Blogworthies LXXIV

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

Noteworthy entries @ Transterrestrial Musings, little green footballs, Pontifications, open book, Catholic Analysis, Evolution News & Views, Rightwingsparkle, Telic Thoughts, Michelle Malkin, Flos Carmeli, Power Line, Off the Record, No Left Turns, Sacramentum Vitae, neo-neocon, and Cor ad cor loquitur.

Grim Milestone Approaches In Unending War @ Transterrestrial Musings:

October 28th, 1944

WASHINGTON (Routers) As this bloody and futile war enters its fourth year, the casualties continue to rise, and while it's hard to know how many American soldiers have been lost, due to a secretive Roosevelt administration, many analysts think that the number of deaths in brutal battle is now approaching a quarter of a million, with many more millions of civilian casualties in Europe and Asia. Even ignoring all of the innocent loss of life, the loss of American soldiers alone is now almost equivalent to that of the entire population of a medium-sized American city....

Muslim Students Shut Down Exhibit at Harper College @ little green footballs:

When Muslim students at a community college in Illinois complained about an art exhibit that criticized the repressive symbol of radical Islam known as the hijab, the school promptly removed the offending artwork....

Transubstantiation as Incorporation @ Pontifications:

On 13 October 1551 the Council of Trent published its Decree on the Holy Eucharist. Chapter IV of the decree defined the dogma of transubstantiation: ....

A person who seeks to understand the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation must begin with this Tridentine definition, just as a person who wishes to understand the Catholic understanding of the Holy Trinity must begin with the definitions of Nicaea and I Constantinople. The dogma of the Church must always be distinguished from the theological speculations of any given theologian. As interesting and compelling as the views of St Thomas Aquinas on transubstantiation may be, they are not the dogma. As interesting and compelling as the views of Edward Schillebeeckx on transubstantiation may be, they are not the dogma. When it comes to transubstantiation, Catholics begin with the Council of Trent....

That NCR editorial @ open book:

.... Several bloggers have commented on this, being rather chagrined that they are agreeing with NCR(eporter). I have no such chagrin. NCR has been on top of abuse reporting since the 80's in a way that not a single "conservative" or "orthodox" publication has. The pleasant news in this piece is that NCR is willing to give Mahony his due — although I will admit they have actually run some pieces on the LA Story in the past year or so, but as a whole, for NCR, LAW has remained the symbol of this scandal, when, I think when the history is written on this — if it ever can be — LA's leadership will come out much more poorly than Boston's, even....

Paradigm Shifts @ Catholic Analysis:

Ever since philosopher Thomas Kuhn published years ago his landmark book on the structure of scientific revolutions, speakers and writers have loved to speak of "paradigm shifts." I recently heard an audio tape in which best-selling author Steven Covey of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People predictably spoke about changing paradigms. The paradigm motif reminds me of how Jesus in his parables referred to cultural realities that his audience was familiar with in that time and place. Some parables speak of the shrewdness of a merchant or of a steward about to be fired — references that remind us of the plethora of books and tapes on business leadership, like those of Steven Covey, in our own time. In a way, we can use the talk of "paradigm shifts" that is so embedded in our American culture to speak to our culture and to ourselves about the import of the Catholic paradigm....

Avian Flu: An Example of Evolution? @ Evolution News & Views:

There has been a lot of talk lately about the Avian (i.e. Bird) Flu, and how it's a new virus which has sadly killed a few dozen people and millions of birds. This post will briefly assess whether the Avian Flu is an example of evolution, and also assess the implications for the origin of new genes and biological structures....

The Best Summer of My life. @ Rightwingsparkle:

I spent the summer I was nineteen going to the University of Hawaii. I took art photography and history. Have you ever had a time in your life where when the time ended, you just knew that nothing like that would ever happen to you again? Where you knew that that kind of moment would never be better? That is how I felt when I said goodbye to Hawaii.

It was the best summer of my life....

Arguing in the Streets @ Telic Thoughts (brackets in original):

Y'see Hunter, if you send your scholars into the streets, don't expect the street people to sit quietly with hands folded in their laps. Expect questions, cynicism and maybe even [gasp], critical thinking. Imagine this scenario unfolding for one of your scholars: ....

USA Today Removes Doctored Photo @ Michelle Malkin:

The doctored photo of Condi Rice has been removed from USA Today's website with this editor's note: ....

The Intellect and the Church @ Flos Carmeli:

It has long been a Protestant slander that to be a Catholic one must check one's mind at the door. Obviously any Protestant who repeats this calumny hasn't paid much attention to the Church I am accustomed to attend.

