Hey, sorry I haven't been posting much lately. Haven't had internet for the past couple weeks. I'm currently crashing at an old compadre's place but hope to have some broadband set up at home in the next few days...

Well, I'm not perfect, but...

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Extreme
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	Low
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Very Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Low
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

Frank Beckwith comes home to Rome

Dr. Beckwith was originally a Catholic but for reasons I can't even remember incorrectly became an evangelical. You can learn more about him personally at his web site, so I won't belabor his biography here.

Well, he recently announced that he is returning to the Catholic faith. There's much talk of this decision in the combox of his blog, linked in the title of this post. The Catholics who chimed in are, naturally, quite happy, and the Protestants who chimed in are, understandably, quite disappointed. Something caught my eye, though, about the arguments used by some of the Protestant posters to convince Dr. Beckwith to reconsider. Some merely expressed their feelings, which I'm not really in a position to argue with, but the others, in their attempt to use Scripture (albeit very pithily--not much room in a combox) to give a thumbnail sketch for their opinion that Rome is apostate or the whore of Babylon or just a little too pagan, I think provided a good case study of the fruitlessness of sola Scriptura.

You can read the comments yourselves, if you want to take the time; I'll just summarize a few points here.

The usual "Rome went off the rails" theory posits that the apostasy happened, or at least began, when it ceased being persecuted by the Roman Empire in the fourth century. The problem there is that there's no evidence of an underground Biblical literalist movement between then and the Reformation; the few people who would still hold to the "Trial of Blood" theory would either have to invoke an oral tradition of literal Biblical interpretation for twelve centuries, or admit that there was a significant historical discontinuity and accept that the Church effectively ceased to exist for that time, which doesn't sit well with the New Testament's words about a safeguarded and enduring institution (corporately visible or not).

One person solved this dilemma by tying the Roman apostasy to the troubles Paul cited in I Corinthians and his references to "another gospel." If you look at historical records, this "other gospel" is most likely a reference to the Gnostics, for the proto-Catholics weren't teaching a "gospel" that was incompatible, let alone in competition, with the four books that are in everyone's Bible. What does the evidence tell us? The very students of the Apostles, sometimes writing while the Twelve were still alive and kicking, wrote stuff that not only meshes with Scripture but is also distinctly Catholic.

You can dismiss "uninspired' documents and whatnot if you like, but the only reason for doing so is an insistence on a narrow reading of Scripture that simply doesn't fit everything else we see about the early Church. Does it make more sense to read the Bible in a way that agrees with things we can independently demonstrate, or to reject those things and a reading that would be compatible with them, for reasons that aren't that strongly put forth in Scripture--that are themselves extrabiblical?

Sure there's a whore of Babylon in Revelation. Saying it's the Church of Rome, though? Scripture doesn't make that identification; it hardly even suggests it, and my feeling is the only similarity is through Satan's attempts to mock the Church and confuse the poor souls living in the end times. A non-Catholic can believe the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon, but he'll have to argue from extrabiblical material and thinking, or from his gut, to make the point; not from the plainness of Scripture itself. Maybe when the Eschaton draws near things will be clearer, or misinformation will be more concrete, but looking at the pope's miter or someone kissing a bishop's ring and saying "How silly! It must be evil!" is pretty facile, in the same vein as "I call my male parent by his first name because Jesus said to call no man father. Never mind what I call my female parent." Some people do make that argument, but it's egregiously legalistic; I doubt most evangelicals would go that far.

Several others used the "another gospel" verse, and one from Galatians about how we are not perfected by the flesh, in order to write off the sacraments and the Magisterium or something. Those verses by themselves do sound like they might condemn such things, but you'd either have to assume from elsewhere that "Romanism" is what Paul meant, or you'd have to read it from the context, but the context doesn't make an implication of Tradition that's even remotely clear.

Where they don't leave well enough alone, as if those two verses were self-evident, they try to explain their positions with a little more detail. The "another gospel" arguments usually add up to "I believe that these extra things that Rome teaches, like the books they added to the Bible or the extra five sacraments, are infusions of paganism," which I won't take the time to refute here; suffice it to say Jesus quoted from the Septuagint and there are at least two references to the Deuterocanon in the Gospels, and that when Jesus says "This is My Body" we do take Him literally. The flesh verse from Galatians at times gets an exegesis that flirts with Gnostic dualism itself, which should be a red flag to anyone familiar with early Church history.

If you're not going to invoke an explicit Magisterium in your reading of Sciprture, you're only going to end up invoking an implicit one.

Specific citations aside, I really had to scratch my head when people implored Dr. Beckwith to read the cited passages, or just to study Scripture in general more carefully. I've seen this argument before--"I was taught to love Jesus/read Scripture"/"If only you had learned to do so!"--and while on the one hand I can understand how it seems self-evident to the person making that argument, it's a little condescendingly pat, and really suspicious when you bother to look at the context of one's spiritual journey.

I mean, look at Dr. Beckwith. Ph.D in philosophy, professor of Church-State Studies at Baylor, and (since neither of these things clinch his Biblical pedigree) president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He's well known, obviously is no slouch, and was highly respected, at least throughout American Christendom (today, perhaps less so by non-Catholics). Do you really think he forgot to read the Bible, or at least didn't look at the Evangelical prooftexts cited in tracts and by preachers everywhere? Do you think he'd get selected for the presidency of the ETS without his peers having a reasonable estimation of scholarly work and devotion to Christ? Do you think that, now that his studies have taken him across the Tiber, another glib advisement to do more of what got him started down this path is magically going to undo it all?

Reading the Bible is what led him to the teaching authority that Christ left with us alongside His teachings. Reading it more isn't going to make him rediscover the passages that show the Bible to be entirely sufficient or the Church to be invisible and anarchic. They aren't in there.

Aside from my daily rosary and other regular prayers, I try to do a few ejaculatory prayers throughout the day. I don't remember to do them very often, usually only when I'm reminded by outside forces or coincidence, but one of the things I do that's becoming sort of a regular thing is say hi to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament before I genuflect and enter a pew, and say good-bye or "See you tomorrow" or something else to that effect after I genuflect upon leaving. Since a large chunk of my spontanteous prayer is asking for help for this or for that, I wanted to try to develop a practice that was informal/not highly structured, personal, and not based on my needs. I think I got the idea from Mother Angelica, who would do something similar whenever she'd walk past the chapel in her convent.

Well, I'm going into church Sunday, and just as I'm about to genuflect I mentally say "Hi, Jesus. How're you today?" I almost laugh at how silly that should sound, being asked of an eternal being, but just as I start to grin I think I hear in my head His response:

"Holy. And you?"

Although I had no idea how to answer, I'm going with the assumption that I didn't just imagine that response.

You ever pray the rosary, and find that some decades seem a lot longer than others, like you seem to be nearing the end of one and look down to see that, even though you've been moving the beads, you're hardly halfway through--or that sometimes, you say three or four Hail Marys and discover that, even without having moved any extra beads along, you're almost on top of the next decade?

Is it just me?

Is cheating no longer considered immoral?

Today on the Drew Mariani Show, one of the topics was the incidence of infidelity. A recent study (of dubious reliability, according to one guest, but it doesn't detract from my point) suggests that about half of all people cheat on their partners at some point.

The question was raised, then, "If everyone's doing it, is it even immoral?" The answer is yes, for a number of reasons, a couple of which I'll only touch on.

First of all, morality is not determined by how many people hew to it, or how many dismiss it. Secondly, if you're still calling it cheating, you probably still have a sense that it's wrong, so trying to argue that infidelity is okay because cheating isn't bad just shifts the problem.

If people walk into relationships expecting their partners to fool around with other people, knowing their partners expect the same, then, true, it's not necessarily cheating, it's just following the conditions of a more libertine arrangement; however, the problem is that when people get married, they do make vows to the effect of "forsaking all others"--putting the spouse first in all things, and not sharing with others what is promised to the spouse.

If people walk into relationships expecting cheating, infidelity isn't the problem. (Okay, it's a problem, but it's missing the point.) The problem is people not taking vows seriously, not making them seriously. Don't expect to remain faithful? It's sad, but at least you're honest. Promise to be faithful anyway? Then you're a liar and a hypocrite.

If your integrity is in question, you can hardly be expected to judge infidelity to be moral or or not.

The feast of St. Gertrude the Great is November 15...or 17....

I mention it now because I just thought of it, and to give plenty of advance notice.

