You'd Think We'd Learn from Japan...

...but it appears we haven't:

The Japanese tried every trick in the Keynesian playbook. Zero interest rates, public works projects tax rebates and tax decreases. The government built thousands of bridges and roads, driving up government debt to enormous levels. Between 1990 and 2000, the Japanese government instituted 10 fiscal stimulus programs totaling $1 trillion. None of these programs worked. Sound familiar?....Dr. Benjamin Powell clearly explains:

Japan created a structure of production that did not meet consumers’ particular demands. Producing things that nobody wants and propping up mal-investments cannot possibly help any economy. This policy is equivalent to the old Keynesian depression nostrum of paying people to dig holes and fill them. Neither policy will revive the economy because neither forces businesses to realign their structures of production to match consumer demands.

Japan's economy has been nearly stillborn for two decades now and it's likely our economy will be for a similar timespan.

The stimulative package sort of reminds me of the surge in Iraq. I remember thinking the surge would work, but only as long as we had 100K troops over there. Similarly, the stimulative package - if done right - could stimulate the economy but to what end? As soon as the government quits pumping money into the economy won't it sink again? It's not as though people have a lot of money to spend and are just waiting for a feeling of confidence, it's that nobody has any money to spend because everyone is nearly up to their eyeballs in debt. Isn't the longterm solution to free people from debt so spending can resume? And won't that take, like, forever?

On the nat'l debt issue, I hadn't been worried about in the past because as a measurement against GNP (rather than GDP) it's much smaller than it was during WW2. So I don't know whether GDP or GNP is the important measure. Regarding median income may not be rising but it will never rise enough.

To play the blame game likely isn't all that helpful or even possible to figure out, but it seems as though Maestro Greenspan let us down. The one grown-up in Washington, he had the ears of the lawmakers and presidents. Place not your trust in princes as the bible says. Or you can simply say that free economies are supposed to boom and bust and without the busting you can't have a boom.

Greenspan was doing what most everyone does: exercising pain avoidance until the avoidance of pain causes causes major arterial damage:

"The crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates low for too long, investment banks leveraging their balance sheets 40 to 1, banks marketing 120% loan to value mortgage loans on overpriced houses, consumers borrowing at obscene levels from their overpriced homes and credit card companies handing out credit cards like candy...".

Didn't we know awhile know, deep down, that something was wrong? Didn't we know it by the way corporations became ridiculous in their efforts to please their quarterly Wall Street masters? How mergers and acquisitions were viewed as a magical, painless form of earnings growth? Didn't we know it when friends or relatives somehow ended up with 50K in credit card debt? Didn't we know it in the unnaturally long recession-less prosperity from '90 thru '01? Didn't we know it when houses suddenly became viewed as a source of money via refinancing instead of a place to, like, live?

Bible Canon Reference

Douay Rheims/RSV Conversion

Younger Than... a Fogelberg Song

Saw "Evan Almighty" as the snows thundered down but was distracted by the seeming pretence of the wife of Noah, played by an actress named Lauren Graham, having been married for twenty years to the main character. It seemed as though they had cast a younger actress than the role called for.

I couldn't wait to get on to IMDB database to check her age. But now I have to admit defeat: born in 1967, she was 38 or 39 at the time of the filming in '06 and so she could've been married at 18 or 19. The picture at right is of Graham at the Evan Almighty premiere. I suppose this shows that I'm getting older since 39-year olds look 25. Or it shows the effects of makeup and good lighting.

Honesty Comes to Scammer Subject Header

As a longtime follower of the wiles of Nigerian scammers, it's rare when there's a true breakthrough in the "art form". Generally they read as form letters although admittedly with more comedy, pathos and grammatical errors than is typical.

The general pattern in the early era was to focus on widows of dead African presidents and later it morphed to a nakedly Christian angle with salutations invoking the name of Jesus. I don't much read them much anymore. The genre seems as tapped out as "spam poetry". But today I received a new form of Nigerian scammer comedy with a subject header guaranteed to disarm: "Be inform That Any money you send to Africa to receive your payment is at your own risk". Truth in advertising! Ye gods, the scammers must be desperate. Necessity is the mother of invention and perhaps at time's the truth as well. Here it is:

Subject: Be inform That Any money you send to Africa to receive your payment is at your own risk

Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:47:14 +0100
To:

Dear

I am Mr Ebeson Ike the Permanent sectary of Senator Tunde Ogbeha. The Chairman House committee Payment and verification on foreign contractors and Foreign Affairs office of the presidency Republic of Benin.

He told me to Contact all the Foreigners that waiting for their Payment , regards to series of petition we receiving from unpaid (Foreign Contractors, Inheritance next of kin and lotto beneficiaries that was originated from America, Europe, Asia, and Middle east) on how African government usually don’t pay them their contract funds, And other Debts owned them by the Government based on this the African Government made a through investigation to ascertain the cause and find out that there are some officials that cooperate with outsiders to extort money from foreign contractors.

So the United Nations then held a meeting and made a resolution that all foreigners contractors and those that are waiting their draft payment and ATM Payment to be paid by Cash through Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in other to beat those fraudsters in Africa that export money from Foreigners with out release their Fund to them...

You have to Contact Senator Tunde Ogbeha The Chairman House committee Payment and verification on foreign contractors and Foreign Affairs office of the presidency Republic of Benin as soon as you received this mail to give you the full contact information of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China that will transfer your fund Directly to your account, have to call him also for more clarification .

This is contact Address
His Name ;Senator Tunde Ogbeha
E-mail Address ;senatortundeogbehe@gmail.com
Phone Number ; 0022998244622

Note ; Any money you send to Africa to receive your payment is at your own risk, you don’t have to send any money to received your payment .

Thanks

Mr Ebeson Ike
The Permanent sectary
of Senator Tunde Ogbeha
The Chairman House committee
Payment and verification on foreign
Contractors and Foreign Affairs
Office of the presidency

Now there's your exhibit A of title inflation: "The permanent Sectary of Sen. Ogbeha the Chairman House committee Payment and verification on foreign contractors and foriegn affairs office of the presidency." A mouthful.

What to Make of Updike's Output?

Must lives, well-lived, imitate stories? For example, would the gospel message have penetrated so thoroughly without the Crucifixion? Let's say Christ performed earthly miracles, died out of the public eye, rose, and ascended into Heaven. Would He have left the impact He did given our lust for story (i.e. conflict) that seems hardwired into our DNA? The story of Jesus, on a purely natural level, is very compelling, which is why Malcolm Muggeridge once said that Mary had to be a virgin if only for the purposes of the story. Grace builds on nature even if the the genesis of nature or story is supernatural.

I hesitate to bring up the personal example of aunts and grandparents on this public blog, but their deaths remain so vivid precisely because they were in such conflict with their lives. The story remains incomplete, of course, pending the general Resurrection. But certainly the seeds of one are sown here. There was no continuity; the iron graciousness of an aunt, her productivity in terms of civility and friendliness and sociability was unimaginably prolific until it completely lapsed to the point where she refused to see her children in her final year. There was no fault involved whatsoever since her disease affected her both physically and mentally, but the contrast in her personality was the stuff of stories, in how the most consistent of persons was laid low. (Death, of course, lays everyone low, and so there is no human story without that particular conflict.) We see Pope John Paul II, the most articulate of popes, the skiing, mountain-climber suffering great disabilities in his final years. I'll never forget an uncle saying that he should retire, give over his duties to someone who can do them. My sad, sad defense was that the "Vatican runs itself" and can handle a semi-incapacitated pope for awhile. We'd both missed the whole message of Pope John Paul II's weakness, of how he was trying to teach us of the sanctity of life from cradle to grave and how we are not our productivity. How would the legacy of JPII be changed if we never saw his weakness? Why do all of our heroes, from Achilles to Superman, have something that weakens them, be it their heel or kryptonite?

Updike seemed to break the pattern, cheerfully writing presumably up until his death. Two months ago anyway he was his gracious, smiling self as reported by one of the literati. He also never had to face his Achilles' heel, that which he most feared: the diminution of his talent to the point where he couldn't go on. For those whose main pleasure is in their talent, the risk of embarrassment is omnipresent (in sports, see Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali). Updike died while still in decent form.

The literary critic James Woods seems to find this discipline of Updike's a point of offensiveness. Updike was never laid low, never let himself be fallow. (Cue Olivia Newton John lyrics: "Have you never been mellow? Have you never tried? To find the comfort from inside you?") This very persistency and steadiness is seen as the flaw, the reason Updike never achieved the greatness he was capable of:

For some time now Updike’s language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life’s gallant, battered ongoingness’, indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on...Updike’s language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.

Updike is really a kind of pagan writer, for in fact, traditionally, God does not always enable language and its easy flow, but beggars it, forcing the writer into approximations and helpless ineffabilities: the Psalmist, after all (in Psalm 90), is ‘consumed away in thy sight’. One would wish Updike’s prose a little more ‘consumed away’, and a little less consuming.

What's interesting to me personally is how Mother Teresa became such a figure of interest to me only after it became clear that she had a story, i.e. that she struggled. Mother Teresa was the least interesting modern saint to me in that hers was a story of iron will, utter predictability in terms of her devotion, dedication, and closeness to God. She was, before the revelations of her long dark night were made known, a "plaster saint". She was like Jesus, only she was like Jesus if He had never been crucified.

But I'm not sure Updike should've just "embraced his inner writer's block" one day and refused the discipline to get up and write. I tend to think that writing for Updike was perhaps the greatest source of pleasure in his life, the way eating is for the very old. And one cannot live without pleasure. If it wasn't always producing of pleasure, then certainly there is something to be admired in someone who plugs along. Fellow writer Paul Theroux admired Updike's output saying "His capacity for work was huge. I think of something V. S. Pritchett once wrote. 'The fewer novels or plays you write—because of other parasitic interests—the fewer you will have the ability to write,' Pritchett said, lamenting his own small fictional output." So I'm not convinced he should've just given into despair for awhile in the hope that it would produce greater depth in his works or a higher-quality book. To simply break something that isn't working the way it ought isn't the way of God. I think it would've been better for Martin Luther to have not let his personal demon of scrupulosity lead to the fracturing of Christianity, for example.

Mother Teresa prayed and worked despite her dryness while Updike produced some books of lesser quality during similarly lean times. It's true that God doesn't like lukewarmness, that he would prefer we would be either cold or hot (Rev. 3:15), but fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and fear of God would suggest plugging along in the absence of direct divine revelation is not a bad thing.

John Updike, R.I.P.

A memoriam here:

In an autobiographical essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and religion as "the three great secret things" in human experience. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions. A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, the Jesuit magazine America awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a "distinguished Christian person of letters."

A fellow Updikephiliac mentions the late author's desire to have a large family after the experience of being an only child.

I learned about in the usual 21st century way: via the Internet. I was checking out the Columbus Metro Library website to see if I had, via them, a free subscription to JSTOR in order to read an analysis of the catalyst for the poem "The Naked and the Nude" by Robert Graves, when I saw the book I'm reading featured (see picture above). I was taken aback by the dates associated with Updike; it took a full second or more to register that the dates weren't publication dates of some kind, but of the birth and death variety. He was 76.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

Just yesterday, a Catholic woman who had previously been a Baptist told me that she often feels that many Catholics do not realize what a gift they are receiving in the Eucharist—that they are receiving Jesus Christ. I took it to heart, for I know I have been guilty of it myself. I once contemplated writing a book about the Midwest entitled “In the Ruins of Catholicism.” When I lived up there, I often visited abandoned shrines, monasteries, and churches—all now closed. They spoke of a glorious day in the distant past. Why did they cease to exist? People stopped caring, I presume. Here the Church is thriving, new buildings are going up, new shrines are dedicated, and thriving religious communities are filled with young souls. Let us never forget the first zeal we felt at the onset of our Christian journey; but if we have forgotten our “first love” (Revelation 2:4), let us start afresh to ever watch for Him in the people and places around us – in our immediate daily life and be mindful that He comes to us in the Blessed Sacrament. - Michael Dubruiel of "Annunciations"

I agree with a bit of this post at the Volokh Conspiracy critiquing the inaugural gestalt that seems more in common with a monarchy than a republic founded, in part, out of a desire for limited government. This is not an Obama issue. It’s an issue related to the increasingly vexing matter of the role of the president in American government and life. I say “increasingly vexing” because I do believe the confusion and pressure is getting worse as government grows. I thought about this often during the campaign, particularly during the debates. Think about it - these candidates are put up there in the debate context, not allowed to use any notes or references, and are expected to be comfortably expert on any and every aspect of domestic and foreign policy that might affect a nation of 300 million people as evidenced by their ability to speak extemporaneously and unaided. Why? Does this expectation meet in any way the realities of presidential decision and policy-making? - Amy Welborn

After that long campaign I had no idea [Obama] was one of us!

"We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."

Strong words against the abortion mafia. - Bill of Summa Minutiae, who hat tipped Ellyn of Oblique House

On Assumed Transitivity and Proof By Counterexample - - actual title of Zippy Catholic post

This is my fourth year redressing the lack of Dinosaur Media coverage with an online photo journal...Following 2007 and 2008, when marchers each year numbered 200,000, we wondered what would happen in 2009 - two days following the inauguration of the most proudly pro-abortion president in this sad episode of our nation's history. This year there were 300,000! I stood on a column in front of the Department of Labor for 2 1/2 hours shooting over 700 pictures. - Barbara, mother of twelve and of "Mommy Life"

Crowd estimates are a thankless task and anyone who has seen the estimates for the Obama inaugural crowd ranging from 800,000 to 1.8 million can understand that. But the headline for this Associated Press video of this year’s March for Life actually had me gasping:

Scores March Against Abortion

Scores? As in groups of 20? Really? Really? I literally have nothing to say about that headline. A GetReligion first: a headline so unfair and inaccurate that I’m left without anything to say. - GetReligion blog

Excommunications Lifted; Media Ignorance Descends - title of a post on Maureen's "Aliens in this World"

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. - Jules Renard

While reading blog comments this week, I've noticed that the same question comes up over and over from the other side: "Why does the right refuse to shut up about abortion?" Ooooooh, pick me! Pick me! For the same reason that the Jews refuse to shut up about the Holocaust. - Karen of "Some Have Hats"

[Now] the weirdest hope. The hope that an Obama presidency will “change” America. Or buck us up as a country. Or make things all better, not because of a policy, but because this guy and his nice family is in the White House. No check. Don’t get it. The first thought that comes to me are general questions about how one discerns a country’s “mood” anyway. I know it is common to do so, and a convenient shorthand for how we view history, but I am unconvinced that it ever has any validity, except perhaps in exceptionally dramatic moments in time such as during or after a war. Reading Obama’s speech - and recalling some of his more important campaign speeches - one senses that the primary problem the United States faces is a crisis of identity, purpose and self-regard. We have lost hope, we need to be recharged and inspired again. I seriously have no idea what any of this means. When I look at the primary problems facing the United States, I see two: the threat of terrorism and a new kind of war-making, and the economy. Neither of these issues are related to emotions or a need to retrieve a lost vision of hope. The economy, in particular, is a complex, global and extremely technical problem that requires clear-headed, objective problem-solvers to even begin to get a handle on. Ideological and even sentimental patriotic language serves to obscure, not solve the problem. - Amy Welborn

I have learned from a reliable source that James Dobson recently prayed for Barack Obama that he might have uneasy nights. When I passed this suggestion on to a friend who was urging us all to pray for Obama (following the scriptural command), he was inclined to think such a prayer mean-spirited, or at least to think that if he prayed it, it would be mean-spirited. I cannot speak for my friend, and of course he must follow his conscience in this matter. But I do not believe that such a prayer is mean-spirited. In fact, I believe it is quite important...The scriptural injunction to pray for kings is unequivocal. So I think that Dobson's idea is a very good one. It is not to wish ill on a man as badly wrong as Barack Obama to wish that he may be made uncomfortable by his conscience in the areas where he is wrong. It is, in fact, to wish him great good. Nor are the pro-life issues I am most thinking of (and they are only some of the issues) merely "political." They are moral, and it is a grave and potentially soul-destroying sin for one to further the pro-death agenda as Obama has done and intends to continue to do. The grace of God does not come to us comfortably. All who are Christians know this. Christ sometimes, indeed, appears to us as disaster. I do not mean personal and physical disaster, though of course God can use that for good as well, but rather that sense of an imminent overturning of one's categories, that sense that one may be called upon to do something one very much does not want to do, that sense that good is good, and bad is bad, that God is good, but that one may not after all be on His side. - Lydia McGrew of "What's Wrong With the World?"

Two Takes on the Rwandan Holocaust

I recently happened across two different theories concerning the roots of the cause of the Rwandan killings. One is from the newly infamous SSPX Bishop Williamson, the other from the book "Led to Faith" by Immaculee Ilibagiza and Steve Erwin.

Williamson's belief in conspiracies (he'd have a lot in common with Obama's former pastor Rev. Wright) suggests that he might well be a contrary indicator of truth but it's still interesting to line up his views next to another. In this essay the blame goes to "modernism, or democratism, in the Catholic Church":

In brief, God makes different men with widely differing natures, for instance some natural leaders, many natural followers, so that by men's different gifts completing and complementing one another, all men may together make up a harmonious society...

