Blogworthies LIX

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

Noteworthy entries @ Steve Sailer, One Hand Clapping, Catholic Analysis, Flos Carmeli, A Saintly Salmagundi, Cross-Currents, ProfessorBainbridge.com, No Left Turns, Wittenberg Gate, JunkYardBlog, Ragged Edges, SecretAgentMan's Dossier, Lex Communis, and Midwest Conservative Journal.

Inside Story on Schiavo Case @ Steve Sailer: iSteve.com Archives:

A Florida lawyer writes: ....

The Schiavo great divide @ One Hand Clapping:

It's obvious that arguments about Terri Schiavo fall into two main camps....

A New Kind of Martyr @ Catholic Analysis:

Terri — or, better, to use her very Catholic full name Theresa Marie — is a new kind of martyr. We usually think of martyrs as those dying for confessing their faith. Theresa Marie is being executed by starvation because she dares to live in a condition that many find repulsive. Our society looks at her and is reminded of what can happen to any of us at anytime and of our inevitable rendezvous with physical suffering and disability. As a good friend of mine told me last night, we want to exile suffering from view and hide it. We want an antiseptic environment in which pleasure and good times are fine, but in which suffering is censored and taken out of existence....

The Danger of the "Rogue Judiciary" Concept @ Flos Carmeli:

To start with, and to make emphatically clear, I do not condone, excuse, or offer any quarter to the judges who have made the decisions that have thus far condemned Ms. Schiavo. As Dickens says at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, "You must understand this for without it there would be no story." ....

On the Phone About Terri @ A Saintly Salmagundi:

I spent part of the day yesterday calling different groups that one might expect to be rallying to the support of Terri Schiavo yet have been noticably silent in order to find out their stance on the situation. I started off each conversation with the same question, "Has your group made any public statement regarding the Terri Schiavo case?" Here are how some of the conversations proceeded....

Silence About Schiavo @ Cross-Currents:

Why aren’t people taking to the streets in support of Terri Schiavo? This case will prove to be the Roe v. Wade of the disabled and terminally ill. Tens of thousands of lives in the future hang in the balance, not just that of one tragic woman whose parents are not willing to relinquish her life to the capriciousness of activist judges. This case will effectively not extend a “right to die,” but firm up the right for people other than the patient to decide when a life is worthwhile preserving or not....

Schiavo, Divorce, and Double Effect @ ProfessorBainbridge.com:

In an interesting post on the Schiavo case, Eugene Volokh takes Slate to task for calling into question the Catholic bona fides of Terry Schiavo's parents' effort to obtain a divorce for Terry from Michael. Eugene opines: ....

Making Sense of Schiavo @ No Left Turns:

Much has been written even today about the Schiavo case. I have chosen to limit my postings on the subject essentially to updates, because the issues are too large to be addressed in traditional blog length posts. However, because I have received several emails with questions, I will address it here. Accordingly, please pardon the length of the post....

When the Law is Wrong @ Wittenberg Gate:

There was a time when the law of this land said that one must return a man who had escaped into a free state to the man in a slave state that claimed to own him. That was the law then, and many people obeyed that law because, well, it was the law....

The Triumph of Intentional Ignorance @ JunkYardBlog:

The blogosphere, once known for its niche punditry and its thousands of angles on every story, is now home to a new innovation: The triumph of intentional ignorance. Look around. Over here, you'll see go-to blogger Glenn Reynolds — a law professor — utterly bereft of an opinion on a major, potentially landmark, legal case that touches on just about every single issue he claims to find interesting. Family law? Check. The definition of marriage? Check. Bioethics and the ability to extend our lives — or not — through advancing technology? Check. Federalism versus states rights? Check. The fundamental right to life, liberty and all the rest? Check. Media bias? Check. The Terri Schiavo case, as wrenching and emotional and as utterly depressing a story as it is, has all the elements that one would think would get blogger of Reynolds' reputation and ability firing on all cylinders.

Yet on this story, all he can manage to do is link to others. And what are those others saying?...

Why I Don't Believe Michael Schiavo @ Ragged Edges:

I've largely avoided writing about the Terri Schiavo case because I'm aware of how little I know about it. I also know that after 7 years of litigation, there's enough information out there on both sides of the debate to keep me reading for weeks should I care to bring myself completely up to speed. That all said, when I heard that Michael Schiavo would be on CNN's Larry King Live tonight, I was eager to watch so that I could hear the answers straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. While there may be a thousand different questions one might want Michael Schiavo to answer, I had but one: since you've already moved on with your life (with your new fiance and kids), why do you care if Terri's parents want the burden of caring for her indefinitely?

Ironically, I just started a rape trial today, and my afternoon was spent doing jury selection. Among the many things I discuss during voir dire, the job of jurors to judge the credibility of the witnesses they will see and hear may be the most important. In covering that ground, I talk with potential jurors about the various cues or tools (as I call them) that we use in everyday life to judge whether somebody is lying to us or not. They are, in no certain order: ....