One of the few female saints granted the title Great, St. Gertrude was a voracious student. Christ visited her in visions throughout most of her life, after an experience at the age of 26 essentially converted her from a student of nature to a student of God. One time, after she prayed for more time to pray and fewer things to take away from prayer time, Jesus told her:

It does not matter to me whether you perform spiritual exercises or manual labor, provided only that your will is directed to me with a right intention. If I took pleasure only in your spiritual exercises, I should certainly have reformed human nature after Adam's fall so that it would not need food, clothing or the other things that man must find or make with such effort.

Thus, spiritual growth is not just for the religious or the studious, and having some variety in our lives is generally a natural and good thing.

Another time, He asked for prayers for the souls in purgatory:

I accept with highest pleasure what is offered to Me for the poor souls, for I long inexpressibly to have near Me those for whom I paid so great a price. By the prayers of thy loving soul, I am induced to free a prisoner from purgatory as often as thou dost move thy tongue to utter a word of prayer.

Yet another, He gave her a prayer, by which He said He would release one thousand souls from purgatory every time it was prayed in love and devotion:

Eternal Father, I offer You the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus Christ, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, those in the Universal Church, in my home, and in my family.

There are other prayers you can do for the souls of the Church Penitent, and I would recommend them all. I would also encourage you to pray for the souls who have no one else to pray for them (on Earth, at least). They will be grateful for your aid, and helpful to your own causes and intentions (in purgatory and heaven, at least).

You can make a heroic act of charity, where you give up all your personal merits to be distributed by the Virgin Mary amongst the souls in purgatory. You can learn more about it at that link to New Advent, or at Our Lady's Tears, where I first read about it, which also has a Purgatory Novena and other prayers helpful to the suffering souls.

Anyway, I was intrigued by an idea I saw over at Free Republic and again at the Mission to Empty Purgatory, where I got most of this information about Gertrude the Great. Being of an analytical mind, the idea appealed to me from a mathematical standpoint, as well as a charitable one, but your milage may vary. The numbers work might seem a bit cold, but if we've been given this gift, we ought to make something of it, and there's nothing wrong with trying to imagine (or more) what could be accomplished with it.

Given that the Prayer of St. Gertrude releases a thousand souls from purgatory, and that there is a finite number of people who have lived, it should be possible for enough people to have a devotion to rescuing those souls and helping them enter the Church Triumphant that purgatory would be effectively emptied, and as long as there are people to pray for the Church Penitent, to keep purgatory virtually empty.

I'll walk you through the little bit of math; MTEP keeps a running tally based on prayer pledges, if you want to see it from someone else.

There seems to be a consensus that throughout history there have been approximately 100 billion (± 5% or so) people. A Google search for "How many people have ever lived on Earth?" will get you numbers in this range from all kinds of sources, some even assuming a very young Earth. Some of the sites show their calculations, so you can check their work for yourself if you like. Naturally that number's always on the rise, but let's stick with an even 10¹¹ for convenience.

Looking at the souls extant to date, how many times would someone have to pray the St. Gertrude Prayer to empty purgatory?

100,000,000,000 ÷ 1000 = 100,000,000

A hundred million. A huge number, but not unimaginable. Seems pretty mechanistic at this point, but consider that currently there are one billion Catholics in the world.

One billion versus a hundred million. If only 10% of all living Catholics, just a hundred million again, say the prayer once, it'd be done. We've got 80 million in the United States alone. Five times that number are in Latin America.

Of course, we should remember that it is a pious devotion, not a numbers game. As we don't pray the rosary just in the interest of quantity, we shouldn't pray this prayer just to get through it, just to rack up spiritual bonus points, either. More than one Catholic I've heard from with memories of life before Vatican II remember how common rushed, unintelligible Tridentine masses were, where the priests just garbled the Latin and went through the motions just to get it done; and how they really weren't as spiritually healthful (albeit still valid) as a Novus Ordo, said in English or Latin, prayed solemnly and with sincere intent.

Not that I'm condemning all the mass celebrants from before 1965. Liturgical abuses didn't end then, and I'm not condemning or condoning everything that's happened since 1965, either--while the frequency of mechanistic, rote masses has probably dropped, the variety of heteropraxy has grown (unless someone can point me to some coulro-Tridentine mass somewhere).

I admit, sometimes the best I can claim is that the 20 minutes I spend praying the rosary is 20 minutes I'm not doing something worldly. I also realize that the numbers angle can be an opportunity to develop some rote habit. However, some habits are pious, and we would not be given simple or repetitive prayers if we were not meant to recite them frequently. We need only direct our wills prayerfully towards Christ "with a right intention."

Here's the thought from Free Republic: the Church should dedicate one day to the emptying of purgatory, and ask every Catholic to say St. Gertrude's prayer. Then, every Sunday, we'd say the prayer once as sort of a keep-it-empty devotion.

Divine Mercy Sunday sort of fits that bill, but if it's this devotion we're interested in promoting, it might be more fitting to put it on the feast of Gertrude the Great. Maybe two weeks earlier, on All Souls' Day, now that I think about it. I'm not trying to tell the Church what to do, and the Church can't liberate people from their purgation under by its own fiat, but what I can do is encourage people to remember the people who died in God's grace but weren't quite ready for prime time. If you like the idea, you can say the prayer every day, or make it a decade; or in the interest of forming a holy habit, at least try to remember it on Gertrude's feast day each year and ask others to do the same.

I know I'd appreciate it when I get there.

Happy 300th birthday, Euler!

Stolen shamelessly from ISCA:

"Thiebault says that he has no personal knowledge of the truth of the story, but that it was believed throughout the whole of the north of Europe. The encylopedist Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of the empress. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The empress was much amused, but some of her councillors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. the empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest's tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented. The mathematician, which was Euler advanced towards Diderot and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: "Monsieur, (a + b^n)/n =x, therefore God exists. Any answer to that!" Diderot,
to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted."

If you can believe anything the Church teaches about itself, why can't you believe everything it teaches?

For my Lenten discipline, I've been reading the Bible straight through. I picked up in the middle of Genesis where I left off several months ago, and have been trying to do it in smaller chunks so I don't get overwhelmed and give up; I've found that when I do something for Lent, it's easier for me to keep to the discipline, so I figured, why not give it a shot? It's Easter and I'm now into the first book of Maccabees, and might finish the whole thing by summer.

I must say it helps tremendously seeing all the familiar readings in their broader contexts (and completely in order, as much as the old books are in order at all), both in understanding for myself and in responding to people who get upset over the distorted impressions they have of Scripture. Except for the repetitive constructions in the second book of Chronicles, I didn't even find it to be too dry. Okay, some of the genealogies and censuses in the Pentateuch didn't do much for me either, but they were shorter and easier to skim than the stuff in the later books I've gotten through so far. Either way, I'm not doing an in depth study at this point, so it's not like I'm sedating myself trying to reconstruct all the travels of Samuel or to uncover the pastoral reason for why the ephod or any of the other vestments were purple or had red thread or whatever.

Anyway, I was talking to someone about it a few weeks ago, and pointed out something that I found interesting. Inside the front cover of my Bible were these words:

A partial indulgence is granted to the failthful who use Sacred Scripture for spiritual reading with the veneration due the word of God. A plenary indulgence is granted if the reading continues for at least one half hour. (Enchiridion Inndulgentiarum)

The respone I got was "I didn't even know they still do indulgences...I'm not sure I believe in them, either."

"No? Why not?"

"Well, how can we know God's always going to do what they say when we do any of these things?"

All right, how can we? Obviously we can't prove it empirically; there's no tangible evidence we can observe. However, Jesus told His apostles that what they bind or loose on Earth will be bound or loosed in heaven--when Peter said that Jesus would pay the temple tax, even, Jesus had Peter catch a fish that had a coin in its mouth to pay the tax, even though it would not be proper (or at least not necessary) for the Son of God to give money for the House of God.

There's more, though. If you're going to doubt that God's going to honor the pious proclamations of His disciples, despite an obvious example of Him doing so in Matthew 17, what's stopping you from doubting that God's going to act every time someone pronounces a blessing or a priest does one of the sacraments? Habit, familiarity--does the ubiquity of the mass give you the impression that God will be more dilligent about performing a real miracle, or less? Hey, maybe last Sunday the Holy Spirit didn't come upon the bread and wine at mass, and they ended up not becoming the Body and Blood of Christ; maybe God felt that a simple symbolic communion would be appropriate at that time.

