Summa Contra Mundum

The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, New Testament

2011-06-22T17:23:00.001-05:00

I just got one of these yesterday, and I am enjoying it immensely. I'm working my way through Matthew, and the footnotes and topical articles are clear and insightful. It's certainly much more worth your while than the New American Bible, with its pedestrian translation and deplorable footnotes.

Is this thing on?

2011-06-22T16:34:00.001-05:00

2011-02-26T01:13:00.000-06:00

Worrying about what bishops are doing

is a sign of spiritual malaise. Don't you have enough to worry about with the state of your own soul? I certainly do. Let bishops be bishops.

2011-02-06T16:32:00.000-06:00

Colds

I don't like colds.

sniffle.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-26T20:17:00.001-06:00

Just a reminder: it is spelled "eucharist" in Greek.

2010-11-11T13:17:00.000-06:00

A new document on Scripture

from the Vatican. The best part is that the pdf, mirabile dictu, is actually typeset rather well, in sharp contrast to most Vatican stuff.

The thing about restarting my blogging:

2010-11-09T11:57:00.001-06:00

I need to write even when I don't have too much to say. So, this is a somewhat random post of things I am thinking about:

The Kindle is very nice. I love the screen, and it is quite convenient to carry along The Lord of the Rings, the complete Summa Theologiae, the Bible, the Menaion, and about eight or nine Chesterton books, all in one small package. I highly recommend it.

Homeschooling is hard, but wonderful. Is "wonderhard" a word?

People shouldn't reveal changes of religion on Facebook.

The Melkites publish wonderful books. I have their Horologion, original version, which is laid out beautifully. Lots of publishers don't understand typography, but Sophia Press does. I have just ordered the new version of the Horologion, and can't wait to get it.

That should do it. Perhaps I'll have something more substantial to say later.

I spent five hours in church today

2010-11-07T16:15:00.001-06:00

We started with Matins at 9am, with four cantors singing four-part harmony. The Divine Liturgy started at 10am, and ran until 11:30. Then I directed the choir until 1pm, and gave a private lesson until 2pm.

Just an ordinary Sunday!

I have reached a Conclusion:

2010-11-05T11:59:00.001-05:00

Indian food is the best cuisine in the world. One can understand why Europeans made so many efforts to find an easy route to India.

Remember, vote today!

2010-11-02T07:12:00.001-05:00

Or you shouldn't complain. I think people underestimate the importance of querulosness as a motive for political activity.

Spiritual discernment? Or just restlessness?

2010-11-01T13:09:00.001-05:00

Having recently lost two friends from my parish to another church, I can't help but wondering whether the attempt to pray, to determine what God is calling you to do, might not hide within it a great danger, the seduction of wanting God to call you away from where you are.

Let me give an example. Say I am an ordinary believer in a church. To go about the ordinary business of being a Christian is often very dry, requiring one to maintain faith even when it doesn't seem as if there are any concrete results. This is the usual state of life for most of us. But when confronted with the slow martyrdom of an ordinary life, we get bored. We lose heart. Here is where the temptation comes: What if God is calling me to change? To find a better church? Now I become important, someone who matters. Maybe God is not calling me to change, but to endure. But enduring is boring! It is seductive to consider oneself part of a grand plan that will bear visible earthly results.

The still small voice of God might be saying "Stay right where you are."

Test

2010-11-01T13:03:00.001-05:00

Just a test.

2010-11-01T11:26:00.001-05:00

Will I post again?

I will, I will!

Now, if I could only get rid of all of the weird spam in the comments. . .

All that rises must converge.

2010-04-09T23:18:00.001-05:00

I'm writing a paper for a conference on St. Edith Stein at Steubenville, and I think I have discovered a unique aspect of her theology, something that she arrives at on her own. Then I find that the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky says much the same thing, drawing on St. Gregory of Nyssa, whom I have no evidence that Stein read.

But they all agree on the very unknowability of any human person as being a way in which humans are in the image and likeness of God. Perhaps a difference could be in the centrality of this aspect.

Cicero on the liberal arts

2010-04-05T19:16:00.001-05:00

Nam ceterae neque temporum sunt neque aetatum omnium neque locorum: haec studia adolescentiam acuunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.

Other pursuits are not of all times, ages, or places. This pursuit sharpens adolescence, delights old age, adorns favorable things, supplies refuge and solace to unfavorable things, pleases at home, doesn't hurt away from home, and watches with us through the night, journeys with us, and relaxes in the country with us.

Got Pharr's Aeneid

2010-01-22T22:31:00.001-06:00

Much fun will be had. I've been working hard on the Latinum Podcast, and the constant practice with oral Latin is really helping. Things that I knew analytically in my previous Latin work are becoming second nature, almost fluent. What a good use for an ipod!

A Note To Me

2009-12-13T21:28:00.001-06:00

Think twice before upgrading your computer. Resist the urge to update the bios. It works--the gains from the upgrade are small compared to the pain of messing everything up.

Listen: it's me talking!

2009-12-04T10:32:00.000-06:00

Speaking of books

Here's my Amazon wishlist: Note to Santa.

2009-11-20T12:54:00.004-06:00

Insta-Library!

I wanted to get a copy of this book:

Usually I would just print it out and stick the pages in a binder. But I decided to try the link for Google Product search. It took me to publicdomainreprints.org, which then took me to Lulu.com. I bought the book. It cost me 17$, including shipping, and took about a week to get. Would you like to see how it looks?

2009-11-19T14:06:00.002-06:00

Holiday Tree?

The town where I live is kicking off a month of Holiday Festivities, where Holiday songs will be sung, Holiday treats will be eaten, Holiday movies will be watched, and a Holiday tree will be lit.

Is Holiday some new kind of holiday? Did I miss its establishment? Is there some new religion whose grand feast is Holiday?

Or, if it is a generic description not meant to offend anyone in a diverse culture, it must mean "any holiday." If it is the "any holiday" season, then, given our diversity, isn't every season the Holiday Season?

Felix Saturnalium, I guess.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times

2009-11-15T23:46:00.001-06:00

for studying the classics. Never before have there been so many resources for people to study Greek and Latin, and never before, thanks to Google Books and others, have so many texts been readily available. Unfortunately, interest in these subjects seems to be small. We starve amidst a banquet.

Recently I discovered the Latinum Podcast. Evan Millner has recorded the entire Adler _Practical Grammar of Latin Language as a series of podcasts that can be downloaded into an Ipod. He goes over the text with meticulously accurate pronunciation and with much useful repetition, so much that one really doesn't need to read the text. The course is primarily in Latin composition, so that the language is learned by speaking or writing it.

I am delighted to have found it. I am through six lessons, and already my Latin has improved greatly, just from hearing it spoken.

If only there were a classical Greek version.

2009-11-09T13:33:00.003-06:00

I note with enjoyment in Catullus 13 he uses this image:

plenus sacculus est aranearum.

(My) purse is full of spiderwebs.

Some Cicero for you:

2009-11-06T06:47:00.001-06:00

Etenim omnes artes, quae ad humanitatem pertinent, habent quoddam commune vinculum, et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.

As a matter of fact all arts which touch on humanity have a certain common chain, and as if by a certain common birth are akin to each other.

I take liberties on "continentur." The sense is that the study of any human art is the study of all of them. It is said that Abraham Lincoln only had two books, the bible and Shakespeare, and educated himself through these. If this is so, one could get a very fine education, since so much of human nature is contained within those books. Learning a few books well would be better than many books poorly.

2009-11-04T09:49:00.002-06:00

From Donna Tartt's The Secret History

Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the particular, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attemp to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

2009-11-03T06:24:00.002-06:00

A tip for using Diogenes

Diogenes is a Greek and Latin lectionary and tool for inflectional analysis. It was originally designed to work with the TLG databases, which I don't possess, but can also work with other Latin and Greek texts, if you use it with the Hopperizer.

But, you need to do something under Ubuntu: the server won't work if you don't.

Go to /usr/local/diogenes/perl

Type "cp Perseus.cgi perseus.cgi"

Otherwise the server fails to run.

I realize this post is obscure. I'm putting it here mostly to keep a record of how to do it, so I don't forget.

2009-10-31T13:39:00.002-05:00

New Windows, same as the Old Windows

I recently got a new Acer laptop that came with Windows 7 installed. I usually use Linux, but I kept Windows installed for the sake of Netflix movies. All went well, until yesterday Windows committed suicide. It failed to boot itself, and then, in the process of the system recovery, trashed the bootloader and made the whole system unusable.

I promptly re-installed Ubuntu Linux using the entire disk, wiping out Windows. Good riddance!

Mind Blowing IMDB.com fact:

2009-10-22T14:34:00.001-05:00

Jackie Earle Haley, the actor who played Rorshach in Watchmen, also played Little League hero Kelly in The Bad News Bears.

Don't Push The Red Button!

2009-10-22T09:45:00.001-05:00

If I tell you not to push the red button, what do you immediately want to do? Right.

Now, if the President tells you not to listen to talk radio or to a certain news organization, what do you want to do? What, in fact, in a free democracy should you do? Right

Vergil in honor of the President

2009-10-09T08:25:00.001-05:00

. . . tum pietāte gravem ac meritīs sī forte virum quem
cōnspexēre, silent arrēctīsque auribus adstant,
--ille regit dictīs animōs et pectora mulcet. . .

