How little we know our sexual selves, and how much less we know with each passing day as we are enjoined to accept ever more bizarre permutations of sexual love (or "love") as perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. There is somewhere in our fascination with all these permutations, most of which are useless except as fillips to a jaded appetite, evidence that we have completely lost sense of the place that sex has in a healthy life.
Just as a sociological matter, this should give us pause. Generally speaking, our society is more concerned with producing and responding to arguments than probably any other in the history of the world. Whether the issue is abortion or gay rights, tax policy or the trade deficit, global warming or third-world debt, everyone seems ready to adduce arguments in support of some position or other. In learned periodicals like the Journal of Philosophy or the Harvard Law Review, on the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, in the rough-and-tumble opinion journalism of National Review and The Nation, in the postings of bloggers and the ramblings of barroom blowhards, we find nothing but arguments about morals and politics. There are very few people—in fact, virtually none—who "a priori reject rational argumentation" in morals or politics.
Indeed, insofar as King has a theology, it involves an Almighty who wills not only sacrifice but also suffering and death to serve a larger purpose that's beyond any mortal ken. Such a God is awesome and cruel all at once, with no interest in answering to his creatures-even if many of King's characters react with appropriately Joban outrage to his demands. "He can't take them all and leave me!" wails David Carver, the preteen prophet from Desperation, when it becomes clear that his whole family will die at the demon's hands while he is required to live. "Killer God," a woman screams in The Stand, when Mother Abagail delivers God’s demand that her husband go out into the desert unarmed to confront their adversary. "Killer God! . . . Millions-maybe billions-dead in the plague. Millions more afterward . . . Isn’t he done yet? Does it just have to go on and on until the earth belongs to the roaches? He's no God. He's a daemon, and you're His witch."
[...]
Nor is King's God disposed to handle every supernatural flare-up. He coexists with a multitude of lesser powers, and he allows most of them more or less free rein. Not only ghosts and demons are loose in King’s post-secular landscape but also a Who’s Who of stranger spiritual influences, some benign and some malignant, some distinctively American and some very much Old World. In Rose Madder, there’s Circe and the Minotaur; in Insomnia, the three Fates, spinning, measuring, and cleaving away; in Pet Sematary, the Native American Wendigo. And then there is the host of quasi-mythic beings that King himself invents, from the dizzying cast of his Dark Tower saga to the unearthly Long Boy, which haunts the visions of a writer and his wife in last year's Lisey’s Story, fixing them with "the hideous pressure of its insane regard." Writing in Books and Culture several years ago, Susan Wise Bauer complained that the willingness of King's God to tolerate these lesser rivals-and his insistence that his human surrogates take them on-made him "an undemanding fellow" who outsources the hard work to human beings "and then desperately hopes they can pull it off." King’s Almighty, she suggested, "is much like Rabbi Kushner’s God-creative, good, well-meaning, but limited."
But, if anything, the opposite is true. King's God isn't a well-meaning weakling, holding our hands and hoping things turn out OK; rather, he's so far above the various adversaries, from Tak to Randall Flagg, that the possibility of their winning passing victories concerns him not at all. The demons are a means to chastise and test a struggling humanity, not a threat to God himself; they are the potter's wheel on which King's characters can be broken without placing God's providence in doubt.
This is questionable theology, but it is genius as a literary move and a perfect solution to the problem that God's omnipotence poses for dramatic tension in a supernatural novel.
Ross Douthat, Stephen King's American Apocalypse
I'm sorry for what my people did to your people
It was a nasty job
Please note the change of attitude
On the bumper of my Saab.
[...]
"In the transformed world of what was once an old boys club, "feminism," he[Walter Benn Michaels] writes, "is what you appeal to when you want to make it sound as if the women of Wall Street and the women of Wal-Mart are both victims of sexism."
Relativism, unfoundedly dogmatic, views religions as unjustified beliefs. Because it does so in an unfounded manner, it cannot demonstrate it, hence it simply "believes it." Relativism "believes" that religions are unfounded, thus they cannot be compared. In other words, it believes that religions have nothing to do with reason and truth. Then all religions are dogmatic, in the trivial sense of the word, i.e. in the sense of "accepted without evidence" (just like relativism, but relativism does not seem to be aware of that).
In the current relativistic vulgate, in fact, the word dogma generically and superficially means "something that is accepted without evidence and thus in a dogmatic manner." Just as philosophical relativism deprives religion of a true public role, the corresponding religious relativism deprives religion from playing its public role. As we will see better later, the public role of reason and that of religious faith either stand together or die.
[...]
Only when man has lost sight of the ability to know what is good and what is true, then all offers of salvation become the same. If we do not have any standards of right living, then all religions are the same. If the standards for right living are relativized, man remains trapped inside religions.
[...]
It is also clear that the political power that seeks to organize society according to reason not only cannot relate to all religions in the same way, but should also cherish its obligations to the true religion. Of course, if the political power is based on the relativistic democracy, it will not feel any obligation in this regard. Relativism, in fact, can only express a procedural public reason. When the truth is replaced by the decision of the majority, culture is set against truth. The relativistic presumption leads to the tearing up of people's spiritual roots and the destruction of the network of social relationships.
