Adult women today who were once part of the giggling, boy-chasing hordes of the 1980s can recall receiving an earful from their parents about how "grody" is not a word. But it turns out to be one after all, at least according to some tubular historians. A professor at Philadelphia's Temple University who has the totally awesome name Muffy Siegel says that "like"--as in "let's, like, get sushi and not pay"--is a "discourse particle."
The Times identified the executives stepping down as: Monsignor Terrance Fleming, Mahony's chief of staff; Sister Cecilia Louise Moore, who oversees charitable foundations; Monsignor Richard Loomis, who heads the secretariat for administrative services; Sister Bernadette Murphy, who oversees the church's educational programs; and Thomas Chabolla, a layman who heads the church offices for pastoral and community services.
The above resigned because, they said, "Cardinal Roger Mahony failed to consult them when he cut program budgets to help close a multimillion-dollar deficit." The article does not mention that the pro-life office was one of the programs eliminated in the budget cuts. Neither does it show any photos of or draw any connections with the offensive new multimillion-dollar LA cathedral, which is an affront to lovers of beauty everywhere.
Here we are on the eve of All Saints, my very favorite holy day of obligation. We are surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses, and as Catholics (and Orthodox of various stripes) we have the pleasure of acknowledging them tomorrow.
So, those of you who want to keep the day holy and not offend it with sex and secularism, do not read the following, which my husband just sent to me via email. Sorry it's all caps; I'm not going to take the time to retype it.
A COUPLE WAS INVITED TO A SWANKY MASKED HALLOWEEN PARTY. SHE GOT A TERRIBLE HEADACHE AND TOLD HER HUSBAND TO GO TO THE PARTY ALONE.
HE, BEING THE DEVOTED HUSBAND, PROTESTED, BUT SHE ARGUED AND SAID SHE WAS GOING TO TAKE SOME ASPIRIN AND GO TO BED AND THERE WAS NO NEED OF HIS GOOD TIME BEING SPOILED by NOT GOING. SO, HE TOOK HIS COSTUME AND AWAY HE WENT.
THE WIFE, AFTER SLEEPING SOUNDLY FOR ONE HOUR, AWAKENED WITHOUT PAIN AND, SINCE IT WAS STILL EARLY, SHE DECIDED TO GO TO THE PARTY. SINCE HER HUSBAND DID NOT KNOW WHAT HER COSTUME WAS, SHE THOUGHT SHE
WOULD HAVE SOME FUN BY WATCHING HER HUSBAND TO SEE HOW HE ACTED WHEN SHE WAS
NOT WITH HIM.
SHE JOINED THE PARTY AND SOON SPOTTED HER HUSBAND CAVORTING AROUND ON THE DANCE FLOOR, DANCING WITH EVERY NICE CHICK HE COULD AND COPPING A LITTLE FEEL HERE AND A LITTLE KISS THERE. HIS WIFE SIDLED UP
TO HIM AND, BEING A RATHER SEDUCTIVE LADY HERSELF, HE LEFT HIS PARTNER HIGH AND DRY AND DEVOTED HIS TIME TO THE NEW STUFF THAT HAD JUST ARRIVED.
SHE LET HIM GO AS FAR AS HE WISHED, NATURALLY, SINCE HE WAS HER HUSBAND.
FINALLY, HE WHISPERED A LITTLE PROPOSITION IN HER EAR AND SHE AGREED, SO OFF THEY WENT TO ONE OF THE CARS AND HAD SEX.
JUST BEFORE UNMASKING AT MIDNIGHT SHE SLIPPED AWAY AND WENT HOME AND PUT THE COSTUME AWAY AND GOT INTO BED, WONDERING WHAT KIND OF EXPLANATION HE WOULD MAKE FOR HIS BEHAVIOR.
SHE WAS SITTING UP READING WHEN HE CAME IN AND ASKED HIM WHAT KIND OF TIME HE HAD.
HE SAID, "OH, THE SAME OLD THING. YOU KNOW I NEVER HAVE A GOOD TIME WHEN YOU'RE NOT THERE."
THEN SHE ASKED, "DID YOU DANCE MUCH?"
HE REPLIED, "I"LL TELL YOU, I NEVER EVEN DANCED ONE DANCE. WHEN I GOT THERE I MET PETE, BILL BROWN AND SOME OTHER GUYS, SO WE WENT INTO THE DEN AND PLAYED POKER ALL EVENING.....BUT YOU'RE NOT GONNA BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GUY I LOANED MY COSTUME TO."
