Just coincidence?

I suppose there was no way the main stream media could have ignored the story of the murder of pro-life activist, Jim Pouillon, given how much coverage they gave to the murder of an abortionist not long ago. But am I alone in wondering why this particular photograph of Mr. Pouillon was the one chosen to appear on the CNN website?

I am trying to avoid cynicism, honestly I am.

Where is Freud when you need him?

EROS and THANATOS

Reuters reports this from Zurich:

Body Worlds plans cadaver show dedicated to sex

German anatomists plan a new show dedicated solely to dead bodies having sex as part of the Body Worlds exhibitions.

Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley show corpses prepared using a technique invented by von Hagens called "plastination," that removes water from specimens and preserves them with silicon rubber or epoxy resin. . . .

Von Hagens has already triggered uproar with a new exhibit which shows just two copulating corpses.

German politicians called the current "Cycle of Life" show charting conception to old age "revolting" and "unacceptable" when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.

The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should wear fewer clothes in Zurich than was the case in Berlin.

"Switzerland is the first country that already said from the outset that we could show whatever we wanted," said von Hagens.

"Zurich is ready ... but it's maybe not so easy in every other town," he said. "We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject."

"Delicate subjects," perhaps you remember the term. It once meant . . . oh, never mind.

Welcome to the final manifestation of the sexual revolution. It was shamelessly irresponsible while it lasted, but now it's come full circle: Eros has turned to Thanatos for titillation. What a perfect and perfectly fitting commentary on its wildly successful attempt to uncouple (if you'll pardon the expression) sex and reproduction, leading directly to the demographic death of Europe and many of the cultures it once inspired.

Thanks to Carl Olson at Ignatius' "Inside Scoop."

The Third Jihad

I am too busy at the moment to watch this film in its entirety, so I cannot vouch for it. But I watched the first part of it, and from what I saw it is balanced and objective. It is, I think, timely. I am posting it therefore in commemoration of September 11th. If you have time to watch it, I welcome your comments.

The Third Jihad

The Morning After . . .

"Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language. . . He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies. Hence, the community of language that he himself wants to use in order to criticize the users of ideological language must first be discovered and, if necessary, established." -- Eric Voegelin

A Monk on the Loose . . .

Harold Talbott on Thomas Merton in Asia:

“He tipped Sikh taxi drivers like a Proustian millionaire. He was on a roll, on a toot, on a holiday from school. He was a grand seigneur, a great lord of the spiritual life. He radiated a sense of ‘This is an adventure, here I am folks,’ and he woke people up and illuminated them and enchanted them and gave them tremendous happiness and a good laugh. People knew his spiritual quality. People in planes knew it. There was no question about it. Merton was not an object of scrutiny, he was an event.”

I get a good long look at some of Merton's fellow Cistercians every morning, and I see this possibility in their bright, childlike eyes. If the Abbot turned them loose on the natives, they might not all be as flamboyant as Merton was in Asia, but I have no doubt they would -- in their own unique way -- give us worldlings good reason to rethink our habitual ways.

Love those who hate you.

1 million Pakistani Catholics pray for persecutors

September 08, 2009

Gathering at Pakistan’s principal Marian shrine the weekend before the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, over half of the nation’s 1.6 million Catholics prayed for their persecutors. “Let us pray and fast for the transformation of terrorists involved in the recent anti-Christian violence,” Father Emmanuel Asi preached on September 5. “We are a complete part of this country and want to become instruments of peace.”

The original story is here, and the Catholic Culture post is here.

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. I regard him as one of the most thoughtful and reliable public intellectuals writing today. He has not been any more sanguine than I have been about the direction of the current administration, but in a column today, he expresses his anxieties with what seems a special sense of alarm and urgency. I recommend his piece.

It is here.

Thievery

Good poets borrow, wrote T. S. Eliot, great poets steal. Well, lazy bloggers steal, too.

My old friend "Athos" has a blog quote so ripe and low hanging that I stole it quicker than Augustine stole the famous pears, but, unlike Augustine, who didn't even care for the pears, I really love this quote, however inadequately I sometimes live up to it. For that failure, I have a firm purpose of amendment.