Perhaps this is the hope? But if I recall correctly, the man to whom the words probably refer gained the Pax Romana through strength, not through words.

Nobel Peace Prize?

2009-10-09T07:49:00.001-05:00

The president has received it. I eagerly await being awarded full tenure, on similar standards.

On Willful Misunderstanding, by David Bentley Hart

2009-10-08T06:39:00.001-05:00

I came across this quote from Hart, an orthodox theologian you should read, in "The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicea" in the wonderful Orthodox Readings of Augustine, St. Vladimir's seminary press:

In any modern engagement between Christian East and Christian West, we begin from the long history of an often militant refusal--on both sides--of intellectual reconciliation. . . . All too often, moreover, this incomprehension takes the depressing form of a simple and a deplorable failure of imagination: an inability to appreciate that, in order to understand another intellectual tradition, rooted in a different primary language, it is not enough to translate its terms into one's own dialect and then proceed to interpret them according to the rules of one's one tradition. And the consequence of this is that, as often as not, "ecumenism" between East and West consists in little more than a relentless syncope of category errors: the drearily predictable alarm and indignation with which traditional Thomists find that Gregory Palamas, transposed into Thomas' Latin, is not a Thomis; the deep and slightly macabre delight with which earnest Palamites discover that Thomas, read through Palamite lenses, proves to be no Palamite.

I have encountered this willful misunderstanding myself, where shallow thinkers focus on a term extracted from a tradition, misinterpret it, or interpret it on purpose in the worst light, and then reject the tradition from which it comes as a heresy. This is not to say that genuine differences don't exist between East and West, or between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, but in wading through the polemics, one often finds that most of the differences are in approach. It's like New York pizza versus Chicago style: both are pizza, but approached differently, the one emphasizing the goodness of sauce and cheese, the other focusing on the crust.

Anyway, go read David Bentley Hart. It's a rollercoaster of erudition.

The Meaning of Essence in Aquinas

2009-10-06T10:33:00.001-05:00

In Palamite debates with the Roman Church, much is made over Aquinas' statement that the true goal of human life is to see the essence of God. They argue, according to their tradition, that no-one ever sees the essence of God, but rather only his uncreated energies. This looks like a clear difference between churches, but is it?

The word for "essence" in Latin is essentia. The word for "essence" in Greek is ousia. Really, then, Aquinas says that one sees the essentia of God, but Palamas says that one does not see the ousia of God. Perhaps they don't mean the same thing.

I came across a very succinct definition of essentia in I.28.2 ST: "Everything which is not the divine essence is a creature."^[omnis res quae non est divina essentia, est creatura.] So, if St. Gregory Palamas teaches that the ousia is uncreated as well as the energeia, then both would count as the essentia of God according to Aquinas' terminology. There is a way they can both be right: To see the uncreated energies of God is to see the essentia of God.

It's a matter of language, then, not doctrine.

Incidentally, one can find the Summa Theologica as an audiobook on the wonderful Librivox.org.

Augustine and John Chrysostom on Original Sin

2009-09-24T21:35:00.001-05:00

Augustine receives the credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for the doctrine of original sin, that every human being by virtue of his birth is tainted and destined for damnation without baptism. He is currently a point of contention in Orthodox-Catholic relations, viewed by some as one who sent Western theology off into its eventual heresy.

But Augustine did not invent the doctrine. As he himself makes clear in Contra Julianum, he is following St. Cyprian and St. Ambrose, whom he quotes approving his own position. It seems clear that he is following doctrinal trends in Carthage and Italy. But what of the East? Augustine attempts to enlist St. John Chrysostom as a witness to his position.

This will be difficult, since St. John says "We baptize even infants, though they are not defiled with sin, in order that there may be given to them holiness, justice, adoption, inheritance, and the brotherhood of Christ, that they may be His members." (quoted from Homilia ad neophytos by Augustine in chapter 6, Contra Julianum.)

St. John says that "Christ wept because the Devil made mortal those who could have been immortal," (Homilia de Lazaro resuscitato.) Augustine enlists this as evidence that all have a guilt of sin. "Why do even infants die if they are not subject to the sin of that first man?" If death is the result of sin, then by what right are infants subject to death if they do not somehow share in the sin?

But this isn't quite what Augustine is saying. To say that infants suffer the effects of sin is not to say that they share in the guilt of sin. Given John Chrysostom's statement about baptism, it seems that he doesn't view original sin as constituting a guilt deserving eternal punishment, but as a damage to human nature. John means mortality as that which enters the world with the sin of Adam. This is sufficient for Augustine's argument with Julian, but not to establish unanimity on original sin between Augustine and John.

The difference is whether infants inherit sin or death from Adam. Augustine agrees that they inherit death, but reasons that they therefore inherit death because of guilt, and therefore need baptism not to share in the deserved condemnation of Adam.

But, it is clear that Augustine is not an innovator. He stands in a long tradition, and it would be improper to blame for what is a legitimate and ancient Christian teaching.

Perhaps more on this as I continue reading Contra Julianum.

Homeschooling Rule #1

2009-08-02T06:45:00.001-05:00

Good days can be hard days.

We've been homeschooling for a bit more than a year now, and we've learned that its hard. Really hard. To teach one child while trying to keep the other children happy is hard. To teach two children is harder. Many days we end up exhausted.

Perspective is needed. It is hard, but the children are thriving. Eldest girl reads all the time, and Secunda (not her real name) is starting to read at age four. We occasionally need to stop and assess our progress: we complain that Una (not her real name) is having trouble with fractions, or that she hasn't gotten the difference between the nominative and accusative case in Latin. She's six. She's doing really well.

As someone we know once said, homeschooling is the hardest best thing we've ever done.

Friendship

2009-07-03T20:55:00.001-05:00

Just came across this:

Est enim amicitia nihil aliud nisi omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate consensio

From Cicero On Friendship, roughly translated:

Friendship, indeed, is nothing other than a harmony of all divine and human affairs with benevolence and love.

Just thought I'd share.

Michael Jackson and the Fall

2009-07-02T09:48:00.001-05:00

The first is proof of the second. Chesterton once famously said that Original Sin is the only doctrine of the Church proved every day on the front pages of the newspaper. Consider this:

He mutilated himself.

He had inappropriate (at best) relations with children.

He popularized masturbatory dance.

Perhaps I am a prude, but this is not a man worthy of any admiration. Why, then, do we admire him? (By "we", I mean of course a substantial portion of the public.) We admire him because we humans are fundamentally irrational, choosing bad things in preference to the good.

It seems to me that the renewal of the Church and of the society in which she dwells will start with a recovery of the doctrine of the Fall. I know that in my case, I might as well have been taught by Pelagians as a child. We were told that God loved us, and that we were good. Confession was an afterthought, a relic of old sacramental systems that we didn't need to worry about. I was told by one earnest pastoral associate that "The Church doesn't talk about sin anymore."

Sin is all around, and needs to be fought vigorously. As evidence, see the adulation of the unfortunate and ruined Michael Jackson.

2009-06-06T13:06:00.002-05:00

Shouldn't we act differently if we believe what we claim to believe?

A constant reproach addressed to Christians: 'Your faith has no outward effect on your way of life. If you really believed in such marvellous and astonishing things, you would live in a different way.'

Answer: 'Surely you believe that death is inevitable? Not only do you believe this but you know it for certain. And yet, does it make any great difference to your way of life? None at all.'
---Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

Baby!

2009-05-27T20:59:00.001-05:00

John Paul, 8 lbs and 15 ozzes. Named, of course, after the famed bassist and keyboardist for Led Zeppelin.

The Seven Silly Eaters: a review

2009-05-22T15:19:00.001-05:00

The Seven Silly Eaters, by Mary Ann Hoberman, illus. by Marlee Frazee, is a delight. It is a rhymed and metrical look at the life of a young couple as they have children, each of whom only eats one thing. The mother, Mrs. Peters, works very hard to fill all of the picky requests of her seven silly eaters. We see her picking apples, making bread, straining orange juice, cooking eggs just so, and doing whatever she needs to do so her family will thrive. The children don't appreciate it enough, until the surprising happy ending.

The text is fun and memorable, allowing the reader to repeat it nearly from memory after a few times. But the real charm of the book is in the illustrations, which capture perfectly the ordered chaos of a large family, a house that is cherished but not too clean, with books and toys underfoot and children draped over every surface. My children like to pause over the pictures to see things they haven't noticed before. Little details support the story, such as the cello that the mother plays is retired to a corner of the house, recalling the sacrifices of individual interests that one has to make as a parent.

It's always one of my favorites to read at bedtime, especially after a difficult day homeschooling, when I feel rather sympathetic to the put-upon, but ultimately beloved, Mrs. Peters.

Grace and Reason

2009-05-21T10:22:00.001-05:00

In my previous post, I think I was unclear. I am not attempting to say that productive argument is impossible, but that it is difficult, and that the fallen state of human beings must be taken into account. I take it as a given that humans do not follow what their minds determine, as Aristotle knew, as Plato knew, as St. Paul and St. Augustine knew. No one ever becomes good simply by reading a book! If you are already good, the book might help you be better, but if you aren't, the book won't do anything for you. As Aristotle says, it is like going to the doctor, listening to the healthy advice, and then ignoring it.