If the climate at St. Blog's is any indication at all, one is far more likely to be requested to check one's heart at the door. Reading in some of the reaches of St. Blogs, one gets the impression that if you haven't spent your entire life arguing yourself into full conformity with Catholic Doctrine on the basis on Natural Law and revelation, then you've been wasting your time and your life. If I wished to live a logically consistent life with everything exactly placed and exactly reasoned, I would have requested a Skinner Box in the early stages of my childhood.

I am far more often annoyed by the rigid intellectualists who admit of no part of the emotional life in the life of the Church. Everything done is to be done on the basis of sheer intellect alone. Our assent to doctrine is intellectual. Our reception of the Eucharist is the reification of a reality that the reason has already checked out and verified. Our very emotions are to be under the complete governance of reason....

Here's a News Flash @ Power Line:

Ron Fournier of the Associated Press doesn't like Dick Cheney. That's pretty much the content of Fournier's latest hit piece. And Fournier is, perhaps because of his animus toward the Vice-President, no stickler for accuracy. He writes:

The latest disclosure also raises fresh questions about the vice president's credibility, long-ago frayed by inaccurate or questionable statements on Iraq.

Really? It would be interesting to see how many such inaccurate statements Cheney made, that were not also made by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton....

schism, and cynicism @ Off the Record:

The Thirty-Nine Articles did not include a pre-nup, and as the divorce between traditional and anarcho-Anglicans draws nearer, folks are starting to ask, who gets custody of the faith?...

It seems pretty clear that the struggle is primarily about power, not property (property here being important mainly as a conduit of power). We're watching the endgame of a slow schism that to a greater or lesser extent involves anglophone Christians throughout the First World. All administrations of all mainstream churches were hijacked by the Left in the 1970s, which, once in control, reflexively denounced criticism as an offense against charity. Tactically, it worked. Only in the last five to eight years have the proletarians cottoned on to the fact that they no longer have the same religion as their governors. Dialogue of a sort continues, but tensely. Revolvers are holstered, yet both sides keep a grip on the handle while they speak....

Thucydides and us @ No Left Turns:

It's hard to avoid thinking about our current conflicts when teaching Thucydides, as I do every fall. I wrote explicitly about it once and implicitly another time (no link, but if you want a copy of the essay, shoot me an email). Victor Davis Hanson can, of course, write much more authoritatively on this subject than I can, and Paul Johnson is the kind of reviewer he deserves.

Here's one provocative thought (mine, not Johnson's or Hanson's), which I advance very tentatively and with great trepidation (I'm not sure how much I believe it myself): Perikles urges the Athenians to accept the challenge of the Spartans and their allies, and recommends that they cautiously wage a long war of attrition. Such a strategy requires that Athens rein in the dynamism that seems to be its leading civic feature. And it requires the authoritative leadership of someone like Perikles....

One fight I hope "we" lose @ Sacramentum Vitae:

OK, I can't stand it anymore. On the principle that one shouldn't encourage the others, I wasn't going to comment on the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. There's already way more political blogging than we need, and the row about Miers in particular has brought the worst out of everybody, including my fellow social conservatives. (Of course my liberalism about health care has also gotten some of the latter afroth, but one doesn't always have to take the delicious opportunity of offending everybody.) All that granted, however, something needs to be said to set this thing in perspective....

The poetry you know and the poetry you don't know @ neo-neocon:

Some of you who've read this blog for a while may recall that I like poetry, and that as a child my school assignments included memorizing a lot of poetry.

And so it is that often when I'm thinking about a subject — even a political one — a poem or line of poetry comes to mind. It happened the other day with, of all things, Saddam Hussein's trial and the poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. And it just happened again with a comment to my nepotism post....

Replies for Seminarians on (Mostly) Practical Apologetics @ Cor ad cor loquitur:

I was invited to participate in an online board discussion with seven or eight Catholic seminarians, who were taking a class on apologetics. Here are the exchanges....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 10/29/05 09:07:58 AM
Categorized as Blogworthies.

Readworthies XX

A handful of interesting, informative, and insightful articles.

News, editorials, columns, essays, et al.

Celebrating the 2000th American Death in the Iraq War by Zombie @ Zombie (ht):

The following pictures were taken in San Francisco on October 26, 2005, at the rally "commemorating" the 2000th death of an American soldier in the Iraq War.

A minor imbroglio erupted a few days earlier when the blogs littlegreenfootballs.com and michellemalkin.com made posts mocking the American Friends Service Committee's plans to politicize the 2000th death of an American soldier in the Iraq War, with both blogs describing the upcoming nationwide events as "parties." Many anti-war blogs (which were also politicizing this artificial "milestone") took deep umbrage at this ironic insult, venting their anger at both bloggers, and insisting that the comemmorative events would be somber and respectful.

