Friday, June 29, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Bishop Sheen: "Venerable"
From Whispers in the Loggia:
In an audience this morning with his chief Saintmaker, Cardinal Angelo Amato SDB, the Pope assented to several decrees of canonization, beatification and the heroic virtue of souls on the path to sainthood.
Of them all, however, none are as likely to resonate among this crowd more than the declaration as "Venerable" of the figure who's arguably the most celebrated and effective evangelist in the history of the faith on these shores, once the nation's most-watched TV personality -- the epic, great and beloved "Bishop Sheen"....
The declaration of Fulton Sheen's heroic virtue marks the Vatican's affirmation of a process concluded by his native diocese of Peoria in early 2008. A miraculous healing attributed to his intercession has already been presented to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
In an audience this morning with his chief Saintmaker, Cardinal Angelo Amato SDB, the Pope assented to several decrees of canonization, beatification and the heroic virtue of souls on the path to sainthood.
Of them all, however, none are as likely to resonate among this crowd more than the declaration as "Venerable" of the figure who's arguably the most celebrated and effective evangelist in the history of the faith on these shores, once the nation's most-watched TV personality -- the epic, great and beloved "Bishop Sheen"....
The declaration of Fulton Sheen's heroic virtue marks the Vatican's affirmation of a process concluded by his native diocese of Peoria in early 2008. A miraculous healing attributed to his intercession has already been presented to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Quote for the Day
Presidential historian Robert Dallek on the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision:
“This is another step in humanizing the American industrial system.”
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
An Untold Story
Review of Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War by R.M. Douglas
AT THE END of World War II, between twelve and fourteen million people, ethnic Germans, were forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe, or, if they had already fled, were prevented from going back to their homes. Many of them were simply bundled on to cattle trucks of the sort previously used to take Europe’s Jews to their fate in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and sent westward to Germany without food, water, or adequate winter clothing. Others were detained in appalling conditions in concentration camps for weeks, suffering from disease, starvation, and maltreatment, before they were brutally pushed out to the west. Long lines trudged towards Germany, with the weak succumbing to hypothermia and malnutrition. Altogether probably half a million and perhaps as many as a million perished in what was the largest action of what later came to be known as “ethnic cleansing” in history.
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Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Does Porn Cause Rape?
Dan Savage quotes Melinda Wenner Moyer writing in Scientific American:
Perhaps the most serious accusation against pornography is that it incites sexual aggression. But not only do rape statistics suggest otherwise, some experts believe the consumption of pornography may actually reduce the desire to rape by offering a safe, private outlet for deviant sexual desires.
“Rates of rapes and sexual assault in the U.S. are at their lowest levels since the 1960s,” says Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The same goes for other countries: as access to pornography grew in once restrictive Japan, China and Denmark in the past 40 years, rape statistics plummeted. Within the U.S., the states with the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and therefore the least access to Internet pornography—experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the states with the most access experienced a 27 percent drop in the number of reported rapes, according to a paper published in 2006 by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University.
It is important to note that these associations are just that—associations. They do not prove that pornography is the cause of the observed crime reductions. Nevertheless, the trends “just don’t fit with the theory that rape and sexual assault are in part influenced by pornography,” Ferguson explains. “At this point I think we can say the evidence just isn’t there, and it is time to retire this belief.”
Perhaps the most serious accusation against pornography is that it incites sexual aggression. But not only do rape statistics suggest otherwise, some experts believe the consumption of pornography may actually reduce the desire to rape by offering a safe, private outlet for deviant sexual desires.
“Rates of rapes and sexual assault in the U.S. are at their lowest levels since the 1960s,” says Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The same goes for other countries: as access to pornography grew in once restrictive Japan, China and Denmark in the past 40 years, rape statistics plummeted. Within the U.S., the states with the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and therefore the least access to Internet pornography—experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the states with the most access experienced a 27 percent drop in the number of reported rapes, according to a paper published in 2006 by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University.
It is important to note that these associations are just that—associations. They do not prove that pornography is the cause of the observed crime reductions. Nevertheless, the trends “just don’t fit with the theory that rape and sexual assault are in part influenced by pornography,” Ferguson explains. “At this point I think we can say the evidence just isn’t there, and it is time to retire this belief.”