I know this to be the case in my own life: I know what is good, and choose the opposite. Perhaps I am being presumptuous in assuming it is the case for others? So, arguments do me know good. In fact, I know them all.

What is needed is metanoia, a change of heart (literally a change of mind). We pray "Create a new heart in me, O God/ put a steadfast Spirit within me." (Psalm 51). Look at the example of the apostles, who constantly misunderstood Jesus, despite living with him for three years. Two betrayed him, and nine abandoned him. Even after the resurrection, they weren't able to understand. It wasn't until Pentecost and the reception of the Holy Spirit that they were able. The steadfast Spirit that we pray for is the Holy Spirit, who teaches us all things.

Let me do it in math:

argument + listener = 0
argument + listener + grace = infinity

Thus the question becomes not "how do we convince," but "how do we help the Spirit?" How do we present God to the world?

Are we too dumb for the natural law?

2009-05-21T02:36:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about this for a while. Humans seem to be immune to moral argument. This was occasioned by Barack Obama's speech ostensibly asking for dialogue on the issue of abortion. There will be no dialogue, of course, since he himself said that the differences are irreconcilable. They certainly appear to be. But why?

It is puzzling for pro-life people why there has been so little movement. Why don't people change their minds? The science is clear. Ethically, it seems obvious that if man is ever worth protecting under the law, he must be worth it in the womb, since there is no substantial change. If humans acquire dignity as a result of some power of reasoning, then we never acquire dignity at all. I've been over this before, but no one ever seems to be convinced.

Why?

Because humans are not entirely rational. We make decisions on the basis of desires and pleasures, and our desires and pleasures and intellect have been disordered by sin. We have trouble thinking clearly, especially when the res is something close to us. We are fallen, and can't think our way up.

But don't just take my word for it. Look at what Plato does in the Republic. He wants to talk about justice, but can't do it, because his audience is not ready. The common wisdom about justice is so faulty that any attempt to reach justice itself is doomed to failure. It is only after the soil is prepared over the whole book that the interlocutors can attempt the ascent out of the cave.

Look at what Aristotle does in the Nichomachean Ethics: he attempts to determine the nature of happiness, and decides that it is good rational activity. Then, he avoids talking about what kind of activity it is, rather spending much time speaking of virtues. But how can one speak of virtues without knowing what they are virtues for? It doesn't make sense, unless he was tailoring the discussion to the audience, only presenting contemplation as true happiness at the end, when presumably they would be more ready to hear it.

But we don't argue that way any more. We don't even argue. There will be no debate on abortion, only soundbites and caricatures. Given the limits of our attention span, how could we convince anyone else of anything important?

I need to think about this more.

Books and Movies I have Read/Seen

2009-05-19T08:27:00.000-05:00

Recent forays into popular media

Star Trek: I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. It breaks the "canon", which I think is a good thing. In the Church, heresy is very bad, since the canon of beliefs come from God. In science fiction, heresy can be good, since the canon only comes from Gene Rodenberry and Rick Berman. Through the magical plot device of time travel, Star Trek gets an all-new alternate universe to play in, complete with young Kirks, Scotts, and Spocks. The casting was good (Eomer as McCoy), and despite lots of plot holes, it was fun.

I am Charlotte Simmons: I picked up a copy of this book by Tom Wolfe for 2$ at my library. It's my first Wolfe (Tom, not Gene) novel. It is a satire of college life, and one gets the sense that it the events and plot are not invented so much as amplified from real occurrences. It's also very funny skewering of current sexual morality---I remember a student telling me once, in reference to Dido and Aeneas' tryst in the cave, "In the old days, people weren't supposed to have sex before marriage." "Oh, when did the rule change?" I responded. She blushed. It's become the norm, but an uncomfortable norm. IACS takes modern sex and explodes it from the inside. Highly recommended.

Plato's Republic: I'm just re-reading it again, and feel like I am reading it for the first time. I never took the irony seriously enough before. Socrates constructs a city in words (in poetry) from which the poets would be excluded, especially the imitative poets, but Socrates the character is a piece of masterful imitative poetry constructed by the offscreen author, Plato, whose book would not be allowed in the ideal cities of the book. My mind is still running in circles.

2009-04-30T11:27:00.001-05:00

Prediction: Tariffs on Toyota

Now that the government runs Chrysler and GM, how long will they allow competition? Gather ye Toyotas, while ye may. There will be tariffs soon.

2009-04-28T11:40:00.002-05:00

Buy American

Now that the US Government has taken over the domestic car industry, presuming that the "American Way" consists of a policy of free markets, is it now the duty of Americans to buy foreign cars?

What if you threw a revolution and nobody noticed?

2009-03-24T10:50:00.002-05:00

I have been blogging occasionally on Popinainteasy, at the invitation of a friend. If you really want to read my stuff, go there and look for posts by Karl.

2009-01-23T11:18:00.004-06:00

One notes today the recent decision to allow US tax dollars to fund abortion overseas. The decision by President Obama, supported by so many Catholics and other people of faith, who found some way to ignore his infanticidal record in Illinois.

I hope his supporters will hold him accountable for these decisions.

2008-11-04T10:39:00.001-06:00

On Voting:

If you don't vote, you can't complain.

But, if you do vote, you can be blamed.

2008-10-17T08:07:00.002-05:00

I, for one, welcome our new alien masters

I won't be publishing anymore political posts. I wouldn't want the ruling class to notice me and do to me what they have done to Joe the Plumber.

Nothing to see here.

2008-10-10T12:23:00.002-05:00

What in the world is going on?

It feels like the world is racing off a precipice. I know this is just emotional venting, and of little rational value, but we run into economic trouble (brought about by market intervention, not by lack of regulation), and everyone is eager to socialize the economy.

There is no conservative party. There is a socialist party that advocates abortion on demand, and a socialist party that doesn't, at least not as much.

My wife works for a bank; I hope she will get civil service benefits.

Well, since this is a rant, I feel no need to tie it all up into a coherent essay.

2008-05-20T08:53:00.001-05:00

Baseless Geopolitical Speculation

How long will it be before oil-producing states need to fear invasion and conquest by oil-importing states?

2008-05-19T14:22:00.003-05:00

A confirmation of the Theology of the Body at the local library

My local library has a little room full of books for sale, various cheap paperbacks and no-longer-important political tracts. Sometimes one finds bargains--I just picked up _The Origins of Tolkien's Middle-earth for Dummies_, for example--but generally it is not too worthwhile. But, today, the book room itself was worthy of notice, because the cheap paperbacks were no longer arranged into romances, mysteries, and sci-fi, they were arranged into "Male Authors" and "Female Authors."

Why would one want to know the sex of the author (or authoress) of a book, unless there really was some sort of deep difference between man and woman?

2008-05-19T00:19:00.002-05:00

I think I am doomed

I just had a vision of my life as a parent, given the recent California Supreme Court decision about marriage and who is eligible for entering into the matrimonial state:

For the rest of my life as a father, I am going to have to fight my nation's culture tooth and nail, for the good of my children, and I am likely going to lose. Everything that I say about things that really matter, about God, family, love, friendship, even about education and thinking well, will be contradicted daily by the bright, shiny, prosperous, but rotting Western world. My little girls will learn, slowly but surely, that Daddy is a crackpot, a crank, a dinosaur, and a religious fanatic.

Maybe if I read them Chesterton at bedtime. . . .

2008-05-16T06:16:00.002-05:00

I really have no interest in politics anymore

having shifted my sights down to the level of the family and away from the international or national. I will vote for someone, somehow, but without any thought of good things resulting from it. But enough of that. I wanted you to notice something: almost every picture of Barack Obama is done in the style of a religious icon. A short web search reveals this one:

Notice the pleroma behind him, the glowing oval of light that reminds us of another image:

For more examples of this sort of thing, the most blatant deification of a candidate I can remember, check out ObamaMessiah.

2008-04-25T12:05:00.001-05:00

A Distributist Summer?

With gas prices likely to hit 5$ a gallon, we in the Casa de Karl are going to be driving very little this summer. Once or twice a week to go to church, I think. I really want to try to see how little we can use the cars. Fortunately, we live in a community with some shops nearby, within walking or bicycle riding distance. There are even a few bike paths.

Which brings me to my next topic: a good use for GoogleEarth: finding bicycle routes. I don't like to ride on the street very much, since drivers of cars don't really expect bicycles to be there, and therefore don't look for them. Via Google Earth, I can plan out a route to the shopping areas. I could even tow a kid trailer to carry the parcels.

We'll see how it goes.

2008-04-22T23:59:00.002-05:00

The hearts of many will be laid bare

if the current food crisis continues. It looks like famines are going to result from a commitment to "biofuels". The developed countries will assuage their consciences by putting their crops into their cars, while the developing countries will starve.

Someone should ask Gore how many people should die in Bangladesh for the sake of an ethanol mandate.

2008-04-17T12:20:00.002-05:00

Concerning music and taste

Criticisms of some of the music at the papal liturgy have raised the cry of smallness against the critics. After all, isn't music a matter of taste?

I don't think it is. I think music is a matter of math and physics, and has a reality that we can't easily evade. I wrote up a handout for my students on this topic, and demonstrated musical concepts with a guitar and with the wonderful Scala microtonal program.