Most Catholics would probably agree that such logic sounds silly when it's applied to an actual sacrament, and I'd be thrilled to hear that people put more faith in the Eucharist than in anything else, but what's harder to believe: that God became man and shared with some of his followers the authority to turn common food into His Body and Blood, or that God shared with some of His followers the authority to commute the temporal punishment due for sin along side the ability to forgive it?

Here's a hint. Is it easier to say "your sins are forgiven" or "rise and walk?"

I'm still watching "LOST" and "Battlestar:Galactica"...

...but I'm really getting tired of the writers confusing moral ambiguity with the main characters just being a bunch of jerks. I can watch "reality" TV if I want that crap, y'know?

Anyone listening out there in Hollywood?

The thing about reasonable accommodations to the exercise of religion is that these accommodations are finite.

So: a woman in Detroit, a Muslim and a plaintiff in a small-claims court case, had her case thrown out because she refused to remove her niqab. She's now bringing a civil rights case against the judge for denying her her day in court because of her religion.

I greatly respect the first amendment, but I don't think the law is on her side. The judge's concern wasn't with her modesty (or lack thereof), it was with the expectation of being able to trust someone whose clothing makes it nigh impossible to even verify that she is who she claims to be.

In this country, a defendant has the right to face his accusers, which means in part that anonymous witnesses and other involved parties are generally verboten, and your rights stop where someone else's begins. It's more important with criminal cases, but I doubt American jurisprudence would be well served by a double standard in this area.

What about the woman's right to worship as she sees fit? Well, what about the government's inability to treat Islam any differently from other religions?

The legal precedents do not point to letting people do whatever they want in the name of religion. The legal precedents point to the government stepping in when religious activity interferes with the administration of the state. The law will not permit you to go about naked in public as a form of worship, nor will it allow you to to perform human sacrifices (even on willing people), nor will it allow you to use mind-altering chemicals that the state has already decided are too dangerous to be left unregulated. Neither is it inclined to take seriously someone who puts on a disguise (it doesn't matter if you claim to be someone specific; the thing about anonymizing outfits is that people can't tell if you are who you say) and starts filing legal claims.

Modesty is great, but your right to anonymity is limited. I generally ought to be able to travel without being harrassed by any bureaucrat in a suit chanting "Papieren, bitte," but if I do get stopped by a police officer, whether for speeding or jaywalking, one thing I do not have the right to do is refrain from identifying myself. If I don't have a driver's license, then they will find some other way to verify my identity--some way other than my solemn word.

This woman can't even use the "honest face" cliche.

Maybe someday handheld fingerprinting or retinal scanning devices will become ubiquitous, and it will be easy to identify people without a man having to look in a woman's face (which doesn't sound very dignifying when I put it that way, does it?), but until then, not having the means to identify a customer or claimant is way beyond the reasonable bounds of accomodation.

Does anyone else find those Trojan condom commercials, where the couple shares iPod earbuds as a metaphor for sex, to be just a little...creepy?

Offer it up

"Isn't Christ's work complete?"

Christ shares everything He has with us, including His suffering. We're not really adding to it on our own, but inasmuch as Christ is one man who suffered, and our works only have value in Him, so is our individual suffering worthwhile.

"This redemptive suffering angle is too weird; I can't buy it."

Yet you still suffer.

"Well, what's the point? Didn't He say on the cross, "It is finished?""

Christ's death was of infinite value, so why was He even scourged in the first place? Christ suffered for us. In Him, we also suffer for each other. As Christ offered Himself up, so we should offer up our own sufferings.

"I can't grok suffering for someone else. It's this trading off of grace 'earned' by one person suffering to another person who needs it more."

Why not? A parent suffers for the benefit of the child. God answers our prayers without physically intervening every time. God is also not limited by time or space in taking our suffering as prayer, and prayer is not limited to the heartfelt recitation (or improvisation) of words.

"Okay, I'm almost following you, but while I can understand how we would want to save our children from pain and hardship, I don't know how I could do it without even knowing why or whom it would be for. Like I said, it's weird."

Yes. On rare occasions a person is granted knowledge of the purpose towards which his suffering is to be directed. A parent, to belabor the analogy, wants good for the child, but can't often see what form the good will take. Will efforts to build the child's character be best manifested in being a volunteer at a charity, or in a job, or eventually as a parent and spouse? Will being frugal to save up for college enable the child to become a great writer, or a great scientist? The difference here is in degree, in level of abstraction, moreso than in kind.

If you're like most of us, you'll sometimes just get frustrated because you can't see the purpose suffering in silence and ignorance. All I can say then is, again, offer your frustration up, too.

Another prayer request for the fam'

My dad recently got word that he's going to be heading back to Mayo to get those tumors on his liver removed. They're going to do a hi-res scan and then open him up to go over the organ with a fine toothed comb. It's scheduled for a month from now. Any and all your prayers would be welcome.

I'd be happy for them to actually find the tumors and finally get rid of them, although I'd be happier if they disappeared like the last couple times but didn't come back.

Saints Luke and Peregrine, pray for us.

Baa baa <blank> sheep....

A while ago I caught a snippet of Sheila Liaugminas on The Right Questions (yeah, you can tell how long I've been sitting on this post, can't you?) on my way from church. She was talking about some person or group--I didn't catch the whole bit--who wants to change "baa baa black sheep" to "baa baa rainbow sheep," since apparently it offends and alienates little children, or at least young minorities.

I'd like to say I'm surprised. Actually, I am, but I'm shocked that I'm still surprised at this kind of thing.

From a full sixty seconds of research I just did, the lyric change appears to date from an English city council meeting proposal in 1999; the suggestion was dumped the next year after black parents reminded the council that the idea was ridiculous.

Of course it was--yet Concerned Citizens seem to be making such suggestions with increasing frequency, with as far as I can tell no sign of learning to develop a sense of perspective after being dismissed this way. Kids that young don't know enough to be offended by an innocuous nursery rhyme. They can be offended by truly offensive things, even by patronization, but what's wrong with this ditty?

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full.

One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

I guess the master is offensive because it suggests a condition of servitude, and the dame is offensive because in the original it stands for the Church or maybe because it's slightly outdated slang for "woman," and supporting the little boy is offensive because it gives caricatured capitalists something to complain about.

Black sheep, though? It's got nothing to do with race. The term "black sheep" as a euphemism for pariah comes from the fact that black sheep, incredibly, have black wool, which is understandably hard to dye, and so isn't worth as much as white wool. There's nothing more to it. I'm not sure the matter of less valuble wool is even germane to the nursery rhyme; it was probably just something alliterative. Unless some demographics are basing their whole identities on their hair color, there's not even room for reasonable concern here.

(Wait for it: topical lemma in 3...2...1...)

What does concern me, though, is this Orwellian push to make everyone forget everything that might be even misconstrued as bad. I see it on multiple levels, but I'll restrict myself in the interest of brevity, so please hold off on accusations of overgeneralizing. Sometimes it's a preemptive attempt to protect certain demographics from certain unpleasantries about the world, other times it's an overreaction to a nonissue, either by the would-be slighted parties or their "enlightened" self-appointed guardians. A plain example would be dismissing the opinions of pro-life men, because they're not women and can't relate and have no standing in the matter, as well as the opinions of pro-life women, because they obviously aren't clearheaded enough to be worth listening to. Ever notice that They rarely wish to protect young people from the dangers of sex, though? Only from its tangible consequences, which don't seem to include things like reduced sense of self-worth, distorted priorities about certain life issues, and a fatalistic attitude about all the concomitant prices and inconveniences that you only have to learn to tolerate when you take something special out of context in an attempt to maximize its specialness. Oh, and children--I guess they're a "risk" of sex between a man and a woman that are, um, best kept in a special context, such as the life of a well-off middle aged professional (or slightly younger and famous) single person no longer satisfied with keeping pets.

If you want to protect your children from the bad juju that's out there, I say more power to you; however, the kids eventually will need to be able to deal with nasty things, even things that aren't nasty at all but might just seem confusing, so simply keeping them in the dark isn't going to help. I'd be pleased if my kids could grow up and never have things like racism and violent crime even occur to them in thought or deed, but I know that the world's not that innocent so they will need some coaching in how life can be hard and unfair, or how certain words have different meanings that don't even relate to each other between contexts. I certainly wasn't traumatized because my parents never kept me out of church to make sure I never saw something as brutal as the corpus on a crucifix. Well, maybe my readers would disagree, but I assure you, any trauma is unrelated.