Looks as if other blogs that use my comment function are also left high and dry. I expect it to pop up again shortly.
In the meantime:
The weekend before Thanksgiving I'll head to Toronto for the annual meeting of biblical and other scholars of religion (about 8,000 eggheads in suits in one place). I wouldn't mention this but for the fact that the "James ossuary," which no doubt all of you have heard about, is going to be on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Admission is $12.00, probably for nothing more than a quick walk-by, kind of like the experience one has on the automated sidewalk that takes thousands much too hurriedly past the crown jewels in the Tower of London.
A couple of people have asked what I think of the ossuary. Frankly, I'm disgusted that it was looted and has been in a private collection for 15 years. The main problem with that situation is that no one knows where the box came from. Archaeologists gain an enormous amount of knowledge from excavating around a precious item. All of that knowledge is irretrievably lost, and the loss is on the magnitude of the finders of the Nag Hammadi codices using several of the manuscripts to start fires. I get almost physically ill thinking about both of these travesties.
As to the authenticity of the ossuary: people I greatly respect have given it the thumbs-up.
As for the alleged threat of "James, the brother of Jesus" to Catholic doctrine : early Church tradition, specifically a second-century apocryphal work, the Protevangelium of James, says that Joseph had sons from a previous marriage ("I already have sons and am old, but she is a girl" 9.2). As a (neophyte) professional in this field, I can't in good conscience give unqualified credence to an apocryphal work. But there is no reason why such an explanation could not be true.
If you have questions about the ossuary that my visit to it it might answer, email me and I'll keep them in mind when I see it next month. I'll blog about it when I return.
Here is a fairly detailed article from Time Magazine on the ossuary. There are other equally good accounts of it elsewhere.
The new Brit--rude, crude, with lots of chest hair--is demolishing the sentimental American notion of the tea-and-crumpets Englishman (and woman). Andrew Sullivan, certainly more a representative of the cultured than of the new Brit, spells it all out for us. [Link requires free registration.]
Sorry, dear readers, I have no idea why the comment function has not been operative for the last few days. I've been too busy to blog since Monday and haven't even looked at any other sites to see if they, too, are comment-los. I'll take a look as soon as I post.
Many thanks to John Hiler of Microcontent News for linking to this site, and welcome to new visitors. Note that John's last name is Hiler. What a kind person he must be; he elided my cognominal mistake in the post below with ... when he reproduced it instead of drawing attention to the error.
In response to John: it would be terrific if he (and others!) could blog high profile events in NYC and elsewhere for us folks in fly-over country. Such an activity seems tailor-made for blogging tech. I wonder if at some point people might even make money doing it. I, for one, would be willing to pay a small fee or make a donation to read a snappy take on a debate or lecture.
Gordon Zaft makes an interesting comment on the post on books below: He is attempting to "try to look at my relationship with *things* and examine whether I'm giving them too much importance in my life."
[Later note: I'm quoting Zaft talking about himself here.]
After thinking about this for all of two minutes, I respond to him that yes, we do need to evaluate continually whether we are too attached to material possessions. Christians in particular have an obligation to free themselves from such attachments. But do books, or at least the books we use as tools in our everyday lives, count?
Let me bring up an example as a contrast. A few years ago I attended a rare books show in Boston. For sale was a first edition of Eliot's "The Wasteland," which could be purchased by anyone who wanted to hand over $15,000. I really wanted it. Of course, I didn't have $15,000 lying about to spend on a yellowing pamphlet. If I had, would I have bought it? Don't know. But if I had bought it, I would agree that I was dominated by a thing. The poem would sit in a case, ideally with temperature and light-controlled specifications, and make me smile when I thought of it. But it's a thing, and it wouldn't be doing me or anyone else any earthly good.
Things don't need to be expensive to dominate us, surely. But if they are our indispensable tools, the instruments with which we make our way in the world, are we still in danger of over-attachment? I suppose, to answer the question briefly, it depends on our attitude. Surely I'm pleased with my books and love my office with its rows upon rows of shelves. Could I give them up? At the moment, I couldn't do so and finish my degree.
Another angle: A professor emeritus from Harvard, one of the most well-known of the first generation of Dead Sea Scroll scholars, sold his library last month. I spoke on the phone with the man representing the company who bought the books.
"Why did he sell?" I asked.
"He needs to move into assisted living and his books are holding him back," the man replied.