Perhaps you will find it interesting. I tried to post it here, but Blogger doesn't like math formulas. Here it is.

2008-04-17T09:20:00.003-05:00

It's great that the Pope is here

but who picked out the awful responsorial psalm at the liturgy in Washington? Parellel whole tone scales? C-D-E-F#, repeated over and over, all for Psalm 104? If the Lord sends out his Spirit to renew the face of the earth, and it results in such cacophony, why would one want it?

An unfortunate choice, I think.

2008-04-16T10:56:00.002-05:00

If you want to read Homer

but, like me, don’t know Greek very well, there are two resources for you:

The Perseus Project under Philologic at the University of Chicago, which has a lot of Greek and Latin texts linked to lexica and morphology analyzers. Just select a word and press “d”, and a definition window pops up. This is a wonderful resource, and is working much faster these days than the Perseus servers at Tufts.

The Chicago Homer, which gives you an interlinear Homer, with Greek on one line and the English on the next. It’s good for when one is puzzled, but it is also a great temptation to cheat.

If you don’t want to read Homer, then there’s no helping you.

2008-04-15T09:41:00.002-05:00

A hypothetical question

If using ethanol in my car caused starving in India, should I still use it?

How many deaths would be acceptable in order to promote biofuels?

2008-04-13T00:16:00.001-05:00

The Difference Between Me and God

When I see suffering, I try to fix it. Well, that's not quite true. I don't try to fix it, but I stand around wondering why someone doesn't fix it. The upshot is that I think of suffering as a problem to be solved.

In my worst moments, I look to God and say, "Why haven't you solved suffering?" Sometimes I get angry, especially after reading the newspapers. How could people do such things? Where is God?

God, being a gentleman, does not point out to me that I haven't solved suffering either. Rather, God does things in a way I never would have. He doesn't get rid of suffering at all; God becomes man and goes to a horrible but completely voluntary death. He sanctifies suffering by undergoing it. Suffering is no longer an evil---no, that's not right: it still is an evil, but an evil which God has made good.

Think about that for a minute. How is it that God chose to act in the world? He chose the lowest, worst, most evil part of human existence, namely the suffering that we inflict on each other, and made it the means to the highest thing imaginable, the participation in God's very nature. The cosmic irony is that Pilate and Caiaphas at their worst were bringing about the best, a superlative good beyond comprehension.

2008-04-11T22:55:00.002-05:00

Trouble at St. Xavier

A threat causes a closing.

I have some experience with St. Xavier and with the people there. I cannot quarrel with Dr. Dwyer's decision to close the school in the face of threats, but I wonder what will become of higher education when anonymous threats can cause a place to shut.

Once again, I do not fault SXU. I think it is the right decision, but I am sure there will be many copycats.

2008-04-10T13:42:00.001-05:00

Freud in Disney's Peter Pan?

I just noticed that the same voice actor who plays Wendy's father plays Captain Hook. I'm not sure what it means, but there it is.

2008-04-05T18:22:00.000-05:00

Smiths in Homer

In book 18 of the Iliad, we have the shield of Achilles presented to us, a marvelous work of craft, a presentation or imitation of the life of two cities on a shield. There is a city of war and a city of peace, and Homer spends many lines describing it. The shield seems like a discordant note in a symphony, or rather like a chordant note in a cacophony. Amidst the horrors of war, it appears. It is like a poppy growing on a dungheap.

Interpretation varies on the meaning of the shield, and it is a mark of Homer’s genius that the shield can bear all the interpretations. Homer’s poem, his making, is rich enough to bear it. But I want to talk about it as a construction of a smith.

Chesterton remarks in _A Short History of England on the remarkable poetry that lies below that most prosaic of names. Smiths take earth and make artifacts, implements, and beautiful things out of it by commanding elemental forces. It is as if the gods have inspired them. I think there is something to be said about the mere craft of smithship, as there is a convergence of themes in this book.

Hephaestus, the smith, is ugly and lame. As a result, he is thrown from the heavens and abandoned by his mother, only to be taken care of by the goddess Thetis. Nevertheless, despite his lameness, he is the one who makes the halls of Olympus where the gods dwell in splendor. It is Hephaestus, more than any other god, who makes the glory of the gods possible.

Thetis, during her visit, reveals to the reader the conditions of her marriage to Peleus, the father of Achilles. It was not a happy marriage, but rather one to which she was forced, being yoked to a mortal doomed to grow old and die. This was planned by Zeus. Achilles is the result of an arranged marriage, and therefore one could reasonably say that Achilles, son of Thetis, is arranged, a work of craftsmanship.

But there is more: Hephaestus is attended by female robots, cast in gold and silver, who do his bidding and by extension that of the gods. He is called upon to make new armor for Achilles, and he makes it and the splendid shield out of gold and silver. Achilles is a robot of the gods, an automaton created so that the will of Zeus may work towards its end. All of his glory comes only from the gods, and it is no credit to himself. Furthermore, the god his glory ultimately depends on is the lame smith, Hephaestus, who creates armor (and hence the persona) for his last battles.

What does this mean? The greatness of the hero lies in the gods, in particular the artificer god. But from the parellel with Homer the blind poet, we can see that the greatness of the hero also lies in the human artificer of words, the poet. It is not his own. The most melancholy part of the story of Achilles is that he seeks an immortality based on martial glory where none of it really belongs to him. The only thing he is really responsible for is the death of Patroclus. Like the Christian who can say that all comes from God except his sin, for Achilles all comes from the gods and poets except for his shame and sorrow, which belong particularly to him.

Let this end the Homeric ramble.

2008-03-24T21:21:00.000-05:00

Atonement and incarnation

Warning: this post contains spoilers about the movie Atonement.

Fr. Edward Oakes presents an analysis of the recent Academy Award winning movie, asking the question “What sort of atonement is available for the atheist?” The gist of the novel is that the character Briony accuses another character of rape on flimsy evidence, ruins his life, and then spends the rest of her life attempting to atone. She becomes a writer and writes a novel about her evil deed, giving those whose lives she destroyed a happy ending in order to make up for or atone for her misdeed. Oakes says:

What struck me in reading this intricate work of metafiction was the implicit motor of the plot: Briony knew the devastation she wreaked and knew equally she had to atone for it. Lies that consequential demand atonement, as the title of the novel already tells us. But Briony lives in an a-religious world (religion never comes up in the novel, even as a topic of conversation), and so her only way to expiate her lie is by living a life of yet more lying.

The atheist has no recourse in attempting to make justice in an unjust world except by lying, by creating a fiction where happy endings can happen. It is an interesting point, but I think there is a different way to read it: The device of the author within the book, who writes herself into the book, is a sort of mini-incarnation. Briony, who reveals at the end of the book and movie that she has falsified the ending to make up for her misdeeds, has put herself into the fictional reality she has created. She has entered into her own creation to make things right for her characters. This, to me, suggests the Incarnation. Briony so loved her sister and her love that she enters into her own novel. In her case, it is ultimately a lie. She can’t change what has happened, but only her representation of what happened. The Incarnation is the same sort of story, except that God can in fact reshape reality, making all things new.

Or so it seemed to me.

2008-03-19T23:30:00.002-05:00

I know it is my own fault

that nobody reads this any more. Somewhere along the line I lost the will to blog. Maybe I should say something controversial to see if anyone is out there. Here goes:

You can't be a good Catholic and a good American. By this I mean that the secular culture and the ways of thought that are required to be a good citizen are quite contrary to those required of a good Christian.

Anyone out there want to pick a fight with me on this?

2008-03-13T15:35:00.004-05:00

Bread
Originally uploaded by byzkarl

That he may bring forth bread from the earth

… and wine, to cheer man’s heart;
oil, to make his face shine
and bread to strengthen man’s heart.

I baked this bread today. This seems a very common thing, but I wonder if you have ever stopped to wonder about how the strangest and most unusual things make man happy. Bread comes from grass seeds, ground, moistened, rising from the cooperation of yeast, and then baked. Who would have ever thought such a thing could be one of the glories of the world? It is no wonder that Christ chose bread and wine to become his Body and Blood—they are already sacramental.

2008-03-11T20:04:00.000-05:00

Nerdus sum

I make fun of a friend of mine for his geek chic (making jokes about tertiary characters in Tolkien, quoting G’Kar, or wearing shirts that say “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1”), but the fact is that I always get his jokes. So, what does that make me? After all, I am writing this post on Vim, using Markdown to code the HTML, and using MultiMarkdown to transform my Markdown docs into RTF, LaTeX, or HTML.

I think my pot is pretty black.

2008-03-09T15:44:00.001-05:00

The Sin of the Age

An interesting thought, well expressed, in John Erickson’s The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History:

Apostasy? Fornication? Is not the besetting sin of our time rather that miserable schizophrenia according to which the Church occupies one compartment of our lives, while all our values and expectations are formed by the increasingly non-Christian world?

Yes, apostasy and fornication still occur, but we are generally too busy with the cares of the world even to notice that we are apostates and fornicators. By that I mean that we have put the things of God into such a box that it doesn’t enter our consciousness that God could make any demands on us, at least not in our real life, the life from Sunday to Sunday. One can preach against more concrete sins all day long, but until the audience realizes that there can be such a thing as sin, that preaching will be worthless.