Relativism regards all religions as equivalent. It does so because it is incapable of engaging in a public critique of religions because for relativism common good cannot be rationally identified. By doing so, it precludes the possibility for the true religion to religiously support what men do to attain the common good. Here, too, we see a negative spiral. Relativistic democracy produces religious relativism and this strengthens ethical and social relativism.
In 1912, in his presidential address to the First International Congress of Eugenics, a landmark gathering in London of racial biologists from Germany, the United States, and other parts of the world, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, trumpeted the spread of eugenics and evolution. As described by Nicholas Wright Gillham in his A Life of Francis Galton, Major Darwin foresaw the day when "eugenics would become not only a grail, a substitute for religion, as Galton had hoped, but a 'paramount duty' whose tenets would presumably become enforceable." The major repeated his father’s admonition that, though the crudest workings of natural selection must be mitigated by "the spirit of civilization," society must encourage breeding among the best stock and prevent it among the worst "without further delay."
Leonard Darwin’s recognition of his father’s role in the formation and promotion of eugenics was more than filial piety. Though Charles Darwin usually preferred the savannas of research to the sierras of philosophic speculation, he was a main player in the "transvaluation of values," including the advancement of theories every bit as hard and merciless as Nietzsche’s. Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their 1991 biography, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, make clear that natural selection was intended as more than a theory of life’s origins. "'Social Darwinism' is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image," they write. "But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start-Darwinism was invented to explain human society."
Peter Quinn, The Gentle Darwinians
For the majority of the airtime on Radio Sawa (50 minutes of the hour) and Radio Farda (the two 24-hour radios in Arabic and Persian), America is represented by everyone from Eminem, to J. Lo, to Britney Spears in the fight against terrorism. (If you find this hard to believe, you can listen in on their websites.) Why at a time of utmost gravity, would the US government do something like this, especially when no other successful international broadcaster, like the BBC, has?
[...]
Radio Sawa’s progenitor, media mogul Norman Pattiz, while still serving his Clinton-appointed term on the BBG in 2002, told The New Yorker that "it was MTV that brought down the Berlin Wall."
[...]
In October 2002, the new and now still serving chairman of the BBG, Ken Tomlinson, approvingly quoted his Naval Academy graduate son: "her (Britney Spears’) music represents the sounds of freedom."
Winning Muslim Hearts with Eminem
Ron Hansen has built up an impressive resume: award-winning author, literary editor, professor.
But Hansen's latest undertaking isn't a typical literary affair -- Hansen has become a deacon in the Catholic Church. He was ordained as a permanent deacon Saturday at the Mission Church in front of over 200 of his friends and family.
Look, the problem of the transmission of tradition and knowledge isn’t a problem; it’s the problem of our civilization. I recently participated in a public debate on school. My interlocutor, the famous Professor Alain Viala, was a man of letters who is very much in style these days, a professor at the Sorbonne, chock-full of all the titles and honors possible. Well, in his course on French Literature, this great professor doesn’t have students read one work–not even one, you understand?–of French literature. To pass the exam in French Literature you needn’t read even one line of Montaigne, Racine, Balzac, or Victor Hugo. For that matter, now they begin instilling doubt in the children’s heads in elementary school. Parents observe–we have thousands of witnesses to this–that their children return from school agitated, troubled, while school, in order to transmit knowledge, should above all give tranquility. Today, school destroys their faith in themselves. Just think, now they’re establishing philosophy seminars for children, "so they learn to seek," they say. But how can an individual look for something, if he isn’t sure about anything?
yesterday. Doubtless the book was only in the ill-tended poetry section for his anniversary."O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day."
As I Walked Out One Evening, November 1937
This grand symbolic response—re-establishing our dignitas and reclaiming history—had to be a Great War narrative. It had to mirror, and in critical ways surpass, the mythic passage of World War II. That war reified the narrative tabernacle, but this war had an even greater charge: the divine final fulfillment of America’s world mission.
So we are, as our own government tells us, in a war of civilizations—a national testing in which we will emerge triumphant, the true beacon and best hope of humankind or else find ourselves destroyed, the detritus of history. This is not simply inflated rhetoric. It is avowed American policy.
In the president’s own words, it is nothing less than “the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history,” pitting “progress” and “freedom” against a “mortal danger to all humanity,” the “enemy of civilization.” Moreover, “the call of history has come to the right country,” and “the defense of freedom is worth the sacrifice.” Ultimately the “evil ones” will be destroyed, and “this great country will lead the world to safety, security, and peace,” a millennial world where “free peoples will own the future.”2
Here inevitably, rather than reflecting actual conditions, it is more important for reality to fit the sacred narrative. So for nearly four years, it has been “the Iraqi people” vs. “the killers,” or more broadly in the world of Islam, “good moderate Muslims” vs. “evil.”
Does it matter whether we pursue grand drama for wholly narcissistic reasons, as long as we win? What if we don’t? Failure might lead to the collapse of friendly tyrannies like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia or even to economic crisis and an expansion of the war. Longstanding alliances could come apart. But even then our military power, our vast economy, and the strength of the American people would still be intact. Strategic recovery should still be possible. The old narrative might be in tatters, but that might turn out to be a good thing because we could then build a more modest national story.