Likewise in the little "country of a thousand hills" of Rwanda, lost in the centre of Africa until the first white man arrived in 1894: for some eight centuries prior to his arrival the minority pastoral Tutsis had peacefully ruled the majority agricultural Hutus because as a tribe the Tutsis had the natural gifts to do so, and they had been wise enough on the whole not to misuse those gifts.

Nor was this natural order disturbed when Catholicism arrived soon after with Belgian missionaries teaching the true religion in the wake of the first World War, in fact Tutsis and Hutus who speak the same language mingled happily in the weeks-long celebrations to commemorate in 1933 the consecration of their joint land to Christ the King by the Tutsi King Mutara III.

The troubles only came when modernism on a large scale began to contaminate Catholics in Europe between the wars: man is God; so man, not Christ, is king; so all men are king, so one man must have one vote. As this democratism spread to Rwanda, so the Hutus were progressively indoctrinated by their clergy and leaders with the insufferability of their undemocratic status as one tribe ruled by another over which they enjoyed numerically a three-to-one majority.

Now let's see how Immaculee Ilibagiza characterizes it:

As is the case in much of Africa, many of Rwanda's modern problems were rooted in the colonial past.

For more than 500 years, Hutus and Tutsis has lived in peace under a long line of Tutsi kings. But that peace was shattered when European colonizers - first the Germans, and later the Belgians - arrived in Rwanda in the 19th century. To more easily conquer and control the country, the Belgians supported the Tutsi monarchy and exploited the existing social structure. The Belgians favored the Tutsis because their lighter skin and finer features made them seem more closely related to the Europeans than the Hutus. The Belgian overlords even introduced an "ethnic identity card" to guarantee that the two groups remained as socially segregated as possible.

When the Tutsi king pressed for independence and asked the Belgians to leave Rwanda in 1959, the Belgians retaliated by helping Hutu extremists seize power and topple the centuries-old Tutsi monarchy. The bloody Hutu Revolution that followed left more than 100,000 Tutsis dead. After the Belgians pulled out of Rwanda in 1962, Hutu extremists began a decades-long campaign of terror and slaughter aimed at Tutsis.

I'm much more inclined to accept the hypothesis in Led by Faith, especially since Williamson is like the guy who has a hammer and sees all problems related to the lack of hammers. He's not an unbiased observer: he's looking for modernism and democracy within the Church as the cause of all troubles foreign and domestic, so naturally he'll find it.

Especially telling in the Led by Faith account was the mention of the introduction of "ethnic identity cards". I suspect that modernization and democratization is less the problem than the social Darwinism that infected the West around the time of Nietsche and bore its ultimate fruit with the Nazis. It seems a clear path from the Darwinism to extreme nationalism to ethnic identiy cards to genocide.

Get Yer Opinions Here, Half-@ssed $1 & Full-@ssed $2

Andrew Sullivan gleefully links to the reprehensible opinions of newly reinstated SSPX Bishop Williamson. Since none of the opinions Sullivan linked to were of a heretical nature, I'm scratching my head at the non-sequitor nature of his post. Since when does the Church excommunicate the misinformed and grossly ignorant? I'm much more concerned about politicians voting for government policies that result in dead babies than obscure prelates with likely the same size audience as this blog making hateful statements.
___________
Angst about Obama being Obama seems misplaced. Rather, it's simply proof that bad voting leads to bad results. I don't blame Obama for being Obama; I blame Americans for voting him into office. (Democracy is a poor system but it's still the best we've got.)

My thinking-aloud theory for why it's tougher for conservatives to be elected is that the number one axiom of politics is voters never appreciate what you prevent, only what you do. That is, a politician will not get credit for avoiding a terrorist attack, avoiding a deep recession, avoiding a war, or avoiding a tax increase, government bankruptcy, etc..(not that conservatives are always adept at avoiding some of these things of course).

By contrast, extremely expensive middle-class entitlement programs are still seen in a positive light. More surprinsgly, FDR is called one of our greatest presidents despite the fact that the Depression lasted a decade and ended not through his efforts but via Japan's (i.e. Pearl Harbor).

___________
Well, in the interest of being "fair and balanced" I have to say I shouldn't be totally giving up on mainstream media (in this case TIME), especially when it goes and produces something like this. It felt like a Goincidence since I came across this link on the very day of receiving a nice handwritten note in the mail from one of the sisters in that very cloister.
___________
Alack and alas, if I knew twenty years ago I'd have a blog and would get linked by a German-speaker I would've studied harder in German class.
___________
Interesting thoughts touching on free will, about a writer who volunteered to go to an insane asylum:

She is consumed by the question of whether she, and society, have chosen madness, or what has been called cosmetic psychopharmacology, as an easier path than free will and its attendant terrors. (A third meaning, about whether madness and will can exist at the same time, hovers in the distance.) ...

But it’s moving to watch her relearn the basic lessons of life: Sit with your anger, and its handmaiden, shame. It isn’t real, but you need to know where it comes from. Figure it out, then don’t worry about it too much. “Just hand the apple back,” she writes. “Just unknow. Because you can.”

Of course, this is not enough to wean Vincent off her daily Prozac. And by taking it, she answers the question about whether madness and will can coexist. Everyone must take responsibility for his own mental health, even those among us who are touched by darkness. As a compromise in an age of psychopharmacological doubt, this seems about right.

___________
As much as I like my avatar, that of meself holding a fine pint, I'd rather have pictures like these adorn that right corner:

But how does one do so without peeps assuming I'm a gal? Especially since I don't even have mits yet?___________
Speaking of girls, Kim gives us a Bingo report, although reluctantly since she's of a mind to ostracize me for my non-volunteering. Understandable as just as elections have consequences so does quitting bingo. But she did offer this:

Anyhow, while cleaning up the tables, I found a note. I am typing it word for word as it is written. I thought you might find it amusing.

To Whom It May Concern

I thank you need to invest in a new coffee pot because the one you got up there tast [yes tast] like shi-

Thank you

A Bingo player

The entitlement mentality grows! Now free coffee is supposed to taste like Tim Horton's?
___________

To end on a much happier if no less expletive-y note, saw this from a friend of my aunt's concerning a boy undergoing radical chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant:

The most important thing is that after his bone marrow aspiration test results came back my heart was overjoyed with happiness that now my grandson can truly be happy with his life again. There were no cancer cells found. Although this is fantastic news he will still need periodic checkups for the next four years just to be safe for he is high risk. It was told early on that even though he may not have any cancer the grace period is five years. So with the love of God we pray that he will remain cancer free for the next several years and on...All his blood workup were fantastic. They ran test on his heart, liver, kidney, eyes and ears, everything came back great. We had a meeting with the entire transplant team, and the head of the transplant team who was Dr. W, I couldn't believe this doctor and what he told my grandson . . . he was looking at all the test results that had come back on the computer and when he was done he came right over to J and put his hand up and for the high five to J and said to him at the same time there hands contacted . . . . . . Jordan you are F . . . ing amazing!!!! I looked at him and told him I can't believe who actually said that with me sitting right here . . . he laughed and told me that this is the kind of results that he would like to happen to all his patients . . . it's amazing and J is awesome! I guess he was so happy that he couldn't help himself but he also knows that I didn't appreciate the swearing . . ha! He any case it was great news and we thank God for his answer to so many of you have prayed for J and we as a family thank all of you so much for all your prayers and support.

Orestes! Orestes! ....

For Orestes Brownson fans - and who among us is not? - Eric Scheske has a tri-posting here.

The Limits of Apologetics

Having never heard any Catholic apologetics as a kid growing up in Catholic schools (we weren't even taught the term 'apologetics'), there was later a sense that some of the Church's doctrines were embarrassing or at least extraneous. That there were sound reasons for the doctrines I didn't know until Ott and Keating, and moreoever I couldn't have imagined then how much light and consolation many of these "extraneous" doctrines afforded some of my brethern. But I was more focused on Christian unity with non-Catholics (seeing how all my friends have been Protestants).

One such friend, Ham o' Bone, said something very interesting after I sent some apologetic material his way a few years back. He said something like "if any church doctrine is false then the whole thing is false". And the Marian doctrines in particular seemed false to him. But of course one could apply the same standard to the Bible, and many atheists and agnostics have. They believe they've found something in the Bible that is contradictory and false and so they can discard the whole thing.

The missing ingredient is faith, be it faith in the truth of the Bible or the Church. I remember going so far as to send Mark Shea's "By Whose Authority" book to an anti-Catholic Baptist radio preacher; call me naive but not late to dinner. I was naive in thinking that apologetics, even good apologetics, are in any sense sufficient. Faith is always required.

Weekend

Fresh as hibiscus it came on horses
home again to gather forces
Frietag's thirst is slaked by Faulkner
playing quarters with strong porters
till the reluctant tuck at two.

Saturday dons my new, blue sweatshirt
(it feels so Yale) to fetch breakfast
Then the mid-hours a bit unsettled,
like the mid-years less 'spiration
the weather yuck as day-old biscuits.

Another Sunday the paper says
to church and wor su gai I do attend
the weekend hours shrunk too fast
I walked and read and blogged it past.

The Risk-Takers

It's a figure of perpetual wonderment to me to the extent we Americans have spent ourselves into debt. In our sympathetic local paper, there were a few lines yesterday about a woman, an accountant, who is seeking help from our U.S. House representative because she was denied a conventional fixed-rate mortgage from her bank and so got an ARM which she now can't afford. This is bedazzingly bedfuddling because one of the solutions to our financial management problem, I thought, was for high schools to require financial planning classes and yet here this lady was an accountant. (Of course, accountacy isn't the same as financial prudence; after all Arthur Anderson - the most bedrock of bedrockian accounting firms - went out of business years ago.) But you would think though that the fact that she couldn't qualify for a fixed-rate loan might - just might - be telling her something. In this age there is no admission of where the buck stops.

I've decided that perhaps part of it is that we are simply a nation of risktakers and taking on debt, though risky, is part of our cultural DNA. If you can get an A.R.M. loan, well why not? Sure it's a bet on your performance and your company's performance and the economy's, since an A.R.M. would assume a rising income but... One thing that the Puritan immigrants of the 1600s had in common with German and Italian immigrants of the 1800s is an acceptance of risk, albeit not necessarily of the financial variety.

That's one spin. Ben Stein says simply that we lack discipline, calling us "free spending Peter Pans":

I have been pondering what advice to give them about money. What I keep coming up with is this: Do not act like typical Americans. Do not fail to save...I wish I could teach that work ethic to those close to me. I wish I could teach them that money is a scarce good, worth fighting for and protecting. But I very much fear that my son, more up-to-date than I am in almost every way, is more of a modern-day American than I am. To hustle and scuffle for a deal is something he cannot even imagine. To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength.

This isn't academic, since of my seven siblings counting my wife's side two have had to recently borrow in order to pay their mortgage and at least two more are in serious financial distress.

Never do I feel more the old fogey when I look back with what trepidation I put my John Hancock on my first mortgage document ('mortgage' means "dead note" I believe). Getting an A.R.M. that could float with interest rates was unthinkable.

I feel an old fogey also when I not only think about the possibility of losing my job but anticipate it.

It may be the result of a chronological accident, having become politically and economically aware during the period from 1975 to 1985. These years featured a severe recession ('82), as well as severe inflation ('75 to '79) and very high unemployment ('77 thru '82). So perhaps those of my exact age (45) might understand, though in a far less vivid way than those of the Depression-era, that "money doesn't grow on trees".

Springsteen's Contentment

I'm all for a happy Bruce, and yet it is interesting to see what effect that has had on his art. Word on the back street is that his latest album is lyrically-challenged. Most, though not all of course, great artists seem troubled to some extent: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Van Gogh, even Shakespeare. Not to compare the Bard of New Jersey with the Bard of Avon but you get my drift.

I feel a bit of a prophet since a couple years ago I imagined Bruce Springsteen writing a song about a grocery store and blaming Bush for fewer choices:

Sixty Minutes correspondent Soft T. Baller asked: "Theoretically, what if the gap between the ideal and performance narrowed such that the darkness, the shadowlands of humanity as it were, was primarily the fact that only ten varieties of Kelloggs cereal were available in some foreign countries due to Bush Administration policies?"

Bruce answered, "Then I'd write a song about that! It'd go something like this [strums guitar while making a low, moaning sound]:

Marshall Bush took the stand
declared the oath but broke the band
when denied he Raisin Bran
to the stores of Ireland...

REF: Yeah there's a darkness in the supermarket...
There's a darkness in the supermarket...

Well it turns out his latest album does wax semi-lyrical about a grocery store, although in a reverse image ala Obamaland according to this WAPO review:

"Queen of the Supermarket" [is] a marvelous, majestic song, save for the lyrics, in which Springsteen goes shopping at a store "where aisles and aisles of dreams await you" -- specifically, where "a dream awaits in aisle number two" -- and winds up snatching a hidden-beauty metaphor from the clearance bin. (Leave it to the Boss to try to romanticize the mega-mart shopping experience.)

Depth and contentment often seem to be inversely-related which is why during good economic times there is a lot of entertainment news and fluff (i.e. see Clinton era). Springsteen's apparent contentment, personal and political, apparently hasn't done him any favors lyrically:

It's a recurring problem. "Surprise Surprise"...sounds like the best Traveling Wilburys song you've never heard, only with strings and, unfortunately, the sort of lyrics that Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, et al., might have laughed out of the room: "And when the sun comes out tomorrow, it'll be the start of a brand new day/And all that you have wished for I know will come your way."

On the driving rocker "My Lucky Day," over ringing guitars and piano fills, Springsteen plays with the old love-is-a-gamble motif, but can only come up with this couplet: "Well, I lost all the other bets I made/Honey, you're my lucky day."...

Throughout the album, Springsteen sounds relatively content -- a far cry from his state of mind 16 months ago, when the bitter and oft-bleak E Street album "Magic" was released. Then, Springsteen was downright disturbed by the realities of this American life under the watch of George W. Bush. Now, he sounds optimistic and occasionally giddy. But it's hardly a celebration of Obama-era political change: "Working on a Dream" is an apolitical album that goes for subtlety over Big Statements as Springsteen, at 59, considers personal relationships and the passage of time.

Well, just maybe it's not a coincidence that political change has changed his tune, I mean lyrics. But it is interesting to wonder if there's connection between happiness and artistry.

Paradise by the Art Institute's Lights

It was a case of severe vacationi interruptus; I'd misunderestimated ecstasy's trajectory. Best not peak too late, but I'd peaked on Tuesday, of all days, with nary a book eaten before Wednesday's mournin' bell nor scarcely a beer drunk.

It was a bit ridiculous, racing 'gainst the clock like that, chugging a couple beers Tuesday at 5pm before 6pm dinner while watching a televised Meat Loaf concert featuring an explosive rendition of "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights". I was quaffing the beer because I was back late from what I'd assumed would be a pedestrian art museum but which had left me surprised by beauty. Happy hour was delayed, but man has a natural right to beer on vacation. (Note to self: check Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" for confirmation.) I find my mood greatly improved by regular beer much as a famous great evangelist found his greatly improved by daily sex. The great Hilaire Belloc saw his sense of humor atrophy during a wineless Lent; I find my far less witty version similarly afffected without the hops or prospect thereof.

It became increasingly clear though that I was experiencing an idyllic vacation high at precisely the wrong time. New vistas suddenly lay before me for it is only the relaxed who are open to mystery ("Americans can't relax enough to be able to pray well" said Blessed John XXIII). If I took the next day off I would surely read the Douay, King Lear, I would find some secret long eluding me, I would linger awhile in the uplands of my library, gathering in the sheaves, making love to my many splendored volumes. Pick your own metaphor. Like the businessman too consumed with work to visit his mistress, so too did I give scant attention to the many beauties within arms length. Tis better to be a contemplative with three books than owning thousands along with a distracted attention.

So the thought of calling in sick to work was just so...obvious. It should be easy now as there's no lie in it; our vacation days and sick days go into the same pile. And yet I'm a miser, a vacation day miser, and I was unwilling to go with my gut and read like a mo' fo'. "Save your vacation days," I thought, "for a pretty day. The year is not 20 days old, for heaven sakes! Hold your fire, keep your tinder dry."

No guts, no glory. I went into work semi-begrudgingly. Oh sure, I played the radio up high on the way in. Oh sure I was alit with calm and peace when my boss stopped by Wednesday morning. I was filled still with the glorious images of art, invigorated most especially by the unaccountably moving scene of George Washington's death bed. He too was mortal, the greatest president of all. All images of him I've seen were of strength yet now I'd witnessed him supine.

There was also that huge panoramic of Cincinnati in 1853 and I searched the large canvas in vain for where my great-grandfather may've worked or lived or worshipped. Call it art as time-travel - be it at George Washington's bedside or my great-grandfather's town. I get to see what he saw, which reminded me of the time I became moonstruck because it - the moon - was the only thing I could be sure I'd seen and Christ had seen, and it was like we had shared something very significant.

There was no shyness in the musuem curators at the Dayton Art Institute in displaying nudity; artists and curators are professionals, like doctors, and so they have their reasons. I marvel at those who can remain pure while painting a nude. I can't imagine the discipline a male painter must have in really seeing a woman's hand when a few inches away lay...

