Blogworthies XLV

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

Noteworthy entries @ JunkYardBlog, Tim Worstall, Off the Record, Catholic Analysis, Chronicle of the Conspiracy, Dust in the Light, Belmont Club, Power Line, open book, MnKurmudge&DCKid, Flos Carmeli, The Corner, ut unum sint, Lex Communis, DeoOmnisGloria.com, Sed Contra, The Moderate Voice, Turnabout, and Eutychus Fell.

Liberals Still Don't Understand the World @ JunkYardBlog:

As you'll recall, The New Republic's Peter Beinart ignited a necessary debate on the left with his recent call to transform liberalism into a "fighting faith" that puts national security and a robust response to terrorism front and center. Beinart's fellow Democrats have greeted his challenge with everything from sober analysis to hooting cat-calls, and David Corn even derided the terrorist threat — which Beinart believes should become the central nugget of Democrat foreign policy — as somewhat less of a motivator than, say, crusading against drunk driving. So it has been clear for a while that in terms of persuading Democrats that they need to take terrorism seriously, Beinart is climbing a steep grade with the wind in his face. Most liberals still allow their hatred of George W. Bush and his Christian supporters to cloud their judgement on all major issues from the terrorist threat to Social Security reform....

Paul Krugman: Lies, Evasions or Simple Ignorance? @ Tim Worstall:

Sad to see a man who is and was a well respected academic economist making the following sorts of statements: ....

Let us greet our presider with #391 in the green hymnbooks @ Off the Record:

.... The original of the following hymn was found in a previously undiscovered folio of the Deutsches Volksgesangbuch (c. 1631). I have hazarded my own provisional translation....

Newsweek Does the Nativity @ Catholic Analysis:

A few days ago I wrote on Time magazine's cover story on the Nativity. Today, it's Newseek's turn (like Time, also the Dec. 13th issue). The Newsweek story is by Jon Meacham whose theological credentials are a two-year tutorial on the Bible with a professor at Episcopalian Sewanee University. The tenor of the article is that there are strong reasons to suspect that significant elements in the Nativity story were invented to bolster the divinity of Christ and to imitate similar stories from the Old Testament and Greco-Roman culture. The Newsweek editor, writing in the front part of the magazine, views the cover story as a public service because at Newsweek they have realized "how little even some of the most committed and educated Christians know about the evolution of their deeply held beliefs and assumptions" (p. 4). Translation: Newsweek is going to do the unwashed masses of gullible Christians a favor by bringing us up to date on the latest high-brow speculation debunking the truth of the Nativity story.

Well, as you might correctly guess, I judge the Newsweek cover story a flat failure in debunking the biblical accounts....

Answering Kinsley @ Chronicle of the Conspiracy:

Michael Kinsley, editorial page editor of the liberal Los Angeles Times and former editor of the ultra-liberal Slate, posted an argument against Social Security reform through personal accounts on Andrew Sullivan's blog. Sullivan positioned it as a call for discussion and counter-argument from the blog community, so here's mine. I'll take it line by line, reproducing Kinsley's text in indented italics....

Steps Toward Making Us All Non-Persons @ Dust in the Light:

Not knowing what else to do with a comment from Stephen Gordon to a previous post of mine, I thought I'd just reprint it: ....

Shame and Disgrace @ Belmont Club:

Andrew Sullivan has criticized the decision to award Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom....

How the Dems See the World @ Power Line:

The Democratic Party sent out an email today that included this description of how the Republicans are "planning to threaten our basic rights": ....

Bible-Only Bonanza @ open book:

Pardon me while I vent. Seriously. And I'm sorry if I offend any readers out there who might share the beliefs I'm going to take on, but... oh well....

Women and Porn @ MnKurmudge&DCKid:

OK, OK, that title is a bit misleading, I admit, because the winning entry has nothing to do with sex, which says (confirms?) something all by itself....

Supernatural and Natural @ Flos Carmeli:

Commenting on St. Thérèse, von Balthasar says, "Everything Thérèse achieves at the supernatural level is rooted in something she has experienced at the natural level." ....

Van Gogh's Website @ The Corner:

Pieter at the Peaktalk blog is busy at work translating some of Theo van Gogh's website into English. Van Gogh being Van Gogh, not all of it will make comfortable — or sensible — reading, but as this comment on America's supposed 'superficiality', well, judge for yourself: ....

Protestant Perspectives on the Real Presence @ ut unum sint:

Someone asked me to write up a brief summary of major Protestant differences on the presence of Christ and the Eucharist, and I thought you might be interested....

To quote Mark Shea, "Supernature abhors a vacuum." @ Lex Communis:

Bill Cork finds an article from ENS on the Episcopalian appropriation of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The article paraphrases Lydia Lopez, an Episcopalian lay leader from Pasadena....

The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Bible @ DeoOmnisGloria.com (italics in original):

I keep hearing the claim that Mary is “invisible” or “faint” within Scripture, which I disagree with. As we near Christmas, Catholics often think of a woman with God actually within her body. As any parent understands, mothers have an automatic and intimate connection with their newborn children that arises from developing the child for nine months. It is worth considering why God chose Mary to carry Jesus out of all women who had ever lived. No one, I repeat, no one has a more intimate connection with God than Mary, the New Ark of the Covenant that held the Word of God within her human body.

So, we get back to Scripture. I wanted to point out the numerous passages in the Bible that refer to the Mother of God and focus on how she is depicted....

Churches and Self-Defined Gayness @ Sed Contra:

The ongoing discussion of the United Church of Christ and its recent advertisement and what sort of Gospel should be offered to men and women living with same sex attraction heightened my attention for an email from a former member of the Metropolitan Community Church which arrived today.

The MCC is the oldest and I believe the largest self-defined church established for self-defined gay men and women. I do not offer this correspondent's observations to slam those who self-define as gay but rather to further reinforce my point that a Church built around a pre-existing ideology, in this case the moral rightness of homosexual sex, simply cannot reflect the teachings or Person of Christ....

How To Destroy Your Political Party In One Easy Lesson @ The Moderate Voice:

I'm not being cynical, mind you, but it just MUST have been Rush Limbaugh who got in and secretly wrote this email that was supposedly mailed out by MoveOn: ....

Natural functions and marriage @ Turnabout:

Over at MarriageDebate.com Maggie Gallagher has been dealing with one of the standard arguments for "gay marriage," that there can't be an essential connection between marriage and procreation because after all 70-year-old women are allowed to marry even though they can't have babies. Miss Gallagher handles the question very well, but there's a lurking point worth bringing out....

While watching a special with my sons... @ Eutychus Fell:

... the other day about hurricane Andrew, I told them it was the kind of film that our teachers used to show us in school. If memory serves, they were produced by the Shell Oil Company. These days, films in school are either on VHS tapes or DVD's. The thing with actual film, I told my sons, was that when the teacher removed the film from the can to load it onto the projector, you knew how long the movie was going to be: the little films were on small reels and the big films were on big reels — you could even see how full the reels were, watch them spin and see how much of the movie was left....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 12/18/04 08:46:49 AM
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