Every Catholic is to some extent a marked man; in the casual contacts of daily life he is bearing witness, or failing to bear witness, to Jesus Christ ... the point is, not so much that we ought to be better Catholics, but that we ought to be better Christians. That we should be lovers of the truth, fair-minded, ready to believe the best of people, impatient of scandal, considerate towards the unbefriended, generous in our enthusiasms, temperate in our pleasures, discreet in our friendships, that we should have a smile for everybody - in a word, that we should live in the sunlight of that creed which we profess. -- Monsignor Ronald Knox

Thanks Athos.

For What It's Worth . . .

I don't have a television or a radio, and, so disheartened am I by developments in our culture of late, that in the last year I haven't bothered to turn on a television even when I'm on the road and stuck in a motel.

But before that I occasionally turned on the TV in my motel room -- switching back and forth, as was my habit, between the cable news outlets, hoping against hope to find some reasonably unbiased reporting. On those rare dips into the turgid waters of the mainstream media, I think I may have caught a glimpse or two of Glenn Beck. He struck me as a young man who needs a rest, who is bordering on clinical hysteria, just as I suspect his MSNBC counterpart, Keith Olberman, is.

As my post about the Van Jones fiasco may have suggested, I got my information about that sordid affair from what have proven to be reliable sources among the new media: NewsBusters for instance (which, by the way, has a story today that bears reading, here), and Sunlit Uplands, Creative Minority Report, City Journal, and others.

Only belatedly did I learn that most people were made aware of the Jones controversy by Glenn Beck's hammering away at it. Well, if that's what it took, I'm glad he did, but that doesn't mean that I find his pugnacity any more appealing than Olberman's.

The above mentioned blogsites are culturally conservative, which is one reason I find them interesting, but their cultural and social conservatism, while occasionally expressed vigorously, as is mine at times, is rooted in something far more substantive than party politics.

As I say, for what it's worth.

The World the Monks Bequeathed

Before Lauds at St. Joseph's Abbey

It was the monasteries of the seventh to the twelfth centuries that were the seedbed for the civilization we have inherited. Among the countless things bequeathed to us by those monastic orders is the recognition of the dignity of work and the joy of being productive and contributing to the material welfare of one's community. They were able to sustain those noble ideas because their commitment to work was only exceeded by the commitment to prayer.

On this Labor Day in the U.S. we can remember not only our debt to those monks, but the dignity of labor as well. We should also pray for those who have lost their jobs or who are unable to find work to support themselves and their families. We may not be able to guarantee every person adequate employment in this vale of tears, but, when given the opportunity, we can do something to remind the less fortunate that we recognize their inalienable human dignity.

The least fortunate among us are those who have no one to pray for them by name. We can pray for them especially.

The Post-Post-Partisan Post

Apropos the prior posting, here's today's Washington Post lede:

"Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, resigns following weeks of pressure from the right and a flurry of revelations about his past statements."

Pressure from the right. Get it. This public servant has been hounded from office by right-wingers. Even when the sing-a-long media feigns objectivity -- which they hardly bother to do anymore -- they expose their bias all the more. According to the Post's innuendo, Jones' departure from the current administration was due to the politically motivated and by implication mean-spirited attack of "the right." Ignore the glaring facts about Mr. Jones' political radicalism and contempt, not just for his political opponents, but for the country from whose taxpayers he condescended to draw a generous salary.

There's more than a grain of truth to the Post's claim that the pressure came from the "right," but it hardly flatters the mainstream media for which the Washington Post serves as a flag ship. The relatively tiny cross-town paper, the Washington Examiner, reported on Friday, weeks after the story had begun to emerge, that the conspicuously non-right-wing news organizations had conveniently averted their eyes:

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.

This leaves all the reporting to the new media and to media outlets that can be labeled as "right-wing," giving the old mainstream media the opportunity to take the sting out of the story by hinting at political bias. Had the Pravda-style mainstream been doing their job, there would have been no grounds whatsoever for the accusation. Had a comparable story emerged -- about, say, a Bush administration figure -- everyone knows that it would have been page one, above the fold in the print press and a prominent feature on the cable channels. As it is, the old and now predictably biased mainstream media had ready at hand a way to deflect the impact of the story: It was all a tempest in a right-wing teapot.

But no one gets a job as prominent as Mr. Jones job was without being vetted by the White House, and no one with anything like Mr. Jones' resumé would survive the Secret Service vetting without very high-ranking White House sponsorship. This is not just another of the administration's personnel problems; it is symptomatic of the same out-of-touch mindset that assumes that the town-hall meetings are the work of disreputable right-wing fanatics. So much for the post-partisan promises. The shell game isn't working as well as planned.