Friday, June 22, 2012
A Kind Word for Pedophiles?
Dr. James Cantor tries to draw a distinction between nonoffending pedophiles (who deserve our sympathy) and child molesters (who don't) in an op-ed today for CNN:
The science suggests that [pedophiles] are people who, through no fault of their own, were born with a sex drive that they must continuously resist, without exception, throughout their entire lives. Little if any assistance is ever available for them.
They are often unable to consult mental health professionals (because of mandatory reporting rules); their families will often disown rather than support them; and despite the openness of the Internet, there are few options for coming out and joining communities of other pedophiles for mutual support.
Having encountered thousands of cases, it is my experience that the pedophiles who do go on to become actual child molesters do so when they feel the most desperate. Yet, much of what society does has been to increase rather than decrease their desperation.
ht: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/06/21/do-pedophiles-deserve-our-sympathy
The science suggests that [pedophiles] are people who, through no fault of their own, were born with a sex drive that they must continuously resist, without exception, throughout their entire lives. Little if any assistance is ever available for them.
They are often unable to consult mental health professionals (because of mandatory reporting rules); their families will often disown rather than support them; and despite the openness of the Internet, there are few options for coming out and joining communities of other pedophiles for mutual support.
Having encountered thousands of cases, it is my experience that the pedophiles who do go on to become actual child molesters do so when they feel the most desperate. Yet, much of what society does has been to increase rather than decrease their desperation.
ht: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/06/21/do-pedophiles-deserve-our-sympathy
Nuns on the Bus Received Like Rock Stars
Posted by Don Wycliff
And on the fourth day…Nuns on the Bus came to South Bend, Indiana. In the chapel of Good Shepherd Montessori School–which doubles on Sundays as the sanctuary for the First Unitarian Church–the women religious involved in this nine-state pilgrimage met with about 300 adoring, sign-waving supporters, and two dissenters.
“We are consubstantial with you!” read one hand-lettered sign of greeting.
“Thank You for keeping the Vatican II Church going for us!” read another.
“Our Sisters Prophets Among Us,” said a third.
And indeed, the event–termed a “friend raiser”–had the feel of a genuinely prophetic experience. Led by Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, four of the nuns described encounters they have had with Americans of various occupations and income levels since they started their tour last Monday in Des Moines. Already they have traveled through Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. Over the next 11 days they will pass through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, ending up on July 2 in Washington, D.C.
The thrust of their effort is to call attention to the hurtful and destructive aspects of the Republican budget plan put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and to call instead for a budget that makes paramount the needs of the poor and the vulnerable.
Without once mentioning the names “Obama” or “Romney,” the sisters reminded their audience that political decisions made in Washington and in the various state capitals will have enormous consequences, and that the Gospels and Catholic social teaching have important things to say about the choices America’s citizens and their leaders must make.
What the nuns seek, Sister Simone said, is “reasonable revenue for responsible programs.” And the Ryan budget, which would cut food stamps, cut Medicaid, reduce taxes for the wealthy and raise them for the rest, and raise defense spending beyond even what the military has requested, is neither reasonable nor responsible, she and her colleagues said.
While the audience members were overwhelmingly supportive of the nuns and their program, they were not unanimously so. Louann Kensinger, who described herself as a teacher at South Bend’s Riley High School, and her husband showed up, carrying placards calling for a stop to the Obama administration’s “HHS mandate” requiring contraception as part of employee health coverage. The nation’s Catholic bishops have said this requirement–and a subsequent compromise plan offered by President Obama displacing the requirement to insurance carriers–infringe the religious liberty of Catholic schools, colleges, hospitals and other institutions. The bishops have mounted a nationwide campaign of opposition.
Significantly, during her presentation, Sister Simone said that one of the happy aspects of the Nuns on the Bus effort was that it put the nuns on the same side as the bishops, who have raised objections on moral grounds to several aspects of the Ryan budget.
Kensinger’s objections to the nuns’ program was not unfamiliar. She said, in posing a question to the nuns, that “we have spent $5 trillion” on antipoverty efforts since the 1960s, and poverty has become, if anything, even worse. What America suffers from, Kensinger said in a subsequent interview, is “a poverty of values, not cash.”
