like Americans in general, have lost the sense of sin and were treating these pederasts as victims rather than wicked moral agents. They had bought in to the therapeutic ethos, bringing in psychologists when they should have called the police and demanded laborious penances from such sinners. (Though knowing what happens to child molesters in prison, putting them in jail would just have likely led to even more hidden acts of rape and sexual abuse in a Dantesque contrapasso). Clericalism among the laity had not only led them to outsource their call to holiness, but to kowtow to every misguided, heretical, or predatory cleric, and are to an extent complicit in the abuse.

Since the homosexual is now a certified Sinless Victim of the Evil Patriarchy, it's no surprise that you're trying to downplay their misdeeds just as the bishops downplayed those of their homosexual priests. Considering the massive percentage of male victims any claim that this is not a homosexual problem is completely laughable. Perhaps you have not heard reports of the "Lavender Mafia" blackmailing their fellow priests into silence, taking over certain seminaries, screening out any normal men and recruiting more members to its perverted circle. That's one reason behind the recent Apostolic Visitation to American seminaries.

Besides curtailing the Lavenders' power, the ban on gay men is also quite reasonable from a pastoral perspective. A gay man can only with great psychological difficulty proclaim the glories of Christian marriage and its consumating act.

"I can’t think of any institution that is less qualified to address the systemic problem of pedophile priests than the Vatican."

I can! I can! The Denver Post's Bloghouse!

As for the vocation shortage, this is very much due to lazy bishops and actual fifth columnists who want no priests so that the laity can take "control." By this time next year, Denver will have ordained over a dozen seminarians in the past two years.

"Sex. It’s normal - it’s healthy. An institution that requires its members to abstain from sex is not. Jesus didn’t require celibacy from his disciples; and his relationship with Mary Magdalene was one of trust and intimacy, if not actual sex. I’m not talking “Da Vinci Code,” although Dan Brown’s novel is probably closer to the truth than the lies spun by the Catholic Church."

Ms. Newsum, this is sickeningly masturbatory. Do you recall that Jesus Himself condemned even sexual fantasies? He is far more demanding than your flabby libertinism or sixties' pop-theology imagines Him to be, which is why the floor of hell is, as St. John Chrysostom said, paved with the skulls of priests and bishops its burning lampposts.

Where do you attend your No Popery meetings?

Denver Post's Bloghouse is quite dead, a failed Old Media attempt to catch the New Wave, but Ms. Newsum does get on the local PBS station occasionally.

A Theological Tidbit for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception

"Answer," then, is quintessentially feminine, and this is why it was so "fitting," as Thomas Aquinas says, that the consent to the incarnation come from a woman.[7] Moreover, not only was Mary predestined to be the Mother of the Savior, whose consent to the incarnation would inaugurate the drama of our redemption, she would do so entirely by the power of the grace of God.[8] Only this realization, enshrined in the infallibly defined dogma of the Immaculate Conception, can preserve the essential feature of our theodramatic redemption: that God has in his infinite freedom decided to save us in a way that respects our finite freedom but which also demands his infinite power of grace to fulfill:

In the course of unfolding these implications, two difficulties were encountered that have occupied theology right up to medieval and modern times. The first arose from the realization that God's action in reconciling the world to himself in the Cross of Christ is exclusively his initiative; there is no original "collaboration" between God and the creature. But as we have already said, the creature's "femininity" possesses an original, God-given, active fruitfulness; it was essential, therefore, if God's Word willed to become incarnate in the womb of a woman, to elicit the latter's agreement and obedient consent... God could not violate his creature's freedom. But where did the grace that made this consent possible come from--a consent that is adequate and therefore unlimited--if not from the work of reconciliation itself, that is, from the Cross? (And the Cross is rendered possible only through Mary's consent.) Here we have a circle--in which the effect is the cause of the cause--that has taken centuries to appreciate and formulate, resulting in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the exact reasoning behind it.

From Edward T. Oakes' Pattern of Redemption, Posted Here Long Ago

Telos at Work, Pardon The Mess

A nice discussion is brewing on essentialism, anti-essentialism, and Darwinism from a philosophy professor and classicist who I have somehow missed all this time.

Kluxers: Star Wars Nerds, Twenties' Style!

A nice little piece from Reason tweaking certain progressive policies of the Ku Klux Klan.