Pretending this stuff doesn't exist is not the solution. It just leaves people ignorant and vulnerable, and conditioned to look for frivolous violations of increasingly diaphonous "civil rights" instead. Remember the guy who got in trouble for saying "niggardly?" Granted, it's not the most common word, but I knew the proper definition of the word when I was a child; here, adults were getting upset because it merely sounded like a word that's actually bad, which is not a standard any other word I can think of is held to. If I'm white and run a labor-intensive business, should I also never employ a black man, in case someone suspects that I might be propagating a metaphorical stereotype that harkens back to early 19th century agricultural labor patterns, or in case someone thinks I've got a token minority on hand just to deflect criticism?

If this attitude continues, I doubt we'll stop anywhere short of flatly prohibiting speech about offensive topics, whatever "offensive" will mean by then. A couple years back I was having a discussion with a graduate of the University of Illinois, whose Chief Illiniwek was featured prominently on sports gear, and at sporting events, and so on, until just recently. Many people find the reduction of an entire native American tribe to a debatably traditional dance by an iconic tribal chief at athletic events to be in bad taste, and wish to retire the tradition of the dance and of all imagery featuring the Chief. Many other people believe it is a suitable tribute--since basically it's a festive dance at a festive event--to the cultural history of the Illinois region and an opportunity for raising awareness thereof, which is pretty much the attitudes of the Chippewa to Central Michigan University and the Seminole to Florida State University, to name two off the top of my head.

There's also relatively little support in the same circles for abolishing drink-until-you're-Irish "'unofficial' St. Patrick's Day." I guess integrity is only trumped by convenience.

I'm not an Illinois resident, so I was only dimly aware of these particular controversies before I met the alumnus, who is avowedly anti-Chief (or pro-retirement, but I'm getting ahead of myself). I ended up playing the Socratic to learn more about the situation, since this guy was pretty quick to spit out smooth-sounding catch phrases (I'm not being snide; he really sounded like a pile of secular progressive fortune cookies) about interesting things I was unfamiliar with.

I was on the fence--I like the idea of historical ties to modern society, but mere caricatures taken too seriously do tend to be degrading, yet from what I understand, the Chief's dance routine and regalia are authentic, if embellished--and the guy almost had me, until he said one thing. He summed up his entire position by confirming that the best way to honor the legacy of the Illinois Confederacy is to remove all contemporary manifestations and references to it: that it should be no more than a historical footnote in a reference book.

I am not exaggerating.

I hope you can see the problem I have with so extreme an idea. The mere display of cultural artifacts doesn't add up to being a bd thing. There are other, legitimate arguments, but they don't temper the suggestion that only the forgotten can rest in peace. We should honor the dead, yes, but we can't do so by removing the headstone.

Yeah, I know, kind of a roundabout way of getting to a point, but it was an interesting conversation I still sometimes think about.

It's attitudes like this guy's that make me wonder if this redacting of culture isn't on the up and up after all (aside from the fact that it's rather PC and I'm Catholic). I don't think the guy's really a latent racist--although some (mostly other white people) make the argument that the Chief should be "retired" because white students portray him, which is a suspicious kind of incongruity that doesn't get any other historical reenactors into trouble--just an iconoclast who happens to have found an agenda before he found a philosophy that could inform it for him.

What's next? Are white people who oppose all visual reminders of history going to tell people who like visual reminders that they're not a valid part of the debate because they're from the opposing side? What are they going to say to the Peoria Illiniwek (or the Seminole, or the Chippewa) who don't have a problem with Native American imagery? The opposition isn't unanimous. That their opinion counts less than the white man trying to protect them? That the Native Americans who do have a problem must be more enlightened? How enlightened do we have to be to make that judgment, to have a dissenting opinion? Aren't we using peculiar values of dead European men in juding the answers to these questions, anyway?

Lent's growing on me

When I was young, it was just that time of year when I had to eat fish on Fridays and do or give up something for 40 days. I didn't mind the latter, in principle, but I hated fish (my mom, a great cook every other day of the year, tended to favor cod fillets cooked into leather and some canned salmon casserole with whole bones that freaked me out), and so I dreaded the season. I've been finding other ways to avoid regular meat, though, so there hasn't been much of a problem there lately.

I used to think of Lent as a spiritually dry time, reflective of it being a liturgically dry time. I don't think dryness is the most accurate way to describe my experience with Lent, though. It has been that way--just trudging through, not seeming to get anything out of it but having enough motivation to keep at it, and otherewise no more interesting than ordinary time--but I think it was more my imagination or expectation, or just temporarily putting a label on something I sometimes felt at other times of the year.

What it does seem to be, though, is raw; a little tender like a blister that's been popped and is healing. It's not exactly painful, but I am a man of mild and even temperment, so any increased spiritual or emotional sensitivity is unfamiliar, and a little uncomfortable in its strangeness, although it's not entirely unwelcome. Particularly this year, I'm getting more of a sense of how poor a soul I really am; the rationalized conceits I protect my ego with seem less compelling, and even the objective truths I take comfort in don't cover everything--I may know I'm properly disposed to receiving the Eucharist after receiving absolution following a sacramental confession, for instance, but I certainly don't deserve it. Seeing--if only dimly--the distance between where I am and where God is, and seeing God bend heaven and Earth to reach us, to reach me and people like me, is an awesome and humbling thing, humbling and awesome, around and around. Sometimes it's enough to make me weep during Mass, which strangely enough is a sort of consolation in itself. It doesn't always happen in the Lenten season, but maybe times out of ten since I've started thinking about it.

I don't really understand it. It's worth meditating on more, but I'm not sure I'll be able to put it into adequate words for posting here. I'll try, though, if no one objects. Any of you have a similar or related experience? What'd it mean to you?

Hopefully this quiz result is representative, and I didn't just luck out and happen to know the particular answers. Whatever that last 1% is, it's not deliberate.

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Mass attendance...

I heard a priest say yesterday that the usual weekend attendance at his church was around 2300, but on Ash Wednesday, it tops out above 5000. The priest was a little incredulous, and perhaps a little disappointed; at three different times during any day they could come in to receive the Lamb of God, but on this one day a year, which isn't even a day of obligation, they show up to get marked and be told "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."

I didn't think of it then to make the quip with comedic timing, but I thought it was too bad he couldn't offer ashes at every mass.

God, Darwin clash again in Kansas

Briefly, the Kansas Board of Ed is reconsidering the policies it adopted in 2005 that downplay the scientific value of evolution (and probably all science that doesn't support a superficial reading of Genesis).

The usual rationale is that evolution and whatnot is not without its gaps, to which I will say that the critics are correct.

The solution, however, is not to refrain from teaching it. If you want to point out the inconsistencies and the questions it hasn't been able to answer, great; it'll give future scientists some ideas of what to focus their research on next, and keep today's scientists modest and hopefully take the wind out of their politics (evolution as proof for atheism is no more valid than intelligent design is for theism). If you want to stop teaching all science that may be conditional or confusing, then you have to stop teaching all science.

In fact, to avoid confusion and muddying up the classroom with uncertain interpretations of things, you really would need to stop teaching everything. Obviously that option is ridiculous, because education is about removing ignorance, not keeping people from getting confused. Some students will get confused along the way; at some point, probably every student at least once. Educators, like scientists, are just human, so we can only hope to minimize confusion and work through it when it arises. Refusing to do their job to keep people from misunderstandings is plain old wrong. There's withholding knowledge to prevent scandal (which can be permissible), and then there's just preserving ignorance to keep people sedate.

Can science tell us everything? No. Can evolution tell us everything about the science that involves it? No. Evolution does, however, happen to be well demonstrated by more different fields of science than perhaps any other theory. The fossil record doesn't prove it, epidemiology doesn't prove it, DNA and morphological similarities between related species don't prove it, but take them all together and you've got something that isn't going to be displaced unless it can answer all these claims (or provide some unimaginably revolutionary breakthrough in one particular area or more).

What claims does "evolution can't be right" make? The chances of random atomic activity resulting in human life are distastefully low; a superficial reading of a religious text demand that the logic and observation that go into science are wrong--either lies or misinterpreted.

I'm sorry, but "It can't be A, so it must be not-A" isn't science. As simple logic, it's fine, but here, it's like dividing the universe up into bananas and non-bananas, and then implying that the only plausible non-banana is an apple, since the fruit in Genesis is usually thought of as an apple.

Whatever it is, it's not science. Are opponents of evolution even as a tentative (if robust) theory interested in having science taught at all?

In the absence of a theism, scientism often rushes in to fill the vacuum.