Certainly there does come a time, like it or not, when we have to let go.
"Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The NYT offers an article about the booklover's perennial problem: storage. Do you double-shelve? (I've never been able to force myself to that extreme.) Do you stack in the bathroom? We have boxes overflowing in various rooms. Right now the spare room, which I think has six floor-to-ceiling shelves in it, is overrun with cardboard boxes full of richness. We try to get rid of multiple copies, but sometimes even that isn't possible, or, to be more precise, negotiable. We probably have three or four copies of Walden: my childhood copy, the one inscribed to me from a dear friend, my husband's college copy, an annotated edition ... Someday my son will have to sort all this out. Will he be ruthless? I tend to doubt it. He has my sentimental side and is already saving things for his children, he tells me. I kept all my old childhood books, of which there were hundreds, and he has read through those. Some of them haven't survived the years, those old Scholastic 60s and 70s editions with the nasty paper, mostly. But still extant are the hardcover sets of Louisa May Alcott, L. M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Marguerite Henry ...
One saving technology is the CD-ROM. I have the full Oxford English Dictionary on it (it's a lot cheaper that way, too). I also have all 42 or 46 or whatever number of volumes of the Ante-Nicene and Nicene Fathers on disk, as well as the Anchor Bible Dictionary and several other large sets. It helps. Anything helps.
INTERNET USERS WHO receive an e-card in the next few weeks might want to think twice before opening it. A new kind of e-card, which requires installation of spam-generating software called Cytron, is making its way around the Internet. If you try to view a Cytron enabled e-card, you are likely to pester friends, family, and co-workers with e-mail and inadvertently send them toward porn Web sites.
John Corante, who provides such a service to the blogging community with his Microcontent News, went to the showdown between Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan on Orwell a few days ago and gave us some highlights on his site. The lucky dog. Sometimes I hate being in a backwater like South Bend. No good restaurants, fat Indiana ladies in stretch pants, little intellectual stimulation outside the university. But at least there's always parking.
To make it even worse, Steve Wolfram gave a lecture, too. Wouldn't my husband have loved that. Guess we need to move to NYC.
A lot of bookies are crying into their shoes today. Florida State was supposed to knock out ND with a 10 point win. Ha-ha! And I say it again, ha-ha! As the talking heads noted, we are believers, now, all of us.
My guess is that a new wave of terrorism is going to target the web. Remember, those guys want to take us down economically as well as build a body count.
Blogger was down today, and this was the first time I've been able to get through.
So much news. Praise God for the capture of the DC area snipers. Not an hour went by that I didn't think of my friends who live there and pray for their safety and for the capture of the murdering bastards. Sorry for the profanity, but the case really requires it, don't you think?
Now we need to pray for the hostage situation in Moscow, which looks truly grim. The best coverage on this situation that I've found has been NPR radio.
Some good news that has nothing to do with world politics or the war on terrorism: Arts and Letters Daily is returning to us! The Chronicle of Higher Education bought it and is retaining its former editor. Hurray!
Good article on changes at Bob Jones University. Amazingly, this article is written without the usual condescending disdain most reporters direct to anyone who professes fundamentalist religion. It's obvious that the author disagrees with many aspects of BJU, but she seems to write about it fairly.
A bit on Catholics from the article:
In the '80s and '90s the school attracted periodic media attention for its officials' inflammatory comments, such as former university president Bob Jones Jr.'s declaration, on being asked whether he would like to meet with Pope John Paul II, that he'd ''just as soon speak to the devil himself.''
Michelle Berg, a junior with a trendy short-handled purse whom I meet in the student center, assures me, ''We love [Catholics]. We have a way for them to be saved from hell.'' But this involves telling them that ''what they believe is wrong'' and unfortunately, says Berg, ''people don't see that as love.''
Note: I hope my praise of the author of the above article doesn't imply that I approve of Bob Jones University. It is in many ways an icon of everything I'm against. What is worthy of approbation, however, is someone writing in an even-handed way about ideas antithetical to her own.
Stunning, heartbreaking article on a neglected and almost abandoned library of rare books at the Jesuit Gonzaga University--a bibliophile's most exhilarating dream and most ghastly nightmare, both at the same time. Thanks to the Bookslut for another excellent link.