Such recovery is foreclosed, however, in a script of civilization and its enemies. Not only did American leaders go for the existential War of History instead of dealing with reality, they chose the worst possible dramatic vehicle for restaging the national passion play. For what we are experiencing is no war of civilizations. It is not even a war.
Questions of method, important as they are, need not be raised at all until the researcher can first determine and circumscribe the object of his studies in a convincing way. And here it seems worth mentioning-just for precision’s sake-that religion does not actually exist. Rather there are a great number of traditions of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call religions but that could scarcely differ from one another more. It might seem sufficient, for the purposes of research, simply to identify general resemblances among these traditions, but even that is notoriously hard to do, since the effort to ascertain what sort of things one is looking at involves an enormous amount of interpretation and no clear criteria for evaluating any of it. One cannot establish where the boundaries lie between religious systems and magic, or folk science, or myth, or social ceremony.
There is not even any compelling reason to assume a genetic continuity or kinship between, say, shamanistic beliefs and developed rituals of sacrifice, or between tribal cults and traditions like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, or to assume that these various developed traditions are varieties of the same thing. One may feel that there is a continuity or kinship, or presuppose on the basis of one’s prejudices, inklings, or tastes that the extremely variable and imprecise characteristic of a belief in the supernatural constitutes proof of a common ancestry or type. But all this remains a matter of interpretation, vague morphologies, and personal judgments of value and meaning, and attempting to construct a science around such intuitions amounts to little more than mistaking "all the things I don’t believe in" for a scientific genus. One cannot even demonstrate that apparent similarities of behavior between cultures manifest similar rationales, as human consciousness is so promiscuously volatile a catalyst in social evolution.
Moreover, the task of delineating the phenomenon of religion in the abstract becomes perfectly hopeless as soon as one begins to examine what particular traditions of faith actually claim, believe, or do. It is already difficult enough to define what sort of thing religion is. But what sort of thing is the Buddhist teaching of the Four Noble Truths? What sort of thing is the Vedantic doctrine that Atman and Brahman are one? What sort of thing is the Christian belief in Easter? What is the core and what are the borders of these phenomena? What are their empirical causes? What are their rationales? Grand, empty abstractions about religion are as easy to produce as to ignore. These, by contrast, are questions that touch on what persons actually believe, and to answer them requires an endless hermeneutical labor-an investigation of history, and intellectual traditions, and contemplative lore, and so on and so forth-which ultimately requires a degree of specialization that few can hope to achieve; even then, the specialist’s conclusions must always remain open to doubt and revision.
-David B. Hart, Daniel Dennet Hunts the Snark
Religio for St. Thomas is just one virtue which presupposes a context of ecclesial practices which are both communal and particular to the Christian Church. Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that during the Middle Ages, considered by modems the "most religious" period of Christian history, no one ever thought to write a book on religion. In fact he suggests that "the rise of the concept 'religion' is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself."32 In other words the rise of the modern concept of religion is associated with the decline of the Church as the particular locus of the communal practice of religio.
The dawn of the modern concept of religion occurs around the late fifteenth century, first appearing in the work of the Italian Renaissance figure Marsilio Ficino. His 1474 work entitled De Christiana Religione is the first to present religio as a universal human impulse common to all. In Ficino's Platonic scheme, religio is the ideal of genuine perception and worship of God. The various historical manifestations of this common impulse, the varieties of pieties and rites that we now call religions, are all just more or less true (or untrue) representations of the one true religio implanted in the human heart. Insofar as it becomes a universal impulse, religion is thus interiorized and removed from its particular ecclesial context.
The second major shift in the meaning of the term religion, which takes shape through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is toward religion as a system of beliefs. Religion moves from a virtue to a set of propositions. Political theorist Hugo Grotius, in his De Veritate Religionis Christianae, can therefore write that the Christian religion teaches, rather than simply is, the true worship of God. At the same time the plural "religions" arises, an impossibility under the medieval usage.
By the same token, the traditional division of a man's public and private lives has been largely reversed in our time. In the 1860s, Newman gave the world a history of his religious opinions, but kept his libidinal appetites to himself. In a college classroom today, both student and professor could more easily discuss their sexual habits than their relationship to Christ. In this too there's a juvenile aspect to the shame and a juvenile aspect to the self-display. The same churchmen who will countenance worship segregated on the basis of homosexual attraction will deplore kneeling at communion as "divisive"; to the mind of a thirteen-year-old, as we know, even someone else's devoutness can be excruciating. What is remarkable is how swift and complete the inversion has been. Perhaps only in certain parts of the military and certain parts of the contemplative monastic life will we yet find models of human dignity in which adulthood holds itself accountable to its own past -- adulthood, that's to say, according to which a man is esteemed for subordinating that which results in his own fun to that which results in the objective good of others.
Diogenes
"Sure, they agreed, pretty Masses are better than ugly ones, and they all preferred high-churchy smells and bells to guitar services and liturgical dance: the things their parents’ generation, poor souls, fondly imagined would “engage today’s youth.” But the radical traditionalists seemed cut from the same cloth as the radical revisionists-and the students dismissed all that kind of 1970s stuff as simultaneously boring and infuriating: the self-obsession and self-glorification of the two sides that, between them, had wrecked Catholic culture in this country. We live with a million aborted babies a year, daily scandals of corruption in the Church, millions of uncatechized Catholic children, and this is what those tired old biddies are still squabbling over?"