I decided to check out the AFSC's "Not One More Death, Not One More Dollar" event in San Francisco to settle the dispute. Would the rally be a somber and respectful memorial to our troops — or a fun and exciting "death party"?

You decide....

Into the woods: Americans may love British fantasy fiction because it hearkens back to simpler times. But it might have more to tell us about the horrors of the present. by James Parker @ The Boston Globe (ht):

"I sometimes think," grumbled the British science fiction writer Michael Moorcock in a 1987 essay titled ''Epic Pooh," ''that as Britain declines... her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals.... Old hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage."

Even had this passage not occurred in the middle of an attack on ''Watership Down" — the best-selling 1972 novel that is being reissued in paperback by Scribner next month — its target would have been clear. For ''Watership Down" concerns itself with mild-mannered chewers of cabbage (rabbits, to be precise) and its author, Richard Adams, at the time he wrote the book, was an English civil servant.

The broader assault of Moorcock's essay is on the body of fantasy fiction produced and consumed by (as he saw it) a ''disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle class" — the ''artificial romance" of J.R.R. Tolkien's ''The Lord of the Rings," the ''corrupted romanticism" of C.S. Lewis's ''Narnia" books. These are precisely the productions, of course, that continue to enthrall the American public. Peter Jackson's ''Lord of the Rings" trilogy bestrode Hollywood like a colossus for three years, and Andrew Adamson's upcoming ''The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is expected to succeed on a similar scale.

Has American culture begun to mimic the chronic nostalgia of a certain strain of post-imperial Englishness? Is the embrace of these fantasies part of, in Moorcock's words, a ''longing to possess, again, the infant's eye?" Or is there something in them that speaks to the moment more clearly than, say, ''Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous"? A closer look at ''Watership Down" reveals that its vegetarian heroes inhabit a rougher and bloodier reality than is generally remembered: a wartime reality. And it is the fact that he had been to war — rather than his class status or political tendencies — that places Adams in the company of Tolkien and Lewis....

The Incredibles: The only debate about Joseph Wilson's credibility is the one taking place at the Washington Post and the New York Times. by Stephen F. Hayes @ The Weekly Standard (ht):

On June 12, 2003, when he first published a story about the matter, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus became the second journalist to have been used by Ambassador Joseph Wilson to peddle bogus information about his February 2002 trip to Niger.

Wilson told Pincus that he had debunked Bush administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. He was specific and apparently seemed credible. And Pincus bought it all.

He wrote:

Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.

During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.

There is one problem with this: It's wrong. Wilson lied and lied repeatedly. His central contention — that he had seen documents about the alleged sale and determined that they were forgeries — was a fabrication. We know this because Wilson took his trip in February 2002 and the U.S. government did not receive those documents until October 2002. It could not have happened the way Wilson described it to Pincus....

Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead by Cassandra Spratling @ Detroit Free Press (ht):

When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights as human beings.

It was a simple act that took extraordinary courage in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. It was a place where black people had no rights white people had to respect. It was a time when racial discrimination was so common, many blacks never questioned it.

At least not out loud.

But then came Rosa Parks.

This mild-mannered black woman refused to give up her seat on a city bus so a white man could sit down.

Jim Crow laws had met their match.

Parks' refusal infused 50,000 blacks in Montgomery with the will to walk rather than risk daily humiliation on the city's buses.

This gentle giant, whose quietness belied her toughness, became the catalyst for a movement that broke the back of legalized segregation in the United States, gave rise to the astounding leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and inspired fighters for freedom and justice throughout the world.

Parks, the beloved mother of the civil rights movement, is dead, a family member confirmed late Monday [Oct. 24]....

A Matter of Life and Death by Marjorie Williams @ Vanity Fair (ht):

The beast first showed its face benignly, in the late-June warmth of a California swimming pool, and it would take me more than a year to know it for what it was. Willie and I were lolling happily in the sunny shallow end of my in-laws' pool when he — then only seven — said, "Mommy, you're getting thinner."

It was true, I realized with some pleasure. Those intractable 10 or 15 pounds that had settled in over the course of two pregnancies: hadn't they seemed, lately, to be melting away? I had never gained enough weight to think about trying very hard to lose it, except for sporadic, failed commitments to the health club. But I'd carried — for so many years I hardly noticed it — an unpleasant sensation of being more cushiony than I wanted to be. And now, without trying, I'd lost at least five pounds, perhaps even eight....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 10/29/05 08:56:43 AM
Categorized as Readworthies.

Pro Ecclesia * Pro Familia * Pro Civitate

Vide.

(Thanks, Esquire.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 10/29/05 08:30:58 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.