For a mere $4.95, I've become a subscriber to the Vocabula Review, an e-publication dedicated to words and their proper usage. The writing is a little snotty, a little stuffy, often a little funny, and always so correct. All these attributes make me think of our own Nihil Obstat, who would enjoy VR very much. ("Very" is an overused word that should be eliminated from sentences whenever possible.) I would send an email to NO giving him/her a friendly notice about this publication, but he/she doesn't make his/her email address available. Oh, well. He/she probably is quite familiar with VR already. Such unlovely syntax do we weave, when we address one who deceives, at least concerning his/her identity. I know that I should talk, since I use a pseudonym as well. But at least I divulge that I'm female.
Peggy Noonan writes an explanation and meditation on the rosary that would be perfect to give to non-Catholic friends, or Catholic friends who misunderstand the prayer.
What was Christ thinking about that night in Gethsemane? That is the first of the sorrowful mysteries. I start to think and then . . . Maybe he knew that in spite of the pain he was about to be subjected to, in spite of his self-sacrifice, the world was going to continue to be a miserable place. Maybe the evil one sneaked into his mind and showed him a film of the future--Thomas More being put to death as a Christian by Christians for the sake of Christianity, Edmund Campion and John Fisher the same. The Inquisition, the Holocaust, cardinals of the church who would be incapable of compassion for the families of children sexually abused by priests. Maybe all of that is what made him sweat blood.
Also: He must have loved life. He must have been in love with life on earth. Why else would he ask that the cup pass? He must have wanted to grow old. Why? Did he love bread, changes in the weather, wine, the feel of rain? He must have liked being a carpenter's apprentice. Woodwork is satisfying: You can see the results of your labor; you can feel it in a smooth finish. Maybe he made a chair once. Maybe it's in the Museum of Natural History now in a case with a card that says, "Child's chair, circa 100 B.C.E." Maybe there's a guard in the museum who's in love with the girl in the gift shop. Maybe they first talked in front of the case that houses the chair and something happened.
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.
I would like to name the Dowd Rule. To wit: No one who thinks George W. Bush is stupid is as smart as George W. Bush.
...The problem isn't that the new elites are consciously attempting to paint whoever disagrees with them as stupid; it's that they really believe that only stupid people could possibly disagree with them.
A less-than-glowing review of Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters. I've now read the book and, despite all my concerted attempts to give it a favorable review, cannot. I respect Hitchens' intelligence and enjoy his writing style in his short essays, especially the series on literature running in the last few Atlantic Monthlys. But this book is not good. I could post a few sentences that are terrible, but it's the book as a whole that disappoints. In the end, Hitchens does not do a convincing job of explaining why Orwell matters. What a shame this is, since his writings continue to have an enormous influence in our times, and, I imagine, for many years to come.
I'm listening to Rush right now, and he's talking about some bored bears in Russia. Bears are one of my favorite animals as long as I'm not actually near one; they're pretty dangerous. Bored bears, evidently, are even more dangerous than bears that are enjoyably employed. Pravda has reported that these animals are rolling rocks down mountains toward people and their cars. Some humans snuck up on the bears to observe this phenomenon, and the analysis is this: the bears are bowling for their own enjoyment. They're no longer hunted, and they have enough food, so now, I suppose, is their time to move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs in pursuit of ursine self-fulfillment.
The Bookslut links to an article in the Chicago Tribune about Arts and Letters Daily, one of my favorite webpages, now defunct. I wrote my own mournful, hiccuping paean to that site below, but Blogger ate it. Actually, Joseph Epstein of Snobbery fame offered a fine piece on ALD in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday or Friday, and the article is on the web here if you're a subscriber.
Mr. Epstein suggests that ALD might survive (or, to be more precise, resurrect and then survive) if those who love it would be willing to pay for it. That's a good idea. I'm with him.
I'm as riveted as anyone else who lives outside the DC area on the sniper story. But what is there to be said, really? There's nothing we can do except pray, which is no small thing.
The pundits in The Corner are hypothesizing that the sniper is part of a new Islamist offensive. That remains to be seen. I wouldn't be surprised either way. We have enough home-grown crazys who would do such things; we don't have to look outside ourselves to explain this unless there's good evidence to do so. May law enforcement put an end to this horrific situation now. Then we can start figuring out who and why. The first task is simply to end the crisis, immediately.
Story out today, without any detail, that the pope is changing the rosary "for the first time in 900 years."
According to Vatican sources, the 82-year-old pope will propose that Catholics meditate on five more events in Christ's life, adding a further layer of spirituality to the age-old prayer.
This is all the information the article gives.