I read long from Updike, "Widows of Eastwick", and received that filling sensation I sometimes feel from his prose. Updike wrote about the desire of one of the older women to stay in the warm sun of New Mexico rather than travel to cold and snowy Boston to visit a friend. And it struck me how it is no accident that Florida is filled with snow birds and that the elderly seek warm climes during the winter. I began to wonder if I'm old before my time in my sensitivity to climate. Certainly if the 'plaints of the elderly are any indication, my own dislike of winter will only grow. It's not something I am particularly concerned about except as an indicator of character. That is, whether it's an indicator of my unwillingness to adapt to nature rather than force nature to adapt to me, since it's modernity's sin to think it can control nature. Embracing the winter seems an indicator of toughness and character and for that reason I should be interested in increasing my tolerance for Ohio winters. Lord knows my life is soft enough as it is.

They say it's the little things that matter, and it's true that I appreciated the little thing of the return of those golden fish filets at the cafe today. To eat when one is truly hungry is a good thing. But my mind goes back to that time of the idiot savant, that of the time spent in the DAI where I looked. I even made my own art, carefully removing the condesation from the window in order to get a shot of the courtyard beyond. I left part of the condensation in the picture in order to preserve the ambiguity.

I recall how startling it was to come around one blind corner and find the bright, airy modern art room with the very tall transparent doors fronted by vines of iron leaf. I remember too the room where I could rest my elbows in the window well and enjoy the bright sunny winter scene beyond, overlooking the mighty Miami river next to the signs of the highway that would take me home. I felt a feeling of exquisite comfort in the moment. I was immaculately preserved from interruption while surrounded by beauty, both outside and inside. I reveled in the moment as I made notes about all the things I wanted to explore. That moment, that single moment looking out the window, was impossibly filling. I was a child again and could’ve leaned in that window well for an hour or more. I walked twice to those great transparent doors with the iron leaves twice.

Contra FOCA

I was going to send Ham of Bone this link and ask he contact our senators about FOCA but then I figured I'd just put it on the blog. I wrote to Sen. Brown saying that while we disagree on the issue of abortion rights, I hope he would vote against the Freedom of Choice Act. Even apart from the pro-life issues, this proposal would radically strip away of the rights of the states to make laws that reflect the will of the people.
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Press Bias 101

Ground zero of media bias is coverage of pro-life activism:

Crowd estimates are a thankless task and anyone who has seen the estimates for the Obama inaugural crowd ranging from 800,000 to 1.8 million can understand that. But the headline for this Associated Press video of this year’s March for Life actually had me gasping:

Scores March Against Abortion

Scores? As in groups of 20? Really? Really? I literally have nothing to say about that headline. A GetReligion first: a headline so unfair and inaccurate that I’m left without anything to say.

I'd often wondered whether the creation of the alternative media - primarily FOX News and conservative blogs - have stripped the audience from MSM television shows and newspapers causing them to tilt leftward more easily (since the conservative audience has already deserted them). But I see that as early as 1990 the laughable coverage, or in this case non-coverage, already existed.

Moi? Naive? Perhaps...

Snippet of a conversation:

Me: I always had confidence Aaron would come back to the faith. Especially back then when I was in the midst of my reversion and had great trust in the sacraments. He'd been baptized, a mark left on his soul. I didn't fully realize how one could resist grace...

My wife: Yes I thought you were naive.

A Couple of Parodies

From the soon-to-be published Guide to Political Slang:

Personal reasons -- a phrase often used to explain the withdrawal from consideration for appointment or as a candidate in a campaign. Typically means "stuff I hadn't thought was going to come out". (That is, for those possessing a modicum of shame, unlike Timothy Geither.)

Example:

Usage: "I am withdrawing for personal reasons."
Meaning: "I am withdrawing because I embezzled funds, worked briefly as a Nigerian scammer, cheated on my taxes despite supporting tax hikes, and frequented prostitutes."

In the latest demonstration of the use of the phrase personal reasons, the NY Times seems to have failed to recognize the all-encompassing nature of the personal:

"Problems involving taxes and a household employee surfaced during the vetting of Caroline Kennedy and derailed her candidacy for the Senate, a person close to Gov. David A. Paterson said on Thursday, in an account at odds with Ms. Kennedy’s own description of her reasons for withdrawing."

We here at the Slang Guide are confused. How could the explanation of the person close to Gov. Paterson be considered "at odds" with Caroline Kennedy's? We hope the NY Times will understand the extremely personal nature of having tax and household employee problems.

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Dogs Won't Bite Under an Obama Administration

PARIS, FRANCE-- Former president George Bush was blamed for a recent dog bite perpetrated upon ex-French president Jacques Chirac by what was obviously a Republican dog.

The dog named Sumo is taking anti-depression drugs.

"Vee feel that all physical, moral, emotional, and intellectual evils can be ultimately placed at the feet of zee American neo-cons," said Chirac through a statesman. "If our beloved poodle wasn't depressed by the success of the surge in Iraq, then he was obviously reacting to global warming brought on by the failure of America to sign the Kyoto protocols."

I Wasn't Alone

When I heard Obama re-took the oath of office, I was taken by surprise. I mentioned to Dylan how it sounded like secular liturgy, as in the conveying of sacraments. A quick Google search later, I learned another soul was thinking along those same lines.

 

And this will be a sign for you.. (Luke 2:12)
"The America in which we were schooled had only two commandments: be nice and be cool...So, one day around 1983, I'm sitting in the smoking lounge of the Georgestown University library - remember when college libraries still had smoking rooms? - reading Tom Jones (education is nice, our teachers told us) while tendrils from my Marlboro (smoking is cool, the movies showed us) spiraled up in blue-gray swirls to break and pool on the stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling. And, growing tired at last of young Tom's long journey to reconcile with Squire Allworthy and the all-too-worthy Sophia, I let my eyes drift to the window.

Down on the sidewalk, across the street, was a woman with a toddler in a baby stroller and a small black dog on a bright red leash. April is Washington's best month, and the sun filtered in a glow through the leaves of the new-green trees as the overexcited, overhappy little dog bounced and yapped, weaving his tangled leash through the stroller's wheels while the mother stumbled after him and the toddler laughed and laughed, clapping her small hands at the slapstick world into which God and her parents had unexpectedly delivered her.

I wish that words could fully re-create that scene - the sharp blue of the stroller, the mother in her red jacked straining for the dog as her snarled purse spilled coins and baby wipes across the brick sidewalk - for it was at that moment I began to fail at the great American goal of niceness and coolness at which I had aimed since grade school. And it all started with the sudden, absolute conviction that babies are good." - Jody Bottum, from here.

Ratings Approval Graph

Since I blogged the other day about presidential approval ratings, thought I'd share this interesting graph and post from Darwin Catholic on the context of past approval ratings:

Day Trip to Dayton

Judge not a city by its size. I'd not been to Dayton as a travel destination since a grade school trip to Wright-Patt despite the close proximity to Columbus. I figured two hours in Dayton would be plenty but boy was I wrong.

It happens there are some 26,500 results in the Google search "lost in a painting", and I got lost in a few at the Dayton Art Institute. It was a satisfying, wonderful refuge into art on this, an appendage'd vacation day to the MLK holiday. I took so many pictures that I had to start a new blog for display purposes. (Disclosure: I'm an art virgin, so it doesn't take much to excite me.)

The museum is next to an imposing Masonic temple, a registered historical landmark, so I wandered over there out of nosiness. Unfortunately there was a guy behind a desk, the universal symbol of "hey, you can't wander around in here freely". He looked a bit like one of the unwholesome characters in Koontz's "Odd Thomas". When I asked if I could look around he said that they don't really allow people to look around.

The next stop was the intriguing-looking Orthodox or Byzantine church on the other side. I walked around the whole church without seeing any identification, which brings to mind a paraphrase: "if you don't know what it's called then you don't belong here." In front of a couple other halls I came across a Greek and American flags flying, dedicated to American and Greek soldiers, and then at last to the somewhat anticlimactic name: "Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church". We have an Annunciation Greek Orthodox church in town too; it seems the Orthodox are really big on the Annunciation.

At the Art Institute...

The first area I came to was African masks, which included one used for the purposes of war, circumcision, and male rites of passage. It looked the epitome of aggression: very low and pronounced brow, foreshortened forehead, nose stubby and flared, teeth showing. Power in such a society is physical. Later I would see a 19th century painting of a woman who looked like she was balding. The description said women would shave the front part of their heads in order to give the appearance of a higher forehead, which suggested greater intelligence: power in that society was intellectual.

Much of modern art is so bad that it has the school-yard quality of "made you look!" There are signs saying "please do not touch" except where they say "please do touch" as is the case of the black steel plate on the ground that you are meant to walk on. For what purpose I'm not sure. Modern art's excuse is that it is wants to mimic the state of flux and emptiness of modernity.

Sometimes you're not sure what is art and what isn't in the abstract art arena. Should I sit on that bench, or is it an artwork, a statement of the banality of modern culture? Many of the fixtures tell us this is art and not to touch it. The funny thing about good art is that awe attends it such that you don't need a sign telling you not to touch it.

It was interesting to read of the tension in art (as in life and film and Santa) over the definition of real:

One of the most significant tensions surrounding realism in painting can be found in its relationship to photography. A mechnically produced image, a photograph was considered an exact and completely objective representation of the subject. In contrast, a painting enjoyed the privileged status of a unique, subjective creation. An audience steeped in these early 20th century discussions began to expect the exactitude and "truth" of the camera in their realist paintings. While this tension was never resolved, nor could it be, both media were forced to fight for the claim of possessing "the aura of the real".

Came across what might've been the first Bouguereau I'd seen in person. It was "Song of the Nightingale", a pretty peasant girl with an expression of ambiguity, which was said to be what makes for good art. (No wonder the Mona Lisa is so admired; it seems we almost long for ambiguity - or perhaps mystery?)

Religious Paintings...

It was surprising, to me, that there were two or three paintings involving Mary Magdalen (almost wrote 'Mary Matalin'). I saw two references in the museum to Noli Me Tange ("Don't cling to me"), the words said by Christ in a Resurrection appearance. I was surprised by how little we focus on the post-Resurrection visions of Christ in church and art, although it's likely the subject is more popular than I realize. In the painting at left, it looks as though the angel is eagerly seeking insight from Mary Magdalen rather than the reverse.

Another painting or two depicted the Magi adoring Christ, and mention was made of how that subject is one of the most often depicted of all scenes in Jesus's life. That was surprising - and yet we see a similar thing in songs, in that the Incarnation is a more favored subject than the death or Resurrection.

The three kings seeing Jesus, bowing to Him, is a very rich message. This painting also contained what looked to be the devil in the background, confused, understanding only power and wondering why the wise and strong would be interested in a fragile baby of seemingly humble parentage. According to "The Golden Legends", Christ's birth created "confusion of the demons".

Another painting showed the lamentation of the good women who prepared His body for burial. You live in that moment viewing it, that moment when they had no idea He would rise. It was an unmitigated tragedy for them at the time, but it teaches us not to despair.

There was the story of St. Sebastian next to his painting, an early martyr who reverse-illustrates Jason of Friday the 13th. In our modern horror stories evil won't die; in the Resurrection of Christ and many early martyrs, the opposite is the case.

Notes about other paintings:

The inspiration for a painting of a Civil War widow was the poem Evangeline by Longfellow

Volumetric - new word I learned, used to describe painting of a fulsome woman

Gigantic painting illustrated Act 4, Scene 6 of King Lear

Mayan stone carving from over 1,000 years ago. Life is so short! Use it well! We are so truly temporary figures on this earth.

The Supernaturality of the Cross

When I see the Crucifix, I usually picture two things:

God so loved us that He chose to die for us.

Just as He suffered, so must we.

All well and good but both betray a purely naturalistic vision. Soldiers, fire-fighters, our parents - all may die for us. It's infinitely more impressive that God did so, but it's still something that we can glean from purely human sources. The second point, the acceptance of our suffering, is no more supernatural than Stoic philosophy.

What is unique about the cross is its supernaturality, the forgiveness of sins, so well-described by St. Bernard:

Where can the weak find a place of firm security and peace, except in the wounds of the Savior? Indeed, the more secure is my place there the more he can do to help me. The world rages, the flesh is heavy, and the devil lays his snares, but I do not fall, for my feet are planted on firm rock. I may have sinned gravely. My conscience would be distressed, but it would not be in turmoil, for I would recall the wounds of the the Lord: He was wounded for our iniquities. What sin is there so deadly that it cannot be pardoned by the death of Christ? And so if I bear in mind this strong, effective remedy, I can never again be terrified by the malignancy of sin.

Surely the man who said: My sin is too great to merit pardon, was wrong. He was speaking as though he were not a member of Christ and had no share in his merits, so that he could claim them as his own, as a member of the body can claim what belongs to the head. As for me, what can I appropriate that I lack from the heart of the Lord who abounds in mercy? They pierced his hands and feet and opened his side with a spear. Through the openings of these wounds I may drink honey from the rock and oil from the hardest stone: that is, I may taste and see that the Lord is sweet.

He was thinking thoughts of peace, and I did not know it, for who knows the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? But the piercing nail has become a key to unlock the door, that I may see the good will of the Lord. And what can I see as I look through the hole? Both the nail and the wound cry out that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The sword pierced his soul and came close to his heart, so that he might be able to feel compassion for me in my weaknesses.

Through these sacred wounds we can see the secret of his heart, the great mystery of love, the sincerity of his mercy with which he visited us from on high. Where have your love, your mercy, your compassion shone out more luminously that in your wounds, sweet, gentle Lord of mercy? More mercy than this no one has than that he lay down his life for those who are doomed to death.

My merit comes from his mercy; for I do not lack merit so long as he does not lack pity. And if the Lord's mercies are many, then I am rich in merits. For even if I am aware of many sins, what does it matter? Where sin abounded grace has overflowed. And if the Lord's mercies are from all ages for ever, I too will sing of the mercies of the Lord for ever. Will I not sing of my own righteousness? No, Lord, I shall be mindful only of your justice. Yet that too is my own; for God has made you my righteousness.

Saint Bernard, Sermons on the Canticle

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

I have now read Neuhaus's As I Lay Dying. It seems a lot more helpful than Faulkner's book of the same title. In addition to a quick recitation of what he remembers about his close encounter with death and dying, and some necessary philosophy and other real things, he also, in his no-nonsense honest way, also looks at other books and poems that have something to say about these matters, and then compares and contrasts them to his own experiences; and finally, without embarrassment, he talks about his "near-death" experience; actually he calls it a "near-life" experience... The outcome was not at all clear for several weeks. Finally he was promoted out of intensive care, soon after which he suddenly one night became aware of two "presences," who made it clear that he had a choice. And they clearly spoke: they said that "Everything is ready now." Not a command or an invitation, but definitely up to him. He thought that if he said Yes he would go on to die. - Ken of "Muellerstuff"

I asked him his secret for being so prodigious a reader and writer. His response I took initially as a non-sequitur, until I had a chance to reflect on it more and put it into practice. His secret, he told me, was to make sure he did his morning prayer before he began to read the newspaper. Once he had put God first and received his help for the day, he could then get to the work God was asking him to do with greater concentration. God seemed to multiply his efforts. One of our mutual friends, who was with him to the end, told me that as his mental capacities were beginning to shut down, the one thing he continued to do lucidly was to pray his breviary. - Fr. Roger Landry on Neuhaus

Unlike no man I have ever met, he was utterly at ease discussing the most serious things; not so much this or that influential book, but struggles in the life of virtue, mysteries in theology, the great questions of my life and his: What does the Lord want of me? That his preferred method of doing so was after evening prayers had been said, with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other, was the practical affirmation of his theological conviction that to rejoice in the Lord's gifts was an obligation of gratitude. - Fr. Raymond de Souza on Fr. Neuhaus

I was talking with a friend over the weekend and we had both come to the conclusion that we really didn't give a toss about one of our main topics of conversation: politics. Why would that be I wonder. Perhaps the last year or more of non-stop political reportage over loaded the circuits in that portion of the brain devoted to the public polity. Or maybe a touch of despair over the prospect of the most anti-life federal government in our history (more so even than Bill'n'Hillary!) coming into power in a few days. And when the rigging in our fantasyland democratic system, always something of an institutionalized con game, becomes so much more obvious, well, it doesn't help. You don't have to be in Illinois to see it; a good look at the California legislature will do just as well. There are so many more interesting things in life that continue on quite well without the gummint. Dr Johnson had it right 250 years ago: "How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"

I’ve always said Catholicism is the easiest or most difficult religion around. You can be a peasant lady who attends says the (entire, all 15-decades) Rosary daily, who has never heard of “transubstantiation v. consubstantiation,” and assumes the U.S. Constitution was written in Latin. She’s probably very wise, but very simple. If you don’t want to be that happy and content peasant lady (and what good red-blooded American does?) and prefer to think on your own, regardless of your innate limitations, then you better be ready to buckle down. And if you want to buckle down, this volume is a good piece of exercise. Benedict Groeschel repeatedly praises this volume. I’ve struggled a bit (I bought it six months ago), but I will get through it. - Eric of "The Daily Eudemon" on Pope Benedict's "Jesus of Nazareth"

Christianity began in the Near East. And for a long time, its main development continued there. Then it spread in Asia, much more than what we think today after the changes brought about by Islam. Precisely for this reason its axis moved noticeably toward the West and Europe. Europe -- we're proud and pleased to say so -- further developed Christianity in its broader intellectual and cultural dimensions....Europe definitely became the center of Christianity and its missionary movement. Today, other continents and other cultures play with equal importance in the concert of world history. In this way the number of voices in the Church grows, and this is a good thing. - Pope Benedict XVI

People have enough sense not to step in front of a moving bus because they recognize the principle of cause and effect in conjunction with simple physics and tradition, but for some bizarre reason when it comes to the religion they start abandoning all previous knowledge and reason is search of making themselves as ignorant as possible mistaking ignorance for some kind of sophisticated brilliance. - commenter "Love the Girls"

One thing you won't see on the Left: grace. - Mike Barnicle on "Morning Joe" discussing the crowds at the Inaugural who booed President Bush.