A while ago I caught, on the Scientific American podcast, part of Michael Bloomberg's commencement address to JHU's medical school. If ever I dreamed of a nigh-utopia ruled by scientists, Bloomberg's speech woke me up.

Don't get me wrong; I still think the average American needs more science education, and more sophisticated science education. I just think that Bloomberg's speech made it plenty clear that "more science" isn't "enough."

Some of his bullet items are no-brainers to anyone who's been around the Catholic circuits at all. I realized that many of them were extrascientific long ago, but I had fallen into the trap of assuming--probably not with the best justification--that common sense was, well, common.

Now, if everyone just upped their science quotient when it comes to voting and public policy discussion, we'd make great strides. However, there were a few things Bloomberg cited that put the lie to his science-as-panacea thesis:

• Terri Schiavo


• global warming


• funding of stem cell research

He also mentioned how ID, as gussied-up creationism, does a disservice to science by masquerading as it, and to theology by conflating the two; but he still betrayed a penchant for utilitarianism.

You can make valid arguments from utilitarianism, and make different ones from existentialism or some other school of thought that may contradict or not even intersect with the utilitarian ones, but just advocating a purely practical or existential position isn't the same thing as using the logical bedrock upon which all philosophy rests, nor can it (or logic) guarantee truth or goodness as its object.

Obviously, bridging part of the gap between "more science" and "enough knowledge to get the job done well" is some basic philosophy, so people can recognize what informs an argument when they see it. In addition, though, I think fundamental critical thinking skills in addition to "X is utilitarianism, Y is stoicism, etc." is essential. I started learning critical thinking when I was ten years old, in a public school no less; I didn't get to differing philosophical schools until I was in tenth grade. Not that I was precocious, but in the state of today's education, most students don't get to the latter until college when they need to fill some general education requirement, and most students never get to the former. It can't be that hard to add a little elementary logic to a curriculum (just showing students half a dozen propaganda techniques and a dozen common logical fallacies should be enough to get us past the "expert juror" hazard in public discourse).

Anyway, I just wanted to touch on the three examples Bloomberg gave, especially the last one.

The Terri Schiavo bit was typical "society has no compelling interest in preserving her, so look--but not too closely--to her husband." Terri wasn't dying, she just didn't have any usefulness left in her. I suppose the pro-euthanasia types also felt some irony, but I was a little disappointed to see so many people making the libertarian argument, that the federal government shouldn't get involved in saving one sick woman's life.

Global warming I've said enough about. Suffice it to say his "what we now know about water being wet and the sun rising" panegyrics to the environmentalist lobby were about as edifying as an Enzyte commercial.

As for stem cell research, the problem isn't stem cells themselves--which is old news I'm not afraid to repeat. The problem is in killing babies to get the embryonic kind. Last I heard, we have around 95 therapies currently in use--at least as effective clinical trials--from adult and umbilical cord blood stems cells, including a functioning coin-sized liver in a petri dish. The embryonics have yielded nothing so far except tumors.

If Bloomberg--or anyone--is so hot and bothered for really helping people, curing life-threatening diseases, then why isn't he more interested in the most practical solution, the one we've already got?

A bird in the hand, Mr. Mayor.

I like having dissenters around.

They can help keep us humble, which helps keep us honest. Even Voice of the Faithful is right in reminding us not to cover up a scandal. Yes, sometimes it is easier for an educated person to tell a recalcitrant ignoramus "Shut up and trust me," but being easy doesn't always mean it's always appropriate.

Most people aren't experts in all, or any, of the subjects that are major, contentious policy issues in this country, but they're not stupid, either. They can be duped by a propaganda campaign but respond thoughtfully when accurate and balanced information is made available. Sometimes people need to be reminded, but with flawed policy as with heresy, the danger is in unbalancing a complementary set of principles and emphasizing one at the expense of the others. We generally take it with a grain of salt when it's commercial advertising or political campaigning, but it's often confusing when it comes from a different source, and sometimes the paralysis of confusion is the biggest defense against would-be policy makers with strange agendas.

Generally this paralysis can be pushed through with a persevering united front of public institutions, either by getting the honest word out or by spinning a convincing story otherwise. There are several examples--pro-abortion activists perpetually recasting the debate in terms of "women's rights and safety versus oppressive men and their brainwashed wives," war opponents defending Saddam (and I'm not saying the Iraq thing has been clean on any level) and conveniently forgetting UN weapons inspectors' reports of being stopped outside of facilities and watching convoys leaving through other exits, people claiming the APA has certified homosexuality as healthy because it took it off its list of disorders (the real reason being, with no apparent means of treatment, reducing the stigma would at least be palliative), and environmentalists warning us that deleterious climate change is such an urgent matter that we can't take the time to study it before trying to fix it.

I'm going to focus on this last point today. I'm not going to say there isn't good science out there, but I'd like to talk about how science isn't the only thing in play, and how if there weren't skeptics of global warming asking these questions, the stop-industrial-emissions-in-developed-countries program would be a lot farther along, and the climatological evidence would either be undiscovered or underreported (because, hey, if crackpots couldn't make skeptics out of normal people, why divert efforts trying to prove anything to them?).

To wit, Dr. Stephen Schneider, a high profile activist for the global warming theory, as quoted in Discover in 1989:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In the same quote he also said that scientists are also humans who care about people and how they live, and I do sympathize completely with his motivation; mentioning any single piece or small assemblage of evidence and letting it drop might elicit no more than "How interesting. What's next, evidence of an inflationary universe?" I also can't blame him for oversimplifying--we see it everywhere, with some of the most dramatic examples coming from the field of nutrition, where we were at first told to cut out all fats because they didn't think we could distinguish HDL from LDL, so people binged on low-fat and later low-carb snacks (well, all right, I won't blame the talking heads for people consuming far more than normal because "good in the right amount" was confused with "harmless")--and it's hard to tell when you're above the "a little knowledge is dangerous" threshold but below the "too much information is confusing to the untrained mind" point. However, what Schneider is talking about isn't science, it's propaganda, plain and simple. While making efforts to convince people of something is just a natural part of society, we have to remember the difference.

"Oh, but now we understand the science better than we did before," says many a disciple of global warming. Yeah, and in a decade we'll understand it even more. Thirty years ago, we were sure there was global cooling because scientists were in consensus. After years of propaganda that got way out ahead of the science, do you really think we're just supposed to pretend that enchanting us with doomsday stories has something to do with reality? Fool me once, fool me twice. Why should we believe your story is true just because you want us to find it engaging? If it was clearly overstated from the beginning, but you advertised it as fact anyway, then it's either pure marketing or part of some other agenda.

We can handle the truth, even if it's bad news. We might want it with a pinch of sugar, but if you're just trying to manipulate us into pressuring the Powers That Be into funding your project, into stopping your pet apocalypse, whatever, we're going to be suspicious because unmixing the truth from the propaganda isn't easy. Show us the science--try not to water it down too much--because trying to convince us to believe it because everyone is believing in it is just calling us to jump on the bandwagon.

Oh, and the Atlantic "conveyor belt" isn't in such bad shape, after all (see the 1117-06 issue of Science). Was this oceanic current supposed to be one of those smoking guns that we can trust, or just a curiosity? Will there be any others?

We've also got The Weather Channel quashing open discussion of doubt in global warming, in the interest of raising science above the level of politics. Science isn't about silence. Honest science--I admit, with humans as scientists, egos often get in the way on all sides--requires listening to all hypotheses and their criticisms, finding evidence for the accurate ones and against the inaccurate ones, and addressing the inadequacies that dissenters can more easily see. The answer to "your theory doesn't cover a few discrepancies I'd like to address" is not "Never mind, and listen to us; we're the ones with the consensus." Sometimes criticism is easily answered, but for the sake of us unwashed masses, please make the effort.

It's doubly important when there's public policy to downplay the facts, whatever they may be. The antidote to propaganda is not contradictory propaganda; it's truth. When someone calumns your position, your first responsibility is not to play that game. Present what you know, admit what you don't, address the criticism, but don't incite panic. There's more to being right than just being persuasive.

"The world's about a degree warmer than it was a century ago!" Look, I'll give you shrinking ice caps, but you've got to come clean so we can all try to solve the problem, whatever shape it's taken: Are you measuring temperatures in 1907 the same way you're measuring them in 2007? What's your confidence interval in each case? Just tell us, and show us how. Obviously being patronizingly vague has gained you as many enemies as it has sycophants, neither of which will convert the other.