[...]
“You can see it clearly out here in California. That whole generation of Catholics in America, basically everybody formed before 1978, is screwed up. Left, Right, whatever....The best of them were failures, and the worst of them were monsters.”
"Father Oakes remembers when your choice was heresy or Hans Urs von Balthasar. Hans Urs von Balthasar felt like a lifeline in 1975 to a conservative, serious orthodox theologian. So he can't understand some young woman coming along and saying, 'but he's not orthodox!' We're going to see a lot more of this. You'll see it in Thomism as well. There's going to be a rebirth--if you look at the scholarly journals, the medieval philosophy magaines--you'll look at a rebirth of Suarezianism, for instance, and Banez, the kind of school manual versions of Thomism. Because the victory of the neo-Thomists and existential thomism was so complete, that these young scholars don't even know what the battle was anymore. And they think "Wait a minute! I just picked up from 1732 this great manual in Thomistic philosophy, and nobody's read it--except me!" We'll see a lot more of this, and it's going to be very interesting to watch it develop over the course of the church.
Like many other state legislatures last year, Iowa’s was narrowly divided. So all it would take to break the momentum toward a constitutional marriage ban was to tip a few close races. If Democrats took control of the House and Senate, however narrowly, the initiative would die, and with it the likelihood of further legislation limiting civil rights for gays and lesbians. And, fortuitously, Carroll’s own reelection race looked to be one of the closest. He represented the liberal college town of Grinnell and had won the last time around by just a handful of votes.
Over the summer, Carroll’s opponent started receiving checks from across the country—significant sums for a statehouse race, though none so large as to arouse suspicion (the gifts topped out at $1,000). Because they came from individuals and not from organizations, nothing identified the money as being “gay,” or even coordinated. Only a very astute political operative would have spotted the unusual number of out-of-state donors and pondered their interest in an obscure midwestern race. And only someone truly versed in the world of gay causes would have noticed a $1,000 contribution from Denver, Colorado, and been aware that its source, Tim Gill, is the country’s biggest gay donor, and the nexus of an aggressive new force in national politics.
They Won't Know What Hit Them, The Atlantic Monthly
Monsignor Roberto Lückert, Archbishop of Coro, Falcón state, and vice-president of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference (CEV), Thursday claimed that the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lied when she said that there were meetings with Venezuelan bishops supporting her criticisms against President Hugo Chávez' Government, Efe reported.
"This lady was way out of line when she said such things that are not true. This is a lie. I am the vice-president of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference and I have never felt that we have been invited or asked for a hearing with the board of directors of the CEV to say what this lady claims," Monsignor Lückert said.
The prelate told local radio station Unión Radio that the CEV board of directors met recently, and "it has not talked about the fact that the US Ambassador to Venezuela (William Brownfield) or any other US official is concerned about us. I think this lady was very clumsy" to speak otherwise, Monsignor Lückert added.
On Wednesday, Rice claimed that the Venezuelan Catholic Church was "under fire" from President Chávez and that US officials have met with Venezuelan Catholic authorities.
El Universal, via The Cafeteria is Closed
Great writer as Orwell was, he is not beyond criticism—as I am sure he would have been the first to agree. He never encouraged anyone to turn him into a plaster saint, though his very abjuration of claims to sanctity is, paradoxically, one of the grounds for his canonization; this modesty should not obscure from us the fact that he was full of contradictions, his powers of analysis were very deficient, he often lacked the imagination to see the consequences of what he said, he accepted political clichés uncritically, notwithstanding his brilliant essay on that very subject, and though he made much of what he saw as the quintessentially English quality of decency (I don’t think anyone would make that mistake nowadays after half an hour in any English town or city), which he contrasted with the cruelty promoted by ideology, he was not himself entirely immune from the latter, at least in the abstract.
Anthony Daniels, Orwell's "Catalonia" revisited
The supreme principle of social morality today is "nondiscrimination"--the exclusive use of financial and bureaucratic classifications in place of traditional ones. Only formal qualifications and free-floating personal qualities that have somehow been separated from any larger setting can be taken into account in social relations, except to the extent the larger setting must be considered for the sake of neutralizing any effect it might otherwise have.
One must of course make distinctions, but under the new order permissible distinctions can only relate to wealth, neutral bureaucratic classifications, and things that (supposedly) no one cares about personally. Other distinctions would be invidious, so they must all be rooted out. You are allowed to distinguish Yale and Harvard graduates, but not Mayflower descendants and Senegalese immigrants. Military experience can count, but not the experience of being raised a man rather than a woman or for that matter the consequences of 1,000,000,000 years of sexual dimorphism. Personality, character and loyalties can matter, so long as they have nothing whatever to do with cultural background. You can exclude people from teaching who haven't taken useless education courses but it's a crushing objection to sex discrimination that some women are bigger, stronger and more stoic than some men.
-Jim Kalb
...most people in the West took warfare for granted as an utterly unavoidable part of the social order. Western states fought constantly and devoted most of their disposable resources to this purpose; during the 1700s, no more than six or seven years passed without at least one major European power at war.
The Enlightenment, however, popularized the notion that war was a barbaric relic of mankind's infancy, an anachronism that should soon vanish from the Earth. Human societies, wrote the influential thinkers of the time, followed a common path of historical evolution from savage beginnings toward ever-greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness and commercial exchange.