Intelligent children often go through a phase in which they rage against the stupidity of humanity. Barring some mutation in conscience, they abandon this pose by late adolescence. By adulthood, they should realize it is not the innately dull-witted who deserve criticism and even contempt; rather, those most dangerous to the world are they who pride themselves on their own overestimated intelligence. - Kevin Jones of Philokalia

As a Communion meditation hymn, the choir (as is their wont) performed “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” in a very soulful and improper way. (There was scattered applause when they finished, which should have so horrified them that they’ll never do that song in a liturgy again, but probably didn’t.)...Our pastor began the homily by talking about cell phones, and said something about how he was sure we had all turned ours off..I still heard two cell phones go off during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, one at the moment of elevation of the Host. - Tom of Disputations on Amy's blog

"The priest no longer stood with his back to us, he turned around to face the congregation." This was presented as a triumph of civility and sanity. Yesterday it occurred to me that there are no (or at least few) creatures in nature wherein the head faces the body. Generally the head and the body face the same direction. It would be evolutionarily counterproductive to always be looking at where you've been. So, how is it a triumph to have the head suddenly face the body--the priest face the congregation? If he is leading us, shouldn't he be focusing our attention in the appropriate direction rather than facing the other way? How do we form one body of Christ with our head turned around and gazing back on us? - Steven of Flos Carmeli

Inaugural Thoughts on the Inaugural...

Rush Limbaugh has a high-larious term for the event: "the Immaculation"

Fine invocation by Rick Warren.

Aretha Franklin has a voice so distinctive and inimitable that "Happy Birthday" would sound interesting, let alone the sublime "My Country Tis of Thee".

Loved the violin quartet.

How unfortunate that Chief Justice Roberts called him "Barack Hussein Obama". Hasn't he learned from the conservative talk show hosts that you can't call him that? :-)

Somebody flubbed up the vows. Initially I thought it Obama, because I wasn't paying attention to Roberts. (The giver of the oath is like the priest at a wedding ceremony: no one's paying him any mind.)

I liked the speech. Good Lord was that better than that awful Democratic National Convention yawner. This time Obama spoke about such things as the market being the great creator of wealth, and of how personal responsibility is key. A bit over-dramatic at times in the sense of "the end of the world is nigh" although if we do end up in another Great Depression it'll feel retroactively accurate. As it is, in terms of desperation and danger we're not to the point of "the snow stained red" as it was during the winter of 1776.

About the poem, lest said is best. Writing a piece for an occasion, rather than via inspiration is difficult. Poetry, like sexual intercourse, perhaps is best done under the influence of mindlessness rather than mindfulness.

Benediction by Lowrey was also a malediction, as far as whites are concerned. You really show your own smallness of spirit when even after your side has won you have to get the last jab in.

Obi in Winter

Odd...

Three prominent American Catholics with a tremendous interest in politics all died before seeing Obama become president: William F. Buckley, Tim Russert, & Richard J. Neuhaus. The national discourse will be poorer for the loss.

Regarding Immigration

I have the proverbial mixed emotions concerning illegal immigration. I can certainly understand why desperate people would want to find work and I think the workplace raids are harsh, unnecessary, and injurious to families.

But one of the assertions of the the Catholic bishops in regard to immigration (as we now call illegal immigration) is that the control of national borders is a legitmate right, and yet the latest comprehensive immigration reform package offered by the bishops includes "abandonment of the border 'blockade' enforcement strategy".

So I'm scratching my head. How does that follow? I searched the USCCB site and came up with the justification:

Components of reform which are needed include: opportunities for legalization for the undocumented currently living in the United States; temporary worker programs with full worker protections and a path to permanency; and reform of our family immigration system that will allow families to be reunited in a timely fashion. The reforms should be enacted simultaneously so that all aspects of our legal immigration system are addressed. Properly implemented, this reform should alleviate the need for a U.S. border “blockade” policy, which has not discouraged undocumented migration and has driven migrants into dangerous and remote parts of the American Southwest.

Leaving aside the debatable point whether the fence has discouraged illegal immigration or not, let's assume that all the aforementioned reforms were enacted. Would that really stem the flow of illegal immigration? This smells like politics and wishful thinking intruding on the thinking of the bishops. I wish they were less influenced by ideology even though I realize that is something likely impossible since none of us is untainted.

Interesting stats from Zogby, which our diocesan newspaper quoted approvingly: "60% of U.S. Catholics would opppose federal legislation to build a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border." (The word 'entire' is telling. It makes the statement sound extreme and thus gather more votes for opposition.) I find the other stat a bit puzzling: 57% of Catholics would oppose "U.S. government assistance and trade policies that would create jobs abroad in order to prevent immigrants from coming here illegally to seek employment." This is the way, it seems, to stem the flow of illegal immigration. Help Mexico become self-sufficient in its own job creation, although it might defy the term 'self-sufficient' to give what probably amount to handouts.

Illegal immigration isn't something I feel strongly about but I'm interested in the history of how the bishops came to their current statement on immigration. It's entirely possible I simply don't understand Catholic social teaching. But it's hard to imagine Bishop Sheen in 1947 saying that control of borders could be accomplished through a lot of reforms that tacitly suggest no responsibility be placed upon Mexico, its government, or its citizens crossing illegally.

Pro-Life Sunday Homily

Commented on Amy's blog, the rough paraphrase reproduced here:

Our pastor said the politicization of the pro-life issue is very unfortunate in that it closes people off. He said that it has not only divided society but far more shockingly has divided Catholics. He said the politicization causes both pro-life and pro-choice to shut down and the resulting discussion to lack depth. He said pro-lifers will mentally check off that he said something about the cause, perhaps saying "it's about time", while pro-choicers will simply not listen at all.

He said the roots of the issue go back to the 16th & 17th centuries. In the wake of the exhaustion at the end of the religious wars there was new thinking among philosophers and others that God was the problem (though it was the opposite case) and so the solution was to remove God from our politics. In order to do so we would become our own god and to that end control of nature was seen as a preeminent concern. We see it today, he said, in the abuse of the environment, in the rapacious attitude towards it. We also see it in those who think that climate change is totally man's responsibility and make a religion of that such that anyone who disagrees with them is a heretic. Similarly with the life issue: our desire for control over nature has now extended to taking the lives of the innocent. Cardinal Ratzinger and others have warned us about the trajectory of this mindset.

Grade Inflation Comes to Baseball?

You see it so many places. Professors routinely giving As and Bs, bosses giving out only "meets" or above...

Every baseball fan has a certain gut instinct about whether someone should be in the Hall of Fame or not. It might be wrong, giving too little credence to defensive skills or what have you, but while Jim Rice was a feared slugger during the 1970s it just doesn't feel like he should be in the Hall. Back watching these guys you knew, instinctively, who was special. Clemente, Aaron, Mays, Gibson, Seaver...You just knew. But guys like Andre Dawson, Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Dale Murphy, well, you knew there was that tissue-thin difference between greatness and immortality, as one writer put it on the Costas show. There were great players, but not deserving of the immortality of the Hall.

It was a decision we took not lightly. My friend and I, avid baseball card collectors, had a limited number of plastic sheets in which to encase the immortals, the ones we felt had a legitimate chance to make the HOF and thus whose cards would increase greatly in value. Dawson, Rice and Lynn and Murphy? Nope. But Bert Blyleven did make the cut for me.

Journalists and Scientists and the Search for Truth

I was watching a tape of William F. Buckley interviewing Malcolm Muggeridge and was taken aback by a comment from MM regarding the path to faith and how he felt it was easier for journalists to come to God: because they see the pure fantasy of everything and so begin to long for the Real.

And yet we've seen the tendency of faith in Christ, and trust in the Word and Church, to wither in society at the same time we've seen our faith in institutions wither. Coincidence?

Since a very high percentage of journalists do not believe in God, or at least are unchurched, it seems a bit of an anecdotal deduction from Muggeridge. It even seems to have the opposite effect. Journalists are often left with less respect for the human, seeing mostly only our seamy side, and perhaps it carries over to the divine. (Don't we routinely, though wrongly, judge the Divine by the human? How many are no longer Catholic because of a priest or nun who treated them wrong, or because of their reading of the Inquisition, Crusdades or treatment of Galileo? How many don't love God as father because they can't imagine love coming from a father since their father's didn't love them?)

Journalists see just how much clay composes the feet of our leaders. Rather than yearning for something greater than the merely human, do they anthropomorphically apply that jadededness to God? Does it make them more egalitarian and distasteful of hierarchy? What is the relationship between awe of the people in authority and awe of God, the ultimate Authority? Is it "good practice" for people to feel awe for presidents, popes and prime ministers in preparation for a much greater form of reverence for God? Or does finding the flaws of the former actually better lead one to God?

Perhaps it's one of the flattening quality of democratic life that we lose the ability to make distinctions. On the distinctions of awe we read:

Latria is sacrificial in character, and may be offered only to God. Catholics offer other degrees of reverence to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Saints; these non-sacrificial types of reverence are called Hyperdulia and Dulia, respectively. Hyperdulia is essentially a heightened degree of dulia provided only to the Blessed Virgin. This distinction, written about as early as Augustine of Hippo and St Jerome, was detailed more explicitly by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, A.D. 1270, II II, 84, 1:

"Reverence is due to God on account of His Excellence, which is communicated to certain creatures not in equal measure, but according to a measure of proportion; and so the reverence which we pay to God, and which belongs to latria, differs from the reverence which we pay to certain excellent creatures; this belongs to dulia, and we shall speak of it further on (II II 103 3)";

in this next article St. Thomas Aquinas writes:

"Wherefore dulia, which pays due service to a human lord, is a distinct virtue from latria, which pays due service to the Lordship of God. It is, moreover, a species of observance, because by observance we honor all those who excel in dignity, while dulia properly speaking is the reverence of servants for their master, dulia being the Greek for servitude."

From St. Thomas it is apparent that a clear distinction exists among latria and forms of dulia within Catholic theology.

Buckley asked Muggeridge why it is, if indeed a search for truth is the criterion for finding God, that something like 90% of all scientists profess no belief? And Muggeridge answered that the best ones do, like Einstein and others who are on the leading edge and realize how pitiful their knowledge is.

Fortunately, there are surely as many paths to God as there are people. If we are no longer captivated by the excellence of our modern-day statemen or artists (we should be our recent popes, imo) Philip Yancey writes in the latest First Things about how it was beauties outside of man that led him to God:

When I look back on my own conversion, I cannot credit a gospel tract or an altar call or an exposition of John 3:16. I had encountered these things many times over in childhood and had learned to mistrust them. Rather, nature, classical music, and romantic love formed the channel of grace that awakened my senses to perception of God. Through that channel I came to believe first in a good world and then in a good God. It is a terrible thing to have no one to thank, to feel awe and have no one to worship. Gradually, prompted by beauty and art, I returned to the cast-off faith of my childhood...Modern humanity does not perceive the world as worth God's dying for. We Christians must demonstrate it.

Our Hyde Jeckyl Government

...is the government passive/agressive? I mean it's not a single entity but composed of millions but it's willing to exercise eminent domain in draconian power grabs, to enfranchise the right of mothers to kill their unborn children, and to tax us to the point where we work until May before we can begin working for ourselves. And yet there's a rebate program in order to pay for the conversion of televison signals from analog to digital? Am I missing something here? Is television our soma?

Last Week in Review

Cockiness will not be tolerated: the week before last was so easy, so short-lived, compared to the plains of this past one. I’d misunderestimated it. It started with the shock of supra-high blood pressure, which alerted me to a new wakefulness on dietary matters. Diet never matters until it hurts someone, and it was evidentally hurting me given the challenge of fitting into pants and blood pressure cuffs.

On Tuesday I engaged in what might be a budding tradition in in my coffers: the weekly movie, although it would’ve been better to have read instead. This week it was Jim Carrey’s “Yes Man”. I found it only moderately entertaining. Nothing as exhilarating as last week’s “Valkeries”, and it had one nauseating scene involving a fornicating old lady. Naturally that is what lingers in memory.
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The week was a one-two punch of a half-foot of snow and brutal cold. The cold is as nothing to the snow but still... Our garage door doesn’t work when it's this cold; we have to “help” it along. Which means on the coldest days of the year we have to leave the car. Which sort of defeats the purpose of garage door openers as you want them most when it’s minus 10 degrees and one nanosecond outside freezes your nose hairs and short hairs. I whine therefore I am.
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But tis all moot now because I’m looking at a fine stretch of pony. Monday is MLK day, an off-day the positive result of our corporation’s political correctness (not meant to disparage Martin Luther King who was a great American leader, but we don't get off President's Day, for example. If you give MLK, you have to give GW & AL.) We’re always behind the times, which is why we only started getting the day off two years ago, but hey at least we get the day off so I shan't complain. Black activists may not have gotten reparations for slavery but they've gotten this honkey a day off work and for that I am grateful.

I have the gimlet eye of McDonald’s coffee and breakfast in my reptile brain, as well as the prospect of the filling prose of Updike (for lyrcisim) or Dean Koontz (for story). Then there’s “The Education of Henry Adams” for an autobiographical break.

I began Friday late afternoon by taking a short nap in the sun under the coincierge of the south window in our family room after devouring Max & Erma’s tasty filets of fish. Before dozing, I read of the exploits involving the story of a US Air jetliner that landed in the Hudson river yesterday. 155 passengers, no deaths. A fine respite from bad news.

Vortex..Can't Avoid...Help Me...

Hep me, hep me, I'm being sucked into the vortex of politics! I made the mistake of watching This Week today and I'll never understand how journalists over the age of 18 can be surprised by the phenomenon of volatile presidential approval ratings.

There was much lamentation and beating of breasts on the panel over the fact that GWB had a rating of 90%+ after 9/11, and now leaves office with the lowest in history. Matthew Dowd thought it tragic but how could it be otherwise? Just as housing bubbles and oil speculation bubbles eventually burst leaving foreclosures and $40 a barrel oil in its place, so too do high presidential ratings. Does anyone else recall that George Herbert Walker Bush had an approval rating of 90% after the conclusion of the Gulf War and then lost the election a year later? Did #41 change, or did the media coverage and people's perception of him change? For a media type like Dowd to lament Bush's low approval ratings is sort of like a wife abuser being shocked at the sight of his wife's bruises.

George Will pointed to two names as the cause of Bush's unpopularity: Terri Schiavo and Harriet Miers. Which perfectly explains the cause of Bush's unpopularity with George Will, but I'm doubtful of its universal applicability. The Miers blip was something all of five people now remember, a misstep that GWB quickly fixed. (Apparently the blame GWB crowd thinks he is to be blamed not only for real blunders but potential ones.) With Schiavo, for the life of me I don't understand how GWB's signing a bill that was passed by the Senate by unanimous consent was somehow controversial, other than media types took offense that he interrupted his vacation to do so.

What Bush's low popularity ratings reflect are three things:

an unpopular war

a very hostile media

an unwillingness to defend himself and/or go directly to the American people

The fact that the panel on This Week (with the exception of Gwen Ifill), didn't get that shows why the only institution with the same low approval ratings as George Bush is....(drumroll)... the media.

A Compassionate Look at Elvis

...here.

Yo Comments are Whack

My commenters are witty and smart. But elsewhere it applies; this post is dedicated to Professor Luse and Dylan of More Last than First, who are the grammaticians in the Catlick blogosphere.

Another Example...

...from Paragraph Farmer, of the most unfairly maligned president of modern times: GWB. He takes an honest look at GWB's legacy here.

Book Lists

I'm always interested in lists of "must reads" ...in this case from a Georgia newspaper. It's akin to looking over and seeing what your neighbor is reading.

(Photo credit: David Robert Brooks)

This & That

When I recently learned I have online privileges with my local library card to the Oxford English Dictionary I've been looking for excuses to look up etymologies. I read in "The Secret History of Words" that "wife" was one of the oldest of English words (while, oddly, husband was more of a newcomer):

wife - n. 1. a. A woman: formerly in general sense; in later use restricted to a woman of humble rank or ‘of low employment’ (J.), esp. one engaged in the sale of some commodity. Now dial., exc. with prefixed descriptive word, esp. in compounds such as ALE-WIFE1, APPLE-wife, FISHWIFE, OLD WIFE, OYSTER-wife, etc.

The earliest reference in the OED is from 725, the third oldest is this one from 950 (I assume uif is wife):

c950 Lindisf. Gosp. John iv. 7 Cuom uif of ær byri to ladanne uæter.

....which gives the sense of the John 4:7 verse concerning the Samaritan woman at the well: "Woman, give me to drink."
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I pretty much agree with this guy. How stupid is buying insurance against U.S. Treasury bonds? I think it indicates a deep-seated human need for reassurance even where none exists, apart from God.

