Blogworthies I

Because The Blog from the Core simply can't cover everything.

Noteworthy entries @ GetReligion, Catholic and Enjoying It! No Left Turns, The Curt Jester, Discriminations, Dust in the Light, JunkYardBlog, And Then? Jihad Watch, Turnabout, Catholic Analysis, and Bettnet.com.

What We're Doing Here @ GetReligion:

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don't. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don't get to see them. But that doesn't mean they aren't there....

The problem of the sentimental rationalist @ Catholic and Enjoying It!

Down below, I linked an article about a guy who uses cadavers for "art" (not that he's just another bankrupt imagination who's only interested in shocking the hoi polloi or anything).

One of my atheist readers wrote:

Aside from the possibility of his knowingly or unknowingly using executed political prisoners (which is a problem), what's the problem?

If you believe in the soul, the soul is no longer there. If you believe the body is needed for the resurrection, then you had better be against cremation, rotting, and medical research. If you believe it's kind of icky, well, yeah, but so?

One of the difficulties faced by atheists is the problem of the sanctity of the human body. When the body is just another collection of atoms and atoms are of no particular value or meaning, it leads to various problems. Christians speak of the body (even the dead body) as a sort of sanctified Temple. You don't defile it with gross exploitation, even when it is dead. Not because they are so simple minded as to think that the body which is buried is identical with the body that shall be raised (heck! Paul made that clear in 1 Cor 15), but because nothing in creation (and least of all the body) is "mere"....

Kerry’s band of brothers @ No Left Turns:

John Kerry is polling at 56% in Michigan, with Dean at 9% and Edwards at 7%. This substantial lead and the general genuflection toward Kerry as the Democratic nominee, combined with his continual reminders that he is a part of a "band of brothers" crafted by their Vietnam experience should begin to focus our minds on who John Kerry is, what he has done, and what his purposes have been, and whether or not hey have chnaged over time. This examination will not be necessarily in Kerry’s interest, I’ll wager. As the Democratic primary campaign crawls on and ends up handing the nomination to Kerry, a couple of things have become clear....

Breaking News @ The Curt Jester:

Next years Super Bowl is going to be held in my adopted home town of Jacksonville, FL and I happen to know some people on the planning committee. They are really concerned about the half time show and want to make sure that the burlesque show and pornographic posturings that happened this year in Texas will not be repeated. They also don't want to totally dumb it down to the level of Barney and would still like to appeal to key demographics.

In a surprise turn of events Janet Jackson has agreed to appear for free and to wear a costume specially engineered to prevent any possible wardrobe malfunction or sexually suggestive moves....

The Shifting Sands Of Preference Justification @ Discriminations:

You should make an effort now to recall — because presently it may become much more difficult to do so — that in Grutter the Supremes held that the need for “diversity” in higher education was compelling enough to justify some racial discrimination in order to produce it.

This justification seems to be largely forgotten already in the debate that is heating up in Michigan over the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a ballot initiative that would add to the state constitution a requirement that the state

shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

Both interestingly and revealingly, the arguments of the preferentialists who are frantically trying to keep this matter off the ballot in Michigan make very little reference to “diversity.” ....

The What Now in Massachusetts @ Dust in the Light:

I can't believe that anybody expected the civil union diversion to work in the case of Massachusetts. The court's Goodridge decision was built around 1) a redefinition of marriage, and 2) the application of a pure equal treatment rule to that definition. To allow a civil union compromise (which, given that the word following "civil" would have been the only difference, mattered hardly at all) would have been to admit the contempt for representative democracy that the Goodridge decision represented. As the court's latest decree puts it: ....

A George Divided @ JunkYardBlog:

George W. Bush ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” by which conservatives assumed he meant to put a smiley face on a movement that sometimes comes across as a harsh you’re-all-alone view of the world. Most conservatives found the modifier more than a little irritating, since we believe our politics are ultimately more compassionate than the state-centered policies of the left, but we let it pass. To borrow from the old African proverb, conservatives would rather teach a man to fish so that he can provide for himself rather than do all the fishing for him and make him dependent on others. A self-sufficient citizen is a happier and more responsible citizen than one living on handouts. Believing "compassionate" modified "conservative" — and not the other way around — conservatives helped Bush win the presidency in 2000.

Three years into his first term, President Bush sometimes seems like he is two different presidents. The compassionate Bush signs bloated farm bills, proposes a sweeping “guest worker” program that looks like amnesty for illegal aliens by another name, signs a massive expansion of Medicare to include a prescription drug benefit in its entitlement, and increases the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Compassionate George has grown federal spending at about 27 percent per year, not all of it going to fund the war, and thus far he has found no way to actually pay for most of it....

Questions and answers @ And Then?

Slightly edited. See update at bottom of post.