One degree doesn't tell us much, anyway. We have decades of detailed meteorological data, including some studies of historical outliers like the little ice age and the warm middle ages, and still have trouble predicting a week in advance. Are we putting a reasonable amount of faith in the predictions made for decades and centuries into the future?

Besides, it's not just a question of what some planetary thermometer can tell us. Just being hotter may not mean much; we also need to look at heat capacity, how thermal energy is stored; at the difference between isothermal climate change and adiabatic climate change. Some extra heat energy is hypothetically converted to mechanical energy in the form of more severe and numerous storms, but there hasn't been much of a change there at this point, as well as in the conversion of ice to water, which we have seen (although they're getting thicker--more snowfall is another meteorological effect of heating in current science; this quickening of the polar water cycle might be another means of buffering the atmosphere from greenhouse gases).

"It's our fault! Temperatures are changing more quickly than they should!" How do we know how quickly they "should" change? Are there studies out there using human-excluding models that have much flatter "hockey stick" graphs than what we're really seeing? I saw one presentation where a researcher from, I believe, NOAA presented a model and findings where the opposite was true, where our impact didn't appear to be sufficient to cause what we're seeing. Just one man, yes, verses a horde of environmental activists and journalists who can't distinguish context from slant assuring me that some expert or plurality of experts somewhere is sure that we're mostly responsible. Whatever studies are out there, once they're in the public sphere, they seem to be suffering from the Bush Dictator effect: badly paraphrased, vaguely cited.

Not to mention methane, which is more potent than CO₂, but not anthropogenic, and the fraction of greenhouse gases that are artificially produced. Actually, they don't mention methane nearly as much. Is it because it's not as important, or just because there's less we can do about it? Why don't we plant a few trees and try to reign in a little our enthusiasm for government oversight, and then look at what we can't do without federal or international cooperation?

Don't get me wrong, I'm concerned about the place we live, too. Even if the Earth were on the verge of another ice age and this shrinking ice cap thing were just a fluke, I'd be in favor of trying to minimize our environmental impact in every sphere--fertilize or irrigate when necessary, but try to do no harm along the way. I'd be a little wary of trying to tame the weather when our knowledge of how climate is is so limited we can hardly even ask the question of how the climate should be. I just don't see the loudest advocates treating it like the emergency they tell us it is. Al Gore--not a scientist--is up for a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing American industrial waste gases even more to the public's attention. To paraphrase a recent letter in the local paper, we shouldn't confuse activism, activity, with accomplishment; but I suppose if Yasser Arafat deserved the prize, Gore is no less qualified.

Not to pick on him, but he's a dramatic example.

Come on: he tools across the country on a private jet that puts out more emissions in a single flight than the average SUV does in a year, in order to warn us even more about global warming, including promoting America as being to blame for being so productive. When he lands, he takes an SUV. Conservation for thee but not for me? Is saving the world too important to bother saving the world along the way?

An Inconvenient Principle?

A few lucky guesses, a few easy questions

You know the Bible 100%!

 

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I only got 98% the first time. I don't remember which answer I guessed differently this time.

I recently caught CNN's special on the early Church, roughly from the Ascention through the legalization of Christianity under Constantine. I am at turns interested in and frustrated with purely secular attempts to exegete ecclesial history. It can be fascinating to learn what perspectives can develop when one is disinterested or slightly skeptical, rather than zealously supportive or antagonistic; on the other hand, sometimes things still get lost or distorted in the interest of one scholar or another trying to advance an agenda completely unrelated to the material in question, if not distinct from the orthodox interpretations for the sake of novelty. In CNN's "After Jesus," they candidly admit that historians can only go by the physical evidence available, but it's still interesting to see how they pitch the Church's development as a rather haphazard thing, like the debate over whether Christian converts needed to be Jews first being determined by a battle of wits and egos, by Paul's persuasion of James, rather than as a discovery of some objective truth, which would have been more how Paul and James would have imagined it.

it reminds me of a discussion I followed at ISCA last year, too late for me to participate, but it took me this long to think of what to write about it for you, and like I said, I prefer to lurk. It's about the time, described in John 12, when a Mary annointed the feet of Jesus with nard, and Judas offered the criticism that it should have been sold (ostensibly for the poor, although he'd actually been embezzling, according to John). Jesus's response is "(7) Leave her alone. She has kept this for the day of my burial. (8) For you always have the poor with you, but you don't always have me." The issue in question during this discussion is why Jesus didn't have the nard sold in the first place. When asked what he got out of the first six verses in the chapter, the user said:

I would have "liked" Jesus to have stopped the woman from washing his feet at all and told her to buy bread for the poor and that they will celebrate his majesty by providing for the hungry.

By verse 7 he's kinda in a tight position, though, so there's not much to say right at that moment. If he had said "Oh, Judas, you're right...' he wouldn't have been the all-knowning dude he was, right?

In response:

Yeah, that's the thing, I'm thinking it's sarcasm, sort of a backhanded "you're not getting this money dude, so don't even think about it". Sort of like, it's better for my feet than to have you steal it with your false concern for the poor.

And...the wise are confounded. Didn't other apostles at other times make similar suggestions to Judas's? Jesus wasn't sarcastic, though; He was saying what He meant. He isn't always direct in the gospels, but even when He uses dramatic language--brood of vipers, raising stones up to children of Abraham, children of the devil--it's pretty clear from the narration, if not always the context, that there's a bigger message being conveyed. Maybe Jesus was being direct--or maybe He meant it both ways, that being annointed in anticipation of His burial is also better than having Judas steal the 300 and spend it on, well, probably nothing he'd have time to enjoy.

I think in a way it's also a lesson in sacramentality. Sure, it's great to do things like give to the poor as a celebration of His majesty or comemoration of His message, but loving your neighbor is the second great commandment, not the first. We are limited, physical creatures; if we do not at intervals make explicit gestures of worship to God, then it is probable we will lose sight of why we are making explicit gestures of keeping after our brothers. It's liable to become a chore, either something eventually neglected or at least done out of habit, devoid of the anagogical dimension God likes to introduce into things He elevates to sacramentals.

No, they say: let's interpret it as Jesus merely scolding, and not as teaching his disciples that making great efforts to worship God (a la the first great commandment) is important next to making any efforts to help one another (the second great commandment). Jesus, after all, was just a teacher, wasn't He? Never mind that the Evangelists thought He was divine, as did the other Apostles, and don't forget that the multitudes he fed didn't want to carry off and coronate Him just for inspiring them to generosity. Let's interepret the passage in a way that has Jesus meaning the opposite of what He says plainly, in a way that expressly precludes what the rest of the New Testament has a pretty solid consensus on; let's catch Jesus glutting a bit on Mary's fawning and weeping with the nard, and then have Him turn it around on Judas when he's caught so people can still say "No, it's all on Judas; it's good to pamper God!"

Taking the "Jesus was sarcastic" route makes the orthodox interpretation look like sophistry--which is fair to suspect, as Judas's question was only asked in the wrong spirit--but if the whole of Jesus's message were "be excellent to the poor," then why'd He waste all that time talking about other things of the Kingdom of God? He sure wasn't executed for being a socialist.

Is it so hard to acknowledge that the stuff about the Jesus's divinity might be on the straight and level? To consider that at least the Apostles thought so? Look at verse seven again: "She has kept this for the day of My burial." It's not just about "celebrating his majesty," and Jesus wasn't overindulging in some TLC from the woman. I can buy Christ trying one more time to correct Judas, but looking at "Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone," where He used situational irony, I can't see Jesus being sarcastic just for the sake of sarcasm, just to cover His behind when He could have just as well told Judas off straight away. It's pretty clear that by this point in the Gospel story, Jesus was anticipating His own imminent death. Why the insistence on reading that verse apart from the rest of the passage? Verses 3-6 set up Christ letting Mary bathe His feet and the others not understanding why resources should be wasted on being good to Jesus. These verses aren't the lesson with Jesus changing the subject in the seventh, they are the question to which the answer is verse seven. It's again like historians trying to reinterpret the story with only secular data: "See, Jesus was all about helping the poor, so when they caught Him enjoying a little luxury, He had to retain an image of modest living and generosity"--a rather one-dimensional image, in the eyes of someone who can accept both/and solutions to an apparent dichotomy--"as well as omniscience, so it's achieved by showing Jesus knowing what Judas was up to and saying that waste is better than theft." At this point I don't see Him being sarcastic, but perhaps ironic again: Judas's suggestion, after all, wasn't bad, but only insincere. The woman at the well also said she had no husband, which wasn't false; it was just inaccurate, as she'd had five, which Jesus made a point of bringing up.