The corollary to all this is that, by noticing the ideological bias of the current administration and its mainstream media votaries, occasional bloggers like yours truly must be right-wingers. It isn't so.

The next thud your hear . . .

Pardon my grumblings . . . but . . .

The next thud White House staffers hear will be the administration bus rolling over the political corpse of green jobs czar Van Jones, Jones soon to join a distinguished roster, including Bill Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Tony Rezko, and a an A-list of sundry administration functionaries with legal and I.R.S. problems. For those on the bus, it's becoming a bumpy ride. For those watching it pass by, the reality is beginning to dawn: this is Chicago politics after all, fitted with leftist ideological blinders, and with a disturbing twist of Saul Alinsky's strategic dissembling throw in for good measure.

For those interested in the work of René Girard, it is worth noting that the now all-too-familiar metaphor of throwing politically embarrassing former political allies under the bus is a quintessentially "sacrificial" and "scapegoating" metaphor -- the bus containing the smiling community of those for whom an occasional thud as the bus rolls over the latest disposable former-colleague is a small price to pay for the restoration of political self-righteousness and the cheerful media-led sing-a-longs that keep the passengers from dwelling overlong on less agreeable matters.

Unquestioned Political Reflexes . . .

I keep up as best I can with what Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, has to say, he being in my view one of the few voices of thoughtfulness and principle at the Globe. I saw that Jacoby had contributed to a symposium for Commentary Magazine entitled "Why Are Jews Liberals?" a symposium in response to a recent book by the same name by the long-time editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. So I decided to take a look. The other contributors were David Wolpe, Jonathan D. Sarna, Michael Medved, and William Kristol. Here are a few excerpts which have implications, not just for Jews, but for all of us.

The first is a humorous but insightful anecdote from Jeff Jacoby's remarks:

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, only 16 percent of Jews attend religious services at least once a week, compared with 39 percent of Americans generally. Just 31 percent say religion is “very important” in their lives (vs. 56 percent of Americans).

Such data led Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, to quote a comment made by the late hasidic troubadour Shlomo Carlebach after a lifetime of visiting American campuses: “I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catholic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew.”

David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale University and the author of "Judaism: A Way of Being," to be published in January by Yale University Press.

Here is an excerpt from his contribution to the symposium:

So what’s happened in Europe?

In much of Western (especially northwestern) Europe, marriage seems to be dying. (“Today . . . 0nly the lower orders and what remains of the gentry bother to marry, and everyone else takes a partner, as if life were a dance, or a business venture.” Thus the Irish writer John Banville in his 2006 novel, The Sea.) Up-to-date Englishmen on the topic of science versus religion sound, too often, like smug low-church curates in Trollope holding forth on the British Empire versus the filthy natives. (This suffocating self-righteousness ruins the novels of — for example — the contemporary Englishman Ian McEwan.) European sex (casual or not, hetero- or homo-) seems to have developed the moral significance of an ATM transaction on a street corner. The “Green party” was a German invention, the English Conservatives have recently adopted a green tree as their emblem, and European eco-priests speaking ex cathedra are generally regarded as infallible.

The strangest aspect of modern Europe is its tentative yet progressing love affair with death. (We think of Keats listening, darkling, to his nightingale.) The death wish is plain among Europeans who shrug off birthrates so low (and immigration rates so high) that their nations will be gone within a few generations. The death wish probably plays a part in the fervor some European nations (especially Germany) feel to lose themselves in the European Union, and in the outright enthusiasm in parts of Europe for assisted suicide. Modern Germany often cremates the dead with no rites and no comment, making death as humdrum as taking out the garbage.

If we sum up these tendencies, we arrive at a belief that man should be happy as an animal among animals, should aspire to nothing higher, and should be satisfied to worship the earth and himself if he must worship anything. This is a new sort of paganism but is clearly related to older types. In fact, mulling German history in particular, one wonders whether the Germans ever were more than half-Christianized, whether paganism hasn’t always appealed to the lofty German Geist. It’s not surprising that Germany should be a leader not only in the new liberalism but also the new paganism.