The unexpected consequence of this change was that those who considered themselves "enlightened," but who still thought they needed to go to war, found it hard to justify war as anything other than an apocalyptic struggle for survival against an irredeemably evil enemy. In such struggles, of course, there could be no reason to practice restraint or to treat the enemy as an honorable opponent.
Ever since, the enlightened dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of modern total war have been bound closely to each other in the West. Precisely when the Enlightenment hopes glowed most brightly, wars often took on an especially hideous character.
David A. Bell, "Putting 9/11 In Perspective"
But as Mr. Michaels notes in his sharply argued polemic The Trouble with Diversity, that tends to be the very point of the jargon of diversity: It allows us not to talk about the increasingly rigid partition of our society along class lines. For as we enthusiastically fine-tune our sensibilities about how cultural or racial groupings can best be spoken about or symbolized, most social goods in our country—health care, affordable housing and higher education, income support, a living wage—drift further and further out of reach for many ordinary Americans. This is far from accidental, Mr. Michaels says; the marketing of cultural diversity as a social desideratum has crowded out any clear understanding—especially on the left end of the political spectrum—of how class privilege operates in America today.
Examples abound, but Mr. Michaels correctly focuses on the fetishizing of racial difference—a tic shared among partisans of every ideological persuasion—as the key factor in the flight from a class-based politics. Mr. Michaels doesn’t deny the persistence of racism, but notes that it’s been significantly downgraded: "Racism has been privatized," he writes, "converted from a political position into a personal failing." And Americans romance nothing quite so ardently as remedies for a personal failing: The mandate to appreciate the anodyne ideal of "cultural diversity"—itself a labored euphemism for the defeat of structural racism—"gives us a vision of difference without equality," since all cultures in this view of things are equally worthy of respect. And this central reverie, Mr. Michaels argues, means that "the political commitment to equality involves not creating it (by, say, redistributing wealth) but just insisting that it’s already there."
[...]
In reality, of course, the whole notion of encouraging economic diversity is farcical: A sane view of social justice involves decreasing the number of poor people, and hence reducing economic diversity. "Indeed," Mr. Michaels writes, "since economic diversity is just another name for economic inequality, it’s hard to see why we would want to promote it."
What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.
Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?
We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.
Harris, however, argues that not just Western gods but philosophers are "dwarfs" next to the Buddhas. And a Harris passage on psychics recommends that curious readers spend time with the study "20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation."
Asked which cases are most suggestive of reincarnation, Harris admits to being won over by accounts of "xenoglossy," in which people abruptly begin speaking languages they don't know. Remember the girl in "The Exorcist"? "When a kid starts speaking Bengali, we have no idea scientifically what's going on," Harris tells me. It's hard to believe what I'm hearing from the man the New York Times hails as atheism's "standard-bearer."
"We know [torture] works. It has worked. It's just a lie to say that it has never worked," he says. "Accidentally torturing a few innocent people" is no big deal next to bombing them, he continues.
In performin' my Cowboy Poetry
I stick to Cowboy Gatherin's as a rule.
Until the Coffee House guru called,
Said it'd be movin', like really cool.
He said their crowd was reachin' out
In darkness, sufferin' cultural incontinence.
Asked if I'd come release a vision
Of the West, the Cowboy experience.
I showed up on the given night.
Listened to their first urban poet.
He sure had a way with words,
But when he was finished I didn't know it.
I started feelin' pretty outa place.
By the second act I was feelin' worse.
Why I even got to wishin'
I'd of written a little free verse.
We're all part of the big food chain,
the big food chain of life.
We eat things, and things eat us,
And it works out so nice.
We're all part of a great big stew
and someday we'll discover
We're born we live we die
and we're all food for one another.
So you ask me my kind friend
Why I am sad and still
And why my brow is darkened
Like the clouds upon the hill
Rein in your ponies closer
And I'll tell you all a tale
Of Utah Carroll, partner
And his last ride on the trail
In a grave without a headstone
Without a date or name
My partner lies there silent
In the land from which I came
Long ago we rode together
We'd ridden side by side
I loved him like a brother
And I wept when Utah died.
This is why Frank Capra, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most challenging of all filmmakers and in some ways the most disturbing. Most "serious films"—the "hard-hitting" "uncompromising" films—ask us only to accept, for example, that poverty is bad, relationships are hard, that politics is corrupt. In short, their "challenge" consists precisely in asking us to accept ideas that we already accept anyway, even if we struggle to know just what to do about them. In these comedies, Capra asks us to accept that the old-fashioned American ideals are still good, that David really can whip Goliath, that our prayers do not go unheard, that the meek shall inherit the earth. In other words, he asks us to accept things about which we have grave, grave doubts. And he is uncompromising in his asking: he doesn't ask us to accept these propositions as nice or inspirational or comforting or helpful—he asks us to accept them as true.
Rod Bennett, The Gospel According to Frank Capra
One time, I heard him[Karol Wojtyla] recount, with a vein of irony, the times that he was called in by the police for the inevitable and frequent questionings. He was asked about his positions on politics, on society, on the structures of power. He answered them at length. He spoke to them about his personal concept of man, citing some contemporary thinkers but even Aristotle's Ethics and Plato's Politics. Then he would distinguish between the ethic of values in Max Scheler and the dangers of solipsism made concrete in 'reflecting on reflection."