There may be a God, the modern person says, but what does He have to do with me?

2008-03-06T23:59:00.002-06:00

Bad news everywhere.

I know it's the normal state of the world, but it seems like war is breaking out everywhere. No news but bad news.

Anyone got any good news? I'll start. My kids pretended to be puppies for a few hours today, crawling around and barking. It was very enjoyable to watch them.

Lord have mercy.

2008-03-03T11:55:00.003-06:00

Why you should read Gene Wolfe:

You should read Gene Wolfe because he does things to you. He plays tricks with you soul. Neat tricks.

I am currently reading the Soldier in the Mist series. In it, the soldier called “Latro” has suffered a head wound, losing his memory daily. His experience is thus compressed to day-sized chunks, and his memory is stored on scrolls that he writes at the end of each day. He takes part in the Persian War around 480 B.C.

So much for the plot.

What makes the book so interesting to me is the use of creative dislocation. This is a term I’ve just coined to refer to the way Wolfe makes the everyday, in this case the everyday of pre-classical Greece, mysterious. Latro is a foreigner with some knowledge of languages, and so hears Greek words not as names, fossilized in their meanings, but as descriptions. Thus Athens becomes Thought, the Spartans are the Rope Makers, the country of the Spartans is called The Silent Land., and so forth. Familiar geography that became crusted over in high school history text books becomes strange and unrecognizable, and therefore fantastic. Characters that one becomes accustomed to are forever new to Latro, and though he may have an inkling of who they are, he needs to meet them again every day. Loves are continually rediscovered.

Also, Latro can see the gods.

He sees the gods when no-one else can. This is because of his forgetfulness, or so the gods tell us in the story. I think it isn’t so much because of the forgetfulness, but because of the state of perpetual newness into which Latro is thrust. The whole world is full of gods, as Thales said, but most of us don’t notice because we are so used to it. Or, to put it in Aristotelian terms, all love of wisdom begins in wonder. Most of us don’t love wisdom because the world holds no wonder.

It’s good stuff. Not an easy read, but well worth the effort.

I should blog more

2007-11-28T23:56:00.001-06:00

Matthew
Originally uploaded by byzkarl

but, failing that, I can show off where I go to church. I took a bunch of pictures of my parish, and you can go see it here.

Why have icons where the people can't see them?

2007-10-28T21:45:00.001-05:00

I gave a tour of my church today, and as I was giving the visitors a peek behind the icon screen, a gentleman asked if other churches had more diaphanous icon screens, so that people could see the icons behind the altar. I said that some in fact offered less concealment, but I said that we must be cautious. Not everything in liturgy needs to be seen by the people. To have that mentality is to shift the focus of the liturgy from God to us--liturgy as entertainment.
It is not a bad thing to have icons that are never seen or prayers that are never heard, since the liturgy is not for the sake of us and our entertainment, but on God and our thanksgiving for the blessings given.

2007-10-22T19:24:00.001-05:00

Have you ever wanted a Greek lexicon and morphology analyzer?

Come on, I know that you have. Hasn't everybody?

This morning I was looking through the Perseus Project, but was disappointed in the speed of the connection. Perhaps the computers at Tufts are overburdened by young classicists. I was trying to practice my Greek by reading the epistle for the day, but I couldn't access the online lexicon. What could I do? What if Perseus went down for good?

There is a solution: "Diogenes", a program for searching the TLG cdrom. I don't have this cdrom (400$, I think), but the program does some things even without it, namely look up the meaning of Lation and Greek words, as well as analyze the form of a word, telling case, number, etc. Just choose the action "Look up a word in the dictionary" or "Morphological analysis." It will even parse words for you. How wonderful!

Google has a Blogger Widget

2007-10-11T15:07:00.001-05:00

I have been very lax on blogging for the last year or so. I'm sorry, and am pleasantly surprised to find that I still have readers. Perhaps having this neat little gadget on my Mac dashboard will help me to blog more often. I find many blogs that are updated more often consist of little stippets of the poster's day. So, here goes:

I'm sitting at my kitchen table reading Fr. Tarazi's volume The New Testament, Introduction: Paul and Mark. It's quite interesting, in particular his take on the disputes between Paul and the Church of James in Jerusalem. One point strikes me: Paul identifies Christ with the Suffering Servant from Isaiah, a servant whose fate was so stunning that all nations would be brought into relationship with God. Paul must preach the gospel to the nations, or Jesus is not Lord. Or, to put it another way, if Jesus isn't the light to the gentiles, then he isn't the one whom the prohets spoke of.

This puts the task of evangelism in a different light. We don't just evangelize to convince others of the truth of the faith, but to convince ourselves of its truth, for through our preaching the power of God is active. We know God through the power of his word, through seeing how all nations come to accept it.

As always, my posts are speculative. All theological points are subject to revision.

Let's see--what else is going on. . . I'm trying to have a few moments of peace while the kids are asleep. I am the "primary caregiver", and so have little time for reading or thinking. I teach two classes and barely find time to get ready for them. I don't know how people like Amy Welborn do it. Right now girl #1 is up sitting newt to me, eating cheese. Girl #3 is in her swing, almost falling asleep but not quite. Girl #2 refused to go to the bathroom, and I took away her blanket until she acquiesced. She didn't, and wet herself. I guess I win.

Well, back to Tarazi, while the kids are mostly quiet.

2007-09-13T22:10:00.000-05:00

I've added a few links,

one from Hieromonk Maximos called "The Anastasis Dialogue", and another called "De unione ecclesiarum", by my friend Bekkos, aka Peter Gilbert. Both are very smart people as well as deep, careful thinkers. Give them a read.

2007-09-04T21:02:00.000-05:00

A modest proposal to end the Great Schism

This is just a thought, and I won't be offended if you think it is stupid.

Ecumenical problems have, it seems to me, the character of problems in differential equations. One starts with constraints and boundary conditions, and must come up with a solution that violates none of them. With two Churches that claim meaningfully to be The Church, I think we have the following boundary conditions:

1. The Catholic Church is not heretical.
2. The Orthodox Church is not heretical.
3. Papal infallibility is a true doctrine (otherwise 1 is false).
4. The infallibility of the Church as a whole is a true doctrine (otherwise #2 is false).

So, here is my solution. Infallibility _must_ be understood as a characteristic of the whole Church, deriving directly from Christ's promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. In the first thousand years, this infallibility inhered in doctrinal pronouncements of the ecumenical councils--not in the canons, since one can see that later canons chance or supercede earlier canons. On this, I think we could all agree.

Now, there is a problem with conciliarism: how does one know a council is ecumenical? Various schemes or characteristics are proposed, but they all (on the Orthodox side) end up with "We don't know how we know, but _these 7_ are." One could say that they are those the Church receives, but that presupposes one knows where the True Church is; what about Chalcedon, for example? What if the non-Chalcedonians are really the Church?

From the Catholic side, one can say that ecumenical councils are those councils recognized by the pope of Rome. This is, I think, the solution to the problem. The Church teaches infallibly when the bishops and Rome speak together. But since 1054 (and really since 787) the ecumene has been wounded, so that genuine ecumenical councils have not occurred.

Does the charism of infallibility leave the Church because of the mutual estrangement of east and west? I don't think so. God's promises do not end. As a result, the East has no ecumenical councils, and the west has councils which say many true things, but which lack the presence of the other four patriarchates, and are therefore irregular.

The Church has been sundered, and that although infallibility continued to inhere in the Church, it did so in an irregular or defective fashion, devolving to an exaggerated papacy and a diminished episcopate in the West, and in the East through a theological conservatism which clung to those things decided when the Church was whole.

The decree would recognize these facts, and then would affirm papal infallibility as a gift to the whole Church, _to be exercised only with the whole Church_. Past exercises of this charism (which are, fortunately, few) would not be termed false, but irregular, as a result of the separation of the Churches. Future exercises would only come in unity with the bishops.

Well, that's it. Have at it. Don't worry about offending me--I'm not even sure I agree with me.

2007-09-01T22:24:00.000-05:00

Praying to Allah

That's what I did for the last week. I spent a week studying theology with the Antochian Orthodox. They have a program of distance study, and I have been taking part. Last week was the residency. Since Antiochians pray in Arabic, we prayed to Allah, meaning, of course, the Holy Trinity.

The week was wonderful, challenging, tempting, frustrating, and fulfilling. I hope to have some reflections in more depth soon.

2007-08-09T00:34:00.000-05:00

Dvorak is great!

I put in a little time to learn Dvorak, and through a kind benefactor was able to get my hands on a Typematrix keyboard, and the combination is wonderful. What I notice most of all about the new layout is the amount that my fingers remain on the home row. I am not continually reaching across the keyboard, especially with the dreaded pinky reach. With the Typematrix, there are additional benefits, namely the small size, gentle feel, and backspace and enter keys in the middle. It is a very clever design, and I don't want to use anything else.

If you want to learn more about the Dvorak keyboard, on which I typed the whole blog post with nary an error, go to DVZine.org.

2007-08-09T00:25:00.000-05:00

The locus of freedom is in the fast.