She did not explain how taking food stamps, medical care and other necessary assistance away from needy Americans would improve their values.
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=19526
“We are consubstantial with you!” read one hand-lettered sign of greeting.
“Thank You for keeping the Vatican II Church going for us!” read another.
“Our Sisters Prophets Among Us,” said a third.
And indeed, the event–termed a “friend raiser”–had the feel of a genuinely prophetic experience. Led by Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, four of the nuns described encounters they have had with Americans of various occupations and income levels since they started their tour last Monday in Des Moines. Already they have traveled through Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. Over the next 11 days they will pass through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, ending up on July 2 in Washington, D.C.
The thrust of their effort is to call attention to the hurtful and destructive aspects of the Republican budget plan put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and to call instead for a budget that makes paramount the needs of the poor and the vulnerable.
Without once mentioning the names “Obama” or “Romney,” the sisters reminded their audience that political decisions made in Washington and in the various state capitals will have enormous consequences, and that the Gospels and Catholic social teaching have important things to say about the choices America’s citizens and their leaders must make.
What the nuns seek, Sister Simone said, is “reasonable revenue for responsible programs.” And the Ryan budget, which would cut food stamps, cut Medicaid, reduce taxes for the wealthy and raise them for the rest, and raise defense spending beyond even what the military has requested, is neither reasonable nor responsible, she and her colleagues said.
While the audience members were overwhelmingly supportive of the nuns and their program, they were not unanimously so. Louann Kensinger, who described herself as a teacher at South Bend’s Riley High School, and her husband showed up, carrying placards calling for a stop to the Obama administration’s “HHS mandate” requiring contraception as part of employee health coverage. The nation’s Catholic bishops have said this requirement–and a subsequent compromise plan offered by President Obama displacing the requirement to insurance carriers–infringe the religious liberty of Catholic schools, colleges, hospitals and other institutions. The bishops have mounted a nationwide campaign of opposition.
Significantly, during her presentation, Sister Simone said that one of the happy aspects of the Nuns on the Bus effort was that it put the nuns on the same side as the bishops, who have raised objections on moral grounds to several aspects of the Ryan budget.
Kensinger’s objections to the nuns’ program was not unfamiliar. She said, in posing a question to the nuns, that “we have spent $5 trillion” on antipoverty efforts since the 1960s, and poverty has become, if anything, even worse. What America suffers from, Kensinger said in a subsequent interview, is “a poverty of values, not cash.”
She did not explain how taking food stamps, medical care and other necessary assistance away from needy Americans would improve their values.
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=19526
Happy Birthday to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Why the World’s First Celebrity Intellectual Still Matters
by David A Bell
He was a man who claimed to have abandoned all five of his children, as newborns, at the door of an orphanage. He broke with nearly every friend he ever made, including some who sacrificed dearly for him, denouncing them in the most hateful and vitriolic terms. He wrote that law-breakers deserved to be treated as rebels and traitors. He referred to his first and most important lover as “Mama.” All in all, the Geneva-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose three-hundredth birthday falls on June 28, was a hard man to admire.
Yet in the 234 years since his death, many critics have gone much further than just pointing to Rousseau’s personal flaws. They have held him responsible for the principal ills of modernity. Writers from Edmund Burke (who failed to find “a single good action” in Rousseau’s life) to the Israeli scholar Jacob Talmon, blamed him for the violence of the French Revolution. Talmon then gave him much of the credit for modern totalitarianism as well. Feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards have charged him with inspiring modern forms of misogyny that imprison women in cages of domesticity. Rousseau has been excoriated for undermining Christianity, for destroying traditional morality, for inventing xenophobic nationalism, and even for starting a quarter-millennium’s worth of noxious child-rearing fads. He remains prominent enough today for the high priestess of reactionary hackdom, Ann Coulter, to denounce him at length in her most recent screed, Demonic. For Coulter, Rousseau was an evildoer of almost Obamaesque proportions: “a paranoid hypochondriac who denied divine revelation and original sin” and inspired “all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century.”