While the pope may not have changed the rosary since its beginnings, many other people have. There are oodles of different ways to pray the beads, from the scriptural rosary to the chaplet of divine mercy. It will be interesting to hear what the pope proposes, though.
When I got into the newspaper business in the late 1970s, it was understood that opinion writers would contemplate a subject long and hard before unleashing their learned thoughts. Rushing to print was very poor form, suggesting a hysterical cast of mind.
...Now the opinion racket is greatly transformed. Writers don't worry so much about daily deadlines; they're thinking about hourly updates. Anyone who began a piece with "it is my considered opinion" would be e-mocked within an inch of their life. Many opinions have been considered for every bit of seven minutes, if that. This is especially true on some of the blogs, where a writer might post half a thought, go to the can, and come back to finish the job.
Justin Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain who says Mr. Bush has a "troglodytic" approach to social and economic problems, was so surprised by his invitation from the White House to a symposium on Twain that he told the aide in the first lady's office he would have to get back to her.
But all four not only turned up in the East Room, they came away startled and impressed by a first lady who is quietly creating her own separate space within a presidency focused on war.
...Participants have also been surprised by the choice of authors, who are always selected by Mrs. Bush. When Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading historian of the American West and the author of the influential revisionist history "The Legacy of Conquest," was asked to speak about the Western writers Willa Cather, Edna Ferber and Laura Ingalls Wilder in September, she had to read Ferber's "Giant" for the first time — and came away stunned.
"It is quite a penetrating, mocking portrait of Texas rich people, and particularly of people making their money in oil," Ms. Limerick said, adding that she at first could not imagine that the first lady, with her roots in Texas, would have selected such a book for White House discussion. But when Mrs. Bush spoke in her opening remarks at that symposium of Ferber's shock at "the swaggering arrogance of men in 10-gallon hats," Ms. Limerick knew that Mrs. Bush was no stranger to the themes of "Giant."
Gee. A conservative who is intelligent, thoughtful, and self-critical. Imagine that. Sometimes the arrogant condescension of artsy liberals makes me so mad that I burst into stuttering obscenity. Which I won't articulate here. Because I, too, am a Lady.
A woman in the UK had an abortion using RU486, "which requires no surgery and is supposed to make terminations easier." Notice the language: "termination;" "supposed to make terminations easier." I repeat slightly to direct attention to two different issues: 1) a pregnancy or life was not ended according to this language; euphemism reigns. 2) RU486 has been marketed as a sort of miracle pill, no surgery, everything hunky-dory, like swallowing an aspirin. In reality, it's astonishing how hard a body works to hold on to its offspring, even if the offspring is only a few weeks past conception. I, with many other women, know this from experience. Statistically, one in three-four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. My personal tally is higher than that, but ask practically any woman who has attempted to have children, and the odds are she's had at least one miscarriage.
Then, in the recovery room, the woman sees a jar with "the products of conception" in it. The jar has her name on it. She freaks out: "I fell apart. I couldn't believe anyone could be careless enough just to leave it lying there. That image will live with me forever."
It. That image. Me. Still no baby in that room, if we rely only upon the language used.
The article gives no more details about the woman's encounter with the bottle with the baby in it. Why was she upset, exactly? Because she can't stand the sight of blood? Because she felt guilt? Because she knew it was a human being, even if she couldn't make herself articulate that fact when she spoke about it later to reporters?
My favorite priest and mentor used to say, "Most of us go through life semi-comatose." Misuse of language is one of the means by which we maintain that often pleasant state. This poor woman met the fact behind the language, and I pray that indeed, the "image" lives with her forever. Perhaps the image will eventually help her accept the reality of what she's done and to bring good from it. The end of the article signifies that this may indeed be so:
She said: "Women need more counselling before abortions, not less."
The aim of the Biblical Theology Group at the SBL International Meeting in Cambridge 2003 is to investigate the ways in which precise text analysis informs systematic theological decisions, and how systematic theological insights are based on distinct layers of biblical redaction. The key question to be addressed is how a systematic theological fixing of a distinct biblical text brings the text to a level of conceptualization given with the text, but their parameters are already given in the text. Second, the systematic theological fixing of one semantic level is related to the respective context in which that decision is made as well as to the multiple contexts associated with the textual layers.
Orwell would have a few words (clear words, distinct words, words carefully chosen to communicate) to say about the above paragraph, were he alive to read it.