This phrase keeps coming to mind. As you know if you still read my occasional posts, I have been thinking about the problem of freedom lately. Not the problem of liberty, which is easily solved, and is quite a different problem anyway, but the problem of freedom. How is it that we are free? This question doesn't interest me, as I take the existence of regret as prima facie evidence that freedom does exist, at least as a possibility. It is possible for me to be free, whether or not I actually am free, and it is the possibility that I could have acted differently that gives rise to regret.

If I am free, where and when am I free? As I reflect on my life, I find that I generally follow my desires. In this I do exactly what an animal or plant does. I do what I want to do, within the constraints of my current situation, but my wants are the real driving engine. The dog follows his desires to the extent he has the liberty to do so, and so do I. There is no freedom here.

No, where freedom is evident is in the fast. When I desire something, and don't seek it, I am demonstrating that I am free. It is paradoxical, perhaps, that freedom is best shown when one does not do something. This is perhaps the greatest reason to fast, that we continually remind ourselves that sin is not inevitable. No matter how oppressive my desires are, no matter how constant the temptations, the fact that I can fast, even if only from something as inconsequential as soft drinks, is a light in the darkness.

The locus of freedom is in the fast.

2007-07-18T16:09:00.000-05:00

I wish I could have been there

The Pro-Life Action League just completed its summer Face the Truth Tour. Generations for Life has the coverage. It turns out that someone tried to steal the signs and beat up one of the organizers.

If you've never been, any event run by the PLAL is the most peaceful protest you are likely to see. It is organized, efficient, and the protesters quietly hold their signs. Many peorple are supportive, but the opponents are almost uniformly rude. I am not surprised that someone was violent this year.

2007-07-15T23:13:00.000-05:00

Now that I've learned the Dvorak keymap

I want one of these:

Typematrix makes what looks to be a pretty neat ergonomic keyboard. What intrigues me is that they line up the keys, rather than having them at the stepped angle they currently are at. Plus, the thing is small and can go in a backpack.

Someday, if I can make a little cash. . . .

2007-07-11T15:36:00.000-05:00

I've joined a cult

I've switched over to the Dvorak Keyboard. I type a lot, and this should save me time and pain in my hands--I've been practicing on it quite a bit and haven't had any trouble, unlike the QWERTY layout.

Plus, it makes me the clear front-runner for the prize of biggest geek in my family.

2007-06-29T23:06:00.000-05:00

A thought for the single folks

Pray while you can! The time will come when you want to, but can't.

This thought came to me as I helped my wife through liturgy for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, attempting to get our two eldest daughters to behave. A genuine state of prayer was difficult to come by.

Pray while you can, and pray for those of us who can't pray as we would like.

2007-06-24T13:19:00.001-05:00

I hate God!

Don't get overly concerned--this is nothing new, but is a statement that I think is true of almost everyone. I was browsing the interent one evening and came across an Orthodox monk's advice to a young man, that he pray, "God, I hate you! I want to love you, but I don't. Please help me to love you." I was struck by the prayer, and have been thinking about it ever since. I have concluded that it is a true prayer.

"If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen." --1 John 4:20

I fail in love of brother all the time. If I am truthful, I must say that I do not love God.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments." --John 14:15

I don't keep the commandments. Therefore, I don't love God. Modus tollens. It seems clear that I cannot say that I love God, and in fact, to judge from my activity, I am a great hater of God and all his works.

"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love." -- 1 John 4:8

Not only don't I love God, but I don't even know him. What a wretched creature I am! And yet, there is hope in this. God is love, and we are called to partake of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), which means that we are called to love. Love is the way to taste God.

I don't love God. In fact, I have a deep antipathy to God, evident every time I choose self over him. These times are legion. Nevertheless, I can do as the young man was advised by the monk: I can pray that God makes me love him. Everything is grace, even the ability to love God.

I hate you, God, but I want to love you. Help!

2007-04-19T09:27:00.001-05:00

"Whole nations now philosophise,

And do their own undoing now.--
Who's gained by all the sacrifice
Of Europe's revolutions? who?
The Protestant? The Liberal?
I do not think it -- not at all:
Rome and the Atheist have gained:
These two shall fight it out--these two;
Protestantism being retained
For base of operations sly
By Atheism."

--Melville, from _Clarel_

2007-04-01T12:25:00.000-05:00

The connection between celibacy and marriage, with help from Gabriel Marcel

It is often asserted in Catholic circles that a failure to understand celibacy or virginity for the kingdom of God will lead to a failure to understand marriage. It is true that cultures without monastics generally have lousy marriages. But why is this the case? What is the connection?

I've been reading a bit of Marcel recently, and I think his distinction between the realm of mystery and problem can help. A problem is something we can solve, but which makes no necessary demands on the solver. The Pythagorean Theorem makes no demands on me--I am the same before and after I think about it. Mysteries are not problems, but demands: “A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon its own data, that invades the data and thereby transcends itself as a simple problem.” (Concrete Approaches to the Ontological Mystery, p 178) Mysteries reveal that there is a transcendent dimension to the world, something that cannot be measured or verified, but nevertheless both answers our deepest need and utters a call to us.

How does this relate to marriage? It is the modern tendency to reduce all to problems, not mysteries. We seek objectivity in all things, even in the realm of love. We treat love like such an object, something we can examine, without ourselves being in it to the gills. We say things like "Love just means what makes you happy" or "Love is just an expression of the procreative drive" or "Love is just chemistry." Beware whenever anyone uses the word "just!" This means that we attempt to explain love simply in terms of drives or interests of the people involved. I am attracted to someone, and I call the attraction love.

The monastic life, the life of celibacy for the Kingdom, resists this analysis, since it involves renouncing an interest, giving up the exercise of a drive. The only reason why one would want to do this is because of mystery, because of the impinging of what Marcel calls "being" on one's life. A man gives up sexual intercourse for life; why? Because he recognizes that there is something greater than the satisfaction of one's desires. It is in this greater that the key to understanding marriage lies.

Marriage for life is not able to be explained in terms of interests, drives, or desires (I use the words somewhat interchangeably). I may enter into a relationship for a period of time because it satisfies my desires, but desires are transitory. What happens if they change, or if they are no longer satisfied? Should the marriage end? We see it happen all the time, as people break marriages for the sake of some new person who presumably satisfies the desires better. The only possible ground of a lasting, till death do us part, in good times or bad, in sickness or in health marriage is a recognition that there is something beyond my desires, that makes a demand upon me. Marriage is only possible on the horizon of mystery.

This is the connection between the celibate life and marriage. Both require a recognition of the transcendent. Those who understand monks, understand marriage, since both require one to realize that there is more to life than just desires.

2007-03-29T03:28:00.000-05:00

Insomnia and Jeeves

I can't sleep. I got caught in a theological debate on another website and can't sleep. So, I thought I would present you, my few readers, with a gift: Hugh Laurie's reflections on P.G. Wodehouse, who, if you don't know, is the greatest English writer of the 20th century, of whose works many are available for free from The Gutenberg Project. So, enjoy it, Eric. Pass it along to John or Renee--they might get a chuckle. (See, I have so few readers I know them by name!)

Here's the Laurie piece, gotten from hatsharpening.com:

TO be able to write about P. G. Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison.

If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

Jeeves and Wooster

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookery nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again.

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that P. G. Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. I speak as one whose first love was Blandings, and who later took immense pleasure from Psmith, but Jeeves is the jewel, and anyone who tries to tell you different can be shown the door, the mini-cab, the train station, and Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a clear conscience. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral, every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear, and considerably funnier.

Now let the pages of the calendar tumble as autumn leaves, until 10 years are understood to have passed. A man came to us - to me and to my comedy partner, Stephen Fry - with a proposition. He asked me if I would like to play Bertram W. Wooster in 23 hours of televised drama, opposite the internationally tall Fry in the role of Jeeves.

"Fiddle," one of us said. I forget which.

"Sticks," said the other. "Wodehouse on television? It's lunacy. A disaster in kit form. Get a grip, man."

The man, a television producer, pressed home his argument with skill and determination.

"All right," he said, shrugging on his coat. "I'll ask someone else."

"Whoa, hold up," said one of us, shooting a startled look at the other.

"Steady," said the other, returning the S. L. with top-spin.

There was a pause.

"You'll never get a cab in this weather," we said, in unison.

And so it was that, a few months later, I found myself slipping into a double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check while my colleague made himself at home inside an enormous bowler hat, and the two of us embarked on our separate disciplines. Him for the noiseless opening of decanters, me for the twirling of the whangee.

So the great P. G. was making his presence felt in my life once more. And I soon learnt that I still had much to learn. How to smoke plain cigarettes, how to drive a 1927 Aston Martin, how to mix a Martini with five parts water and one part water (for filming purposes only), how to attach a pair of spats in less than a day and a half, and so on.

But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done. You begin with a diamond on the page, and you end up with a blob of Pritt, The Non-Sticky Sticky Stuff, on the screen.

Wodehouse on the page can be taken in the reader's own time; on the screen, the beautiful sentence often seems to whip by, like an attractive member of the opposite sex glimpsed from the back of a cab. You, as the viewer, try desperately to fix the image in your mind - but it is too late, because suddenly you're into a commercial break and someone is telling you how your home may be at risk if you eat the wrong breakast cereal.