All in all, it is quite a heavy indictment to press against a man who never held political office, who lived in obscurity until his late thirties, and who spent much of his remaining time on earth in various forms of uncomfortable exile, or even on the run from the law. And most of it is simply ridiculous. As with any truly great writer, it is foolish to judge Rousseau by the instances where people tried to follow his advice literally, still less by the harmful things done in his name (by which standard Jesus Christ does not exactly come off unblemished.) Rousseau’s influence on modern culture has been far too vast and multifaceted to squeeze into reductive categories of “positive” and “negative” and even his most misguided prescriptions often came accompanied by profound and poetic insights. And his influence came in a remarkable range of fields: not just in political philosophy and literature, but in what we now call anthropology, education, psychology, religion, and also in the performance of a very new sort of public role, that of the celebrity intellectual. Rousseau was one of a very small number of writers who embodied something fundamental about the modern Western world, in all its promise and in all its peril. His anniversary is not simply an occasion for recognizing his achievements, but for looking deeply into ourselves.
more
by David A Bell
He was a man who claimed to have abandoned all five of his children, as newborns, at the door of an orphanage. He broke with nearly every friend he ever made, including some who sacrificed dearly for him, denouncing them in the most hateful and vitriolic terms. He wrote that law-breakers deserved to be treated as rebels and traitors. He referred to his first and most important lover as “Mama.” All in all, the Geneva-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose three-hundredth birthday falls on June 28, was a hard man to admire.
All in all, it is quite a heavy indictment to press against a man who never held political office, who lived in obscurity until his late thirties, and who spent much of his remaining time on earth in various forms of uncomfortable exile, or even on the run from the law. And most of it is simply ridiculous. As with any truly great writer, it is foolish to judge Rousseau by the instances where people tried to follow his advice literally, still less by the harmful things done in his name (by which standard Jesus Christ does not exactly come off unblemished.) Rousseau’s influence on modern culture has been far too vast and multifaceted to squeeze into reductive categories of “positive” and “negative” and even his most misguided prescriptions often came accompanied by profound and poetic insights. And his influence came in a remarkable range of fields: not just in political philosophy and literature, but in what we now call anthropology, education, psychology, religion, and also in the performance of a very new sort of public role, that of the celebrity intellectual. Rousseau was one of a very small number of writers who embodied something fundamental about the modern Western world, in all its promise and in all its peril. His anniversary is not simply an occasion for recognizing his achievements, but for looking deeply into ourselves.
more
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
A Quote for the Day
"The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is."
Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Condemned Book on Best-Seller List
Washington Post:
Twenty-four hours ago news broke that the Vatican had condemned the book “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” a publication by a prominent nun-theologian that disagrees with church teaching on same-sex marriage, masturbation and remarrying after divorce. Monday morning, the book’s reported ranking on Amazon: #142,982.
Tuesday afternoon, after a day of furious news coverage of the Vatican censure: It’s at #16.
more
Twenty-four hours ago news broke that the Vatican had condemned the book “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” a publication by a prominent nun-theologian that disagrees with church teaching on same-sex marriage, masturbation and remarrying after divorce. Monday morning, the book’s reported ranking on Amazon: #142,982.
Tuesday afternoon, after a day of furious news coverage of the Vatican censure: It’s at #16.
more
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Recessional
"Recessional" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which he composed on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The poem went against the celebratory mood of the time, providing instead a warning about the transient nature of British Imperial power. Kipling recognizes that boasting and jingoism, faults of which he was often accused, were inappropriate and vain in light of God's dominion over the world.
God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem)
God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem)
Friday, June 1, 2012
Recent Purchases
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
Michael Sandel, ed., Justice: A Reader
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism
John Rawls, Political Liberalism
The Philokalia, vol. 1
J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines
The Columbia History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy
Peter Brown, The Body & Society: Men, Women & Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity
I've also downloaded a zillion freebies (or 99 cents) to my Kindle.
-:FROM SANTA FE PUBLIC LIBRARY:-
Isaiah Berlin (4 or 5 vols.)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life
John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation
of the American Soul:
Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty
&c., &c., &c.
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