Catholics of a traditionalist bent often look in askance at anything post-Vatican II — with as much chronological snobbery, by the way, as modernist Catholics who look in askance at anything pre-Vatican II. If it wasn't addressed by the Baltimore Catechism, it must be suspect. (That, as an aside, is not a jibe at the Baltimore Catechism, but an observation.) While I am not an expert in John Paul II's theology of the body, I am familiar enough with it to take a crack at providing catechetical answers to Baltimore-esque questions about the theology of the body. If anyone more expert than I in the theology of the body notices a mistake, please correct it in the comments box and I'll edit the post.

"1. What is 'new,' if anything, about the theology of the body?"

John Paul II's theology of the body is a new formulation and development of the age-old doctrine of the Church on human sexuality. This development of doctrine is the fulfillment of Christ's promise that the Holy Spirit would continue, through the course of time, to guide Christ's Church into all truth (cf. John 16:13). The Church's understanding of doctrine does not mutate from one belief into its opposite; doctrines believed from the beginning are deepened and better explicated....

Jihad and the Killing of Non-Muslims @ Jihad Watch:

A letter to CNN regarding the article I discussed here, from John Eibner of Christian Solidarity International:

Dear Sir/Madam,

The hopes of many were surely raised seeing a CNN.com headline on the 31st of January declaring: “Top Saudi religious authority condemns terrorists”. But upon further reading, I was disturbed to find that the Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Sheik was very selective in his condemnation....

Is conservatism to the point? @ Turnabout:

I got another note from my Finnish correspondent, who continues to express some dissatisfaction with conservatism (he is specially concerned with Russell Kirk). As in the past (here and here) his questions seemed worth editing and passing on, together with my attempts to answer them:

Finnish Correspondent: Nothing changes. When communism failed, its adherents switched to political correctness. Anti-socialist reforms are undertaken out of economic necessity on purely utilitarian grounds and are seen as something very different from ethics. Will history move like a pendulum, or will the situation stabilize on a level where sheer collapse is avoided, but the system remains unhealthy?

Jim Kalb: The problems with current social and moral ideals are quite basic, and people will patch things up and deny the obvious as long as possible rather than change their fundamental orientation. Still, paralysis can turn to radical change very suddenly when an outlook has lost plausibility and no longer offers satisfaction or hope. The way things are looks impenetrable and rocklike but that’s an illusion. These things are purely human and man is changeable. It’s unpredictable when something dead will fall apart though.

I suppose a basic question is whether some things are natural to man, so they tend to reappear, and others are unnatural, so they tend to fall apart and require special conditions that don’t last to keep them going. To me it seems clear that the latter is how things are. I think it’s part of what’s involved in saying morality is objective.

In any case I very much doubt that the situation will stabilize and the current orientation continue indefinitely. At the crudest level, if the Europeans don’t have children the European way of life will disappear....

Epitaph for the Episcopal Church USA — and Liberal Protestantism for That Matter @ Catholic Analysis:

The Episcopal bishop for Virginia has made a statement that should go down as the definitive epitaph for the Episcopal Church USA as a Christian denomination:

"If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy," said the Rt. Rev. Peter J. Lee to 500 Episcopalians meeting for the annual diocesan council at the Hyatt Regency in Reston.

"For as a heretic, you are only guilty of a wrong opinion," Bishop Lee said, quoting Presbyterian scholar James McCord. "As a schismatic, you have torn and divided the body of Christ. Choose heresy every time."

Source: Washington Times, Jan. 31, 2004.

As can be seen by the Episcopal bishop's quoting from a Presbyterian scholar, the counsel "Choose Heresy" is also a fitting epitaph for liberal Protestantism in general. The Episcopal bishop is, of course, drowning in confusion. The word "heretic" derives from the Greek heresis meaning "faction" or sect (see Stravinskas, Catholic Dictionary s.v. "Heresy"). Heresy by its nature creates factions, creates schism. A closer look at these terms should make this clear....

Is a Jesuit AIDS activist right to criticize drug companies? @ Bettnet.com:

On Thursday, during a Vatican press conference introducing the Pope’s theme for Lent, a curial official announced that the Pope’s charity is funding a home for AIDS orphans in Kenya. When the Jesuit priest directing the AIDS home got up to speak, he launched into a vitriolic diatribe against pharmaceutical companies. He spoke of the “genocidal action of the drug cartels who refuse to make the drugs afforable in Africa even after they reported a $517 billion profit in 2002.”

If that were the whole story we’d be right to join in Fr. d’Agostino’s outrage. But of course it isn’t.

I received information from someone who works for one of the top 3 biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. He’s not a PR flack or marketing guy. He works in the trenches there and was very upset that he and his colleagues were being accused of genocide and putting profit before the lives of the sick....

P.S. See also Blogworthies? and Blogworthies II.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 02/07/04 02:34:01 PM
Categorized as Blogworthies.