It also seems to have hints of liberation theology. It's a little beside the point, but we've got here another case where someone takes portions of the Bible that fit some philosophy or agenda at face value, and dismiss the rest with a wave of the hand, hardly bothering to rationalize ignoring the other text: Jesus was all about helping and feeding the poor, and only about helping and feeding the poor; when He mistakenly lets Mary pamper Him and Judas calls Him on it, Jesus smacks him down because Judas was just filching from the Apostolic purse anyway.

I'm all for helping the poor, but doesn't it seem rather unoriginal? "Jesus taught us to help the needy! Let's call him God!" seems no less silly than "Jesus goaded us not to hoard our lunch for ourselves! Let's make him king!" I suppose I should expect as much from a one-dimensional philosophy, whether it's a dimension of welfare or a dimension of pacifism.

When it comes to Lord, liar, or lunatic, why is it so easy to say "You know, I don't like the historical evidence. I think he was just a swell guy who got a little puffed up in the retelling by his cultus?"

What's next, wild dogs?

Pro-lifers are sometimes criticized for not emphasizing other quality-of-life (so to speak) issues like poverty, drugs, war, or AIDS. Those issues are important too, but unfortunately, not everybody can work on every social problem. It would be great--and some people do try to make some contribution to every kind of charity--but unfortunately there's not enough time in the day for any one person to do a lot for every issue. The people who fight abortion are just working on that particular thing because it's something they can do--maybe it's personal for them, maybe their talents happened to fill a need that a Crisis Pregnancy Center had that a St. Vincent DePaul shop didn't. Other people work on other things. There are plenty of people working on all the different social problems--or rather, there are some working on each but not enough working on any of them.

If you want to work on one, and it's not the pro-life movement, it's okay. You can't focus on one, though, pretend you think they're all worthwhile, and then tell a pro-life activist "Abortion doesn't matter or can't be stopped; my pet charity is most important or more urgent."

You can't have it both ways. Either fighting abortion is worthwhile (because abortion isn't the solution to the other problems), and you just have different preferences, or you like doing some charitable work but only want to hear support for abortion.

Liberals are moderate?

Seems a logical contradiction, but I often hear things like "over half the population considers itself to be progressive," although apparently there's still some nostalgia for family values (probably in a few of the flyover states that didn't get counted--perhaps the tradcon proclivities held by moderates don't really count, either) and "I'm really a centrist" from people who are clearly to the left of folks who identified themselves as liberal a generation ago--as if it were self-evident that the rest of the country moved that far left around them. Well, maybe two generations ago; the 1960s/1970s are a statistical outlier no matter which way you slice it.

I also hear things like "Reality has a liberal bias."

If it were so, why do we have to be told?

What's the word for the condition where people treat imaginary things that they want to be true as real?

Apologetic for a Random Reader (III)

Today's topic: the death penalty

How can we say we're part of the culture of life if we permit the death penalty? The culture of life bills itself as honoring the value of all life, so how can we execute anyone?

A similar argument can be make for Just War theory, but here isn't the place and now isn't the time.

First of all, while those questions are good ones, there's more to the culture of life than the matter of executing prisoners, which is why we normally associate "pro-life" with ending abortion. A well-ordered culture of life would seek to preserve all life, of both fetus and felon. The difference is the realization that we can't always do both; sometimes we need to protect the innocent from the criminal.

If we categorically refuse ever to use lethal force, then on the occasions that nothing short of lethal force will stop someone from causing great harm, we will be unable to prevent the harm. Our purpose is not just to refrain from causing violence; it is also to protect people from it when necessary (state of California notwithstanding, flight from an assailant is not always an option). If we are charged with protecting life, and we expressly fail to do so, then we are guilty of negligence. We can't wash our hands of it on the grounds that we avoided directly promoting a death. Life is a real thing we are obligated to try to preserve, not an abstract concept we serve only through personal avoidance of cause.

You'll get no argument that in this day and age, in this society, the necessity of applying lethal force after a criminal has been sequestered is just about nil. Thus, we admit the DP in theory, but usually deny it in practice.

If we put health warnings on cigarette packages, shouldn't we also put mercury warnings on cans of tuna?

For my whimsy quota...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Whence Christmas?

Mark Shea's got an excerpt from his upcoming book about where we got Christmas, or more to the point, why we have it when we do. I won't repost it here, being a bit long, but it's worth a read, and there's some good stuff in the combox that fills in a few other details. Just permit me to highlight a few details and then ramble on, on my own, for a little while.

Christmas was not merely a reappropriation of pagan winter holidays. Early Christians were very interested in how their Jewish forebears scheduled things, and not so much what pagans did.

While the Church did sometimes "baptize" pagan practices once it had the momentum and resources to evangelize whole nations, it wasn't simply a matter of putting a Christian skin on a pagan animal. Easter--still called Pascha in the Eastern traditions and in many other languages, and described with the adjective "Paschal"--near the vernal equinox, but more importantly it followed (and in the East, still does) closely the Passover, which is in the spring for its own reasons. Christmas, December twenty-fifth, is no more (even less so) pagan than exchanging rings at weddings. First of all, Christmas comes nine months after the independently scheduled (for the most part--when you've got imperfect record keeping, there will always be conflicts between placing an event when it's thought to have taken place and placing it in relation to another event a specific length of time away) Feast of the Anunciation, which gives any relation to Saturnalia a circumstancial flavor, and had been so set since before Aurelian's promotion in 274 of the celebration of Sol Invictus, which had been a minor holiday until the Emperor decided an alternative to the Christians' nativity feast was necessary. The Christians, turning the astronomical imagery into a metaphor for the Son Himself, were not having any of it.

There's no closer relation between Christmas and pagan holidays than there is between Santa Claus and Old Man Winter. The gift exchange doesn't even stem from Hannukah, which is a relatively minor Jewish holiday (you'll find the original events in Maccabees 1 and 2), but rather from the Feast of the Epiphany, which takes place a little after Christmas, but the adoration of the magi as well as of the shepherds got rolled together with the Nativity, at least in the U.S.

But anyway, merry Christmas. I'll probably have a little more for you around the Feast of the Mother of God. I always get good material when I'm hangin' with the fam. Pax.

Development of doctrine and priestly celibacy

There is currently a discussion about the history of marriage restrictions in priestly and religious life in the Church going on in the Bible and Christianity forum over at ISCA. One recent post briefly summarizes the nature and history of consecrated life; in the penaultimate paragraph, a few apparently androgynous mystical experiences are cited, and the piece ends with the following paragraph:

Why does the Catholic church still insist on celibacy and male-only priests? Their justification is still largely sacerdotal purity, though inheritance issues also drove the demands for celibacy in the 11th and 12th centuries. They claim that as priests are the representative of Christ on Earth, he cannot be represented by a woman. But the Catholic church is reaching a crisis point; many diocese are terribly underserved, as older priests retire and die and as the church weathers the storm of child abuse scandals. It's likely that, within our lifetimes, we will see a change on these fronts, but the pontiff will have to be forced into accepting it. If there aren't enough priests to maintain a parish, something has to give. Either accept married priests in the ranks or ordain women.

Some of the flaws in the argument are obvious. Two thousand years ago we learned the significance of a distinct, ordained male priesthood; one thousand years ago, we learned the value of a priesthood not divided between parish and family. These benefits aren't just practical; you don't solve a pragmatic problem by compromising principles. I can see a relaxing of the rules preventing married men from getting ordained, but not anytime soon; the tradition, though not the rule, of celibacy is two millennia old, and orthodox seminarians are on the rise. As for the pope being forced into accepting anything, the user who posted the article apparently doesn't understand papal infallibility; from the Church's perspective, a pope couldn't contradict Ordinatio Sacerdotalis even if he wanted to, and from an external perspective, the doctrine of infallibility itself would shield him from political pressures for compromise.

I've seen this pattern in the Church before, and I don't think it's a coincidence. Five hundred years ago, there were nascent Protestant movements promoting iconoclasm and simplicity of worship. What was Rome's response? St. Peter's Basilica. John Paul II was the most ecumenical pope to date, and what was one of his most favorite topics? Mary, perhaps presently the greatest stumbling block to Protestant dialog with the Church.

Why does the Church not take more opportunities for emphasizing common ground? Is schism not worse than heresy?