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Ah the audacity of Nigerian scammers and business website operators. Spam attempting to disguise itself as other than spam inevitably appeals to intimacy, like the kiss of Judas. A Toronto real estate claims a connection with Fr. Benedict Groeschel's "Good Counsel Homes", which can't be easily verified, but said they added a link to my site on their home page, which can.

Hello,

Recently I visited your website; while visiting your site I noticed that you link to http://www.goodcounselhomes.org at this address: http://poncer.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_poncer_archive.html. As we are closely related to them, I would love to exchange links with your website, currently there are about 5,000 - 7,000 people per day that goto my site and search for information, Therefore I would to link to an excellent site like yours.

I have taken the liberty of adding your site to my home page: [link removed] to determine if it is of any benefit to you, if you have a stats program you can check it and let me know...

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Speaking of Judas, MaryH has a good post here about the subject of Judas and Hell.

I looked up what the Church Fathers said concerning Jesus telling Judas it would be better than he'd never have been born. From Origen:

"Or, [Christ] spoke generally, to prove the nature of each of their hearts, and to evince the wickedness of Judas, who would not believe in One who knew his heart. I suppose that at first he supposed that the thing was hid from Him, deeming Him man, which was of unbelief; but when he saw that his heart was known, he embraced the concealment offered by this general way of speaking, which was shamelessness. This also shows the goodness of the disciples, that they believed Christ's words more than their own consciences, they began each to say, Lord, is it I? For they knew by what Jesus had taught them that human nature is readily turned to evil, and is in continual struggle with the rulers of the darkness of this world; whence they ask as in fear, for by reason of our weakness the future is an object of dread to us."

It's also interesting to see the spin Origen uses: Jesus said not "by whom I have been betrayed" but "through him" - through the Devil, the true instigator of Judas's betrayal. None of my bible translations say through him, so I assume Origen was looking at a different early manuscript.
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I love the Catholic blog search engine, which presumably checks untold numbers of Catholic blogs upon entering a search key. But I'm a bit suprised by how often the subjects/links I'm interested in are uncovered in the Catlick blogosphere. The New Yorker article on Samuel Johnson is one example, but even the Gopnik piece on Chesterton had relatively few mentions ("Gopnik" + "Chesterton" gets only 4 hits).

I'd expected an avalanche of hits concerning Philip Jenkins' latest "The Lost History of Christianity", on the controversial subject of where and why Christianity died out, and yet there was only a thimbleful. (Although the book did just come out...) The best single comment I'd seen was from Western Confucian who said:

I was a bit surprised to read the author of The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice to write, "Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ's uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions." The author says that "the church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ." Would we expect Buddhists to question Buddha's uniqueness or Muslims Mohammed's?

On amazon.com reviews, one solitary warrior proclaimed:

I started the book and realize that what is in front of me is a not very convincing apologetic for a sort of Christian relativism. I can see why Mr Jenkins is an ex Catholic in his extolling of the heresies of Nestorianism, Gnosticism, Monophysites and the like. It seems that, for Jenkins, anyone who was dissatisfied with proclamations or rulings on the faith vis a vis Church councils is, well, heroic in breaking off and setting up pseudo churches with bishops, priests, monks, etc. that just make up their own dogmas and doctrines.

Predictably, he was heckled by those intolerant of intolerance. But that said, Jenkins' book does look like a fascinating glimpse of a subject well-deserving of study. Of course, studies like this tend to tempt one to trade empiricism for faith. History is always shrouded in mystery since the facts we have are incomplete, while God Himself is infinitely more mysterious than history.

The O'Rama Guide to Potential Weight LossTM

As a service to readers, I occasionally provide diet and exercise advice. Sometimes even cooking recipes. I give and I give. As always, your (and my) results may vary:

Exercise, but only moderately

Too much exercise is a metabolism killer. What does it profit a man if he exercises intensely for an hour and then spends the other 23 slumped in a chair, semi-comatose? Likewise sore muscles tend to result in a decrease in activity during the day and the law of inertia asserts that whatever is at rest will tend to remain at rest and anything in motion will tend to remain in motion. So exercise, like alcohol, is best used in moderation. I leave the reader to define moderation in these matters.

Drink Water like a Mo' Fo'

It's an article of faith in the dieting world that drinking water displaces food somehow. Or that if you are semi-dehydrated you'll unconsciously seek the water in food rather than drinking it. I don't know how it works but I pass along the advice of those who know.

My tip is to drink 8-16 ounces of water first thing in the morning. Pretend it's beer and you're at college and people are yelling, "chug! chug! chug!"

It's easy, by the way, to tell if you're semi-dehydrated because your urine will be darker than it should. And it's easier for guys to tell this sort of thing since we pee standing up, facing the bowl. Thought you might want to know that. (Could that be called an unhelpful digression?)

Scale Down with Baby Steps

If you normally have a milkshake with dinner every night, have a chocolate milk instead. If you normally have a chocolate milk, try a white milk. If you normally have a white milk, try skim milk. If you normally have skim milk then you should be skinny and I should be reading your guide to weight loss.

Listen to Your Body

If you have a craving for chocolate cake, as I did yesterday, then your body is telling you it needs chocolate cake. Listen to it. It does no good to eat five salads and two hamburgers for lunch when all you really wanted was a bit of chocolate cake and a half a hamburger. I had two pieces of it yesterday and now, today (voila!) I don't want chocolate cake, so the problem is solved and I can move along to raw carrots.

Never Eat Carbs w/out Protein

Carbs are not your friend. Or at least they need to be chaperoned by protein. Never allow carbs to enter your bloodstream without being accompanied by protein. There are deeply complex biological reasons for this. Man has not evolved to live on processed sugars alone.

Let's Play....

...why's my bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so heavy?

My lack of having anything to say is your gain because that is the impetus for going to my handy, dandy amazon Kindle and copying from its "Save Page as Clipping" feature:

...as a rule the New Englander's strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered no more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he repelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. - Henry Adams stereotyping a swath of the country, which you could do in those days. From "The Education of Henry Adams"

In the cave at Bethlehem, God shows himself to us as a humble “infant” to overcome our pride. Perhaps we would have submitted more easily before power, before pride; but he does not want our submission. He appeals, rather, to our heart and to our free decision to accept his love. He has made himself little to free us from this human pretension of greatness that arises from pride; he has incarnated himself freely to make us truly free, free to love him. - Pope Benedict XVI

The desire to pass is loaded territory and can lead to the ugliest sort of argument there is. “You want to be French, Mary Frances, that’s your problem, but instead you’re just another American.” I went to the window for that one and saw a marriage disintegrate before my eyes. Poor Mary Frances in her beige beret. Back at the hotel it had probably seemed like a good idea, but now it was ruined and ridiculous, a cheap felt pancake sliding off the back of her head. She’d done the little scarf thing, too, not caring that it was summer. It could have been worse, I thought. She could have been wearing one of those striped boater’s shirts, but, as it was, it was pretty bad, a costume, really. Some vacationers raise the roof — they don’t care who hears them — but Mary Frances spoke in a whisper. This, too, was seen as pretension and made her husband even angrier. “Americans,” he repeated. - David Sedaris, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames"

It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. 'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality. - G.K. Chesterton

The driver recited into his mike, “One of the commonest questions we get is ‘Why is the ice so dirty?’ Well, glacier ice is made of snow, meters of it compressed to a centimeter or two of ice. As you may already know, every snowflake and raindrop has to form around a tiny piece of dirt in the air. The snow melts, but the dirt stays there.” Had Alexandra known that? That snowflakes and raindrops each need a germ of dirt? Does the sky hold enough dirt to supply them all? - John Updike, "Widows of Eastwick"

At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted; but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied. As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do believe in is damnation. The greatest of purely modern poets summed up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line-- "There may be Heaven; there must be Hell." The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition; and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin by being gloomy. -G.K. Chesterton

The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to remember that simplicity is complex. -The Education of Henry Adams

[David Foster] Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make. - NY Times column

My favorite Onion headline was '95% of Americans Support Public Transit for Other People.'" - Peggy Noonan

Henri Bergson once said that the motive power of democracy is love. For many years I didn’t understand what he meant. So much of democratic life is filled with conflict, hyperbole, theatrics, and bad taste. But I think I know now. We serve our democratic institutions best when we love our country; when we nourish its greatest ideals through our own courage, honesty, and active political engagement... There isn’t one “right” answer here. Committed Catholics can make very different but equally valid choices: to vote for the major candidate who most closely fits the moral ideal, to vote for an acceptable third-party candidate who is unlikely to win, or to not vote at all. All of these choices can be legitimate. This is a matter for personal decision, not church policy. -Archbishop Chaput, "Render Under Caesar"

When we arrived in the chapel the following morning, the Pope [John Paul II] was already before the altar, hunched over in a chair, bent nearly double. He had been praying for an hour, a nun explained in a whisper. He seemed to me then such an extraordinary symbol. In spite of his frailty, he was still Pope, and I sensed no diminishing of his power, as if within his weakness lay his strength. -Cherie Blair "Speaking for Myself"

Context of Blog Title

Found here, emphasis mine:

The Story of Medea and Jason

The Argonauts now stemm'd the foaming tide,
And to Arcadia's shore their course apply'd;
Where sightless Phineus spent his age in grief,
But Boreas' sons engage in his relief;
And those unwelcome guests, the odious race
Of Harpyes, from the monarch's table chase.
With Jason then they greater toils sustain,
And Phasis' slimy banks at last they gain,
Here boldly they demand the golden prize
Of Scythia's king, who sternly thus replies:
That mighty labours they must first o'ercome,
Or sail their Argo thence unfreighted home.
Meanwhile Medea, seiz'd with fierce desire,
By reason strives to quench the raging fire;
But strives in vain!- Some God (she said) withstands,
And reason's baffl'd council countermands.
What unseen Pow'r does this disorder move?
'Tis love,- at least 'tis like, what men call love.
Else wherefore shou'd the king's commands appear
To me too hard?- But so indeed they are.
Why shou'd I for a stranger fear, lest he
Shou'd perish, whom I did but lately see?
His death, or safety, what are they to me?
Wretch, from thy virgin-breast this flame expel,
And soon- Oh cou'd I, all wou'd then be well!
But love, resistless love, my soul invades;
Discretion this, affection that perswades.
I see the right, and I approve it too,
Condemn the wrong- and yet the wrong pursue.
Why, royal maid, shou'dst thou desire to wed
A wanderer, and court a foreign bed?
Thy native land, tho' barb'rous, can present
A bridegroom worth a royal bride's content:
And whether this advent'rer lives, or dies,
In Fate, and Fortune's fickle pleasure lies.
Yet may be live! for to the Pow'rs above,
A virgin, led by no impulse of love,
So just a suit may, for the guiltless, move.
Whom wou'd not Jason's valour, youth and blood
Invite? or cou'd these merits be withstood,
At least his charming person must encline
The hardest heart- I'm sure 'tis so with mine!
Yet, if I help him not, the flaming breath
Of bulls, and earth-born foes, must be his death.

This, That, and the Other Thing

I'm vaguely disconcerted by the fact that my blood pressure has crept up again, surely the result of the annual winter weight gain. Color it winter as walking catch-22: eat more and drink more because there's less opportunity to exercise.

Yesterday our secretary brought in the most delectable chocolate cake in the world and tells me about it, obligating me to consume two large pieces. In summer, it's as nothing to wolf that down while in winter there's a return to the zero-sum game.
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"Walk-bys, we get walk-bys, we get lots and lots of walk-bys...." The move from office to cubical has occasioned shorter walls and since I'm in a main artery there is the constant deflection. But I say: "why have walls at all if they discourage someone 5'8'' but not six foot from invading your space?" Call it discrimination against short people, who surely have a right to distract you too. Someone should sue. I'm too tall else I would. I demand that someone call Esquires Berres or Scheske about this!

One guy recently walked by and asked me who the olden time figure in my cube was. Oh felix distractio! I told him the Cure de Ars because I couldn't remember "St. John Vianney" (or even the correct century he was a priest). Saying "Cure de Ars" must've sounded like saying "Homer Simpson" in response to a query about the weather: that is, completely non-sequitorial. He thought the picture was one of the American Founding Fathers.

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Had lunch at an exotic restaurant as compared to the usual cafeteria, aka "Ted's" as in Ted Turner, a bison eatery. On the wall was mounted a bison head, a serious-looking animal of so much tusk and hair as to be a prime example of Godavagance (God + extravagance). I was cheered by the news that our local park is considering the re-introduction of bison. Now that's what I'm talking about! I hope someone will create a woolly mammoth from the DNA found on fossils such that we could re-introduce those dudes too. Talk about adding interest to a hike.

I've written about the park before in these virtual pages and how I especially like the little things, like how they left old barns up just off the path. It's clearly marked as not on park property, which, of course, doesn't mean we'll not explore these old weathering hulks. There's a tangy bit of history in these piquant relics of the past. I'm greatly cheered by the fact that our city hasn't yet become so paralyzed by Fear of Lawsuit that it feels comfortable leaving up ancient barns near the prairie paths. Thank God that life isn't completely antiseptic yet.

RJN Photo

From here. More links and remembrances here.

News You Can Use

"Doctor, I've been shot. Can you find the bullet?"

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

If you’re a Latin Rite Catholic and have never experienced worship in one of these other [Eastern] Catholic churches, go. It will open your eyes to what worship is, and help you grasp what people are saying, even in the Latin context of “singing the Mass” instead of “singing at Mass,” for almost every bit of the liturgy is chanted by presbyter, deacon and people, mostly facing in the same direction. It puts staring at each other and mumbling back and forth in a whole new light. - Amy Welborn

Fr. George Rutler, a former Anglican priest, was the one to give last rites to Fr. Neuhaus who was a former Lutheran priest which invokes to me Fr. Neuhaus line about having many ironies in the fire. - Curt Jester

He bore with grace the charge of having become “neo-conservative,” when the term was intended as an insult, and even turned that charge into a positive advantage, carving out a new blend of Christian orthodoxy and political realism. Increasingly, he regained his love for the nobility of the American experiment, a term he understood with all its attendant ironies. He was a great friend to Martin Luther King, William F. Buckley, Jr., Peter Berger and many other great public spirits of our time. In fact, few people in the world have shown his talent for friendship. - Michael Novak

I remember the first time Father Neuhaus attacked me in print: I felt on top of the world. For a left-of-center person like me, being attacked by Father Neuhaus was a badge of honor. To gain the notice of someone with whom you disagree is much more flattering than to gain the praise of a mentor or an acolyte. - Michael Paulson via "Get Religion"

the words “abortion,” “Roe v. Wade,” or “pro-life” are nowhere to be found. - "Get Religion" commenting on lengthy NY Times obit

Already this new marvel of technology has proven the saying, true even of so-called labor-saving devices: the more you have, the more time you have to spend taking care of it. - Jim of Bethune Catholic on his wife getting a digital camera for Christmas

There is much happy buzz about The Raving Atheist's becoming The Raving Theist. So I dropped by to check it out and left a brief comment expressing my gladness. I was amazed to receive a lovely reply, including some background on how I came to be a Saint of the Week. What pulled me up short in this note, besides the fact that I was remembered after all this time, was being told, "but you were so darned nice." That couldn't have come at a better time. Ready to declare war on the USPS (and our postman in particular), the phone company, the dogs and various members of my family, I was feeling anything but nice. - Ellyn of "Oblique House"

Never tell anyone that you're writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They'll encourage you to death. - Lynn Johnston

[I'm] annoyed that the Feast of the Circumcision was cut. - - a Facebook commenter

Have you ever had those moments where you feel like God has blessed you with an incredible word of knowledge, only to realize (sometimes only seconds later) that people have been telling you this for years? I had one today during adoration. Deep in meditation, I came to the sudden realization that we should be good in order to please God, whom we love as children love a Father. This was a huge insight to me ... for about seven seconds. "Well, duh," I said to myself. - Eric Pavlat of "Inside Catholic" via Jim Curley

One could say Philip [Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP, PhD] doesn’t really give a yes or no answer to the question of whether there is a right or wrong way to argue as a Dominican... - William Cork at A Twitch Upon the Thread via Terrence Berres

Only after discovering Jesus do we realize “this is what I was waiting for”...You will not be afraid any longer to lose your freedom, because you will live it fully by giving it away in love. You will no longer be attached to material goods, because you will feel within you the joy of sharing them. You will cease to be sad with the sadness of the world, but you will feel sorrow at evil and rejoice at goodness, especially for mercy and forgiveness. - Pope Benedict XVI

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one. - Joan Baez

Often you get the impression that some people think that Marian devotion was invented by ignorant medieval peasants so distant from God and the Gospel that they turned to the primeval Mother Figure instead and just started mumbling random prayers to her out of the blue. Well, no. Of course, Marian devotion began in the East mostly because, well, CHRISTIANITY began in the East. I’m not going to do some big historical survey here, but I’ll just say that any Protestant thinking that the Easterners will make them more comfortable in terms of Mary than the Romans, might want to take a look at this portion of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom...If anything, honoring and asking for Mary’s intercession is even more deeply integrated into normal Eastern liturgical life than it is in the West, because it is a part of the Sunday liturgy in a way that it is not in the West. - Amy of "Charlotte was Both"

It is strange that some theologians have difficulty accepting the precise and limited doctrine of papal infallibility, but see no problem in granting de facto infallibility to everyone who has a conscience. - Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, via Bill Luse who got it from Zippy

The Reading Room

Felt moments of sheer elation this week merely sitting in the bookroom, deep in my laboratory surrounded by all my potions and elixirs. I slowly turned my head to the right and the left, wanting to drink and bathe in the beautiful texts like the rich man covers himself in his money.