Of course, the functionaries questioning him understood nothing of these long monologues. And in the end they would let him go, and write on their reports, "He is not dangerous."
"And they thought," he told me years later, laughing,"that one day, I too would end up collaborating."
Joaquin Navarro-Valls
Everyone's happy now for maybe five minutes. Jimmy and the monk are splitting and I’m measuring the wood they split. That ended when I tripped over a rock.
I start stumbling backwards and fling my arms out to catch my balance. That’s when the board I was holding flew out of my arms and starts spinning through space. It’s slicing across the work area, like a sidearmed an axe, right at the monk.
All I could think was, "Aww snap! They ain’t never gonna let me be an Oblate now!"
Right before the board plunged into the back of his neck, the monk bent down to pick up something. It missed the top of his head by maybe an inch. He looks at the board which is now embedded into a nearby tree, turns around and says, "Well, that could have been much worse."
As Peter Heath observed some decades ago in his wonderful book The Philosopher's Alice, Lewis Carroll was not a writer of nonsense but rather an absurdist, and a Carrollian character is absurd precisely because he does not blithely depart from the rules but "persists in adhering to them long after it has ceased to be sensible to do so, and regardless of the extravagances which hereby result." When Carroll's characters assume the authoritative tone, the opinions they express are invariably ridiculous, but those opinions "are held on principle and backed by formal argument... The humor lies not in any arbitrary defiance of principle, but in seeing a reasonable position pushed or twisted by uncritical acceptance into a wholly unreasonable shape.
-David B. Hart, "Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark," First Things, January 2007
Many of the people who are angry at or even hate Mr. Bush have very good reasons, and they are not making arguments for anger but are making impassioned arguments against an abominable and awful administration. If those arguments put off many “moderates” and the like, it is because our political culture has almost certainly become too pathetically nice and has been completely sapped of the kind of vigour that once made politics the sort of rough-and-tumble affair in which decent men would not have wanted women to participate because of its harshness.
Nowadays we have the ludicrous Speaker of the House having photo-ops of children holding the Speaker’s gavel and the President talking about how much he cares about this or that suffering group. The endless appeals to bipartisanship, the constant flow of saccharine rhetoric and the nauseatingly cheerful ranks of professional politicians tell me that our political culture is so far from being flooded with anger that it isn’t even funny. For those who, like Mr. Wood, think we live in an age of considerable political anger and fear its culturally destructive effects, I will point them to the bizarre enthusiasm for Barack Obama, who always offers the sickening “let’s bring people together” pap and embodies the tiresome ”I understand your valid concerns” style of disingenuous politicking. [...] Personally, I regard this treacly, meaningless kind of political appeal as a far more serious threat to the quality of our political discourse than legions of bitter Kossacks shouting themselves hoarse with contempt for the GOP. The Kossacks and the like may not have much to say, but they do say something. Politicians operating in the Obama style have nothing to say and actually seem proud that they deal in such empty banter.
Daniel Larison
The full extent of Father McNabb's own charity will of course never be known. What he did privately remained private even after the public death that we will shortly be considering. One known instance may have to suffice. In another rotting block of flats close to Camden Lock lived an old bed-ridden woman. For months, possibly for years, someone came regularly to talk to her, to tidy the room and to scrub the floor. A few weeks after Father McNabb had died, a group of people living in rooms near to the womans were discussing who would do the job as the old lady who had come to do the work before had evidently stopped coming. Only the bed-ridden ladys best friend knew that this lady had in fact been Father McNabb, on his way to Parliament Hill, dropping in for an half-hour-or-so to see the old lady.
On a more serious note, he once attended a public meeting on the subject of the Mental Degeneracy Bill then passing through the House of Commons. After listening to various medical experts explaining how they would certify as degenerates, and as a result sterilise, many types with whom Father McNabb was familiar in his pastoral work, the good friar stood up and, having been called to speak by the chairman of the meeting, bellowed: "I am a moral expert and I certify you as moral degenerates!" He stormed out of the meeting to rapturous applause and the meeting broke up in disarray.
"Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot."
-Vincent McNabb
The third (psychological) principle is that from the average man we cannot expect more than average virtue. A set of circumstances demanding from the average man more than average (i.e. heroic) virtue is called an Occasion of Sin.
The fourth (moral) principle is that the occasions of sin should be changed, if they can possibly be changed, i.e. they must be overcome by flight not fight.
The great observed fact, of world-wide incidence, is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas) normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue...
..From this observed fact that the industrialized town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be fled,... Flight from the Land must be now be countered by Flight to the Land."
A self-proclaimed "agitator" against feminism declared ladies nights at Colorado nightspots dead Friday after prevailing in the first stage of a civil rights complaint against the Proof Nightclub in southeast Denver.
Steve Horner learned Thursday that Colorado's Division of Civil Rights for the Department of Regulatory Agencies sided with him in his complaint that men were unfairly having to pay cover charges and higher drink prices than women at the Proof's ladies nights.
"Ladies night is now illegal," said Horner, a 59-year-old corporate speaker, who says he's been on an anti-feminist crusade since his wife left him with two young children several years ago.