USA Today's Jack Kelley obtained an al-Qaeda planning document, listing their top terrorist targets in America. On the list was a plan to hijack every school bus full of children in an American small town one morning, and blow them all to bits. Think of the impact of something like that happening in the heartland. Our Islamist enemies certainly have.
Jonah Goldberg responds to Rod Dreher's "crunchy conservatism," a concept that many blogs, including this one, munched on a while back. Jonah makes essentially the same point I did, though he does it much better: So? What's unusual about liking good food and Rush Limbaugh and homeschooling, all at the same time?
My friend, Jack Burditt, a wonderful and award-winning Hollywood writer, just told me a story. He has four kids, three of them girls, and one of his daughters, 16, wanted to go to an all-day punk rock festival, advertised in Southern California as The Inland Punk Rock Festival, with a few of her girlfriends. This was to take place on Saturday, September 14, at the Glen Helen "Blockbuster" Pavilion in Devore. He listened to his daughter carefully make the case for going, and then told her the chances of this happening were roughly equivalent to Yasser Arafat being cast in "The Menachem Begin Story." His daughter volleyed back that she didn't think he understood her, because she really, really wanted to go. Then she screamed for twenty minutes. This is not a bad tactic, as tactics go, so Jack jumped back over the Antietam wall and said, "Okay, you and your friends can go, but only if I take you, myself, and stay with you the whole time." She's not stupid, so she shrugged agreement, and off they went to join fifty thousand other acolytes for a day of sun and anarchy...
The lead singer of every band that day had gotten huge cheers in between songs by shouting things like "ANARCHY!" or, "F--- CORPORATIONS!" or just, "S---!" and all fifty thousand kids would scream their approval, whoop, and shove their fists into the air. Typical, I guess. Then, "Buzzcocks" came on, played their first song, and the lead singer stepped forward and shouted this (verbatim from Jack, he wrote it down) into the mike: "F--- GEORGE BUSH! DON'T LISTEN TO HIM. WE HAVE NO BUSINESS BEING IN IRAQ, NO MATTER WHAT HE SAYS." And here comes the good news.
There was a long pause, complete silence. And then they started. The boos. One here, one there. Then everyone. Everyone. Louder and louder. Jack told me how the puzzled singer blinked in surprise, looked at the rest of his band, and then stepped forward again to try to save the moment. "NO, NO, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. I SAID F--- GEORGE BUSH. F--- HIM." The boos grew even louder, and then people began shouting back up to the stage, "NO, MAN, F--- YOU!" "YEAH, F--- YOU, A-----E!" More and more, ceaselessly rising, until the shaken band caucused quickly and just blasted into their next song.
Not bad, eh? I know, I know, it's not exactly parliament shouting down Clement Atlee, but, all in all, not bad. Americans can always surprise you, for good or ill. Jim McDermott and David Bonior are Americans, and they surprised me by making me think, "Gee, I didn't know I could throw up that much."
But that was a heck of a nice surprise from these kids, wasn't it? Black boots and nose rings and tattoos, but they knew, to a person, what was right. They might not be able to point out the no-fly zones on a map, but they knew what was right. If we Americans fight terror all the way it'll take many years, and neither Trent Lott's kids nor Tom Daschle's kids are going to fight it. It'll be fought by a lot of the kids at the "Blockbuster" Pavilion, though.
A coalition of Catholic groups and victims of abuse by clergy unveiled a report Tuesday that accused the Vatican of trying to hide widespread child sex abuse scandals and called on the United Nations to step in.
"There has been cover-up and collusion not only on the part of the bishops but by the Vatican," said Frances Kissling, president of U.S.-based Catholics for a Free Choice, which spearheaded the research.
How this woman has the gall to call herself a Catholic while agitating publicly to make the Church change its stance on the preservation of innocent human life is one of the imponderables of our time. The fact that some Church leaders have screwed up royally does not give such a logically-impaired shrew the moral highground. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors here.) With all their sins of commission and omission, our bishops don't deserve lectures from the likes of her. Not even Cardinal Law, for whom I have not the least bit of respect anymore. Both Kissling and Law have violated our children, each in their own way. I'm not going to argue about which way is worse. But both people need to be quiet, turn to God, and change their lives and deeds.
Well--I suppose one could ask, does either Kissling or Law deserve a self-righteous lecture from me? I've got my own prayer and changing of life and deeds to work on.