It’s only when something is withheld that you appreciate it and I was sufficiently lit starved (while simultaneously rich with new books) that I was overcome with emotion in my “Temple of Peace” as William Ewart Gladstone called his library. I always feel that the library is a fine counter to the routine of corporate life.

I was pleased too because I’d removed the television which free’d up two more shelves of chocolate walnut bookshelf space and I contemplated the emptiness and chocolateness of those shelves while imagining them filled with the 1911 Britannica’s that are a’ coming, a buy inspired by the late Fr. Neuhaus and imprimatur’d by Steven Riddle (who owns only 18,200 more books than I do, give or take). This set of Britannica's made number 28 on NR's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books of the century (ht: TB). (Helprin says: "The infinite riches of the world, presented with elegance, confidence, and economy.")

The late First Things progenitor off-handedly presented a scene of burnished beauty in my imagination a month ago: he in his personal library, consulting an entry from the politically incorrect 1911 Britannica, the dusty ancient volumes standing like miraculous time travelers. I take solace that RJN’s writings live on and that I have a few First Things I haven’t read yet. He, like WFB, will provide sustenance beyond his death.

Sometimes, surrounded by books, I feel the vague shadow of nag which first occurred on a Feburary day as a freshman in college when I heard the words of a Paul Simon song: “I have my books…and my poetry to protect me.” How cruelly mocking was the song “I am a Rock” and in its seeing right through me! Would Simon demean my joys and make them into mere addictions or crutches, no different than beer to the fraternity jock or the designer shoes of the sorority girl?

I was shaken by the song and I went to my books and my poetry afterward for consolation. *grin* Perhaps I missed the larger point, that of failing to take risks in order to avoid pain that relationships produce. But there’s no question Simon’s song was something extremely contra to my philosophy at the time, raised as I was by Thoreau and Sarton. Their load star was self-reliance, not other-reliance, and “I am a Rock” pristinely represented the anti-Thoreau vision though Thoreau saw nature and solitude rather than books as "the rock".

The J Months

"But February made me shiver
With every paper I delivered..."
--Don McLean "American Pie" (who surely meant January)
It's cold and it's getting colder
It's gray and white and winter all around
And oh I must be getting older
All this snow is trying to get me down.
--John Denver "Winter"

Canadian Geese, like battalions at Normandy
The "J" months - January, June and July - are the most authentic of seasons, the trueness towards which autumn and spring can only point to like calendric John the Baptists. All other months are promissory notes of future cold or warmth, full of the lukewarmedness that the Scriptures warns against. In winter and summer there is the feeling of arrival.

The 'j' in the month names mimic the 'g' in genuine. We are living right now in the dead heart of winter, feeling the quintessential experience of winter just as in June and July we experienced the very essence of summer.

Can we accept the climatic seasons as well as the seasons of our lives, i.e. youth & age?

The Left's Greed

Obama is something of an anamoly on the left since he has the temprament of a conservative - not given to rashness or hyperbole or hatred. And so far his appointments have been mostly sane.

But not so his fellow travellers. It's interesting to see that the hatred on the left continues apace even as George W. Bush's term in office fades. With Pavlovian consistency, Frank Rich in the NY Times produces a Bush tirade every time a column is due. And many of his ilk are begging Obama to prosecute Bush and administration officials, presumably on the charge of not liking his politics. (Cue creepy Stalinesque show trial music.)

It's also instructive to hear Tavis Smiley whine on C-Span today about the lack of blacks in the media and how he wants the press to "look like America" (though surely not sound like America, that is with more conservative voices; he's interested in superficial skin-deep characteristics presumably as a trojan horse that will further his ideology).

Now we'd all like more diversity in the press so I'm only dissing his timing. Most Catholics would love it if there were more Catholics in the media who "got religion" (to paraphrase the title of a well-known blog). But it displays the leftist mentality that even with the ascension of Obama it's never enough: It's like if Sen. Sam Brownback, a pro-life conservative Catholic, won the presidency and I called for more pro-life conservative Catholics in the media. Maybe I should reflect on the victory and be grateful for, say, half a minute? But shamelessness is in the liberal activist's gene, and gratefulness not in their vocabulary since it renders them momentarily impotent. Gratitude is, after all, reactionary.

Barriers to the Faith

From here:

Why we need Christ to become authentically human

A second barrier concerns what it means to be human. Here the fundamental misunderstanding that blocks the path of many young people is shaped by what has been called the culture of authenticity. This is the idea that somehow being a Christian involves giving up or suppressing what is uniquely human in each one of us and accepting an external criterion or measure which is alien to one’s true self.

Like the aforementioned culture of pluralism, the supporting matrix of ideas behind this sense that “each of us has an original way of being human” (Taylor 1992, 28) is a ingrained feature of modernity and penetrates popular culture at every level. Sometimes called expressive individualism and resembling moral relativism, it actually functions as a kind of moral ideal for many people: “[T]he soft relativism that seems to accompany the ethic of authenticity [asserts]: let each person do their own thing….One shouldn’t criticise the others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The sin which is not tolerated is intolerance” (Taylor 2007, 484). Not only is it immoral to be intolerant of the values of others. It is immoral to allow some extrinsic measure to displace one’s authentic self. Fundamental to this “moral ideal” is the understanding “that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious and political authority” (Taylor 2007, 475).

These ideas pose a considerable barrier to a true understanding of what Christian discipleship really entails for every human being. In response, the first thing that needs to be affirmed follows directly from Christ’s unique mediatorship. To become sharers in the communion of divine life, we must become like the Son so that the Father sees and loves in us what he sees and loves in Christ. We become conformed to Christ in order to be “at home” in the shared life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But the conformation to Christ that is the principle of our transformation is not a slavish conformity to a model but the realization of our distinctive and unique personal identity. This must be so for otherwise the communion with the Blessed Trinity to which this transformation is ordered could not be achieved. The image of God in us consists precisely in the spiritual capacities of knowing and loving that make interpersonal communion possible. To claim-as does expressive individualism-that each person has an original way of being human is not to deny that each person shares a human nature which can be described as ensouled bodiliness and is characterized by a range of capacities, including the capacities to know and love other persons.

In the Christian understanding, authentic interpersonal communion presupposes the full realization, not the absorption or suppression, of the individual persons who enter into it. Thus, if Christ is to be the pattern for the transformation accomplished in us by the Holy Spirit, it can only mean that in being conformed to him, we each discover and realize our unique identities as persons. This is an immense and almost astonishing claim.

“If a man wants to be my disciple, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his life? Or what will he give in return for his life?” (Matthew 16:24-26). Here Christ asserts, in effect, that each person will find his or her true self only by being conformed to Christ. In ordinary experience, this would be an outrageous thing to say. None of us, whether as teachers or parents or pastors-no matter how inflated our conceptions of ourselves or how confident our sense of our abilities-would ever dare to say to anyone in our charge that they will find their true selves by imitating us. Yet this is precisely what Christ asserts. In effect this means that an indefinite number of persons will realize their distinctive identities by being conformed to Christ. Only the Son of God could make such a claim on us. Only the perfect image of God who is the Person of the Son could constitute the principle and pattern for the transformation and fulfilment of every human person who has ever lived. The more we are conformed to his image, the more authentically to we become our true selves. Pope Benedict made this point in the stirring peroration to his sermon at the inauguration of his pontificate: “If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything”.

Why the Moral Law is Good for Us

...There we learn that eros is meant to lead us to agape, to the love of God and to the love of one another in God. Pope Benedict resists absolutely the misreading, sometimes perverse, that claims to see in Christian faith the suppression of the ordinary fulfilments of human earthly life, particularly human intimacy and love, in favor of a good beyond life. On the contrary, for Christian faith the whole range of human desire-or, to use more technical language, the inclination to the good embedded in the very structure of human existence-finds it complete fulfilment in the love of the triune God, and nothing less. Although Pope Benedict does not use this expression in the encyclical, we might call this unity of and continuity between eros and agape “the sanctification of desire.” It is to this end that the moral law directs us.

Johnson's Anxiety

I've been thinking about why it is that other people's scruples are somehow consoling, such as Samuel Johnson's, beyond merely the consolation of companionship. I can't imagine Johnson could be damned (though obviously who can know) and so his fear seems a idiosyncracy indicative of humility, a charming tic. As Adam Gopnik writes in a recent New Yorker :

What makes [Johnson] so sympathetic is that his sense of Christian faith proceeds from his sense of himself as a sinner, not as the saved. Where others were sure of feeling superior to the people who didn't believe, Johnson was just hoping to get to Heaven on a lucky break - praying for mercy, but not counting on it.

"Lucky break" is one definition of grace, or at least the way I see it since anything unearned feels of that category. Of course the pain of fear of Hell and the anxiety it produces is nothing to be dismissive or jest about. But perhaps the disease is worse than its cure, for if Johnson had escaped the mental agony and anxiety it might've provided him sufficient license to miss Heaven. Perhaps it's not completely unlike the way Mother Teresa was said to have the darkness of soul in order not to become full of herself and full of the ego that one so close to God would otherwise feel. (So too St. Paul and his thorn of the flesh.)

Gopnik opines, against the backdrop of Johnson's living in close quarters with his love interest, that:

Johnson's piety is more impressive if we imagine it up against the keen daily edge of erotic appetite, rather than simply a long-term bulwark against imagined insanity. Compare him with C.S. Lewis, who modelled himself on Johnson, and we recall that Lewis, too, becomes human when at the end of his life he wanted something, the physical love of his American mistress. We love Johnson for his humanity, and what makes us human is the contest between our desires and doctrines.

Gopnik's definition of what makes us human recalls a recent talk given by Pope Benedict on the topic of original sin:

As a consequence of this evil power in our souls, a murky river developed in history which poisons the geography of human history. Blaise Pascal, the great French thinker, spoke of a "second nature", which superimposes our original, good nature. This "second nature" makes evil appear normal to man. Hence even the common expression "he's human" has a double meaning. "He's human", can mean: this man is good, he really acts as one should act. But "he's human", can also imply falsity: evil is normal, it is human. Evil seems to have become our second nature. This contradiction of the human being, of our history, must evoke, and still evokes today, the desire for redemption. And, in reality, the desire for the world to be changed and the promise that a world of justice, peace and good will be created exists everywhere. In politics, for example, everyone speaks of this need to change the world, to create a more just world. And this is precisely an expression of the longing for liberation from the contradiction we experience within us.

Dickens and Dostoevsky, Bottum & Neuhaus

Two of my favorite writers both happen to work/have worked for First Things. And yet Joseph Bottum and Richard J. Neuhaus seem to embody different archetypes. Perhaps everyone can identify with one or the other, just as most people are more right-brained or left-brained. Reid Buckley, the brother of WFB, puts it this way:

Coleridge famously divided human beings between Aristolelians and Platonists - that is, between inductive and deductive thinkers, between those who move easily into abstractions and those who prefer dealing with particulars....The creative verbal imagination - most of us agree - is torn between polarities: the polemical and the Dionysian. There is that eximious infatuation with language, the sheer, lush love of the sound for the sound of it, sense be damned.

I can identify with Bottum or at least I could before middle age (or my job) made me more deductive and less inductive. Bottum seems the Beethoven to Neuhaus's Mozart and so it was fitting to read of their literary preferences from Neuhaus in a recent First Things:

Readers of long standing will recall that for a few weeks each summer at the family cottage in Quebec, across the Ottawa River from Pembroke, Ontario, where I was born and reared, I attend to a particular project, usually a re-reading of familiar texts. Last year it was the epistles of Paul, but the texts are usually of a literary nature; for instance, the tragedies of Shakespeare, the complete Joseph Conrad, and, time and time again, Dostoevsky. Any Dostoevsky, but most particularly The Brothers Karamazov, to which I think I will return next year. It is new on each re-reading, and I have long since learned to be patient with friends so obtuse as not to recognize it as the greatest novel ever written.

But this year, at the urging of many, such as my colleague Joseph Bottum whose literary judgment I trust, I returned to Charles Dickens. Against my inclinations, I admit, for I have repeatedly found Dickens a bit too much: too much in his broad caricatures; too much in his melodrama; too much in his sentimentality; too much in his sheer prolixity. Yet it is my experience that ages of life are differently attuned to different authors and, after giving him a rest for ten years or more, I was persuaded to have another run at Dickens. So it was that I packed a bundle of his novels to see if or how he or I had changed over the years.

Is Bottum from Dickens and Neuhaus from Dostoevsky? And if so does that reflect their personalities? This is all quite a stretch likely, but isn't that what blogs are for? It's somehow not surprising that the former inclines towards a writer in English, choosing not to suffer the aesthetic indignities invariably perpetrated in translations, while for Neuhaus meaning is king. Neuhaus had a great relish for argument and philosophy which Dostoevsky provides in his studies of the knife-edge of belief and unbelief, doubt and faith, life and death, while Dickens allows us to escape into the world of characters so rich they become almost caricatures.

Elvis Shows Even Springsteen is a Reactionary

I caught a bit of an Elvis Presley documentary on television last night and it occurred to me how Elvis was in some ways like the beat poets; he and they rebelled against the perceived strictures of the '40s and '50s with abandon. Free love, drugs, New Age spirituality, banana and peanut butter sandwiches. (Well, that last was an Elvis tic.) And Elvis's tragic end involved reclusiveness and paranoia, drug-taking and spiritual books. How similar was Jack Kerouac's final days!

According to Wikipedia, Elvis's hairdresser Larry Geller was interested in New Age spirituality and Presley voraciously read books that Geller supplied. The emptiness of materialism and the vapidness of Hollywood led Elvis to long for mysticism, and Geller became something of a spiritual mentor. The King's favorite books besides the Bible were said to be: "The Prophet" by Kahil Gibran, "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yogananda, "The Impersonal Life" by Joseph Benner (of which Elvis was said to have given away hundreds of copies) and "The Infinite Way" by Joel S. Goldsmith. Jerry Schilling and Priscilla Presley said that Elvis was attracted to the Self-Realization Fellowship of Paramahansa Yogananda.

So the pattern seems to be: reaction against the strictures of the '40s, then reaction against the indulgence in the purely material by a longing for the mystical. Elvis was also quite lonely and would often just want to talk to, rather than have sex with, the models he dated. The reaction to this might be seen in the role of therapists among the current rich and famous.

Elvis was the idol of many, including a young Bruce Springsteen who consciously reacted against the example of the '70s-era version of the King of Rock 'n Roll. Springsteen would stay away from drugs and weight gain, and apparently traded the Presley's Eastern philosophy for left-wing politics in his search for meaning. But just as Elvis reacted in response to the time he grew up, so did Springsteen. In fact our very existence is a reaction to our parents' and God's will. And if we love, "we love because He has first loved us." (1 Jn 4:19)

RJN R.I.P.

Death
like forest canopies
cathedrals and Roman columns
makes us feel small
makes us recall
that God alone perdures.

A Tip o' the Hat

...to Darwin Catholic, who often writes the sort of posts I'd like to write if I weren't writing about waistline changes and four-day vacations. In the link above he fills in some of the backdrop of Zionism. And in this imaginative post, he considers the economics of Scrooge (try to find that info somewhere else) mentioning "from what I've read about the mid 19th century British economy...". And since I've read little to nothing of 19th century British economy this means I learn something, which can't be bad. So I applaud his heavy-lifting and his giving bloggers a good name.

Fr. Neuhaus, R.I.P.

I remember the sweetly curmudgeonly presence of Fr. Neuhaus opposite Raymond Arroyo, and how the two seemed so ill-matched and yet - for that reason - so well-matched in their complementariness.

I remember him saying in a golf voice on one of those EWTN telecasts, "We have not been given background notes as to who to credit for introducing the Holy Father to aspects of the aesthetic suffering endured by the faithful in America."

I remember his masterful meditation on the Crucifixion, Death on a Friday Afternoon.

And of course there were his ever-absorbing commentaries in First Things which will be keenly missed. I also recall meeting him just six months ago:

We went to the Church of the Immaculate Conception at 14th and First Avenue and heard Fr. Neuhaus, founder of "First Things" magazine, say Mass. I got a new appreciation for the power not just of words, which we readers tend to over-emphasize, but of delivery and the tangibility of "presence". His homily was consoling both in words and inflection, the deep bass conveying Christ's message that we are not to worry about the morrow and that we are worth more than sparrows.

After Mass I wondered what, if anything, I should say. That I read "First Things"? That I blog about it sometimes? My wife suggested she get a picture of us shaking hands which seemed excessive if appealing. I asked him for a photo and he assented and I told him I've blogged about "First Things" and that I'm from Ohio and he asked where in Ohio and he bore it all better than I would have, had I been in his shoes.