It didn't take long for America's first blockbuster feature film to produce its first creepy fan subculture. Right before the Atlanta debut of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, an epic that glorified the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, William Joseph Simmons and 11 others celebrated Thanksgiving by burning a cross atop Stone Mountain and declaring the KKK reborn. A week later, on December 4, 1915, they received a charter from the state of Georgia for their new organization, dubbed The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.

The parallels with contemporary Star Wars or LOTR fans is too precious to ignore.

Being a Libertarian, of course the author has to bash some of the Klan's more moralistic strains:

Race may have been paramount in other parts of the South, but in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, wrote Alexander, the Klan's activities "indicated a strikingly small amount of hostility to Negroes." Instead, the "Klansman's conception of reform encompassed efforts to preserve premarital chastity, marital fidelity, and respect for parental authority; to compel obedience of state and national prohibition laws; to fight the postwar crime wave; and to rid state and local governments of dishonest politicians." These Klansmen were more likely to flog you for bootlegging or breaking your marriage vows than for being black or Jewish.

One of my great-grandfathers made it into family lore for kicking the Klan out of his yard when they tried to burn a cross on it. This of course brings to mind the image of an old-timer yelling "Damn kids, get off my lawn!" but the Klan in Denver was quite intimidating and politically powerful for a time. Thomas Noel reports one incident in Arvada not too far from my great-grandparents' home:

The Shrine of St. Anne also attracted the hooded eyes of the Ku Klux Klan, which met on nearby Hackberry Hill. These spooks burned crosses in front of the shrine and harrassed Walter Grace, the first pastor. The Klan and its sympathizers took glee in charging Father Grace with forging an altar wine permit and serving wine socially during the prohibition era, for which he served two years in prison.

In August 1925, several thousand Klansmen marched through the streets of Arvada. In reply, thousands of Catholics led by the Knights of Columbus and Holy Name societies from throughout Denver countermarched from Regis College to St. Anne's for an outdoor Mass. Shortly afterwards, the Klan collapsed.

I've fancied putting together a parade to follow the old KofC route to mark the centennial and to celebrate the Klan's demise. I still have twenty years to plan a dance on the Kluxer's grave.

Galileo Galilei's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina is an excellent read.

A favorite passage:

I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities, Of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. For the sake of those who deserve to be separated from the herd, it is necessary that wise expositors should produce the true senses of such passages, together with the special reasons for which they were set down in these words. This doctrine is so widespread and so definite with all theologians that it would be superfluous to adduce evidence for it.

It is quite a pity that Counter-reformation paranoia, clerical politics, and no small amount of impolitic aggrandizing generally kept Galileo's work in the dark.

Plaudits to DarwinCatholic and Speculative Catholic for bringing it to my attention.

"I will now let you into a secret. Not only do most voters not have the slightest knowledge of or interest in policy; the majority of politicians do not possess it either."

Alan Watkins, via Kevin Michael Grace's The Ambler

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Business?

As discussed previously, big government is the best friend of big business. Tim Carney gives actual examples of this influence at work:

Wal-Mart made news last month when it called for a raise in the federal minimum wage--something Democrats typically welcome. Despite its reputation for paying slave wages, Wal-Mart on average pays its hourly full-time employees $10.53 per hour, according to the company's website. The current federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.

So, if minimum wage goes up, Wal-Mart might not pay an extra dime in wages. But Mom 'n Pop corner stores--Wal-Mart's competition--who employ local High School students at or near minimum wage will be in a pickle. The small stores might just have to close their doors, driving even more business to the retail giant--that is if Wal-Mart gets its way in Washington.

And what about evil Phillip Morris? What is it lobbying for on Capitol Hill? Check the company's annual report to find out. The 2005 Altria Group annual report states that the company: "endorsed federal legislation introduced in May 2004 in the Senate and the House of Representatives, known as the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which would have granted the FDA the authority to regulate the design, manufacture and marketing of cigarettes and disclosures of related information."

In other words, Phillip Morris is on Ted Kennedy's side in supporting greater federal regulation of tobacco. This regulation, of course, would be more burdensome to smaller cigarette companies than to Phillip Morris, which controls nearly half of the industry.

Short Story in Six Words

A month or two ago either Matthew Lickona or Terry Teachout (maybe both) were talking about Hemingway's successful reply to a challenge that required him to write a story in six words. Hemingway's answer:

"Baby shoes for sale, never used."

My contribution to the contest:

"Wifey's pregnant, but the vasectomy worked."