Naturally, one hopes there were compensations in watching Wodehouse on the screen - pleasant scenery, amusing clothes, a particular actor's eyebrows - but it can never replicate the experience of reading him. If I may go slightly culinary for a moment: a dish of foie gras nestling on a bed of truffles, with a side-order of lobster and caviar may provide you with a wonderful sensation; but no matter how wonderful, you simply don't want to be spoon-fed the stuff by a perfect stranger. You need to hold the spoon, and decide for yourself when to wolf and when to nibble.

And so I am back to reading, rather than playing Jeeves. And my Wodehousian redemption is, I hope, complete. Indeed, there is nothing left for me to say, except to wish, as I fold away my penknife and gaze up at the huge oak towering overhead, that my history teacher could see me now.

2007-03-16T01:04:00.000-05:00

A short reflection on the Suffering Servant

(It occurs to me that I should blog, especially since people who seem to know me are posting in my comment boxes.)

I am currently reading Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi's commentaries on the Old Testament, and I came across the following passage about the "Suffering Servant" from Isaiah: "In contrast to Israel's habitual disobedience 'forcing' the Lord's hand, through the servant's perfect obedience God is now given the opportunity to do things completely his way, without interference, from beginning to end."

There is a curious juxtaposition here of the concept of obedience and that of freedom. The obedience of the servant leads to the freedom of God. If this is true, then it follows that the disobedience of the sinner puts constraints on God. Justice must be served, after all, if God is just. Consider the example from Amos 4, where God says how he had to send various plagues and droughts upon Israel, because they wouldn't return to him. It's like a father complaining about having to spank his child; if only the kid would behave as he ought, the father would be free in his actions.

To break the tiresome cycle of transgression/punishment requires that God be freed from the cycle. Note that God is not bound by some force external to him, but by his own justice, which is of course consequent on his goodness. To be good, God must be just. To be just means God must punish, or rather, that God must somehow make right what has been made wrong. Throughout the history of Israel this keeps happening. One gets the feeling, reading scripture, that it would never stop. The Suffering Servant prophesied by Isaiah obeys God perfectly, and therefore enables him freedom, the ability to do something completely new, to triumph over the requirements of justice and save us, "while we were yet sinners." (Rom 5:8) Instead of punishment, we have redemption. Instead of justice, we have justification. Instead of sacrifices, we have sanctification. All of these are free gifts of God, gifts made possible by the perfect obedience of Christ to the Father. God acts to free himself, through the mystery of the Incarnation.

Note, this is all theological speculation. I don't think anything here is wrong, but if it is, I'm not a heretic, for the simple reason that I don't want to be a heretic.

2007-02-15T23:24:00.000-06:00

A Seasonal Note

Alas, black soul! How long wilt thou continue in evil? How long wilt thou lie in idleness? Why dost thou not think of the fearful hour of death? Why dost thou not tremble at the dread judgment-seat of the Saviour? What defence then wilt thou make, or what wilt thou answer? Thy works will be there to accuse thee; thine actions will reproach thee and condemn thee. O my soul, the time is near at hand; make haste before it is too late, and cry aloud in faith: I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned against Thee; but I know Thy love for man and Thy compassion. O good Shepherd, deprive me not of a place at Thy right hand in Thy great mercy.

2007-01-20T16:04:00.000-06:00

Body Worlds and Respect for the Dead

I remember once reading a Dorothy Sayers mystery where there was a sculptor noted for his lifelike sculptures. It turned out that he wasn't a sculptor at all, but was killing people and preserving their bodies inside of his sculptures. So, you can see, I was already predisposed not to like Gunther von Hagens' "Body Worlds 2" exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Nevertheless, I went--it was a free ticket gotten through my wife's work.

Before I went in, as I was commiserating with another husband who didn't want to see it, a woman who was a personal trainer insisted that we go, and also insisted that we should like it, because it shows the glory of the human body. I tried to argue, first, that I was more interested in the works of the human soul than of the human body, and, second, that those were corpses in the exhibit, which made it problematic for me. She said,"But they gave consent! They donated their bodies." Well, never mind whether one can actually donate one's body as if it is merely an object. Perhaps she was right, and I was merely squeamish.

Upon entry to the exhibit, there were several large banners with quotes from philosophers. I saw one from Nietzsche, one from Epicurus, and one from Seneca. All three had in common the argument that the body is merely a body, and that death is the ceasing of existence. You can apparently buy the posters here. "Death is the release from all pain, and complete cessation," Seneca tells us. Why should an anatomical exhibit have philosophical quotes, and especially these quotes? Perhaps it is to disarm people like me, for whom the "artistic" display of human corpses is distasteful.

In addition to the philosophical quotes, there is a large placard declaring that all the bodies were donated. So, what's my complaint? There are two reasons why I think this exhibit is gruesome, and morally repugnant:

1) The way in which the corpses are displayed. As you go through the exhibit, you can't help thinking that von Hagens and his people are playing with the bodies. They are posed in athletic stances, which could perhaps be construed as educational, but there were several curious poses. A female body was in a yoga pose, leaning back with her skinless breasts pointed upward, topped with obviously fake nipples. It seemed as if they were attempting to be erotic. A male body had been eviscerated in a pattern mimicking a chest of drawers. It's one thing to make use of dissection to teach anatomy; it is another thing to play with the remains of living men and women.

2) I doubt the claims of consent. In fact, I am positively sure that many of the people whose bodies are in the exhibit did not consent. For, as we walked through the exhibit, there was a group of skeletons posed in a family group. Did the child consent? Furthermore, there was an exhibit of embryos in various stages of development: Did they consent? There was a room (which we didn't enter, as we were sick to our stomachs at this point) with fetuses and babies. Did they consent? Clearly not.

Whatever the benefits of anatomical displays, I think Dr. von Hagens' work is seriously morally problematic.

2007-01-08T23:55:00.000-06:00

On Free Will and Determinism

The fundamental fact of Christian moral teaching is this: sin is the opposite of free will. We are only free when we are able to do the good. We are free when we can do the true good despite any passions or habits we have leading us to lesser, apparent goods. Get this fact down, and the rest of moral theology makes sense.

I was thinking today how this affects the question of free will versus determinism. If freedom is the opposite of sin, then to be determined is to be enslaved to sin. The question "Is man free?" is wrongly formulated; the question should be "Are you free?" To which I answer, "Kind of. Sort of. Well, not really. I am not free--I do the wrong even when I know what is right. I must admit that I am not free, but I hope to be free someday."

Freedom is not ours by nature, at least not anymore, but it can be, through the grace of God. We aren't free, but we are free to be free; we can ask for help.

2007-01-07T21:08:00.000-06:00

Six Weird Things About Me

I've been tagged by Eric, so here goes:

1. I've sung with a big band, for money.
2. I hate ballpoint pens. Hate hate hate. Fountain pens are the way God intended us to write. In fact, if you were taught penmanship by nuns, you have probably been disappointed all these years to have been give instructions that just don't work with ball points. But try a fountain pen; all they said works!
3. I like Bach better than Mozart, and think Beethoven's music tries too hard. Music should court the listener, not overpower him.
4. I never really liked the rosary that much. Shhh! Don't tell my sister-in-law! The Jesus Prayer, on the other hand, rocks.
5. I used to play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.
6. I often wear a stocking cap to bed. It has to do with my lack of hair.

There you go, 6 weird things.

2007-01-05T22:31:00.000-06:00

God is unchanging--isn't that boring?

I came across a wonderful passage in Gabriel Marcel's Creative Fidelity concerning the traditional metaphysical predicates applied to God, that he is one, unchanging, eternal, that God does not suffer or need anything, etc. Sometimes when people hear these descriptions, they think that it seems rather limiting. How could God be unchanging? If I were unchanging, and eternal, I think I would be bored out of my mind. Surely it is better to think of a god who can change, who can experience passionate love as we do, or who can suffer with us, isn't it?

In fact there is a flaw in this sort of thinking. We think that what the theologians are doing by applying these predicates is to limit God, to say that God cannot do things. But what is actually going on is that the predicates are negative--they are denying that something limiting applies to God. To say that God is unchanging is not to say that God can't change, but that he need not change, since he is already perfect. To say that God is eternal is not to say that he endures throughout an endless duration of time, but that he is beyond time. Time doesn't even apply. To say that God does not suffer does not make God heartless, it makes him perfectly joyful.

Marcel's passage is worth quoting:

I cannot overstress the fact that theological affirmations as such are a snare; for the "properties" I have just mentioned, if construed as predicates, seem to be the most impoverished that exist; if they are construed as principles of understanding it must be conceded that they are in a sense more inadequate than those which are conferred on the humblest and most ephemeral creature in our world. To achieve that conversion of our outlook which is indispensable, and to reveal what seems an infinite deficiency as the infinite plenitude that it really is, consciousness must, by an act of decisive conversion, sacrifice itself to the One whom it must alone invoke as its Principle, End, and only Resort.

God is plenitude, so much so that to our meager conceptual apparatus, it looks like poverty.

2006-12-17T01:22:00.000-06:00

Some thoughts on Apocalypto

First, the title. It doesn't mean, as Gibson claims, a "new beginning." It means an unveiling, a revelation, which, of course, could mean "new beginning," if in fact it is the revelation that allows or enables the new beginning. More on that later.

