Blogworthies LIII

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

Noteworthy entries @ Rightwingsparkle, Catholic Analysis, One Hand Clapping, Power Line, Dust in the Light, ProfessorBainbridge.com, Mere Comments, willingtonworld, GetReligion, Eternity Road, DeoOmnisGloria.com, doxology, American Digest, Mystery Achievement, Althouse, HerbEly, Recta Ratio, Off the Record, Ace of Spades HQ, The Dawn Patrol, Cor ad cor loquitur, and IowaHawk.

Each issue of Vanity Fair Magazine... @ Rightwingsparkle:

... always brings me an extremely interesting tidbit. I get the feeling that VF honestly doesn't think anyone on the right reads this magazine. The Editor Graydon Carter's years of over the top anti-Bush, anti-Republican rants may have driven all those even leaning to the moderate right away, so perhaps I am the only one.

Michael Wolf has an article on the demise of the nightly network news. He describes this year's annual CBS holiday press party when Dan Rather suddenly appears in the room....

C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce & Lent @ Catholic Analysis:

No, the title has nothing to do with divorce between a man and a woman, but rather with the "divorce" of heaven and hell....

North Korea has nukes!!!! @ One Hand Clapping:

.... Today's claim may not even be true; the Dear Leader's government is the world's leader in mendacity and prevarication. No Western intelligence service doubts that the DPRK has the techonology, the scientists, the engineers and the fissile material needed to produce atomic warheads. But there is no certainty, there is no "slam dunk" on this matter simply because the North Korean government is the most insular in the world....

Not Even Voltaire Believed This One @ Power Line:

Very few people realize how often mainstream media sources say things that just aren't true. Sometimes the reason is malice, more often it's ignorance or prejudice. A fascinating example of a libel directed against the Catholic church — undoubtedly the world's most frequently defamed institution — was brought to our attention by reader Matthew Kowalski....

The Ideal as Trojan Horse @ Dust in the Light:

Before my wife gave up trying to find a full-time teaching job in Rhode Island's public school system, I had to learn how to disguise my sneer at the notion that "teachers are the most underpaid professionals." It was perfectly clear to me that, in this state at least, teachers unions and their political allies were holding up struggling near-outsiders such as my wife in order to argue for benefits and job protections for those who were already established and hardly impoverished. Groups have a tendency to hold up the most convenient faces from among their members toward any given end....

CST and Marxism: Plus Ruminations on Catholic Legal Scholarship @ ProfessorBainbridge.com:

At a conference over the weekend, I had what one observer referred to as a "full and frank" discussion of the intellectual roots of Catholic social thought with esteemed Catholic legal scholar Tom Shaffer. As I understood Tom's claim, he argued that CST is basically Marxist in origin because it accepts virtually all of Marx's core principals excepting only such things as the claim that religion is the opiate of the masses and so on.

I will concede that elements of CST were infused with a Marxist sensibility during the heyday of liberation theology, of course, but I rather forcefully rejected Tom's apparent view that the key documents — especially the foundation stone laid by Rerum Novarum should be understood as even quasi-Marxist documents....

Ash Wednesday: An Observation @ Mere Comments:

In the evening, I take two buses, a subway, and one train, traversing the northwest side of Chicago to its downtown “loop” and then out to our home in the city’s far western suburbs. Tonight’s commute was a revelation. Everywhere I turned, there were men and women with ashes on their foreheads. Not discreet, barely-visible smears, mind you. With few exceptions, these marks were in dark, fat, no-doubt-about-it crosses. I also walk for several blocks in the city and I’m not exaggerating: tonight about one in four people bore the sign....

Me vs World — Grad School with the Left. @ willingtonworld:

Had class last night [Mon. Feb. 7]. The professor was going to be late so he left instructions for us to break into groups and rate from 1-20 the most important political issues to the least important....

Punches on the Darwinian front lines @ GetReligion:

I am shocked, shocked to discover a strong interest among GetReligion readers in the topic of mainstream media coverage of debates between defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy and their critics....

Don't Know Much About Poetry Part 4: The Rape Of The Categories @ Eternity Road:

Back in the mid-Eighties, when Prince — your Curmudgeon will have no truck with any of his various changes of moniker — released his single "When Doves Cry," a dear friend commented to your Curmudgeon that "in twenty years, we'll be back in the jungle beating on logs."

Your Curmudgeon and his friend were both in their early thirties at the time. The friend didn't live to see the rise of "rap music," which is halfway between a relief and a pity that he didn't get the satisfaction of knowing his prediction had come true....