An Essay summarizing Gilson's From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again

Class notes from Rev. Wojciech Giertych, OP's class on Fundamental Moral Theology. It is of the same school of thought as Servais Pinckaers, who was featured here long ago.

Yet Another Sex Article

I am getting very sick of "sex talk." Too much theory, not enough practice! St. Paul's admonition "let some things never be spoken of among you" provides a convenient excuse for opting out of the always mildly salacious discussions frequenting the topic.

I suppose such talk is necessary, after all, and I think the Touchstone article by R. V. Young, The Gay Invention is quite useful, concisely covering the linguistic and conceptual history of homosexuality.

A few extracts and commentary:

St. Thomas thus points out that while even simple fornication is “against properly human nature, of which the act of generation is ordered to the appropriate education of children,” sodomy is “against the nature of every animal” because it is not aimed at generation at all.

This finally makes the "against nature" description of such acts make sense. The rationale also applies both against a contracepted act of fornication and a contracepted marital act. Perhaps this means the contemporary adulation of homosexuality is linked on a very deep level to the wide acceptance of contraception, because even married people no longer aim at begetting children in the consumation of their married life. Elsewhere Thomas decribes self-abuse as a sin sometimes called the sin of effeminacy, further revealing a possible deep consistency behind the course the pornoculture is taking.

But in our consequentialist age, who wants to argue against distributing contraceptives to kiddies or the HIV positive because contracepted acts are inherently sodomitical and that unprotected fornication is a "less grave" mortal sin than the "protected" kind? I'd be tempted to make such an argument just to shock. However, the newly-found reverence for sodomy is better explained if one thinks that mainstream America has itself been practicing sodomy even in the marriage bed.

Lest one think this too radical, it has been reported that Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, advised Paul VI that the reasoning behind the condemnation of sodomy collapses upon declaring contraceptives compatible with Christian marriage.

Another conclusion: it seems a contracepted marital act cannot consumate a marriage.

A further point of interest from the article:

The first edition of the OED (1933) lists sporadic usages of “gender” for “sex” from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, but notes that such usage is “now only jocular.” The second edition (1989) adds this to the entry: “In mod. (esp. feminist) use a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.”

Though there is a way of thinking in merely biological categories that should be avoided, the flight from the biological is getting really ridiculous right now, especially with the advent of transhumanist nutjobs.

Peas in a Pod: The State and The Corporation

I have come across an interesting essay by anarcho-capitalist Roy Childs, Big Business and the Rise of American Statism. I skimmed halfway through until I hit pay dirt.

A few excerpts:

For the Marxists hold that there are fundamentally two opposing “interests” which clash in history: the capitalists and the workers. But what we have seen, essentially, is that the interests (using the word in a journalistic sense) of neither the capitalists nor the workers, so-called, were uniform or clear-cut. The interests of the larger capitalists seemed to coincide, as they saw it, and were clearly opposed to the interests of the smaller capitalists. (However, there were conflicts among the big capitalists, such as between the Morgan and Rockefeller interests during the 1900s, as illustrated in the regimes of Roosevelt and Taft.) The larger capitalists saw regulation as being in their interest, and competition as opposed to it; with the smaller businessmen, the situation was reversed.

[still happening today. See the USDA's upcoming requirement to license all livestock, no matter how small one's flock or herd.]

[...]

In this crucially important era, I have focused on one point: big business was a major source of American statism.

[...]

Big business, then, was behind the existence and curriculum of the public educational system, explicitly to teach young minds to submit and obey, to pay homage to the “corporate liberal” system which the politicians, a multitude of intellectuals and many big businessmen created.

In several ways, this piece dovetails with the distributist critique of the large corporation. Too much capitalism doesn't mean too many capitalists, but too few, and it's in the interests certain folk to make sure there are too few entrepreneurs. Reading the essay, I realized not only does regulation benefit the larger businesses, but they have enough clout to tailor the regulations to their existing business structure, further keeping their compliance costs down while maintaining the appearance of doing something.

I had already realized that public schooling can transfer vocational training costs from business to taxpayers, but Childs provides a few choice quotes from early twentieth-century corporate leaders who supported the move towards compulsory education.