To have mentioned the word 'blog' wasn't all that smart, as evidenced by his understandable attitude towards the blogosphere:

It is hard to argue against the claim—and I am not at all inclined to attempt it—that Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the gold standard for the writing of biography. It is often said that Johnson is larger than life, but it is more accurate to say that he showed how large life is. Nobody thought that one man could produce that monumental dictionary of the English language, but Johnson did. With a few assistants, to be sure. He included himself in his definition of a lexicographer: “A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” His definition of essay certainly does not apply to his own efforts in that direction: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” It is as though he had foreseen the blogosphere two centuries ahead of its time.

Finally, a quote a couple of years ago from Fr. Neuhaus:

It is not a matter of revving ourselves up to experience again the wonder of the Christ Mass. There is no point in trying to recapitulate Christmas as you knew it when you were, say, seven years old. That way lies sentimentalities unbounded. The alternative is the way of contemplation, of demanding of oneself the disciplined quiet to explore, and be explored by, the astonishment of God become one of us that we may become one with God. He embraced the whole of our experience, beginning as an embryo, as we began as an embryo. In his abject helplessness is our only help.

More Neuhaus posts here.

Fat, Drunk & Stupid is One Way to Get Thru Life

...but I'm not ready for it yet since it would involve shopping.

I'm trying not to be fat, and that precludes drunkenness as there are lots of calories in alcohol. Beer slows the metabolic rate of fats - curse the British for their study that found that "when alcohol was added to a high-fat, high-calorie meal, less dietary fat was burned off and more was stored as body fat." I'm no longer invincably ignorant.

The ten pounds I gained over the holidays must be shed, requiring portion control of foods as well as exercise and no beer but for Fridays. Clothing never lies and it certainly got my attention when pants became suddenly - almost overnight? - tight. The thought of experiencing the horrors of shopping, of descending into "Mall hell" (pardon the redundancy), frightens me into submission of my appetites.

Last night we headed back to H20 aerobics after a three week break and there was much water sluicing and ducing. I was serious about it, and the instructor praised my "breakthru", evidenced apparently by better posture & greater use of the abs. All I know is that I was hungry to burn calories given the visions of that mawing jaw of Mall, the fourth circle of Hell in the updated Dante for suburban males.

How to Eat on the Upper East Side for $8 a Day

He's a movin' on up!...to the East Side...to a deluxe apartment in the sky...

I speak of the colorful Ham of Bone, who last night related his latest (mis)adventure. Call it "Hambone Takes Manhattan".

He's going to be there for all January working unbearably long hours as a computer consultant (it's the 'curse of the good' - those too good at their jobs not to be used & abused) but I was particularly pleased to learn that his penury ways perdure: you can take the boy out of Frugalville, but you can't take the frugal out of the boy. In a time of tremulous financial instability Bone's financial stability remains rock solid.

First the backdrop: He makes shovel-fulls of money and saves roughly half his income. So he doesn't need to save his per diem money except towards the funding of his early retirement at age 43, give or take. But old habits die hard and of the $64-a-day allowance for food his employer offers, he's living on eight of it. So where does he eat day-in and day-out? A local Seinfeldian deli called "Toasties" (photo above). He gets a gigantic sub that has spinach and lettuce and bacon and ham and peppers (green & red) and whatever else, and this serves as not just one meal but two. Lunch and dinner.

The next day? Rinse & repeat. Same deal.

The following day? Rinse & repeat. Same food.

"What about fruits and vegetables?" I inquire, thinking he put just a very small amount of lettuce & spinach on the sandwich.

"Coffee is supplied by the office...It's ground plant matter," he says, after which I warn him about the dangers of scurvy.

<-'Bone Apartment

Then he relayed one of these "Midwestern innocents abroad" stories I so cherish. One day the subways were full to the point of overflowing, of course, and Bone engaged in a little gender profiling resulting in a near catastrophe. He was going for the last spot on the train when a woman, thin but deceptively strong, managed to get in front of him and hip-check him out of the way in order to get the last spot. He was left with his arm trapped in the subway car as the doors closed, holding his laptop. He could either drop his laptop (and thus lose it) and get his arm out or...or keep trying to exit the car despite the impossibility of that. Fortunately he attracted the attention of a subway employee who radioed the driver to stop the presses because someone was about to lose his life or arm or both. The subway doors were opened and Bone was set free, with his angel mumbling something about having had to have saved his life. All in a day's work in the big city...

GKC! GKC!

Lovely caricature of the man from the WSJ via Eric Scheske.

Year in Review

I picked up a meme (reminds me of what my grandaddy used to say if we got pinkeye: "stop peeing in the alley!") at Darwin Catholic, which involves posting the first line from your first post of every month. This seemed like a good idea because sometimes my best line is the first one. For example, a blog friend recently complimented me on "What sylvan glade, at least in frigid winter, compares to the beauty of a cleaned bathroom?" saying, "You have quite a way with an opening sentence!" which I suppose is like having a good first step in basketball although not as lucrative. A surprising number are actually not said by me but by someone quoted in Spanning the Proverbial (i.e. not necessarily literally) Globe, which I will put in quotes:

December:
"The title of my talk has been taken from Francois Mauriac."

November:

Once upon a time, in a Midwestern state said to be politically competitive, I received a voice mail that began with a stirring rendition of the U.S. Marine Corp hymn.

October:

Bevin Alexander makes this statement early in his book How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: "William Tecumseh Sherman won the war for the North by employing precisely the strategy that Stonewall Jackson had tried but failed to get the South to follow: he conducted "unrelenting war" on the people and property of George in his march from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the sea, in 1864. The campaign broke the back of Southern resistance."

September:

"We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers."

August:

This is a cut & paste from a comment made on Sancta Sanctis.

July:

"It's easy to think of St. Peter and St. Paul in binary terms: one as the positive to the other's negative. Heck, we could draw two tables on a piece of paper and make a parlour game out of their contrasting personalities and ministries."

June:

Saturday was magical from start to finish, embodied physically by the breath of the cottonwoods in the backyard, white whispers floating in the wind.

May:

As the pandering begins to really heat up, lets cool off with this (from St. Pat's parish bulletin):

April:

"When the mob gathers against Horton, the argument that his cause must be ended and the speck destroyed is a familiar one: it must be done for the sake of the children!"

March:

"There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty."

February:

Given that Hillary has at least a 1-in-3 chance of being president (with only Obama & McCain standing in her way), the media has rightly pointed out how wrong it feels for a democracy to have two families, Bush & Clinton, owning the presidency for thirty years.

January:

Mom called me to complain about my comments about as written concerning an aunt (not on the blog).

Songs in the Key of Food

Long time readers may recall my cafeteria food fetish and how I am fortunate enough to work at a place with the best cafeteria in the lower 48. Retirement for most people means simply not going to work; for my wife and me it will mean finding an alternate food source because currently I not only eat lunch but bring home dinners from the cafe. It'll be a shock similar to that of going from a hunter/gather society to an agricultural one.

My original goal was a "5 year plan", which meant that I would work five years and then quit and travel the country for a year in an RV ala the Blue Highways guy. Now the plan is "I can't retire because what would I do for food? -- besides, I'd end up watching too much TV". It's uncannily like Hazel Motes in O'Connor's "Wise Blood" thinking he would do a 4-month stint in the army. You can't go home again, at least not if you want to eat.

Experience has taught that buying extra food at the cafeteria is sort of like catching the elevator just before it closes: it's a dramatic act in a land starved for drama. I did both today. (I give and I give...) It gets people's attention. It's the corporate equivalent of dying your hair pink.

Anyhow, a cafeteria worker who noticed my unusual buying habits said, sotto voce:

"Is your wife sick?"

I said "No, she's just sick of cooking!"

(rimshot!)

I relayed that conversation to the cashier, saying I'm going to tease my wife with that tonight. She says approvingly, "My kind of girl!"

But then again there's nothing better than the immediate gratification of food when I get home from work, combined with the fact that I get to pick out the meals -- so not asking my wife to cook is not exactly an unselfish act.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

I cannot begin to respond to the deluge of assurances of prayer and concern about my health. Please be assured that I am grateful and count mightily on being remembered by you before the Throne of Grace. Or, as Catholics are wont to say, on your storming the gates of heaven. The nature of the cancer is beginning to come into clearer focus, and I hope to have more details in short order. Meanwhile, I will, please God, continue to be as engaged as possible in the work of First Things and other apostolates, even as I am compelled by grace to know more deeply our solidarity within the Body of Christ. - Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus, who is receiving treatment for cancer

If we know how great is the love of Jesus for us we will never be afraid to go to Him in all our poverty, all our weakness, all our spiritual wretchedness and infirmity. Indeed, when we understand the true nature of His love for us, we will prefer to come to Him poor and helpless. We will never be ashamed of our distress. Distress is to our advantage whe we have nothing to seek but mercy. We can be glad of our helplessness when we really believe that His power is made perfect in our infirmity. - Thomas Merton via Dylan of "More Last Than First"

The very feet of one who brings good news are beautiful. Over that we have another layer of meaning, for those feet are probably coming to us over scorched earth. I wonder how the Good News finally came to the mothers and fathers of the Holy Innocents... We who like to say that "Christmas is for children" don't like to meditate on what the first Christmas actually meant to children who were alive at the time. - Sancta Sanctis

It is a bit too easy for people in the West to deplore the failure of intellectuals living in unfree societies to follow the example of a Solzhenitsyn. Such stories are rare. His arose from an unusual confluence: a great crime, a great silence, a receptive audience and personal courage well above the ordinary. - The Economist on Solzhenitsyn via "The Provincial Emails"

He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world — from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual — emerges, as if for the first time, in the complete­ness of its actual being. - Sam Tanenhaus on John Updike via Terrence Berres

Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies. - Florence King on George Orwell's collected essays via TB

Apparently they never heard Candidate Unicorn when he said that marriage was between a man and a woman all those months on the campaign trail. - Phil of "A Musing", on the uproar over Rick Warren at Obama's inauguaral

Saw an old Twilight Zone episode about a reader with thick glasses who always wanted more time to indulge in his passion; as the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, the reader relishes the chance to read for the rest of his life without interruption. That is, until he accidentally breaks his reading glasses...ha. - Ham of "Social Engineering"

An old post from Disputations:

After the milking this morning, I noticed that Mme. Bessie had remained behind, standing quietly in the shadows by the side entrance. She is a Guernsey, a proud member of a breed my own people have been bred to treat with reverence. Only with great effort did I refrain from bowing my head respectfully as I addressed her, "Git along."

Heh! The Diary of a Country Priest is great stuff, but this parody is so cruelly accurate! A friend of mine once said of the protagonist, "I just want to hug the poor guy and make him eat a bowl of hot chicken soup." I concurred. What he really needed to do was to get out of that carcinogenic little town and go to a parish that didn't hate priests. - Meredith of "For Keats' Sake"

Black and White, Good and Evil

From Elena, an interesting link from Melissa Etheridge, who concludes regarding those against same sex marriage: "They don't hate us, they just fear change." Which, I suppose, is an improvement!

But what I don't get is how those who for religious reasons can't support same-sex marriage are written off as "fearing change" when many simply fear God and want to obey His words? (Of course that's overly generous because on the issue of divorce, for example, we generally don't fear God and want to obey His words...)

It was interesting to read partially because I recognize in Etheridge my own tendency to ascribe the worst motives to political opponents. Etheridge simply has a different ultimate authority than I do. I don't feel any animosity towards her. Although I can't read him, I do feel sympathy towards Andrew Sullivan too since I've likewise melded (present tense also I'm sure) beliefs around lifestyle rather than the other way around.

The assignation of motives reminds me of something I read recently in a Peggy Noonan column:

For me, the quote of the year was from a Democratic political strategist, a black woman, off air on election night. She walked up to an anchorwoman who is white, and said, “I’m trying to figure out what so moves me and I realize it’s this: You meant it.” The anchor shook her head. “You all said you would vote for a black man,” said the strategist. “You all said you’d judge him on his merits, race wouldn’t stop you. I didn’t know until tonight that you meant it.”

This feels so foreign to me in part because most whites want to vote for a black, simply to be able to cheer over the progress made over our sordid past regarding race. And yet this woman, had Obama lost, would've attributed the result to racism -- just as many gay activists label anyone against same-sex marriage as bigots or fearmongers. One senses that Obama's win doesn't eliminate the root cause of our problems because the root cause wasn't addressed: that of the feeling of persecution by those who aren't being persecuted*. This feeling is epidemic and certainly I'm similarly afflicted. But you want to shake the woman and say, "We love you! We really love you! But this isn't like the Academy Awards, but rather choosing the leader of the free world and if we don't vote for Obama it's about policy and ideology and experience...!" But the personal is the political these days. If you vote against gay marriage or against Obama you're a homophobe or a racist. Sigh.

* - On the other hand, can you really blame someone who grew up during Jim Crow for not trusting that prejudice has been lessened? Or can you blame gay activists for wanting to change the definition of marriage given that many were semi-tortured as children for being different?
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I was reading something recently by a commenter on foreign policy who mentioned - this was written before the George Bush era - how Americans view things through a Manichean lens - there are good guys and evil ones and we need to assign them labels.

Is there something in that that suggests America's inability to compromise? The Europeans have stricter abortion laws without outlawing abortion outright, while we bless it and honor it with ridiculous protections outside the Constitution (i.e. Roe v. Wade) as if in a lame attempt to reassure ourselves that it's a positive good.

I admire that we take stands: abortion is either evil, or not. The Gulf War treaty either meant something or did not. Slavery is either evil or not. Christianity is either true or not. Gay marriage is either right or wrong. But at the same time I wonder how it is that modern-day Europe, a far more secular society, has stricter rules on abortion. I think, for good or ill and I'm not sure which, it's because we are "all or none" people.

Mark Noll writes in his book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis of how Roman Jesuits saw the American Civil War as a dramatic example of the inherent problems of Protestantism. Both the North and the South tried to defend their position from the Bible. Both pointed the other as evil, and they lacked a third party, a Magisterium, which ended up resulting in the bloodiest war in American history.

A cardinal archbishop, Karl Reisach, wrote that

"such a state of total biblicism - since the Bible was their only code of law - was able neither to moderate nor to constrict the absolute liberty and independence of the individuals who were reading and explaining the same Bible; and thus the same foundational principle of the Reformation naturally and necessarily caused the collapse of such a theocratic system and caused new sects and religious societies to be born."

Lacking a Magisterium, there was no tie-breaker with respect to the positions of the North and South concerning slavery. "Subjective Christianity" results in extremism said another author, who added that Protestantism's "vaunted trust in Scripture had failed to define a unifying public morality."

If a unifying public morality was not possible when America was made up almost entirely of Christians, that goal seems even less likely now as we enter this more secular age.

When Did Scandal Become (Especially) Scandalous?

After researching when Santa Claus became controversial, I now try to figure out when scandal became scandalous. Not scandal in the sense of New Testament Greek which is meant in the very broadest sesne as any kind of hindrance, but as specifically a cause of the weakening in the faith of others.

No one in the gospels (that I'm aware of) is reported to have lost his faith over Judas or from Peter's denial of Christ (although of course you can't prove anything from an absence of scriptural data). Yet common sense suggests that human nature doesn't change and that scandal has always been around even if not explicitly defined.

The OED defines scandal as:

Discredit to religion occasioned by the conduct of a religious person; conduct, on the part of a religious person, which brings discredit on religion. Also, perplexity of conscience occasioned by the conduct of one who is looked up to as an example.

Scandal is omnipresent in today's world; Fr. Neuhaus writes about a victim of it, Rod Dreher:

Here’s an interesting statement by Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, who also runs the “Crunchy Con” blog on beliefnet.com. Some years ago he was giving major attention to the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, and a priest warned him that “I was going to find places darker than I realized existed.” He did, and he left the Catholic Church. “After I converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity,” he writes, “I made a deliberate decision not to investigate the scandals in my own church. And there are scandals there. My family needs me to be spiritually healthy. My family needs to have a church. And there’s nowhere left to go. So I can stand on the sidelines and watch journalists commenting about scandals in the Orthodox Church, and I can cheer them on to see justice done, but I cannot be involved in that. If that makes me less of a journalist, then that’s something I have to live with, but at least now I know my weakness.” He is not less of a journalist, and his decision does not reflect a weakness. He is simply a journalist who has decided that, for compelling personal reasons, his beat is not the Orthodox Church.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary, there seems to be a morphing of the meaning of the word over time and it's that morphing that interests me. What changed scandal from merely a stumbling block (i.e. such as the 'scandal of the cross') to the point where it meant a discredit to religion by poor behavior of religious people? The etymology from New Oxford American says:

Middle English (in the sense 'discredit to religion (by the reprehensible behavior of a religions poerson)'): from Old French scandale, from ecclesiastical Latin scandalum 'cause of offense,' from Greek skandalon 'snare, stumbling block.'

According to "The Secret Life of Words" by Henry Hitchings, scandal was imported from the French during the Middle Ages during a time of heightened moral acuity:

French terms suggested the changing contours of day-to-day morality. There were new ideals of behavior. The language of status became the language of moral excellence, while low status was equated with low moral standards...We see something of the new moral color in the Ancren Riwle, a manual for aspiring female hermits dating from around 1230, which introduces a host of new words: apocalypse, comfort, discipline, guile, purgatory, virtue and hypocrite, plus an early, isolated, sighting of scandal.