The movie opens with scenes of a hunt of a tapir, rather bloody. They chase the beast down, kill it, and disembowel it, and Jaguar Paw hands parts off to his friends according to their personality. The liver goes to one, the heart to another, and the testicles go to his chubby, impotent friend, who doesn't know that it is a joke simply to get him to eat testicles. Nevertheless, the treatment of the tapir is a little gut-wrenching to those of us who are used to getting our meat nicely wrapped in plastic.

Why would this scene be in the movie? There are two reasons, one obvious and one not: to show us the main characters and get us to see that, despite the bones through their noses and earlobes, they are not very different from us, but also, I think, to show us a prefiguring in the animal of the later mistreatment of humans. Jaguar Paw holds out a heart of a tapir, whereas the high priest holds out the still-beating heart of a man. The meaning is clear: the Mayans have come to see man as expendable, as a beast just like the tapir, to be hunted, enslaved, or killed as circumstances warrant.

Jaguar Paw returns to his village with his father and friends, and scenes of domestic life are shown. We are introduced to his son and his wife, Seven, played by the beautiful Dalia Hernandez, who is near-term pregnant. Later that night, they listen to one of the elders tell a story, which sets the theme for the entire movie. I will paraphrase as I remember it: Man asked for gifts from all the animals, and got sight from the vulture, strength from the bear (I can't remember the details), etc. But the animals were dismayed when the owl said that man had a hole in him, and that no matter how much he received, he would always seek for more, until the earth itself declared that she had no more to give. This parable matches exactly the contrast between the villagers who hunt to support their families, and the Mayans, who enslave to build cities, and then kill to appease the gods to save the cities they have built, killing ever more and more people, so much that they have to raid other nations and peoples to supply their sacrifices.

At this point, a Mayan raiding party captures the men and some of the women of the village. I don't care to go into detail about what happens, but Jaguar Paw manages to secrete his wife and child down in a pit, but goes off to help in the defense of his village. He sees his father killed before him, but his father is able to give him one last word: "Do not be afraid." It is advice that comes ultimately from Christ, but were notably the first words in the first sermon of Pope John Paul II.

Here begins a long march to the Mayan capital. Of interest is the contrast between the Mayan captain and his underling (I didn't get the names), who is willfully cruel to the prisoners. The Captain is all business, and is almost admirable in the way he goes about transporting his prisoners to their death, whereas the underling, who I will call Mean Guy, does all he can to make the journey painful and humiliating. It is an interesting contrast. Mean Guy enjoys his job, but because he is a bad man. The Captain enjoys his job, not because he is a bad man, but because he things his work helps his people. He is a competent workman who takes pride in the work of his hands, and there are even tender moments as he encourages his son to do well in the profession. The Captain is the chief villain of the piece, but he is not portrayed as someone purely evil or as a caricature, but as a good family man who does his duty, as he perceives it.

I note that as the abandoned children of the village follow their parents and the captors, having nowhere else to go, one of the women prays to Ixchel, "mother of mercy", to protect them from harm. "Mother of Mercy" is one of the titles of the Virgin Mary, found in the prayer Salve Regina.

Once they arrive at the capital, through scenes of the blight of the surrounding region (which to my mind recalled the grail story, where the whole land suffers because of the wound of the king), and a leprous girl who, when spurned, prophesies the doom of the Mayan nation, we see the men prepared for sacrifices. They are painted blue (as the old wall-paintings show), and ultimately brought to the top of the pyramid to have their hearts cut out and fed to the idol of the god Kukulkan, and then to be decapitated and flung down the steps. The purpose was to ease the blight by appeasing the blood-lust of the god. Many of the people take part eagerly in the bloody festival, but the royal family and many others are bored.

It is fortuitous that I saw this movie on the same day that I read a story about the possibility of Ukrainian babies being killed after birth to provide stem cells to cure adults. The parallel is obvious: the Mayans (and the Aztecs) had to conquer neighboring peoples to remove the blight on their crops, whereas modern man has to kill children (preferably in the womb) to satisfy his appetites, either for convenient sex or in the hope of immortality. Other humans are reduced to the status of the hunter tapir in order to provide the needs of the powerful. I think that's clearly one of the major themes of the movie, that in a decadent society people are reduced to animals, to mere means to an end, to fodder for the gods or to serve whatever ends others have.

Jaguar Paw makes a miraculous escape from the pyramid, and alone survives to return to his forest, where his wife and child await in the pit. It is quite a thrilling chase. Suffice it to say that he does eventually beat his pursuers and rescue his family. He does this because the last pursuers are distracted by the arrival of the Spanish ships on the beach.

The movie ends with Jaguar Paw, Seven, and the two boys making their way into the forest. Seven asks if perhaps they should go meet the newcomers, but Jaguar Paw says that they should go into the forest, to make a new beginning. At this point we finally get the title of the movie and the credits.

Could you read this movie as a defense of the Spanish conquistadors? I don't think so, especially given the words of Jaguar Paw, that it is better to go into the forest. Nevertheless, the parallel of "new beginning" with Apocalypto shows that there is a Christian undercurrent to the movie. One should also note the lines in the credits "In remembrance of Abel." Abel was the first murder victim, starting a cycle of killing that has continued ever since. The Spaniards and the Mayans are not much different, except that there is the Cross and Resurrection, which, for those who accept it, provides just the new beginning that is needed, a release from fear, and from the rapacious desire attributed to man by the Owl in the old man's story. How is one to make a new beginning? I quote from another Mel Gibson film, where Jesus, when he meets his mother on the path to Golgotha, says through his pain "See how I make all things new!"

That should suffice for now. In summary, a very interesting film.

2006-12-17T01:20:00.000-06:00

I'm still here!

I haven't abandoned the blog. It's just been sleeping.

2006-08-10T16:11:00.000-05:00

Transfiguration College now offering classes

of a sort. We are offering non-credit evening seminars on Plato and on the Church Fathers, in Aurora, IL. Go to the link for more information, and sign up--it should be fun, and, since the classes are moderated by me, how could it not be fun?

2006-07-12T22:19:00.000-05:00

The arguments of the pro-choice side

Today, we continued the Face the Truth Tour in Chicago, and the counter-protestors were out. Let me give you the arguments they gave me:

1) Our pictures are fake. Those are really full-term babies. I asked some follow-ups:
a) Where'd we get the pictures? "You people killed the babies, then took pictures of them." Another fellow said "Those are Iraqi babies, killed by your idol, George Bush!"
b) I asked one woman "Would it make a difference to you if you thought the picture was real? "No." Then why claim that it's a fake? "To show what wackos you people are."

2) Numbers 5 is a theraputic abortion. So said a passerby. I pulled out my bible and read the passage in his presence. He said "See? Therapeutic abortion!" Go read it yourself, and see if his tendentious reading is correct. When I attempted to chat with him about it, he told me to go find someone who read Hebrew. Then he called me a psycho and walked away, even after I invited him to lunch to discuss the issue. His loss--I would have paid.

3) A man dressed in black with a Roman collar and a pectoral cross came by. He said that he had an open mind on the abortion issue. I, of course, love open minds, since one can then have a good debate. I attempted to bring up some bible passages, such as Jeremiah and the Visitation, when John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb at the presence of Christ. He said "Don't talk to me about the bible! I studied the bible for five years in seminary!" I said "Ok. I studied it too. Let's talk about it!" He then said "I read the bible in Greek!" I said "So do I." He refused to listen or even converse with me in any way, and wouldn't even tell me which church he belonged to.

4) A woman told me that I should support birth control since I am opposed to abortion. When I asked her about the detrimental effects that contraceptive sex has on relationships and marriage, she said "Marriage is a sh*t institution designed by the patriarchy to oppress women!"

All these conversations are reported nearly verbatim, subject to the constraints of my memory.

2006-07-11T19:51:00.000-05:00

Tales from the Front

This week I am helping out with the Pro-Life Action League's Truth Tour, where we hold graphic signs on the side of busy streets. There has been much controversey over whether our method is proper, whether anyone should have to see such horrible images, and whether some other method (ultrasounds) might work better. I don't know about all of that, but want to tell you two stories from the last two days:

1) A woman came up to us with tears in her eyes and said that she was pregnant three years earlier when she saw our signs, and it caused her to decide to have her baby. Little Arianna is three years old, the light of her mother's life.

2) Today a boy of fifteen walked by our demonstration and told my friend Pat that his girlfriend was pregnant, that he didn't know what to do, but that he had prayed for a sign. He got it today.

Every day I help out with the tour something like this happened. Earlier this year a woman came up to me crying, and said "I've had six abortions. Do you have any literature I could have?" Would she have sought healing if not for us? Maybe. These questions are open to debate. But she did seek healing, and a boy and his girlfriend are going to have their child, and little Arianna is three.

2006-07-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

Constitution, Schmonstitution.

See what I did yesterday: Photo.

Go here for more.

2006-06-13T08:46:00.000-05:00

A short note from St. Basil the Great

I was listening to "On the Holy Spirit" while I jogged the other day. (I like to make the text files into mp3 files. It beats listening to pop music. Yes, I am a church nerd.) Basil commented about the passage from John's gospel where Jesus tells the woman at the well that soon people will worship "In Spirit and in truth", that this is to show the woman that God is not a local god, but spirit, without place or time.

This is a refreshing way of understanding that passage, which is used problematically by those who say "Dude, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual!"