Yet another ID vs. Darwinism Post

Last Sunday, an opinion piece on the current science education kerfuffle, Science and religion face off:
The two really aren't incompatible, was printed in the Denver Post. I was going to send a snide and pithy letter to the editor about it, since snide and pithy letters are the only kind the editor prints, but fortunately the author is a member of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, which has a weblog called Prometheus. (One wonders about the propriety of defending the concordance of science and religion on a site named for a Titan who defied the will of Zeus to bring technology to man.)

So fortunately I could post a fleshed-out list of my concerns with the piece on the thread Tom Yulsman on Religion and Science, which will hopefully receive a reply. I copy most of my comments below:

For what it's worth, I thought the piece was a bit weak. For one, it sometimes treated religion as the practice of engaging in warm and fuzzy thoughts about self and universe, and sometimes as simple deism, the former type of religion being compatible with anything, and the latter being, as pointed out, anathema to most monotheists.

For another, I don't think invoking Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" is credible, since to my knowledge he treated no religion as having any teaching authority. Though at least he didn't engage in the village atheist polemics of Dawkins.

Finally, there is at least one point where science could hypothetically disprove Christianity, namely by finding the body of Jesus of Nazareth. As St. Paul declares, "And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins." (1 Cor 15:17) Certain Christians and atheists think there are more areas where such disproofs could happen, but that's at least the bare minimum arena of possible conflict.

I'm wondering what you make of the way evolution is taught. There is certainly a lot of sloppy teaching in the field. One of my anthropology classes at CU-Boulder engaged in Bonobo hagiography, depicting the oversexed apes as moral exemplars, while the professor habitually proclaimed his existential despair because he believed himself to be in a purposeless universe, and that Darwinism justified his unwelcomed hopelessness.

What's more, there's a certain philosophical anthropology at work in the presentation of evolution. For all its claims to have banished "telos," popular Darwinism treats genetic propagation as the highest good of mankind, and thus lust is portrayed as a positive good rather than a sin. It also tends to deny human agency and, following Darwin, any ontological difference between man and his fellow creatures.

Of course, fanboy that I am, I had to plug my former professor Edward T. Oakes' writings. I did neglect to mention that he's revising the draft of his book on evolutionary theory for Cambridge University Press.

Philosophers Ancient and Modern

The ancient schools of thought—Platonic, Aristotelian, Cynic, Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptic—commonly drew a distinction between “philosophy,” meaning the moral and spiritual formation of the soul or person , and “discourse about philosophy,” understood as the investigation of the nature of things and the modes of our knowledge of them. This distinction is related to the more familiar categories of practical and speculative philosophy. But whereas late-modern, recent, and contemporary thought has invested greatest effort and talent in the pursuit of speculation—in the form of epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophies of language and logic—the ancients give priority to practice, and, within that, to the cultivation of wisdom and the development of what the Greeks called “untroubledness” (ataraxia).

Much more of the writing of antiquity, the middle ages, and the early modern period belongs to “philosophy” in the sense of the “practice of wisdom” than is now generally recognized. The French historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, has argued that the Western idea of spirituality, which we are apt to think of as entirely religious in source, may have originated not in the Desert Fathers of Christianity but in pre-existing philosophical traditions.

John Haldane, What Philosophy Can Do

2005 Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh

Note to aspiring philosophy majors: Don't go into academic philosophy under the impression that it still resembles the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life. Modern philosophy departments implicitly deny the necessity of ethical training for good philosophy, rarely requiring that discipline of self which checks the libido dominandi, among other passions, from compromising one's intellectual inquiries.

The Local Classical Music Scene

Enthused by an Indian Summer of weather and health, I made it down to an exquisite performance of Handel's Messiah, Dublin Version, last Friday at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Littleton. I had no idea of the quality of their music program. They have a choir and chamber orchestra, a baroque orchestra, and a Gregorian schola! In the desert of contemporary church music, they are an oasis of tradition and good talent.

Of related interest, Early Music Colorado

A Monitory Example of the Political Novel Genre

Senator Barbara Boxer has written a bad novel

CU-Boulder Episcopal Chaplain Is Converting to Catholicism

James Cavanagh notes his decision and asks for prayers.

I never met any Episcopalians while at CU, so at most I perhaps only knew him through the annual anti-cult warning given to new students, which most of the chaplains endorsed.

When I first matriculated, CU's Catholic parish was a bit flaky, as are most campus parishes. It has become much more lively since the arrival of FOCUS.

(I am now informed that the Paulists are pulling out of the parish, which is a pity. It was there that I was reintroduced to the practice of confession, and for that I owe those priests something priceless.)