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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thursday, November 18, 2004
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Gerard Serafin, RIP A good friend of The Blog from the Core, fellow blogger Gerard Serafin a.k.a. Gerald Bugge, died today. His last substantive blog was the text of the Catechism's article In the Fullness of Time. His unfailing love of God and the Church was a great inspiration to many. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen. P.S. See also Justin Katz's tribute. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 07:36:58 PM |
ELCore.Net: Four Years Old Today My other website was started November 18, 2000. If you haven't been there before, here are some highlights:
P.S. The domain www.elcore.net was temporarily unavailable Friday morning, but it's working correctly again Friday afternoon. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 07:07:35 PM |
Dedication of the Basilicas of Ss. Peter & Paul Today in the Roman Church is the feastday of the Dedication of the Basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome. See Prayers for the Church Unity Octave: In honor of Saints Peter and Paul. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 06:29:23 PM |
Liberal Bias in Academia The New York Times reports on new studies today: .... The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged from 3 to 1 among economists to 30 to 1 among anthropologists. The researchers found a much higher share of Republicans among the nonacademic members of the scholars' associations, which Professor Klein said belied the notion that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly careers. "Screened out, expelled or self-sorted, they tend to land outside of academia because the crucial decisions awarding tenure and promotions, choosing which papers get published are made by colleagues hostile to their political views," said Professor Klein, who classifies himself as a libertarian. Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley who was chairman of the faculty senate and director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, said that professors tried not to discriminate in hiring based on politics, but that their perspective could be warped because so many colleagues shared their ideology. "Their view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe," said Dr. Trow, who calls himself a conservative. "Debate is stifled, and conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor judgment." .... Frankly, I'm rather surprised that NYT even admits there's some sort of dispute about the liberal bias in academia. Here are abstracts: .... In Spring 2003, a large-scale survey of American academics was conducted using academic association membership lists from six fields: Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy (political and legal), Political Science, and Sociology. This paper focuses on one question: To which political party have the candidates you've voted for in the past ten years mostly belonged? The question was answered by 96.4 percent of academic respondents. The results show that the faculty is heavily skewed towards voting Democratic. The most lopsided fields surveyed are Anthropology with a D to R ratio of 30.2 to 1, and Sociology with 28.0 to 1. The least lopsided is Economics with 3.0 to 1. After Economics, the least lopsided is Political Science with 6.7 to 1. The average of the six ratios by field is about 15 to 1. Our analysis and related research suggest that for the the social sciences and humanities overall, a "one-big-pool" ratio of 7 to 1 is a safe lower-bound estimate, and 8 to 1 or 9 to 1 are reasonable point estimate. Thus, the social sciences and humanities are dominated by Democrats. There is little ideological diversity. We discuss Stephen Balch's "property rights" proposal to help remedy the situation.... Using the records of the seven San Francisco Bay Area counties that surround University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, we conducted a systematic and thorough study of the party registration of the Berkeley and Stanford faculty in 23 academic departments. The departments span the social sciences, humanities, hard sciences, math, law, journalism, engineering, medicine, and the business school. Of the total of 1497 individual names on the cumulative list, we obtained readings on 1005, or 67 percent. The findings support the "one-party campus" conjecture. For Stanford, we found an overall Democrat to Republican ratio of 7.6 to 1. For UC-Berkeley, we found an overall D to R ratio of 9.9 to 1. Moreover, the breakdown by faculty rank shows that Republicans are an "endangered species" on the two campuses. This article contains a link to the complete data (with individual identities redacted).... Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 05:57:01 PM |
Marriage in the Fifty States Here's a page at the Heritage Foundation that keeps track of how all us bigoted, reactionary, hateful "homophobic" rednecks are doing at protecting marriage by statute or constitution. (Thanks, Ryan.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 05:27:40 PM |
Jay Damien's Story And Fr. Emmett McLoughlin. It was summer vacation, and I was again at my Grandmother's house, in her bedroom, staring at black beads in a green glass dish. Those mysterious beads! I was drawn to them but didn't dare touch them. Every night Grandma took those beads from their resting-place. Her eyes closed and her lips whispered as the circle of beads slowly moved through her fingers to the swish-swish rhythm of her rocking chair. What did it mean? What was she doing? I watched, transfixed. I was sure she was doing something "Catholic." I always knew that Grandma was Catholic and that my family was Southern Baptist, but she never said a word to me about the Catholic Church. Except once, when I blurted out, "Why are you Catholic?" Granny replied, "The Catholic Church was the first church, why isn't it the right church?" I would forever remember those thirteen words, spoken when I was seven or eight years old.... A reader referred me to Damien's article in response to my blog of more than two years ago: Emmett McLoughlin was a fallen priest (of the diocese of Tucson, most likely, or maybe of Phoenix) who made a name for himself in the last century by publishing works directed towards the baser instincts of anti-Catholic bigots, including Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church, An Inquiry into the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and People's Padre. A friend has been told that McLoughlin was reconciled to the Church before he died. Supposedly, a Franciscan priest named Father Albert Braun had claimed to have heard McLoughlin's confession, though it is unclear to me whether it was Fr. Braun who had supposedly reconciled McLoughlin to the Church. If anybody has any information about this, to verify or to refute it, or to point me towards more information, please write to me. Thanks.... Damien's story mentions Fr. McLoughlin several times (emphasis in original): .... I had such an aversion to the Catholic Church, I had never even considered looking into it. And then, Father Emmett McLoughlin left the Catholic Church and the news was splashed across the front page of my hometown newspaper. He began speaking about the evils of Catholicism at local Baptist churches and introduced his book, People's Padre, at the public library. I was enthralled by his words and reminded of how grateful I had been all my life that my mother had left the Catholic Church before I was born. I purchased his book as a "thank you" gift for her. And I read it.... So I have no doubt that if I had not read that anti-Catholic book written by an apostate priest, I would still be convinced that the truth could not be known through the Bible only, and my story would have ended there. Without Fr. McLoughlin, I would never have found the very author of the New Testament the Church established by Christ to be my teacher. I would never have known the Church that put the New Testament together with the Old Testament at the close of the fourth century to form the first Bible. It was as if Judas had shown me the way home to the Catholic Church. I will be grateful until the day I die, and beyond. Fr. McLoughlin eventually came back to the Church, without fanfare; no book or newspaper documented his return. I was privileged to be present when a venerable, old Franciscan priest, Fr. Albert Braun, told a group one night that he had heard Fr. Emmett's confession before he died. Thank you, God, for your great mercy; your mercy endures forever. I had long since identified what had troubled me about Fr. Emmett's book. He had either been in seminary or in active service as a priest for about 25 years. Why had it taken him a quarter of a century to discover the evils of the Catholic Church? He could have left and written his exposé at any time. Instead, his criticism of the Church and rejection of its doctrines came after his refusal to obey transfer orders from his superior. He was a popular priest, well known and very influential in the community, and he didn't want to leave. He justified breaking his vow of obedience by launching an attack upon the Church. But, like the good Mother that she is, the Church forgave him.... My correspondent also referred me here, and concluded: I worked in Mescalero, and even after 30 years, the people still revered Father Braun. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 07:42:33 AM |
Revolution of Love.com Blog Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 11/18/04 07:33:09 AM |
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