Will American Jewish liberalism drift by inches into American Jewish paganism? Not necessarily. But that fate will be avoided only if American Jews form a clear picture of the direction in which they are headed before they follow Europe into the anonymous pagan abyss and disappear. Jewish religious genius is capable of rearing up at any time and changing the direction of history—but only if Jewish prophets speak up loud and clear . . .

Finally, Michael Medved, a radio talk show host, offers what was perhaps the most provocative contribution to the symposium:

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. This observation may help to explain the otherwise puzzling political preferences of the Jewish community explored in Norman Podhoretz’s book. Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity—especially the fervent evangelicalism of the dreaded “Christian Right.” . . .

Anyone who doubts that rejection of Jesus has replaced acceptance of Torah (or commitment to Israel) as the eekur sach—the essential element—of American Jewish identity should pause to consider an uncomfortable question. What is the one political or religious position that makes a Jew utterly unwelcome in the organized community? We accept atheist Jews, Buddhist Jews, pro-Palestinian Jews, Communist Jews, homosexual Jews, and even sanction Hindu-Jewish meditation societies. “Jews for Jesus,” however, or “Messianic Jews” face resistance and exclusion everywhere. In Left-leaning congregations, many rabbis welcome stridently anti-Israel speakers and even Palestinian apologists for Islamo-Nazi terror. But if they invited a “Messianic Jewish” missionary, they’d face indignant denunciation from their boards and, very probably, condemnation by their national denominational leadership. It is far more acceptable in the Jewish community today to denounce Israel (or the United States), to deny the existence of God, or to deride the validity of Torah than it is to affirm Jesus as Lord and Savior.

For many Americans, the last remaining scrap of Jewish distinctiveness involves our denial of New Testament claims, so any support for those claims becomes a threat to the very essence of our Jewish identity. Many Jews therefore view enthusiastic Christian believers—no matter how reliably they support Israel and American Jews—as enemies by definition. Rather than acknowledge the key role played by Christian Zionists (prominently including Harry Truman) in establishing and sustaining the U.S.-Israel alliance, liberal partisans love to invoke 2,000 years of bloody Christian anti-Semitism. Today, however, the echoes of that poisonous hatred, complete with seething contempt for the allegedly disloyal and manipulative -“Israel lobby” in American politics, turn up far more frequently in the newsrooms of prestige newspapers or the faculty lounges of Ivy League universities than they do in Baptist churches in Georgia or Alabama.

The whole symposium is here.

A Merely Technological "Civilization"

A merely “technological and bureaucratic civilization” – which is what Western Culture becomes without Christianity – will not long remain civilized. First it’s civility and then its dedication to the human dignity of each person will erode and finally succumb to forms of barbarism from which Christianity slowly liberated the pagan world, forms of barbarism made incalculably more destructive by technologies no longer constrained by Christian moral imperatives.

A random thought upon returning home . . .

"The days are coming," declares the Sovereign LORD, "when I will send a famine through the land-- not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it." (Amos 8:11-12)

Knowledge untouched by prayer will never achieve the status of truth, however much factual accuracy it might attain. Facts aggregate (Google) without ever acquiring the capacity to nourish -- much less satisfy -- our hunger for truth. Amos' assessment is far truer today than it was in the 8th century before Christ.

From Hadley Arkes

Within the orders of Creation living things were higher than the lifeless stars, and among living things the peak would come with those moral beings, who could reason over right and wrong. If Creation has a purpose, life has a purpose, moral beings have a purpose, and a Creation with moral beings must contain a moral purpose.

Nice summary I'd say. The whole reflection is here.

Women and Girls

As I said in London, it is not about Qur'anic texts; it's about the cultural outworking of the Islamic worldview.



Thanks to Robert Spencer.

Making it simple . . .

Thanks to Athos at The Three Massketeers, here are three short sentences from Archbishop Charles Chaput that encapsulate my own take on the current hot topic:

The whole meaning of “health care” would be subverted by any plan that involves mandated abortion access or abortion funding. The reason is obvious. Killing or funding the killing of unborn children has nothing to do with promoting human health, and including these things in any “health care” proposal, no matter how shrewdly hidden, would simply be a form of lying.

Bob Dylan

“I think that this world is just a passing through place and that the dead have eyes and that even the unborn can see and I don’t care who knows it.” -- Bob Dylan

Steal a Fetus, find a Baby

In case you haven't seen reference to this:

None dare call it baby

Steal a Fetus; Find a Baby: MSM Struggles with Reality