While Horner claimed that all bars will have to cancel ladies nights, officials from the Department of Regulatory Agencies said their rulings only apply to the targeted business, in this case the Proof.
"This is now a violation of law. I will now make it a point to visit as many ladies nights as I can every week. I'll have my rights violated, then I'll sue them in county court and collect my $500 (the maximum penalty in county court for each incident of discrimination)," Horner said.
"I feel it could net me $3,000 to $4,000 a week easy, and I'm going to do it," he added. "It takes me five minutes to be discriminated against."
Habermas has come to believe that modern Liberalism is "intrinsically self-contradictory" because it represses and devalues the free speech of religious citizens, and demands of them "an effort to learn and adapt that secular citizens are spared having to make."
We still believe in censorship today. It's just that we're too hypocritical to call it censorship, and talk instead of "inappropriate language" in regard to gender or ethnic stereotyping, and of the need to have our "awareness raised". Bah humbug, says Ladenson, in so many words. At the same time, we are so permissive and civilised, Ã la Jenkins, that you can find de Sade (Moors murderer Ian Brady’s favourite bedtime reading), with its catalogue of child rapes, sexual tortures, mutilations and murders, in any high-street bookshop. And all thanks to such highbrow defenders as Simone de Beauvoir, who hailed de Sade for "his ability to disturb us": the bog-standard defence of every shlocky writer or artist going nowadays. Just because some great works of art are disturbing does not mean that a disturbing work of art must be great. A pretty simple principle, although one that still seems to elude the understanding of many a contemporary Brit artist.
Ladenson isn’t fooled. Our knowing sniggers at Victorian prudery hardly suggest that we have attained any greater maturity ourselves, while de Sade sits freely and unexpurgated on our bookshelves "as a reassurance that ours is a culture that has shed the pointless repressions of the past and fully embraced transgression as an absolute . . . Ours is an age all for subversion, as long as the ideas subverted are other than our own".
-Christopher Hart
For pre-democratic peoples, begetting and filiation are the elementary locus and analogate of human order, for in the household the material boundaries of human identity have their strongest natural roots. But modern philosophers taught that we are in fact born free and equal into a "state of nature." Our humanity is universal from the outset, wholly manifest in each person. Although the modern philosophers also taught that the state of nature makes all the more necessary the construction of a political order--man reborn, as it were, through the social contract--this is not the moral of the story today. The structures of politics now must serve an abstract and universal "man," who is only incidentally situated as a citizen--or, for that matter, as a spouse, or a child.
-Russell Hittinger, "Dissecting a Democratic Illusion"
Intercollegiate Review Fall 2006
. Hittinger focuses Manent's reflections on the problems political abstractions pose for us embodied creatures. Universalist anti-nationalism diffuses to the point of inconsequence the variety of bodies politic, while egalitarianism encourages blindness to basic physical differences between individual human bodies: strong and weak, adult and child, man and woman, young and old. I once attended an event at the Sydney Opera House where some 2500 people had gathered. A Danish percussion group were performing and they wanted the crowd to participate. Their leader stood and gave orders—clap, shout, stand, pat your knees—and 2500 men and women obeyed his commands. I myself declined to take part, but the elderly woman beside me, with shining eyes, followed every movement as though she had been waiting eighty years for instructions. She would have stood on her head if they asked.
Hamlet believes that the apparition is indeed the ghost of his father and that it has told the truth. Yet it may be a demon in his father's shape, tempting him to kill an innocent man. This doubt as to the ambiguous apparition accords with ancient doctrine and was perfectly intelligible to any Elizabethan audience. Disregard of Hamlet's dilemma has led to misinterpretation of his character...
Sing a song of sixpence,
A case full of rye;
Four-and-twenty Yankees
Started going dry.
When the case was opened,
The yanks began to sing,
To Hell with the Stars-and-Stripes
And God save the King!
-Reputed Prohibition-Era Drinking Song
via Charles Coulombe
Now it might well be objected that smoking does indeed pose a threat to an individual’s health, and this I cannot and will not dispute. But it must be submitted that the governments who are so interested in the health of the taxpayer on this point have interesting lacunae elsewhere. Statistically, an active participant in certain “risky” forms of behavior is far likelier to contract AIDS than a ten-pack-a-day smoker is to come down with lung cancer. Yet the Supreme Court has ruled that such behavior is a human right, and cannot be outlawed.
Domino’s pizza founder Tom Monaghan, one of the nation’s richest and most controversial Roman Catholic philanthropists, wants to deliver Sen. Sam Brownback to the White House.
Monaghan is advising the 2008 presidential exploratory committee for Brownback, a longtime social conservative who converted to Catholicism a few years ago.
Monaghan is expected to play a lead role in “Catholics for Brownback.” But, more important, his support and network is likely to spice up Brownback’s fundraising, which is currently regarded as the weakest part of the Kansas Republican’s candidacy.
Kansas City Star
"In the Catholic community, he’s looked upon as kind of on the fringes," said the Rev. Robert Drinan, a liberal Roman Catholic priest and former Democratic congressman who teaches at Georgetown University. "The world view is, 'We have to get back to a Catholic civilization.' They want to go back to a Christian society imposed from above. [...] It's just another world they want to build."