Will You Suffer for God? @ DeoOmnisGloria.com:

Lent is upon us. Starting with Ash Wednesday, Catholics begin celebrating the Liturgical Season of Lent during which we prepare ourselves for salvation, in effect. During Lent we choose suffering to mortify our bodies and focus our thoughts on God as He suffered for us at the first Easter. The verse that always comes to mind for me is: ....

Not Having in a Must Have World @ doxology:

As promised, a follow up to my first post on the session Curt and I attended with Dr. Janet E. Smith....

Eason Jordon and the Unwritten Blacklist @ American Digest:

The Eason Jordan / American Soldiers Assassinate Reporters story has been running outside of the mainstream media for well over a week. There is a videotape, as yet in an undisclosed location, and there could be a transcript of that tape.

Major media hasn't touched this one at all, as a brief search under Eason Jordan on Google News will reveal....

The Enduring Myth Of The Moral Muslim @ Mystery Achievement (brackets in original):

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things is one of my intellectual and spiritual heros. Of the people who I could point to who were responsible for my conversion to Catholicism, he would make any short list. His application of Catholicism to politics from what might be loosely but fairly called a neo-conservative point of view has had an influence on my own thought that is too comprehensive to adequately put into words.

One of the very few recurring themes in his political writings that consistently strikes a flat note, however, is his insistence that, "A major source of [Muslim] rage is the moral decadence of American society as communicated by Hollywood and other media." This in spite of the fact that there is ample evidence that actual Muslim sexual practices and newfallen snow are not easily confused....

Ralph Peters Defends General Mattis @ HerbEly:

The press and the blogosphere had devoted much attention to the unusually blunt statements by Marine Lt.Gen. Jim Mattis. The liberal media, in particular, is outraged at the admission that soldiers love their jobs. Here is part of Peters’ comment....

Who cares about feminism? @ Althouse:

I wasn't going to write about that Frank Rich article today [Sun. Feb. 6], but Mickey Kaus is talking about it... so I'm going to have to have my say about this. Rich is insufferable, but I usually glance at his weekly essay long enough to see what he's going on about. Today, because it's Super Bowl Sunday, he bounces his anti-right rant off Janet Jackson's breast. Kaus responds: ....

Samuel McIntire: The Man Who Built Salem @ Recta Ratio:

For the most part, only people who live in Salem, or make a close study of early American architecture are familiar with Samuel McIntire. But he was the foremost Federalist-style architect (he called himself a "housewright") and wood carver outside of Boston. Indeed, looking at their surviving work, it is difficult to say who was the more talented, McIntire or his contemporary Bulfinch, who dominated the Boston market....

Imprinting @ Off the Record:

An Austrian zoologist named Konrad Lorenz identified a phenomenon called "imprinting" through his observations that newly hatched goslings tended to bond with the first object encountered after their emergence from the dark world of the eggshell.

There's a whole generation of liberal Catholics who, it seems, were "born again" in the 1960s, having burst free from the constraints of dogma, and who were imprinted with the first enticing stimuli they encountered at the moment. Time froze....

Jordangate: Bigger Than Rathergate @ Ace of Spades HQ:

And you know this, as Sherlock Holmes said, by the dog who didn't bark....

Smeared @ The Dawn Patrol:

The story about me under the headline "DAWN OF THE DESK" in the "Memo Pad" column of today's Women's Wear Daily is absolutely, completely untrue....

Second Dialogue With Alastair Roberts (Reformed) on Transubstantiation @ Cor ad cor loquitur:

.... I attempt to approach these issues in an attitude of "charitable ecumenical realism": a position which I have set out in several papers. Honest, deeply-held differences are acknowledged and freely discussed (not papered-over) but without the animus that so often accompanies discussions across "party lines" (indeed, hopefully within a context of actual friendship and a feeling of Christian brotherhood)....

TV Classics: "Chutch" @ IowaHawk:

Still reeling from Vietnam, and with Watergate and OPEC looming on the horizon, 1972 was a turbulent time for America. Nowhere was the zeitgeist more reflected than on ABC Thursday nights, with the debut of "Chutch." Starring Jan-Peter Bronston in the title role, the fast-paced action series centered on the adventures of a mystic, Indian-like professor at fictional Boulder University. Based on the rugged hippie anti-hero Bronston portrayed in a skein of popular low budget drive-in biker films (including 1968's "Tenured Losers" and 1970's "The Angry Ones"), Chutch battled against injustice and The Man with a lethal arsenal of martial arts, mystic dialog, dirt bikes and his faithful mountain lion, Zapata....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 02/12/05 07:56:29 AM
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