Andrew Sullivan has chosen Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters for his next book discussion. I bought the book with high hopes several weeks ago, only to be disappointed in how ... well, patchy, it is. I was hoping for a more structured conversation that would present Orwell's life and ideas in an organized fashion. Unfortunately, on my first skim (and that's all I've done so far), I would not recommend the book to someone who knows little about Orwell. That said, Hitchens' opinions, as always, are worth reading, and the discussion over at AS should be pretty stimulating.
Last summer my son read Animal Farm, and when he heard my husband and me talking about 1984 in enthusiastic tones, he wanted to read it, too. I wouldn't let him. He was upset. He was even more upset when his fencing buddy, who is his age, read it. I felt like calling up the buddy's mother and asking, "How could you do this? How could you let your son read lines like this (which express the thoughts of the main character)?
'He would like to flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would like to tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.' "
Sorry, I can't let my son go there yet. He will read this book because it is essential reading. But not yet.
I gave him Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow instead last week. The latter in particular is pushing it because of its constant potty language and the presence (mercifully, not elaborated) of prostitution and pedophilia. But Ender's Shadow is one of the most profoundly and explicitly religious books I've ever read, with a terrific plot and engaging characters. My son read it in three days. I can hardly wait to discuss it with him.
I am delighted that one of the leading Roman Catholic seminaries for the training of young priests in Ireland is closing down because it can't get any recruits. When I read that in the newspaper, it left me smiling for the rest of the day. However, if the Catholic Church does die in Ireland - and I devoutly hope it will - I hope that it will not be replaced by some other idiotic superstition like New Age-ism or some other kind of religion.
The Roman Catholic Church is one of the forces for evil in the world, mainly because of the powerful influence it has over the minds of children. The Catholic Church has developed, over the centuries, brilliant techniques in brain washing children; even intelligent people who have had a proper, full cradle-Catholic upbringing find it hard to shake it off when they reach adulthood. Obviously many of them do - and congratulations to them for it - but even some really quite intelligent people fail to shake it off, powerful evidence of the skill in brainwashing that the Catholic Church exercises.
THE NEW YORK TIMES has lately come under a barrage of media criticism, not all of it from "the right," about the extent to which editorial bias has infected the paper's hard news columns. And already some of that criticism has been directed specifically against the paper's A-section reporting on its own, proprietary public opinion research (commissioned in partnership with CBS News). So what I'm about to offer isn't exactly without precedent. The bias in question, however, may well be without precedent; I can't remember anything quite like it, at least. "Poll Says Bush Needs to Pay Heed to Weak Economy," written up by Times correspondents Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, and awarded pride of place--the front-page lede--in yesterday morning's edition, isn't just slanted (or misleading or imbalanced or overstated or any other word commonly applied to such things). The story is an outright fraud, a falsehood, a work of fiction.
"Just tell me a story," Dr. Danielle Ofri admonishes her medical students and interns at morning rounds. To Dr. Ofri, an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital Center, a part-time writer and the editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, every patient's history is a mystery story, a narrative that unfolds full of surprises, exposing the vulnerability at the human core.
On Saturday we went to campus for the game. What a perfect football day! Not a cloud in the sky, temp about 60 degrees, everyone smiling, alumni tossing footballs to small sons and daughters on every open space. The brats were gone by the time we were hungry, but we had burgers, and we were there in time for the pregame band concerts. The entire band plays a few crowd favorites (the fight song, "Love Thee Notre Dame," etc.), and then they break into instrumental groups. Percussion stays put, and puts on quite a show, but since my son is a trumpet player, we walked with the brass over to the Main Building. The trombones play outside, but the trumpets arranged themselves on the second-story balcony under the dome and serenaded the assembly below. My son was stunned by their virtuosity, especially their ability to play while moving their instruments up and down in criss-cross patterns with each other. His stated goal is now to be a member of the ND marching band.
Beyond the obvious reasons, my husband was pleased with ND's win for one personal to himself:
"I just couldn't go back to Silicon Valley if ND had lost to Stanford," he said as he prepared for his flight back to the project. "I would never hear the end of it."
My husband just called me from his plane, in which he had been sitting for the last three hours due to bad weather in Chicago (a whippy arm of the hurricane?). He's been in San Jose on a project all week, and he let me know that his fellow detainees on the flight east were almost all rowdy Stanford fans sporting "Beat ND" buttons. Hah! We'll see about that.
“Hey, Jay, just so you know, not all of us are left-wing. Yes, some of us are on the ‘Right’ path: We just can’t say much about it, owing to that nasty tenure thing. Want to get rid of Saddam? Just send in 100 conservative political scientists. We are stealthy, quick-witted, and above all masters of camouflage. Instead of the Marines, send the Mortarboards!”