"There is certainly a degree of presumption, even hubris, in marketing institutions of this type on the premise that all the other schools are failing to educate Catholics effectively," said Richard Yanikoski, the president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.
"You want to arrest somebody like you were arresting your own brother. Because in a small town, the person you arrest on Saturday just might be sitting next to you in church on Sunday morning."
-Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener
Wegener isn't talking about the election now. He is talking about meeting the president of the United States in October at a school safety conference in Washington. ("Holy smokes, talk about being out of your element.")
...the romanticization (and careful sanitization) of the Civil Rights Movement in popular culture led countless imitators to try and replicate its success. Mostly, they got even the most basic details wrong then wondered why they weren't one-tenth as successful: as I eventually tired of explaining to my 1980s peace movement colleagues, what impressed Mr. and Mrs. White America most about Civil Rights kids was how well dressed, calm and polite they all seemed -- these were the kids they imagined Sidney Poitier having; MLK insisted that action participants dress like they would to go to church on Sundays. (A black Pentecostal church in Montgomery in 1964, not that honky Church of Do What You Want you might shuffle into, late, today). You can imagine how that went over with my atheist comrades, whose wardrobes consisted mostly of black t-shirts with stylized yellow fists on the front.
Kathy Shaidle
...suppose a politically savvy Rip Van Winkle in say, 1965, perceiving that a movement to legalize abortion was gaining strength in the country, were asked, "Which of the two major political parties will eventually identify with that movement?" What would he answer? I think he would mull it over in his head for awhile and then say: "the Republicans, probably."
Why? "Well, in the first place, [abortion] fits pretty well into the Republicans' private-property philosophy. 'Let's keep government out of a woman's most personal property.' Secondly, consider the demographics. The Republicans draw heavily from the upper-middle class WASPs, where the drive for population control has always come from. Abortion fits very well into the old eugenics mythology -- the belief that you can improve the health of the 'race' by limiting the breeding of 'undesirables.' You can still hear echoes of that in the conversations of bicoastal Republicans. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Republican Party came out with a plank saying 'We support abortion, in certain cases, for the nation's overall health and well-being.' Finally, consider the Republicans' emphasis on the need for law and order and their conservative approach to welfare. The Republicans may not say this out loud but it slots right into their conservative ideology: abortion is good because, by holding down illegitimate births, it will cut down on crime and welfare costs."
What about the Democrats? "Well," Rip would say, "let's start again with demographics. Consider the heavy concentration of Roman Catholics in the Democratic Party. The Church hierarchy would go bananas if any prominent Catholic Democrat -- or any Democrat at all --came out in favor of abortion. The Church has consistently held that abortion is one of the gravest moral offenses because it involves the direct killing of an innocent human being. No way is a Catholic Democrat, or any Democrat who wants Catholic support (and what Democrat doesn't?), going to support abortion. It might even be smart politics for the Democrats to pick a fight with the Republicans on the abortion issue. Democrats like to boast that they protect the weak and the vulnerable. You remember Vice President Hubert Humphrey's characterization of his party as the advocate of those 'who are in the dawn of life; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.' All they have to do is insert 'unborn children' into that list and they can beat up Republicans every time on the abortion issue. I can hear them now: 'Let the Republicans pick on the weak and vulnerable, killing children in the womb to cut welfare costs. We Democrats are the party of compassion, the party that sticks up for the little guy, including the littlest guy of all, the child in the womb [Applause].'"
-George McKenna, Criss-Cross: Democrats, Republicans, and Abortion (PDF)
Anyone who thinks that the bishops operate independently, handing down decrees and getting those below to obey, has it almost exactly backwards. The bishops’ pronouncements well up from currents of thought circulating among people below them, in some cases from those far below them. Not from the pews, though. From Catholic seminaries, from Catholic journals and theological associations, from philosophy and theology departments in Catholic universities, and, most immediately, from the staffers who serve the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The overwhelming majority of those occupying these seats of influence are Democrats, and some are Democratic activists. For them, any move toward condemning the Democrats’ position on abortion only helps the Republicans, and helping the Republicans only helps to inaugurate or perpetuate social policies that are, in the final measure, un-Christian. Therefore, to single out the Democrats’ abortion plank for condemnation is to side with the forces opposed to the Church’s program of peace and justice. Objectively speaking, as the Marxists used to say, it is anti-Catholic.
Hoccine audiistis, an solum soletis audire Al Jaziram?
Quod ad Bush: idealem uel perfectum, minime uero. Sed ut Hitler? ut Caesar? Nihil ridiculius audiui!
Timothy Bendel often stamps "RKBA" on his work. It's an acronym for the Second Amendment "Right to Keep and Bear Arms."
"When you have the right to own and carry guns, you have all your other rights," he explains.
America is a great country. Here, Bendel is not only free to carry guns, but free to own an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo. He bought it on the Internet in March for less than $400,000, and recently gave me a tour. Built in 1960, it was on alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was decommissioned in 1965 as more advanced missiles came on line.
Bendel lives here with his wife in the former officers' quarters, 20 feet beneath the windswept plains northwest of Cheyenne. Bendel also works here with three partners in 15,000 square feet of reinforced concrete that once housed an Atlas-E missile with a nuclear warhead.
Missile silo is gateway to final frontier