From the OED quoting the Ancren Riwle:

a1225 Ancr. R. 12 Auh hwarse wummon liue oer mon bi him one, eremite oer ancre, of incges wiuten hwarof scandle ne kume: nis nout muche strence. Ibid. 108 Auh er en et biddunge arere eni schaundle, er heo ouh for to deien martir in hire meseise. Ibid. 380 e nowen nout unnen et eni vuel word kome of ou: uor schandle is heaued sunne.

I don't know what that means so I'll leave it to you linguists. (I would insert a risque joke here, but it would cause scandal.) In 1581 comes the next reference: "A punishment of her lightnesse and vanitie, by meanes whereof she hath giuen occasion of scandale and offence."

OED says:

Before the 16th c. the word occurs only in the Ancren Riwle, exc. in the forms treated s.v. SLANDER n. (from the OF. variants escandre, esclandre). In the 16th c. it was re-adopted from the Latin in the form scandal, possibly after the Fr. learned form scandale, which had been introduced to represent the strict sense of eccl. L. scandalum, as distinguished from the senses that had been developed by F. esclandre.

I wonder if when Christendom began to fracture there was more sense of the impact of scandal. The early Christian community had "unity issues" causing St. Paul to write at the start of Romans 14:

Welcome anyone who is weak in faith, but not for disputes over opinions. One person believes that one may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. The one who eats must not despise the one who abstains, and the one who abstains must not pass judgment on the one who eats; for God has welcomed him.

But that doesn't precisely get at the notion of losing one's faith because of another's behavior. That seems more along the lines of division over differences.

Yet even at the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, apparently the notion of scandal was already quite familiar (if not yet the English word), and he also sees in Paul (1 Thessalonians 5:22) an implicit reference to scandal. Aquinas defines scandal this way:

Article 1. Whether scandal is fittingly defined as being something less rightly said or done that occasions spiritual downfall?
...

On the contrary, Jerome in expounding Matthew 15:12, "Dost thou know that the Pharisees, when they heard this word," etc. says: "When we read 'Whosoever shall scandalize,' the sense is 'Whosoever shall, by deed or word, occasion another's spiritual downfall.'"

I answer that, As Jerome observes the Greek skandalon may be rendered offense, downfall, or a stumbling against something. For when a body, while moving along a path, meets with an obstacle, it may happen to stumble against it, and be disposed to fall down: such an obstacle is a skandalon.

In like manner, while going along the spiritual way, a man may be disposed to a spiritual downfall by another's word or deed, in so far, to wit, as one man by his injunction, inducement or example, moves another to sin; and this is scandal properly so called.

Now nothing by its very nature disposes a man to spiritual downfall, except that which has some lack of rectitude, since what is perfectly right, secures man against a fall, instead of conducing to his downfall. Scandal is, therefore, fittingly defined as "something less rightly done or said, that occasions another's spiritual downfall."

More from St. Thomas:

...if a man were to "sit at meat in the idol's temple" (1 Corinthians 8:10), though this is not sinful in itself, provided it be done with no evil intention, yet, since it has a certain appearance of evil, and a semblance of worshipping the idol, it might occasion another man's spiritual downfall. Hence the Apostle says (1 Thessalonians 5:22): "From all appearance of evil refrain yourselves." ...

As stated above (I-II, 75, 2,3; I-II, 80, 1), nothing can be a sufficient cause of a man's spiritual downfall, which is sin, save his own will. Wherefore another man's words or deeds can only be an imperfect cause, conducing somewhat to that downfall. For this reason scandal is said to afford not a cause, but an occasion, which is an imperfect, and not always an accidental cause.

Neuhaus on the Election

A couple months ago my reaction to John Allen's column lamenting the lack of a Catholic-utopian candidate was "how could those who are to be 'in the world but not of it' even expect a political party to perfectly match up to their beliefs and aspirations?" Well seems every now and then a blind squirrel finds a nut because here's what Fr. John Neuhaus wrote in the latest issue of First Things:

A week before the November election, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter... weighed in with a remarkably tendentious and muddled commentary on how so many Catholics are “alienated from both parties” and feel “disenfranchised.” So why, on that score, should Catholics be different from many, if not most, other voters? But Allen wants a party that represents “a holistic Catholic sensibility,”...“What would happen if a serious candidate came along who’s pro-life, pro-family, anti-war, pro-immigrant, anti-death penalty, pro-sustainable development, and a multi-lateralist in foreign policy concerned with religious freedom and a robust role for believers in public life?" . . . If one sets aside conventional liberal biases in defining such slogans, it is obvious that an argument can be made that John McCain meets, except for the death penalty, all those desiderata. In a wearily familiar mode, Allen bundles issues, gives each its liberal spin, and then suggests both candidates are unacceptable, leaving it implicit that Obama is less unacceptable than McCain.
...
Apart from the political partisanship, however, John Allen’s initial concern is misguided. Why is it a problem that Catholics are politically “disenfranchised” or “homeless”? True, most Catholics once thought they had a “home” in the Democratic party, but that was part of a long immigrant experience that is, for most Catholics, now long past. For Catholics, as for all Christians, “we have here no abiding city” (Heb. 13:14). The sense of being homeless, out of step, and bereft of any enduring alliance with parties or temporal powers is a sign of Christian fidelity. In our exile we can, as Jeremiah advises the Jews in their Babylonian exile, work with whoever is willing to advance whatever measure of justice is possible in what St. Augustine calls the “city of man,” which is far short of our destiny in the City of God. Meanwhile, political homelessness is not our problem but our appointed circumstance on the way toward home.

The President's Bookshelf

I caught a bit of C-Span's White House interview with President Bush, and I thought it interesting that Bush said there were only two things that allow him to "escape" the White House within the White House: vigorous exericise and reading. I'm surprised he didn't say prayer too.

The camera panned the President's bookshelves in the 2nd floor Central Hall, a place where he apparently loves to read. Who isn't insatiably curious about what the stranger on the subway is reading, let alone the president? Here are the volumes I saw with the help of the zoom function on my TV:

Team of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin (who isn't reading this? If I'd read this one I could probably opine on whether it's the most overrated book of the last hundred years)

an Alan Furst novel

Polio - (likely book by David Oshinsky)

Apostle Paul - novel by James Cannon

Mellon - Cannadine

America Alone by Mark Steyn

a Babe Ruth biography

Opening Day (likely the story of Jackie Robinson by J. Eig)

Hemingway's Hurricane by Phil Scott

Andrew Carnegie biography

Now It's My Turn - Mary Cheney

Michael Lewis book (likely "The Blind Side" but can't confirm)

Kremlin Rising: Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution - Baker & Glasser

1939 (likely "1939: Baseball's Tipping Point" by Boston & Grisham

Four Days in Ohio

I feel a compulsive need to document vacations, even those spent at home, in order to sustain them or at least to post-mortem them in the case of failure. I treat vacations like lefties do Obama, like the dawning of a new era. Contrary to past experience. I see every vacation, even short 4-day’rs, as having the potential for a golden era of learning and reading. But this never quite happens over Christmas vacation especially. The Christmas holidays are survived, not thrived, and this was no exception. It was harrier than a harridan. Today, Saturday, was the first day things calmed down such that I could catch my breath.

New Year’s Eve was early spent at M’s house, where inexplicably I began sneezing early and often, eyes watering, sinuses plugged. In no time at all I was an allergic wreck; my body must’ve been rebelling from too many family gatherings in too short a time. (I joke!)

Families are interesting. Within them, siblings are often radically different in order to distinguish themselves from the others. And yet paradoxically there is a similarity within that gives a family some unifying characteristic that makes it unique from others. I've always been interested in 'fish out of water' stories where someone from France (like DeTocqueville) comes over and writes "Democracy in America" and ends up telling Americans what we are like far more than any American has ever done! Ironic? Does it takes someone outside the family to understand it?

____
Much of the wasted time the last three days was self-inflicted of course, especially the nausea over too much television. I was suffering from severe reading debt before I was aware of it, which had lowered my IQ a full ten points before this morning's partial recovery involving James Buckley’s oral history book, which scratched the itch of curiosity concerning his Senate career (before my time) and subsequent loss to Pat Moynihahn. (Well, if you’ve got to lose to someone….) I didn’t realize he ran for Chris Dodd’s seat a few years later, losing to Dodd and well there’s your crime. (Dodd’s father was well-beloved, proving that voter preference for ‘name brands’ has been alive and well for quite some time.) Followed that up with more on Mother Teresa, who along with the Buckley family seems to be my chief sources of fascination biography-wise for ’08 (and now into ’09).

This paragraph is of little interest and may be profitably skipped though I can’t guarantee any of this post will be profitable in any sense. The elephant in the room this vacation was Master TV. Our old cable company was limping along and when I learned I could get a cheaper deal with the new one along with a ‘universal dvr’ that allows the viewing of recorded shows on the bedroom tv, I was hooked. Unfortunately to say this was a hassle was an understatement. Guy comes out in early December. Spends 2 hours. Finds out a flood in St. Louis has affected their computer system & made all installs impossible. The next reschedulement was “8-10am” on Dec. 31st. We took the slot and the guy, none too bright a later technician would tell us, worked from 8:30 to 3:30. It’s oddly wearying having a stranger in your house that long. Around 5pm I notice that the TV reception is poor. The picture freezes occasionally and then unfreezes. I spend an hour playing with the cords and checking the connections. I also notice that the vaunted “universal dvr” wasn’t working – at all. Pathetic. I called the new cable company and am on the phone about an hour as the guy tests this and that as two power outages twice take down his system, requiring him to start all over. He tells me the signal coming into the house is good but the wiring is bad. He says there will be a new guy out Jan. 1st, 12-2pm. The new guy comes out, immediately sees what is wrong, fixes it, is bit in the thigh by our German Shepherd and promises not to sue. We hope. Fortunately the skin wasn’t broken but we learned a valuable lesson. We hope. (i.e. always muzzle our dog when a repairman comes over.)

So New Year’s Day was spent mostly reliving what went wrong with training our dog, creating about eight favorite channels out of a quadzillion mostly weak ones, and learning about the new software interface. Set up pgms to tape, watched some of the Rose Bowl parade, and finally settled all too belatedly on the Rose Bowl itself. PSU lost to USC unfortunately. Then later it was the UC game, who fell to the Hokies.

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Grimly I find myself looking down the barrel at the end of what was billed as a four-day vacation, Thrs-Fri-Sat-Sun. The days burnt away like fossil fuels in Victorian Manchester, such that now only fragments remain like the ghost of Scrooge’s undigested bit of beef. Ill spent, it would seem, at least until today (Saturday). I find I can’t leap right into the vacation, a noun meaning falling into transcendental poementation. There needs to be a buffer. It’s like how reading over my lunch hour, other than about politics, has never worked. At work there’s all the foreknowledge of time’s limit and you know couldn’t lose yourself in the literary let alone beauty. The atmosphere smells of work somehow, like my old McDonald’s uniform would smell of fries and grease after a shift, and you don’t want to spoil the psychological scent of your book.

So Thursday went trailing away in a vapid of vaporous football, or vapor of vapidous football (although the first half of the Penn State game was tasty), leavened by the sterling start occasioned by Mass. Fit in also a trip to Target where I succumbed to buying a new high def TV/dvd combo for the bedroom since the prices have been coming down and the end is near anyway. They say men near death have an urge to have sex (why would they be any different?), as if to affirm the life principle on the precipice of losing it, and perhaps I feel an urge to spend now as the economy begins its death throes. It’s a ridiculous concession to the culture perhaps, but those summer Reds games were unwatchable on the bedroom tv after starting the games on the downstairs highdef (a Christmas gift from my wife). It illustrates my number one rule: never improve your standard of living if you can help it. I had no plans to ever buy a HD tv until I already had one, just as I had no intention of ever smoking anything but Swisher Sweet cigars.

So Thursday went by in about ten minutes, adjusting for vacationary inflation.

Friday dawned, as all days do, and now the real vacation would begin. No cable guy visits or dog traumas, and the televisions all present and accounted for and working fine. Nothing but net now. Spent an hour or so reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood”, and so uncanny it was that I highlighted some revelatory passages for blog purposes. She says that which can’t be said because it’s too true to life, which is the mark of the great fiction writer.

Highlight I did but I never talk back to books of any sort, that is I never write in the margins, perhaps because either a) I’m too easily influenced to rebut, especially to someone found worthy of publication or b) I don’t see a book as a conversation but as a story (fiction) or lecture (nonfiction), though minus the harshness the latter word connotes, and I wonder now if some of the marginalia of a John Adams or anyone else is simply for posterity, a way to say beyond the grave that you didn’t agree with something. Worrying about one’s earthly legacy always seems slightly humorous to me, since 99.999% of us are forgotten a couple generations after our death. Not Adams though, of course, so he’s excused. On the other hand, perhaps there are those who write comments in order to remind a future self who reacquaints himself with a book to what concerns his past self felt. That is, they write their journal in the margins of books rather in the pages of a Word document.

I had jobs to do Friday. First I had to return the "old" HDTV that had a “stuck pixel” in the middle of the screen. How much trouble can a HDTV be? Let me count the ways. Somewhere Jim Curley and Jeff Culbreath are shaking their heads and quoting the apocrphyal Psalm 192: "I told you so." I’d ordered it a week or so back and tried every which way but lose to “fix” this manufacturer defect. It had been said that pushing it in, or flicking it, would work. Or not. Then there was this magical free software pgm that would fix it, but the distance between that TV monitor and my computer seemed to be big enough to quote an old Dwight Yoakam song:

Take a rock tie a rope
Throw it down in the sea
Let it fall to the bottom
Nobody knows how deep
Stare real hard through the water
And you might just perceive
The distance between you and me
The distance between you and me….

Climb the Earth's tallest mountain
To where it reaches the sky
Take a gun fire a bullet
Straight up out of sight
Where it stops in the heaven
Well that ain't half as high
As the distance between you and me
The distance between you and me

The problem essentially was that both the computer and the television wanted the “male” half of the RGB cable but such cables maddeningly had one male and one female.

But packing the TV and shipping it was nothing compared to finding the old cable company, who had moved from their previous location and who were bound and determined to thwart any attempt to reach a live human being for purposes of finding where their new building was. Neither did the Internet help. It was a secret wrapped in an enigma in order to keep their customer service office from being too busy. But through pluck and luck I got the person and the address and entered the building with only a phone modem in order not to have to hold the boxes while I waited in line. A customer rep eventually waved me forward and I dumped the modem and then said I would be back with more. I was still another modem short, one that hadn’t worked, for which I’ll have to return. (It’s always a tie in these things; no winner is ever recorded.)

Then after that we had an appointment with the vet. Our cat had a bulbous growth on his side and we feared the worse: cancer. He had grown odd-shaped over the past couple months; emaciated at the head, neck and thin at the back. Only his stomach bulged and my wife began calling him an Ethiopian while my stepson nicknamed him “Skeletor”. The vet took an X-ray and the picture was worth a thousand words: a gigantic something – he knew not what - had taken over the area which would otherwise be devoted to organs such as the kidney and liver. It had pushed the organs to the side and pressed against the bladder and we were amazed our cat hadn’t shown more obvious complaints about this foreign intrusion that had caused his belly to be hard as steel. It couldn’t be cancer, the vet said, because no tumor that big could not have already caused his death.

He couldn’t diagnose it and recommended we come back tomorrow (Sat) for an ultrasound, which we did and found out that our cat has a small tumor on the kidney that had produced a bunch of fluid, which was what showed up on the x-ray. The vet had proceeded to drain that fluid, or urine, which amount to a full liter. Our 10 lb cat was down to 8.5 lbs in ten minutes. The bad news was that the tumor looks to be cancer, so his time is limited but not quite as limited as it seemed Friday when he was almost going to quite literally burst.

So after the semi-good news about Sam, I hit the local park for a walk with our dog, and under the influence of lake-shine I felt that familiar verge of being on the verge of some important discovery, if only that of recapturing remembrances of time past, of feeling exactly what it was like to be there then. I remembered how short a time it seemed since we were in Manhattan and I was shaking the hand of Fr. Neuhaus, who now tragically is suffering from cancer.

What lingeration with trips! You can relive them so that they live even after the credit card payments come due and are paid. I wonder vaguely at the lifespan of vacation memories as I recall the thrill of riding the subway, full of anticipation, in going to a Yanks game and the Bronx for the first time. I remember stumbling around in deadeye fatigue around Union Square.

After the hike I pressed on, with a sense of mission given the rapidly evaporating vacation, driving towards Barnes & Noble. I’d received a gift card for Christmas and had done ridiculous amounts of prepatory work. I’d called one of them and asked for the biggest B&N in the Columbus area. I was told they were the biggest. Then I called another and they said Polaris was the biggest. I trusted them since they hadn’t said themselves. I was probably right since when I put in an obscure book Polaris was the only B&N to have it.

I picked up Dolan’s “Irish-Americans” and a book on Mother Terersa as well as “What Your Money Means: And How to Use It Well”, with had included a positive blurb from Archbishop Chaput and which I obviously need to read after buying a second HD tv. It was very hard to resist Avery Cardinal Dulles' book of lectures titled “Church & Society” but I did. The catechism chapter looked especially interesting so I hope to see a review elsewhere on the blogsophere.

And that's the way it was...

Broken Alabaster Post

With thoughts on spiritual honeymoon periods...

The Daily Pope

See Pope Benedict's messages here from Bill of Summa (non) Minutiae.