But then Al Gore rose from the dead to demonstrate that his political antennae are still as reliable as a 1948 TV with busted rabbit ears. Senate Democrats emerged from their hole to find their 2004 Presidential front-runner had dug them a brand new one. Remember Al? The first Android-American to run for President? The first candidate to win the popular vote without being popular? Al spent his riveting Gore '00 Presidential campaign in a fruitless pursuit for "the real Al Gore," launching a brand new "real Al Gore" every couple of weeks. But, in fairness to the Democratic Party's very own weapon of mass self-destruction, throughout all his multiple personalities Gore has been consistently tough on Saddam, ever since he was one of the few Democratic Senators to vote for the first Gulf War 12 years ago.
...Poor Al: The smart bomb who's so smart and always bombs. With his usual brilliant instincts, he chose to discard his pro-war stance just as his party's Senators were discarding their anti-war stance. Thus, the Democrats found themselves with the rare double problem of figuring out a way to spin both the obvious opportunism of their belated approval for the war and the obvious opportunism of Gore's belated opposition to it.
Their movement was at first regarded warily by ecclesiastical authorities, but Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, who died in 1975, will be canonized Sunday at the Vatican after one of the shortest waiting periods in church history. The ceremony is expected to draw 230,000 supporters from 84 countries to Rome, Opus Dei says.
No one is neutral about Opus Dei: one is either a passionate defender or an equally passionate detractor. That being said, I know too little about the movement to make much comment on it. Only one friend of mine (to my knowledge) belongs to The Work, as it is called. This guy can be a little scary at times in his opinions. I've read some of the things Escriva has written, and some are not my cup of tea; again, a little scary at times. But the pope supports them. That's a pretty strong argument in their favor.
Burglars, car thieves and purse snatchers in the Colombian city of Cali say they will go straight for one day next Sunday in protest against "white collar crime".
A spokesman for the criminals, Jose Nieto, announced the "work stoppage".
"We want to protest against the corruption that is dragging our country into misery," Mr Nieto told Radio RCN.
Soon after September 11, some intellectuals (for instance, Andrew Sullivan, Richard John Neuhaus, a few others) began to ask an interesting question: is monotheism a negative force in the world? Does belief in one God move people ineluctably to exclusivist claims that lead, in their turn, to violence as religious adherents defend the honor of their deity?
Michael Novak doesn't mention the above debate, but he does give evidence, via the indispensable Alexis de Tocqueville, that is useful in working through those questions.
Our elderly neighbors two doors down are moving, and this morning (even as I write) they're having a big auction of most of their possessions. There's an auctioneer, a hot dog van, a port-a-potty, and at least 200 people.
I went over to inspect the stuff and spoke with the lady of the house, Karen.
"You never know who's going to come to one of these things," she said. "A woman saw the whip that Don bought in Mexico, and she said, 'My neighbor would really like this for her S & M bed and breakfast.' "
We both started to giggle, and as the impact of what she said--I couldn't quite believe that a woman in her 70s had used words like this--started to sink in, both of us laughed until we almost cried. I'm sorry to lose such a neighbor. Their children grown, they've sold their beautiful house (two stories with finished basement) and are moving into an apartment which, Karen says gleefully, "I won't have to clean!"
The auctioneer just started into his sing-song spiel. I'm going to go and see if I can get the stainless silverware.
Establishment of a high-profile national review board headed by Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma only confirmed the suspicion. While the board drew media kudos as 'impressive,' (troubling in itself coming from that bastion of anti-Catholicism), savvy Catholics shook their heads over the naming of Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, and Robert Bennett, Clinton's lawyer. Their connection to the lascivious and predatory former president makes their involvement as guardians against sexual abuse almost laughable, not to mention their support for the most pro-abortion team ever to occupy the White House.
Who is the Lady of Shalott?Click here and find out. Why do I call myself the Lady of Shalott?
In addition to being a blogger, I'm a wife, mother, and Ph.D. student specializing in scripture and the Graeco-Roman world, and I'm just a little bit pregnant with a dissertation (but we're not going to talk about the dissertation, are we? No!). In hopes of receiving tenure someday at a university as wonderful as the one I now attend, this blogger will remain resolutely anonymous. Nothing like yards of politically incorrect off-the-cuff statements to derail the tenure track. But we'll have lots of fun anyway.