Well, it is, but perpetuating the scandal of heresy just to end schism isn't much of a bargain. My point is that this crisis is not a sign from God to the pope that the doors in all the seminaries and iconostases need to be flung open. I think it's an opportunity to emphasize how important a celibate, male priesthood is. In a time when the priesthood is at a nadir in number and quality (sorry, but the pedophilia angle is usually invoked by now), insisting on admitting only single men into the seminary is a dramatic sign of what the priesthood is.

Currently reading...

Science and Religion: some historical perspectives, John Hedley Brooke

A two-foot stack of neglected issues of Newsweek, AOPA Pilot, Flying, and This Rock. There's probably still an issue or two of Parenting mixed in for some unfathomable reason, too.

"Theology of the Body" Explained, Christopher West and George Weigl. Well, I keep starting it....

I just got news that my dad's cancer is still playing hide and seek with his liver, so I don't really feel like posting anything right now. Prayers, for healing for my dad and strength for my mom, would be much appreciated.

Apologetic for a Random Reader (II)

The claim by fashionably skeptical secularists and a few para-Christian groups: "Santa Claus is a myth. We don't even know where the idea came from."

If by "we" you mean "those of us who prop up our own convictions with our own convictions, rather than careful study," then yes, you don't know. If by "don't even know" you mean "can't find evidence documented to 21st century standards," then you're only half wrong; we have documentation on where and when he lived and who he was, and then historical traditions that are pretty consistent in the relevant details.

The popular incarnation of Santa that we see today was started the better part of a century ago in a Coca-Cola ad campaign, but the trail doesn't exactly get cold right afterwards. The name comes from the Dutch "Sinterklaas," which is a contraction of the Dutch for "St. Nicholas."

Nicholas, an actual saint, was a fourth century bishop of Myra, in present-day Turkey. Especially in Europe, he's still depicted as a bishop, complete with miter and crozier. His feast day is December 6, when I should have made this post. He was known for giving anonymously to the poor, to the point that after his death such anonymous charity continued and was still attributed to his actions. He is also the patron saint of pawnbrokers; three gold balls are traditionally hung outside of pawn shops in honor of his best-known anonymous gift, three bags of gold secretly tossed into a poor man's house as dowries for his three daughters. Well, it was anonymous at the time, anyway.

The name Kris Kringle comes from the German for Christ Child (probably thanks to Martin Luther), in the interest of focusing on Jesus Himself over a man who...well, I needn't remind you of the whole commercialization-of-Christmas thing, which even then could have added to the distraction from Christ, if not added to the richness of a Christocentric holiday. Somehow the name and the saint were conflated.

There is the most tenuous of pagan ties through what we think of as Father Christmas. In some places in pagan Europe, around this time of year a man would dress as what we'd recognize as Old Man Winter; centuries ago, the old man would go house to house, where the hospitality shown him was supposed to reflect how gentle the winter would be to that household. There was no association with bringing gifts; the only material holdover I can see would be leaving him a snack, and even that one is mitigated by the fact that hospitality isn't exclusive to paganism, and that St. Nicholas traditions exist even where Christmas doesn't happen during cold winters, so placating a personification of the weather doesn't even have the remotest symbolic value.

Single parenting...

The December 4, 2006 Newsweek has an article about the boom of children being raised primarily by (i.e. in a household with) one parent. It starts with the usual examples of people who are surprised and then blasé when they play the odds on modern courtship practices and lose, and then gets into the sociological ramifications.

On the one hand, single parenthood is shown to be less than a tragedy, since people are getting married later and later in life (and, I infer, condoms will break at any age), so kids outside of marriage are just going to happen. On the other hand are the likes of Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who draws a connection between single parenthood and child poverty, and with welfare dependence, both of which contribute to future births of children with unwed parents. Continues the article:

But sociologists say many of these kids actually fare pretty well, especially when two parents are involved. The determining factor seems to be family stability--and marriage has no lock on that.

Duh. Marriage might not have exclusive rights to domestic stability, especially in this day and age, but which arrangement tends to be most stable in the first place?

"Be excellent to each other" theology

I sometimes--often?--sound a little derisive when I use that term when people rely on Matthew 5-7 as a behavior guide to the exclusion of the rest of the Gospel, because while it revolutionized how we should treat one another, the first half of Matthew 7:1 is often used as the lens through which the entire Sermon on the Mount is viewed, with supporting evidence like "Jesus didn't condemn the adulterer" and "He ate with tax collecters."

Turning the other cheek is great, but there is more to loving your neighbor than simply damping down the cycle of violence. Refraining from judgment is great, but you're not loving your neighbor by telling him his sins are good. The last thing Christ told the woman was "Go and sin no more."

Correcting the sinner, instructing the ignorant, and counseling the doubtful are spiritual works of mercy. None of them runs counter to any of the others. Picking out a few at the expense of the others may be convenient, but saying something like "You don't have to be helpful as long as you're kind" is sort of like spoiling a child, and it's a sin against justice. Charity may be the greatest of things, but justice, too, is a good.

The Joyful Mysteries

Almost thought I forgot, dinn'tcha? Or weren't you even keeping track? Well, I did almost forget.

1. The Annunciation
   

   
   Mary can be seen as analogous to the Jews as a whole. They were chosen by God to be the ones through whom the Savior would be brought to the world, a societal tabernacle as well as possessing the gold and wood one. Then Mary was the tabernacle of flesh, the apotheosis of the tabernacles of flesh that we all are before the end of Mass.
   

   
   


2. The Visitation
   

   
   I often wonder how much Elizabeth knew or suspected about her child or the child of her cousin. Zechariah no doubt wrote down everything Gabriel said for Elizabeth to consider, but imagine what she was thinking when she wanted to tell Mary the great news of finally having a son, one destined for great things, only to find that Gabriel had meanwhile told Mary of the great son she too would have. From her exclamation when John leapt in her womb, she must have known something great was afoot. What did they talk about during their three months together? Did they realize that the culmination of salvation history was actually upon them?
   

   
   


3. The Birth of Jesus
   

   
   This mystery is bittersweet. Truly, the Incarnation, in sanctifying creation by God's entering it, is something monumental, and like the other third mysteries is a fulcrum, in this case the locus of the history of salvation. It is said later in the Gospel that Jesus was unwelcome in his home town. Jesus, in some ways, faced that fact right since the Nativity. Joseph and Mary could find no lodging, so they had to stay with the animals. When the magi came, one of the gifts was myrrh--not a sign that he had no place in the world, but a foreshadowing of death, a sign of how life in this world is transient. Soon the holy family would have to hide out in Egypt for a spell. In time Jesus would reveal that we who are in Him also shouldn't be thinking of this world as home.
   

   
   
4. The Presentation
   

   
   This one also has a sad tinge to its joyfulness. The presentation itself, and Simeon's affirmation of the Christ upon seeing him? Great. Simeon's prophecy, that a sword will pierce her heart? Sad. Did Mary have any idea of what sorrows were in store yet? Prophets were usually called when God wanted them to begin speaking for Him; what was God doing coming to the mother of someone destined to be great (or in the case of Zechariah, the father)?
   
   ...but suffering is redemptive, and Mary was united to Christ in sorrow and joy from the beginning.
   

   
   


5. The Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple
   

   
   I like to think of this one in part as a reminder of the Eucharist. Look for Jesus: sure, you'll find Him amongst us, we who live in Him, but don't be surprised to find Him physically in the House of God, also. If it weren't for the Real Presence, He would not be there in any meaningfully different way than He is in the hearts of the faithful or in the Scripture.
   
   This mystery, like the others, is more complex than simple joy or sorrow. Jesus would not have been the kind of boy who got into trouble, so not seeing him for a while in a caravan probably filled with family and friends would itself not have been a great cause for worry. Finding that none in the caravan had seen him, and searching for Jesus for three days in the holy city, on the other hand, would have been. Where did they find him? In His Father's house, conversing with and impressing the teachers. While Luke tells us Mary and Joseph didn't understand why Jesus had to be there--Where was He even staying at night? Did the rabbis or scribes not think to ask after his parents?--they would have understood how a man leaves his parents to fulfill his own vocation, and in time they should have come to know the emptiness parents feel when their child strikes out on his own, and the pride in seeing the child now as a man.
   
   In the end, Luke gives us a sign that, like the wedding at Cana, prayers to Mary can be effective, for Jesus will give her what she asks of Him: When they find Jesus in the temple, they bring him home rather than leaving him to his Father's business, and (Luke 2:51) "He was subject to them."