Lies, Damn Lies, and Federalism @ SecretAgentMan's Dossier:

Caving in to its pro-life constituents, the Stupid Party finally got off its rear end and did something that would simultaneously protect the culture of life and garner lots of controversy and hostile attention from the culture of death. That culture has, predictably, responded with its usual shotgun-spray of hypocrisy and half-truths. Such as the weekend's editorial from The New York Times: ....

"Err on the side of life" and other ontological firewalls against the pragmatic utilitarians. @ Lex Communis:

James Lileks' on the meaning of Captain Christopher Pike and his beeping wheelchair is worth reading.

I found the the concept he was circling around interesting. In the 1960s, the solution to the problem of Pike was not to "flip the switch." Instead, Mr. Spock went to great lengths to improve the quality of Pike's life. If the same episode was filmed with the sensibilities of the 21st Century, Spock would have flipped the switch....

Slippery Slopes @ Midwest Conservative Journal:

A friend wrote me recently about the Terri Schiavo situation. She could, she told me, understand the husband's point of view. She had been afflicted with an extremely serious medical condition that could very well have left her in the state Ms. Schiavo is in now. And she also hadn't written anything down. She was not the least bit afraid to die but she was afraid of not being allowed to. She vividly remembers her stark terror at being unable to communicate with the hospital staff that she did not want to end up like Terri Schiavo.

Fears like my friend's should not be dismissed. For everyone has had or still has them even if you haven't been as close to the edge as my friend was. I have them fairly regularly. If you live alone, as I do, you regularly ponder the stroke that will render you unable to get to a phone or slipping in the bathtub and breaking your neck; in either case, living out your remaining years or decades in a nursing home trapped in your own body is a possible outcome. I watched my mother die of Alzheimer's Disease every day for two years and the thought of such a death terrifies me beyond measure. Heart attacks are not the worst things in the world....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 03/27/05 08:26:23 AM
Categorized as Blogworthies.

Henry Longan Stuart: "Resurrexit"

Easter Sunday 2005

Resurrexit

All you that weep, all you that mourn,
   All you that grieving go,
Lift up your eyes, your heads adorn,
   Put off your weeds of woe.
The sorrows of the Passion week
   Like tearful dreams are fled.
For He hath triumphed Whom you seek,
   Is risen—That was dead.

Oh! you who to the Sepulchre
   At break of morning bring
The tribute of your spice and myrrh
   To balm our murdered King,
Each cleft of His forsaken tomb
   With Easter sun is red,
For He you laid amidst its gloom
   Is risen That was dead.

See! all about the prostrate stone
   Its abject sentries stand,
Death, with his diadem downthrown,
   And Fear, with fettered hand.
Lo! captive of the nails and spear
   Captivity is led,
For Love, that conquers Death and Fear
   Is risen—That was dead.

Henry Longan Stuart (1875-1928)

The Catholic Anthology: The World's Great Catholic Poetry (revised edition, 1940), ed. Thomas Walsh and George N. Shuster, p. 396.

See also Easter Sunday and Edmund Spenser: Easter.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 03/27/05 07:54:10 AM
Categorized as Literary & Religious.

Three from Walsh & Shuster I

Three sonnets by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

For Inspiration

The prayers I make will then be sweet indeed,
If Thou the Spirit give by which I pray;
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
Which of its native self can nothing feed;
Of good and pious works Thou art the seed
Which quickens where Thou sayst it may;
Unless Thou show us then Thine own true way,
No man can find it! Father, Thou must lead!
Do Thou, then, breathe those thoughts into my mind
By which such virtue may in me be bred
That in Thy holy footsteps I may tread;
The fetters of my tongue do Thou unbind,
That I may have the power to sing of Thee
And sound Thy praises everlastingly.

(tr. William Wordsworth)

The Defence of Night

O night, O sweet thou sombre span of time!
All things find rest upon their journey's end—
Whoso hath praised thee well doth apprehend;
And whoso honors thee, hath wisdom's prime.
Our cares thou canst to quietude sublime;
For dews and darkness are of peace the friend;
Often by thee in dreams upborne, I wend
From earth to heaven, where yet I hope to climb.
Thou shade of death, through whom the soul at length
Shuns pain and sadness hostile to the heart,
Whom mourners find their last and sure relief!
Thou dost restore our suffering flesh to strength,
Driest our tears, assuagest every smart,
Purging the spirits of the pure from grief.

(tr. John Addington Symonds)

On the Crucifix

The course of my long life hath reached at last
In fragile bark o'er a tempestuous sea,
The common harbor where must rendered be
Account of all the actions of the past.
The impassioned phantasy, that, vague and vast,
Made art an idol and a king to me,
Was an illusion, and but vanity
Were the desires that lured me and harassed.
The dreams of love, that were so sweet of yore,
What are they now, when two deaths may be mine,
One sure, and one forecasting its alarms?
Painting and sculpture satisfy no more
The soul now turning to the Love Divine,
That oped, to embrace us, on the Cross its arms.

(tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

The Catholic Anthology: The World's Great Catholic Poetry (revised edition, 1940), ed. Thomas Walsh and George N. Shuster, pp. 136f.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 03/27/05 07:34:38 AM
Categorized as Literary & Sunday Poetry Series.